Thomas Poell and Jose van Dijck (Amsterdam): Social Media and New Protest. Zeynep Tufekci on how social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump. Platform moderation and its discontents: Robert Gorwa reviews Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie. The military-messaging complex: Rafia Zakaria on social media and the War on Terror. Nicholas Confessore on the unlikely activists who took on Silicon Valley — and won. “Weaponized ad technology”: Facebook’s moneymaker gets a critical eye. Pinterest moms share parfait recipes next to QAnon memes.
Twitter’s misguided quest to become a forum for everything. We need a new model for tech journalism. Tech companies aren’t raising prices, but they’re still monopolies: Sean Illing interviews Sally Hubbard on why “fake news” is an antitrust problem. Ben Thompson on Facebook’s story problem — and opportunity. Rethinking the human in the digital age: An excerpt from The User Unconscious: On Affect, Media and Measure by Patricia Ticineto. See no evil: Software helps companies coordinate the supply chains that sustain global capitalism; how does the code work — and what does it conceal? Digital detox: Grafton Tanner on big tech’s phony crisis of conscience.
Mark Zuckerberg is totally out of his depth and so are all the big boys of tech: They’re monumentally screwed, because they have no idea how to tame the monsters they have created. The Internet trolls have won — sorry, there’s not much you can do. Can liberal democracy survive social media?
