Media
Twitter Finds Leader for 'Decentralized' Social Media Project Bluesky – BNN
(Bloomberg) — Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey wants to change how social networks operate and interact with one another. On Monday, his nebulous effort to make that happen took a small step forward.
Twitter said that Bluesky, the open-source project the company first announced in 2019 to build a “decentralized standard for social media,” will be led by Jay Graber, a startup founder and cryptocurrency developer. Bluesky will be funded by Twitter but operate independently. At a Bitcoin conference in late July, Dorsey said that Bluesky was his “biggest focus right now.”
“I’m excited to take on this role and build the future of social media,” Graber said in a statement. She previously wrote an “ecosystem review,” shared by Bluesky in January, looking at similar technologies already in existence. “I look forward to partnering closely with Twitter as well as other companies as we embark on this journey — it won’t happen overnight, but we’ll share our progress along the way.”
While there are many ways that Bluesky could unfold, Dorsey’s vision is to create a technology that will allow more people to build social media services and features around the same collection of user posts. If Twitter ends up adopting this system, called a protocol, then the millions of tweets sent every day could be viewed through Twitter’s existing app and through other interfaces created by developers using the protocol.
Similarly, Twitter could show content that was originally shared on a different network, so long as that network is also using the protocol. Dorsey has argued that such a protocol would enhance the “public conversation” online, since it would mean posts are no longer constrained to the network on which they are shared.
Proponents of the strategy also say it would have an immense impact on content moderation, enabling different organizations to create their own rules and algorithms. A post that might violate Twitter’s rules, and thus be removed, could be visible on another service using the same protocol but with more lenient content standards.
“In such a world, we can let a million content moderation systems approach the same general corpus of content — each taking an entirely different approach — and see which ones work best,” Mike Masnick, author of the blog Techdirt, said in a post pushing for this type of change in 2019. “If people feel that one such interface or filter provider is not doing a good job, they can move to another one or tweak the settings themselves.”
Dorsey has said that he is uncomfortable with Twitter’s power to police user posts and is typically in favor of leaving up as much content as possible. But Dorsey also told a congressional committee in March that policing content is a business decision.
Bluesky is in its infancy, and it’s still unclear how it will develop, or even whether Twitter will use the technology that the project creates.
It’s also not known whether other companies will choose to use this open protocol. Email services already use a protocol that lets people send and read messages from various user interfaces. But most social media companies, Twitter included, currently keep all user posts contained within their own platform. That approach helps them protect data and gives people a reason to open the app. It’s possible that if a well known service like Twitter uses the technology, others could follow, though it’s unclear whether a competitor, like Facebook Inc., would join.
©2021 Bloomberg L.P.
For a bunch of people who supposedly hate social media, we sure do spend a lot of time on it.
Just 33 percent of U.S. adults have “some or a lot” of trust in social media, according to a late 2022 report from the Pew Research Center(opens in a new tab), and people who spend time on social media are more likely to experience mental health problems(opens in a new tab), including depression. According to BroadbandSearch, an independent research site that compares internet providers, the average American spends a little more than two hours a day on (opens in a new tab)the very same hurtful platforms they purport not to trust. And it seems like new social media platforms — any sort of online space in which people are publicly chatting with each other, including Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and, yes, LinkedIn — are popping up every day.
There aren’t loads of social media platforms that are brand new in 2023, but there are dozens that we spend our time on every day that have had some pretty radically nightmarish moments in 2023. Unfortunately, as it is the middle of the year, it’s time to rank these nightmares.
While evaluating these social media platforms, I’ve considered five questions:
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How widely-used is the app?
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How grumpy does the app make me because of the content?
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How grumpy does the app make me because of the interface?
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How likely is the app to disrupt democracy?
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How annoying are the influencers on that app?
There are many apps that launched recently that didn’t make the list — Geneva, Diem, Melon, Pineapple, Somewhere Good — because they just aren’t widely-used enough to asses just how awful they are. I’m omitting far-right social media apps like Parler and Gab — they are all worse than the apps I’m writing about here, and their content is too vile for me to make fun of in a listicle.
Here are the social media platforms that have stolen our brains so far in 2023, from least bad to worst. This list is just my opinion, but it is also correct.
Mastodon
A very nice escape from Twitter for the 20 minutes it was relevant.
BeReal
Fine, but no one uses it anymore so it is now therefore boring. Boring, to be clear, is not necessarily an insult when it comes to social media (see: Facebook further down the list, which I wish was more boring).
Artifact
Boring but alright.
BlueSky
This app seems fine but I don’t have access to it. Send me an invite and I will do my best to accurately review it.
Lemon8
A new app that is annoying to me, but others find it lovely.
There are LinkedInfluencers(opens in a new tab), which is annoying but not actively harmful.
Substack
Stay with me, but the newsletter platform is kind of killing it this year. It launched chats and a Notes feature to rival Twitter and some of the more popular Substack writers make a pretty good living from their newsletters. It’s this far down, though, because Substack isn’t without its problems: The platform allows some pretty hateful speech, like the transphobic newsletter from Graham Linehan.
Snapchat
This would be higher if it didn’t force Snapchat AI onto every single user.
TikTok
Can be vile, but can also feed you a pretty consistent number of frog videos. It’s lower down because entire nations are banning it for — you guessed it — potential threats to democracy.
I swear to God if I get fed one more video about dieting I’m going to scream.
Unfortunately for Facebook, most of us simply refuse to forget 2016(opens in a new tab) and the Facebook Papers. There’s an old saying in Tennessee(opens in a new tab) — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, ruin democracy once, shame on — shame on you. Ruin democracy twice — you can’t get democracy ruined again.
Elon Musk 🥴
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VIENNA, June 2 (Reuters) – OPEC has denied media access to reporters from Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal to report on oil policy meetings in Vienna this weekend, reporters, Bloomberg and people familiar with the matter said on Friday.
The three media organizations are among the world’s leading suppliers of financial news and information. They report on the outcome of policy meetings between OPEC and its allies, where ministers make decisions that impact the price of the world’s most traded commodity.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies is a group known as OPEC+ and includes top oil producers Saudi Arabia and Russia. Ministers from the group, which pumps more than 40% of the world’s oil supply, are scheduled to gather on Saturday and Sunday for regular biannual meetings.
OPEC staff declined on Friday to give media accreditation to Reuters journalists to cover the event. The staff handling media accreditation at one of Vienna’s luxury hotels said they could not issue accreditation without an invite. They did not comment when asked why Reuters reporters received no invites.
OPEC has not responded to requests for comment from Reuters this week on why it has not invited or accredited Reuters reporters for the meet.
“We believe that transparency and a free press serve both readers and markets, and we object to this restriction on coverage,” a spokesperson for Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters Corp (TRI.TO), said on Friday.
“Reuters will continue to cover OPEC in an independent, impartial and reliable way in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.”
A reporter from Bloomberg was also denied accreditation on Friday, a person familiar with the matter said.
A Bloomberg spokesperson confirmed on Friday the company has not been given accreditation to cover the OPEC meeting.
The Wall Street Journal did not respond to a request for comment.
Reporters from the three outlets, many of whom have been covering OPEC meetings for years, did not receive invitations from OPEC ahead of the meeting.
Without accreditation, journalists cannot enter the OPEC Secretariat where the ministers meet, or attend press conferences during the event.
Reporters at other media outlets including trade publications Argus and Platts received accreditation on Friday. Argus confirmed its reporters have been accredited and will attend. Platts did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Media
OPEC denies media access to Reuters, Bloomberg, WSJ for weekend policy meets – Yahoo Canada Finance
VIENNA (Reuters) – OPEC has denied media access to reporters from Reuters, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal to report on oil policy meetings in Vienna this weekend, reporters, Bloomberg and people familiar with the matter said on Friday.
The three media organizations are among the world’s leading suppliers of financial news and information. They report on the outcome of policy meetings between OPEC and its allies, where ministers make decisions that impact the price of the world’s most traded commodity.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies is a group known as OPEC+ and includes top oil producers Saudi Arabia and Russia. Ministers from the group, which pumps more than 40% of the world’s oil supply, are scheduled to gather on Saturday and Sunday for regular biannual meetings.
OPEC staff declined on Friday to give media accreditation to Reuters journalists to cover the event. The staff handling media accreditation at one of Vienna’s luxury hotels said they could not issue accreditation without an invite. They did not comment when asked why Reuters reporters received no invites.
OPEC has not responded to requests for comment from Reuters this week on why it has not invited or accredited Reuters reporters for the meet.
“We believe that transparency and a free press serve both readers and markets, and we object to this restriction on coverage,” a spokesperson for Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters Corp, said on Friday.
“Reuters will continue to cover OPEC in an independent, impartial and reliable way in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.”
A reporter from Bloomberg was also denied accreditation on Friday, a person familiar with the matter said.
A Bloomberg spokesperson confirmed on Friday the company has not been given accreditation to cover the OPEC meeting.
The Wall Street Journal did not respond to a request for comment.
Reporters from the three outlets, many of whom have been covering OPEC meetings for years, did not receive invitations from OPEC ahead of the meeting.
Without accreditation, journalists cannot enter the OPEC Secretariat where the ministers meet, or attend press conferences during the event.
Reporters at other media outlets including trade publications Argus and Platts received accreditation on Friday. Argus confirmed its reporters have been accredited and will attend. Platts did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Alex Lawler, Dmitry Zhdannikov, Ahmad Ghaddar, Julia Payne, Maha El Dahan; writing by Simon Webb; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
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