I am setting up this blog to address a number of technical and legal issues that, over the long run, can affect the freedom of media newbies like me to speak freely on the Internet and other low-cost media that have developed in the past ten years.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
Twitter admits it has a problem with abusers and sees no simple, reliable solutions yet; blocking "low follower counts" could backfire
Twitter is drawing heat on how it deals with abuse,
particularly online stalkers (mostly of women) and, of course, terror
propaganda, and recently, certain kinds of threats (as against airlines). Vox (with its subsidiary “The Verge”) printed
some comments where CEO Dick Costello admitted the company’s deficiencies in
some flowery language, link here. He says “we will kick these people off right
and left …. And make sure nobody hears them.” He admitted that the problems were costing the
service legitimate users.
Eva Galperin and Nadia Kayyali write about this at
Electronic Frontier Foundation, and suggest that Twitter could developed some
more nuanced strategies for letting users block unwanted content (link ). I think there is some capability
now; many users don’t allow
non-followers to see their timelines or profile details (just like Facebook)
and some users to reject specific followers.
Celebrities or those with professional accounts, however, usually remain
public.
A problem exists, however, in that some stalkers (or
terrorists) will just keep creating different accounts from different servers
and new names. So EFF suggests letting
users block new accounts or accounts with low follower counts, among other
ideas.
I would be concerned about these proposals because of
the “catch-22” that they could create.
They could make “popularity” essential to being heard at all,
again. You’d have to be established in
the real world again, just like in pre-social media days (even
pre-Internet). Of course, there are
those who think that we are losing the ability to work together in the real
world for real causes and real people, because some of us don’t do very well
with social hierarchies that demand popularity.
I would add that I get a lot of short-term spammy followers who then drop me in a day or two if I don't follow them. I only follow parties that I am interested in, typically for some commonality that is relatively specific. I often look at other public feeds without necessarily following them.
Update: Feb 22
On Sunday, Michelle Goldberg talks about this problem for female writers with feminist messages, "An unbearable burden: Feminist writers are so besieged by online abuse that some have begun to retire", link here. She talks particularly about writers published on xoJane. It seems that some men resent the idea that a female would not allow herself to be "available" to him, and mentality that is said to live on some campuses. It also lives in undeveloped parts of the world, particularly with radical Islam.
Update: Feb. 23
The "Dummies" books has an advice page on how to detect "spam" followers in Twitter, link here. I see this all the time, a party that looks irrelevant to my content follows me and drops me in about two days, as I don't follow them back. Some sites generate messages all the time. "Chess Quotes" generates left wing messages about the abusive bourgeois class and some silly but harmless "heterosexual" pictures, but sometime actually sends legitimate news stories, so I left it up! "Healthy Living" generated a lot of aphorisms that actually made sense, but then disappeared.
But the fact that spam-following happens a lot would also denigrate the idea that people should have minimum-follower counts, as that encourages and even rewards spam.
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