Robert Gorwa

The PlatGov Conference is back! What a joy! I have learned so much from this research community. Join us this year 👇 @robyncaplan.bsky.social @gorwa.ca @ameliehldt.bsky.social @naomiappelman.bsky.social @deeliu97.bsky.social

Alex de Waal · How to Measure Famine During the past year, as starvation started to appear in Gaza, Israel has clashed with the United Nations and aid...

Meticulous & chilling piece from Alex de Waal on the international moral disgrace that is the Gaza famine:

‘The level of urban starvation in Gaza has not been seen since the Dutch Hunger Winter and the siege of Leningrad’

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Can Democracy Survive Online? The dream of a democratic web has turned into a nightmare of moderation crises, content mines, and billionaire overlords. Rebuilding digital spaces for meaningful participation in a post-X future will...

Many are fleeing major platforms for services like this one. I have an essay on two great books (by @paulgowder.bsky.social + @ntnsndr.in) that offer historically-rooted visions for democratic, social networks that we need to consider in the era of Bluesky and beyond...

jacobin.com/2024/12/inte...

Aaaaah thank you so much for reading and highlighting and sharing! 🕺🫶

We spoke before Nov 5th and in retrospect I would’ve loved to have deepened the conversation on the US + the craziness that is likely to happen in a Trump II term, esp. when it comes to EU/US relations…alas. Hope this is still an interesting conversation and good overview of some of my arguments

hey look! big thanks to @justinhendrix.bsky.social for having me for this interview

2: DM’s are centralised and not e2e (like Twitter; Mastodon they were also not e2e, but not broadcast to whole network; more like email in that only server admins could have access; Mastodon also baked in multiple reminders into its interface telling you to be cognizant of privacy)

Also important to know:

1: blocking is managed in a public manner on the protocol - ‘you can query the network for every person who is blocking or is blocked by JK Rowling’

‘Part of the concern I have with Bluesky presently is thus that people are gaining the impression that it's a decentralized system in ways that it is not’

Really helpful technical analysis from one of the lead ActivityPub devs

dustycloud.org/blog/how-dec...

Moderating model marketplaces: platform governance puzzles for AI intermediaries The AI development community is increasingly making use of hosting intermediaries, such as Hugging Face, which provide easy access to user-uploaded models and training data. These model marketplace...

maybe it’s a good time to plug the work of @gorwa.ca and me on hugging face’s moderation practices… www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Short answer: quite a lot of interesting techniques, including audio hashing, working with transcribed text, and moving away from content to profile users more deeply…

cdt.org/insights/rea...

I have a new report out w. @cendemtech.bsky.social looking at the latest in automated content moderation for the live-streaming context. Live video is hard to analyze, and - importantly - can’t be hashed and matched to existing infrastructures eg for CSAM detection. How are companies responding?

Jawboning and lawboning: comparing platform-state relations in the US and Europe - CELE Jawboning and lawboning: comparing platform-state relations in the US and Europe The concept of ‘jawboning’ refers to scenarios where the government pressures online services to moderate user content...

Some interesting posts as well from @daphnek.bsky.social @joanbarata.bsky.social, @pjleerssen.bsky.social worth checking out too:

observatoriolegislativocele.com/jawboning-an...

Political Capital and Informal Platform Governance - CELE Political Capital and Informal Platform Governance It’s widely understood by close observers of platform governance and content moderation — but perhaps less widely mentioned in the interdisciplinary...

Hi all - freshly arrived to share a few new bits and bobs. The first is a blog post in the recently published CELE symposium on informal platform regulation / jawboning / government threats:

observatoriolegislativocele.com/political-ca...