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Hanging by Meta’s Threads

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

If you are very much online in social media, you’ve likely heard the buzz about Threads – the new microblogging platform owned and operated by Facebook’s parent, Meta.

I’m not going to get into a detailed discussion of Threads versus its problematic competitor Twitter or ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s problematic alternative, Bluesky Social. You’re perfectly capable of doing the homework on them and other competing microblogging platforms.

Of concern to me: how will Threads eventually interact with the open source federated universe (fediverse) of platforms including Mastodon. Threads is expected to federate eventually and allow easy sharing of communications and content between member platforms in the fediverse.

There has been so much conversation about this topic in Mastodon that I’ve had to filter it out. The discussion has been warranted, but the subject has been polarizing and frankly exhausting.

Some Mastodon users – mostly those who left Twitter and miss it badly – want this new Meta project to integrate seamlessly with Mastodon so that they can encourage former Facebook folks to come over to Mastodon. They’re missing much busier levels of activity in their timelines which was driven by algorithms at Twitter and as well at Facebook. And some simply can’t handle the increased complexity Mastodon poses, from choosing an instance to finding friends old and new, or building a feed.

Some Mastodon users – like me – don’t really care to federate with Meta’s users whether from Facebook or Instagram. In my case my primary concerns are data privacy and remaining ad free. While I feel fairly confident my experience within Mastodon won’t ever involve ads, I can’t say that will be the case once I make contact with someone in Threads just as looking at a tweet on Twitter will likely expose me to advertising. I simply do not want to give my attention without my advance consent to any business advertising in social media.

(Side note: look around here in emptywheel – see any ads? How’s that shape your experience here?)

Because of these concerns I’ve been looking for ways to limit exposure of personal data now that Meta has begun a soft launch of Threads over the last 24 hours.

~ ~ ~

Ahead of a formal launch, Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s creator, published a statement about the way Threads and Mastodon are supposed to work. This statement was the result of meetings he had with Meta about the way Threads was expected to work once it joined the fediverse.

See https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

Note this paragraph in particular:

Will Meta get my data or be able to track me?

Mastodon does not broadcast private data like e-mail or IP address outside of the server your account is hosted on. Our software is built on the reasonable assumption that third party servers cannot be trusted. For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access. A server you are not signed up with and logged into cannot get your private data or track you across the web. What it can get are your public profile and public posts, which are publicly accessible.

There’s still a problem here, if you think back to what researcher Aleksandr Kogan could do with Facebook’s data harvested ~2014. The network of people around those whose data had been obtained could still be deduced.

If some users outside Meta have past usernames in Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp which match; and/or if users have had previous long-term contacts with Meta users, and/or if data from Twitter or other social media platforms can also be acquired and correlated, it wouldn’t be difficult to build out the social network of Threads users who interface with Mastodon or other fediverse platform users.

This gets around the reason why Mastodon in particular has been resistant to integrating search across the fediverse. Search was intentionally limited during Mastodon’s development to prevent swarming and brigading attacks and other forms of harassment targeting individuals, particularly those identified in minority and/or protected classes.

Consider for example the case of a gay person who associates with other gay people who know each other locally but communicate using these tools. It won’t take that much effort especially with the aid of GPT AI to to create the means to identify entire networks of gay persons related one to several degrees apart. Once identified, it wouldn’t take much to begin brigading them if enough other hostile accounts have been established. One could even imagine the reverse identification process applied in order find persons who are violently anti-gay and likely to welcome opportunities to harass gays.

Imagine, too, how this could affect young women contacting others looking for reproductive health care information.

~ ~ ~

There is a temporary saving grace: Threads is not approved in the EU. Not yet.

The server which hosts my Mastodon account is located in the EU and therefore will not yet allow Threads users access through federation.

The same server’s administrator also polled users and asked if they wanted to allow Threads to federate with this server — they voted it down.

So I guess I’m okay where I’m at for the moment.

There are fediverse servers out there which will never allow Threads to federate with them. I’ve seen a Mastodon server which has said it will never allow Meta applications to federate because it’s against their server’s terms of use to allow entities which enable genocide and crimes against humanity to do so.

Good for them.

And good for us: PressProgress editor Luke LeBrun collected the app privacy policies for Threads, Bluesky, Twitter and Mastodon for contrast and comparison:

Can’t imagine why I would have any concerns about Threads…ahem.

~ ~ ~

This is all fairly new and unfolding even as I write this. What the fediverse will look like once Threads makes full contact is anybody’s guess.

But there are several things we do know right now, with certainty:

– Meta has been and remains a publicly-held holding company for a collection of for-profit social media businesses. Its business model relies on selling ad space based on targeted markets, and selling data. This will not change short of a natural disaster like a meteor strike taking out all of Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco area, and that may still not be enough to change the inevitable monetization of Threads and all the platform touches.

– Meta has been operating under a consent decree issued by the Federal Trade Commission since 2011 after violating users’ privacy; it violated that agreement resulting in a $5 billion fine which it has fought against paying. Meta’s track record on privacy is not good and includes the non-consensual collection of personal data by academic Aleksandr Kogan. The data was later used by Cambridge Analytica/SCL and may have been involved in influence operations during the 2016 election.

– The EU is light years ahead of the US when it comes to privacy regulations. California as a state comes closest to the EU in its privacy regulations but it shouldn’t matter which state we are in – our privacy concerns are the same across the country, and opt-in should be the standard, period. US state and federal lawmakers have been and will likely continue to be slow to take any effective action unless there is considerable pressure by the public to meet the EU’s efforts.

– Law enforcement in the US have purchased and used without a warrant personal data collected through users’ use of social media. There has been inadequate pressure by the public to make this stop and will put the health and safety of women and minority groups at risk.

Changing the direction in which this is headed requires engagement and action. By now you know the drill: contact your representatives in Congress and demand legislation to protect media users’ privacy. (Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121 or Resist.bot)

That’s no slip: no form of media on the internet should be immune from protecting its users’ privacy.

You should also contact your state’s attorney general and as well as your legislators and demand your state matches California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) when it comes to privacy protections – at a minimum. Meeting the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) would be better yet.

Leaving Las Birdas

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Marcy asked Sunday about a checklist of actions:

It’d be useful for someone to put together a checklist for journalists to prepare for the inevitable banning: download archive, delete DMs and phone number, update Masto follows… What else?

I started drafting one but as I was doing so, Elmo was changing the rules. I had to toss some parts, rewrite others, do more research than I expected all because Elmo decided he was going to ban a journalist permanently (WaPo’s Taylor Lorenz) and ban all references to certain other social media platforms.

And then Musk did a 180-degree turn and deleted a bunch of the new rules late Sunday evening.

A flood of new users over the weekend combined with increased posting volume flooded Mastodon servers again, making everything a bit slow. It will speed up again once everything settles down into a new stasis.

Anyhow, here’s the list journalists probably could have used already.

1) Get your Archive — Do not pass go, do not collect $200 until you have requested an archive of your Twitter history which includes all your tweets, retweets, quote tweets, media, more.

— Select Settings and privacy.
— Choose Your account.
— Select Download an archive of your data.
— Confirm your password, then select Request archive.
— Watch for notice in your Settings within the next 2-5 days that your archive is ready to download. Don’t count on an email notification as those appear to be spotty.

This archive will not be readily readable to folks who don’t code, but there are tools to format it into readable structure.

2) Obtain 2FA backup passcodes — you need a way to access your account if Twitter’s 2FA service crashes. It has in Ukraine and India and spottily in the US since November 1.

Once you have your 2FA backup passcodes, make sure you have 2FA set up on your account. Next step will help a lot with 2FA.

3) Remove your phone number from your Twitter account. Lifehacker published a how-to. If you must keep a phone number attached, consider either switching it to a dedicated cheap burner or leave the existing number but get a new number wholly separate from Twitter for everything else.

Unauthorized use and sale of phone numbers may violate the FTC’s consent decree, but Musk has already proven repeatedly he doesn’t care what the FTC’s consent decree says, having violated it multiple times since taking control of Twitter. Don’t assume regulation can restrain him or that regulatory bodies in the U.S. or EU can act before the damage is done.

4) Leave contact information as to where else you can be found.

Musk is now suspending accounts for sharing Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, Post, Tribel, TruthSocial, Nostr addresses and links. To ensure readers can still obtain addresses at these platforms, try these alternatives:

— There are three open source link shorteners available which can mask an underlying link. See https://opensource.com/article/17/3/url-link-shortener for information about Lessn More, Polr, and Yourls; or

— Use Glitch.com to cite all your social media addresses and identities in one link. You can ‘hide’ your Mastodon address in it and use the URL on your Twitter profile;

— Another approach is to collect your identities and put them in an image file and add it to a pinned tweet (do not include any text referring to the image’s content). So far I haven’t seen any indication Twitter is using OCR to detect ‘forbidden’ addresses except perhaps in profile header images;

— If you already have a blog, you can draft a post or a page with all your contact information in it and link to that page/post. (I’ve done this, it’s very easy.)

5) Delete your Direct Messages (DMs) — this may take some time if you haven’t had a practice of deleting them as you go along. In the future use Signal for private messages with auto-deletion so you don’t have this albatross to deal with if you need to leave another social media platform.

Protect your sources and ask them to make sure they’ve deleted on their end as well.

6) Delete your Tweets — this is not a necessity and may actually cause problems if others have relied on your tweets in their reporting. Unlike DMs, tweets are assigned a unique URL; deleting one can create a 404 error for anyone who cited one of your tweets. Think long and hard about doing this.

It may be difficult to delete more than your last 3200 tweets. I couldn’t; the service I used choked on the copy of my archive for one of my accounts. So I left it as it was.

If you have sensitive tweets which could end up deleted by Twitter’s current or future regime, consider archiving them in the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.

7) Pull a list of follows/followers if you’re headed to Mastodon — technically speaking, this information is in your archive copy but without the right tool it can be difficult for the non-coder to read. Use tools like Fedifinder or Twitodon to pull a list of follows/followers identifying those who’ve migrated to Mastodon already. Log into your Mastodon account and follow the emigres as desired.

8) Nuclear Options: a) Lock your account, or b) Deactivate/Delete your account.

a) Locking your account means it is only visible to your existing followers at the time it is locked. You won’t get spammed/trolled by non-following accounts while you’re locked. Other accounts may try to follow you but you’ll have to approve them and at this point most may be spammers or troll/bot accounts not worth your time to screen let alone approve.

b) Deactivating/Deleting your account will freeze your username for 30 days but after that the username is available for use by another new user. I do NOT recommend this; if your name is your brand, you don’t want someone misusing it. Just make sure the account is secured by 2FA and walk away.

Between my two accounts I have less than 3000 followers and I’d informed them the account was going on hiatus and left info on how to find me. I locked my accounts and haven’t logged back in.

9) Prep your other social media/future social media home — I’m not going to assume journalists are headed to Mastodon though many are. Some media figures are heading elsewhere.

— Make sure to update your other/new media accounts with new addresses as appropriate;

— Make sure you’ve activated 2FA or MFA secured logins on your other/new accounts;

— If you’re leaving Twitter, remove buttons and links from your social media accounts and — blog/website which take readers to your Twitter account;

— Share a post as soon as possible on your alternate platform(s) advising your status, and then make sure to sustain some level of consistency in posting there to develop audience.

10-a) If you are moving to Mastodon — find the circulating lists of journalists who’ve opened a Mastodon account. Follow your peeps from that list, have yourself added to that list.

— an ongoing Google Doc of journalists prepared by Tim Chambers, administrator of indie.social (@[email protected]):

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13No4yxY-oFrN8PigC2jBWXreFCHWwVRTftwP6HcREtA/htmlview

The list is at least 1280 entries long. When clicking through the link above, note the link at the top to a form to collect new entry’s personal information.

— an ongoing active list of verified journalists prepared by Dave Lee of the Financial Times (@[email protected]):

https://www.presscheck.org/

Caveat: Dave is swamped, there’s a backlog of requests by new accounts.

10-b) If you are moving to Mastodon — you have a lot to learn in a short period of time; make sure you understand how Mastodon’s culture differs from Twitter’s, and how the lack of algorithms and nominal analytics may change your mode of operation.

— YouTube video introduction by Jeff Jarvis (@[email protected]), journalism prof at CUNY Newmark School:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xnbct41Sxnk

— Introduction to Mastodon at Washington Post:

A guide to getting started with Twitter alternative Mastodon (gift link)

There was another intro at Wall Street Journal this weekend as well — which says something interesting, doesn’t it? I don’t have a link to it, though, as I don’t have a subscription.

~ ~ ~

Now, a note about reporting on Elmo and Twitter going forward: ARCHIVE TWEETS BEFORE REPORTING ABOUT THEM. Make this an automatic practice.

I’ve run in to a number of situations where journalists have posted in Mastodon about Twitter rules and Elmo’s tweets, sharing links to the Twitter-based content. Because I refuse to give Twitter traffic I copy the URL of the tweet and check the Internet Archive first for an archived copy instead.

I can’t tell you how many times the shared tweet url had NOT been archived, even this Sunday during the height of Musk-ian confusion about the new rule regarding mentions of social media competitors.

Do not trust Elmo not to delete content whether tweets or administrative content under Help, Twitter Support, or other Twitter organization account. Take a screenshot, document the hell out of it. Add any links to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.

Polititweet had been archiving Musk’s tweets including tracking those deleted, but I can’t be certain it’s up to date.

Just don’t trust him or the business he runs because it’s not the Twitter you once knew.

~ ~ ~

Go. Remember you’re supposed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Do it from a better place than the circus Twitter has become.

Held Hostage by the Barmy Bird

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Of all the journalists suspended by Elmo on the bird site, I was bothered most by that of Voice of America’s Steve Herman.

I mentioned before he’s a straight news kind of guy. I’d followed his account at Twitter so far back I can’t remember which of us had a Twitter account first. He was one of the few early Twitter sources I could rely on for news about earthquakes in Japan. His coverage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011 was invaluable.

But the most important factor about Herman’s suspension is that he is a U.S. government employee.

Herman works for us. He’s paid with our tax dollars.

And a single foreign-born billionaire offering weak excuses after the fact had OUR public employee suspended for doing their job.

Once again, I’ll point out that Elmo was exercising his own free speech rights by suspending journalists on the social media platform he owns.

Popehat said it better, of course:

Remember: Twitter is Elon’s company, he has the free speech and free association right to run it pretty much however he wants and to ban people for petty narcissistic reasons.

And we have the right to laugh and point at his ridiculousness and at the free-speech pretenses of his gullible fans.

But even Popehat said that on Mastodon.

Elmo may be within his rights to capriciously decide to suspend journalists, but in suspending VOA’s Herman it became crystal clear that the U.S. government should not allow its resources to be subject to the whim of a single individual when the entire country relies on those resources.

Thankfully, Herman was already on Mastodon before the suspension and has been ramping up posting on that open platform since he launched his account.

But it’s who else is NOT on Mastodon which is now a problem.

Every member of Congress who has an account on Twitter is vulnerable to suspension.

Every U.S. government department and agency still on Twitter is likewise at risk.

Let’s say Musk becomes annoyed with the Federal Aviation Administration because of its regulations on airspace and planes, commercial and private. Could he suspend the FAA’s account?

Or perhaps Musk gets his pants in a knot about National Aeronautics and Space Administration because he and NASA don’t see eye to eye about a SpaceX-related matter. Could he suspend NASA accounts (there are multiple for this agency).

One might say, “Surely Musk wouldn’t be stupid/crazed enough to do that.”

Except he’s already suspended one employee of a U.S. government agency, and holding that person’s account hostage until content is deleted from that person’s account.

Elmo might have the right to do this, but the U.S. should not be held hostage by a pasty excessively-monied git with an unmanaged ego.

Look at this situation from another angle: this is ransomware denying service to a user until a specific deliverable has been provided.

In VOA’s case, Musk by way of Twitter Safety has demanded Herman delete a tweet before service will be resumed.

How should a government agency respond to demands for ransom like this, when an open platform is ready and waiting to provide alternative service?

There’s no good reason why each department and agency is still on Twitter but not on Mastodon, nor is there any good reason why each member of Congress doesn’t have an account on Mastodon.

None of the work government departments, agencies, and employees do should be impeded by the private sector let alone by a single butt-hurt billionaire.

Contact your members of Congress and tell them this needs to be fixed going into the next session of Congress. Each of them and their caucuses need to have a non-commercialized open social media platform account.

Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121 or use Resist.bot (which has a Mastodon account, by the way).

After the Deluge: What’s Next on Mastodon for Journalism? [UPDATE-2]

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. Updates at the bottom of this post. /~Rayne]

After Thursday’s Musk-ian tantrum booting off more than eight journalists from Twitter, there was a stampede of new users opening accounts on the open social media platform Mastodon.

It bogged down performance considerably on the largest servers. My timelines lagged by nearly three hours at one point on mstdn.social. But that was Friday; there wasn’t a lot of urgent news. We could afford the lag.

Though service improved greatly over 24 hours later, servers may still be throttled a bit. They’ll likely be upgraded over the next week or two depending on the instance and if traffic continues to level out over the next 48 hours.

The lag will be more obvious than some of the corporate-owned commercial platforms, but we’ve all seen now what the price is for the responsiveness of commercial Big Tech.

Besides, we’ve been here before during early rapid growth of a platform.

We’ll get through this.

~ ~ ~

Now that journalists have finally been confronted by the reality their go-to social media platform is run by an erratic narcissist, it’s time to ask what’s next.

Some of the outlets employing these journalists are already turning a blind eye to what happened now that Musk has lifted the suspension on several journalists. The selective approach should be yet another signal to media outlets that there is no return to normal. The big name outlets like CNN, NYT, NBC saw the ban on their journalists lifted, but the smaller independent outlets and freelance journalists are still suspended.

Among them are the only woman of color who was banned (Linette Lopez) and a commentator who’s retired from political commentary (Keith Olbermann). Hello racism, misogyny, ageism, and not a single complaint from the big media outlets about this because they’re not affected (wow, if that doesn’t say something else).

Not only is the Musk-ian problem of throttled journalism continuing, it will happen again. It’s just a matter of time before some other issue arises which trips Musk’s hair trigger and a journalist or outlet will be suspended.

(While I was writing this piece, Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz was suspended from Twitter without explanation. Her account also happens to be on the so-called antifa list circulated last month — surely just a coincidence, hmm?)

There’s purpose to this beyond an expression of Musk’s shallowness. It’s now a means to change the subject and redirect journalists’ attention — even away from some of the journalism being throttled.

What was it that Lopez reported which triggered Musk? Why isn’t that getting more attention?

And as I asked in my previous post, what really tripped the suspension of Matt Binder? Was it about Tesla’s performance?

This is among the what’s next actions: journalists and their employers need to stop getting played by Musk the same damned way they were played by another malignant narcissist who mastered undermining and marginalizing the media.

Stop navel gazing and start doing more and better reporting about Musk and his effect on free speech and press freedom.

Publish it on an open social media platform, which the narcissist’s platform isn’t.

Do that with all reporting.

~ ~ ~

Consultant Dan Hon has posted a few observations, assessments, and recommendations of media outlets’ next steps. He began writing about news organizations moving to open web platform Mastodon back in October just before Musk took ownership of Twitter, before journalists were banned:

— News outlets need a Mastodon instance;
— Instances should be associated with organization’s existing website URL to ease discovery while building on and enhancing brand;
— Instances should verify its journalists’ (and opinion columnists’) identities through the Mastodon instance;

Thursday’s journalists’ suspensions emphasize the importance of Hon’s recommendations. News media shouldn’t be held hostage by a single billionaire with an attitude, especially if these outlets don’t have financial relationship with that billionaire and his social media business.

It’s possible the big name media outlets whose journalists’ suspensions were lifted have or have had advertising purchases with Twitter which influenced Musk’s handling of the suspensions.

No outlet so far has copped to this though it’s certain some participate in Twitter’s video monetization program Amplify. We only know that some of the outlets begged for mercy *cough* asked for reconsideration of the suspensions.

The New York Times asked its reporters not get into confrontations with Musk in public view on Twitter.

In one case the news outlet has punished the journalist for their coverage of Musk. NBC dressed down Ben Collins and pulled him off coverage of Twitter for his tweets earlier in the month which were characterized as “not editorially appropriate.”

NBC’s behavior may have emboldened Musk.

Entities pleading with Musk like the American Foreign Service Association on behalf of VOA’s Steve Herman may only have fed Musk’s ego.

FreePress.net’s insistence Musk step aside as Twitter’s CEO is laughable given how much of his own wealth is invested in the business, not to mention Musk was exercising his own free speech rights suspending journalists.

None of these actions deal with the problem, which is that a media platform has been taken over by a billionaire fascist narcissist with no genuine interest in free speech and a free press.

Dealing with this effectively means building a better mousetrap which can’t be overtaken by a single person’s whims.

There have been some instances established on open platform Mastodon for some media outlets listed below:

— USA —
https://c.im/@ABC (bot)
https://c.im/@CNN (bot)
https://c.im/@NBC (bot)
https://journa.host/@onthemedia
https://journa.host/@[email protected]
https://mstdn.social/@RollingStone
https://newsie.social/@TheConversationUS
https://newsie.social/@themarkup
https://newsie.social/@Chalkbeat
https://newsie.social/@STAT
https://newsie.social/@ProPublica
https://newsie.social/@damemagazine
https://mastodon.world/@FAIR
https://mastodon.world/@foreignpolicy
https://mastodon.world/@theprospect
https://mastodon.social/@niemanlab
https://mastodon.social/@GovTrack

— US Local —
https://mastodon.social/@gbhnews
https://mastodon.social/@KCStar (bot)
https://texasobserver.social/@TexasObserver
https://newsie.social/@Chron
https://mastodon.tucsonsentinel.com/@TucsonSentinel
https://journa.host/@msfreepress
https://journa.host/@berkeleyscanner
https://sfba.social/sfchronicle
https://sfba.social/@sfgate
https://sfba.social/@sfstandard
https://sfba.social/@thevallejosun
https://verified.mastodonmedia.xyz/@theoregonian
https://mas.to/@sltrib

— Technology —
https://c.im/@Mashable (bot)
https://c.im/@Engadget (bot)
https://geeknews.chat/@arstechnica
https://mastodon.social/@macrumors
https://restof.social/@restofworld

— Sports —
https://c.im/@NBA (bot)
https://c.im/@NFL (bot)
https://c.im/@MLB (bot)
https://c.im/@NHL (bot)
https://c.im/@Soccer (bot)

— International —
https://botsin.space/@bbcworld (bot)(UK)
https://bylines.social/@BylinesNetwork (UK)
https://bylines.social/@BylinesScotland (Scot)
https://bylines.social/@BylinesCymru (Wales)
https://bylines.social/@YorksBylines (UK)
https://bylines.social/@NEBylines (UK)
https://bylines.social/@BylinesEast (UK)
https://bylines.social/@CentralBylines (UK)
https://bylines.social/@NWBylines (UK)
https://bylines.social/@KentBylines (UK)
https://bylines.social/@SussexBylines (UK)
https://bylines.social/@WEBylines (UK)
https://c.im/@BBC (bot)(UK)
https://c.im/@DW (bot)(German)
https://mastodon.social/@riffreporter (German)
https://mamot.fr/@lesjoursfr (France)
https://mamot.fr/@mdiplo (France)
https://piaille.fr/@Vert_le_media (France)
https://piaille.fr/@politis (France)
https://amicale.net/@lemondefr (bot)(France)
https://masto.ai/@linforme (France)
https://mastodon.social/@Reporterre (France)
https://mastodon.social/@Mediapart (France)
https://mastodon.social/@citizenlab (Canada)
https://mastodon.social/@rferl (International, Ukraine)

Note those marked (bot) — these may not have been established by the news organization but instead by some other entity whose identity is not clear. They are cross-posting news headlines from somewhere, possibly Twitter. Each (bot) is a failure; it may share the organization’s news articles faithfully, but the site isn’t verified and its posts will never answer any questions from readers. It’s a loss of control over IP and branding, at a minimum.

The real successes are those which set up their own instances, like the Texas Observer. Best in class is the Bylines Network which has not only established an instance but accounts for each of its local news subsidiaries. Ideally this is what news organizations like Gannett or McClatchy would do with their network of local papers.

Of course these are all news outlets which still focus on print; television news should take the same approach.

And all of the journalists who report for these entities should have verified accounts with their employers’ instance.

Not a single thin dime need be spent on Twitter Blue to achieve verification.

Every instance is an opportunity to develop a closer relationship with readers in ways Twitter couldn’t provide. Because Mastodon is RSS friendly, every one of the news outlets above can be followed with an RSS reader by simply adding .rss to each address and then adding the address to a preferred RSS reader.

~ ~ ~

Why haven’t or won’t media outlets migrate to an instance on open platform Mastodon? As Don Hon wrote, it’s a bunch of work! It needs maintenance not unlike a website, and it needs a level of creative thinking which Twitter/Facebook/Instagram haven’t required because they’ve been fairly stable for years. The open web and the Fediverse is terra nova for news organizations, and it will take some craftiness to develop an new media ecosystem with measures to determine success of any invested effort.

It’s also too tempting to look at another billionaire-funded closed platform like Post.news and assume from its polished finish that this might return media outlets to normalcy.

Sadly, no. Many users are turned off by what has been characterized as a hollow echo chamber effect with little community building.

There are still more opportunities but each has has major drawbacks. Hive.social has had a major security problem; Jimmy Wales’ WT.social in beta phase is based in the UK and subject to entirely different laws regulating speech and intellectual property; no one wants to go back to relying on Facebook or Instagram, and LinkedIn wasn’t designed for the kind of community usage Twitter has had.

I have yet to hear anyone express interest in Jack Dorsey’s BlueSky which is still in development.

At some point media outlets need to face reality, as UCLA Associate Professor of Information Studies Dr. Sarah T. Roberts explained:

As people are leaving Bird for good, I find that many are engaged in what I believe is a dangerous and misguided game of mixing apples and oranges. After what just happened, and all that it has revealed about reliance on for-profit corporate entities for interpersonal and community interaction, why advocate for another such environment? Substack is already known garbage, and Post provides no future-proofing. When I say, “seize the means of your social media production,” this is why.

Seize the means, indeed.

~ ~ ~

UPDATE-1 — 12:15 P.M. ET 18-DEC-2022 —

Community member Laura Hoey informed us The Oregonian (OregonLive.com) has a Mastodon account. I’ve added it to the list of local news outlets above.

It’s a particularly interesting addition because the host instance, https://verified.mastodonmedia.xyz, is a dedicated server for use by journalists or media personalities. The owner/operator is Matt Karolian, who describes himself as “Boston Globe by day, Mastodon Admin by night.”

If you know of a local news outlet which has a Mastodon account but isn’t on the list above, let me know in comments and I’ll add it as long as comments are open on this post. Thanks!

UPDATE-2 — 3:50 P.M. ET 18-DEC-2022 —

Another local news outlet added to the list, courtesy of community member Katrina Katrinka. See Salt Lake Tribune at https://mas.to/@sltrib.

If you are a newer user of Mastodon and find the site laggy, it’s because of a crush of new accounts and more posts. I’m trying to write yet another post which should address the reason for this influx.

Flipping the Bird: Social Media Update

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Given Elon Musk’s concerted effort to turn Twitter into Gab, I wanted to update my current social media choices (I’ll invite other posters to do the same).

As a number of people have noticed, I locked up my Tweets the other day. That was a response to my inclusion on a list that fascists are attempting to deplatform on Twitter. I’ve heard from a number of people who don’t have an account and who only check Twitter for my Tweets. At least until the fascist campaign ends, and possibly for good, I plan to primarily post my journalistic tweets at Mastodon. And even ignoring that the Approve Follow Requests appears to be buggy at Twitter, I’ve got a long list of requests from entities that may or may not live in a troll farm in St. Petersburg.

So for those of you who might be locked out at Twitter, please check Mastodon.

The exception will be commentary about people on Twitter — commenting on things journalists or propagandists say on Twitter.

My Mastodon address is @[email protected].

I have gotten an account at Post.news, also @emptywheel. For a variety of reasons (privacy and format, among others), I’m taking a cautious approach with Post for now.

I do have accounts on other social media outlets, but for now, I’m focusing primarily on Mastodon.

As a reminder, you can get emailed notice of posts here at this link.