Words. Ideas. Actions.

03 April 2023

Tonight’s post is a little bit of a throwback. When I first started these, it was a way to fill the void I was feeling as I abandoned Tweeting. But I ended up writing about Twitter quite a lot in those early days. So, as we come to the penultimate planned post here, it’s only fitting that the weekend’s events have forced me to look at the smoldering wreckage my favorite app has become.

Thankfully, these posts have kept me from logging into The Bird Site. I deleted the app from my phone long ago. I’m no longer loading the Explore tab on my laptop every other hour, either. I think it’s finally safe to say that my Twitter addiction is broken. But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the continuing decline of a platform I spent so much time and energy helping to create. One such anecdote came to me at about 11 a.m. this morning when a friend in a Slack group shared a report that the Twitter logo had been replaced by Doge.

Now, I’m not a financial genius, nor do I have a business degree, but I’m pretty sure that using an image of a meme-ed Shiba Inu in place of an iconic logo which is known around the globe is not great for the potential profitability of your company. Never mind that the change comes days after April Fool’s Day, and during the window of time where the current management announced they would be removing the Verified check marks which helped people figure out which accounts were actually who they say they are. It’s almost like a voluntary self destruction. But through incompetence. 

I usually like to bring solutions to conversations when I point out problems. But as I’ve said here before, I’m not being paid to solve Twitter’s problems any more, so I’ll leave that to others. I will say that if you were looking to add more nails to a rapidly built coffin, making it harder to trust the information you’re getting there would surely do it. 

There are many things which could kill off a social platform. But most of the deadly choices currently being made at HQ seem to be self-imposed. It’s like knowing you’re deathly allergic to peanuts and deciding to sustain yourself entirely on a diet of Butterfingers. It’s not the fastest way to kill yourself, but it will bring additional issues along with completely, painfully destroying yourself. If I were advising Twitter users, I’d make sure that you’ve already downloaded your data, found another place where your community has gathered, and made the patient as comfortable as possible because it feels like they’ve made a Kevorkian-like choice.

See you tomorrow?

[Important note: I don’t make these suicide references unadvisedly. If you or someone you know needs help, though, you can call 988 in the U.S. at any time.]

13 January 2023

Last night, just after getting yesterday’s post up, I caught the beginning of “Amanpour & Co.” which featured a segment with Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician and epidemiologist, senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the editor at large of Kaiser Health News. She’s also Grant Wahl’s wife. After her recent piece in the New York Times, Amanpour had her on to talk about misinformation, specifically around COVID-19 vaccinations, and how her loss became a central piece of propaganda for purveyors of misinformation online.

This led me to look for her other recent appearances on the topic. She’s been on NPR, CBS, and the “PBS Newshour,” among other outlets. She tells the story of how she wanted to get the truth about Grant’s death out to the public as soon as possible. Her quick efforts seemed to tamp down a lot of the initial misinformation, but after more misinformation started filling social media sites following Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin’s cardiac arrest on the field just a few weeks later, she felt it was important to head into the breach once again. 

One of the ways she recommends fighting these conspiracy theories is by pairing facts with empathy. But how do we do it at scale? Not all of us have access to the New York Times op-ed page. And with companies like Twitter gutting their content moderation teams, even the entities which were once trying to battle mis- and disinformation at a large scale are throwing in the towel under the guise of “free speech.” 

I wish I could be more hopeful about these efforts, but the game of Whac-A-Mole we have to employ to combat all that’s out there is just not sustainable. And the pending machine-learning revolution is only going to bake our existing shortcomings into the ones and zeros of machines repeating the same poor decision making which got us into this predicament in the first place, only now at potentially quantum speeds.

I was stunned when Grant died. I wrote about it as best I could shortly after it happened. I still shake my head in disbelief when thinking about what a shock it was. And is. If there’s one good thing to come out of all this it’s Dr. Gounder’s efforts to cement Grant’s legacy in a beneficial, meaningful way. By protecting and empowering Grant’s memory, whether it ends up being through a journalism award or scholarship, and potentially putting out an anthology of his work, the ideas and ideals he stood for can live on long after his final whistle.

See you tomorrow?