social media
The Real Problem with Biden's Bad Debate
The response to President Biden's subpar debate performance against Donald Trump creates an opportunity to talk about the poor choices black voters in particular face in seemingly every election in the United States. I'm talking about the reaction to the debate rather than the debate itself because I didn't watch it. Debates are not the same as governing, and what the Biden administration has accomplished legislatively (rather than just through executive orders) is more than enough to merit a second term. The immediate aftermath of the debate was filled with panic, both in my social media feeds and among friends I talk to regularly. The chattering class at the New York Times ran to fill their opinion columns with calls for Biden to resign (calls they very notably did not make when Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records). What I most noticed about every single panicked replacement plan I saw posed in social media is that they all involved stepping over Kamala Harris, the current Vice President of the United States who also happens to be a black woman (as well as southern Asian, on her mother's side).
When you call out liberals on this, you tend to get responses that look like this one:
This is utter horseshit because if Michelle Obama was running you wouldn’t hear any of this. And you know it, but for some reason the people making your argument want to ignore it.
— Underachiever (@whiskeyblackout.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 12:31 PM
Aside from the obvious virtue signaling, they tell you who has no clue, memory, or care of the way the actual Michelle Obama was treated while she was First Lady. I called it out as wishful thinking at the time, and while the original poster had very little to say in response, another person on Bluesky provided this helpful reminder of how both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were once regarded:
The history of the Democratic Party taking black voters, our issues, and candidates from our communities for granted is not exactly a short one. As such, the idea among many hair-on-fire panickers about Biden's poor debate performance that they should simply replace Biden (and his vice president) with someone else that can beat Trump is not surprising. One proposed replacement, Pete Buttigieg (currently secretary of transportation), ran for president before and had his candidacy fail in large part because of a lack of connection to and interest in black voters and our issues. I haven't looked deeply at other prospective replacements regarding their connections to and interest in engaging black voters (in addition to other demographics), but the small percentage of black voters they represent suggests that they haven't had to care about black voters to win elections. The speed with which the powers-that-be in the party suggested that Biden be cast aside after the bad debate suggests to me a desire to no longer be beholden to black voters (and our interests) in the way Biden quite clearly is because his primary campaign was on life support before South Carolina and Jim Clyburn's intervention and now he is president.
Seth Moulton might be the best current representatives of the middle of a Democratic Party for whom the existence of black voters is an hindrance to his goal of having the party change its focus by "talk about [Biden's] bipartisan wins, like the infrastructure bill". Particularly when the GOP marches in lockstep behind the convicted felon who currently leads them, the insistence of Moulton's fellow "centrists" on bipartisanship dooms good policy to defeat. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema prevented the child tax credit from being expanded, erasing the gains made in the reduction of child poverty--which helped everyone while it was in place, including black folks.
According to Moulton, his party colleagues have "lost the middle" due to Biden's push for student-loan debt relief and "identity politics". When I looked up the demographics of the congressional district Seth Moulton represents, it turns out to be not only one of the whitest congressional districts in the country, but also rather well-off financially on average. It's quite revealing of a so-called centrist to point to "identity politics" as why the Democrats have supposedly lost the middle in an environment where the Supreme Court has made affirmative action in higher-education illegal and conservative school boards in so-called red states are busily banning books by and about black people. Despite not treating black people as a constituency to be respected, the Seth Moultons of the Democratic Party will be the first ones to turn around and blame us when his party loses elections they think they should win.
This isn't to suggest that the Biden administration has been an unambiguous plus for the black community either. While he did choose Kamala Harris as his vice president and nominated Ketanji Brown-Jackson to be the first black woman on the Supreme Court, along with passing economic recovery legislation that helped reduce unemployment among black people to the lowest level on record, he hasn't succeeded in reviving the Voting Rights Act from its nearly-dead state (thanks to judicial overreach from the conservative activists who sit on the Supreme Court). Biden has also been relentless pro-police, despite decreasing rates of violent crime, and despite the disproportionate impact of police violence on black communities. And that's before you get to the prior years of his political career which included mishandling the hearings which would ultimately result in Clarence Thomas being elevated to the Supreme Court, co-sponsoring a crime bill that paved the way for decades of mass incarceration of black folks, and legislation that stripped student borrowers of bankruptcy protections--which would ultimately be shown to disproportionately impact black borrowers.
The "indifference, unless it's an election year" approach of national Democrats is obvious enough that the GOP has made it part of their pitch to black voters. But a GOP approach that veers between the cartoonish (such as Trump's continuing insistence on the appeal of his mugshot to black voters), the insulting (literally anything Vivek Ramaswamy says), the dishonest (Tim Scott pretending that systemic racism doesn't exist), and voter suppression manages to be even worse. Any messages they might try to put forward about values, or fiscal responsibility, or entrepreneurship are largely undermined by Trump's corrupt business dealings, nepotism on behalf of his incompetent children, and his unconvincing attempts to even pay lip service to the idea of Christianity mattering even a little bit to him personally. But in the debate where Biden performed poorly, Trump may have managed to hit a new low even for him by warning both during the debate and a recent campaign rally that migrants are taking "Black jobs" and "Hispanic jobs" from Americans.
Predictably, we took "black jobs" and ran with it for fun on Black Twitter #BlackJobs, to flip Trump's nasty xenophobia into a way to highlight the variety of different work we do in this country. Sadly, given the disrespect I've observed and personally experienced online directed at black immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens or who have parents from abroad, there is definitely a small segment of black Americans Trump will succeed in attracting to his camp with xenophobia. Nor will I rule out the possibility of xenophobia succeeding in attracting a small number of Hispanic Americans. But the press is so focused on Biden's poor debate performance that they've almost entirely missed and failed to even comment on why this particular remark by Trump is revealing and important. Quinta Jurecic touches on why political media's handling of this might be inadequate:
it feels like the whiteness of big political media spaces right now is having a big effect on how people are thinking about the debate. eg I have seen relatively little discussion of trump's "black jobs" comment, which immediately exploded on black twitter
— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 9:45 AM
Adam Serwer's reply provides necessary context as well:
Both the “black jobs” remark and using palestinian as a slur are hopefully clarifying as to actual Trump’s ideology and worldview, in contrast with the imaginary trump some people have built up in their heads as the memory of his administration has receded
— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) Jun 29, 2024 at 12:10 PM
Beyond nobody in the GOP even thinking to push back on the xenophobia of these remarks by Trump, having developed a very strong muscle memory for surrender during his reign of the party, it is necessary to take certain "never Trump" Republicans to task as well. Whether they recognize it or acknowledge it or not, the GOP we see today is one that to a man (and virtually all of them are men) that they helped create. On their watch, the GOP changed into a party that embraced the vision of Pat Buchanan and rejected the "kinder, gentler" conservatism of George W. Bush which despite the many flaws of his presidency (both foreign and domestic) managed to appeal to enough voters to win the popular vote in 2004, including between 40 and 44% of Hispanics. So while they have predictably joined the chorus of panic that would push Biden out in favor of some mythical moderate candidate who would appeal to enough of the electorate to beat Donald Trump, they are operating from the same Seth Moulton perspective that sees black voters and our issues as a inconvenience. They may oppose Donald Trump, but their views of black voters don't appear to be much more sophisticated than his.
So these are the choices of black voters--a Democratic Party that takes our votes and interests for granted, or a GOP who would rather suppress our votes and divide them than compete for them. Black voters ceased to be the largest minority group in the United States years ago, and both parties appear far more interested in pursuing Hispanic-American and Asian-American votes than black votes.
"I have no time for foolishness."
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
Toni Morrison
This is the quote that came to mind as I watched a clip of CNN's Dana Bash asking the governor of my state, Wes Moore, about Republicans blaming diversity policies for the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Governor Moore's response to Bash's initial question was the right one in my view, because he dismissed the Republican assertions as foolishness and talked about closure and comfort for the families of those killed in the accident, safety for first responders, re-opening the channel and port, and rebuilding the bridge. Bash persisted in asking the governor about the "DEI mayor" insult against Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott by someone from the blue check brigade on Twitter. Governor Moore's response was similarly focused on Baltimore's recovery from the accident, which he ended by saying "I'm focused on what matters right now."
Unlike the poor journalism which animated my earlier complaint against the press coverage of the disaster (which leaves the racism of critics as subtext), Dana Bash's line of questioning directly aids and abets racists and their critique by foregrounding it and asking the governor of the state to respond to it as if it is legitimate. There is of course no actual evidence that DEI had anything to do with a ship the size and the weight of a skyscraper plowing into the bridge and destroying it. So why would Dana Bash waste air time elevating the ignorant nonsense of GOP pols spewing racism on Twitter? My guess is that CNN wanted to appear "balanced", but they failed at that in addition to wasting the governor's time and that of their viewers. What does a Utah state representative have to say that could possibly be relevant to the issue at hand? As it turned out, absolutely nothing. What does a former member of the Florida House of Representatives have to say that could be relevant? Again, absolutely nothing. Remember--six people died as a result of this accident. As of this writing, some of the dead still have not been recovered. A key driver of economic vitality for the city and the state is now at risk. Dana Bash (and/or her producers) still chose to waste nearly two minutes of airtime on racist, conspiratorial nonsense from the fever swamps of Twitter.
Journalism isn't economics, but opportunity cost is a useful lens through which to view the time spent on foolishness. The entire interview was just over seven minutes long, and most of the questions were good, prompting useful responses from Governor Moore. But about 20% of the interview time was taken up by GOP nonsense from Twitter. That's time which could have been spent asking about potential future changes in policies and procedures for handling large cargo ships in the future. It could have been used to ask about the victims of the accident, who merited only a brief mention from Bash at the end of the interview. It could have been used for a deeper dive into the local economic impacts of the accident on the Port of Baltimore, and on the people who work there. Many port workers live in Dundalk, MD, a place that differs quite a bit demographically from what racists on Twitter seem to think.
Joy Reid's interview with Mayor Scott, even while calling out the conspiracy theories around the accident as ridiculous, did surface the very same tweets from the fever swamp as Dana Bash did. Mayor Scott took the opportunity to respond to the racist assertions from Twitter, which is his right. But a large part of me wishes that he had followed the governor's example and left the foolishness of the right-wing fever swamps to Black Twitter. Because if there's anything Black Twitter does well, it's turn insults on their head. Since DEI is the new n-word, here is a small sampling of what's been done with it:
In my view, journalism continues to let social media be their assignment editor and set the agenda. Whether would-be centrists like CNN or NPR, or overtly left-leaning MSNBC, Twitter still figures far too prominently in their coverage and in their questions. Particularly when the owner of Twitter has made it his mission to platform Nazis and personally amplify the most offensive and extreme right-wing thoughts, integrating the worst output of such a platform into news coverage cannot help but make the news product worse, and less useful to us as citizens. Difficult as it is to find conservative perspectives on issues that are actually useful, the press needs to make the effort. Racist positions are not owed airtime simply because they are "the other side". In researching this post, I found Ed O'Keefe of CBS' Face the Nation did the same thing Dana Bash did when he interviewed Mayor Scott. Here's a quote of O'Keefe's question:
I've got to ask you one of the wilder things is some conservative critics blamed the bridge collapse on diversity, equity and inclusion policies in Maryland. Diversity, equity inclusion, better known as DEI to a lot of people. They called you, some critics, "the DEI mayor." What did you make of that when you heard it?
Ed O'Keefe interviewing Mayor Brandon Scott on Face the Nation, March 31, 2024
To steal a line from President Mohamed Irfaan Ali of Guyana, "Let me stop you right there." No, Ed O'Keefe, you don't have to ask the mayor of Baltimore about conspiratorial nonsense from aspiring governors and congressmen from Utah and Florida just because they happen to be Republican. Not only do they not represent Baltimore, they would probably be lucky to be able to find the city on a map. They don't have relevant expertise in shipping or ports or bridge-building or disaster response. Don't be the journalist who makes a conversation worse by bringing voices to it that have nothing to add beyond ignorance and racism.
Now Sharing to the Fediverse, My Threads Account
When I checked in on my Threads account recently, I saw that the Fediverse sharing feature was available and turned it on.
As you can see above, I've added my Threads account in the last available metadata entry on my primary Fediverse account. In testing the new link before publishing this post, I found that Ivory desktop and mobile clients appear to rewrite the link to @genxjamerican@www.threads.net (which doesn't work). Clicking the Open in Browser button that comes up after the first failed site visit gives you another rewritten URL, [www.threads.net/user/genx...](https://www.threads.net/user/genxjamerican#.) (which also doesn't work). When I visit my profile in a browser however (at https://hachyderm.io/@genxjamerican), clicking the Threads link takes me directly to the profile as expected.
A search for my handle in the Ivory desktop client now shows my Threads account and my Mastodon account. Only time will tell whether or not the anti-Meta fedi pact I posted about last year has a meaningful impact on the growth of Threads in the fediverse. Meta could just as easily sabotage its own growth through strategic errors. One of the fediverse's most consistent advocates and contributors, Dr. Jorge Caballero, makes a persuasive argument that paying for "good" Threads posts is one such mistake.
I haven't really set up anything to cross-post the same content to multiple social media accounts beyond what Jetpack Social supports. My blog posts are automatically posted to Tumblr and to my Mastodon account. I might change that just to see how different the levels of engagement are. IFTTT is probably where I should look first, having set up a bunch of automations there in the past. So far, when it comes to sharing posts from this blog, followers on Mastodon engage far more often with them than in any other social media network where I have a presence.
Unremarked Corners of Social Media: Substack Notes Edition
It's been about 5 months since Substack introduced Substack Notes. Some Googling to refresh my memory regarding the timing of the announcement and the impact surfaced articles like this Guardian piece that detailed Elon Musk's petty response to the launch of a (much smaller) competitor to Twitter. The shenanigans regarding blocked links, searches, and false "unsafe link" warnings have long since ended. An alert from one of the Substackers I follow prompted me to look at the service after some time away.
Here's my Substack profile:
I wasn't sure what the Claim Your Handle thing was about, so I clicked through to see:
Instead of the suggested handle, I went with the one I'm increasing using on all social media (and this website):
The Notes feature itself is nicely laid out, making it easy to see your "restacks", original notes, replies, and other engagement from the Substack community. I only follow a few writers here, and I suppose Notes makes engagement easier. But it's such a small audience it's pretty easy to see why Substackers came to rely on Twitter so much to drive engagement with their pieces. It might not even be fair to Substack Notes to call it a social media option. I definitely could see engaging with Substack Notes more if I had a Substack newsletter, but I don't write long enough or consistently enough for that to make sense (I also prefer to own my words, hence the choice to maintain this blog rather than let any one social media option own them).
Exploring Mastodon Continued: Moving to Hachyderm.io
After almost 4 months of using Mastodon, I found the community on Hachyderm.io (and its administrator, Kris Nóva) so interesting that I decided to move from the larger instance I initially joined (mastodon.cloud). The advice in my first post about sticking with a larger server unless you come across a particular server/community that really interests you still holds. The specific way I applied it is tied to a Mastodon feature I didn't fully grasp the utility of back then: the Local timeline. I wrote about timelines later, but what only became clear after creating an account on hachyderm.io and using Local timeline was that because the vast majority of people there are techies like me, there was a much higher volume of interesting toots there than on a large instance like mastodon.cloud.
One of my Mastodon mutuals switched from mastodon.cloud to hachyderm.io due to racist harassment being directed at his account from a domain they don't block. Not only does hachyderm.io proactively block that domain, they do things like give you a chance to review certain follow requests even if your account isn't locked, as shown below:
The actual steps I followed to migrate were a combination of this article, and this post from Eugen Rochko (in that order). Migrating doesn't delete the old account, but it does disable the old account so it looks like this:
Migrating to a new account meant updating my account metadata as well to verify that new account belongs to me.
Only the posts from my original Mastodon account can't make the move to hachyderm.io--but only because I don't control the instance. If I were willing to run my own Mastodon server, it might be possible to import the archive I downloaded from my previous account and republish them there.
In addition to migrating to hachyderm.io, I provided a small donation to the administrator through ko-fi.com. In addition to the charitable giving I'm doing this year, I'll be putting more into these tip jars for online services that I find valuable. I contribute a bit to the main Mastodon project through Patreon.
Your Mastodon Experience May Vary--And Not Always in a Good Way
While my own experience on Mastodon has been a positive one so far, my experience is by no means universal. As more prominent accounts from Twitter have joined, particularly those of black folks (and especially black women) I’ve followed there for awhile, they’ve begun to share details of consistently negative experiences on Mastodon.
Her experience has been difficult enough that the Mastodon post sharing that she was taking a break from that platform linked to the tweet above. It’s hard to imagine a more damning indictment of how a platform treats people from marginalized communities than posting that criticism on Twitter, a site that has done far less policing of slurs against black people in the wake of Elon Musk’s purchase. Trying to summarize her thread wouldn’t do it justice, but if there is any common thread between her negative experience and that of other black people on Mastodon it is around the content warning feature (abbreviated CW as shown below).
Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s objection to the name of the feature is a function of being a rape survivor. The other pushback I’ve seen most often is around the use of the feature for posts regarding racism. Elon James White, who I first started following during his coverage of Ferguson in the wake of the protests of Michael Brown’s shooting death by police officer Darren Wilson, refuses to use it for discussions of racism. Mekka Okereke, director of engineering for the Google Play online store, has a more nuanced viewpoint, which separates whether or not white people want to hear about racism from what is effectively a mislabeling of the feature. He summarized his feelings on this as follows:
Feels very very much like "Ban teaching civil rights, so white kids don't feel bad."When I did a bit of searching to try and learn more about content warnings and trigger warnings in their original context, it seems that the original scope of such terminology was limited to things that could cause someone to recall a traumatic experience they had. My primary takeaways from one piece in particular was that broader, more casual use of the term "triggered" ended up both being conflated with people being "too sensitive" and conflating trauma with mere discomfort. "Conflating trauma with mere discomfort" ends up being a great summation of the way far too many white people still respond to black people merely describing the racism they've survived.
Mastodon (and the Fediverse)’s turn in the spotlight, and the negative experiences of at least a few black people on it I follow make it a microcosm of both the best and the worst aspects of tech more broadly. A few of the best aspects: software a young man named Eugen Rochko first started writing in 2016, has held up rather well all things considered against a significant increase in usage and attention. It’s open source, so not only can you see how it works, you can suggest changes, or even make a copy of it and make changes yourself if you have the time and expertise. It uses a decentralized social networking protocol that doesn’t just interoperate with other Mastodon servers, but with other social networking applications that use the same protocol. Despite the good–which is significant–Mastodon is just as susceptible to some of the negative aspects of the for-profit tech industry it intends to be an alternative to. The most obvious negative aspect is the gatekeeping. Despite beginning my professional career just a few years after the founder of Mastodon was born, it would take over 15 years of that career before I would find an employer where there was more than one other person who looked like me writing software for a living. Software engineers who are Hispanic or Latino aren’t that much less rare than black software engineers. Today, the percentage of women in technical roles is projected to be around 25% by the end of this year. But the history of computing predates the machines that do it today, and a much higher percentage of those literal human computers were women. Those women who do persevere through the gatekeeping that would prevent them from entering the industry ultimately end up leaving at unfortunately high rates because of the hostility to women that still persists in too many work environments.
Tim Bray (co-author of the XML spec and contributor to numerous web standards), shared this piece as one of his first posts on Mastodon. I have no doubt that he meant well, and that the author of the piece meant well, but when you title a piece “Home invasion” when talking about new users of a platform you’re used to, that comes across as incredibly hostile. The same author that talks about trans and queer feminists building the tools, protocols, and culture of the fediverse makes not a single mention of people of color in his piece–not unlike the commercial tech companies in general, and Twitter in particular that are among the targets of his critique. The entire piece is worth reading in full to understand the author’s perspective, but I will pull quote and highlight one paragraph that seems most emblematic of the blind spot that some veteran Mastodon users appear to have:
This attitude has moved with the new influx. Loudly proclaiming that content warnings are censorship, that functionality that has been deliberately unimplemented due to community safety concerns are "missing" or "broken", and that volunteer-run servers maintaining control over who they allow and under what conditions are "exclusionary". No consideration is given to why the norms and affordances of Mastodon and the broader fediverse exist, and whether the actor they are designed to protect against might be you. The Twitter people believe in the same fantasy of a "public square" as the person they are allegedly fleeing. Like fourteenth century Europeans, they bring the contagion with them as they flee.To see yourself (as a new user of Mastodon and a long-time user of Twitter) be described as someone bringing contagion hits a lot differently when you've endured racism in real life as well as online, and when you've had to overcome--and are still overcoming--so many barriers in both places merely to be included, much less respected. And were the author to be called on this huge blindspot publicly, I have no doubt that he would respond with the same sort of defensiveness that Dr. Prescod-Weinstein described, and that Timnit Gebru, another recent joiner of Mastodon has also described.
As I said at the start of this piece, my own experience with Mastodon has been a positive one so far. Some of it is a function of having participated in online communities for decades (as far back as the Usenet newsgroups days), and even becoming a private beta tester one of the newer ones (StackOverflow.com) before it went public. But those communities too had their gatekeepers, mansplainers, and jerks. Certain open source projects are unfortunately no different in that regard either. There’s something to be said for understanding the pre-existing culture of a place–even if it is virtual. That said, the idea that culture is static–and should remain so–is a perspective that it seems some Mastodon veterans would do well to change. Otherwise, they risk perpetuating the same harms as commercial social media–just without the financial rewards.
Exploring Mastodon Continued: Timelines and Federation
While checking out the Mastonaut desktop client for Mastodon, I came across the following diagram explaining the visibility of a toot:
Still reading? I appreciate your patience. I don't blame any of the folks who noped out of this post after seeing that diagram. It's a consequence of the servers thing I mentioned in my previous post on exploring Mastodon. It's one of many features that highlight who the target audience for Mastodon really is (people like me who used to write software for a living, or still do).
Even for me, the Home timeline is the only relevant one because it will display toots from people I follow--regardless of what server they're on--toots those people boost, and your replies. The Local timeline shows toots from people on the same server where you registered whether you follow them or not. The Public or Federated timeline appears to show toots from people across all the Mastodon servers (again, whether you follow them or not). We’ll see if more time on Mastodon confirms or changes my understanding of the timelines.
Exploring Mastodon Continued: Verification
As I mentioned at the end of my first post on Mastodon, I’ve been following Martin Fowler’s notes on his own journey. His November 1 memo on verification interested me, especially in light of Twitter’s recent update to charge $8 for the blue check mark.
As Fowler explained it, Mastodon being decentralized (unlike Twitter) means verification is up to each server. Whoever runs it can verify members however they wish–or not at all. The approach to verification he describes and implements is what he calls cross-association. By adding a <link> element to the <head> of his personal website with an href attribute for his corporate Mastodon profile, Mastodon “sees” the link and marks it as verified.
I followed Fowler’s example to do the same thing with my Mastodon profile. I updated the header.php of the WordPress theme I’m using this way:
<head> <meta charset="<?php bloginfo( ‘charset’ ); ?>"> <meta name=“viewport” content=“width=device-width, initial-scale=1”> <link rel=“profile” href="//gmpg.org/xfn/11"> <link rel=“me” href=“https://mastodon.cloud/@genxjamerican"> <?php wp_head(); ?> </head>
With that change made, my Mastodon profile now looks like this:
This way, people who follow me on Mastodon know that I control this website as well.
Farewell To Threads, And What Comes Next
I deleted my Threads account today. Meta's previous announcements about the end of third-party fact-checking and changes to moderation rules (to enable more abuse of people from marginalized communities on its platforms) and Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko speaking out regarding the danger of the changes prompted me to turn off the fediverse-sharing feature on my Threads account. At the time, I was unsure if I would continue to have a Threads account.
Meta's announcement today that they're immediately terminating DEI programs inside the company gave me the push I needed to delete my account from an app that frankly isn't that good. The tech industry I've worked in since before Facebook ever existed didn't treat people who weren't white and male very well for decades before that. DEI efforts across the tech industry were largely belated, token efforts at most companies, that didn't meaningfully increase the diversity of rank-and-file employees or leadership. Meta retreating from DEI feels like yet another slap at black folks who have already endured far more than enough between the death of affirmative action in higher education, a legal settlement that literally prevents black people from giving away their own money to black women the rest of the venture capital industry ignores, the outcome of the presidential election, and everything else that comes along with what we should have left behind from Trump's first term. I don't even want to imagine how awful it must have been for Meta's now-former chief diversity officer, Maxine Williams, to see Mark Zuckerberg casually nuke a decade of her work.
What's next (as detailed in an earlier post) is more financial support for decentralized social media and efforts to create more hospitable online spaces for black folks (like Blacksky) and other marginalized communities that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, (and others) have targeted for abuse. My Mastodon server (hachyderm.io) administrators opted to defederate from Threads in the interest of protecting their users who are part of marginalized communities. I expect many other Mastodon instances of varying sizes to follow suit, or apply some moderation to Threads accounts. Deleting other Meta accounts (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) is much harder than deleting Threads because of how many meaningful relationships I have with people that social media makes it easier to maintain. Perhaps this will be a year of seriously seeking alternatives--and making more efforts to connect in real life.