now @ethanz@social.coop

UMass Amherst, Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. Formerly MIT Center for Civic Media. Always Berkman Center. #MakeAmericaKindAgain

Last Notes

2024-11-13 17:32:55 UTC

This account is moving to another Mastodon node. You can find me at ethanz@social.coop . Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!

2024-11-12 21:39:23 UTC

We've come to think of internet trolling as the use of aggressive language to abuse people online. Henna Paaki at Aalto University would like us to broader our understanding and consider "covert behavior". #CSCW2024 This is trolling that uses manipulation and norm violation to get people involved with pointless, but sometimes harmful, discussions. She gives the example of a thread on Reddit where a troll posts about whether his cat has autism. It's polite... but it's trolling

2024-10-28 17:29:01 UTC

Danielle Allen gave a tremendous and optimistic talk at UMass Amherst today, on "How to be a Confident Pluralist": https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/10/28/danielle-allen-at-umass-amherst-on-how-to-be-a-confident-pluralist/
It's helpful - and challenging - to hear her optimism on the power of engaging respectfully.

2024-09-16 16:38:52 UTC

I could not be more thrilled that we are welcoming Malka Older as the new executive director of Global Voices. It's hard to imagine GV after Ivan Sigal moves on, but if anyone can lead this amazing project forward, it's Malka: https://globalvoices.org/2024/09/16/global-voices-announces-its-new-executive-director/

2024-08-01 22:15:04 UTC

Meta shutting down Crowdtangle will be a disaster going into a highly contentious election. Great report from my friends at Coalition for Independent Technology Research: https://independenttechresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/CrowdTangle-Survey-Report-Final.pdf

2024-05-29 16:20:05 UTC

A talk from Brown CS professor Diana Freed completely changed my understanding of computer security - how do we secure systems for domestic violence survivors and their children? I got to talk with her about these questions for Reimagining the Internet: https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/101-diana-freed/

2024-05-23 11:55:10 UTC

Grateful to Will Oremus for taking time to explain the Unfollow Everything suit against meta to Marketplace - much like his WaPo analysis piece, it's a terrific overview of the issues at play around middleware, section 230 and user control: https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/college-professor-challenges-section-230s-status-quo/

2024-05-06 20:03:32 UTC

It's interesting which audiences different media reach. With an essay in the @nytimes today, I've heard from lots of faculty at universities I've studied at, and an equal amount of complaints from internet strangers that I am abusing the US legal system... https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/05/opinion/facebook-court-internet-meta.html

2024-05-02 17:22:16 UTC

Grateful for @npub1hyk…3p33 with a terrific thread contextualizing the suit Knight First Amendment and I are bringing against Meta as a path towards adversarial interoperability: https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/#cda-230-c-2-b

2024-05-01 17:53:37 UTC

With my brilliant friends at the Knight First Amendment Institute, I filed suit against Meta today, asking a federal court to find that CDA section 230 gives users rights to control what they see on social media via third party tools. See our complaint at: https://knightcolumbia.org/cases/zuckerman-v-meta-platforms-inc . Vittori Elliott has a great overview of our case and what's at stake in her piece for Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-section-230-users-algorithm/

2024-04-19 19:11:35 UTC

Twitter's new business model - Russian Disinformation: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/04/19/twitters-new-business-model-russian-disinfo/
For the first time, I stumbled on US-targeted Russian disinfo in the wild... and they're a Twitter advertiser.

2024-04-03 19:16:58 UTC

When US legislators invoke child safety, it's a good time to reach for your revolver: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/65593/tiktok-ban-united-states-safety-first-internet

2024-03-27 15:18:04 UTC

This is both terrific research and absolutely beautiful presentation of data about image generation systems. Adding this to my "recommended readings" on AI and ethical implications - super smart and affecting work: https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way

2024-03-12 18:56:04 UTC

Understanding the current state of US politics means understanding a 50 year rise in mistrust in institutions - my conversation about by 2021 book Mistrust with the editor of the Christian Science Monitor: https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Author-Q-As/2024/0311/How-mistrust-explains-all-those-frustrating-things-about-US-politics

2024-02-27 18:36:11 UTC

Hey, if you've been meaning to try Gobo.social - our social media aggregator developed at UMass Amherst - this is a great time. It supports cross posting and reading from Mastodon and BlueSky, and we hope to bring on Twitter and Threads in the next few months. We now support mentions, making the tool way more useful. And support for choosing, auditing and tuning the algorithms used to sort your feed in in development. Let me know if you'd like a beta account.

2023-04-06 23:36:43 UTC

- reply

#[0] But that’s not the problem we are trying to solve. I love social.coop and would love to see more experiments. But we are trying to let people read from Twitter, Mastodon and Reddit using the same tool and sorting results based on their personal criteria. That’s better done at the edge of the network, aka a client.