The Facebook Papers: In the wake of last week’s Congressional testimony, “[j]ournalists from a variety of newsrooms, large and small, worked together to gain access to thousands of pages of internal company documents obtained by Frances Haugen [@France…
Something Weird is Happening on Facebook
Don’t take candy from strangers and don’t feed your personal information to bots. If you spend any time on Facebook you’ve probably noticed a blizzard of question memes coming from clickbait accounts. You’ve likely either commented on them yourself or …
rich ideological texts of whiteness and domesticity!
The Ideological Battlefield of the “Mamasphere.” Anne Helen Petersen interviews Kathryn Jezer-Morton – currently writing her PhD dissertation on the topic – about “momfluencers” and the rise, growth, and transmogrification of mommy-blogging.
“I’m not…
Unfollow Everyone While You Can (Facebook sucks)
Facebook Banned Me for Life Because I Help People Use It Less This summer, Facebook sent me a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action. It permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts. And it demanded that I agree to never again crea…
The critique of everyday life in 15 seconds.
Nayanjyoti’s roundup of proletarian TikTok in India for the political webzine Raiot includes videos of rural workers, workers on the long walk home, workers goofing off, construction workers goofing off, reaction videos, lipsynched labor, and synchroni…
“If we make more angry content, we get more engagement.”
Whistleblower Frances Haugen will give congressional testimony later this week about internal Facebook research and communications she gave to the SEC, in the form of tens of thousands of pages that document the company’s deliberate and deceitful ampli…
The Digital Death of Collecting
How platforms mess with our tastes. In the era of algorithmic feeds, it’s as if the bookshelves have started changing shape on their own in real time, shuffling some material to the front and downplaying the rest like a sleight-of-hand magician trying …
How did these bots get in our memetic fabric (or why)?
This would be an Ask Metafilter question for how to deal with another new conspiracy meme, but we’re all bots here endlessly mutating the memetic fabric. New to me is the idea that the banality of social media is evidence that we’ve all ben replaced by…
What’s MINE to care about and what’s NOT mine to care about?
And yet, when I check social media it feels like there are voices saying “if you aren’t talking about, doing something about, performatively posting about ___(fill in the blank)___then you are an irredeemably callous, priviledged, bigot who IS PART OF …
Goodreads’ problem with extortion scams and review bombing
How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned Goodreads Into Many Authors’ Worst Nightmare (Time) Scammers and cyberstalkers are increasingly using the Goodreads platform to extort authors with threats of “review bombing” their work–and they are…