Monthly Archives: June 2020

National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell said Juneteenth will be recognized as a league holiday and ordered the closing of the league office, according to a memo obtained by CNBC Friday.

In the memo, Goodell said he wants staff to use June 19 as a day to reflect on our past but, more importantly, consider how each one of us can continue to show up and band together to work toward a better future.

Juneteenth celebrated the official end of slavery in the U.S. after the Civil War ended in 1865, despite the freedom of slaves via the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Goodell said the historical event weighs even more heavily today in the current climate.

The May 25 death of George Floyd continues to plague the country, sparking renewed conversation around police brutality and racial and social injustice against Black people.

Last Friday, the NFL also made headlines when Goodell issued an apology to NFL players who kneeled during the national anthem to bring awareness to social injustices against the Black community. The NFL also upped its donation to $250 million over 10 years for social justice causes.

Other companies like Twitter, Square, and Nike also announced plans this week to make Juneteenth a holiday. Goodell said in the memo that the date not only marks the end of slavery in the United States, but it also symbolizes freedom.

A freedom that was delayed, and brutally resisted; and though decades of progress followed, a freedom for which we must continue to fight, Goodell wrote.

Jabari Young, CNBC

Jabari Young is a national sports business reporter for CNBC.

Excerpt from:

The NFL joins Nike and Twitter in making Juneteenth a company holiday - NBC News

Twitter said Tuesday it is bringing Fleets, its version of Stories that lets users post ephemeral content to its social network, to India. The company says it is still testing the feature, which is also available to users in Brazil and Italy.

Fleets arent private stories, but its Twitters way to allow users to share things that are less accessible to the world. As my colleague Sarah Perez described recently, anyone can visit someones public Twitter profile and tap to view their Fleets, which, like Stories on other platforms, sit at the top of the screen. But Fleet wont circulate on Twitters network, show up in Search or Moments, and it cant be embedded on a third-party website.

Were testing a way for you to think out loud without the Likes, Retweets, or replies, called Fleets! Best part? They disappear after 24 hours, Twitter India said in a tweet.

India, the worlds second-largest internet market, is a key overseas nation for several American technology companies. Twitter had about 55 million active users in India in the month of April, according to mobile insight firm App Annie and shared by an industry executive. In comparison, Facebook has over 350 million monthly active users in India, and Google reaches just as large audience.

This is the first time in several years that Twitter is timely bringing a feature to India or doing anything noteworthy in this Asian market, where its platform has been scrutinised for not taking swift action on spread of misinformation and abusive messages.

India is important for Twitter since it is one of our largest and fastest-growing audience markets globally. We are excited to bring the Fleets experiment to India and make it one of the first three countries in the world to experience this new product, said Manish Maheshwari, Managing Director at Twitter India, in a statement.

From the test in India, well learn how adding a new mode of conversation changes the way Indians engage on Twitter. Itll also be interesting to see if it further amplifies the diversity of usage by allowing people to share what theyre thinking in a way that is light-touch and light-hearted, he added.

Twitter is perhaps the last major social platform to explore Stories, a feature conceptualised by Snapchat. Stories format has since replicated by Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube. Spotify also recently announced that it was testinga Stories-like feature and even Skype, Match and Bumbletried their hand.

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Twitter brings Fleets, its version of Stories, to India - TechCrunch

Twitter is working on a new system for verifying users, according to a tweet by reverse engineer and online sleuth Jane Manchun Wong. She discovered a request verification field in the Twitter app in the personal information section of the apps settings.

Twitter confirmed Wongs tweet but declined to comment further. The companys help page still says its verified account program is on hold, and we are not accepting any new requests at this time, however. So its not clear when Twitter may reopen verification to users or what the new process may entail.

Twitter used to add a blue check next to the names of accounts it had verified as authentic, and that were of public interest. Although Twitter originally stated that a verified badge did not imply a formal endorsement by the company, it has since acknowledged that there was some confusion over the purpose of the badge and what it represents.

The verification process was paused in 2017 after widespread outcry over the companys decision to give a blue check to a white supremacist who tweeted disparaging comments about Heather Heyer, a woman killed during the 2017 Charlottesville rally.

Twitter said in 2018 it didnt have the bandwidth to continue work on the verification system, and instead shifted focus to election integrity. It attempted to verify candidates on primary ballots and elected officials but with mixed results. And earlier this year, Twitter started granting blue checks to public health officials to give authenticity to their tweets about COVID-19.

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Twitter is working to bring back verification - The Verge

Credit: Chase Sutton , Ava Cruz

Amid protests across the country, a global pandemic, and nearly a dozen primary elections, seven words on Twitter made national news. For the first time, the social media platform called out 1968 Wharton graduate and United States President Donald Trump for spreading misinformation to his 82 million Twitter followers.

Get the facts about mail-in ballots, the Twitter addendum read which prompted Trump not only to accuse the platform of election rigging, but to issue an executive order aiming to weaken social media companies.

Twitter's label linked to an article entitled, Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud, followed by a list of bullet points refuting the claim that mail-in balloting was fraudulent.

For years, Twitter has passively watched the president use its platform as a bullhorn to antagonize political rivals and spread misinformation, including recent tweets about how Democratic governors handled Black Lives Matter protests, and how Michigan planned to "illegally" send absentee ballots to millions of citizens for this year's primary and general elections.

In response to Twitter's added correction, Trump tweeted hours later that the media platform was interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election, and doubled down on his claim that mail-in ballots would lead to corruption and fraudulent voting.

"Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH, and I, as President, will not allow it to happen!" Trump wrote in the May 26 Twitter thread.

Trump also noted that the article Twitter linked to was contributed by, as he said, "Fake News CNN."

Twitter's methodology of linking to an article by a news organization was "not the way you go about fact-checking," Eugene Kiely, who is the director of Penn-affiliated FactCheck.org, said. When fact-checking, Kiely said it is key to cite primary sources or experts in the given field, rather than news organizations.

FactCheck.org, a project of the University's Annenberg Public Policy Center, was founded in 2003 and is an independent, non-partisan organization that aims to provide voters with accurate and fact-checked information based on politicians campaign ads, social media posts, speeches, and other methods of voter outreach.

In FactCheck.orgs article rebutting the information in Trump's tweets, author and Managing Editor Lori Robertson cited a University of California, Irvine political science professor who published a book about voter fraud and a law professor at the University of Maryland who is considered an expert on the subject.

Twitter is just moving into [fact-checking]. We havent seen Twitter put fact-checking labels on any tweets before, Robertson said in an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian.

FactCheck.org has not worked with Twitter, but it does work directly with Facebook, which has a history of fact-checking posts.

Following the 2016 election, Facebook partnered with six fact-checking agencies, including FactCheck.org, in an effort to curb the spread of viral misinformation. Kiely said the partnership came as a result of the BuzzFeed News report showing that viral fake news stories outperformed professional news in the final weeks of the 2016 election. In the weeks leading up to the election, 17 of the 20 highest performing false election news stories were overtly pro-Trump or anti-former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the report showed.

At the time, that news was coming from God knows where some from Russia, some from Macedonia, some from people just looking to make a buck for writing a click bait headline, Kiely said. From the start, the [partnership with Facebook] was created to fact-check fake news.

Throughout the four-year long partnership, the way in which Facebook has displayed fact-checked posts has changed multiple times.

Until December 2017, Facebook marked articles that contained misinformation with disputed flags that appeared beside the posts. In December 2017, the company changed its policy and began attaching related articles to posts deemed not to contain fact-based information.

Shortly thereafter, Facebook again changed its policy and began to conceal fact-checked posts with a transparent grey box and a warning message which states that the uploaded post has been fact-checked by an independent fact-checking organization and contains false information. This remains Facebook's policy surrounding misinformation posts.

Facebook, however, does not permit fact-checking on politicians accounts.

What I would suggest is a hybrid [of these policies], which Facebook has not agreed to do. We would bring back the reference articles for politicians, rather than applying the system that they now have in place [with the obscured post]," Kiely said. Rather than just ignoring what politicians say, we could be able to provide Facebook with information so that they could provide reference articles for users.

In an effort to follow through on his promise to protect the First Amendment right to free speech, Trump signed an executive order two days after the Twitter addendums had been placed, on May 28, that aims to weaken social media companies.

Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, social media sites are protected against libelous information posted on their sites. With Trumps new executive order, however, these protections would disappear. While many initially viewed the order as an attack on free speech, Trump said by adding information to posts with false information only some of the time, Twitter is an editor with a viewpoint."

Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, wrote in an email to The Daily Pennsylvanian that Trumps executive order is a government action, so it is constrained by the First Amendment, and there will certainly be legal challenges.

He added that U.S. courts have been cautious to add restrictions to social media companies over the years, and that the executive order is unprecedented and grounds for fresh debate on the role of government restrictions on social media.

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Were seeing mounting pressures for [social media companies] to do more, Smith wrote. The Libertarian spirit that characterized the early days of social media has grown less popular with the rise of fake news and hate speech.

Conservative pundits have long claimed that social media companies unevenly target their posts and accounts, as compared to liberals, with misinformation flags and bans. Trump's executive order works alongside this claim, in that it would open social media companies to lawsuits from users posting untrue information.

Itll be interesting to see how far [Twitter] takes [fact-checking], Kiely said. Its a big undertaking to fact-check everything on Twitter, so itll be interesting to see how much more fact-checking we will see from them, not just on the president, but on anyone.

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Trump vs. Twitter: How the tech giant's clash with POTUS brings fact-checking to the fore - The Daily Pennsylvanian

The future of gaming is almost here. But Twitter is always here.

Sony revealed the PlayStation 5 during a June 11 live video after months of speculation and delays.The show, which lasted just over an hour, featured tons of game trailers, but no specifics as it pertains to the price,reveal date, features and more.

But the one thing Sony did show was the console's design, which looks futuristic (and fancy).

MORE: A complete guide to the Sony PS5

If you notice a little difference, that's because there is: the console on the left has a disc drive, while the one on the right is solely digital and will house game and content downloads solely. There's expected to be a bit of a price difference between the two, but nothing official yet.

The system once again looks to feature a lot of vents, the ability to be placed vertically or horizontally and signature lighting on it. While the system specs were detailed in a March video, the console architecture of it has yet to be announced.

Needless to say, Twitter was reacting to the design of the console accordingly, with loads of humor:

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Sony's PlayStation 5 design has Twitter bringing out the jokes - Sporting News

In February, I declared, somewhat winkingly, that Twitter is real life. My argument was not that what happens on that social media website is broadly representative of popular opinion but that what happens on Twitter is a good barometer of enthusiasm around movement-building and fandoms. And that elites tend to undervalue or dismiss what happens on the platform, suggesting that those loud voices making them uncomfortable arent accurate indicators of lived experiences.

Since, Ive received a steady stream of gloating emails about how wrong I was. After all, I cited Senator Bernie Sanderss online movement for the Democratic presidential nomination, powered in large part by Twitter, as a primary example of this insurgent force and referred to the candidate as arguably now the Democratic front-runner. Not two weeks later, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Joe Biden, effectively cementing him as the Democratic Partys nominee. If Twitter was actually real life, surely it would be Mr. Sanders doing virtual town halls from his basement campaign headquarters, not Mr. Biden.

The power of online movements has been at the front of my mind the past two weeks as Americans have gathered by the tens of thousands to protest police and state violence against black people. Millions, too, have followed along on their screens, amplifying protest messages, sharing donation links and expressing solidarity. Online platforms, especially Twitter, have become like security camera grids, each with images of a dystopia, my Times colleague Jenna Wortham wrote last week of the images of police violence against peaceful protesters.

Those images appear, at last, to be having a sweeping effect on our public consciousness of racial inequality and injustice, especially in regard to police violence. The most urgent filmmaking anybodys doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones, Wesley Morris, a Times critic at large, wrote last week.

For black activists and their allies, the only thing new about this experience is its widespread public recognition. This movements rallying cry Black Lives Matter was coined as a hashtag in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of Trayvon Martins murder, and scholars have been studying the internets central role in amplifying protest movements and racial inequality since before that.

Social media participation becomes a key site from which to contest mainstream media silences and the long history of state-sanctioned violence against racialized populations, Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa wrote in 2015 in a hashtag ethnography of the Ferguson protests.

They cite early hashtag movements like #HandsUpDontShoot and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown as entry points into larger and more complex worlds that helped illustrate that #Ferguson is everywhere not only in the sense of a broad public sphere but also in the sense of the underlying social and political relationships that haunt the nation as a whole.

But as the activism dominated social media, it did not necessarily have large-scale public support. A 2017 Harvard-Harris poll suggested 57 percent of registered voters had an unfavorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement. And yet, these conversations didnt disappear off the internet when they left front pages. They were there all along, in plain view for those who sought them out. They continued, despite portrayals to discredit the movement as a violent fringe and specious claims that systemic racism is a myth perpetuated by the media and so-called social justice warriors.

But what begins online and is castigated as an unrepresentative view gradually builds consensus, in this case, tracking to our current moment. When, at last, it reaches critical mass it is treated as conventional wisdom by those who once dismissed it. According to a new Times analysis, in the last two weeks, American voters support for the Black Lives Matter movement increased almost as much as it had in the preceding two years. As my Opinion colleague Aisha Harris wrote on Tuesday, all of a sudden, everybody seems to care about black lives.

The undergirding movement and struggle has been there the whole time. It was an articulation of a better future, even when it fell on unlistening ears. It was real life.

Theres a similar argument to be made for the insurgent-left politics of Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Throughout the primaries, centrist Democrats argued that the senators ideas were overindexed on places like Twitter but considered on the fringe and unpalatable to most Americans. But since Senator Sanders dropped out of the race in April, his policies have resonated beyond his base. Now staring down a pandemic, mass unemployment and a potential depression, centrists have mused publicly about a health care system like Medicare for All that doesnt tie insurance to employers.

Similarly, the Sanders campaigns racial justice reforms and intersectional economic programs now appear more acceptable to a political establishment that dismissed the proposals as unrealistic and radical. Twitters left-leaning politics werent (slightly) ahead of the times they were merely disregarded as implausible or not representative. Or as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor at The New Yorker declared just before he left the race, Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders.

This cycle is beginning to play out again during the George Floyd protests, where protesters have adopted a new rallying cry: Defund the Police. The demand has been met with scorn by the president and conservatives, and anxiety by centrist and establishment Democrats. The Biden campaign has rejected it as a bridge too far. Journalists and news outlets have qualified it suggesting its merely an aggressive statement of support for reprioritizing police funding.

Of course, for tens of thousands marching in the streets waving #DefundThePolice signs, the phrase is not a dog whistle; its a bullhorn. It is, like Medicare for All, a call for a complete reimagining of what they see as a corrupt, broken system. The argument is, quite literally, to defund the police and build a healthier public safety system from scratch while investing that money in other adjacent community-support resources.

An argument about Twitter or any part of the internet as real life is frequently an argument about what voices matter in our national conversation. Not just which arguments are in the bounds of acceptable public discourse, but also which ideas are considered as legitimate for mass adoption. It is a conversation about the politics of the possible. That conversation has many gatekeepers politicians, the press, institutions of all kinds. And frequently they lack creativity.

Many times our politics and our political imagination is limited by our politicians. I think people who could do more to try to imagine a different political world often times are obsessed with the filibuster, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates said last week on a podcast about reimagining the police state. Im not saying the filibuster isnt important. But Im saying that theres one group of people who have to be concerned about that but theres another group of people who also should think long term. What do we want? What are the guiding lights?

Right now, in the midst of a series of cascading, intersecting crises (racial and economic inequality, climate change, mass unemployment, a pandemic), whats possible feels like more of an open question than in recent memory. But that possibility, while life-affirming for many, is deeply threatening to some: the rich, and the white and powerful, to name a few. And those who feel threatened will try to demean the ideas. Theyll be met with eye rolls as the out-of-step activism of the hyperpolitical Twitter fringes or the ramblings of the woke, coddled campus kids. Implicit here is that Twitter and the campus are siloed spaces away from reality.

Which is what makes the events of the past two weeks of mass protests so powerful. The marching in the streets, the waving of signs and defiant chanting as well as the choking tear gas and the grotesque shows of police force they are positively, indisputably, physically real. And it is further proof that the online spaces that helped to galvanize these movements have always been rooted in reality. Its just one that many refused to open their eyes to.

Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) is an Opinion writer at large.

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The Floyd Protests Show That Twitter Is Real Life - The New York Times

Amazon and Twitter are both successful companies that evolved from very humble beginnings.

One started as an online bookshop, while the other was a "microblogging" service that limited posts to 140 characters.

Although they hardly overlap in functionality, they each followed one common rule to grow and eventually dominate their worlds: Gall's Law.

The law comes from US author Robert Gall, who wrote a book called "General Systemantics" in the 1970s.

The idea is that a good complex system always originates from a foolproof smaller system.

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked, reads the often-quoted passage.

"A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system."

Both Amazon and Twitter followed this philosophy to stop their systems from getting bloated with annoying features. They added new functionality as they witnessed customer behaviours.

Twitter, when it started in 2006, only allowed users to publish posts of maximum 140 characters nothing more, nothing less.

It had no retweet, reply or hashtagging functions.

According to a CBInsights report, it was only after users tried to mimic retweeting and replying within the constraints of the system when the company introduced them as functionality.

"As co-founder Evan Williams put it, it wasnt even clear 'what [Twitter] was' in those early days, and the product took several turns before settling on what it is now," stated CBInsights in its report.

It wouldn't have been far-fetched for Twitter to have thought users might want sharing and replying.

"But cultivating an openness to what users actually did, rather than assuming they knew exactly what to build, was key to how Twitter developed into the product it would become."

So what happens if you try to put in all the bells and whistles too quickly?

ICQ is what you have.

Older folks would remember ICQ in the 1990s as the first messaging and arguably a social media product that found mainstream fame.

The software caught fire with the public late last century and boasted more than 100 million accounts at its peak in 2001, according to CBInsights, during a time when not everyone had home internet access.

Then it all went downhill.

"ICQ started branching out from its core utility by adding features around shopping, music, games, and even careers resulting in a busy interface that felt removed from the purpose of the product," stated the CBInsights report.

Just a few years later, Facebook took its place in the zeitgeist where ordinary people connected online.

Dropbox co-founder and chief Drew Houston gave his take in 2010 while answering a question on Quora.

"ICQ became so comically bloated that they released an 'ICQ Lite' version, but by then they were already on the decline," he said.

"In fact, feature bloat is how most consumer web and desktop products suffocate themselves: portals (Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc), social networks aside from Facebook (Friendster, MySpace), file sharing (Kazaa vs Kazaa Lite) and media players (Winamp)."

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The rule that took Amazon and Twitter from startups to mega businesses - Yahoo Finance Australia

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgersechoed President Donald Trumps frustration with Twitter after the president signed an executive order May 28 targeting a key legal protection social media companies rely on, but the Spokane Republican said she has concerns about the federal government deciding what they allow on their platforms.

The presidents move was made in apparent retaliation after Twitter, in a first, added fact-checking labels to two of his tweets May 27. The order targets a 1996 law that shields companies from liability for content posted on their platforms. Legal experts say that, although the order may not hold up in court, it may already havedealt a blow to free speech online.

The law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, also lets tech companies decide what content should be removed from their platforms. Trump has long alleged that companies like Facebook and Twitter discriminate against conservatives in their moderation policies.

McMorris Rodgers backed Trumps criticism of the company.

I certainly share a lot of the presidents frustrations with Twitters policies, the Spokane Republican said. Theyve focused on President Trumps tweets and then they ignore propaganda from authoritarian regimes like the Chinese Communist Party, that goes unchallenged.

On May 27, after the New York Post pressed Twitter on this point, the company added similar labels to months-old tweets by a Chinese government spokesperson promoting a conspiracy theory that the U.S. military exported COVID-19 to China.

But McMorris Rodgers, a member of the House committee charged with oversight of tech companies, offered a note of caution about the executive order, which directs federal agencies to clarify how Section 230 should apply and to investigate the content moderation policies of social media companies.

I also believe that we have to be really careful about unintended consequences as we move forward, she said. I have a lot of concerns about the federal government expanding its job in a way that they would be deciding whats OK or whats true.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., co-authored the Communications Decency Act when he was a congressman in 1996. In a virtual event hosted by the Aspen Institute on June 2, he described Section 230 as both a sword and a shield.

What 230 says is that users, not the website that hosts the content, are the ones responsible for what they post, he explained. Thats the shield. But we also gave the companies a sword so they could take down offensive content.

That sword allows companies like Twitter to remove posts that violate their policies, such as pornography and threats of violence. But what to do when the person violating those policies is the president?

The day after Trump issued his executive order, Twitter labeled another tweet. In it, he warned those protesting police violence across the country that when the looting starts, the shooting starts, echoing words uttered in the Civil Rights era by segregationist politician George Wallace and a Florida police chief who in 1967 said we dont mind being accused of police brutality.

Twitter went a step further this time, hiding the tweet unless a user clicks through a warning that reads, This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about glorifying violence. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the publics interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.

Yet even Twitter has been cautious, saying it wouldnt remove multiple tweets in which Trump suggested TV host and former congressman Joe Scarborough murdered a congressional staffer, despite the womans widower issuing a plea for the company to act. The conspiracy theory has been widely debunked, but in a statement Twitter said Trumps insinuations did not violate its policies.

Trumps executive order already faces a legal challenge after the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology filed a lawsuit June 2, alleging the move was unlawful retaliation against Twitter.

But Charles Duan, director of technology and innovation policy at the R Street Institute, a D.C. think tank that advocates for free markets, said the executive order may already have had its desired effect, pressuring companies to give the presidents posts special treatment.

Its the effect of basically trying to bully the social media companies into doing things that the president wants, he said. They know that the president can now impose large costs of litigation and large attorney fees on companies who say things that the president doesnt like.

I think thats going to make them somewhat more risk averse. I think that theyre going to be concerned about even doing things that appear to trigger the president, Duan said.

That pressure seems to have had an effect on Facebook. Last October, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress, If anyone, including a politician, is saying things that can cause, that is calling for violence or could risk imminent physical harm we will take that content down.

But speaking May 28 on CNBC, Zuckerberg said, I dont think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth.

At least two Facebook employees resigned in protest of Zuckerbergs response. At an emergency staff meeting June 2, the Washington Post reported, thousands of Facebook employees voted to ask the CEO, Can we please change our policies around political free speech?

Two other social media companies said last week that they would not give special treatment to the president. Snapchat announced it would no longer promote Trumps account, and a LinkedIn executive told staffers the platform would restrict the speech of any leader who violated rules about inciting violence.

Lawmakers have proposed reforms to Section 230 over the years presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has even called for it to be revoked entirely but McMorris Rodgers urged patience and said she favored changes through legislation rather than by the executive branch.

We shouldnt rush to make drastic changes to Section 230, she said, because I think its also really important for start-ups and new entrants to be able to have liability protection, and thats another way to hold Big Tech accountable.

Here is the original post:

McMorris Rodgers weighs in on Trumps spat with Twitter, Congresss role - The Spokesman-Review

When Twitter launched its swipeable, alternative news feeds, based on Twitter lists, last June, it also noted that it was working on a new way to help users find relevant Twitter lists, with a public collection of lists displayed by topic.

Now, Twitter appears to be close to launching that option, with a new List Discovery process spotted in testing.

As you can see in this example shared by @WFBrother(and posted by Matt Navarra), the new option would provide a display of various lists that you can follow, making it easier to connect with different topics of interest across the platform.

Users will be able to search the listings by topic, and follow any streams that they're interested in.

You could then pin those lists as your alternate feeds, providing more ways to utilize the option.

The listings, at present,seem fairly limited (only from Twitter Moments and verified members), but you would assume that the eventual plan would be to display all public lists within this directory, which could give users a huge range of options to choose from when looking at alternate, topic-focused following options.

Or there could be some further limitation on what lists are displayed. In the main screen above, the second point says that users can create and share lists with others. Right now, you can make your Twitter lists private, meaning all your non-private ones are public - but maybe, in future, there'll be another option which enables you to publish selected lists into this directory. That could help to ensure that only the better lists make it through.

It'll also be interesting to see if Twitter looks to moderate the lists in its directory, in order to ensure that users are discovering high-quality, relevant feeds.

That would likely be the ideal scenario, making it a more valuable, useful option. Twitter's been working to make lists and topics a key element, expanding the focus of the platform beyond simply following people, while also making it easier for new users to discover more relevant content. In that context, moderating this feed would likely be important -but that would also require additional labor commitment.

We'll have to wait and see, but it does look to be in the advanced stages of development.

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Twitter's Working on a New List Discovery Option as it Continues to Focus on Topics - Social Media Today

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All of a sudden, everybody seems to care about black lives.

Well not everybody, of course. But since the slow, recorded killing of George Floyd by Officer Derek Chauvin made headlines at the end of May, the floodgates have been kicked open. From Taylor Swift to Star Wars to your friends confessing their white privilege on Facebook, protecting black lives has been at the top of minds where it never seemed to exist before.

Yet some who have finally chosen to chime in and proclaim that yes, black lives matter, have been greeted by a pesky little critter best described as The Ghost of Racism Past. The Ghost exists in many forms, but on Black Twitter as of late, it has frequently taken on the shape of two simple words.

This you?

Brutally crisp and blatantly rhetorical, the phrase has become a catchall representing the internet currency of receipts, forcing bandwagon participants to confront things they might have said or done that seemingly contradict their newfound commitment to the cause.

The N.F.L. player Drew Brees, for instance, participated in the thoroughly muddled but hugely popular social media campaign Blackout Tuesday, tweeting a link to his Instagram page, where hed posted a black square to express solidarity with black people. A short and sweet This you? was waiting for him in the form of a users retweet, accompanied by a photo of a smiling Mr. Brees alongside President Trump and Melania Trump. (Until very recently, Mr. Brees had also been a vocal critic of football players kneeling to protest police brutality during the national anthem.)

The main account for H & M France tweeted, in French, support for black Americans. This you? a user retweeted, with an image of the retailers ad from 2018 featuring a black boy in a hoodie that reads Coolest Monkey in the Jungle.

The Baltimore Police Department tweeted photos of its officers kneeling with protesters. This you? someone retweeted, with a screenshot of a New York Times article featuring the mug shots of the Baltimore officers involved in the arrest of Freddie Gray, who died in their custody in 2015.

This you, Mark Wahlberg?

This you, Justin Bieber?

This you, Disney?

Usually this specter floats in the internet ether, left unacknowledged (at least directly) by the subject it haunts and taunts. But the rest of us see it and take note and sometimes add our own sassy tweets approving this swift undercutting of performative wokeness.

Certainly, this manner of exchange is nothing new for Twitter, where call-out culture has long reigned supreme, for better and for worse. But theres something especially apt right now about this particularly succinct framing, which, according to the website Know Your Meme, has morphed from merely catching a Twitter user in a mildly embarrassing act of deception to a mode of accountability for palling around with President Trump.

Its delectable. Its satisfying. Its a message.

A message for the moment, in which combating anti-blackness or rather wanting to appear as if one is combating anti-blackness is The Thing to do. In many ways, this wave of protests feels quite different from others: Anti-racist literature lists are being shared far and wide; inboxes are awash in carefully worded Very Special Emails from businesses espousing key phrases like racial disparities and We pledge to do better. Protests from city to city and country to country have carried on for many days now featuring Ben Affleck! and show little sign of slowing anytime soon.

Yet George Floyds death is not the first to be captured in a disturbing video and go viral. (See: Walter Scott, Philando Castile and Eric Garner, for starters.) And its not the first to spark widespread protests across the nation and even the globe (Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin). For those who have been doing the real work for some time, protesting is more than a trend.

This you? captures the sense among some that for all the attention given and demonstrating and donating that has occurred in the past two weeks, not much has changed yet. It taps into a feeling that these affirmations of black life by public figures and corporations alike are merely lip service for the time being, catching on the way trends often do if everyone cool is doing it, its finally safe for them to do, too. It highlights the hypocrisy and disconnect between actions and words, and does so in the infinitely shareable, memeable, retweetable syntax of the internet.

Thats its power. A detailed tweet revealing how a star who just announced #blacklivesmatter also has a history of mistreating her black colleagues is juicy to read. But a This you? retweet from a random user is like a simple alley-oop; it just hits differently.

Its a way to keep people and organizations in check, and nudge them to work harder to receive their cookies, to make it clear that this wont be easy for them, because it has never been easy for black people. A black square, a hashtag, a one-time donation alone isnt going to cut it and, frankly, is a very low bar to clear. Part of doing the work and moving forward is taking responsibility for the past. Weve only just begun.

Its a question, but not really. Everyone knows its you. They just want to make sure you know its you.

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This You? Is Twitters New Meme. Heres What Its All About. - The New York Times