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The Right Triumphed Over Social Media and Helped Elect Trump

[Julia Angwin at The New York Times]

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Julia Angwin makes a strong argument for the open social web:

"If we want a quality information environment, we have to build a new one beyond the walls of the existing Big Tech social media platforms.

We can do that by funding people who do the hard work of collecting facts (a.k.a. journalists) and by finding new ways to reach audiences beyond the grip of social media algorithms that are designed to promote outrageous content rather than sober facts. There is also a new movement brewing that aims to break open the gates of the closed social media platforms."

Julia goes on to describe the fediverse and how it's a key part of the solution. I particular, it's a way for all of us to seize control of our social media environment from platforms that are not acting in any of our interests.

[Link]

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How Rappler Is Building Its Own Communities to Counter AI and Big Tech

[Lucinda Jordaan at Global Investigative Journalism Network]

I'd missed this story from back in July. Rappler is building its own end-to-end encrypted, decentralized communities on the Matrix protocol.

"Built on the open source, secure, decentralized Matrix protocol, the app has the potential to become a global independent news distribution outlet, and promises to pave the way for a “shared reality” — a call Ressa has been making to counter “the cascading failures of a corrupted public information ecosystem.”"

This is both incredibly cool and makes a ton of sense. It's the first time I've seen a newsroom build decentralized communities in the wild - and it's doubly cool that it's end-to-end encrypted. For CEO Maria Ressa, whose work has been beset by endless legal challenges in the Philippines, that last feature is particularly vital. But it all helps the newsroom evade censorship and avoid serving up its content for AI vendors to train on.

This quote from Ressa is something that every newsroom should learn from:

"We realized: there is no future for digital news unless we build our own tech, because there are only three ways a digital news site, or any digital site, gets traffic: direct, search, or social search.

[...] If you do not trust the tech, then you are always going to be at the mercy of surveillance for-profit tech companies that, frankly, don’t understand news or the value of journalism."

Exactly. I've banged this drum repeatedly, but it's a far more effective message from Ressa than me. This is the way. I truly hope that more will follow.

[Link]

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The global growth rate for mobile internet subscribers has stalled

[Khadija Alam and Russell Brandom at Rest of World]

Mobile internet subscriber growth is significantly slowing globally:

"From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million. Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers. That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge."

Many services - Facebook included - were able to grow rapidly by hitching a ride on the growth of the internet itself. It looks like that rapid growth is coming to an end, which will have implications for consumer startups down the line.

It will also fundamentally change the way we relate to the internet. It used to be that the majority of internet users were new: correspondingly, there was a shine to just being connected that overshadowed shortcomings. But we're finding ourselves in an era where most of us have been able to sit with the internet for a while, sometimes for generations. That inevitably leads to a more nuanced relationship with it - and in turn, more detailed thoughts around regulation, policy, and the kinds of applications we want to be using in the long term. That cultural change will be interesting to watch, and likely societally positive - but it will come with some downsides for tech companies and platforms.

[Link]

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Don't call it a Substack.

[Anil Dash]

Anil Dash on Substack's attempt to brand "writing in a newsletter":

"We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to "read my Amazon". A great director trying to promote their film by saying "click on my Max". That's how much they've pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as "my Substack", there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification."

Anil makes a point to highlight Substack's very problematic content policies: not only won't they ban someone who is using the platform to spout real hate, and have not removed most Nazis (not figurative Nazis, not right-wing voices, but literal flag-waving Nazis) from posting or earning money there.

They don't deserve to brand an open platform like email. And, in fact, nobody does. I appreciate Anil calling it out.

[Link]

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SF tech layoffs: Tales of post-pink-slip reinvention

[Jillian D'Onfro at The San Francisco Standard]

On one level, this piece about tech workers leaving the industry behind and doing something more culturally meaningful is quite nice:

"Andrew Wasilewski, who managed to live “very frugally” on his layoff package while launching the Faight Collective, a music and art community in the Lower Haight, signed the lease for the space mere weeks after his last day of work in tech sales."

But then you find yourself asking: how does an artist community pay a lease on the Lower Haight? How do any of these folks live like this, even for a while, in one of the most expensive cities in the world?

And the answer is obvious, and a little sad, and perhaps not very empowering after all.

[Link]

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Inside UnitedHealth’s Playbook for Limiting Mental Health Coverage

[Annie Waldman at ProPublica]

UnitedHealth Group has been using an algorithm to determine whether patients have been receiving "too much" therapy and then cutting them off:

"Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements."

The kicker here is the regulatory arbitrage: the practice has been ruled illegal in three states so far, but United simply undertakes its activities to a state where it's still legal. And because it doesn't answer to a single regulator, it's hard to impose stronger rules. In fact, more than 50 regulators each have jurisdiction over small slices of United's activities.

Effectively that makes it ungovernable:

"For United’s practices to be curbed, mental health advocates told ProPublica, every single jurisdiction in which it operates would have to successfully bring a case against it."

And:

"State regulators are supposed to be making sure private insurers that manage Medicaid plans are following the mental health parity laws. But this year, a federal audit found that they were failing to do so. “They are not well designed to essentially be watchdogs,” Lloyd said. “There’s very little accountability. Insurers can run roughshod over them.”"

In other words, the system needs to be radically overhauled if patients are going to receive adequate care. Will it be? Perhaps not soon.

[Link]

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Microsoft and Google incubated Chinese startups tied to police

[Joanna Chiu and Viola Zhou at Rest of World]

Tech companies like Microsoft and Google have, through their accelerators, supported startups that provide censorship and policing technologies in China. It's perhaps not a surprise that they've supported these endeavors - after all, startups look to find product/market fit in their regions - but it flies in the face of efforts they've made to appear to care about human rights.

I've been thinking about this a lot:

"Support for the companies through their startup incubator programs raises questions about the future of these initiatives, especially as Donald Trump prepares to take a second term as president."

We know that tech companies comply with authoritarian regimes when they try to do business there. There's a long history of that, from IBM colluding with the Nazis through Yahoo giving up the identities of bloggers to the Chinese authorities. What happens when their home turf becomes one? I don't think we can expect anything other than collaboration.

At this point, that's mostly speculation (beyond existing contracts with ICE, say) - but there's no doubt that surveillance and censorship have been used in China to squash dissent and commit human rights abuses. The tech companies who directly fund the infrastructure to do this are complicit, and should be publicly held as such.

[Link]

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Elon Musk algorithmically boosted Republican accounts on X from the moment he endorsed Trump

[Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic]

Elon Musk didn't just endorse Trump with his words - according to this pre-print research paper, he gave Republicans an algorithmic boost on X, too:

"The analysis reveals a structural engagement shift around mid-July 2024, suggesting platform-level changes that influenced engagement metrics for all accounts under examination. The date at which the structural break (spike) in engagement occurs coincides with Elon Musk’s formal endorsement of Donald Trump on 13th July 2024."

Despite big words about "free speech", Musk seems to be hell-bent on using the platform he acquired as a megaphone for his own interests, in the same way that Rupert Murdoch has used Fox News. To me, this points to the need for media regulation, and for anyone using the platform to approach it with caution. It's not an even playing field - not even close.

[Link]

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Escape from Twitter: The Future of Social Media Is Decentralized

2 min read

This is a pretty great article about the decentralized social web, which quotes Christine Lemmer-Webber, Blaine Cook, and me.

It’s in Polish, but if you don’t speak the language, the “translate” button on your browser works pretty well.

Here are the full remarks I sent Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, the author of the piece:

Social media is where people learn about the world: they discover the news, connect with each other, share the things they love and what's happening around them. We learn about art and love; about current events; and sometimes, about injustice and war — all at a global scale.

The owners of these spaces have the power to influence the global conversation to fit their business needs. Business model changes at every centralized social media company have made it harder to reach your community, but it goes beyond that. We recently saw the owner of X heavily weigh in on the US election. Previously, lapses at Facebook helped lead to genocide in Myanmar. These spaces are too important to be privately owned or to be subject to any single owner's needs or whims.

Decentralized social media divests ownership back to the people. Federated social networks are co-operatives of small communities, each with their own ownership and their own rules. Fully decentralized social networks allow users to make their own choices about how their content is moderated and presented to them. There is never a single owner who can unilaterally change the conversation; the platform is owned by everybody, just as the web itself is owned by everybody.

In answer to a question about my employer, ProPublica, its involvement in the Fediverse, and advice I might have for other publishers, I wrote:

ProPublica was already on the fediverse before I got there. That's down to Chris Morran, a member of the audience team. But, of course, I've been a strong advocate.

My main advice is: be everywhere your audience is. That does mean Mastodon and Bluesky - and we've had strong engagement on both. Use your own domain to validate your accounts and encourage your staff to join individually. By using cutting edge social media platforms and not being afraid to experiment early, ProPublica has so far bucked the downward trends that have been seen at other publications.

You can read the whole piece here.

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Biden Asked Microsoft to “Raise the Bar on Cybersecurity.” He May Have Helped Create an Illegal Monopoly.

[Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke, at ProPublica]

Security lapses in Microsoft's own products led to hacks that in turn pushed President Biden to ask for help from it and other tech companies to improve White House security. Microsoft saw it as an opportunity to lock the White House into its products.

Microsoft pledged to give $150M in technical services to the government to upgrade its security. But it wasn't altruistic:

"Microsoft’s seemingly straightforward commitment belied a more complex, profit-driven agenda, a ProPublica investigation has found. The proposal was, in fact, a calculated business maneuver designed to bring in billions of dollars in new revenue, box competitors out of lucrative government contracts and tighten the company’s grip on federal business."

The result may have created an illegal monopoly on government systems - and increased its susceptibility to future Microsoft flaws:

"Competition is not the only issue at stake. As Washington has deepened its relationship with Microsoft, congressional leaders have raised concerns about what they call a cybersecurity “monoculture” in the federal government. Some, like Wyden and Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, have blasted the Defense Department in particular for “doubling down on a failed strategy of increasing its dependence on Microsoft.”"

Monocultures are bad. It's hard to see how these kinds of toxic relationships don't get worse over the next four years.

[Link]

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What I want from Mozilla

Firefox on a phone

Like many of you, I received a survey today with the title: “What is your dream for Mozilla?” I filled it in, but the potential for Mozilla is so expansive and critical to the future of the internet that I wanted to address my thoughts in greater depth here.

Mozilla describes its mission as follows:

Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

I believe Mozilla is best placed to achieve this goal by explicitly fostering an ecosystem of open, accessible software that promotes user independence, privacy, and safety. It should be a facilitator, supporter, and convener through which projects that promote these values thrive.

What should its next chapter look like in an internet increasingly dominated by corporate interests? Mozilla has the tools, the history, and the mission to reclaim its role as a pioneer of the open web. But doing so requires bold steps and a renewed focus on impact and innovation.

A mission focus on impact

Its success should be determined through impact. It should publish an impact report that shows how it has spread usable, private, open software worldwide, and solicit donations based on that activity. How has Mozilla prevented a monopoly of ad-driven surveillance technology in different markets? How has Mozilla helped people keep themselves safe online while seeking reproductive healthcare? How has Mozilla tech been used in authoritarian regions to support community well-being? It should clarify its roadmap for turning its mission into measurable outcomes, and then be unashamed about fundraising based on this directed mission. These focused impact reports would guide internal strategy, demonstrate accountability, and inspire public and donor trust.

Conversely, I believe Mozilla is not a media company. That means it should not attempt to be Consumer Reports; we don’t need it to navigate the world of AI for us or tell us what to buy for Christmas. Those are valuable pursuits, but Mozilla should leave them to existing technology media companies.

Impact-focused products that bring something new to the table

I believe this impact focus means that it should not seek to charge consumers for its products. If the mission is to make the internet open, accessible, private, and safe for individuals, as much friction towards achieving that goal should be removed as possible.

Many of Mozilla’s efforts already fall in line with this mission. The Firefox browser itself is an open, anti-surveillance alternative to corporate-driven browsers like Chrome, although it has fallen behind. This is in part because of anti-competitive activity from companies like Google, and in part because some of the most interesting innovations in the browser space have happened elsewhere: for example, Arc’s radical changes to browser user experience are really compelling, and should probably have been a Mozilla experiment.

Firefox Relay — which makes it easy to hide your email address when dealing with a third party — and Mozilla VPN are similarly in line at first glance. But because the VPN is little more than a wrapped Mullvad VPN, with revenue splitting between the two organizations, it isn’t really adding anything new. In a similar vein, Relay is very similar to DuckDuckGo’s email protection, among others. And why is one branded as Firefox and one as Mozilla? I’m sure the organization itself has an answer to this, but I couldn’t begin to tell you. (For what it’s worth, Mozilla seems to agree about the distraction and has scaled back support for these services.)

AI is a new, hot technology, but there’s nothing really new for Mozilla to do here, either. Many vendors are working on AI privacy, because that’s where a lot of the real revenue is: organizations with privacy needs that relate to sensitive information. There is no reason why Mozilla will be the best at creating these solutions, or differentiated in doing so.

Instead, to paraphrase Bill Clinton: it’s the web, stupid.

If Firefox is the biggest, most impactful software product in Mozilla’s arsenal today, how can it bring it back to prominence? One interesting route might be to use it as a way for third parties to explore the future of the browser. Mozilla can ship its own Firefox user experience, but what if it was incredibly simple for other people to also build wildly remixed browsers? Could Mozilla build unique features, like privacy layers tailored for vulnerable users, that competitors don’t offer?

Projects like Zen Browser already use core Firefox to build new experiences, but there’s a lot of coding involved, and they’re not discoverable from within Firefox itself. What if they were? One can imagine Firefox browsers optimized for everything from artists and activists to salespeople and investors, all available from a browser marketplace. The authors of those experiences would, by sharing their unique browser remixes, help spread the Firefox browser overall. While browsers like Chrome serve corporate goals around ads and analytics, the Mozilla mission gives Firefox a mandate to be a playground for innovation. It should be that. (And, yes, AI can play a supporting role here too.)

Note that while I think products should be made available to consumers free of charge, that doesn’t mean that Mozilla shouldn’t make money. For example, if there’s revenue in specific experiences for certain enterprise or partner use cases, why not explore that? Enterprise offerings could directly fund Mozilla’s open-source projects, reinforcing its mission.

Truly supporting a vibrant open web

While Mozilla’s products are key to advancing its mission, its influence can extend far beyond the browser. Mozilla has the potential to be a home base for similar projects that have the potential to create a more open, private, safe and self-directed web.

While that might mean support technically — developer resources, libraries, and guides — the most burning needs for user-centric open source projects are often unrelated to code. These include:

  • Experience design. Most open source projects lean towards coding as a core competency and aren’t able to provide the same polished user experiences as commercial software. Mozilla could bridge the gap by providing training and direct resources to elevate the design of user-centric open source projects, and to prepare these projects to work well with designers.
  • Legal help. Some projects need help with boilerplate documents like privacy policies, terms of service agreements, and contributor license agreements; others need assistance figuring out licensing; some will have more individual legal needs. It’s highly unlikely that most projects have the ability to produce this in-house, meaning they either leave themselves open to liabilities by not getting legal advice, or have to retain legal help at a high cost to themselves. Mozilla can help.
  • Policy assistance. Mozilla could help projects navigate complex regulatory environments, such as GDPR or CCPA compliance or lobbying for user-first policies globally.
  • Funding. Offering grants or investments for vetted open source projects could amplify Mozilla’s impact. It’s done this in the past a little bit through its defunct WebFWD accelerator and specific grants, and it’s doing a version of this today with its accelerator for advancing open source AI. There’s room for a wider scope here, and a little bit of a carrot-and-stick approach: for example, funding could be contingent on a project demonstrating its human-centered approach and being willing to work with designers.
  • Go-to-market strategy. Mozilla could provide guidance on launching and scaling projects, including identifying its first users, building community, and targeting messaging to them. Mozilla could host workshops on community engagement and messaging, enabling projects to scale effectively.
  • Regional impact. Different geographic communities have different needs. Regional accelerators could deliver it as a curriculum to local cohorts of open source teams. Regional accelerators could support open-source teams with tailored workshops and local mentorship, building capacity while addressing regional challenges.

A centralized Mozilla hub could provide templates, guides, and access to expert mentorship for projects to tackle legal, design, and policy hurdles. One-to-one help could be provided for the projects with the most potential to meaningfully fulfill Mozilla’s impact goals. And through it all, Mozilla can act as a connector: between the projects themselves, and to people and organizations in the tech industry who want to help mission-driven projects.

By creating a thriving ecosystem of user-centric open-source projects, Mozilla can ensure its mission outlasts individual products.

The dream of the nineties is alive in Mozilla

Mozilla has the tools, the history, and the mission to make the internet better for everyone. By fostering innovation and empowering communities, it can reclaim its role as a leader in the fight for an open web. Now is the time for bold action — and a strong focus on its mission.

That’s my dream for Mozilla. Now, what’s yours?

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Newsletter platform beehiiv launches multi-million dollar journalism fund

[Sara Fischer at Axios]

"Beehiiv, a newsletter startup taking aim at Substack, says it's making a "multi-million dollar investment" to create a new "beehiiv Media Collective" of journalists on its platform."

Beehiiv's new fund for independent journalists will give them a monthly health insurance stipend and pre-publish legal review support. There's also Getty access and deeper business strategy report. It's actually kind of remarkable - and a clear shot across the bow to competitors like Substack.

More competitors to Substack - which famously has supported actual Nazis - can only be a good thing. The real question is how long this fund will last, and whether the journalists who take advantage of it will sink or swim when it inevitably comes to an end. Hopefully everyone who takes part uses the time to become self-sufficient.

[Link]

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Is BlueSky the new Twitter, and if so is that a good thing?

[Mathew Ingram at The Torment Nexus]

Mathew wrestles with where Bluesky sits in the future of social media given its connections to venture capital and blockchain supporters:

"I have no doubt that, as Cory says, Graber and the other founders of Bluesky are sincere in their desire to build an open service with a federated protocol, etc. But history has shown time and again that economic interests often interfere with the best efforts of founders."

Here's my slightly controversial take: I think there's something to learn from blockchain and how it developed. We already see that represented in the data structures Bluesky uses behind the scenes, and beyond that, an optimistic cultural take on decentralization. That doesn't mean crypto markets aren't full of scammers - there's certainly more to avoid than to learn from - but blockchain is not an irrelevant pursuit, even if blockchains themselves are not the best route forwards.

This feels right to me:

"In the short term at least, it seems as though we could have three or four competing social networks: one, Twitter/X, is the place for right-wing Musk fans and tech bros and Trump supporters (and journalists and others who need to be there for work); Bluesky is the place for that early Twitter anything-goes vibe plus journalists and real-time news; Mastodon is the place for nerds and geeks and others who like the nuts-and-bolts of social tech; and Threads is... well, Threads is whatever is left over after all of those other things are removed :-)"

Let's see what happens.

[Link]

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Bluesky, the Fediverse, and the future of social media

Birds, flocking

I care a lot about the future of social media. It’s how many of us learn about the world and connect to each other; putting something so important in the hands of a handful of centralized corporations has repeatedly proven itself to be harmful. That’s why I’m so excited about the growth of federated and decentralized social media in the wake of Elon Musk’s disastrous acquisition of X. These platforms give more control to communities and individuals, reducing the risks of a central corporation manipulating the global conversation through algorithms or other means.

Although a lot of my focus has been on Fediverse platforms like Mastodon, from time to time I’ve mentioned that I’m really impressed with what the Bluesky team has achieved. The Bluesky platform is growing very quickly and seems to be the go-to choice for less-technical users like journalists, politicians, and so on who want to leave X. Bluesky offers valuable insights for anyone interested in the future of social media and how to build a vibrant alternative platform.

  • Easy to understand onboarding: You register at the Bluesky site. To get you started, you can access “starter packs” of users to follow around various topics, so your feed is never empty. Here’s a starter pack of ProPublica journalists, for example, or people in tech from underrepresented communities.
  • It feels alive: The posts are both timely and engaging. This is in contrast to Mastodon, where they’re purely chronologically-ordered, or Threads, where I was still seeing hopeful posts from before the election a week later (because they piggybacked on the Instagram algorithm, which is optimized for a different kind of content). News can actually break here — and so can memes. Find an old-timer and ask them about ALF: an inside joke that I absolutely refuse to log an explanation for here.
  • Search works universally: It simply doesn’t on Mastodon, and I can only describe the search engine on Threads as weird.
  • It’s moderated and facilitated: The site has easy-to-understand moderation. More than that, the team seems to have invested in the culture of the community they’re creating. Particularly in the beginning, they did a lot of community facilitation work that set the tone of the place. The result — so far — is a palpable sense of fun in contrast to a seriousness that pervades both Threads and Mastodon.

At the same time, Bluesky benefits from an open mindset, an open-source codebase, and a permissionless protocol that allows anyone to build tools on top of it. Critics will note that it isn’t really decentralized yet: there’s one dominant personal data store that basically everyone is attached to. In contrast to Mastodon’s model of co-operative communities anchored by a non-profit, Bluesky is a venture funded startup that grew out of Twitter.

Other critics complain about the involvement of Jack Dorsey, who created Twitter and therefore a lot of the problems that we’re all trying to get away from. I don’t think that’s a valid complaint: he famously both established Bluesky because he felt that Twitter should have been a protocol rather than a company, and both left the board and closed his account after becoming dissatisfied with the way Bluesky was run as a moderated community. He has since described X as “freedom technology” and put a ton of his own money behind Nostr. I’ve personally found Nostr to be a particularly toxic decentralized network dominated by Bitcoin-loving libertarians. This may indicate where his priorities lie.

I’ll be honest: on paper, I like Mastodon’s model better. It’s a community-driven effort paid for transparently by donations, much like any non-profit. (Much like any non-profit, the bulk of the funding comes from larger entities, but these are advertised on the Mastodon website alongside smaller-dollar donors.) I also like the co-operative model where smaller communities can dictate their own norms but interoperate with the larger network, which means that, for example, communities for trans posters or journalists can provide more directed support.

But this model faces a much harder road. It means, firstly, that there is less money to go around (Bluesky has raised $36M so far; Mastodon raised €326K in 2022), and secondly, that it’s harder to understand for a new user who wants to join in. It’s also clear that CEO Jay Graber has established a cohesive team that by all accounts is a lot of fun to work in. That counts for a lot and has helped to establish a healthy community.

Even with its hurdles, Mastodon’s model embodies a rare, user-first ethos, and I believe it’s worth supporting. In the end, the future of social media may depend on which values we choose to uphold.

I suspect both will continue to exist side by side. If I had to guess, Bluesky might become a mainstream platform for people who want something very close to pre-acquisition Twitter (which it is rapidly becoming right now), and the Fediverse might become the default glue between any social platform. For example, I post my book reading activity on Bookwyrm, which I find more useful in its own right than Goodreads. Other people can follow and interact with my book reviews there, or they can follow from other Fediverse-compatible platforms like Mastodon. (Right now, my followers are about half and half). Mastodon itself will allow niche supportive communities to grow, and of course, the fact that Threads is building Fediverse support means that any of its hundreds of millions of users will be able to interact with anyone on any other Fediverse platform.

Bluesky may evolve into a streamlined alternative to Twitter, while the Fediverse could serve as a decentralized, cross-platform connector among diverse networks. This dynamic offers a promising future for users, with both worlds learning from one another in a productive tension that has the potential to strengthen the open social web. That’s good news for everyone who values an open, user-driven future for social media.

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The Onion acquires Infowars

[Oliver Darcy at Status]

I literally had to check to see if this was real:

"The Onion has successfully acquired Infowars.

The satirical news outlet purchased Alex Jones' right-wing conspiracy empire at a court-ordered auction, the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting announced Thursday."

I cannot think of a more fitting end for such a toxic, falsehood-filled media outlet. Of course The Onion should own it. Where better than the original home of fake news?

Clearly the Sandy Hook families felt the same way: they actually decided to forgo part of the money owed to them in order to make this happen.

"While Jones will no longer own Infowars, he has indicated that he will continue to broadcast after losing control of the media company."

May he lose that one too.

[Link]

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Why the Guardian is no longer posting on X

[The Guardian]

Given the reluctance to leave X among most publishers, the Guardian is taking a big leadership role here by refusing to continue to post to X:

"This is something we have been considering for a while given the often disturbing content promoted or found on the platform, including far-right conspiracy theories and racism. The US presidential election campaign served only to underline what we have considered for a long time: that X is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse."

X users will continue to be able to share links to the Guardian, which is simply a property of them being a web platform. The Guardian also reserves the right to embed tweets when they are newsworthy.

I couldn't agree with their reasoning more, and I sincerely hope that more publications follow suit. I also predict that this won't hurt the Guardian's metrics overall, at least in the medium term.

I also appreciate their note at the bottom of the article:

"Thankfully, we can do this because our business model does not rely on viral content tailored to the whims of the social media giants’ algorithms – instead we’re funded directly by our readers."

Yet another reason why patronage models are far better than advertising.

[Link]

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The corner café

4 min read

We’ve got a new takeaway in the neighborhood, occupying a small space that was previously taken up by a pizza joint. Their opening was a bit of a saga — it seemed like they were waiting an age for permits to be approved — so it’s exciting to have them finally open.

I was also really intrigued: the owner is an award-winning chef who spends significant time supporting abused children. At the same time, their Instagram feed seemed to just be stock images of food, while there didn’t seem to be rhyme or reason to the enormous menu. Cheesesteaks sat alongside gumbo and salmon with mango salsa. I couldn’t begin to tell you what the through line was: everything seemed to have been chosen in the spirit of, “maybe they’ll buy this?”

I walked in on opening day to buy two burgers as a test order. It was chaos: the room was filled with black smoke, every surface in the kitchen was covered in ingredients that ran the gamut from spices to ready-made Belgian waffle mix, and laundry baskets full of fruit and vegetables sat on the floor. I counted seven people working in a space the size of a corner store.

Every meal seemed to be cooked one at a time. My burgers took 25 minutes to cook; they were largely ungarnished and incredibly expensive for what they were. One of them had a hair in it. The fries were pretty good but had been over-salted. The woman at the counter made sure to ask me to come back with feedback as they were just getting started.

My review so far might seem unkind, but I really want them to succeed. It would be lovely to have some decent food just down the street; while Philadelphia is rightly known for excellent restaurants, my part of the suburbs is not. So I was dismayed to read Instagram updates from the restaurant that apologized for long wait times, as well as a confusing update that I think was about not being open on Veteran’s Day and offsetting their menu options by a day as a result — though there’s no daily rotation to adjust, as far as I could tell.

Today’s update was that they’d hired more staff to make things go faster, and I’ve never seen a software analogy write itself so neatly and so clearly before. If you’ve ever been on a project that’s been falling behind, you’ll know that adding more people is a great way to fall further behind. Hiring more people when a team is struggling is often like trying to untangle a knot by adding more hands: without clear roles, it only gets messier.

I really want to tell them to focus on a small number of menu items, aimed at a specific community that they want to serve, and only grow once they’ve hit menu / eater fit. Clean out the kitchen, retain a smaller but well-trained staff, and design processes to get that food made repeatedly well in an acceptable time, and at a price that makes sense. Launching with a “this is for everyone!” mentality practically ensures that you’re releasing something for nobody at all.

It’s not my place, of course, although I probably will send them some gentle feedback about the hair in the burger at the very least. I genuinely hope they do succeed; I would like to eat there regularly. I’m cheering for them. But for now, from afar.

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I’m a neurology ICU nurse. The creep of AI in our hospitals terrifies me

[Michael Kennedy and Isobel Cockerell in Coda Story]

Just one example of many of AI being used to take agency away from ordinary workers:

"The upshot was, it took away our ability to advocate for patients. We couldn’t point to a score and say, ‘This patient is too sick, I need to focus on them alone,’ because the numbers didn’t help us make that case anymore. They didn’t tell us if a patient was low, medium, or high need. They just gave patients a seemingly random score that nobody understood, on a scale of one to infinity.

We felt the system was designed to take decision-making power away from nurses at the bedside. Deny us the power to have a say in how much staffing we need."

The piece goes on to discuss the mass surveillance that AI enables. In a world where a patient's discussions with the healthcare workers attending to them are recorded, to feed an agent or otherwise, all kinds of abuses become possible. Not only does it remove agency from the experts who should be advocating for patients, but consider the effects in a state with adverse reproductive healthcare laws, for example.

This is the salient point:

"The reasoning for bringing in AI tools to monitor patients is always that it will make life easier for us, but in my experience, technology in healthcare rarely makes things better. It usually just speeds up the factory floor, squeezing more out of us, so they can ultimately hire fewer of us."

And this tends to be true regardless of what the original intention might be. If a technology can be used to cut costs or squeeze more productivity out of a worker, absent of any other constraints, it absolutely will be. In healthcare, like many fields that depend on care, attention, and underlying humanity, that's not necessarily a good thing.

[Link]

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Congress About to Gift Trump Sweeping Powers to Crush Political Enemies

[Noah Hurowitz at The Intercept]

This should be a five alarm fire:

"Up for a potential fast-track vote next week in the House of Representatives, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, also known as H.R. 9495, would grant the secretary of the Treasury Department unilateral authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit deemed to be a “terrorist supporting organization.” [...] The law would not require officials to explain the reason for designating a group, nor does it require the Treasury Department to provide evidence."

Unbelievably, this is a bipartisan bill, despite its obviously harmful effects: if any non-profit can be stripped of its status without reason or evidence, the ability for an adverse administration to do harm with it is huge.

Non-profits one can imagine being affected include those reporting the news, providing reproductive healthcare, supporting vulnerable communities, aiding immigrants at risk of deportation, providing aid in places like Gaza, and more. It's a blank check to harm political opponents - and it seems ludicrous that it's on the verge of passing.

[Link]

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How I ship projects at big tech companies

[Sean Goedecke]

This is very good. It's advertised as a piece about shipping in big tech companies, but honestly, I think it's true of many smaller companies too. It's not true in the smallest startups or for organizations with certain kinds of engineering cultures - but I suspect they may be in the minority.

"What does it mean to ship? It does not mean deploying code or even making a feature available to users. Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped."

Software engineering isn't a technology business: it's a people business. You're building tools that solve real problems for real people, and you're doing it inside an organizational structure that is also made of real people. There's no way to get around this: unless the organization is exceptionally organized around engineering needs (which many small and medium tech companies are!), you will have to navigate these sorts of interpersonal dynamics.

This hits the nail on the head for just about everybody:

"I think a lot of engineers hold off on deploys essentially out of fear. If you want to ship, you need to do the exact opposite: you need to deploy as much as you can as early as possible, and you need to do the scariest changes as early as you can possibly do them."

It seems counterintuitive, but again: if your goal is to ship (and it probably should be), you need to focus on doing that.

[Link]

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Improving Private Signal Calls: Call Links & More

[Signal]

Signal has improved its group call functionality pretty significantly:

"If you love group calls on Signal, but don’t want to create a group chat for every combination of your friends or colleagues, you’re in luck. Today we’re launching call links: Share a link with anyone on Signal and in just a tap or click they can join the call. No group chat required."

This is good news, and brings Signal in line with other videoconferencing software. These calls include hand raising, reply emoji, and the other functionality you'd expect to see elsewhere - while being end to end encrypted.

I'm hoping this is a prelude to even more group / workspace functionality. The blog post mentions that Signal's own meetings are Signal-powered (as they should be!), and it's a hop, skip, and a jump from there to powering internal chat with it, too.

This would be a game-changer for any organization that needs to maintain secure comms. It's also a good idea for anyone who conducts regular calls or chats in a group.

Signal is free and open source, is always end-to-end encrypted, and can be downloaded on every major platform.

[Link]

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PSA: Social media privacy and you

A camera to indicate surveillance

I’ve noticed a few mistaken assumptions circulating on social media lately, so I thought it was worth clarifying a few things around privacy and surveillance.

Much of this depends on the idea of a threat model: a term that refers to the potential risks you face based on who you think might try to access your information and why.

Making a social media profile private does not make it safe from surveillance.

While it may make you safe from harassment by preventing drive-by comments from outside attackers, its content is still accessible by the platform owner.

For centralized services like Threads and X, this is hopefully obvious: the platform owner can see your content. However, it’s also true on other platforms. For example, the owner of your Mastodon instance could theoretically view your non-public posts.

If your main concern is harassment, setting your account to private can be a helpful step. If your threat model is a state actor or other large entity accessing your information and using it to incriminate you in some way, it does not prevent that from happening if the social media platform co-operates. For example, if X was compelled (or chose to) provide information about users posting about receiving reproductive healthcare, it could do that regardless of an account’s privacy settings. Threads or a Mastodon instance could similarly be subpoenaed for the same information.

Remember, even with privacy settings in place, your data belongs to the platform owner, not you. This is a critical point to understand in any digital space, regardless of ownership or whether it is centralized or decentralized. Even if a platform is decentralized, privacy still depends on who runs your instance, their stance on co-operating with outside requests for information, and the legal demands of the region they reside in.

If a platform chooses to co-operate, a warrant is not necessarily required for this information, and you may never find out that it has happened.

Decentralized/federated social networks are not free from surveillance.

These platforms are based on permissionless protocols, which allow anyone to join the network and interact without needing special permissions from anyone. This is great for accessibility but can also make it easier for bad actors to watch public posts.

In some ways, that makes them easier to surveil than centralized services. For an actor to surveil X or Threads, they would need to work with the platform owner. For an actor to do the same thing with Mastodon or Bluesky, they simply need to implement the protocol and go looking.

This is where making your account private can help, as long as the platform owner is not directly co-operating. (As described above, if a platform owner does co-operate, all data stored with them is potentially accessible.) If your account is public, your information can be freely indexed with no limitations.

Social media is not suitable for sensitive conversations.

As we’ve seen, privacy settings are helpful but limited. Given the limitations of privacy settings on social media, for truly sensitive conversations, it’s wise to switch to encrypted channels. You should also be mindful of what you share on any social platform, even with privacy settings enabled.

I always recommend Signal for sensitive conversations, and suggest using it to replace DMs entirely. You’re much more likely to use it for a sensitive conversation if you’re already using it for everyconversation. Unlike the alternatives, it’s open source and auditable, not owned by a large corporation, end-to-end encrypted, works on every platform, and is very easy to use.

You should also consider using Block Party, which is the most user-friendly tool I’ve seen for locking down your social media privacy settings.

In the end, privacy settings can only go so far. Using a platform like Signal can make a meaningful difference in safeguarding your most sensitive information. It’s a free, simple choice. But even more than that, it’s worth remembering: the point of social media is that someone is always watching. Act accordingly.

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Journalists - is Twitter actually your community?

[Damon Kiesow in Working Systems]

Damon Kiesow, who is the Knight Chair in Digital Editing and Producing at the Missouri School of Journalism, writes:

"We ourselves have torn down the wall between editorial and business interests if as journalists, our calculation here is not values-based. To wit: “But I have a large following and neither BlueSky or Threads does.” That is the rationalization of a marketer, not a journalist who believes in the SPJ Code of Ethics dictate to “minimize harm.”"

The questions Damon raises in this post are the right ones. It's long past time for journalists to interrogate their uses of social media and whether they're doing harm, and I deeply appreciate the callout to the SPJ Code of Ethics as a core principle here.

Alternatives are available that don't have these toxic traits and are more engaged, less dangerous for your community, and a part of the future of the web rather than a relic of the past. Use them.

[Link]

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Accessible tips for people to protect their privacy

[Bill Fitzgerald]

Bill Fitzgerald has updated his open source guide to personal privacy:

"Conversations about privacy and security often focus on technology and give scant attention to the human, non-technological factors that affect personal privacy and security. This post covers a range of concrete steps we can all take to regain control over what, when, and with whom we share."

I really appreciate the straightforwardness of the guide - these are things that everyone can do to help keep themselves safe. And because it's open source, the more eyes there are on it validating the information, the better the guide will get.

Some of the general advice is needfully pessimistic but doesn't always apply. For example, it talks about there not being an expectation of privacy on work devices, or using a work-provided VPN. That probably is generally true, but for example, in my role leading technology at ProPublica, I and others would absolutely flip a table if we decided to surveil our employees. (For one thing, that would be a terrible approach if we cared about keeping sources safe, which we obviously do.) So it's always worth checking in with your IT leadership to understand their concrete policy.

Regardless, I would feel comfortable sharing this verbatim. I'm grateful that Bill has released it under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, so there are opportunities to create designs for this guide and share them back to the community.

[Link]

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Wind the clock

[Molly White]

Unsure what to do now? Molly White has some solid ways to get started helping:

""Many of us have looked back on historic events where people have bravely stood up against powerful adversaries and wondered, “what would I have done?” Now is your chance to find out. It did not just start with this election; it has been that time for a long time. If you’re just realizing it now, get your ass in gear. Make yourself proud.""

There are compelling suggestions here around protecting yourself; working to support press freedom and access to information; migrant rights; reproductive rights; trans rights. But more than that, the spirit of this post is that we should have a bias towards meaningful action.

[Link]

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