Episode 56: The Age of the Moderator

Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls and Petros Koutoupis talk Twitter's new Birdwatch experiment, Signal's resistance to moderation, and Redditors' impact on the stock market.

Show notes:

[02:06]: Twitter outsourcing content moderation with expirimental Birdwatch feature.

[13:32]: Signal's founder has pushed back against internal efforts to have some sort of mechanism to prevent misuse of the platform.

[26:25]: Redditors take on hedge funds and the stock market with Game Stop and others. Robinhood and Discord respond.

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Links:

• Twitter introduces 'Birdwatch' to fight misinformation | Engadget — “Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context,” Twitter writes in a blog post. “We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable.”
• Warning Signal: the messaging app’s new features are causing internal turmoil - The Verge — Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world.
• The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook - WSJ — Deciding what does and doesn’t belong online is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the technology world—and perhaps the most grueling. The equivalent of 65 years of video are uploaded to YouTube each day. Facebook receives more than a million user reports of potentially objectionable content a day.
• Mind Your Own Business! - YouTube — Gladys Kravitz.
• Amazon.com: Shephard's Drone: A Novel (9780960051908): Frischmann, Brett: Books
• Amazon.com: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (9781984897787): Hyde, Lewis: Books
• Amazon.com: COMMON AS AIR (9780374532796): Hyde, Lewis: Books
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books
• Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times — We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
• GameStop, Reddit and Robinhood: A full recap of the historic retail trading mania on Wall Street — GameStop mania took Wall Street by storm, thanks to a legion of retail traders glued to the WallStreetBets message board on Reddit.
• Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server, but new ones have sprung to life - The Verge — Discord says it did not ban the WallStreetBets server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” The Verge gained access to the server and can confirm the claim that users of the channel were spamming hateful language, including racial slurs.