Why is “intellectual dark web” content at the top of my feed? Thoughts on WT:Social

On Friday, I signed up for WT:Social, a news focused social network from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. There’s a lot of buzz about WT:Social, and membership is soaring — up from just a few thousand users at the beginning of the month to almost 100,000 when I signed up two days ago. The waitlist is long, but if you get a paid account ($12.99/month or $100/year) you can skip the queue.

Since I’m also working on some news focused social network software, and so am interested to see how others approach the problem, I paid for a month. If you’re also developing social media software, there’s a lot to learn here, so it might be worth it for you as well.

Otherwise, save your money. [1]

Red flags from the beginning

There were some red flags from the beginning, starting with the lack of up-front information about a code of conduct, anti-harassment policy, or content guidelines. As Elisa Camhort Page said when we were discussing this

A site that welcomes any content is inevitably a site that welcomes harassment, hate speech, threats, and misinformation. You cannot stave off one if you will not take a stand on the other.

Yeah really. Eventually I discovered that the Terms and Conditions actually does link out to a Code of Conduct, as well as FAQs on Diversity and Ethics; from the dates on them, they seem to have been written for WT:Social’s previous incarnation as WikiTribune, but presumably they still apply. Still, most people won’t invest the effort to find these, and so won’t know what’s expected of them. It’s much better to make sure that people see these right up front — and explicitly agree to them.

Another immediately-obvious problem: the experience using a screen reader is really horrible. There’s no “skip navigation” link, so the initial experience on the page starts with reading out all the menus and recommended sub-wikis. Then when you finally get to a link, the title of the article is repeated multiple times, and it reads out the complete URL. Yikes.

Also, it doesn’t seem like WT:Social has really thought through about how people might try to game the system, let alone applied structured techniques like “social threat modeling” [2] For example, the notifications are all on by default — meaning new posts get sent to you via email What could possibly go wrong? Here’s a screenshot of some email I got (with the subwiki’s name blanked out).

In this particular case it was an accident [3] but you can certainly see how it could get abused. Mechanisms like this make it open season for spammers, harassers, propagandists, and other unsavory types.

If you have an account there, you can turn the notifications off by going to “My Account” and then “Edit Notifications”. The link https://wt.social/myaccount/notifications also works, at least for now … although, as Kathy Gill points out, the way the notification dialog uses red and green is problematic from an accessibility perspective. Here’s what the initial settings look like via Coblis, the color blindness simulator. Are they on or off?

Even though I’ve turned all the notifications off, I still see some when I check the site. Still, it’s a lot better than it was — and things aren’t showing up in my email.

It’s more like reddit than Facebook

Even though a lot of people are describing WT:Social as an alternative to Faecebook, it’s really a lot more like reddit. Links get organized into “subwikis”, which fill a similar role to reddit’s “subreddits”. You can browse a subwiki, comment on posts there, or join it (which lets you submit links of your own).

The word “subwiki” doesn’t seem like a great choice to me. Subwiki’s aren’t wikis, and they aren’t part of a wiki. In my own informal survey nobody found it a particularly appealing name. But, it probably sounded good to Jimmy Wales and the people he hangs out with.

Your home page is a “feed” of the most recent posts, along with the most recent comments, from any of the subwikis that you’ve joined. There are also some “global links” that the people running the site decide everybody gets to see (no way to opt out yet, sorry, and no information about how they decide on which links to send out). There’s also the additional twist of collaborative wiki-like editing of posts, although I haven’t been able to get it to work yet. [4]

It mostly works. I was able to figure out how to make a post and share a link myself (although I had to hit refresh to see whether it had succeeded or not). I like exploring new social networks, so I hunted around found the FAQ and Known Bugs list. [5] Putting my civil liberties hat on, I created the Section 215 subwiki to share links about the upcoming USA FREEDOM Act reauthorization battle, and seeded it with a post. Then I sent invitation links to a couple of friends.

This was, in retrospect, a mistake. My apologies. If you’ve also signed up, and are considering inviting other people, please read this footnote first.[6]

How I spent my Friday evening

A few hours later one of the friends I had sent an invitation link to asked me

“Why is there an article from Quillette at the top of my WT:Social feed?”

Good question. I went back to check WT:social again and there was an article from Quillette at the top of my feed as well. WTF?

For those of you who don’t know Quillette, it’s an online magazine usually described a a part of the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), which also includes other prominent members like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Jonathan Haidt. Like others in the IDW, Quillette is polarizing.[7] Some people see it as upholding values of free speech against the onslaught of SJWs and snowflakes. Others see it as … not the kind of content they want to be confronted with unexpectedly on a Friday night.

Most of my friends fall into the second category, so I hurriedly circled back to the people I had shared invitations with and let them know that they might be in for an unpleasant surprise if they signed up. Then I looked to see what was going on.

Before we go into that, though, think for a moment about the effect this is likely to have on WT:Social. Lots of people are looking for alternatives to Facebook et al. When somebody like my friend goes to check out a new site and the first thing they see is IDW content … they’re likely to leave, and not come back.

And people who hear about this and don’t want to deal with IDW content might not even bother to check WT:Social out. When I’ve told other friends that if the sign up for Jimmy Wales’ new social network they they might well see IDW content at the top of their feed, their reaction is generally that they’ve got better things to do with their time.

Then again, there are plenty of people out there who actively like IDW content. They’re ones who are likely to stick around, and invite their friends. By placing this content so prominently, WT:Social is going to attract them — and drive away the people like me and most of my friends, who would rather not be confronted with IDW content on a Friday night. This seems like good news for IDW fans who feel like they’re being oppressed by Facebook, Twitter, and reddit. But as we’ll see, even for them, there are downsides.

Why should IDW fans have all the fun?

Once I looked into it, I realized that what had happened to my friend was fairly straightforward:

When they signed up for WT:Social, they were automatically joined to the “Long Reads” subwiki, (along with a handful of other subwikis).
When somebody shared IDW content to Long Reads, all 16,000 people in the “Long Reads” subwiki (including people like my friend, who were automatically joined when they signed up) saw it at the top of their feed. It’s quite possible some or all of them got it in their email as well.

It turned out that I had been automatically signed up for the “Long Reads” subwiki too. When I left it, the Quillette article vanished from my feed.

But wait a second, why should IDW fans have all the fun? So I rejoined “Long Reads” and shared Jessie Daniels’ Twitter and White Supremacy: A Love Story. When I asked another friend to sign up, here’s what they saw at the top of their feed.

Of course, criticisms of large tech companies for helping white supremacists are also polarizing. Some people see this as … not the kind of content they want to be confronted with on a Friday night. One WT:social member appeared particularly incensed that this link was in his feed, and replied with multiple comments objecting to this “obvious nonsense” and “BS sensationalist headline”. And when I refreshed my front page, there was also a heated debate on the Quillette post as well.

Since there isn’t any way to hide posts from your feed, or prevent WT:social from showing you the five most recent comments on every post, now there was something for everybody!

Conservatives looking for alternatives because they feel like they’re being oppressed by corporate social media sites will be immediately irritated by “obvious nonsense.” Why use WT:Social instead of alt-right fave gab.ai?
People looking for alternatives because they feel like corporate social media sites are siding with white supremacists may get a better first impression — but then as soon as they scroll down they’ll see IDW content. Thanks but no thanks.
And people from across the political spectrum will get to see bloviating in comments – with no way to turn it off. Y’know, there are a lot of reasons people are looking for alternatives, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard people say “the real problem with Facebook and Reddit today is that there’s not enough arguing about white supremacy and the ‘intellectual dark web’.”

A good learning experience

People are continuing to flock to WT:Social: 75,000 new members over the last two days, and the wait list is over 100,000. The potential is there; for example, somebody posted a link to a story about sexism in Wikipedia, and there were some really great comments. There’s interesting links on some of the subwikis as well. But judging from the discussion on the site, most people signing up aren’t having good experiences.

Admittedly, it’s early days yet. WT:Social could learn from this, take a step back, and redesign their system yet again to pay more attention to things like harassment, abuse, and hate speech. I’m not holding my breath, but we shall see. I haven’t deleted my account yet[8] , so if you want to friend or follow me, here I am.

More importantly, WT:Social is not the only game in town. Their initial floundering is also a learning experience for other nascent social networks and news-focused social media. True, many of the lessons aout what not to do could also have been learned from Wikipedia’s own history and projects like Mastodon and Diaspora that also set out to provide free speech-oriented alternatives to ad-funded, surveillance capitalism social networks. Still, it’s a good reminder.

And fortunately, there are positive lessons as well. One big takeaway is the huge amount of interest in WT:Social (as well as MeWe, the privacy-friendly Facebook alternative, which is also currently getting a lot of signups[9]). A couple of years ago I wrote about a potential tipping point. Since then, the pent-up demand is continuing to grow — and not just with techies; I’ve seen a lot of activists I know talking about WT:Social.

Another takeaway is that it’s time for a different approach. What would a social media site look like if it built on best practices and research into anti-harassment, content moderation, online extremism, and amplifying marginalized voices?

Hopefully we’ll start to see some examples of this over the next few months.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Shireen, Kaliya, Shasta, Kathy, Elisa, Victoria, Jim, Vicki, Jim, Soren, Deborah and everybody else for the valuable discussion about WT:Social and feedback on earlier versions of this post!

Footnotes

[1] I certainly don’t mind paying for ad-free social media; I’ve had paid subscriptions to Dreamwidth for years, and support a couple of Mastodon instances on Patreon. But these are all sites that I started using for free and have had good experiences — and they are asking for a lot less than WT:Social. Dragos Ruiu describes describes WT:Social’s approach as a “fee extortion waiting queue” which is pretty much how I feel about it too. Also, Wales’ track record is not encouraging; see for example Mathew Ingram’s Wikipedia’s co-founder wanted to let readers edit the news. What went wrong? and Julia Jacobs’ Wikipedia Isn’t Officially a Social Network. But the Harassment Can Get Ugly.

[2] Shireen Mitchell and I discussed social threat modeling in our 2017 SXSW talk. There’s an overview of related work in The Winds of Change are in the Air. My personal experience is that taking a social threat modeling approach early in a project is incredibly valuable. Like so many other security-related issues, this kind of stuff is very hard and expensive to try to patch in after the fact.

[3] Somebody had shared a link to a story from the Financial Times, quite the one about WT:Social, that turned out to be paywalled. So when WT:Social tried get the title of the article, it instead got the paywall message. The software didn’t bother check for this, but just posted it blithely, and sent out the email update to everybody following the subreddit who hadn’t yet turned off notifications. The person who had posted the link realized their mistake, and deleted it quickly … but it was too late: the email had already gone out.

[4] Implementation bugs aside, I don’t understand how this is even supposed to work. The impression I have is that you can set up posts that anybody can edit and people will then converge on a neutral point of view summary. What could possibly go wrong?

[5] Which has some scary stuff, like not being able to deny a friend request.

[6] Invitation links have some very unexpected behavior: everybody who accepts via the same link gets connected as friends, with no option to approve. Once again, what could possibly go wrong?

[7] For example, when I shared an earlier draft of this on Facebook, somebody took exception to my classifying Jordan Peterson as “a mainstay” of the IDW. So for a while the Facebook thread — which was supposed to be discussing WT:Social — turned into an argument about whether or not Peterson aligns with white supremacists, how misogynistic and anti-trans he is or isn’t, what some see as a pattern of passing off bullshit as “scientific studies”, and so on.

[8] Although I’ve cancelled future payments

[9] Of course, MeWe has challenges of its own. See Inside MeWe, Where Anti-Vaxxers and Conspiracy Theorists Thrive.

Algorithmic Glass Ceilings and Gendered Echo Chambers: “Bias Amplification” in Social Networks

A pair of recent papers highlights how today’s social networks not only reflect societal biases, but can actually amplify them.

Ana-Andreea Stoica et. al.’s Algorithmic glass ceiling in social networks: the effects of social recommendations on network diversity looks at the effect of “social recommendations” such as friend suggestions and people to follow, both at the theoretical level and empirically on Instagram. The authors find that “prominent social recommendation algorithms can exacerbate the under-representation of certain demographic groups at the top of the social hierarchy.” More specifically:

Our mathematical analysis demonstrates the existence of an algorithmic glass ceiling that exhibits all the properties of the metaphorical social barrier that hinders groups like women or people of colour from attaining equal representation.

One would a priori expect similarity metrics, usually the basis of recommender systems, to contribute to sustaining disparities among various groups. We show much more: using empirical evidence from newly collected data on Instagram and a rigorous analysis of mathematical models, we prove that prominent recommender algorithms reinforce the rate at which disparity grows.

The first couple of sections of the paper are a quick read, after which it gets into some heavy-duty math. Fortunately, Kim Martineau’s How Social Networking Sites May Discriminate Against Women on Columbia News, is a good summary; and Adrian Collyer, on the ACM’s The morning paper, walks through the paper in detail.

The underlying dynamic here of homophily — people’s tendency to prefer to interact with people similar to themselves — isn’t new. Neither is the idea of a “glass ceiling” in social media,* or realization that algorithmic recommendations reflect societal biases.** What’s important about this paper is both the formal model and the experimental results showing bias amplification.

Meanwhile, Nikki Usher et al‘s Twitter Makes It Worse: Political Journalists, looks at “beltway journalists’ peer-to-peer relationships on Twitter—or how journalists use the platform to legitimate, amplify, and engage each other,” and similarly finds substantial evidence of gender bias. In particular:

Most alarming is that male journalists amplify and engage male peers almost exclusively, while female journalists tend to engage most with each other. The significant support for claims of gender asymmetry as well as evidence of gender silos are findings that not only underscore the importance of further research but also suggest overarching consequences for the structure of contemporary political communication.

Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here!

* see for example Susan Herring et. al.’s classic 2003 paper Women and children last: the discursive construction of Weblogs and Shirin Nilizadeh et. al.’s 2016 Twitter’s Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility.

** recent books like Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality have plenty of examples; here’s a 2011 post from me focusing on TechMeme‘s recommendation algorithms

Mastodon: 14 perspectives on a breakthrough month

April was a big month for Mastodon, the open-source, decentralized, ad-free Twitter alternative. As lead developer Eugen Rochko says

Twitter changed the reply system, which everybody told them they shouldn’t do, and then removed the iconic egg avatar for new users, and suddenly all of my work of telling people that one day Twitter would do something they didn’t like and they’d need a viable alternative paid off.

Yeah really! By the end of the month, Mastodon had grown to over 500,000 users, over 1,000 instances, hundreds of contributors to the code base, and funding for a developer and project manager. Exciting times!

Of course, rapid growth can cause challenges as well. Can Mastodon keep its anti-harassment, pro-furry, pro-LGBTQ+, anti-Nazi focus as it grows? What to do about content that’s acceptable by some instances but illegal elsewhere? Is the influx of new people who don’t understand the network’s culture the start of an “Eternal April”, like Usenet’s Eternal September?*

There’s certainly a lot to learn from this last month. Before sharing my own thoughts, I wanted to start with a bunch of other perspectives I found very useful. These are organized mostly-chronologically, so you can get a sense of how the month played out – although I put Eugen’s April Post-Mortem at the end, to give him the last word.

Mastodon Is Like Twitter Without Nazis, So Why Are We Not Using It? by Sarah Jeong in Motherboard (April 4), describes her experiences in late March and early April just as things started to heat up. Her summary of the culture: “it’s really more of an LGBTQ-oriented space, one with a lot of anime avatars and a lot of furries.” Her conclusion: “And judging by the chatter on the federated timeline, a lot of people have found a home here. Mastodon, I think, is here to stay.”

What I wish I knew before joining Mastodon, by Qina Liu on HackerNoon (April 9), uses Harry Potter gifs as part of an excellent getting-started guide. Since then, Mastodon has implemented some onboarding screens that should help new people, and introduced new functionality as well, but most of what’s here is still very relevant.

Mastodon, pineapples, social media and other unanswered questions, by Johanna Drott (April 9), captures the sense of possibilities — and the challenging questions. “What is interesting is that the sense of early 90s cyberoptimism has started to reappear. It is possible to do things again, to change things, to build things that will make a difference…. What can and ought we do to establish sustainable social norms? How do we live together without breaking one another?”

Transforming Tech with Diversity-Friendly Software, by me, from a presentation on April 13 at TRANSform Tech, includes a look at Mastodon’s early membership (gay communist furries, LGBTQ+ people), attention to harrasment, early significant advances over the state of the art like content warnings.

From Witches to Dolphins, These Are the Communities That Make Mastodon Great by Sarah Jeong in Motherboard (April 14), looks at “the top five instances of Mastodon, according to me, as judged by completely meaningless criteria that I refuse to disclose”: mstdn.jp, kirakiratter.com, botsin.space, oulipo.social (which prohibits “that fifth symbol, or any variant of it, that is found in Latin script, including using “3” or homographic symbols in its spot”) and dolphin.town (“the e’s have to go somewhere”).

The Normal Invasion (April 16–17), an epic tootstorm by @dredmorbius@mastodon.cloud, suggests that Mastodon’s initial quirkiness and welcoming to certain non-mainstream communities will inevitably be lost as the community grows.

What No One Else Has Told You About Mastodon, by Ryan Parreno (April 17), discusses the challenges of getting discovered and gentrification. “If you poke into the site now, you may not recognize it but the older users are fighting for control over the community from the newbies. Will gay-friendly Mastodon survive? Or can we build a better community in its place?”

Is Mastodon the new social media star, or imploding black hole?, by Eileen Brown on ZDNet (April 17), looks at the current status of Mastodon and the “fediverse”, and concludes that while Twitter and Facebook don’t need to worry about their ad revenue, Mastodon isn’t going away. “In the last seven days I have had more meaningful interactions with my few Mastodon followers there than I have over the last year with the passive followers I have on Twitter.”

*The graph of the fediverse — Liaizon Wakest. Mastodon is the lower left structure.*

Mastodon : un autre Twitter est possible (in French) by Amaelle Guiton in Libération, on April 19 looks at the reality, challenges, and possibilities as of mid-April, with excellent observations from Cthulhu 2017, suggesting that it’s off to a more promising start than other alternative social networks like Diaspora*, and Corentin on communities around values.

Mourning Mastodon and Mourning What Now? by Allie Hart (April 22–23) look in more depth at the power structure and ways in which queer people are increasingly being marginalized (as well as other diversity isssues). “Had Mastodon given queer contributors the ability to make executive decisions regarding the project, the community could have reached a place where it was no longer in peril.”

pixivのマストドン参入の理由と可能性についてPawooプロダクトマネージャーが語る — ログミー (Pixiv’s Pawoo Person Speaks) (in Japanese), on Logmi (April 25), a transcription of a talk by Tomio Shimizu of Pawoo.net, discusses what Pixiv is planning on doing with its Mastodon integration. Matthew Skala’s Mastodon WTF Timeline (in English) has some useful background on this.

The Bits and Bytes of Mastodon (in Dutch), by Ninah Marie on De Weg Naar, (April 25), looks at the network as sparking a “giant international multicultural chatbox”, has a great set tips and tricks, and in a postscript talks about how professionals might use Mastodon.

>Laure Lucchesi : “Nous voulons tenter l’aventure du réseau social Mastodon”(in French), Acteurs publics (April 28): an interview with the director of the French government agency Etalab discssing why they’ve set up a Mastodon instance for French government employees.

April Post-Mortem, by Mastodon lead developer Eugen Rochko (April 25) looks at the month and the current state of Mastodon.

There was plenty of other good stuff written as well, but these should be enough to get you started.

Coming soon: Lessons from #EternalApril

* I first heard the term “Eternal April” from Roza Shanina. Kit Redgrave and gravity conscious orb both used it early the month; and no doubt others have as well.