Category: Tales from the Net
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It’s possible to talk about The Bad Space without being racist or anti-trans – but it’s not as easy as it sounds
The title applies to me as well, and I’ve probably said some things badly in this article. Apologies in advance. I’ll update the post as problems surface. Join the discussion in the fediverse “Following UI Integration”, from FSEP proposal This matters from a safety perspective because if somebody follows you they can see your followers-only…
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Mastodon and today’s fediverse are unsafe by design and unsafe by default – and instance blocking is a blunt but powerful safety tool
Do you have thoughts? hoodieaidakitten, Mastodon’s Complicated Relationship with Queer Activism, July 2018 Others remain active – and forks like glitch-soc continue to provide additional tools for people to protect themselves – but Mastodon’s pace of innovation had slowed dramatically by 2018.8 Mastodon lacks basic safety functionality like Twitter’s ability to limit replies (…
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Black Twitter, quoting, and white views of toxicity on Mastodon
Last updated: January 12, 2023. See the update log at the bottom. For a detailed look at design considerations of a “quote boost” implementation, see the followon post Social threat modeling and quote boosts on Mastodon “The platform is made up of people. Elon Musk bought Twitter, but he did not buy the communities that…
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Mastodon: a partial history (DRAFT)
Last major update: December 3. See the update log below for details. DRAFT! Feedback welcome!I’ve shared the draft on @inquiline@mastodon.social on Mastodon Then again, whiteness resists change. As Are0h says “It’s culture. And whiteness, as Du Bois identified years ago, is committed to fighting to assert itself in yet another new space.” Unfortunately a lot…
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Consent, Automated Systems, and Discrimination (FTC Comments)
Submitted to regulations.gov a couple of hours before last night’s deadline. An earlier version of points 2-4 appeared in the extended remix of my public comments in September. Thank you for your attention to the pressing issues of commercial surveillance and data security. As the author of the Nexus of Privacy Newsletter, I write about…
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“White Man’s Gambit”: yet another ‘pundit’ suggests a real names policy
Every few weeks or so, someone white dude suggests that the way to solve all of our online problems is to require users to submit ID verification and use their “real names,” ignoring years of research and commentary. This is what I like to call the White Man’s Gambit. – Jillian C. York, Peter Steiner’s…
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Going beyond ‘The Social Dilemma’: what you can do (and what they didn’t discuss)
Meaningful Movies Everett watched The Social Dilemma over the weekend, and I was asked to speak briefly afterwards. The movie makes an important point: you are the product that Facebook, Google and other big tech companies manipulate and exploit as part of their “surveillance capitalism” business model. That said, as reviews like Flamethrowers…
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DRAFT: How social media algorithms embed and magnify racism, sexism, and misogynoir
DRAFT! Work in progress! Please do not forward broadly yet. Feedback welcome! There’s a comment section at the bottom, experimenting with Commento, or you can get in touch with me via email or social networks. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and other social networks use algorithms to decide what news to show you; which of your…
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Social networks, disinformation, and the white supremacist mob
Image description: a multi-colored meter, with the needle pointing to the orange area “attempted coup”, labled Coup-o-meter. Screenshot from Is this a coup? What happened yesterday in DC and statehouses around the country is certainly part of an attempted coup, but it’s just one event so needs its own name … a lot of people…
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Sex, pleasure, and diversity-friendly software: the article the ACM wouldn’t publish
Oh well, maybe next time.
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Lessons (so far) from Mastodon for independent social networks
Update, November 2022: This post was originally written in May 2017. Since then I’ve updated by fixing typos and adding new links but haven’t changed the lessons. In 2018 I noted that Mastodon has continued to make progress, and that were new lessons to learn, so added “(so far)” to the title. Flash forward to…