Assistant Professor at Boston University in journalism and emerging media studies. Founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute. Pride of Saugus.
Mar 28 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Here is a reminder that Harvard Kennedy School and the Shorenstein Center are awful places to do scholarship about tech:
Harvard has refused to give me the rights to my IP, thus attempting to suppress my career, and seized $3.1 million in research funding that I raised to support my work.
They continue to malign me by telling former colleagues and press that I’m a disgruntled employee.
Dec 31, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The folly of Musk buying X allowed Meta to launch Threads successfully.
Could it be that X ends up being the very thing that saves Meta from its own disastrous plunge into the metaverse?
Just as the design of Facebook was stolen from others, so too in Meta’s Threads.
I really can’t imagine how services like Blue Sky or Threads get away with such a clear cut cases of copyright infringement. Even the buttons are the same.
Dec 27, 2023 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
My full account of being terminated from Harvard Kennedy School and how senior colleagues and staff heisted all my research programs and millions in funding: whistlebloweraid.org//wp-content/up…
If you think the plagiarism scandal or the failure to address antisemitism and Islamophobia are the biggest problems facing Harvard today, read my account of how donors from Facebook influenced Dean Elmendorf to shut down my research lab and prevent me from digging into Meta.
May 14, 2023 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
Spent my whole life breaking into boy’s clubs and making room for different kinds of folks.
The last 4 years gave me a very up close look at how elite political culture functions and thrives.
C. Wright Mills called them the power elite. I need to write today’s edition.
I read about it in history books. I studied the sociology of knowledge, reading Mannheim and Polanyi, Kuhn, Fleck, even dipped into Horkheimer and Althusser.
Ideologies may clash between institutions, but places like Harvard serve the purpose of reconciling those differences.
Apr 6, 2023 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
As I look at the state of the field of misinformation/ disinformation research today, it’s a full on battle.
I see institutions taking a step away from addressing the issue. I see gov agencies backing away from taking action. I see political operatives,
masquerading as journalists, telling Congress that if it were not for “the censors” Biden would have lost.
With the indictment, I see the left play a similar game of “if not for x then Y would have happened.”
Sep 5, 2022 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
I haven’t spoken much about KF over the years, mostly out of sheer horror and a feeling of hopelessness after their hosting of the manifesto and video of the Christchurch massacre.
I would talk with reporters once in a while about possible angles to cover KF, but it was futile.
The problem, of course, was anyone who spoke of KF was likely going to endure networked harassment, possibly for years on end.
KF isn’t just a website that coordinates harassment. It’s is an infrastructure of evil frequented by people who have a serious amount of technical skill
Apr 25, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is a very interesting way to do politics by other means.
If Musk buys Twitter, then he will surely return Trump to the platform, opening the door for a viable 2024 run.
Twitter in Advanced Talks to Sell Itself to Elon Musk - The New York Times nytimes.com/2022/04/24/tec…
I am unsure if all things will remain equal on this platform though. If someone does build a stable alternative to twitter, then it’s possible there will be a significant migration. That’s a HUGE if, but could be possible if personal account data was portable and interoperable.
Feb 12, 2022 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
It’s not just @jonstewart, We all have questions about who gets to decide what is misinformation and what is not.
1. Experts get to decide. (Good explanation but most experts- or at least the really sharp ones- will hedge and say they still need to do more research, so it’s not always so cut and dry. Moreover, experts have a difficult time communicating nuance.)
