Trump supporters have been decamping to Parler, a social network started as an alternative to Twitter and Facebook. Now, due to decisions by Apple, Google, and Amazon, Parler has had to shut down. Is this fair? Is it right? Or is it a threat to open operation of the internet? After the invasion of the…
I am posting this in case you want to compare what I wrote to what was published after editing. The original version is here. Here’s a link to the Globe’s page containing the piece. And below is the text of the actual op-ed that ran in the Globe. Social media broke America. Here’s how to…
This is the draft of the op-ed I first sent to the Boston Sunday Globe for publication in its Ideas section. It was never published in this form. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” But that was before social media. Now, thanks to…
Marc Andreessen famously said that software is eating the world. That was a statement about economics. Now I believe that social media is swallowing our brains, which is a much broader statement about human behavior. The precipitating event for this observation is Salesforce’s announcement that it would acquire Slack for $27.7 billion. According to Salesforce…
Boycotts rarely work. But in the face of advertiser boycotts, Facebook just did a U-turn on its policy on labelling or blocking presidential posts. The cause and effect here is a lot more complex than it appears. As recently as the beginning of June, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the right decision on presidential posts,…
I’m not getting together in person with very many people these days. I connect with all my professional friends on social media and email. And you people are remarkably consistent — you either offer value, or you don’t. Here’s what I value: original, thoughtful content, and information I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. For example: Data,…
Twitter’s VP of Research and Design Dantley Davis tweeted a list of new features coming to Twitter. Here’s the list: Where’s tweet editing on this list? These are minor tweaks that will mostly affect heavy users and celebrities. Everyone who has ever made an error while tweeting — that is, everyone who uses Twitter —…
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on CNN that YouTube will never be free of offensive content. Fine. But let’s get some appropriate principles for content in place. Here’s some of what Pichai said: We’ve gotten much better at using a combination of machines and humans. . . . So it’s one of those things, let’s…
We all belong to an insiders’ club. What’s yours? By 2007, Charlene Li and I had gotten the approval from Forrester to write the book that become Groundswell. She was already well-known as the top analyst covering the use of social media for business. With her help, I studied and became knowledgeable about that as…