3x35: Generated For The Purpose Of Journalism

[sil]

Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which

• [00:02:50] Online trolls are assholes offline too, at least according to a new survey
• [00:17:20] Facebook Workrooms seem to be the long-promised "Facebook Spaces", much to Jono's intemperate joy
• [00:29:50] Excellently detailed albeit mildly depressing summary of Google's myriad messaging apps which is worth reading
• [00:40:50] The UK government's planned "Online Harms Bill" tries, among other things, to define what a journalist is so they can be exempt from some regulations, which is possibly a very concerning development
• [00:55:00] Twitter are allegedly going to start requiring viewers to be signed in to view tweets (pro tip: embrace nitter.net if this is a problem!)

Come chat with us and the community in our Slack channel via https://badvoltage-slack.herokuapp.com/!

Bad Voltage 3x35: Generated For The Purpose Of Journalism

Download from https://badvoltage.org

News music: Long Live Blind Joe by Robbero, used with attribution.

Thank you to Marius Quabeck and NerdZoom Media for being our audio producers!

[jcolag]

A lot of the names-and-behavior research goes back to when Facebook especially started demanding that everybody use their real names, then completely botched it by banning a bunch of transgender people and basically anybody whose name was uncommon in Western Europe or might be pronounced like an impolite term. While this one tries to get into the “real world,” almost every study shows a lack of correlation between strength of identity and behavior. A bunch of them also find that official real name policies increase harassment, because–like in the Facebook example–accusations are a blunt weapon to beat people with, and real names help the harasser to track their target down.

For Twitter, I’ve said for a while that its only real draws are that…

• Brands and politicians use it.
• It’s a permanent record, with deletion the only way to “fix” a problem.

So, I’ve always said that there’ll never be a way to edit tweets–because that would allow anyone to update embedded tweets to say something like “I love kittens”–and they probably won’t actually block read-access.

They’ve actually been kicking around a lot of dumb ideas. Investors are looking for them to start actually turning a profit, so a lot of those ideas are looking to charge for services like Tweetdeck or toss up paywalls. Most ideas are probably never going to get past brainstorming.