Resolve: Thursday* Roundup for 12-13-24
*It's not Thursday (ran out of time yesterday), but this compilation of the most insightful stuff Public Enlightenment has seen in the past week doesn't care.
For the next week I’m going to continue messaging about the PRESS Act. Tom Cotton blocked the bill from moving forward this week. Call his office and tell him to shut up with the “liberal media” BS and secure whistleblower protections. Every American who understands the need for transparency in government, regardless of who is in charge, supports this bill. Only fools want their government to operate in secret.
Call your senators right now and tell them to pass the PRESS Act.
Americans are fighting with each other over issues they care about and simultaneously have no idea about. The amount of solutions journalism—reporting on the people pursuing solutions to widely held social problems and the efficacy of those efforts—we receive is severely lacking. That’s why this story, “100,000 Homes: Housing the homeless saves money?” from 60 Minutes is a breath of fresh air from a major, corporate network.
In September, homeless advocates in Nashville held a luncheon for some of the people they had helped. In 100 days, they had gotten nearly 200 people into homes, and all but a handful were still in their apartments. But there weren’t enough apartments for everyone. Ernest Thomas didn’t get one. He ended up back in prison on a parole violation and then homeless once again.
You should know what’s happening over at Bluesky. The site offers us an unbelievable opportunity for healthier information, a return to a moderated online public square where democratic uprisings can be live-streamed and scientists who might otherwise never meet can find community and advance human flourishing. But right now it’s at an inflection point. Why? You guessed it—anti-trans bullshit.
For TechCrunch, Sarah Perez penned, “Bluesky at a crossroads as users petition to ban Jesse Singal over anti-trans views, harassment.”
He is now the most blocked user on the social network, and user outrage over his participation on the platform is growing. People are demanding that Bluesky take a stand: it’s either a place that promises it won’t host bad actors like this, or it’s a place that promises not to inflate the reach of such bad actors thanks to its various moderation tools.
It cannot be both.
Sarah adds some information about Bluesky’s moderation tools that I think are pretty cool.
Bluesky users have also reported Singal’s account en masse, leading the company to ban him, reinstate him, and then label his account intolerant by its moderation service. (That means users can go into their Bluesky settings to turn on or off or set to be warned about posts that fall into this category.)
I can’t imagine being tasked with Trust & Safety on a 25 million user social media site. I once helped run an improv theater and even that could get gnarly. Because I’m scared of losing ground in the Information War to folks like Elon Musk, I want Bluesky to not cause a stink and allow bad actors while also supplying users with robust moderation tools like blocking accounts with “intolerant labels.” But then, I’ve never been a trans person under attack from trolls and billionaires.
Speaking of billionaires, the Information War, and social media, Frank McCourt wants to buy US TikTok as “part of a broader mission to move millions of people to healthier online platforms.”
Makena Kelly and Zeyi Yang interviewed the real estate billionaire for Wired:
FMcCourt: What we're proposing is there'll be an alternative where [users] are not surveilled, the data isn't scraped, and they permit the use of their data. Individuals get value for it, and agency is returned to individuals. And very importantly, they own their relationships. Right now, the TikTok user base—the influencers and creators—do not own the communities they create.
McCourt aims to attract users in part by offering them the opportunity to be compensated for their personal data. It’s definitely a business bet built on mixing the surveillance status quo with humanity’s desire for healthier online spaces. With Zuck and Musk controlling everything, I will absolutely simp for off-brand billionaires promising a brighter future.
McCourt: I compare this to large scale, human physical migration. There're people that live in very difficult places—in the case of my ancestors, there was a famine—they really want to go somewhere else. But there's a second condition required, and that is you need a place to go. Right now, people are getting wise to the harms of the current Internet, and the fact that they're being taken advantage of and not being rewarded properly or fairly. But nothing's gonna happen unless there's an alternative and a place for them to go.
Every year Nieman Lab puts out its “Predictions for Journalism.” They ask, like, one hundred media and journalism folks for their insights into where the information industry is headed. It’s definitely a lot, but for a guy like me it’s better than receiving my enshittified Spotify Wrapped.
If you’re cool you’ll read them all. But it’s hard to be cool these days so I’ll share one. Gabe Schneider, co-director of The Objective, wrote about the threat of information consolidation and the resolve we must have to make healthier information choices.
It’s not so much a prediction as a necessity: We must abandon publications and platforms that fail to center our values in favor of newsrooms that actually care for us, our families, our neighbors, and our future.
We are living in a system where our information needs are increasingly being sidelined due to shrinking newsrooms. What we’re left with now is a false choice: Many of the newspapers and platforms that remain are run at the behest of people with a minimal understanding of and interest in the success of our day to day lives.
This is a non-partisan publication. Ok, well it is partisan towards truth and democracy. The truth is that Republican politicians lied about an election to foment a coup and then America elected the coup guy. Pretty gnarly. Though we’re all about to suffer immensely, I’ve got nothing against people who voted for the coup guy other than a deep, abiding desire for them to consult more fact-based sources of news and information. As such, this publication will advocate for ideas to combat the disinformation nation that billionaires spent 60 years creating.
Enter Ryan Cooper writing this week for American Prospect.
IN SHORT, DEMOCRATS LOST THE PROPAGANDA WAR, which brings me back to local news. A poll back in April, before Biden dropped out, found that he was winning voters who get their news from newspapers by 49 percentage points, while Trump was winning those who don’t follow political news at all by 26 points. No doubt that is partly demographics, but also partly due to opportunity: In a large chunk of the country, there is no local paper even available, and in a much larger chunk the few papers that remain are private equity–gutted carcasses with little aside from Associated Press reprints.
He goes on…
As local news is steadily strangled to death by the Facebook/Google advertising duopoly, the resulting gap is being filled with right-wing propaganda and reactionary voices on social media, who flood the information space with hysterical lies about national culture-war topics, and salient local information falls by the wayside. Nobody hears about the infrastructure or manufacturing projects the Biden administration is standing up nearby. This is how Latinos in heavily mixed-status families in South Texas were convinced to vote for the “deport all unauthorized immigrants along with their citizen children” candidate.
For Ryan’s proposed solutions…
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Here’s to healthier information,
Brian
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