danah boyd's SXSW Edu keynote, What Hath We Wrought? builds on her essay from 2017 about the relationship of media literacy education to the rise of conspiracy theories and the great epistemological rift in which significant numbers of people believe things that are clearly untrue, from climate denial to flat-earthing.

Since the earliest days of Facebook, social scientists have sent up warnings saying that the ability to maintain separate "contexts" (where you reveal different aspects of yourself to different people) was key to creating and maintaining meaningful relationships, but Mark Zuckerberg ignored this advice, insisting that everyone be identified only by their real names and present a single identity to everyone in their lives, because anything else was "two-faced."

danah boyd (previously) writes enthusiastically about Virginia Eubanks's forthcoming book, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, which she calls "the best ethnography I've read in years," "on par with Barbara Ehrenreich's 'Nickel and Dimed' or Matthew Desmond's 'Evicted.'"

Danah Boyd from Data & Society writes, "The report examines why the media was vulnerable to manipulation from radicalized groups that have emerged from a variety of internet subcultures. We're seeing an intentional and systematic attack on institutions and information intermediaries and most folks are unaware of the degree to which they are a pawn in others' gameplay. — Read the rest

danah boyd writes, "Yesterday, a group of us at Data & Society put out six essays on 'media, technology, politics.' Taken
together, these pieces address different facets of the current public
conversation surrounding propaganda, hate speech, and the US election.
Although we only allude to specifics, we have been witnessing
mis/disinformation campaigns for quite some time as different networks
seek to manipulate both old and new media, shape political discourse,
and undermine trust in institutions and information intermediaries. — Read the rest

Sonia Livingstone, an LSE social psychology prof, gives us a peek into the results from The Class, a year-long, deep research project into the digital lives and habits of a class of 13 year olds at an ordinary school.

danah boyd nails it: "We blame technology, rather than work, to understand why children engage with screens in the first place."

Brett "Remix Manifesto" Gaylor tells the story of his new project: a revolutionary "mashup documentary" about privacy and the Web.

danah boyd responds to A Teenager's View on Social Media (written by an actual teen), pointing out that what white, affluent boys do with social media is not a full account of "how teens use the Internet.

danah boyd points out that when kids conduct their social lives in commercial spaces, it's not because they don't care about selling out; it's because they have no other option: "In a world where they have limited physical mobility and few places to go, they're deeply appreciative of any space that will accept them."

The US paperback of my novel Homeland comes out today, and I've written an open letter to teenagers for Tor.com to celebrate it: You Are Not a Digital Native. I used the opportunity to draw a connection between kids being told that as "digital natives," everything they do embodies some mystical truth about what the Internet is for, and the way that surveillance companies like Facebook suck up their personal data by the truckload and excuse themselves by saying "digital natives" have demonstrated that privacy is dead. — Read the rest

Kathryn Mills reports that discussion has become dominated by unconvincing 'experts' and scaremongering. The evidence is not in.

The respected Crimes Against Children Research Center reports that one in seven children is sexually exploited online. This figure is both credible and alarming. But the context is vital: as danah boyd writes, the average predator isn't a twisted older man trawling for kids; rather, "most children are sexually solicited by their classmates, peers, or young adults just a few years older than they are." — Read the rest

Last week, I wrote about danah boyd's analysis of the White House's Big Data report [PDF]. Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has added its analysis to the discussion. EFF finds much to like about the report, but raises two very important points:

* The report assumes that you won't be able to opt out of leaving behind personal information and implicitly dismisses the value of privacy tools like ad blockers, Do Not Track, Tor, etc

* The report is strangely silent on the relationship between Big Data and mass surveillance, except to the extent that it equates whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden with the Fort Hood shooter, lumping them all in as "internal threats"

Danah boyd, founder of the critical Big Data think/do tank Data and Society, writes about the work she did with the White House on Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values [PDF]. Boyd and her team convened a conference called The Social, Cultural & Ethical Dimensions of "Big Data" (read the proceedings here), and fed the conclusions from that event back to the White House for its report. — Read the rest

Sociologist danah boyd's long-awaited first book, It's
Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, hits shelves
today. boyd is one of the preeminent scholars of the way young people
— especially marginalized young people of diverse economic and racial
backgrounds, as well as diverse gender and sexual orientation — use
the Internet, and her work has been cited here regularly for her
sharp observations and her overwhelming empathy for her subjects. — Read the rest

Outstanding social scientist danah boyd has founded a new thinktank (or "think/do-tank") called The Data & Society Research Institute, based in New York City, and devoted to critical analysis of big data, and "social, technical, ethical, legal, and policy issues that are emerging because of data-centric technological development." — Read the rest

Danah boyd has a great summary of the new Pew report on Teens, Social Media, and Privacy. The whole thing is worth a read — especially her thoughts on race and social media use — but the most interesting stuff was about "social steganography" — smuggling meaning past grown-ups through the clever use of in-jokes and obscure references (this is also something that Chinese net-users do to get past their national censors):

My favorite finding of Pew's is that 58% of teens cloak their messages either through inside jokes or other obscure references, with more older teens (62%) engaging in this practice than younger teens (46%).

danah boyd sez, "Researchers who focus on technology's role in human trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of minors teamed up to create a short primer for technologists who are trying to do the right thing. This high-level overview is intended to shed light on some of the most salient misconceptions about human trafficking and provide some key insights that will be useful for anyone who is trying to build tools to intervene. — Read the rest

I've signed the Declaration of Internet Freedom, a short, to-to-point manifesto for a free and open Internet. It's attracted some very august signatories, including Amnesty International, Hackers and Founders, Global Voices, Mozilla, the NY Tech Meetup, Personal Democracy, Fight for the Future, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Aaron Swartz and Jonathan Zittrain. — Read the rest