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America Is No Longer the Home of the Free Internet

[Ethan Zuckerman in The Atlantic]

I completely agree with the points Ethan makes here. The TikTok ban was a spectacular own-goal for all kinds of reasons. In particular:

"[...] This is a depressing moment for anyone who cherishes American protections for speech and access to information. In 1965, while the Cold War shaped the U.S. national-security environment, the Supreme Court, in Lamont v. Postmaster General, determined that the post office had to send people publications that the government claimed were “communist political propaganda,” rather than force recipients to first declare in writing that they wanted to receive this mail. The decision was unanimous, and established the idea that Americans had the right to discover whatever they wanted within “a marketplace of ideas.”"

Truly, so much for the country that is allegedly about freedom of speech. There's something particularly messed-up and McCarthyist about how this ban came about, not least because some representatives have admitted that the ban is partially because of the availability of pro-Palestinian content on the platform. If we endorse this ban, do we also need to revisit the rightly widely-derided un-American-activities policies of the past? I'd rather we leave them in the dustbin of history.

But luckily, the kids are alright. This is also true:

"Although I don’t think this specific rebellion can last, I’m encouraged that American TikTok users realize that banning the popular platform directly contradicts America’s values. If only America’s leaders were so wise."

[Link]

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So how, exactly, did blogging help my career?

4 min read

I’ve written a few times about how blogging has been the single most important accelerant in my career. I mentioned this when I asked more of you to blog, in remarks about other peoples’ posts on blogging, and so on. But I’ve never actually explained how.

The arc of this journey is simple: I was a complete outsider with no money or connections, living in Scotland. Blogging allowed me to found two startups, build at least one enduring open source community, find multiple jobs, and enjoy career opportunities that otherwise would never have come my way. There is precisely zero chance that I would be doing my current job without it — or any job I’ve had since 2005.

I’ve been blogging since 1998. Because of that, I was familiar with the mechanics of what we’d later call social media very early on. I built a viral social site that was hitting millions of visits a day in my bedroom in 2001.

When I started to work in e-learning at the University of Edinburgh in 2003, I was able to immediately see the deficiencies in how people were learning and sharing online, and suggest a better alternative based on what was already happening. I collaborated with a PhD student who was studying education, and we wrote a white paper about what that might be. And then I published it on my blog, and he published it on his.

It was picked up by other bloggers in educational technology, who liked the idea. We offered it to the university, who declined (“blogging is for teenage girls crying in their bedrooms,” was the official response), so I quit my job and started building it full-time, narrating the whole journey on — you’ve guessed it — my blog. We built the platform into one that was used by universities, Fortune 500 companies, social movements, and NGOs around the world — all through word of mouth, driven by blogging.

When I left, it was my blogging that led me to be invited to speak at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Hauser School of Governance. After that talk, I met up with two of the attendees, who were journalists who saw the need for entrepreneurship to revive a flagging industry. I continued to collaborate with them, and together we built Latakoo, an enterprise video platform which continues to be the way NBC News and others gather footage and send it back to their newsrooms, in the format that each newsroom needs. Of course, I narrated the whole journey through blogging.

When I left Latakoo, it was to start Known, which could be described as a blogging platform. Because I’d been blogging heavily about an ongoing tech ethics issue at the time, it just so happened that I was quoted in the New York Times on the day that I was interviewing to be funded by Matter Ventures. It certainly didn’t hurt that Corey Ford, the General Partner, saw my name that day.

I blogged that journey too. Ultimately, Known had a small acquisition by Medium, and I continued to blog about indie web and tech ethics topics externally — and about things that Medium could be doing internally. That helped me build enduring relationships with people on the strategy team there. (“I don’t think Ben’s really an engineer,” someone accurately commented. “He could be running Medium,” they less-accurately added.)

One of the factors to Corey offering me a job at Matter was the writing I’d done around the dangers of Facebook as a single point of failure. In the wake of the 2016 election, that was significantly more clear to more people. So I joined the team, and used blogging to get the word out about what we wanted to fund.

When Matter stopped investing, I moved to Unlock Protocol — a company whose founder, Julien Genestoux, I had met through blogging and the indie web. After that, I worked at ForUsAll, which knew me through my work at Matter. I can’t draw a direct line between blogging and my work as CTO at The 19th, but there’s zero chance I would have gotten that job without everything that came before it. And then my current work as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica came from that.

Without narrating my journey, my opinions, and things I’ve built, I might still be in my starter career. Which, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with at all! But my arc has definitely been blogging-informed.

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Let’s talk about AI and end-to-end encryption

[Matthew Green]

I think this is the most important discussion with respect to AI:

"[...] I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot more of our private data. This data will be examined and summarized by increasingly powerful systems, producing relatively compact but valuable summaries of our lives. In principle those systems will eventually know everything about us and about our friends. They’ll read our most intimate private conversations, maybe they’ll even intuit our deepest innermost thoughts. We are about to face many hard questions about these systems, including some difficult questions about whether they will actually be working for us at all."

I lead technology at a non-profit newsroom where we've banned use of hosted AI models on sensitive data like reporting notes and source information. We've turned off AI assistants on our cloud services, and we've deployed client-side encryption for sensitive documents.

Even if we think vendors are trustworthy (I don't), sending this level of data to any third party creates a honeypot for surveillance and potential misuse by government, law enforcement, the vendors themselves, and beyond. If a vendor has access to your most personal data and receives a criminal subpoena, which could easily come from the government or from a third party, you might never know that your information was compromised. (Civil subpoenas sometimes allow vendors to notify you that this happened.)

So these solutions are pretty interesting, although fall far short of the encryption standard the author and I would both like to see:

"Apple’s approach to this problem is called “Private Cloud Compute” and it involves the use of special trusted hardware devices that run in Apple’s data centers. [...] Apple ensures that no long-term state is stored on these machines, and also load-balances your request to a different random server every time you connect."

As the author notes, when this level of data is being gathered centrally and is potentially available for government use (or even vendor use beyond our intent as users), serious questions are raised about who this software actually works for. Is it ours? Is it empowering? Is it covertly a system of control and monitoring? Or all of the above?

I think the answer, sadly, is inevitable.

[Link]

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‘The Interview’: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy is Done

[David Marchese in The New York Times]

This profile of Curtis Yarvin in the New York Times (paywalled, probably for the best) is far softer than it should have been, with far less formal fact-checking. It is of the moment, though: this guy’s writing is highly influential to the political class that’s about to land in power, as well as to prominent VCs and other tech luminaries.

It’s not a bad idea to shine a spotlight on who he is and what he’s all about — this is a man who has directly inspired JD Vance, multiple prominent venture capitalists, and other people in our still-forming tech oligarchy. And as softball and cozy as the conversation really is, it’s still hard to come away without thinking: this guy is genuinely evil.

In this interview he argues, among other things, that the Civil War (what he calls the “War of Secession”) didn’t improve anybody’s lives, and that women’s lives before suffrage were pretty great. He argues that people had at least as much liberty in the era of kings than they do today.

Towards the end of the interview, you'll find this exchange:

"What’s your Achilles’ heel? I also have self-confidence issues. I won’t bet fully on my own convictions."

I mean: good.

[Link]

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How extreme car dependency is driving Americans to unhappiness

[Oliver Milman in The Guardian]

Car culture isn't just physically bad for us, it affects us mentally too:

"The car is firmly entrenched as the default, and often only, mode of transport for the vast majority of Americans, with more than nine in 10 households having at least one vehicle and 87% of people using their cars daily. Last year, a record 290m vehicles were operated on US streets and highways.

However, this extreme car dependence is affecting Americans’ quality of life, with a new study finding there is a tipping point at which more driving leads to deeper unhappiness. It found that while having a car is better than not for overall life satisfaction, having to drive for more than 50% of the time for out-of-home activities is linked to a decrease in life satisfaction."

The trick, of course, is that most of our communities have been heavily designed around the car, in part because of a century of lobbying and pressure from the automotive industry. It's obvious that more integrated city planning that doesn't heavily favor car use leads to a happier and healthier life, but American society is largely not built for it.

In turn, most Americans can't even imagine a world that isn't car-centric, and vehicles have become a core part of the culture. That's as intrinsically toxic as smoking culture, but because it literally has dictated how the environment around us has been designed and built, it's going to take a long time to undo - and before we get there, we need to have the widespread will to undo it, which doesn't seem to exist.

Compounding that, our most walkable and transit-enabled communities are also by far the most expensive to live in, because - shocker! - they're the most desirable. So a reasonably healthy living environment has become the preserve of the relatively wealthy.

This is the kind of thing that needs to be legislated for: new built environments need to hit certain standards for integration, transit, and walkability, and then our existing environments need to be iteratively rebuilt. That seems like a tall order in the current American cultural era, but I don't see how this gets better on its own.

[Link]

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Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment already

Over a hundred years later, it's way past time to get this done.

2 min read

If ever there was a litmus test about who to avoid, it’s the people who see the language of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 21st Century and think, “oh, that’s problematic”.

Here is the full text:

SECTION 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

SEC. 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

SEC. 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

It’s that simple. If you or your community read this simple text — and as simple as it is, section 1’s 24-word sentence is the substance of it — and think “oh, we don’t want this,” congratulations, you are officially the baddies.

What happens next is unclear. The ERA should have been formalized as the 28th Amendment when Virginia ratified it in 2020. It should have been ratified by all the necessary states when Congress approved it in 1972, which in itself was far too late, given that it was written over a hundred years ago. It’s not the only glaring indictment of American society’s disdain for basic civil rights, not by a long shot, but it certainly is a big one.

America: just formally ratify the thing or come out and admit that you’re hoping for Gilead. There’s nothing else to say. It’s way past time.

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We Don't Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.

[Joan Westenberg]

An absolutely spot-on call to action:

"Cynicism is the cheap seats. It’s the fast food of intellectual positions. Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or destined to fail. The real challenge? Building something better.

[...] Cynicism comes with hidden taxes. Every time we default to assuming the worst, we pay in missed opportunities, reduced social trust, and diminished creative capacity. These costs compound over time, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which cynical expectations shape cynical realities."

We've got to have optimism. Not the dumb kind that Andreessen talks about; the kind where we know we can make the world better, we just have to go out and do it.

A thousand times, this:

"The world has enough critics. What it needs are builders who can see problems clearly without being paralyzed by them, people who can maintain hope without succumbing to naïveté, and people who can engage with reality while working to improve it."

Criticism is useful, but the real work is in imagining something new, something better, and making it a reality.

[Link]

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Peter Thiel Dreams of Empire

[Dave Karpf at Tech Policy Press]

Peter Thiel and other tech oligarchs are seeking to weaponize US foreign policy as a way to enforce their corporate agendas:

"Thiel is developing a blueprint for putting Big Tech’s policy agenda at the center of US foreign policy. Australia’s social media ban is bad for American social media companies. The European Union’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act impose regulatory requirements on very large online platforms that operate within the EU. Peter Thiel expects the US government to do something about that, in the guise of investigating and redressing past wrongdoings.

Tech billionaires like Thiel simply do not believe that their companies and investments should be beholden to governments. And now that they have control of the US government, they are suggesting that, if any other countries interfere with their business, the US government ought to intervene on their behalf."

The thing is, protections like the ones offered by the European Union are really good, and significantly better than we enjoy in the United States. Part of the worry is that if they're allowed to stand, similar restrictions will emerge here too. We're already seeing that in more progressive states like California.

That's an inevitability: as we all get more used to the internet now that most of us are on it, beyond the initial excitement, we're going to make more nuanced policy decisions. Clearly, privacy is an important democratic prerequisite, and countering the internet's tendency to support monopolies is similarly important to prevent outsized centralization of power. When it comes to the free reign moguls have enjoyed to build giant businesses unencumbered, time is ticking. But in the meantime, they'll keep trying to protect their interests - in increasingly dramatic ways.

[Link]

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Look Up Private School Demographics With ProPublica’s New Database

[Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash, Brandon Roberts and Ken Schwencke at ProPublica]

Private schools in the US are much whiter than public schools. My colleagues over in the newsroom at ProPublica explored this data while illuminating the ongoing extent of segregation academies in the south:

"Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white."

But that data hasn't traditionally been easy to explore. Until now:

"In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data."

The Private School Demographics database is available to use for free. It makes it very easy to examine disparities between private schools and their surrounding school districts. And knowing is the first step towards changing something.

[Link]

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Meta Is Laying the Narrative Groundwork for Trump’s Mass Deportations

[Joseph Cox at 404 Media]

Not just obeying in advance but actively collaborating:

"Multiple speech and content moderation experts 404 Media spoke to drew some parallels between these recent changes and when Facebook contributed to a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, in which Facebook was used to spread anti-Rohingya hate and the country’s military ultimately led a campaign of murder, torture, and rape against the Muslim minority population. Although there are some key differences, Meta’s changes in the U.S. will also likely lead to the spread of more hate speech across Meta’s sites, with the real world consequences that can bring.

“When we look at the history of mass atrocities against particular groups, we always see a period where the information landscape is shaped away from recognizing the humanity of the targeted group. By letting hate speech flourish online, you enable the pre-conditions for group violence offline,” [Rebecca Hamilton, law professor at American University] added."

We're in for a rough few years, and Meta and its big tech compatriots seem to be all in.

[Link]

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Make America More Like Europe (please)

2 min read

I realized some time ago that all the ways I want America to change just bring it closer to being Europe. Like, what if we had this can-do attitude and all the good parts without the guns and with universal healthcare, real education, unprocessed food without sugar in it, a real safety net, and integrated public transit instead of car culture.

Maybe the easier path is if we all, like, move to Amsterdam.

If I could change one thing it would actually be car culture. So much is related to that: what psychologically makes it more attractive to be in a little cocoon by yourself instead of in a tram or a bus with other people, even if it makes more traffic and more pollution? Fix that, fix so much else.

I think that’s maybe why I’m so drawn to cities like New York and San Francisco: there it’s much more common to rely on shared infrastructure, to be in the same spaces as other people. The New York subway is dirty and feels old, but it’s also a genuine marvel compared to public infrastructure in much of the country.

Those, to me, are the good places in America: every kind of person is living with every other kind of person, all relying on the same bedrock of infrastructure and norms, and generally, it works and results in a much richer culture and way of life. I wish it was all like that.

I make many multiples of what I used to make when I lived in Europe, but my quality of life is worse. So many of my political opinions about what needs to change in America really boil down to, “can I have the quality of life I had until my thirties back please?” And I’d like that for every American.

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"I have fired Meta as a client."

[Mark Lemley on LinkedIn]

Meta's lawyer in its AI case has fired them as a client, and is not beating around the bush as to why:

"I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness. While I have thought about quitting Facebook, I find great value in the connections and friends I have here, and it doesn't seem fair that I should lose that because Zuckerberg is having a mid-life crisis.

[...] I have deactivated my Threads account. Bluesky is an outstanding alternative to Twitter, and the last thing I need is to support a Twitter-like site run by a Musk wannabe."

I wish I could read a response from Zuckerberg himself. I suspect none will be forthcoming.

[Link]

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US finalizes rule to effectively ban Chinese vehicles, which could include Polestar

[Andrew J. Hawkins at The Verge]

I think this is the wrong kind of protectionism:

"The Biden administration finalized a new rule that would effectively ban all Chinese vehicles from the US under the auspices of blocking the “sale or import” of connected vehicle software from “countries of concern.” The rule could have wide-ranging effects on big automakers, like Ford and GM, as well as smaller manufacturers like Polestar — and even companies that don’t produce cars, like Waymo."

I would much rather see a ban on vehicles that spy on you, regardless of who manufactures them. The rule as it stands provides very uneven protection, and allows domestic vehicle manufacturers to conduct significant surveillance over their customers. Legislators should just ban the practice outright, and conduct inspections to ensure that it's the case across the board.

[Link]

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Free Our Feeds

[Free Our Feeds]

The non-profit social media foundation space is really heating up. Which is not a bad thing!

Enter Free our Feeds:

"It will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.

Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen."

The names involved in this particular venture are really fascinating. Nabiha Syed is the ED of the Mozilla Foundation and is joined by Mark Surman, its President; Robin Berjon has done some of the most important writing and thinking in this space, particularly with respect to governance; Eli Pariser is an experienced activist who co-founded Avaaz and used to run MoveOn; Mallory Knodel is the ED of the ActivityPub-centric Social Web Foundation.

And then the signatories to the letter are people like Jimmy Wales, Mark Ruffalo, Cory Doctorow, Roger McNamee, Shoshana Zuboff and Audrey Tang.

So the Social Web Foundation is ActivityPub-centric and Free Our Feeds is AT Protocol-centric. My (figurative) money is increasingly on A New Social, which posits that all these individual protocols and sub-networks will ultimately be universally addressable as one social internet, and is backing tools to help make that happen.

It's all wonderful. It's all such a great change from the old model - and in a week where Zuckerberg went "full Musk", the timing couldn't be better.

[Link]

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The people should own the town square

[Mastodon]

Mastodon is growing up:

"Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

[...] We are in the process of a phased transition. First we are establishing a new legal home for Mastodon and transferring ownership and stewardship. We are taking the time to select the appropriate jurisdiction and structure in Europe. Then we will determine which other (subsidiary) legal structures are needed to support operations and sustainability."

Eugen, Mastodon's CEO, will not be the leader of this new entity, although it's not yet clear who will be. He's going to focus on product instead.

Another note, right at the end of this announcement: the non-profit seeks to grow its annual budget to €5 million. That's a big increase from current levels, but is absolutely needed. It sounds like plans are in place to make that happen.

I'm excited for everyone involved; everyone who uses Mastodon; everyone on the web. Greater competition through a truly federated solution with decentralized ownership is good for everyone. I can't wait to see what happens next.

[Link]

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Content Policy on the Social Web

[Social Web Foundation]

The Social Web Foundation's statement about Meta's moderation changes is important:

"Ideas matter, and history shows that online misinformation and harassment can lead to violence in the real world.

[...] Meta is one of many ActivityPub implementers and a supporter of the Social Web Foundation. We strongly encourage Meta’s executive and content teams to come back in line with best practices of a zero harm social media ecosystem. Reconsidering this policy change would preserve the crucial distinction between political differences of opinion and dehumanizing harassment. The SWF is available to discuss Meta’s content moderation policies and processes to make them more humane and responsible."

This feels right to me. By implication: the current policies are inhumane and irresponsible. And as such, worth calling out.

[Link]

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DoJ releases its Tulsa race massacre report over 100 years after initial review

[Adria R Walker at The Guardian]

A full century after the Bureau of Investigation blamed the Tulsa race massacre on Black men and claimed that the perpetrators didn't break the law, the DoJ has issued an update:

"“The Tulsa race massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps.”"

Every one of the perpetrators is dead and can no longer be prosecuted. But this statement seeks to correct the record and ensure that the official history records what actually happened. There's value in that, even if it comes a hundred years too late.

It's worth also checking out Greenwood Rising, which will be the first to tell you that discrimination against Black citizens of the town and the descendants of the race riot has been ongoing.

The Tulsa race massacre "was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence". Calling it a stain on our history would paint it as a one-off; instead, it's part of a continuum of hate, violence, and discrimination.

[Link]

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The indie web should be a universe of discovery

The Norrington Room, from Wikimedia Commons

In Oxford, my hometown, the flagship Blackwell’s bookshop looks like any ordinary bookstore at ground level. But if you go down a set of stairs, you find yourself in the Norrington Room: one of the largest rooms full of books in the world. The shelves expand out around you to encompass almost every possible subject: three miles of bookshelves, holding hundreds of thousands of books.

As in any good bookstore, tables are set out where the knowledgable booksellers (and Blackwell’s has some of the most informed and knowledgable booksellers in the world) have curated interesting titles. But you also have the ability to peruse any book, at your leisure. The Norrington Room doesn’t have a coffee shop or sell music, but there are comfy chairs where you can enjoy the books and read.

The modern version of Google search has been optimized for fast answers: a search query. But that’s not the only kind of search that’s valuable. It’s not an experiential search. I had a conversation with capjamesg the other day that put this into focus: he’s very smartly thinking about the next decade of useful tools for the indieweb. And on an internet that’s focused on transactional answers, we agreed that an experiential web was missing.

The indieweb should feel like the Norrington Room: an expansive world of different voices, opinions, modes of expression, and art that you can explore, peruse, or have curated for you. It’s not about any particular goal aside from the goal of being enriched by people sharing their lived experiences, creativity, and expertise. It’s a journey of discovery, conversation, and community, not a journey of extraction.

Curators and linkblogs are one part of it. Webrings like the indieweb webring scratch the surface of it. Blog directories like ooh.directory and blogrolls are part of it. But I feel like we’re missing something else. I’m not sure what that is! But I sure wish we had the equivalent of knowledgable booksellers — indie tummelers, perhaps — to guide us and help intentionally build community.

Norrington Room photo from Wikimedia Commons, shared under a CC share-alike license.

Syndicated to IndieNews.

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Is Ignorance Bliss?

[Jared White]

I've been thinking about this paragraph since I read it:

"In times past, we would worry about singular governmental officials such Joseph Goebbels becoming a master of propaganda for their cause. Today’s problem is massively scaled out in ways Goebbels could only dream of: now everyone can be their own Goebbels. Can someone please tell me what the difference is between an “influencer” holding a smartphone and…a propagandist? Because I simply can’t see the distinction anymore."

This brings me back to Renee DiResta's Invisible Rulers: whoever controls the memes controls the universe.

[Link]

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Building an open web that protects us from harm

We live in a world where right-wing nationalism is on the rise and many governments, including the incoming Trump administration, are promising mass deportations. Trump in particular has discussed building camps as part of mass deportations. This question used to feel more hypothetical than it does today.

Faced with this reality, it’s worth asking: who would stand by you if this kind of authoritarianism took hold in your life?

You can break allyship down into several key areas of life:

  • Who in your personal life is an ally? (Your friends, acquaintances, and extended family.)
  • Who in your professional life is an ally? (People you work with, people in partner organizations, and your industry.)
  • Who in civic life is an ally? (Your representatives, government workers, individual members of law enforcement, healthcare workers, and so on.)
  • Which service providers are allies? (The people you depend on for goods and services — including stores, delivery services, and internet services.)

And in turn, can be broken down further:

  • Who will actively help you evade an authoritarian regime?
  • Who will refuse to collaborate with a regime’s demands?

These two things are different. There’s also a third option — non-collaboration but non-refusal — which I would argue does not constitute allyship at all. This might look like passively complying with authoritarian demands when legally compelled, without taking steps to resist or protect the vulnerable. While this might not seem overtly harmful, it leaves those at risk exposed. As Naomi Shulman points out, the most dangerous complicity often comes from those who quietly comply. Nice people made the best Nazis.

For the remainder of this post, I will focus on the roles of internet service vendors and protocol authors in shaping allyship and resisting authoritarianism.

For these groups, refusing to collaborate means that you’re not capitulating to active demands by an authoritarian regime, but you might not be actively considering how to help people who are vulnerable. The people who are actively helping, on the other hand, are actively considering how to prevent someone from being tracked, identified, and rounded up by a regime, and are putting preventative measures in place. (These might include implementing encryption at rest, minimizing data collection, and ensuring anonymity in user interactions.)

If we consider an employer, refusing to collaborate means that you won’t actively hand over someone’s details on request. Actively helping might mean aiding someone in hiding or escaping to another jurisdiction.

These questions of allyship apply not just to individuals and organizations, but also to the systems we design and the technologies we champion. Those of us who are involved in movements to liberate social software from centralized corporations need to consider our roles. Is decentralization enough? Should we be allies? What kind of allies?

This responsibility extends beyond individual actions to the frameworks we build and the partnerships we form within open ecosystems. While building an open protocol that makes all content public and allows indefinite tracking of user activity without consent may not amount to collusion, it is also far from allyship. Partnering with companies that collaborate with an authoritarian regime, for example by removing support for specific vulnerable communities and enabling the spread of hate speech, may also not constitute allyship. Even if it furthers your immediate stated technical and business goals to have that partner on board, it may undermine your stated social goals. Short-term compromises for technical or business gains may seem pragmatic but risk undermining the ethics that underpin open and decentralized systems.

Obviously, the point of an open protocol is that anyone can use it. But we should avoid enabling entities that collude with authoritarian regimes to become significant contributors to or influencers of open protocols and platforms. While open protocols can be used by anyone, we must distinguish between passive use and active collaboration. Enabling authoritarian-aligned entities to shape the direction or governance of these protocols undermines their potential for liberation.

In light of Mark Zuckerberg’s clear acquiescence to the incoming Trump administration (for example by rolling back DEI, allowing hate speech, and making a series of bizarre statements designed to placate Trump himself), I now believe Threads should not be allowed to be an active collaborator to open protocols unless it can attest that it will not collude, and that it will protect vulnerable groups using its platforms from harm. I also think Bluesky’s AT Protocol decision to make content and user blocks completely open and discoverable should be revisited. I also believe there should be an ethical bill of rights for users on open social media protocols that authors should sign, which includes the right to privacy, freedom from surveillance, safeguards against hate speech, and strong protections for vulnerable communities.

As builders, users, and advocates of open systems, we must demand transparency, accountability, and ethical commitments from all contributors to open protocols. Without these safeguards, we risk creating tools that enable oppression rather than resisting it. Allyship demands more than neutrality — it demands action.

Syndicated to IndieNews.

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The Good, The Bad, And The Stupid In Meta’s New Content Moderation Policies

[Mike Masnick in TechDirt]

Mark Zuckerberg is very obviously running scared from the incoming Trump administration:

"Since the election, Zuckerberg has done everything he can possibly think of to kiss the Trump ring. He even flew all the way from his compound in Hawaii to have dinner at Mar-A-Lago with Trump, before turning around and flying right back to Hawaii. In the last few days, he also had GOP-whisperer Joel Kaplan replace Nick Clegg as the company’s head of global policy. On Monday it was announced that Zuckerberg had also appointed Dana White to Meta’s board. White is the CEO of UFC, but also (perhaps more importantly) a close friend of Trump’s."

He then announced a new set of moderation changes.

As Mike Masnick notes here, Facebook's moderation was terrible and has always been terrible. It tried to use AI to improve its moderation at scale, with predictable results. It simply hasn't worked, and that's often harmed vulnerable communities and voices in the process. So it makes sense to take a different approach.

But Zuckerberg is trying to paint these changes as being pro free speech, and that doesn't ring true. For example, trying to paint fact-checking as censorship is beyond stupid:

"Of course, bad faith actors, particularly on the right, have long tried to paint fact-checking as “censorship.” But this talking point, which we’ve debunked before, is utter nonsense. Fact-checking is the epitome of “more speech”— exactly what the marketplace of ideas demands. By caving to those who want to silence fact-checkers, Meta is revealing how hollow its free speech rhetoric really is."

This is all of a piece with Zuckerberg's rolling back of much-needed DEI programs and his suggestion that most companies need more masculine energy. It's for show to please a permatanned audience of one and avoid existential threats to his business.

I would love to read the inside story in a few years. For now, we've just got to accept that everything being incredibly dumb is all part of living in 2025.

[Link]

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Mullenweg Shuts Down WordPress Sustainability Team, Igniting Backlash

[Rae Morey at The Repository]

The bananas activity continues over at Automattic / Matt Mullenweg's house:

"Members of the fledgling WordPress Sustainability Team have been left reeling after WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg abruptly dissolved the team this week.

[...] The disbandment happened after team rep Thijs Buijs announced in Making WordPress Slack on Wednesday that he was stepping down from his role, citing a Reddit thread Mullenweg created on Christmas Eve asking for suggestions to create WordPress drama in 2025."

Meanwhile, a day earlier, Automattic announced that it will ramp down its own contributions to WordPress:

"To recalibrate and ensure our efforts are as impactful as possible, Automattic will reduce its sponsored contributions to the WordPress project. This is not a step we take lightly. It is a moment to regroup, rethink, and strategically plan how Automatticians can continue contributing in ways that secure the future of WordPress for generations to come. Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress."

This is a genuinely odd thing to do. Yes, it's true that Automattic is at a disadvantage in the sense that it contributes far more to the open source project than other private companies. Free riders have long been a problem for open source innovators. But it's also why the company exists. I have questions about the balance of open source vs proprietary code in Automattic's future offerings. That's important because WordPress is the core value of its products and the open source core guarantees freedom from lock-in.

Is there a proprietary CMS coming down the wire? Is this bizarre board activity behind the scenes? Is something else going on? This whole situation still feels to me like there's another shoe ready to drop - and the longer it goes on, the bigger that shoe seems to be. I hope they don't completely squander the trust and value they've been building for decades.

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Indonesia kicks off ambitious $45b free meal plan

[Natasya Salim, Najma Sambul, and Bill Birtles at ABC News]

This is something that every nation should provide. It's really impressive that Indonesia is putting it into action:

"Indonesia has launched a transformative free meal program designed to combat malnutrition and support underprivileged communities.

Championed by President Prabowo Subianto, the initiative aims to provide nutritious meals to almost 83 million Indonesians by 2029, focusing initially on school children and pregnant women."

Over here, this would likely be dismissed as socialism, because how dare we simply provide for people who need it? (The horror!) But the bet is that it will lead to greater growth and prosperity, not least because of investment in the ecosystem itself:

"On the other hand, Mr Prabowo called the program one of the main drivers of economic growth, saying it would eventually add an estimated 2.5 million jobs and spur demand for local produce."

Over in the Financial Times, they additionally note:

"Prabowo, who took office in October, has touted the programme as a solution to improve children’s nutrition and boost local economies — which he hopes will have a ripple effect on economic growth and development in the world’s fourth most-populous country.

“This is a long-term investment in human capital,” said Dadan Hindayana, head of the newly created national nutrition agency, which will oversee the free meals programme. "

There will be a lot of people incentivized to not make this work. But it should. And we should be looking to this as leadership; we should be following suit.

[Link]

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Meta’s Free Speech Grift

[Jason Kottke]

Jason nails what the supposed focus on free speech by Meta and others is really about:

"What Zuckerberg and Meta have realized is the value, demonstrated by Trump, Musk, and MAGA antagonists, of saying that you’re “protecting free speech” and using it as cover for almost anything you want to do. For Meta, that means increasing engagement, decreasing government oversight and interference, and lowering their labor costs (through cutting their workforce and strengthening their bargaining position vs labor) — all things that will make their stock price go up and increase the wealth of their shareholders."

It's a grift, pure and simple. One that happens to help them curry favor with the incoming President and his fan-base.

[Link]

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© Ben Werdmuller
The text (without images) of Werd I/O by Ben Werdmuller is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0