Attention to the Unseen

Natalia Antelava writes: “Your account has been suspended.” “You cannot post or comment for 3 days” “You can’t go live for 63 days” For Afghan journalist Shafi Karimi, the list of restrictions that Facebook has imposed on him goes on and on. “I am blocked and I am losing an audience, and people are losing vital information,” says Karimi, who is covering Afghanistan from exile in France. He is not the only one. From Afghanistan to Ukraine, and much of…

Read More Read More

Jonathan Haidt writes: Social media has given voice to some people who had little previously, and it has made it easier to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds, not just in politics but in business, the arts, academia, and elsewhere. Sexual harassers could have been called out in anonymous blog posts before Twitter, but it’s hard to imagine that the #MeToo movement would have been nearly so successful without the viral enhancement that the major platforms offered. However, the…

Read More Read More

Robert Reich writes: The Russian people know little about Putin’s war on Ukraine because Putin has blocked their access to the truth, substituting propaganda and lies. Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that assumption was. At least the US responded to Trump’s lies. Trump had 88 million Twitter followers before Twitter took him off its…

Read More Read More

Reuters reports: News of Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk taking a board seat at Twitter has some Twitter employees panicking over the future of the social media firm’s ability to moderate content, company insiders told Reuters. Within hours of the surprise disclosure this week that Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” acquired enough shares to become the top Twitter shareholder, political conservatives began flooding social media with calls for the return of Donald Trump. The former U.S. president was banned…

Read More Read More

Timothy L. O’Brien writes: Elon Musk just bought a $3 billion stake in Twitter Inc., because when you’re the world’s richest human you can toss billions around like poker chips. This may be just another piece of performance art from Musk, who has alternately endorsed and pooh-poohed Bitcoin to great effect. He’s also taken to Twitter to hype altcoins such as Dogecoin and Shiba Inu, while simultaneously warning followers: “Don’t bet the farm on crypto!” “True value is building products…

Read More Read More

Reuters reports: The two Southern tech entrepreneurs had the two qualities that Donald Trump’s Truth Social startup needed: tech-industry expertise and a politically conservative worldview aligned with the former president, a rare combination in the liberal-leaning industry centered in San Francisco. Josh Adams and Billy Boozer – the company’s chiefs of technology and product development – joined the venture last year and quickly became central players in its bid to build a social-media empire, backed by Trump’s powerful brand, to…

Read More Read More

Yahoo reports: Former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social app is seeing a 93% drop in signups and similarly steep decline in traffic after a rocky rollout last month fraught with technical issues and an extensive waiting list for new signups to actually use the service. After going live on President’s Day, the Twitter-lookalike app saw installs decline by more than 800,000 since its launch week, according to Sensor Tower. Installs on the Apple app store this month have fallen to…

Read More Read More

David French writes: I want to share with you two remarkably similar numbers. At first glance, they should have nothing to do with each other. On closer examination, they’re inextricably linked. The first number is 57. That’s the percentage of Republicans who told Yahoo News/YouGov pollsters that the United States should take Ukraine’s side as it defends itself against Russian invasion (28 percent said the U.S. should back neither, and 5 percent said we should back Russia). By contrast, 76…

Read More Read More