Posts about social media

On joining Mastodon

November 21, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
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An academic friend asked for help joining Mastodon. I wrote a detailed email in response that I thought it might be useful to others. I’m also going to teach a master class in Mastodon at my school on Dec. 5 — much interest, I’m told — so here is my preparation on the practical stuff. (I will also talk that day about the implications of federation on journalism and of affordances on communities such as Black Twitter.) Keep in mind that I am a newbie, so please correct me where where I stray.

It will be a pleasure to welcome you to the new neighborhood. I’m quite liking it already. Once you arrive, you’ll find it familiar enough: You have a home timeline, a feed of just the people you follow, but with no algorithmic promotion, no ads. You can write posts (the verb to “toot” has, mercifully, become to “publish”) and boost others’ posts (AKA retweet) and reply to posts. You will receive notifications when people respond to you, boost your posts, and follow you.

You cannot quote-tweet posts as of now because of the founder’s belief that this affordance leads to performative over conversational behavior. That contention is being contested by people from Black Twitter, who use quote tweets for their call-and-response culture. Dr. Johnathan Flowers is forceful and instructive on the topic. Lately, Eugen Rochko, (@gargron), Mastodon’s founder, has softened and said he open to discussion. Developers are making suggestions for how to make QTs work (which is the beauty of this open-source project; change is emergent).

The two things that befuddle people getting started are how to pick an instance or server to join and then how to find folks. Mastodon is actually a few thousand servers — or instances, in the parlance — that each run versions of the same software and are all connected or federated in what is called the Fediverse, using an open-source protocol called ActivityPub. Every instance is independently run but can connect to any or all of the other instances, allowing you to connect with anyone on them. Not all of them are Mastodon; there are, for example, other servers for a photo-based social network called Pixelfed. No one owns this; no one can. That is the value of open source and federation. (Here is a post I wrote that examines and explains some of the implications and opportunities of federation.)

It doesn’t greatly matter what server you join as in this federated ecosystem, you can follow and converse with anyone on any server (except those that your host blocks; for example, the far-right, noxious Gab is blocked by most). Each server has its own rules. I am on mastodon.social, which is the biggest and is run by Eugen (@gargron).

If you prefer to be among academics, you might look to join hcommons.social for humanities scholars (though it is temporarily closed to new members until they catch up to the flood) or zirk.us for arts and humanities, where I see lots of smart folks, or perhaps religion.masto.host. Here’s a list of alternatives from the Humanities commons and here is very good reference that lists academic servers. You can go to any server address and add explore — e.g., zirk.us/about — to learn more about the server: who runs it, what its rules are. For journalists, we at Tow-Knight are supporting Adam Davidson as he launches journa.host. There’s another called newsie.social. Note that various news organizations — including Rest of World, Texas Observer, and San Francisco Standard — are starting their own servers for their own newsrooms.My fellow geeks might want to join Leo Laporte’s twit.social; to manage the onslaught he is now restricting it to members of his club.

Don’t stress about the choice; just pick one and go with it.

The only real implications of joining a particular server are (1) that you can view a “local” timeline populated with the posts of all the people from that server and you might find that useful , and (2) you want a responsible host who is going to block the bad guys and moderate wisely. If once on Mastodon you find the grass greener on someone else’s server, you can take your identity and your followers and go there — that portability and interoperability is a key benefit and differentiation of the federated vs. the corporate and centralized internet. Keep in mind that the content you create on your first server stays there.

OK, to get started. Go to one of the addresses above, say zirk.us. Click sign up and you’ll be shown the rules of the house, and then pick your name and such. You’re in.

I strongly recommend that you first take the time to fill in your profile with information about you, with your photo, for as soon as you start following people, they will want to know who you are and follow you back if relevant. I find it frustrating to have folks following me without letting me know who they are. It is also recommended that you write an introduction post and pin that to the top of your profile. (If you have a blog or site of your own, you can connect the two so that readers can know you are who you say ou are by using the rel=“me” markup, but that’s a graduate-level course I’ll leave that for another day.)

You will start using the web interface for Mastodon. It’s good, though I have a few key recommendations. Go to the settings (the little gear icon on top left) and under preferences/appearance I strongly suggest selecting advanced web interface. This will look like Tweetdeck. I happen to hate dark mode in all instances, but on Mastodon, it’s particularly hard to adjust to, so I urge you to try light mode.

Now to the next challenge: following people, for until you find folks to follow, you will hear only silence. One way to start is to search for folks you know are on Mastodon and see whom they follow.

Mastodon provides another fantastic way to get a starter kit: Under settings, import and export, click on import and here you can upload lists of folks to follow. For my friend to whom I wrote a version of this email, a book historian, I provided a list of book historians someone has compiled and a list of folks from my Book History Wonks Twitter list. Here is a wonderful list of lists of academics by discipline. Here is an incredibly long list of more than a thousand journalists on Mastodon (unless a masochist for hot takes, I would not suggest uploading them all).

Some of these provide a ready-made CSV to import. If not, copy just the column of Mastodon addresses into a new spreadsheet and save as a CSV. Upload the CSV file into Mastodon under settings/upload (you want to check the merge option). Voilà, you have new friends.

If you wish, you can use debirdify or fedifinder to check your own followers on Twitter for accounts that have Mastodon addresses. Click “search followed accounts” and it will produce a list and a CSV file. Since more and more folks are doing this, you will probably want to go back to your Twitter profile and add your new, forwarding address. My address, for example, is @jeffjarvis.

By the way, Mastodon does not have a good, full-text search — on purpose (for they also believe that that enables trolls to find their targets). But you can search for names, Mastodon addresses, and hashtags.

Now let’s explore the advanced web interface for Mastodon.

The second column from the left is the most important: your home timeline. This, again, is just the people you follow in reverse-chronological order; no algo, no ads.

The third column is notifications. Once you get your sea legs, click on the settings icon on the top right of the column (the three lines) and you’ll find a plethora of choices for what notifications to receive or not: new followers, posts that mention you, replies to you, and so on. While you’re here, I recommend turning OFF sound on each one; the blips can be quite annoying. Note the subtle blue bar on the left; this is just what is new since you last read the column. (You can click the check atop the column to mark all as read.)**

Now to the first column. Here you can search for names. You can also search for hashtags; that is how people gather around topics and conversations on Mastodon. I have to get back into the habit of using hashtags in my posts. If you find a hashtag very useful, you can pin it as a column that will always appear.

Click the icon with a head and many arms and you will get your “local” timeline in another column. This is just people on your server, whether you follow them or not. Depending on the server you choose, it can seem useful or random. In the setting for this column, you can choose to pin and always show it, or not. The globe icon will open a new column called the “federated” timeline, which is a collection of everything from everyone that all the folks on your server boost on other servers. It can be a firehose. You may also choose to pin or not pin this. Thus far, I don’t use the local or federated timelines much but you might like them as a way to discover serendipitous conversations and people.

Now click on the hamburger menu on the upper left of the first column. If it is not already open, this will open the “getting started” menu with lots of offerings: direct messages to you (with the caution that direct messages are not encrypted so don’t go sharing your innermost secrets here); posts you have bookmarked (I find this handy), posts you have favorited (“liked” in Twitter parlance), lists you create, follow requests (NB this is *just* the follow requests Mastodon thinks might be suspicious; you will find all your follow requests in the notifications column). Note also that you can create lists of accounts you want to read regularly — I use that feature frequently on Twitter — but unfortunately, they are private and cannot be shared. Instead, there are groups. See some examples on the academic on mastodon page.

Click #Explore and you see four nice features: Posts are posts that are popular from across the fediverse. Hashtags are stats on the trending hashtags. News is an ok list of media stories getting links. And for you are recommendations for folks to follow; I find it of limited utility.

Now, finally, to the important part: writing. In that first column, you’ll find the box for that purpose. On most Mastodon instances, the character limit is 500 — generous next to Twitter’s 140 then 280. Some servers up that to 1,000; I have so far resisted the temptation to migrate there.

Here you can add a poll and mark the post’s language. By the way, translation works pretty well; I follow people in many languages as a result.

Mastodon has many norms built up since 2016. Norms being norms, these are likely to evolve as new people arrive wanting change and veterans resist that change; such is society.

One strong norm is that when you upload an image (with the paperclip in the posting box) you are expected to click “edit” and add alt text for accessibility. I was scolded once for not doing so and now I do it.

Another set of norms revolve around the content warning. When posting, click on the CW in the creation box and you can write a small headline others will see with the option to reveal the rest of your post — or not. This was intended to mask triggering or offensive content, important because Mastodon from its start has served vulnerable communities. However, some have extended this norm to contend that the content warning should be used for political posts. Others — especially people of color — insist (rightly, I think) that we should not hide the realities of life behind this veil. How you use it or not is up to you.

Some folks prefer other interfaces for Mastodon on the web and mobile. I’m odd — Chrome OS and Android — so I can’t speak to those for Mac and Windows and IOS.

The ethos of Mastodon, I find, is friendly, polite, curious, open, caring, decent. There will be bad apples in any orchard. Block them. Report them if they’re bad enough. There are more than enough smart people here with whom to have enjoyable, informative, and provocative conversations without the trolls Elon is nurturing in the Other Place.

Keep in mind that nearly everything you do on Mastodon is thanks to the volunteers who run servers and moderate activity there. They are humans, not algorithms. They, like algorithms, will make mistakes. Give them a break.

And give them money. Every server is likely to have a link to a place to give money to the host to pay for very real technology bills. You have left the land of corporatized, centralized, controlled conversation. It’s a new and exciting world. Help support it.

**New tip, thanks to my new Mastodon friend, Maxi5X, who pointed me to the notifications setting for the quick filter bar. That’s the menu bar atop the column. Set the second choice to display all categories…

And this is what appears: 

That way, you can get notifications just for mentions, favorites, boosts, poll results, and new followers. 

That little house icon takes you to another feature I didn’t mention: When you follow someone, next to the follow button is a bell. Click on that and you will be notified whenever that person posts. Thus I see whenever Eugen and my son — and Mike Masnick — post. Cool. 

UPDATE: Here’s video of a class in Mastodon I gave to some faculty and students at the Newmark J-School. It’s essentially a video version of this post. 

God made a social network

October 7, 2021 by Jeff Jarvis
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Chapter 1

1 God made a social network. It was called Earth. Even She could not be certain what would follow.

Chapter 2

1 For the longest time, or so it seemed to the people of Earth, She allowed them to roam free, to explore, to commune, to be social.

2 Then She decided they required limits to test. She gave unto them Community Standards. Yet the people disobeyed. They fought. They told falsehoods. They shared graven images of themselves.

Chapter 3

1 The people divided into tribes and religions and parties and nations and they fought still. They waged crusades and shitstorms against one another. They fought wars of thirty and a hundred and many hundred years over Her.

2 They invented arrows and guns, compasses and clocks and used them not to protect but to conquer.

3 But the people also invented pictures and paints, alphabets and presses and made so many wondrous things with them: worshipful art.

4 Their scribes and their Pharisees are always blind to the wonder. They see only darkness and doom, for they believe that they — not I — shine the light.

Chapter 4

1 In the heavens, in the Senate of the Gods, Zeus called upon the Lord to smite Her social network, Earth, and to silence it with configuration errors, for it had become a cesspool that runneth over with hatred and heresy, bots and bile, corrupting the children of Earth to commit fakery and finstas.

2 And God spake unto him: “O, chill, Zeus. Enough of your panic! Have you no memory? Can you not see that this is what my people have done through eternity with all their tools and toys?

3 “At the moment of invention the people are amazed at what they hath wrought: proud and boastful. Then they wield their implements to destroy, to claim power for themselves over Me. They are corrupted. They sin yet blame their tools for their folly.

4 “Finally, they write their rules and build their institutions to live together in peace with themselves and their inventions. Give them time.

5 “Verily, they cannot see that the problem is not in their inventions or in their earthly corporations and the solution is not in their law-givers or self-anointed saviors but instead in themselves.

6 “They, like you dear Senator, must learn again and again that the path to peace, via struggle, is freedom. Remember well that I did not cut down the tree of knowledge of good and evil but left it standing so that the people may learn from it still.

7 “I prophesy that they will just keep screwing up and then they shall figure it out. They are human.”

Chapter 5

1 And God shrugged.

Here endeth the blogging of Her Holy Thread.

Governance: Facebook designs its oversight board (should journalism?)

August 13, 2019 by Jeff Jarvis
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Facebook is devoting impressive resources — months of time and untold millions of dollars — to developing systems of governance, of its users and of itself, raising fascinating questions about who governs whom according to what rules and principles, with what accountability. I’d like to ask similar questions about journalism.

I just spent a day at Facebook’s fallen skyscraper of a headquarters attending one of the last of more than two dozen workshops it has held to solicit input on its plans to start an Oversight Board. [Disclosures: Facebook paid for participants’ hotel rooms and I’ve raised money from Facebook for my school.] Weeks ago, I attended another such meeting in New York. In that time, the concept has advanced considerably. Most importantly, in New York, the participants were worried that the board would be merely an appeals court for disputes over content take-downs. Now it is clear that Facebook knows such a board must advise and openly press Facebook on bigger policy issues.

Facebook’s team showed the latest group of academics and others a near-final draft of a board charter (which will be released in a few weeks, in 20-plus languages). They are working on by-laws and finalizing legal structures for independence. They’ve thought through myriad details about how cases will rise (from users and Facebook) and be taken up by the board (at the board’s discretion); about conflict resolution and consensus; about transparency in board membership but anonymity in board decisions; about how members will be selected (after the first members join, the board will select its own members); about what the board will start with (content takedowns) and what it can tackle later (content demotion and taking down users, pages, groups — and ads); about how to deal with GDPR and other privacy regulation in sharing information about cases with the board; about how the board’s precedents will be considered but will not prevent the board from changing its mind; even about how other platforms could join the effort. They have grappled with most every structural, procedural, and legal question the 2,000 people they’ve consulted could imagine.

But as I sat there I saw something missing: the larger goal and soul of the effort and thus of the company and the communities it wants to foster. They have structured this effort around a belief, which I share, in the value of freedom of expression, and the need — recognized too late — to find ways to monitor and constrain that freedom when it is abused and used to abuse. But that is largely a negative: how and why speech (or as Facebook, media, and regulators all unfortunately refer to it: content) will be limited.

Facebook’s Community Standards — in essence, the statutes the Oversight Board will interpret and enforce and suggest to revise — are similarly expressed in the negative: what speech is not allowed and how the platform can maintain safety and promote voice and equality among its users by dealing with violations. In its Community Standards (set by Facebook and not by the community, by the way), there are nods to higher ends — sharing stories, seeing the world through others’ eyes, diversity, equity, empowerment. But then the Community Standards becomes a document about what users should not do. And none of the documents says much if anything about Facebook’s own obligations.

So in California, I wondered aloud what principles the Oversight Board would call upon in its decisions. More crucially, I wondered whom the board is meant to serve and represent: does it operate in loco civitas (in place of the community), publico (public), imperium (government and regulators), or Deus, (God — that is, higher ethics and standards)? [Anybody with better schooling than I had, please correct my effort at Latin.]

I think these documents, this effort, and this company — along with other tech companies — need a set of principles that should set forth:

  • Higher goals. Why are people coming to Facebook? What do they want to create? What does the company want to build? What good will it bring to the world? Why does it exist? For whose benefit? Zuckerberg issued a new mission statement in 2017: “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” And that is fine as far as it goes, but that’s not very far. What does this mean? What should we expect Facebook to be? This statement of goals should be the North Star that guides not just the Oversight Board but every employee and every user at Facebook.
  • A covenant with users and the public in which Facebook holds itself accountable for its own responsibilities and goals. As an executive from another tech company told me, terms of service and community standards are written to regulate the behavior of users, not companies. Well, companies should put forth their own promises and principles and draw them up in collaboration with users (civitas), the public (publico), and regulators (imperium). And that gives government — as in the case of proposed French legislation — the basis for holding the company accountable.

I’ll explore these ideas further in a moment, but first let me first address the elephant on my keyboard: whether Facebook and its founder and executives and employees have a soul. I’ve been getting a good dose of crap on Twitter the last few days from people who blithely declare — and others who retweet the declaration — that Zuckerberg is the most dangerous man on earth. I respond: Oh, come on. My dangerous-person list nowadays starts with Trump, Murdoch, Putin, Xi, Kim, Duterte, Orbán, Erdoğan, MBS…you get the idea. To which these people respond: But you’re defending Facebook. I will defend it and its founder from ridiculous, click-bait trolling that devalues the real danger our world is in today. I also criticize Facebook publicly and did at the meetings I attended there. Facebook has fucked up plenty lately and that’s why it needs oversight. At least they realize it.

When I defend internet platforms against what I see as media’s growing moral panic, irresponsible reporting, and conflict of interest, I’m defending the internet itself and the freedoms it affords from what I fear will be continuing regulation of our own speech and freedom. I don’t oppose regulation; I have been proposing what I see as reasonable regimes. But I worry about where a growing unholy alliance against the internet between the far right and technophes in media will end.

That is why I attend meetings such as the ones that Facebook convenes and why I just spent two weeks in California meeting with both platform and newspaper executives, to try to build bridges and constructive relationships. That’s why I take Facebook’s effort to build its Oversight Board seriously, to hold them to account.

Indeed, as I sat in a conference room at Facebook hearing its plans, it occurred to me that journalism as a profession and news organizations individually would do well to follow this example. We in journalism have no oversight, having ousted most ombudsmen who tried to offer at least some self-reflection and -criticism (and having failed in the UK to come up with a press council that isn’t a sham). We journalists make no covenants with the public we serve. We refuse to acknowledge — as Facebook executives did acknowledge about their own company — our “trust deficit.”

We in journalism do love to give awards to each other. But we do not have a means to systematically identify and criticize bad journalism. That job has now fallen to, of all unlikely people, politicians, as Beto O’Rourke, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Julian Castro offer quite legitimate criticism of our field. It also falls to technologists, lawyers, and academics who have been appalled at, for example, The New York Times’ horrendously erroneous and dangerous coverage of Section 230, our best protection of freedom of expression on the internet in America. I’m delighted that CJR has hired independent ombudsmen for The Times, The Post, CNN, and MSNBC. But what about Fox and the rest of the field?

I’ve been wondering how one might structure an oversight board for journalism to take the place of all those lost ombudsmen, to take complaints about bad journalism, to deliberate thoughtful and constructive responses, and to build data about the journalistic performance and responsibility of specific outlets. That will be a discussion for another day, soon. But even with such a structure, journalism, too — and each news outlet — should offer covenants with the public containing their own promises and statements of higher goals. I don’t just mean following standards for behavior; I mean sharing our highest ambitions.

I think such covenants for Facebook (and social networks and internet platforms) and journalism would do well to start with the mission of journalism that I teach: to convene communities into respectful, informed, and productive conversation. Democracy is conversation. Journalism is — or should be — conversation. The internet is built for conversation. The institutions and companies that serve the public conversation should promise they will do everything in their power to serve and improve that conversation. So here is the beginning of the kind of covenant I would like to see from Facebook:

Facebook should promise to create a safe environment where people can share their stories with each other to build bridges to understanding and to make strangers less strange. (So should journalism.)

Facebook should promise to enable and empower new and diverse voices that have been deprived of privilege and power by existing, entrenched institutions. (Including journalism.)

Facebook should promise to build systems that reward positive, productive, useful, respectful behavior among communities. (So should journalism.)

Facebook should promise not to build mechanisms to polarize people and inflame conflict. (So should journalism.)

Facebook should promise to help inform conversations by providing the means to find reliable information. (Journalism should provide that information.)

Facebook should promise not to build its business upon and enable others to benefit from crass attempts to exploit attention. (So should the news and media industries.)

Facebook should warrant to protect and respect users’ privacy, agency, and dignity.

Facebook should recognize that malign actors will exploit weak systems of protection to drive people apart and so it should promise to guard against being used to manipulate and deceive. (So should journalism.)

Facebook should share data about its performance against these goals, about its impact on the public conversation, and about the health of that conversation with researchers. (If only journalism had such data to share.)

Facebook should build its business, its tools, its rewards, and its judgment of itself around new metrics that measure its contributions to the health and constructive vitality of the public conversation and the value it brings to communities and people’s lives. (So should journalism.)

Clearly, journalism’s covenants with the public should contain more: about investigating and holding power to account, about educating citizens and informing the public conversation, and more. That’s for another day. But here’s a start for both institutions. They have more in common than they know.

Hot Trump. Cool @aoc.

January 6, 2019 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’ve been rereading a lot of Marshall McLuhan lately and I’m as confounded as ever by his conception of hot vs. cool media. And so I decided to try to test my thinking by comparing the phenomena of Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at this millennial media wendepunkt, as text and television give way to the net and whatever it becomes. I’ll also try to address the question: Why is @aoc driving the GOP mad?

McLuhan said that text and radio were hot media in that they were high-definition; they monopolized a sense (text the eye, radio the ear); they filled in all the blanks for the reader/listener and required or brooked no real interaction; they created — as we see with newspapers and journalism — a separation of creator from consumer. Television, he said, was a cool medium for it was low-definition across multiple senses, requiring the viewer to interact by filling in the blanks, starting quite literally with the blanks between the raster lines on the cathode-ray screen. “Low-definition invites participation,” explains McLuhan’s recently departed son Eric. (Thanks to Eric’s son, Andrew McLuhan, for sending me to this delightful video:)

Given that McLuhan formulated his theory at the fuzzy, black-and-white, rabbit-ears genesis of television, I wonder how much the label would be readjusted with 4K video and huge, wrap-around screens and surround sound. Eric McLuhan answers that hot v. cool is a continuum. I also wonder — as does every McLuhan follower — what the master would say about the internet. That presumes we can yet call the internet a thing unto itself and define it, which we can’t; it’s too early. So I’ll narrow the question to social media today.

And that brings us to Trump v. Ocasio-Cortez. Recall that McLuhan said that Richard Nixon lost his debate with John F. Kennedy because Nixon was too hot for the cool medium of TV. He told Playboy:

Kennedy was the first TV president because he was the first prominent American politician to ever understand the dynamics and lines of force of the television iconoscope. As I’ve explained, TV is an inherently cool medium, and Kennedy had a compatible coolness and indifference to power, bred of personal wealth, which allowed him to adapt fully to TV. Any political candidate who doesn’t have such cool, low-definition qualities, which allow the viewer to fill in the gaps with his own personal identification, simply electrocutes himself on television — as Richard Nixon did in his disastrous debates with Kennedy in the 1960 campaign. Nixon was essentially hot; he presented a high-definition, sharply-defined image and action on the TV screen that contributed to his reputation as a phony — the “Tricky Dicky” syndrome that has dogged his footsteps for years. “Would you buy a used car from this man?” the political cartoon asked — and the answer was no, because he didn’t project the cool aura of disinterest and objectivity that Kennedy emanated so effortlessly and engagingly.

As TV became hotter — as it became high-definition — it found its man in Trump, who is as hot and unsubtle as a thermonuclear blast. Trump burns himself out with every appearance before crowds and cameras, never able to go far enough past his last performance — and it is a performance — to find a destination. He is destruction personified and that’s why he won, because his voters and believers yearn to destroy the institutions they do not trust, which is every institution we have today. Trump then represents the destruction of television itself. He’s so hot, he blew it up, ruining it for any candidate to follow, who cannot possibly top him on it. Kennedy was the first cool television politician. Obama was the last cool TV politician. Trump is the hot politician, the one who then took the medium’s every weakness and nuked it. TV amused itself to death.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not a candidate of television or radio or text because media — that is, journalists — completely missed her presence and success, didn’t cover her, and had to trip over each other to discover her long after voters had. How did voters discover her? How did she succeed? Social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube….

I think McLuhan’s analysis here would be straightforward: Social media are cool. Twitter in particular is cool because it provides such low-fidelity and requires the world to fill in so much, not only in interpretation and empathy but also in distribution (sharing). And Ocasio-Cortez herself is cool in every definition.

She handles her opponents brilliantly on social media, always flying above, never taking flack from them. Some people say she’s trolling the Republicans but I disagree. Trolling’s sole purpose is to get a rise out of an opponent, to make them angry and force them to react. She does not do that. She consistently states her positions and policies with confidence; let the haters hate. Yes, she shoots at her opponents, but like a sniper, always from her position, her platform.

She uses the net not only to make pronouncements but to build a community, a constituency that is larger than her district.

 

And her constituents respond.

 

Now I know some of you will argue that Trump is also a genius at Twitter because, after all, he governs by it. But I disagree. Trump’s tweets get the impact they get only because they are amplified by big, old media making stories in print and TV every single time he hits the big, blue button. Trump treats cool Twitter like he treats cool TV: with a flamethrower. On Twitter, he doesn’t win anything he hasn’t already won. Indeed, in his desperation to outdo himself, I think (or hope), it is by Twitter that he destroys himself through revealing too much of his ignorance and hate. That’s not cool.

Trump and his allies don’t know how to tweet but Ocasio-Cortez does — and that’s what so disturbs and confounds the GOP about @aoc. They think it should be so simple: just tweet your press releases — your “social media statements,” as their leader recently said — plus your best lines from speeches that get the loudest, hottest applause and rack up the most followers like the highest TV ratings and you will win. No. Twitter, Facebook, et al are not means to make a mass, like TV was. They are means to develop relationships and trust and to gather people around not just a person but also an idea, a cause, a common goal. That’s how Ocasio-Cortez uses them.

I want to be careful not to diminish Ocasio-Cortez as merely a social-media phenom, nor to build her up into some omniscient political demigod who will not stumble; she will. She is a talented, insightful politician who has the courage of her progressive and socialist convictions. Even when old media tries to goad a fight — because old media feed on the fight — over Ocasio-Cortez’ college dancing video, she still manages to bring the discussion back to her stands, her agenda. That is what drives them nuts.

 

And then:

 

Everyone ends up dancing to her tune. But they don’t talk about the dancing. They talk about the policy — her foes and her allies alike. She suggests a 70% tax rate for the richest and here come her enemies and then some experts, who have her back:

 

So what lessons do we learn from the early days of @aoc as possibly the first true, native politician of social media, not old media?

I think the GOP will eventually learn that anger is a flame that runs out of fuel. Anger stands against everything, for nothing. Anger builds nothing, not even a wall. Oh, anger is easy to exploit and media will help you exploit it, but that takes you nowhere. Lots of people might want to scream with the screamy guy, but who wants to invite him home for dinner? Trump is the angry celebrity and you end up knowing everything you want to know about him by watching him; there is nothing to fill in because he is so hot. “If somebody starts screaming at you, you don’t move in closer, you back up a little. And if they get a little rowdy and scream a little louder, you back up a little more. You don’t move in closer and start hugging,” Eric McLuhan explains in the video above. “A really hot situation like that… doesn’t require or even invite involvement.”

@aoc is a little mysterious, someone you want to know better; she is cool. The GOP has no cool politicians. The Democrats do not need their Trump, their celebrity, their hot personality. They should be grateful they have someone like Ocasio-Cortez to teach them how to be cool, if they are smart enough to watch and learn.

Media, too, have much to learn. We in journalism must see that our old, hot media — text and TV — are of the past. They won’t go away but they probablywon’t be trusted again. If we journalists have any hope of meeting our mission of informing the public, we have to use our new tools of the net to build relationships of authenticity and trust as humans, not institutions. We need to measure our success not based on mass but instead based on value and trust. Then we have to find a place to stand — on the platform of facts would be a lovely spot — and stay there, relying on principle and not on a mushy foundation built of fake balance or fleeting popularity or our own savvy. This is social journalism.

Oh, and we also need to learn that the next politician worth paying attention to won’t come to us with press releases and press people trying to get them on TV as that won’t matter to them. They are already out there building relationships with their constituents on social media and we need new means to listen to what is happening there.

There is one more confounding McLuhan lesson to grapple with here: that the medium is the message, that content is meaningless but it’s the medium itself that models a way to see the world. McLuhan argued that linear, bounded text by its very form taught us to how to think. The line, he said — and this sentence is an example — became our organizing principle. Books have borders and so do nations. This, I’ll argue, is why Trump wants to build his wall: a last, desperate border as all borders crumble.

McLuhan said electricity broke that linearity and he saw the beginnings of what could happen to our worldviews with the impact of television upon us. But that was only the beginning. Imagine what he would say about Twitter, Facebook, et al. I think he would tell us to pay attention not to the content — see: fake news! — but instead to learn from the form. What does social media teach us to do? What does the net itself teach us to do? To connect.

Congratulations, America. Victory against Infowars!

August 6, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
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You did it, O, you denizens of social media, you sharers of cats, you time-wasters, you. With every appalled tweet and retweet and angry emoji on Facebook, you vanquished the foe, Infowars. You got it banished from Facebook, Apple, YouTube, and Spotify. Congratulations.

I have no inside information to know what made the platforms finally come to their senses. But I will bet that it was the cover provided by the public on social media that gave them the courage to do the right thing.

Consider what Sleeping Giants and Shannon Coulter’s #GrabYourWallet did to get thousands of advertisers to drop Breitbart. After Kellogg dropped Breitbart back in 2016, right-wingers tried to declare a cereal boycott. It fizzled like stale Rice Crispies. Then the social pressure started on every advertiser that appeared on Breitbart and by the hundreds they flew away. I spoke with advertisers who did not resent Sleeping Giants for this. No, they were grateful for the cover.

Meanwhile, #GrabYourWallet also put pressure on retailers to stop carrying the merchandise of the enabler-in-chief and éminence greed, Ivanka Trump, and she killed her company. Last week, many of us brought a shitstorm down on the Newseum for selling fake news T-shirts and they relented. Many of us keep screaming about cable news shows inviting on Trump’s liars and at least a few listened as Morning Joe stopped inviting Kellyanne Conway and Joy Reid, Nicolle Wallace, and Rachel Maddow stopped giving free airtime unencumbered with context to Trump rallies, press briefings, and tweets.

So that is your job, America: Keep demanding the best of platforms when it comes to distributing extremist bile. Demand the best of brands, ad networks, ad agencies, and retailers when it comes to supporting their shit. And demand the best of media — I’m looking at you, cable news — when it comes to inviting pathological liars and extremist nut jobs on your air to amplify their hate and disinformation.

Now it would be nice if the companies that run the internet had long since shown the decency, good sense, and courage to do this on their own. But it seems they feared blowback from the other side, the indecent side, the allies of Infowars and you-know-who. Well, we showed them who is more powerful.

Now I know there’s a risk here. A tool is a tool and bad guys can use them just as well as good guys. Indeed, it was the far right that first went after Facebook with accusations that it was disadvantaging conservative news in its (now gone, thank you) Trending feature. Facebook caved and then cowered — until now. I don’t want to see mobs going after voices because of disagreement. But that’s not what happened here. Citizens went after companies to uphold basic standards of decency. Big difference.

 

My message here is simple: Keep it up, social media. Keep it up, America. Demand the best of ourselves, our technology companies and media companies and their advertisers. Then come November, demand the best of the women and men who represent you in government.

What you’re seeing is democracy and civilization in action — and civilization is winning. At last.