Werd I/O

The EU has opened up an investigation into Elon Musk’s X:

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, may have broken the European Union’s tough new Digital Services Act rules, regulators said as they announced the opening of a formal investigation today. A key concern of the investigation is “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel,” the European Commission says.

What actually counts as illegal content under the Digital Services Act isn’t completely clear-cut:

What constitutes illegal content is defined in other laws either at EU level or at national level – for example terrorist content or child sexual abuse material or illegal hate speech is defined at EU level. Where a content is illegal only in a given Member State, as a general rule it should only be removed in the territory where it is illegal.

So, for example, what is considered illegal in Germany under the DSA isn’t necessarily illegal in Ireland or Poland. Service providers therefore have to keep a matrix of content rules for each EU member state, and remove any given piece of content only in the jurisdictions where it is illegal.

In addition to policing illegal content, seventeen named Very Large Online Platforms (X, Meta, YouTube, TikTok, the Apple App Store, and so on) and the two largest search engines also need to assess their impact on four broad categories of what the legislation calls systemic risk:

• “The sale of products or services prohibited by Union or national law, including dangerous or counterfeit products, or illegally-traded animals”
• “The actual or foreseeable impact of the service on the exercise of fundamental rights, as protected by the Charter, including but not limited to human dignity, freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, the right to private life, data protection, the right to non-discrimination, the rights of the child and consumer protection”
• “The actual or foreseeable negative effects on democratic processes, civic discourse and electoral processes, as well as public security”
• “Concerns relating to the design, functioning or use, including through manipulation, of very large online platforms and of very large online search engines with an actual or foreseeable negative effect on the protection of public health, minors and serious negative consequences to a person's physical and mental well-being, or on gender-based violence”

When assessing these risks, those platforms are required to consider their content and advertising algorithms, content moderation policies, terms and conditions, and data policies.

So the EU’s investigation into X isn’t just around X distributing illegal content (which it potentially is, given the proliferation of straight-up Nazi content that is illegal in at least one member country). It’s also around whether X is doing enough — and, reading between the lines, whether it’s even actively trying — to mitigate those systemic harms.

It’s also explicitly around whether the new blue checks are deceptive, given that they purport to verify a user as authentic when, in reality, anyone can pay to obtain one. (If you’re wondering if this really is deceptive, just ask Eli Lilly.)

Finally, X hasn’t allowed researchers access to the platform for auditing purposes, violating a principle of transparency which is enshrined by the Digital Services Act. Following changes to the platform, access to data for research purposes has been severely curtailed:

Social media researchers have canceled, suspended or changed more than 100 studies about X, formerly Twitter, as a result of actions taken by Elon Musk that limit access to the social media platform, nearly a dozen interviews and a survey of planned projects show. […] A majority of survey respondents fear being sued by X over their findings or use of data. The worry follows X's July lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after it published critical reports about the platform's content moderation.

Regardless of how you feel about Elon Musk and X — as regular readers know, I have my own strong feelings — I’m struck by the level of compliance required by the Act, and how I might think about that if I ran X.

If I was in Musk’s place, I think these things would be true:

• Blue checks would indicate a verified identity only. They might be paid-for, but it would not be possible to obtain one without verifying your ID. The same rule would apply for every user. (Currently, my account has a blue checkmark, but I can assure you that I don’t pay for X.)
• Researchers from accredited institutions would have access to all public data via a free research license.
• I would be careful not to personally promote or favor any political viewpoint.
• The accounts of previous rule violators like Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones would have remained banned.

I honestly don’t know how I would adhere to the illegal content rule, though. The level of human content moderation required to keep illegal content out of various jurisdictions seems very high, almost to the point of making running a service like X prohibitive.

Of course, this isn’t unique to the EU. Any country has the ability to mark content as illegal if a platform does business there. It just so happens that the EU has the strongest codification of that idea, which is going to be onerous to comply with for many companies.

Which maybe it should be. I don’t know that we gain much by having giant social platforms that seek to serve all of humanity across all nations, owned by a single private company. It’s almost impossible for a company to serve all markets well with trust and safety teams that understand local nuances, and when you underserve a market, bad things happen — as they did when Facebook under-invested in content safety in Myanmar, leading to the genocide of the Rohingya. It’s not at all that I think these platforms should be able to run as some kind of global free market with no rules; that kind of cavalier approach leads to real and sometimes widespread harms.

Instead, I think an approach where the social web is made out of smaller, more local communities, where owners and moderators are aware of local issues, may prove to be safer and more resilient. A federated social web can allow members of these communities to interact with each other, but everyone’s discourse won’t be owned by the same Delaware C Corporation. In this world, everyone’s conversations can take place on locally-owned platforms that have appropriate rules and features for their locality. It’s a more sustainable, distributed, multi-polar approach to social media.

The Digital Services Act is onerous, and I think it probably needs to be. The right for companies to do business doesn’t outweigh the right of people to be free from harm and abuse. Whether X has the ability to keep running under its rules shouldn’t be the yardstick: the yardstick should be the rules needed to protect discourse, allow vulnerable groups to communicate safely, and to protect people from harm overall.

Image by James Duncan Davidson, licensed under CC BY-NC 3.0.

When I was eleven years old, my family relocated to the outskirts of Durham, North Carolina for a little while while my dad taught at Duke. We home-swapped with an abortion doctor, and our temporary home was sometimes pelted with eggs. My parents asked us not to play in the rooms of the house where the windows faced the road.

I attended an elementary school straight out of an American TV show. It was all stuff I’d never seen before: the desks and chairs were those all-in-one units, all aligned in rows. There was an American flag in the classroom. The cafeteria served unrecognizable pizza, Sloppy Joes, a pulled pork concoction that resembled tuna more than anything else, and ice cream cones that had been thawed and refrozen so many times that they were chewy.

I always feel like a fish out of water, but Durham made me feel like I’d launched out of the fishbowl, hit escape velocity, and found myself in another galaxy. It was all little things, though, mostly without consequence. I refused to stand to pledge allegiance to the flag, but nobody really batted an eyelid. Everyone was really into fishing for some reason, and the first time I tried it my fishing pole ended up in a tree. Camo gear was really popular, as if everyone thought they were on some kind of battlefront. Everyone was obsessed with New Kids on the Block. And the local animals were a little more dangerous than I, coming from a place that had exactly zero venomous creatures, understood.

Generally, I think spiders are our friends; an important, benign part of our ecosystem. I’d always just picked them up and moved them if they showed up inside. Some people are irrationally afraid of them, but I’ve never been one.

So when everyone seemed terrified of a spider hanging out on a fence at school, I thought they were really silly. Which is why I walked up to the fence, lay my hand on it, and let the spider crawl on me for a while.

It was only later that I understood how dangerous a black widow spider actually is — particularly to an eleven year old. It was one of the most profoundly stupid things I ever did as a kid.

There’s no real lesson here, except perhaps to stop and listen to other people who might know more than you, even if you think you’re being silly. But I do sometimes think about what might have happened if the spider hadn’t taken kindly to me. It was one of those points where, had my luck run a little bit differently, absolutely everything could have changed.

Spider moments, let’s call them. Life is full of them. And all we can do is try to be a little less stupid and a little more prepared.

I’d been doing pretty well on my manuscript until I realized I needed to make a major plot revision. That’s been a tough thing to go back and re-edit for. For a few months I was paralyzed between just rewriting the whole thing or diving into extensive re-edits.

I chose to go back and re-edit. At this point in the year, I’m almost all the way through. It’s not a particularly environmentally friendly process, but here’s what worked for me:

1. Print out each chapter in turn
2. Read through it on paper
3. Make notes on it with a Sharpie
4. Go back into Ulysses and make changes
5. Re-read it on paper again
6. Make any necessary edits that I catch on the second pass

It’s been good. I caught a few other mistakes and inconsistencies this way — and deleted more words than I’ve added, which I don’t think is a bad sign — and I think this is a process that’ll work for me when I come to do my actual edit.

I’d lost a little momentum, but I’m hoping that I can catch up the draft by Christmas, and then re-embark on writing the rest of the story. I think the change strengthens my story considerably, and I’m pretty excited about where it’s going next.

The topics I play with in the novel won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s read my posts for a while, but the ideas and the story hopefully will be. I’m looking forward to sharing it with some beta readers sometime next year, once I’ve completed the draft and gone through the thematic and line-by-line edits.

And then who knows? Finding an agent and courting publishers isn’t a million miles away from raising money as a startup founder, but I’m not allowing myself to consider that stage in proceedings until I have a fully-baked product that I feel like is worth sharing. So for now: on with the work.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my Twitter/X account. I don’t want to leave it dormant, because the current policy is to reclaim usernames from accounts that don’t post, which creates a risk that someone will come along and claim to be me later on. (I’d canceled my account but revived it for this reason.) I also don’t want to post, because the current owner is a dumpster fire of noxious ideas, down to and including reinstating the account of Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones.

I have automatic posting set up for my bookmarks to other places, and for a while I’ve been posting them to Twitter, too. But I don’t think this is the right approach; it’s still actual, ongoing use of the network.

So for now, I have a timed post that publishes every day, which reads as follows:

In protest of Elon Musk's policies, actions, and promotion of white supremacist figures and rhetoric, I won't post here anymore.

You can find me on:

Threads: https://threads.net/@ben.werdmuller
Mastodon: https://werd.social/@ben
My website: https://werd.io

You should leave too.

A little bit of a nudge to jump ship, as well as a signpost to where we can connect elsewhere.

What do you think? What have you done?

I participated in this year’s NiemanLab Predictions for Journalism. My prediction is about AI flooding the web with spammy, bland content — and the techniques newsrooms will need to use to connect with their communities:

Newsrooms that commit to AI-driven storytelling as a way to cut costs while increasing output will be lost in a sea of similarly bland content and spammy marketing. Newsrooms that cling to traditional SEO and social media tactics will find that they become less and less effective in the face of more and more noise.

In contrast, the newsrooms that survive the flooding of the web are going to be the ones that report deeply, commit to diverse representation, invest in investigative journalism in the public interest, and choose to meet their communities where they’re at by doing things that don’t scale to engage them.

Read the whole thing here.

Meanwhile, Dana Lacey predicts that publishers will embrace open source:

[Publishers] will finally see open source software as a competitive advantage, and the cheapest way to keep up with the pace of innovation. They’ll explore ways to use open source technology to combat disinformation, personalize content, and reach new audiences by tapping into global expertise.

Andrew Losowsky invites newsrooms to learn from influencers as a way of building trust:

Journalism has to rebuild itself around the real needs of our communities. To do this effectively, we first need to show up for them. We need to be more approachable and present, to ask and answer ongoing questions, to encourage and engage in discussions around what and how we cover, to show up for our communities in good times as well as bad, to reward and encourage loyalty, to create near-seamless access to our work, and to provide real, demonstrable value with everything we make. In other words, learn from influencers through the lens of engaged journalism.

Sisi Wei discusses “news mirages” — news that looks trustworthy but isn’t news at all:

Rapid developments in AI (and the billions in funding being poured into it) are making it easier and easier for bad actors to conjure these mirages using text, audio, photo, and video, using quantity to overwhelm the little oases of quality information communities manage to access.

[…] In 2024, journalists must double-down on finding, publishing, and distributing quality independent information to fill the void. It’s not enough to only dispel the illusions created by news mirages. If we only debunk misinformation without publishing quality information of our own, we have only shifted a news mirage back into a news desert.

Upasna Gautam calls for newsrooms to learn how to build product in a more agile way (which they frankly should have a long time ago):

Central to an agile environment is the core concept of iterative development cycles. These succinct sprints, spanning two to four weeks, liberate development teams from the constraints of traditional waterfall methodologies. They empower teams not just to deliver software but to orchestrate incremental improvements, enabling swift adaptation to emerging trends and seamless integration of user feedback.

Amethyst J. Davis bluntly calls for the PressForward funding initiative to prove itself to the Black press:

How are the neediest of newsrooms supposed to trust Press Forward when public and private funders involved have already tried to lock us out? We all have stories.

I know so many Black-centered newsroom leaders who’ve expressed doubt about Press Forward behind the scenes. They’ve been told they should keep their comments quiet because they’ll lose out on critical dollars.

The whole list is a check on the pulse of how the news industry is thinking. I love it, and feel very privileged to contribute. You can check it out here.

I was very taken by Robin Berjon’s description of technologists:

Someone needs to navigate the digital world (for a business, a project, any institution) without blind deference to vertical experts, and without monkeying dumb Silicon Valley tropes or giving credence to breathless LinkedIn thoughtleadering.

The full post is a solid description of the sort of generalist who can write code and understands product principles but can also gather multidisciplinary threads together in order to help an organization understand and navigate technology more holistically. I see myself in it, and I see a lot of other people I’ve worked with. I’d love to see a dedicated position for this kind of person, because, selfishly, it’s exactly the kind of thing I do.

The closest I’ve probably come is as a founder, where you have to be a generalist; a CTO at a non-technical organization, where you necessarily have to understand technology holistically to build and advise on strategy; and as a Director of Investments, where you invest based on your understanding of these trends. It’s not surprising, then, that those are my favorite jobs over my career.

It also brought up something else for me. It’s never been obvious that I’d fit well into a larger tech company. My interactions in those environments have left me with an understanding that their cultures are largely logical and analytical. That’s not a criticism any way; you’d probably expect that from a largely engineering-based organization. But it’s also not quite how my brain works, and I’ve been unhappy when I’ve tried to force myself to be that person.

Myers-Briggs is astrology for business and should never, ever be used to hire or assess a team member. Still, I’ve found it to be a useful way to think about my own traits, alongside other tests I’ve taken along the way (the CliftonStrengths test, Dimensional, and so on). Consistently, by every measure, I land more on the feeling-perceiving line: some version of INFP. My experience of the world is in line with this: I’m interested in abstract ideas and human impacts more than details and logical intricacies.

Don’t get me wrong: I can code productively, and have built entire companies by doing so. But I’m not motivated by the code or the fundamental problems themselves. My motivation is always human. That inevitably means I’ve become more of a technical generalist than a deep expert on any particular technical topic; more or less the kind of person Robin described.

I was originally more drawn to coding as self-expression than coding as formal engineering. It took years for me to understand the difference, but there’s a gulf in approaches. An expressive coder will often get to great results but is nowhere near as disciplined. I had to forcibly retrain myself to be comfortable with style guidelines, code review, and all the belts and braces that make great engineering teams really successful. They’re really important, but as someone who wanted to short-cut to the human impact, it took me a little while to come around.

It’s not just me, by the way: often mission-driven teams are lean towards creative coders rather than engineers. I’ve found that, when I’ve come across a team that’s grown around creative coding rather than engineering, it’s taken a lot of time, effort, and practice to reframe the job and grow those skills.

I’ve learned how to help teams do that. I’ve also become good at supporting engineers as three-dimensional human beings, and intuitively understanding their needs. I’m also good at finding the needs of people we’re trying to help, and wrangling some of the existential problems that lie at the heart of building a productive team culture. Being successful, for me, has been about accepting my INFP-ness rather than trying to shoehorn myself into another shape — and partnering with great, detail-oriented engineers who I can deeply support.

Long before Robin’s post, I was describing myself as a “humanist technologist”. I eventually took it off my profiles because I don’t think anyone but me knew what it meant. Here’s another attempt:

• Humanist: someone who is motivated to improve personal and social conditions
• Technologist: a generalist whose expertise spans engineering, product, and policy, who can use multidisciplinary skills in order to help organizations to navigate technology issues and build a strategy

A humanist technologist, then, is someone who uses multidisciplinary skills to help organizations use or understand technology in order to improve personal and social conditions.

• We’re not primarily engineers, but we can read, write, architect, and evaluate code.
• We’re not primarily product managers, but we can navigate trends, human needs, and organizational priorities in order to set goals and build plans.
• We can develop and communicate strong policy positions based on our understanding of the technology, business, and human sides of a problem.
• We can rally a community and help galvanize our colleagues around a solution that makes a human impact.

I think it’s a better description of what I do. I think I’ll return it to my profile; I wish there was a way to make the description more mainstream. If nothing else, it will serve as a reminder that there’s plenty of room for people in technology who are motivated by people more than the technology itself, and that they should feel welcome.