Fair warning

Today marks Twitter's 10th anniversary, an occasion for us all to look back and sigh. What hath Twitter wrought in the past decade, really, besides trolls, tweetstorms, and keyboard gadflys? I *guess* it did give us Black Lives Matter. And the Arab Spring. And @darth. I'll let you divvy up the good/bad sides of that pie chart.

1. Twitter's most prolific user tweets mostly nonsense. And if THAT ain't a parable, I don't know what is. Since 2012, @Venethis has sent 37 million tweets, five times the amount of his nearest competitor. But no one knows just who he is, or what he's doing this for.

2. The Facebook groups that dox "snitches" and "rats." Thanks to social media, criminal informants face a new source of danger and harassment. Several dozen anti-snitching groups now exist to out CIs, regardless of their guilt or exact circumstances.

2. Who's more powerful: Uber, who owns nothing, or Uber drivers, who own their cars? Who do we think has more influence: the people who make books, or the website they sell them on? Luciano Floridi is an ethicist and philosopher with some provocative questions about power in the 21st century. (He asks more than he answers, though, so: fair warning!)

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Postscripts: Boaty McBoatface. Crazy Jewish mom. Way more compelling than an Apple live blog. Facebook for guns and lines of text I've clicked to exit ads. The Internet has indeed delivered: There's a puppy or bagel APP. The inherent bias of facial recognition. The queen of useless robots. How to be a lady on Twitter and what it feels like when computers take your job. Today, in Twitter beef: Elizabeth Warren v Trump and Gene Simmons v. Talib Kweli. Last but not least, a parting dispatch from a Web that was far less orderly.

See ya tomorrow!
@caitlindewey

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