With news that the new owner of Twitter has decided to sell verified accounts, I’ve decided to keep @foundhistory to prevent anyone from impersonating me (though Lord knows who would want to). You won’t see me tweeting for the reasons I laid out last week, but I figure if I’m keeping the account, I might as well push links to posts on this blog to the platform for those of you who remain there.
More Twitter: Zeynep Tufekci on ad-supported social networking sites (Twitter in particular): “Humans have strong in-group and out-group tendencies — sociology-speak for my team versus your team…. If you want to keep a group of people engaged, fueling that group competition is a pretty good method…. This means that whatever the topic, by design and by algorithm, social media often elevates the worst, most divisive content…. This is an infrastructure of authoritarianism, created to deliver ads more effectively. It’s a terrible model for the digital public sphere.” I spent an hour in my class today trying to explain this dynamic, and Zeynep just did it in a paragraph. Sigh.
And in non-Twitter news: UConn is launching a new streaming service for its athletics program, the first in the nation.
