Quitting social media gave me a new creed: only disconnect: ‘…our virtual selves are not our inner selves, but behaviours drawn out from us by the social media platforms’.

Older music has been getting a second life on TikTok, data shows: An increasing amount of TikTok videos use music that’s at least 5 years old.

More than 140 Kenya Facebook moderators diagnosed with severe PTSD: Spending hours a day looking at the worst humanity has to offer is damaging to one’s health.

Why Romania’s election was annulled – and what happens next?: Romanian courts rule that their presidential election was too contaminated with social media manipulation, Russian interference, cyber attacks and illegal funding to stand.

Why is Meta adding fediverse interoperability to Threads?: I was somewhat astonished when Meta said it’d build Fediverse compatibility, am less so to hear they’re not doing so overly enthusiastically.

Who is winning UK Politics Bluesky so far?: The left, at least as measured by the slightly strange metric of how many MPs follow them.

Texas AG Declares War On Advertisers Who Snub Musk’s ExTwitter: Ken Paxton seems to want to make it illegal to not give Elon Musk money.

Blue skies ahead: Leon wrangles with whether to join Bluesky.

Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power: How decentralised Bluesky is depends on what exactly you mean by decentralisation.

On Bluesky: Regarding its vibes and its technology.

Bluesky and enshittification: The most well-intentioned service remains at risk of enshittification whilst there remains significant costs incurred when switching away from it.

Why I Am (Still) a Liberal (For Now): ‘Thin’ vs ‘thick’ liberalism, and the Cruelty Culture of 2022-era Twitter.

The AI-Generated Product Reviews Choking the Internet Are Now Illegal: The FTC makes certain types of fake reviews illegal, whether human or robots wrote them, in the US.

Why you should ditch social media for a (micro)blog: Yes, I’m a big fan of both the general concept and the specific product Aaron mentions.

Why changes to the block on Elon Musk’s X are driving users away: Musk doesn’t believe block buttons should block.

Online Safety and the “Great Decentralization” – The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media: Is the Fediverse in need of better tooling around moderation?

TikTok plans mass job cuts on UK moderation and safety teams: To be replaced by a mix of offshore workers that they can treat and pay a lot worse alongside cost-cutting ‘automation’ it sounds like.

TikTok knows its app is harming kids, new internal documents show: All the social media companies either know full well the harms that using their product can bring or are wilfully ignorant of them.

The future of live news online sucks: Why the TikTokization of the big social media platforms makes them ‘uniquely bad places to follow news’.

Crowdsourcing the Monetization of Social Media: Social media could have been good if only we’d landed on a different incentive structure.