Notices by ethanz (ethanz@social.coop)

I have students who are afraid to come to class because of ICE. I have students deleting their social media presence for fear they're being surveilled, looking for excuses to deport them. Five UMass students have had visas revoked: https://www.umass.edu/news/article/immigration-actions-affecting-students-umass-sponsored-visas

The attacks by the Trump administration on universities by cutting funding are painful, and are going to damage our ability to conduct research. The attacks that are revoking student visas are utterly terrifying to students and are destroying our ability to teach.

I'm giving a talk on mis/disinformation and the idea of the "post-truth society", in conjunction with a screening of "Don't Look Up" at Amherst Cinema, April 1st, as part of "Science on the Screen". Come join us! https://amherstcinema.org/series/science-screen

Here's a fun back to back: The Atlantic offers a tool to let you find which of your writings have been included in Llama (and likely other AI chatbots) without your permission. My score? Both my books, intros to two other books and about 20 papers. (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/)

Glad to be of help? No, really I'm not. It's one thing to have these in Libgen for students in developing nations to access. Having Meta torrent these to train their stochastic parrot is something entirely different.

And the followup: OpenAI and Google and now asking their good friends in the White House to allow them to do this shit without legal consequences in the interests of national security: https://www.theverge.com/news/630079/openai-google-copyright-fair-use-exception

(China's not going to respect US copyrights so we need to be able to ignore laws as well or we'll fall behind in our race to create mediocre text generators and spambots!)

Can journalism survive Trump? Can democracy? Jay Rosen, in conversation with Taylor Owen: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/03/13/jay-rosen-and-taylor-owen-can-journalism-survive-trump-can-democracy/

"Move fast and break things" is a lousy way to run a country: my latest in Prospect on Musk, Zuckerberg and the perils of bringing Silicon Valley thinking to democracy: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/69350/musk-isnt-disrupting-the-government.-hes-breaking-it

Meta cancelling professional factchecking in favor of community notes is causing worry in West Africa, where online disinfo has led to community violence and death: https://globalvoices.org/2025/02/21/the-impact-on-the-african-continent-of-meta-scrapping-its-fact-checking-program/ - Great Global Voices coverage. (Also I love that we can toggle between original quotes and translation - great for me as a French language learner.)

To be slightly blunter than The Atlantic allowed me to be: the tiktok ban is a protectionist subsidy to Meta and Google worth hundreds of billions of dollars: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/internet-censorship-tiktok-ban/681361/

Grateful that The Atlantic will still read unsolicited manuscripts from me, given that I tend to send them my angriest pieces: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/internet-censorship-tiktok-ban/681361/

I have a hard time believing how far the US has fallen as a defender of speech online in the past two decades.

Social Web Foundation  (I am an advisor) warns that having an unfactchecked Threads on the fediverse is a recipe for misery and mischief: https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/01/12/content-policy-on-the-social-web/

There's lots of hot takes on Zuckerberg's content moderation decision, and then there's Julia Angwin's, who uses it to explain that Meta is no longer growing through innovation and is reduced to political groveling. https://buttondown.com/JuliaAngwin/archive/heavy-lies-mark-zuckerbergs-crown/

@jamesmarshall It's easy to slam Meta - and there are countless reasons to do so. But I think they've innovated in two related ways. One, they've made tools so simple that very large sets of people have been able to use them. That's not nothing - one of the major barriers to fediverse adoption is ease of use, and human factors work is HARD. Relatedly, they've assembled an absolutely massive index of users globally, which is incredibly powerful - if you know someone, they are likely on Meta.

Asteris Masouras says that what attracted him to blogs was not journalism but the 
"fairytale" of open source. He was amazed at how much "crazy stuff" could run on software we had written. That creativity is still somewhere - in our community (GV), it's about content, not infrastructure. But perhaps we can bring that spirit of open source and resilience back. #GVSummit2024

Our readership is through the roof on online properties, but we get no revenue from these online spaces. It’s leading to a crisis in the press that’s linked to the crisis in democracy, explains Dixit from Nepali Times #GVSummit2024

Trump's victory has me thinking about the problems of listening at scale, which is one of the hardest problems in democracy. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/united-states/us-election-2024/68666/polls-are-out-listening-is-in (This column is inspired by brilliant new work from Eric Gordon - excited about his forthcoming book.)

@evan I hope so - I am in the process of moving 6K followers over at the moment. Following the excellent guide here - https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/