Notices by Dr. Casey Fiesler (cfiesler@hci.social), page 2

Heh now people in my TikTok comments are insisting that LAX was evacuated because of a private jet carrying Burning Man escapees. Which is not true (see: https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/part-of-lax-ticketing-area-temporarily-evacuated-due-to-suspicious-item-investigation/) but I managed to trace the rumor back to… you guessed it, random people on twitter just stating something like it’s true without any sources.

I’m sure you will be shocked to hear that the user who tweeted a bunch of these Burning Man Ebola rumors has straight up admitted they were making stuff up for X revenue $$$. Posted a screenshot of a $12k payout.

I wouldn't know about this new game from NYT had I not seen someone playing it on TikTok! (Apparently it's still in beta - not even listed on the main game page.) I really like it.
https://www.nytimes.com/games/connections

An update to my article from November, mentioning now how Twitter alternatives are doing.

I really do think that Twitter does feel like watching a shopping mall go slowly out of business.

(Also Mastodon is still my personal favorite out of this list.)

https://theconversation.com/metas-threads-is-surging-but-mass-migration-from-twitter-is-likely-to-remain-an-uphill-battle-209367

and then a 700 billion dollar company launched a social media app without the ability to add alt text to images

I know we hope that Mastodon could get to a point where it can replicate the utility of Twitter for e.g. crisis communication - but in the meantime I certainly hope I haven’t hit my tweet limit the next time my town is on fire. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8exgmVX/

We ( @bkeegan @MattNicholson @blakeley ) are researchers at University of Colorado Boulder conducting a survey about social media platform migration. If you are at least 18 and have used Twitter and/or Mastodon you are eligible to share your experiences with leaving (or choosing not to leave) Twitter and/or joining (or choosing not to join) Mastodon. You can optionally provide your email address to enter a drawing for a $75 gift card. Please boost! Survey link: https://cuboulder.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3BLXjcmBmKpyR2S

an interesting anecdote for wondering "how big is VR right now" is that if you go to the Google News category for VR on any given day, about half of the articles are about Pokemon Go

As someone who does work on ethical speculation, as a reminder, being future-thinking and imagining possible harms doesn't mean designing towards sentient AI or the robot wars. The point of e.g. the Black Mirror Writers Room teaching exercise is to practice speculation as a skill so that you can better think through the actual, immediate harms of your tech. Focusing too, um, long term, can really lose the plot. https://medium.com/cuinfoscience/the-black-mirror-writers-room-the-case-and-caution-for-ethical-speculation-in-cs-education-5c81d05d2c67

So now, officially, every computer science student who was registered dropped my graduate-level tech ethics class. :(

HAPPY PUBLIC DOMAIN DAY! And this is a special day because ALL OF SHERLOCK HOLMES is finally in the public domain! Which means that we're finally done with the silly lawsuits like the one I described in this video a couple of years ago. #publicdomain #sherlockholmes https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey/video/6990845947194510597

The number of people who hear the term "racial bias," immediately translate that to "racism," and then define racism in a way that requires intentionality is mind boggling, and it makes it absolutely impossible to have any kind of conversation about bias in tech.

someone asked me if I thought Elon Musk would run for president, and ignoring the natural-born citizen requirement, all I could think was how utterly ludicrous an idea that would have been 10 years ago and how not ludicrous it is now

I gave a talk at the University of Washington iSchool earlier this week and a couple of folks asked for copies of my slides.

I've given versions of this talk MANY times, but it has a new title! "Remember the human" is one of the first rules of netiquette (also reddiquette) but is also how I've come to think about internet research ethics. https://drive.google.com/file/d/13R2xVhaeJY2Bcn5SFPVrSbeVUohEfK65/view

Also I love this image so much. It was an illustration for a piece that I wrote for (the now defunct) How We Get To Next magazine. If it looks familiar, it was based off of a comics panel in Watchmen. As soon as I saw it, I asked the publication and artist if they minded me using it for other things and they said no, so it's been in most of my talks for the past four years. :) https://www.howwegettonext.com/scientists-like-me-are-studying-your-tweets-are-you-ok-with-that/

really neat academic job for a Canada Research Chair in "Technological Change for Inclusion"! https://www.sfu.ca/siat/hiring/crc.html

It really annoys me when people suggest that Tumblr is silly or whatever. I'd like to see the entire userbase of Mastodon slowly read and discuss a classic epistolary novel together over the course of six months.

Now that we're starting to see more impersonation accounts on Mastodon, a reminder that verified websites are a thing. It's not perfect, but implementable at the individual level, and this is how we know for example which of these is the real @stephenfry - and it's not the one with the meaningless checkmark. :)

Was just asked by a journalist if I knew of anyone besides white men who would be able to speak about the intricacies of Mastodon and how it works (especially on the backend) - any suggestions?