Category: social computing
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Hillary Clinton Facebook group overrun by troll mob
The Hillary Clinton group got overrun with trolls last night. A Facebook bug — that’s been reported and unfixed since February — prevented the admins from being able to react. I saved a snapshot of a series of 25 threads with sexist (and in many cases racist) subjects; I won’t quote them, but trust me,…
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Clay Shirky to deliver closing plenary at CFP08!
From the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy blog: We are pleased to announce that Clay Shirky will deliver the closing plenary keynote at CFP Technology Policy ’08. Since the 1990s, Shirky has written, taught, and consulted on the social, cultural, and economic effects of Internet technologies and social media. His most recent book, Here Comes Everybody:…
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Phyllis Schafly to get Honorary Doctorate from Wash U?
The intro of the No honorary doctorate for anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly Facebook group: Wash. U. will honor anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly at commencement. WHAT? This is the woman who lives the hypocrisy of having a career that takes her around the country lecturing “family values” groups on how women should stay home. This is the woman…
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Allies in the blogosphere
There’s so much to write about for Angry Black Woman’s Carnival of Allies that it’s hard to know where to start. At first I thought of focusing on “why the usual excuses are not good enough.” As the month of April went on, though, with brownfemipower’s and Blackamazon’s final statements, the growing list of women…
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This just in: Obama defriends Wright on Facebook!
Andy Borowitz breaks the story in the Huffington Post: In an act that campaign insiders said indicated an irrevocable break with his former pastor, Sen. Barack Obama today de-friended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Facebook. It looks like all the fears about the divisiveness within the Democratic party are, if anything, understated. I didn’t realize…
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My new bio-in-progress, 2.0
It’s amusingly difficult for me to write professional biographies, especially for print publications. Not only do I have a hard time reducing my career to the paragraph you’re usually allowed, at some level it feels like it forces me to reify my identity. Nonetheless, it has to be done; right now, I’m on the hook…
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Intersectionality 2.0
I’ve been working on a couple a potential proposal a keynote for this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference related to the topic of intersectionality and social networks. Here’s an overview: Since first being developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1970s, theories of intersectionality have become a powerful lens for examining questions of race and…
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Indeed! The Economist on “computer science as a social science”
The Economist’s Technology Quarterly has an excellent article on Software bugtraps: software that makes software better. This is something of a followup to an article they did a few years ago; most people quoted think that the situation is improving, although of course as Capers Jones points out it depends on your metrics. And why…
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Community defense vs. trolls in the One Million Strong for Barack Facebook group
Like a lot of political sites these days, the Barack Obama Facebook page and One Million Strong for Barack group have been suffering from an infestation of trolls and hate speech. Obama supporters, like others, use Facebook to help with “get out the vote” work (for example posting links to information about polling places) and…
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Voting rights victories in LA County and Texas!
Update, March 6: democracy largely (albeit imperfectly) prevailed in the LA County mess; 47,153 “double bubble†votes were counted in Los Angeles County. What about Ohio? We shall see … Julia Rosen’s Victory post yesterday on Courage Campaign’s blog announced Dean Logan’s agreement to count every possible LA County decline-to-state ballot, and followup mail from…
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Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008: call for proposals is up!
From the CFP2008 web page: This election year will be the first to address US technology policy in the information age as part of our national debate. Candidates have put forth positions about technology policy and have recognized that it has its own set of economic, political, and social concerns. In the areas of privacy,…
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Coverage for ‘How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech’
The two-part series I posted on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki is starting to get some coverage. Shai Sachs has an excellent piece on MyDD: There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook “censorship” of free speech. The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an…
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Grr: “Our terms of service has changed”
This morning when I went to log in to a discussion forum on Yuku (“your interests, your communities” — the next-generation, friend-enabled version of ezboard), I was greeted with: Our terms of service has changed. Please read the new terms of service. By clicking “I agree,” you agree to Yuku’s Terms of Use. Oh, they…
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Facebook Barack Obama discussion board has been deleted!
The discussion board on the Barack Obama discussion page is now *gone* — not just unlinked, vanished. If you follow a link to it, it takes you to your home page instead. Sigh. Looks like they’re choosing fear over hope. Any bookmarks or links won’t work. I’m sure it’s around on backup somewhere, so hopefully…
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Facebook: censoring political speech
Update on February 22: How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech is up on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki and links back to comments in this thread. Alas, the Facebook Barack Obama discussion board was deleted on February 20, so many of the links here go off to oblivion. If…
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“Yes We Can” do grassroots campaigning for Obama on Facebook
The Yes We Can/Sí Se Puede video’s already got at least a million hits on YouTube — 566,000 for the one I linked to here, a couple more instances with 285,000 and 140,000, and then a long tail curve … How many people will watch it if we get it all over Facebook? I dunno,…
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Yahoo!?!?!
Todd Bishop’s Microsoft goes after biggest buy ever to catch up with Google in the Seattle PI has the most common framing: Could a PC software giant and an Internet icon join forces to take on the Web search king? That was the big question Friday as Microsoft Corp. stunned the online world with a…
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“An experiment in community information gathering”
I thought the Clinton Attacks Obama wiki was a great idea the first time I heard about it, and it’s steadily grown since then. Here’s the welcome message: This is an experiment in community information gathering. My name is Baratunde Thurston. I’m a comedian, writer and social media junkie. As a contributor for Jack & Jill Politics, I’ve seen…
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Gender, race, age, and power in online discussions, chapter n
I summarized the Economist’s debate on social networks in education on the Tales from the Net blog, but I wanted to focus more on the race and gender aspects here on Liminal States. To start with, check out the participants and their roles. Superficially (and to the extent we can tell from the pictures and…
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Howard Rheingold’s new video blog
Howard Rheingold (author of The Virtual Community) has a new vlog up. The first video does a great job in setting today’s high-bandwidth, visually immersive world in the context of online community, social networking, and activism over the late 20 years. From his intro post on Smartmobs: It all started when I started thinking about…