IMPORTANT FINAL NOTE:
Talking Climate's structure is deliberately based on the behavioural science of how to catalyze action--not worry--by sharing concrete solutions & actions.
Why? Because the whole world could be worried but if they don't know what to do, they'll do nothing!
Read more...
14. What can Berlin’s story tell us about the broader relationship between technology, culture, and the places we live? @jordanaut.bsky.social is the author of a book that tries to answer these questions and more called Mobile City: Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin.
Hear from experts @alicetiara.bsky.social, @mkgerchick.bsky.social, and @thakurdhanaraj.bsky.social, moderated by @jordanaut.bsky.social — as they share strategies for ethical, effective research that centers marginalized communities. Register:
Advocating with Evidence: Lessons from Researchers from Civil Society
Hear from experts @alicetiara.bsky.social, @mkgerchick.bsky.social, & @thakurdhanaraj.bsky.social, moderated by @jordanaut.bsky.social — as they share strategies for ethical, effective research that centers marginalized communities.
Register: cdt.org/events/advoc...
Very excited for this book event next Thursday in Brooklyn!
DHS has removed manual guidance barring investigations solely based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
This is a prerequisite to targeting the LGBTQ community with criminal investigations solely based on being LGBTQ.
news.bgov.com/bloomberg-go...
As Trump and Elon Musk signal menacing new intentions on numerous fronts, a scholar of democratic breakdown explains how we’re now seeing textbook signs of a country’s slide into authoritarian rule.
The circus is starting: Jim Jordan, Taibbi & Shellenberger are congratulating themselves on Twitter Files.
Jordan opens by gloating ab getting Stanford Internet Observatory shut down. Yes: the congressman got 1A protected research shut down. That's censorship.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7G5...
Horrific. Reporters are beginning to collect the names of specific people that Musk and Trump have killed by abruptly terminating USAID—in this case Pe Kha Lau, a Burmese woman living in Thailand
BREAKING
The Trump administration is maintaining a funding freeze at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in defiance of two federal court orders.
The ongoing freeze was confirmed by an NIH official and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information.
New op-ed at @techpolicypress.bsky.social! US state lawmakers should focus on 3 areas that haven't been addressed at the federal level: support for victims of hate and harassment, social media transparency, and stopping misguided legislation against moderating hateful and harassing content.
"Far-right populists are significantly more likely to spread fake news on social media than politicians from mainstream or far-left parties, according to a study which argues that amplifying misinformation is now part and parcel of radical right strategy"
Verifiably: right wingers are liars
IES is one of the country’s largest funders of education research, and the slashing of contracts could mean a significant loss of public knowledge about schools.
New, from @jodiscohen.bsky.social @jsmithrichards.bsky.social @propublica.org
Before the month is over, don't miss the new books published in January 2025 including:
MOBILE CITY by Jordan H. Kraemer
ANIMAL PEOPLE by Adam Reed
STRONG COMMANDERS, WEAK LEADERS by Phillip A. Martin
and
FRAGILE KINSHIPS by Kathryn E. Goldfarb
www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/new-books-pu...
I spoke to @techpolicypress.bsky.social’s @justinhendrix.bsky.social about my new book on social media and urban space in Berlin, on how digital platforms are shaped by the people and places that use them.
A screenshot of a tweet from the account "Department of Government Efficiency" (@DOGE) stating, "Adjustment to DHS website." The tweet includes a side-by-side comparison of two screenshots of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) website. The left screenshot shows a page titled "LGBTQI+ Community Resources," containing information on safety resources and support for LGBTQI+ individuals. The right screenshot shows a "Page Not Found" message with a DHS logo and an image of a K-9 dog wearing a vest. Below the tweet, engagement metrics indicate 1.1 million views. The post includes suggested questions: "Why was DHS page removed?" and "Why was the adjustment made?"
They removed resources for LGBTQ institutions to get support when threatened with violence.
The message is clear, MAGA can now threaten and commit terrorism against the LGBTQ community with impunity.
This should be an opportunity to build public platforms grounded in data privacy, user control, community moderation, portability, and interoperability. They must be designed by and with the communities that use them, to support organizing, resilience, and solidarity.
As democracy and civil rights come under attack, local connections and mutual support are even more crucial. But major social media aren’t meeting those needs.
Meanwhile, newer platforms like TikTok aren’t based around peer social connection in the same way. Users sharing is no longer the point; engagement is.
After 2016, Facebook downranked political content, and shifted to features for local groups. Such spaces have become central to many neighborhoods & communities, especially with the decline of local news media.
When Facebook changed its algorithm & features starting in 2013 to prioritize news content, more people began reading and sharing news there (& on other platforms). More political content, combined with incentivizing engagement, made it easier to inflame divisions and spread extremism and disinfo.
We’ve reached the height of their ad-based business model: serve content, collect data about users, sell that data to advertisers. Algorithmic systems have remade “social” media into individualized feeds that spread hate and false information, rather than supporting social movements or communities.
After nearly two decades, social media are not contributing to the public good, and mostly benefit their shareholders or billionaire owners. They have abandoned much of their potential to create community through peer networks.
New Op-Ed in @counterpunchmedia.bsky.social!
We've Reached the End of Social Media
Social media were supposed to build social connection; instead they’ve become tools of division and polarization.
Before folks start comparing this to European autocracies, pause and ask why so many folks - Black and white - didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Or the Wilmington Coup. Or the Colfax Massacre. Or the Elaine, Arkansas massacre.
Erasure has been a key tactic of white supremacy. Right here.
But even as these tactics supported informal workarounds at the margins, they didn’t change the broader dynamics that make some places more peripheral than others.
“Yet young people in this emerging middle class found ways to manage infrastructural unevenness and respond to dominant orderings of space through informal tactics that often enabled participation in cosmopolitan worlds.”
Online life was grounded in place-based structures, even as young people found workarounds to pursue transnational connection:
Getting online and accessing content was shaped by place as well. Internet service, licensing agreements, and tech expertise varied owing to rural/urban divides, national borders, international regulations, and the divergent history of tech access between former East and West.
"Logistical labor characterizes home life in late modernity more broadly, as the flip side of workplace managerialism."
