Ethan Zuckerman

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

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npub1wslkwq0yrwvlff2n2sr7r4ct6gs480mfj7v0v8xqk0fde6a4krjq5g8r6f

NIP-05 Address

ethanz@octodon-social.mostr.pub

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nprofile1qqs8g0m8q8jphx0554f4gplp6u9ayg2nha5e0x8krnqt85kuaw6mpeq03aydu

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npub1wslkwq0yrwvlff2n2sr7r4ct6gs480mfj7v0v8xqk0fde6a4krjq5g8r6f

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Last Notes

2024-11-13 17:32:55

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

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

2024-11-12 18:25:35

My friend Nina Lutz has an excellent paper, "We're not all construction workers: Algorithmic compression of Latinidad on TikTok" at #cscw2024. She and a collaborator interviewed 19 Latine people in the US, asking them to look at videos in their TikTok feeds and rank how well they represented them. They found evidence that people feel "algorithmically compressed", packaged into a box as a generic Latine person, or presumed to be Mexican.

2024-10-28 17:29:01

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.

2024-09-25 21:48:20

Excited to be on the advisory board for the Social Web Foundation, a great new group working to make the Fediverse stronger than closed, crappy social media : https://socialwebfoundation.org/mission/

2024-09-25 21:46:24

As the US election looms, be on the lookout for "weaponized doubt", a powerful tool for undercutting otherwise legitimate elections: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/information-technology/67985/if-in-doubt-vote-with-confidence
(My latest column in Prospect Magazine.)

2024-09-16 16:38:52

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/

2024-09-04 17:23:16

New research from friends at NYU and Northeastern finds that Facebook could block a lot of fraud by blocking ads with links to Telegram... which hosts a massive amount of fraud, CSAM and other nastiness. https://cybersecurityfordemocracy.org/illegal-activity-in-meta-ads

2024-08-06 19:20:53

By the numbers: what statistics can and can't tell you about undervalued cities, like Pittsfield MA: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/08/06/by-the-numbers-what-statistics-can-and-cant-tell-you-about-undervalued-cities/ (The next post in my ongoing road trip series.)

2024-08-01 22:15:04

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

2024-07-02 20:57:27

YouTube is way weirder than you think. It's not necessarily a good thing that OpenAI is training their systems on it - an essay from @Antisomniac and me for @ConversationUS: https://theconversation.com/ai-companies-train-language-models-on-youtubes-archive-making-family-and-friends-videos-a-privacy-risk-232121

2024-06-24 12:38:28

"Are there any humans left on the Internet?" my column for The Prospect on how AI spam is displacing human conversation online: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/internet/66995/are-there-any-humans-left-on-the-internet

2024-06-12 16:06:28

Talking with Cory Doctorow is always fun. Talking with him about enshittification for Reimagining the Internet is an unabashed joy. Such a good time: https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/102-cory-doctorow-enshittification/

2024-05-29 16:20:05

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

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/

2024-05-13 20:46:25

Thanks to Paul Barrett for this insightful analysis of what we're hoping to do with a suit against Meta around Louis Barclay's Unfollow Everything: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/a-zuck-takes-on-meta

2024-05-06 20:03:32

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

2024-02-21 16:08:08

40 years ago, Apple introduced the Macintosh - smart, beautiful and easy to use... but also locked down, tamper resistant and abstracted in ways that anticipate our smartphone and app future. My reflections on the anniversary in Prospect: https://t.co/bcszl5sN7n

2023-05-18 14:07:01

Just heard about Brandolini's Law, which states that the energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than the energy needed to generate it: https://www.thebulwark.com/elon-musk-when-a-shitposter-runs-a-social-media-platform/

2023-05-09 01:15:30

I can't stop staring at this map.
There's a 20 year gap in life expectancy between deep red areas of the US, like the southeast, and blue areas like New England. Your lifespan in the US relates directly to where you live and how it's governed. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-05/americas-decline-in-life-expectancy-speaks-volumes-about-our-problems

2023-04-27 23:27:23

I've got a browser window with tabs for Twitter, Mastodon, Blue Sky and two instances of Smalltown, our hacked Mastodon designed for standalone communities. I think I am now the ideal test user for Gobo.social... holding my breath for our prototype, scheduled to come out in May.

2023-04-06 23:36:43

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#[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.

2023-04-06 13:50:33

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#[0] I understand, and the idea of the loyal server is very much at the heart of most fediverse theories. I just don't think it works for most users. I think control over clients is something most users understand, which is why we're focused there.