It’s fine, just hold the power button until you hear the startup chime

Yoel Roth : « Les réseaux sociaux se sont vraiment éloignés de la modération » Yoel Roth, ancien chef de la sécurité de Twitter, aujourd’hui vice-président de la sécurité pour le groupe Match (applis de rencontre comme Tinder, Meetic, Hinge…), plaide pour faire de la sécurité des utilisateurs « une exigence ».

Yoel Roth : « Les réseaux sociaux se sont vraiment éloignés de la modération »

Toot toot, beep beep

No

I’m in some highly specific group chats.

Well played

One can only hope

Honored for sure. That line (and the last one) absolutely killed me.

Big time same

NOTICE AND TAKEDOWN Every day, thousands of removal requests flow into the Lumen Database — the public archive where the internet's most powerful actors are forced to show their work. Most requests are routine. Some are weapons. When copyright attorney Marcus Vega files a takedown notice targeting Clearwire, a scrappy digital rights nonprofit, he expects the usual: compliance, a form letter, maybe a sternly worded reply. What he gets instead is Eli Marsh - Clearwire's counternotice specialist, former EFF researcher, and the most infuriating person Marcus has ever had the professional misfortune of opposing. Eli knows the law. He also knows Marcus - knows his firm's clients, his win rate, the pattern of industries he protects. What Eli can't account for is what happens when the two of them end up at the same internet governance conference in Geneva, arguing in bad faith over cocktails until they're not arguing at all.

The notices keep coming. So do the counternotices. So do the emails that start as legal correspondence and become something neither of them can quite name. Marcus has spent his career making inconvenient things disappear. Eli has spent his making sure they can't. Between them sits every question the internet has failed to answer about who gets to control what's public, what's private, and who decides. Some things, it turns out, can't be taken down. For readers of Heated Rivalry, Better Than People, and anyone who has ever found themselves deeply, inconveniently attracted to someone who sends documents with tracked changes turned on.

I asked Claude to generate a book jacket blurb for a novel inspired by Heated Rivalry and the Lumen database, and, umm…

I feel extremely attacked by this

I kept having one where I’d tap an article and it would load to a blank sheet, which I could only resolve by force-quitting the app and relaunching. It happened often enough to annoy me into switching.

I got sick of some of the bugs in legacy Reeder and switched to Unread. It’s a delight. Highly recommended.

Sonic is very high up on the list of reasons I’d be reluctant to leave the Bay Area. 10 gigabit fiber for $60 a month, from an ISP that actually respects its users. We stan Sonic.

Anyway, Brandolini’s law continues to hold: Bullshit is asymmetrical.

Editorial failures like this put the burden on me to track how even purportedly scholarly works (mis)use what I’ve said and written, and expend time and effort to set the record straight. It’s untenable in the long run.

I still can’t wrap my head around how this could have happened in any reasonable research and writing process.

Like, I’ve written lots of stuff; I always start by bucketing sources into “agrees with/supports the point I’m making” and “disagrees with it.” How do you accidentally mix those up?

I appreciate the forthright acknowledgement of the mistake from the author, and look forward to decisive action by @princetonupress.bsky.social to correct this error, and any others, that made it past their robust editorial process.

Requested a correction from @princetonupress.bsky.social. Let's see what happens.

There’s a lesson here about writing in the age of weaponized lies: Always precede false claims with giant red text, ideally wrapped in a <blink> tag, that says “THIS IS A LIE I AM REFUTING!!”

But also, why is a book that makes this kind of lazy, bad-faith argumentation getting any accolades at all?

And yet, In Covid’s Wake quotes me as saying that “the FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands” — literally the opposite of what I argue — to buttress their claim that the government was too busy censoring speech to adequately deal with the pandemic.

The FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands In the Fifth Circuit's analysis, the line between permissible information sharing and threat alerting and coercive moderation demands is a porous one. If representatives of the government share indicators of compromise (IOCs) with private sector entities, is a coercive demand to take some kind of action implicit in that sharing? The Fifth Circuit takes this to be the case: ... we do find the FBI's requests came with the backing of clear authority over the plattorms. Atter all, content moderation requests "might be inherently coercive if sent by ... [al law enforcement officer." ... although the FBI's communications did not plainly reference adverse consequences, an actor need not express a threat aloud so long as, given the circumstances, the message intimates that some form of punishment will follow noncompliance.® The implications of this argument are striking. The Fifth Circuit appears to hold that any information-sharing from the FBI to platforms is de facto coercive, simply by virtue of who it originated with. Even in situations where platforms actively solicit information from the government-as was regularly the case on election security matters between platforms and the FBI-the resulting communications are taken to be coercive because of the FBI's standing as a law enforcement entity.

Receiving and acting on external reports is a core function of plattorm content moderation teams, and the essential nature of this work is an independent evaluation of reported content under the platform's own policies. The fact, cited in Missouri v. Biden, that platforms only acted on approximately half of reports from the FBI shows clearly that the standards platforms applied were not wholly, or even mostly, the government's. Finally, it does not withstand factual scrutiny that platforms were so petrified of adverse consequences from the FBI that they uncritically accepted and acted on information sent to them by the government. The Twitter Files themselves document clearly at least two instances in which, presented with low-quality information or questionable demands, Twitter pushed back on the FBI's requests. In one case, the FBI passes on a request-seemingly from the NSA-that Twitter "revis[e] its terms of service" to allow an open-source intelligence vendor to collect data from the Twitter APIs to inform the NSA's activities. This request is arguably as close to jawboning as any interaction between Twitter and the FBI gets; yet, in response, I summarily dismissed not only the request for a meeting to discuss the topic, but the entire premise of the request, writing, "The best path for NSA, or any part of government, to request information about Twitter users or their content is in accordance with valid legal process." The question was not raised again.

One such refutation appears in my paper under the heading “The FBI went beyond strategic information sharing and made direct moderation demands.” I spend several hundred words explaining that that didn’t happen.

Getting the Facts Straight: Some Observations on the Fifth Circuit Ruling in Missouri v. Biden

The authors quote from an article I wrote in 2023, refuting false claims about government jawboning of social media platforms. One of the claims I directly push back against is the persistent lie that the FBI demanded Twitter censor online speech.

knightcolumbia.org/blog/getting...

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty:

My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media.

Huh? When did I say that?!

@yoyoel.com at TrustCon making the key point that big platforms can weather storms and absorb blows (litigation, regulatory churn) that kill their smaller rivals.

The legal threat may look the same to an array of platforms, but the real question is who can survive it.

The operating mantra is, “Yes, and… you’re banned”

This is an extraordinary and courageous piece of writing that wrestles with one of the great challenges of this moment: How do you decide whether to remain a part of broken institutions to try to fix them from within?

New Paradigms in Trust and Safety: Navigating Defederation on Decentralized Social Media Platforms Defederation on decentralized social media offers new possibilities for online governance. Experts consider how it can be used responsibly, in a way that balances speech and safety.

An article by @samlai.bsky.social @yoyoel.com @noupside.bsky.social @klonick.bsky.social @mallory.techpolicy.social.ap.brid.gy @evan.cosocial.ca.ap.brid.gy and @aaron.bsky.team?!?!?!

Basically the Wu-Tang Clan of the fediverse right here...

Well played, @carnegieendowment.org

Don’t make me snitch tag the menswear guy

Absolutely not.

Seems like something we could figure out. :) Will be in touch.