Building in pre-payments or a tax on data leaks to prevent companies neglecting negative externalities could be an important stick in government regulation.

While it should apply across the board, it should be particularly onerous for for-profit companies.

an interesting neologism to describe something that many want

Continuing with the idea above about the shift of Sunday morning talk shows and the influence of Hard Copy, is social media exerting a negative influence on mainstream content and conversation as a result of their algorithmic gut reaction pressure? How can we fight this effect?

One of the main features of Darius Kazemi's Hometown, a fork of Mastodon from 2019, is that it allows "local only posting". This gives the users an option to post their content only with a small, limited group of people instead of spreading it widely outside of their social group. In addition to helping to tummel a smaller conversation this also prevents those who are more likely to suffer from context collapse of the groups social norms from engaging and potentially souring the conversation.

This feature could also be well leveraged for small private classroom conversations between teachers and students without leaking their personal/private data or conversations that ought to be small as they learn.

Could also be fun to limit the level of federation to the level of an academic department, academic discipline, or even a university. How might one define a group or groups of publics within Mastodon so that one could choose a level at which to share their content?

Just like chilling action by political actors, social media corporations can use changes in policy and APIs to stifle and chill speech online.

This doesn't mean that there aren't bad actors building bots to actively cause harm, but there is a class of potentially helpful and useful bots (tools) that can make a social space better or more interesting.

How does one regulate this sort of speech? Perhaps the answer is simply not to algorithmically amplify these bots and their speech over that of humans.

More and more I think that the answer is to make online social interactions more like in person interactions. Too much social media is giving an even bigger bullhorn to the crazy preacher on the corner of Main Street who was shouting at the crowds that simply ignored them. Social media has made it easier for us to shout them back down, and in doing so, we're only making them heard by more. We need a negative feedback mechanism to dampen these effects the same way they would have happened online.

There's some odd irony in this quote. Kazemi indicates that Twitter was unfriendly for bots, but he should be specific that it's unfriendly for non-corporately owned bots. One could argue that much of the interaction on Twitter is spurred by the primary bot on the service: the algorithmic feed (bot) that spurs people to like, retweet, and interact with more content and thus keeping them on the platform for longer.

Eddy, Matthew Daniel (anticipated 2022). Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700-1830. University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo173084820.html

Here's where things get spicy

I love the verbifification of MySpace here. Its one of the earliest and most popular social media platforms which is now primarily known for its spectacular collapse and death as a social platform.

See also this thread with Noel De Martin, discussing a (Solid-based) organizer for your media library/watchlist: https://noeldemartin.social/@noeldemartin/105646436548899306

It shouldn't require Solid-level powers to run this. A design based upon "inert" data like RSS/Atom/JSON feeds (that don't require a smart backend to take on the role of an active participant in the protocol) would beat every attempt at Solid, ActivityPub, etc. that has been tried so far. "Inert"/"dead" media that works by just dumping some content on a Web-reachable endpoint somewhere, including a static site, is always going to be more accessible/approachable than something that requires either a server plug-in or a whole new backend to handle.

The litmus test for any new proposal for a social protocol should be, "If I can't join the conversation by thumping on my SSG to get it to produce the right kind of output—the way that it's possible with RSS/Atom—then the design is fundamentally flawed and needs to be fixed."

I'm sure I read this ages ago, but it's not in my notebook yet. Perhaps worth another pass for notes.

Michael Mina. (2021, September 24). Thread On tests and the media It is almost universal that any piece discussing Rapid Ag tests says “PCR is more accurate but…” But even this isn’t true. It simply depends what you want to detect. If wanting to identify ppl who are contagious, PCR is much less accurate. 1/ [Tweet]. @michaelmina_lab. https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1441420493228236801

The historian in me always wants to look back at how this sort of media control has played out historically, so thinking about examples like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, David Sarnoff, Axel Springer, Kerry Packer, or Rupert Murdoch across newspapers, radio, television, etc. might be interesting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor

Tim Wu's The Master Switch is pretty accessible in this area.

On the intercultural front, the language (very careful public relations and "corporate speak") used in this leaked audio file of the most recent Twitter All Hands phone call might be fascinating and an interesting primary source for some of the questions you might be looking at on such an assignment. https://peertube.dk/w/2q8cdKR1mTCW7RyMQhcBEx

Who are the multiple audiences (acknowledged and unacknowledged) being addressed? (esp. as they address leaks of information in the call.)

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1518692851386703873.html

The randomness of interesting tidbits in a social media scroll help to put us in a state of flow. We get small hits of dopamine from finding interesting posts to fill in the gaps of the boring bits in between and suddenly find we've lost the day. As a result an endless scroll of varying quality might have the effect of making one feel productive when in fact a reasonably large proportion of your time is spent on useless and uninteresting content.

This effect may be put even further out when it's done algorithmically and the dopamine hits become more frequent. Potentially worse than this, the depth of the insight found in most social feeds is very shallow and rarely ever deep. One is almost never invited to delve further to find new insights.

How might a social media stream of content be leveraged to help people read more interesting and complex content? Could putting Jacques Derrida's texts into a social media-like framing create this? Then one could reply to the text by sentence or paragraph with their own notes. This is similar to the user interface of Hypothes.is, but Hypothes.is has a more traditional reading interface compared to the social media space. What if one interspersed multiple authors in short threads? What other methods might work to "trick" the human mind into having more fun and finding flow in their deeper and more engaged reading states?

Link this to the idea of fun in Sönke Ahrens' How to Take Smart Notes.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that manual human curation as evinced by Twitter front runs Google Scholar by a few days.

On the need for disinformation educations

...but what is the difference "between what’s a purposeful attempt to mislead the public and what’s being called disinformation because of a genuine difference of opinion"

Petrie-Flom Center. (2021, December 6). COVID-19, Science, and the Media: Lessons Learned Reporting on the Pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZVVVLi4dBc

Elon Musk acquires Twitter and shares some words about what he hopes to do: open source algorithms, defeat spam bots, authenticate humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project

Katherine Ognyanova. (2022, February 15). Americans who believe COVID vaccine misinformation tend to be more vaccine-resistant. They are also more likely to distrust the government, media, science, and medicine. That pattern is reversed with regard to trust in Fox News and Donald Trump. Https://osf.io/9ua2x/ (5/7) https://t.co/f6jTRWhmdF [Tweet]. @Ognyanova. https://twitter.com/Ognyanova/status/1493596109926768645

Gollwitzer, A., Martel, C., Brady, W. J., Pärnamets, P., Freedman, I. G., Knowles, E. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2020). Partisan differences in physical distancing are linked to health outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(11), 1186–1197. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-00977-7

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, February 17). The global infodemic has driven trust in all news sources to record lows with social media (35%) and owned media (41% the least trusted; traditional media (53%) saw largest drop in trust at 8 points globally. Https://t.co/C86chd3bb4 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1362022502743105541

Adam Kucharski. (2021, February 6). It’s flattering being asked for your opinion by the media (especially if you have lots of them) but I do think it’s important to defer to others if you’re being asked on as a ‘scientific expert’ and the subject of the interview falls outside your area of research/expertise. [Tweet]. @AdamJKucharski. https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/status/1358050473098571776

John Lichfield. (2021, April 10). Weekly French vaccination thread. The French roll-out, still described as “stuttering” or “glacial” in UK media (and even some Fr media) continues to boom. Over 500,000 doses (1st/ 2nd) were given yesterday, a record. Fr should exceed its 10m 1st jabs 15 April target by 2m. 1/12 https://t.co/hhJa8rafCV [Tweet]. @john_lichfield. https://twitter.com/john_lichfield/status/1380807805960130561

ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘Now #scibeh2020: Pat Healey from QMU, Univ. Of London speaking about (online) interaction and miscommunication in our session on “Managing Online Research Discourse” https://t.co/Gsr66BRGcJ’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 6 March 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1326155809437446144

Mike Caulfield. (2021, March 10). One of the drivers of Twitter daily topics is that topics must be participatory to trend, which means one must be able to form a firm opinion on a given subject in the absence of previous knowledge. And, it turns out, this is a bit of a flaw. [Tweet]. @holden. https://twitter.com/holden/status/1369551099489779714

Stefan Simanowitz. (2021, March 18). 1/. The PM claims that the govt “stuck to the science like glue” But this is not true At crucial times they ignored the science or concocted pseudo-scientific justifications for their actions & inaction This thread, & the embedded threads, set them out https://t.co/dhXqkSL1bz [Tweet]. @StefSimanowitz. https://twitter.com/StefSimanowitz/status/1372460227619135493

The Troll Zoo. (2021, May 4). 3. As an example, this popular post amended the headline of a Guardian story, to say that Devi Sridhar had claimed that ‘coronavirus can infect camels’. Https://t.co/6lRPYNZgdQ [Tweet]. @TrollZoo. https://twitter.com/TrollZoo/status/1389547190863994882

Sarah Mojarad. (2020, October 23). What are some of the positive consequences of social media? Would love to hear your stories! [Tweet]. @Sarah_Mojarad. https://twitter.com/Sarah_Mojarad/status/1319722197766733825

ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘RT @euronews: COVID-19 vaccine rollout: How do countries in Europe compare? Https://t.co/SsFXS0L8mi’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 29 March 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1376440206505676807

Dr. Syra Madad. (2021, February 7). What we hear most often “talk to your health care provider if you have any questions/concerns on COVID19 vaccines” Vs Where many are actually turning to for COVID19 vaccine info ⬇️ This is also why it’s so important for the media to report responsibly based on science/evidence [Tweet]. @syramadad. https://twitter.com/syramadad/status/1358509900398272517

ReconfigBehSci on Twitter: ‘RT @FassnachtMartin: #Vaccination-#campaign #GER vs. FRA🇫🇷 // Let me put it this way: We can learn A LOT from France… https://t.co/SgR1B7qj…’ / Twitter. (n.d.). Retrieved 16 August 2021, from https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1412452204297048070

Carl T. Bergstrom. (2022, January 11). Curious if this what @Twitter meant when they talked about their commitment to combat covid disinformation. Https://t.co/sxrhNVTFW8 [Tweet]. @CT_Bergstrom. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1480760362496446464

this looks interesting and based on quotes in this paper in the final pages might be interesting or useful with respect to pulling apart memory and orality

Has media studies looked at primary orality and the ideas of space repetition, art, dance, and mnemonics as base layers of media by which cultures created networks of knowledge and culture that they might use to select, store, process, copy, and pass along their knowledge?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html

A former Redditor's perspective on Musk's purchase offer of Twitter. Sounds like he gets many parts right, but doesn't address the specific toxicity of social media's part in amplifying it all using metrics and algorighms which encourage the fringes to fight. Simply turning off algorithms and tamping down on amplifying marginal content would make it all vastly more human.

This is a great question and I ask it frequently with many different answers.

I've not seen specific numbers, but I suspect that the majority of Hypothes.is users are annotating in small private groups/classes using their learning management system (LMS) integrations through their university. As a result, using it and hoping for a big social experience is going to be discouraging for most.

Of course this doesn't mean that no one is out there. After all, here you are following my RSS feed of annotations and asking these questions!

I'd say that 95+% or more of my annotations are ultimately for my own learning and ends. If others stumble upon them and find them interesting, then great! But I'm not really here for them.

As more people have begun using Hypothes.is over the past few years I have slowly but surely run into people hiding in the margins of texts and quietly interacted with them and begun to know some of them. Often they're also on Twitter or have their own websites too which only adds to the social glue. It has been one of the slowest social media experiences I've ever had (even in comparison to old school blogging where discovery is much higher in general use). There has been a small uptick (anecdotally) in Hypothes.is use by some in the note taking application space (Obsidian, Roam Research, Logseq, etc.), so I've seen some of them from time to time.

I can only think of one time in the last five or so years in which I happened to be "in a text" and a total stranger was coincidentally reading and annotating at the same time. There have been a few times I've specifically been in a shared text with a small group annotating simultaneously. Other than this it's all been asynchronous experiences.

There are a few people working at some of the social side of Hypothes.is if you're searching for it, though even their Hypothes.is presences may seem as sparse as your own at present @tonz.

Some examples:

@peterhagen Has built an alternate interface for the main Hypothes.is feed that adds some additional discovery dimensions you might find interesting. It highlights some frequent annotators and provide a more visual feed of what's happening on the public Hypothes.is timeline as well as data from HackerNews.

@flancian maintains anagora.org, which is like a planet of wikis and related applications, where he keeps a list of annotations on Hypothes.is by members of the collective at https://anagora.org/latest

@tomcritchlow has experimented with using Hypothes.is as a "traditional" comments section on his personal website.

@remikalir has a nice little tool https://crowdlaaers.org/ for looking at documents with lots of annotations.

Right now, I'm also in an Obsidian-based book club run by Dan Allosso in which some of us are actively annotating the two books using Hypothes.is and dovetailing some of this with activity in a shared Obsidian vault. see: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/24/55803196/. While there is a small private group for our annotations a few of us are still annotating the books in public. Perhaps if I had a group of people who were heavily interested in keeping a group going on a regular basis, I might find the value in it, but until then public is better and I'm more likely to come across and see more of what's happening out there.

I've got a collection of odd Hypothes.is related quirks, off label use cases, and experiments: https://boffosocko.com/tag/hypothes.is/ including a list of those I frequently follow: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/#Hypothesis%20Feeds

Like good annotations and notes, you've got to put some work into finding the social portion what's happening in this fun little space. My best recommendation to find your "tribe" is to do some targeted tag searches in their search box to see who's annotating things in which you're interested.

https://blog.flickr.net/en/2022/03/17/flickr-forever-2022/

Flickr is creating space for restricted and moderate content. Free users can only have 50 non-public photos.

There is a parallel between these practices and the same sort of practices seen in social media posting, annotating, and bookmarking, however in the digital realm the user interface is so simple that one needn't put very much thought into the process and the results become almost instantaneously meaningless. Was this the case in the medieval context as well, or did the readers/compilers get more out of their practices?

Another organization fundraising with "Founder NFTs"

Virpi Flyg on Twitter. (n.d.). Twitter. Retrieved 1 April 2022, from https://twitter.com/VirpiFlyg/status/1452995562224201736

Health Nerd. (2021, August 29). Fascinating stuff, a whole thread of people saying weird shit about me (and a poem that I’ve said many times was idiotic in hindsight) [Tweet]. @GidMK. https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1431828103416877058

I find it interesting that Amanda's name is the only name mentioned in the New York Post's headline. Not the killer's, nor the victim's, Meredith Kercher. Even though this same New York Post, published an article on March 27, 2015 of Amanda's acquittal. The headline should read, "Rudy Guede, the man who murdered Meredith Kercher, Freed on Community Service." In my opinion the New York Post continues to use her name because it's probably more recognizable, than the others, and they need to sell papers. It's marketing! Doesn't make it right though. But geesh! Give Meredith some respect!

https://waxy.org/2022/03/pirating-the-oscars-2022/

Social Media Conversations in Support of Herd Immunity are Driven by Bots. (n.d.). Federation Of American Scientists. Retrieved March 31, 2022, from https://fas.org/blogs/fas/2020/10/social-media-conversations-in-support-of-herd-immunity-are-driven-by-bots/

Sacasas also makes reference to an article he wrote in which he made use of Goffman's theory to make sense of online experience

Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD. (2021, December 30). When the antivaccine disinformation crowd declares twisted martyrdom when bumped from social media or condemned publicly: They contributed to the tragic and needless loss of 200,000 unvaccinated Americans since June who believed their antiscience gibberish. They’re the aggressors [Tweet]. @PeterHotez. https://twitter.com/PeterHotez/status/1476393357006065670

ReconfigBehSci. (2021, December 20). RT @CaulfieldTim: Timothy Caulfield: Misinformation – Vaccines, Vaccine Hesitancy & Media https://youtu.be/wQSIo1AmQMw via @CARPNews @Zoomer… [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1472984068291764224

https://world.hey.com/dhh/we-can-t-thrive-without-friction-6cb38fd3

John Bye. (2022, January 6). Despite repeatedly being proven wrong by subsequent events, covid disinformation groups like HART have constantly been given a platform on TV and radio throughout the pandemic. Even after #hartleaks revealed many of their members to be anti-vax conspiracy cranks. 🧵2: Broadcast https://t.co/I3unq04gij [Tweet]. @_johnbye. https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1479202308139409413

https://sanlive.com/desocial/

Social media has to some extent democratized the access to media, however there are not nearly enough processes for creating negative feedback to dampen ideas which shouldn't or wouldn't have gained footholds in a mass society.

We need more friction in some portions of the social media space to prevent the dissemination of un-useful, negative, and destructive ideas swamping out the positive ones. The accelerative force of algorithmic feeds for the most extreme ideas in particular is one of the most caustic ideas of the last quarter of a century.

https://vi.to/hubs/micro-camp-march-2022/pages/micro-camp-march-2022-town-hall-mp4?sidebar=shown&v=%2Fvideos%2F4859

@pratik Mastodon caps at 500 as a default. The information density of the particular language/character set is certainly part of the calculus.

Here's a few to start (and see their related references): - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/How-Constraints-Affect-Content%3A-The-Case-of-Switch-Gligoric-Anderson/de77e2b6abae20a728d472744557d722499efef5 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0280-3

Position Statement W3C Video Workshop 12/13th Dec 2007

"Architecture of a Video Web - Experience with Annodex"

• Dr Silvia Pfeiffer
• Vquence, Xiph.org and Annodex.org

https://book.micro.blog/

Schreiber, M. (2022, March 4). ‘Bot holiday’: Covid disinformation down as social media pivot to Ukraine. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/04/bot-holiday-covid-misinformation-ukraine-social-media

Thrasher, S. W. (n.d.). There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID. Scientific American. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-nothing-normal-about-one-million-people-dead-from-covid1/

That's interesting. I like The Verge articles / videos for their high quality, and did notice they often address deeper topics than just news reporting -- but never connected this back to their mission statement.

Or it's a result of their awesome staff? Maybe both influence each other?

For philosophical works on the properties of ‘the Digital’, see Stéphane Vial’s Being and the Screen, MIT Press, 2019 (official translation from the original book in French published in 2013).

Fidalgo, P. (2022, February 22). How the Hell Did It Get This Bad? Timothy Caulfield Battles the Infodemic, March 3 | Center for Inquiry. https://centerforinquiry.org/news/how-the-hell-did-it-get-this-bad-timothy-caulfield-battles-the-infodemic-march-3/

Wordle's spread on social media was enabled in part by its low-tech approach for e.g. sharing scores.

One low-tech approach that could've been used here for data persistence would be to generate and prompt the user to save their latest scorecard in PDF or Word format—only it's not a PDF or Word format, but instead "wordlescore.html" file, albeit one that they are able to save to disk and double click to open all the same. When they need to update their scorecard with today's data, you use window.open to show a page that prompts the user to open their most recent scorecard (using either Ctrl+/Cmd+O, or by navigating to the place where they saved it on disk via bookmark). What's not apparent on sight alone is that their wordlescore.html also contains a JS payload as an inline script. When wordlescore.html is opened, it's able to communicate with the Wordle tab via postMessage to window.opener, request the newest data from the app, and then update wordlescore.html itself as appropriate.

Blau, W. (2022, February 14). Climate Change: Journalism’s Greatest Challenge. Medium. https://wblau.medium.com/climate-change-journalisms-greatest-challenge-2bb59bfb38b8

How cherry-picking science became the center of the anti-mask movement. (2022, February 14). Gothamist. https://gothamist.com

News ·, A. M. · C. (2022, January 15). Canadian COVID-19 vaccine study seized on by anti-vaxxers—Highlighting dangers of early research in pandemic | CBC News. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-study-omicron-anti-vaxxers-1.6315890

Claudia Sahm. (2022, January 5). “We, as experts, have a responsibility to policymakers and everyday people to match the strength of our recommendations to the strength of our data. When I read Oster, I see a tone and conviction that far exceeds the many limitations of her data.” https://t.co/NqWwj0hi28 [Tweet]. @Claudia_Sahm. https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm/status/1478532000441151488

Fox News goes all-in promoting anti-vaccine mandate Canadian truckers. (n.d.). Media Matters for America. Retrieved February 11, 2022, from https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/fox-news-goes-all-promoting-anti-vaccine-mandate-canadian-truckers

Dame Adjin-Tettey, T. (2022). Combating fake news, disinformation, and misinformation: Experimental evidence for media literacy education. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 9(1), 2037229. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2022.2037229

Michaud, M., & Center, U. of R. M. (n.d.). Trust in science at root of vaccine acceptance. Retrieved February 8, 2022, from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-science-root-vaccine.html

Stephan Lewandowsky. (2022, January 15). This is an extremely important development. The main vector for misinformation are not fringe websites but “mainstream” politicians who inherit and adapt fringe material. So keeping track of their effect is crucial, and this is a very welcome first step by @_mohsen_m @DG_Rand 1/n [Tweet]. @STWorg. https://twitter.com/STWorg/status/1482265289022746628

Independent SAGE. (2022, February 7). An announcement from @allthecitizens: Https://t.co/RK5opmUFSs [Tweet]. @IndependentSage. https://twitter.com/IndependentSage/status/1490633910300119044

Robin Sloan considers himself a "media inventor" by which he means someone who creates containers and things which go into them.

Enough with the harassment: How to deal with anti-vax cults. (2022, January 26). Healthy Debate. https://healthydebate.ca/2022/01/topic/how-to-deal-with-anti-vax-cults/

Democracy in the age of social media. (n.d.). EXPeditions - Meet the World’s Best Minds. Retrieved February 5, 2022, from https://www.joinexpeditions.com/exps/43