I feel like the one of the lowest level human internet problems we haven’t solved is how to be around millions of people, many of whom vocally disapprove of at least some of our thoughts and actions, without letting our hyper-social status-sensitive primate brains either melt or devote themselves to arguing that all our positions are the right positions for everyone.
Like yes, some algos are bad, but we also just built structures we can’t quite handle and are perma-mad at each other about it.
Bluesky has reply-gating (you can set who can reply to a post, like people you follow or a given list or no one) and is now testing out post-publication reply locking.
I just want to yell for a second about how humane and consent-forward these features are, especially after seeing some people here losing their minds when someone asked for gating recently because they felt (alas, not a paraphrase) entitled to always be able to respond.
Ozone, Bluesky's stackable moderation system is up and open-sourced.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation
I think it's interesting in obvious ways and risky in some less obvious ones (that have less to do with "O NO BILLIONAIRES" or "O NO LIBERTARIANS" and more to do with placelessness), but we'll see.
I hope good things emerge from/grow on top of this framework.
[I recognize that mentioning this is widely considered to be an invitation to explain capital like I am a tiny baby. You could also not.]
It's very tempting to believe that KOSA is so bad that it won't really pass/won't survive but the past year of anti-bodily-autonomy legislation has liquified my remaining shreds of normalcy bias, and I'm worried. US folks, please call your reps if you can.
(Muting this in advance bc of my workload today. 🙌 )
If you’re doing US-based events for women in tech, especially if your events are NB and trans-inclusive, you need to be paying a whole lot more attention to security than most events do. Get some paranoid infosec women and a real physical security presence. Safety planning right now should make everyone sweat. And don’t do events in states where your attendees are exposed to legal and medical harm. 🤦🏻
Dear internet please get someone to do a reported piece on the Grace Hopper conference disaster about how that was a failure of event management bc holy shit was that a failure of event management
The Novavax news is mostly pitched in the media as "nice for antivax weirdos I guess" but a lot of people with, for instance, autoimmune diseases, have had a fairly terrible time with mRNA shots, so a trad vaccine is a huge thing for a lot of people.
Last Thursday and Saturday, I posted the first two pieces of a four-part series on Meta in Myanmar on my site:
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setuphttps://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis
These two posts stitch together accounts of what was actually happening in Myanmar between 2012 and 2018, both online and off. The third post, set to go up this coming Thursday, deals with what we now know about what was happening inside Meta at the time—inside the machinery of Facebook’s algorithms and inside the company itself.
Okay, Part II of the Meta in Myanmar series is up:
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis
Meta post with notes is here: https://erinkissane.com/meta-meta
Content warnings for genocide, hate speech, and non-graphic descriptions of atrocities.
I'll be around a bit this weekend to fix typos and things, but I'm mostly heading outdoors and away from the screens for awhile, so I may not be super quick to respond.
I've written the series because I think that if we plow ahead with attempts to make new and better social platforms and tools without understanding the industry's recent history in relatively granular detail, we run the risk of making the same mistakes—or of failing to recognize major threats.
The first post deals with Myanmar's ultra-optimistic crash entry to the internet—and outlines many warnings Meta received about its role in worsening ethnic tensions and violence in those years.
The second post, which is going up tomorrow unless my computer explodes, deals with the escalation into the 2016-2017 "ethnic cleansing" and genocide of the Rohingya and Meta's role in those events.
The third post is about how Facebook as a platform became both an active accelerator for violence-inciting messages and a host for a truly massive covert fake-page network built to manufacture support for genocide.
In the fourth post, I talk about what I think we should take from all of this.
Over the next two weeks, I'll be publishing a series of four (well, 4.5) posts about Meta's role in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar.
Part I is up now, along with a little meta-post with notes on terminology and sources and ct.
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setuphttps://erinkissane.com/meta-meta
These posts are aimed squarely at people like me and my tech-world peers—people who work on and care about social technologies.
I've written the series because I think that if we plow ahead with attempts to make new and better social platforms and tools without understanding the industry's recent history in relatively granular detail, we run the risk of making the same mistakes—or of failing to recognize major threats.
The first post deals with Myanmar's ultra-optimistic crash entry to the internet—and outlines many warnings Meta received about its role in worsening ethnic tensions and violence in those years.
Just posted part one of my series on Meta in Myanmar:
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup
…and a little meta-post with notes about names and sourcing and all that stuff:
https://erinkissane.com/meta-meta
This series is what I've spent a good chunk of the last few months—and all my available hours in the past month—researching and writing.
I'll probably do a real thread tomorrow, but I am very grateful to have the thing up there.
Three more parts to go over the next few weeks. 😬
Fedi developers and instance-runners reading the Zuckerberg interview in the Verge are definitely also reading this today, right?
https://wapo.st/3PBtyme
This is not "Facebook is an evil corporation boooo I'm a purist FOSS person"
this is
"Remember how Zuckerberg and all the other spox spent years saying they'd handle this and it turns out they were letting powerful people in India run the exact Myanmar Protocol all over again."
US parents who are having trouble finding pediatric covid shots, I recommend calling your pediatrician’s office even if they didn’t do shots in the last round.
We’re on a wait list at ours with no known vax date (because the private sector is so much more efficient than governmental distribution!!) but it’s a signal of interest to the office. Gonna call the pharmacy as well.
(This is ridiculous and I hate it, but here we are, part 849,902,344.)
(Internet Brain Syndrome compels me to note that I have complicated feelings about conscience rules—they’re double-edged and have been deployed in terrible ways. But I like the Quakers here.)
Does everyone who wants to know about FediForum—next week, all online, unconference—actually know about it?
I'm trying to decide if I should rejigger my schedule to attend the whole thing.
https://fediforum.org #meta
Hey US folks, the FDA is expected to approve boosters very soon, but the CDC’s vax advisory committee doesn’t meet until Sept 12. That’s when we’ll know who will be able to get boosted.
Paul Offit, the guy opining in the media about who gets shots, is just an advisor to the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. He is not in charge of anything is always like this: He voted against the bivalent booster and argues against using covid vax to protect against infection.
I’m delighted to see people learn about this process and submit comments ahead of that Sept 12 CDC advisory committee meeting! That is great.
But also I think the irresponsible journalism that failed to contextualize Offit’s schtick is probably scaring at least a few people more than is necessary or useful.
I noticed by using the new "Find People to Follow" modal and viewing the #people tab in Explore and there were half a dozen people I follow in there and…I was suddenly not following any of them anymore?
I don't know where to begin trying to find out who I've lost.
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