{"id":44232,"date":"2022-12-17T13:15:05","date_gmt":"2022-12-17T18:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sciencebusiness.technewslit.com\/?p=44232"},"modified":"2022-12-17T13:15:05","modified_gmt":"2022-12-17T18:15:05","slug":"bye-bye-bluebird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/technewslit.com\/sciencebusiness\/?p=44232","title":{"rendered":"Bye-Bye Bluebird"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Mountain<\/a>
Mountain bluebird (A. Kotok)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

17 Dec. 2022. Sharp-eyed readers of Science & Enterprise may have noticed that in mid-November we removed our Twitter feed display in the right-hand column. Yesterday, we decided to leave Twitter altogether and deactivated our account.<\/p>\n

Twitter and its increasingly erratic owner Elon Musk has been making headlines recently, with the latest stunt being the tossing, then reinstating of several journalists<\/a>. Apparently, Musk didn’t like some reporters digging into the way he conducts business or his management style. Later, Twitter stopped connecting links to Mastodon<\/a>, the open-standards social media site, including the link to the Mastodon page of our parent company, Technology News and Literature. (The tech news site Gizmodo<\/a> has been quite good at covering this sorry saga.)<\/p>\n

At that point, I decided enough was enough. In mid-November, I began to doubt the viability of Twitter when Musk laid off half of his engineering staff<\/a>, after blocking the work of its content monitors<\/a>, the people watching for violence, conspiracies, or hate speech. Many advertisers, who don’t want their products or services displayed in proximity with that stuff began bailing on Twitter<\/a>. When Twitter canceled the accounts of respected journalists and blocked our link to Mastodon, I decided to pull out as well.<\/p>\n

While we’re not advertisers, we don’t want the display of our work anywhere near Musk’s crackpot fantasies. Last week, Musk called for the prosecution<\/a> of retiring NIAID director Anthony Fauci, then leveled another gratuitous shot<\/a> at immunologist Peter Hotez at Texas Children’s Hospital. Hotez’s crime in Musk’s eyes is apparently developing an inexpensive vaccine protecting against Covid-19 disease, which we covered on Science & Enterprise<\/a> a year ago.<\/p>\n

How long before Musk begins to attack other news reports about vaccines? We’ve got better things to do than wait around and find out.<\/p>\n

Science & Enterprise still has its Facebook fan page<\/a>, where we post summaries and links to our stories, as well as my LinkedIn page<\/a>. As mentioned earlier, we’re also on Mastodon<\/a>, a social network built on the ActivityPub<\/a> recommendation, an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. Musk has plenty to fear from Mastodon. Like the Web itself, no one owns Mastodon. It operates with a compatible collection of interconnected servers call instances. Any person or group operating a Mastodon instance must pledge<\/a> to moderate against hate speech, make daily back-ups, and give at least three months notice if shutting down.<\/p>\n

We’ve now removed all links to Twitter from Science & Enterprise, including through social media sharing. Bye-bye Bluebird. It’s been fun.<\/p>\n

– Alan Kotok<\/p>\n

We designed Science & Enterprise for busy readers including investors, researchers, entrepreneurs, and students. Except for a narrow cookies and privacy strip for first-time visitors, we have no pop-ups blocking the entire page, nor distracting animated GIF graphics. If you want to subscribe for daily email alerts, you can do that here<\/a>, or find the link in the upper left-hand corner of the desktop page. The site is free, with no paywall. But, of course, donations are gratefully accepted.<\/p>\n

[wpedon id=”42724″ align=”center”]<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 *<\/p>\n

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