Today, online, I saw one unsavoury character described as “so bad that even Meta blocked him”.
In the past, one might have said something similar of Twitter, but it doesn’t really work now… and not because Twitter has started being responsible about blocking people!
Two quotations occurred to me this morning. The first was from Edmund Blackadder, talking to Prince George:
“Well, it is so often the way, sir: too late one thinks of what one should have said.
Sir Thomas More, for instance — burned alive for refusing to recant his Catholicism — must have been kicking himself, as the flames licked higher, that it never occurred to him to say, “I recant my Catholicism.”
Leaving aside for a moment a somewhat rare error on the part of the writers — Thomas More was beheaded, not burned — the topic of when to abandon one’s principles was in my mind, because I was reinstalling WhatsApp on my phone, having deleted it several years ago.
I have written enough here in the past about why I consider Facebook not to be a force for good in the world, and why I think that all of their apps — Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and now presumably Threads — go a step too far in the privacy-infringement arena because, for example, they capture the details not only of the person using the app, but of all their contacts too. I have a few friends who could be considered celebrities, for example, and, now that I’m running WhatsApp again, their details are on the Meta servers…
Except, of course, that they aren’t… at least, not really because of me.
I was taking a stand to alert people to what Meta were doing, but it’s clear that most of my friends didn’t really care that much. Many who actively didn’t like Facebook didn’t realise that WhatsApp and Instagram were the same company. But lots of them had Gmail accounts, or used Android phones, anyway, so security & privacy weren’t too high up their list of priorities. And it turns out, of course, that most of them are already on WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram themselves, so not only were their details already known to the servers, but so were mine, because of them. My virtuous stance was a bit of an empty gesture. (Besides, I hadn’t been quite as pure in my dedication to the cause as I suggest, because I did still have a rarely-used Instagram account, so all bets were really off anyway.)
And so I am now accessible on WhatsApp again, which will make certain social interactions easier. I still think Signal to be superior in almost every way, and will continue to use it and other services where possible in preference. But in the end, it came down to my second quotation of the day: the famous observation made by Scott McNealy, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, nearly quarter of a century ago, long before Facebook and its siblings even existed:
“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”
Perhaps he was right. 🙂
There was a time when I perused Facebook and Twitter several times a day.
Then, a few years ago, I decided life would be better without Facebook and deleted my account. Never looked back.
Then, in lockdown, I set up Screentime to limit my use of social media apps to 15 mins a day. Good decision.
Then the whole Twitter/Musk thing happened and I shifted my attention to Mastodon. I found myself looking at Mastodon about once a day and Twitter about once a week.
Now, I find I’m only looking at Mastodon about twice a week and Twitter about twice a month. And I’ve never even had the urge to investigate TikTok.
I think this is all a healthy progression. I feel like a drug user breaking a habit.
Or does it just mean I’m getting old?
For all its problems over the years, one thing that Twitter has always done quite well is to give you access to backups of your data. You can request a dump of your archive and (a day or two later) download a ZIP file containing all of your Tweets and lots of other data besides, which you could process with your own code, but can also view using an HTML page included in the archive.
As the future of Twitter gets ever more uncertain, I ask for backups more frequently! You might want to do the same… one day you may not be able to.
I had an account in the very early days, and then deleted it, before joining again a little while later. So the first tweet on my current account, just over 15 years ago, says:
I didn’t have an iPhone back then – it existed, but I waited for the 3G version, which arrived a few months later. So quite a few of my early Tweets are about the fun things I could do with my iPod Touch, though I guess most of them would actually have been submitted using SMS text messaging, as you did back then.
I was also amused to see that one of my earliest messages was while barbecuing in the garden. I was recommending a local brand of sausage, which I can still recommend as one of my favourites: “Musk’s“.
That name, but attached to another owner, was to pop up on Twitter occasionally in the future.
I had actually met Elon Musk a couple of years before, but little did I know that his name would one day be so closely associated with this new social network. Back then, he was mostly known for PayPal and SpaceX, though he did have an intriguing side-interest in electric cars. It didn’t look likely that I (or most of my friends) would ever be able to afford one, though, so his other activities were of more interest.
These days, I still consume that fine brand of Newmarket sausages with the same frequency and enthusiasm as I did back then. Other things have changed, however. I drive an electric car every day, and have barely been in a petrol station for 7+ years. Twitter, on the other hand, I only look at a couple of times per week. Elon Musk is primarily responsible for both of those changes!
I’ve started playing a bit more with Mastodon.
For some of you, Mastodon will be old news — I’ve had a Mastodon account for four years, but haven’t really used it before — but many more, I imagine, will be saying, “Mastodon? Never heard of it!” I think you probably will be hearing a lot more about it, though, very soon, so I wanted to make sure you heard it here first!
At its simplest, Mastodon is a social network/microblogging platform rather like Twitter. And it’s getting a lot of attention at present as people are leaving Twitter, or at least exploring alternatives, because they don’t like what Elon Musk is doing with it or what they fear he might do in the future. I’m reserving judgement on that for the moment, but Mastodon has apparently gained about a million users in the last couple of weeks.
So what does Mastodon have going for it, apart from not being under Elon’s control? Well, a proper answer to that would be really quite long, but here are a few key points:
Mastodon is not run by any single company. It is not driven by profit as its primary motivation.
The feed(s) you see are based purely on whom you follow, and not on somebody else’s algorithm. There’s essentially no spam or advertising, at least for now, and it’s much less likely in the future.
Mastodon is ‘federated’, meaning that it consists of lots of servers talking to each other. Many people sign up to one of the big ones like ‘mastodon.social’ — you can find me as @quentinsf@mastodon.social — but there are lots of other options. Some servers (or ‘instances’) are built around particular interests or regions, others may be run by companies or other communities. Each server is moderated and managed by the people who run it, and one view you can choose shows you the new content from people on your instance.
But you can follow, and be followed by, people on any instance, not just the one you’re on. The best analogy here is email: a large number of people choose to use gmail.com, but they can still send and receive emails to people on any other email server. You can choose to get your email service from Fastmail or Microsoft or Yahoo or you can run your own server. (Running a Mastodon instance — e.g. for your company — is rather easier than running an email server!)
You can have multiple accounts on multiple instances and switch between them easily. If you decide to move somewhere else, you can leave a forwarding address so people will find you, and you can even arrange that all your followers will follow you automatically. (Your actual posts are stored on the instance, though, so your history doesn’t come with you to the new place.)
For the technically-inclined, Mastodon instances communicate using an open protocol called ActivityPub, which is also used by other systems such as NextCloud and PeerTube, and I suspect we’ll see it adopted more widely soon. For example, I’ve installed a plugin for this blog, so it can publish using ActivityPub. As well as following me as @quentinsf@mastodon.social, you can get notified of posts on this blog by following @qsf@statusq.org. (Please do!) If all goes well, this post will be one of the first I publish that way! The feed will be entirely independent of any other organisation, but you can still choose to follow it through, for example, any Mastodon apps or websites.
What I like about this stuff is that, to me, it feels more like the way the internet was in the early days, and the way it should be: people running or choosing their own servers, and people reading and subscribing to content based on their own preferences and not on the profit-maximising algorithms of big American or Chinese corporates.
I hope it flourishes.
This is a great post by Scott Galloway warning about the influence of TikTok. Some have accused it of fear-mongering, but do read the whole thing and see what you think. Here are a few key points:
TikTok has over a billion users. This includes ‘nearly every U.S. teenager and half their parents’. The average monthly hours spent on it per user are way higher than for the other social networks. And the amount of data gathered about every interaction is vast.
All of its data are readily available to the Chinese government. TikTok is not actually allowed to operate in China, though, so this is purely data gathered about people in the rest of the world.
“Facebook is the most powerful espionage vehicle ever created and now China commands the most powerful propaganda tool”. The Russians have become very good at manipulating Facebook and Twitter, but the process is still much harder for Putin than it is for Xi Jinping.
So, Galloway warns, small changes in the configuration of the TikTok algorithms — just a thumb resting on the scale — can have a massive influence:
Dial up wholesome-looking American teens with TikTok accounts railing against the evils of capitalism. Dial down the Chinese immigrant celebrating the freedoms afforded in America. Push Trump supporter TikToks about guns and gay marriage into the feeds of liberals. Find misguided woke-cancel-culture TikToks and put them in heavy rotation for every moderate Republican. Feed the Trumpists more conspiracy theories. Anyone with a glass-half-empty message gets more play; content presenting a more optimistic view of our nation gets exiled. Hand on scale.
The network is massive, the ripple effects hidden in the noise. Putting a thumb the size of TikTok on the scale can move nations. What will have more influence on our next generation’s view of America, democracy, and capitalism? The bully pulpit of the president, the executive editor of the New York Times, or the TikTok algorithm?
Sobering stuff…
Thanks to the footnotes in John Naughton’s Observer column for the link.
Dear Reader,
Can I encourage you to try something today? Go to Signal.org and get hold of the Signal messaging app, and/or go to your app store and download Signal for your phone. And while it’s downloading, come back here and I’ll tell you why I’ve become so fond of it, and why you might actually want another messaging app.
To put it in a nutshell, Signal is like WhatsApp but without selling your soul. Imagine what a good time Faust would have had without that awkward business with the Devil, and you get the idea. Well, OK… you don’t quite have to sell your soul to Facebook to use WhatsApp, but you do have give away your privacy, your friends’ privacy, endure a lot of advertising, and so forth. (More info in an earlier post.)
For Apple users, Signal is rather like Messages, which I also like and use a lot, but you can use Signal with your non-Apple friends too, on all of your, and all of their, devices.
Signal:
Now, of course, it has the problem that all networks initially have: what happens if none of my friends are on it? And yes, that can be an issue, but it’s becoming less so. When I first signed up, I think I knew about three other users. Now, over 100 of my contacts are there, and more arrive every week. When I see them pop up, I send them a quick hello message just to welcome them and let them know I’m here too. It’s a bit like wondering if you’re at the wrong party because you know so few people here, and then over time more and more of your friends walk through the door.
How do you find them? Well, like WhatsApp, Signal works on phone numbers, and when you sign up you have the option to let it scan your contacts list and see if any of them are on Signal too. Unlike Facebook/WhatsApp, however, your contacts’ details aren’t transmitted to the company’s servers and used to build the kind of personal profiles that FB keeps even on people who aren’t members.
Signal instead encrypts (hashes) the phone numbers in your contacts, truncates the encrypted form so it can’t be used to match the full phone number, sends those truncated versions to their servers, and if it finds matches for any truncated other account numbers it sends the encrypted possible matches back to you for your app to check. Security experts will realise that this isn’t perfect either, but it’s so much better than most of the alternatives that you can be much more comfortable doing it. Here’s a page talking about it with a link to more detailed technical descriptions about how they’re trying to make it even more secure. And here’s the source code for all their software in case you don’t trust what they say and want to check it out for yourself.
So in recent months, if I’ve wanted to set up group chat sessions to discuss the care of an elderly relative, or plan a boating holiday with friends, or discuss software development with colleagues in another timezone, I tell people that I disconnected from Facebook a few years back so I don’t do WhatsApp, but have you tried Signal? It’s pretty much the same, with all the bad bits taken out, and works much better on the desktop and on tablets, in my now-rather-dated experience, than WhatsApp ever did.
So give it a try, and if you find that not many friends are there, don’t delete it. Just wait a bit… and tell all your friends about this post, of course!
There are many reasons I’m glad we decided not to have kids. One is that I don’t have to worry about the amount of time they’re spending on TikTok.
Thanks to John & Pete Naughton for the link to Scott Galloway’s excellent article on the subject, which is well-worth reading. If you still have the attention span of anything more than a flea, that is.
Here’s a question. As people’s attention span has moved from books, to TV, to Netflix, to YouTube, to TikTok… are there any benefits? (Except to marketing organisations.) This is a serious question: I wonder if people are able to context-switch more quickly, for example, which might have the occasional advantage.
To live in the modern world, you need to understand social networks. That’s not the same as using them; you can understand them without using or wanting to use them, and you can quite happily use them without actually understanding how they work at all. In fact, I would suggest, most people do, and that ignorance is amongst the bigger problems facing the world today.
Fortunately, we have a good antidote to it, in Charles Arthur’s latest book “Social Warming: The dangerous and polarising effects of social media”. I think it is superb.
Arthur is a highly-respected writer and journalist of long standing, but it’s still quite an achievement to produce a book which is nicely written and enjoyable to read, yet simultaneously extremely serious and important.
The title draws an analogy with global warming: there’s no one single massive event that causes climate change: it’s the result of millions of small actions and interactions taking place all over the planet for an extended period. And the mechanisms which drive social networks, which make them tick, also seem mostly harmless at the level of individual interactions, but they too accumulate to have enormous impact. We remain in ignorance of them at our peril… until perhaps one day we’ll find things have gone too far.
The dramatic cover might lead you to think this is going to be a shocker: a breathtaking exposé of corporate evils, which you can only escape by banning Facebook from your life forever. In fact, however, it is a rational explanation of the algorithms social networks have found to be effective in driving ever-greater engagement of the audience (and hence ever-greater revenues for their shareholders). And it’s a journey through numerous examples of the impact these mechanisms have actually had in key situations in different parts of the world.
The phrase “required reading” is a somewhat clichéd one, and I don’t think I’ve ever used it before, but I think it may be appropriate here. Perhaps, though, I should moderate it a bit. This book should be considered required reading if you post to social networks, read social networks, have any close friends or family who use social networks, read papers or watch media where the journalists get information from social networks, meet people whose approach to global pandemics depends on what they read on social networks, live in a country where voting is heavily influenced by social networks, or have kids growing up in a world dominated by social networks.
The rest of you don’t need to read it.
‘Social Warming’ can be purchased from Amazon and many other sources, with hardback, Kindle and audiobook versions available now, and paperback to follow in the spring.
I remember a discussion with a good friend of mine, a co-founder of some of my past companies. He was a bit of a perfectionist, and often pointed out to other employees when they didn’t live up to his exacting standards.
“That’s fine”, I said, “but people will remember the times when you criticise them ten times as clearly as when you praise them. So if you want to maintain even a basic equilibrium, make sure you go out of your way to find good things to say to people ten times as often as bad things.”
I was thinking about this as I switched off my Twitter app this evening. Actually, I didn’t close it down: my phone did. At the start of the pandemic, I was worried I might spend too much time on social media, so I used Apple’s rather good Screen Time system to set a limit for social networking apps. In my case, that means Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, and my combined use of all of those networks, on all of my devices, shouldn’t exceed 15 mins per day.
This limit has worked very well. I often don’t hit it, and when I do, I almost always let the system do its thing and switch off the aforementioned apps for the rest of the day. The result is that I’ve got out of the habit of checking Twitter on a regular basis; I look at it perhaps every second day, when I happen to think about it.
And I think this is a good thing. Twitter and Facebook are the world’s biggest tabloids, and a big part of their business model involves convincing you that the world is more broken, angry, shocking and angst-ridden than it actually is in real life. And, as with my employee-relations example above, negative comments about anything are often more memorable: we all know how a media critic can come up with a short, clever, cutting remark about a dramatic work over his cup of coffee, and so devastate months of work of dozens of creative people. If you spend too much time with social networks, you can come away with a very negative view of life, and I think it’s important to keep a careful eye on that balance.
So what is the right balance? Well, for me, 15 mins of social networks for every 23 hours and 45 mins of ‘no social networks’ seems about right, to keep things in perspective. Recommended.
Nicholas Carr, writing in The New Atlantis, has a splendid overview of how past regulation of technologies has distinguished between personal communications, which should be private, and broadcast communications, which should be regulated because, as Hoover put it, “The ether is a public medium, and its use must be for public benefit.”
He talks about how regulation of radio was accelerated because of the interference of amateur broadcasters in the rescue efforts when the Titanic went down, and follows the trajectory from there.
With the even more expansive Communications Act of 1934, Congress replaced the FRC with a more permanent body, the Federal Communications Commission, and widened its purview to include the personal communication systems of telephony and telegraphy, and eventually the new broadcast medium of television. By combining the mandate that telephone and telegraph providers operate as common carriers with the mandate that broadcasters act in the public interest, the legislation formalized the two-pronged philosophy that would govern electronic communications for the rest of the century.
The public interest, as we all know, is not easy to define. But that is part of its strength, Carr argues.
As the fraught history of the fairness doctrine makes clear, the public interest standard is not a magic bullet. Its amorphousness means that its interpretation will always be messy, combative, and provisional — as political processes tend to be in a democracy. Some legal scholars and pundits, particularly those with a libertarian tilt, have argued that the standard’s imprecision gives government regulators too much leeway. The standard, writes one typical critic, is “vague to the point of vacuousness, providing neither guidance nor constraint.” But that’s a misinterpretation. The public interest standard is more than just a legal principle. It is an ethical principle. It assures the people’s right to have a say in the workings of the institutions and systems that shape their lives — a right fundamental to a true democracy and a just society. The vagueness of the standard is necessary for a simple reason: public opinion changes as circumstances change.
Exactly how this distinction might be applied to social networks is not clear, he admits.
On a social network like Facebook, conversations feel like broadcasts, and broadcasts feel like conversations.
In addition, some posts which were intended for a small audience go viral and become a large-scale broadcast, whether or not that was the author’s intention. But he makes the point that the networks themselves are very aware of all the statistics about the reach of each individual post, and that this might form the basis of some form of regulatory distinctions.
And…
It’s worth remembering that Congress’s decision to license radio operators after the Titanic disaster was about more than just allocating scarce spectrum. It was about bringing those who speak to the masses out of the shadows and into the daylight of the public square. It was about making broadcasters, whether individuals, businesses, or other organizations, visible and accountable.
A very nice piece and worth reading in full. Thanks to Charles Arthur for the link.
This is haunting, beautiful, and spooky. And it’s from 2013, but I’ve only just discovered it.
It’s by Vienna Teng, and it’s most fun to watch her introduce it live:
But if you want the lyrics more clearly, someone’s done a nice transcription.
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