Thanks for a great thread, Robert's optimism is encouraging, while we also need to watch out for how federated social media networks pan out in different contexts. Arguing against EU's enthusiasm for small platforms, I had said: Although the EU proposal to require very large platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) to open up to competitors with mandatory interoperability is relevant in the pursuit of anticompetition policy objectives, this is not an obvious solution to the problem of extreme speech. This proposal assumes that regulating large platforms and fostering smaller players would create a scenario where “users could freely choose which social media community they would like to be part of—for example depending on their content moderation preferences and privacy needs—while still being able to connect with and talk to all of their social friends and contacts” (EDRi 2020, 4). This approach, thick with liberal baggage, underestimates the possibility that this very “marketplace for ideas” could provide an easy way for hate mongers—as illustrated by alt-right actors—to hop between platforms and innovate on content. Even more, as emerging scenarios in India suggest, politically vested interest groups are likely to invest and drive the market of multiple smaller players toward partisan and divisive messaging. https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/small-platforms-and-the-gray-z... I have just joined a Mastodon instance; comm and media studies scholars might also find this opt-in list useful to find fellow scholars: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vFWP_eBXrjeDqDkmT6PEbxnsZ_QFC4OgEgUHTrJW... Best Sahana *** Sahana Udupa | Professor of Media Anthropology | University of Munich New book: https://nyupress.org/9781479819157/digital-unsettling/ On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 6:45 PM Michael Klontzas via Air-L < air-l@listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
Emma,
This may not be the case with other tools, but Debirtify only gets read access to information that is already publicly available plus any private lists. This is confirmed by Twitter on the login/authorisation page. Debirtify can't read DMs either. 'Why do you need me to connect to my Twitter account?' on their website explains why they need us to log in instead of doing what Fritter for Android [1] does.
[1] Fritter can figure out who you follow and show you your tweets stream without you having to log in to Twitter or anything else.
Best, Michael
On 10/11/2022 14:41, Dr. Emma Briant via Air-L wrote:
Thank you so much Robert! It's good to have this clarity over the role the admins play, I really had no idea how this worked. I hope they are able to advance the encryption for DMs at some point. My main concern was these 'migration from Twitter' websites. Where I can certainly see their reasons for needing us to log in with our Twitter accounts it seems quite potentially possible that having this access, could compromise DMs. Having had experience of being impacted by a recent hostile cyber attack I think I will personally choose not to put my Twitter credentials into a website whose developers I don't know a great deal about. Call me paranoid but I just haven't seen enough that's reassuring about this. Emma
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