@patrickokeefe
💼 Online community management, content moderation, trust and safety, policy, product 🏗️ Built: D2C, membership, streaming products 🏢 Past: CNN, Warner Bros. Discovery 📚 Author: Managing Online Forums 🎙️ Host: @communitysignal.bsky.social 📍 Hollywood
"Before they were legends, they were brothers."
The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel. March 20. Netflix.
From the doc team, including @blammoair.bsky.social.
Noem's new job sounds like Special Intelligence Bilateral Envoy for the Reliable Immunity of the Americas, aka SIBERIA.
Ugh. Sorry.
You might be familiar with the Jon Hamm dancing meme. But what you probably don't know is that my toddler PJ heard it, and it is now one of his favorite songs. Here's the PJ mix.
Outstanding statement from @anthropic.com today.
In addition to standing up for the private sector and all Americans, they also know what DOD may soon find out: the government can't conscript a labor force that doesn't want to be conscripted.
As we explain: www.ifyoucankeepit.org/p/a-steel-mi...
An orange graphic for the 57th NAACP Image Awards announcing "Winners Night Three" over a subtle, translucent image of the award trophy. It lists the winners for four categories: "Sinners" (Andy Gill) for Outstanding Stunt Ensemble (Television or Film), "Love, Brooklyn" for Outstanding Independent Motion Picture, "Souleymane's Story" for Outstanding International Motion Picture, and "Being Eddie" for Outstanding Documentary (Film).
A promotional poster for the Netflix documentary "Being Eddie." The main image is a close-up, color portrait of Eddie Murphy looking directly at the camera with a slight smile. The background is a collage of black-and-white film contact sheet frames showing Murphy making various facial expressions. Text on the poster reads "A Netflix Documentary," followed by "being eddie" in large yellow letters, and "Only on Netflix | November 12" at the bottom.
Being Eddie won the Outstanding Documentary (Film) award at the 57th NAACP Image Awards! Congrats to everyone who worked on the film, including the Netflix doc team and @blammoair.bsky.social!
James Cameron stinks.
... why wouldn't they just ban the portal?
1. I don't care what the feature set of the Third Reich is or how good their UI/UX people are. I'm not using it.
2. Good gracious, man. They power email newsletters. Yes, they have layered some "social" over it, but let's not pretend they cured cancer here.
Use. Something. Else.
Anyway, I was reading the comments on a post about this and someone said something akin to, "I signed up to Substack for the feature set. I'd leave if I found someone else with the feature set."
Two things.
The whole "Substack profits from nazis" thing is making rounds again.
It's 100% true, and I'm always glad to see this one swing around the sun because people need to know. At this point in 2026, there is *no one* at Substack who has clean hands. This will follow them for the rest of their lives.
Yes, I know this pain. It's odd to me how the options it gives aren't periodically updated to sync with job titles people include in actual LinkedIn job posts. I have "community manager" as one of my titles, if you can believe that. 🙂 I'm not even interested in those jobs, I just want the relevancy.
Breaking: Trump told Palm Beach police chief 'everyone' knew about Epstein and 'evil' Maxwell www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...
While there is nothing stopping them from doing that now, repealing 230 kicks us more readily down that road, increasing the fear that small community and platform operators will have, for both their freedom and their lives. But more importantly, it creates an easy legal pathway to do so.
Try to create a safe community for trans people? You're harming children. What about one for Black people? You're racist. What if you banned knitting patterns related to Trump, as Ravelry did? That's discrimination. And on and on. Insert your own examples here.
If they can't find a legal way to do so, they will use the official governmental social media channels of the United States to cast these platforms in the worst possible light, sending unstable people to these platforms and the offices and homes of people who operate them.
Many small communities and platforms are volunteer-led with little, if any, budget. Trump will pay people to be full-time bullies to smaller orgs until they simply give up. And they will. Even if they want to fight, they'll need fundraising campaigns and/or pro bono representation to have any hope.
These errors will be weaponized into broken laws. If you want to sift through a million forum posts to find one where a law might have been broken, you'll probably find it. Using this to penalize or threaten the platform or community operator will be easy, aided by our tax dollars.
For online communities or platforms that have attracted their ire or are simply in their way, the Trump admin will analyze their content, looking for the potentially inappropriate or embarrassing posts their moderation has missed. These "errors" are inevitable. It is silly to pretend otherwise.
This despite the fact that Trump was convicted for falsifying business records to hide hush money payments that impacted the 2016 election. He is renowned for discriminatory housing practices, bilking contractors, and acts like he has Section 230 immunity for things that come out of his own mouth.
In response, the Trump administration will take an approach similar to what they have done to Adam Schiff, Leticia James, and Lisa Cook. They'll look for moderation "mistakes" that people make every day, ones that many people would consider relatively harmless, understandable errors on paper.
Second, you'll see what I will call the "mortgage fraudification" of websites. Where Facebook and co. will fall in-line for profits and favorable legislation that harms their competition, smaller platforms won't do that. They'll make principled stands for their communities.
Once 230 goes, it's reasonable to assume the Trump admin will seize on it. I see two big things. First, they will bring the big platforms even further in-line. Zuckerberg, Musk, etc. are already essentially in Trump's pocket. But if you think it's bad now, just wait. Vulnerable groups will suffer.
As I've said before, if there was ever not a time to repeal 230, this is it. Trump's brand of authoritarianism is on the rise. Though they don't need Gordon-Levitt to get rid of 230 (they might already have the votes, who knows?), as long as 230 is on the books, it is an impediment to Trump.
It's just weird because he operates a platform where people can post user-generated content, and he'd suddenly be liable for all of that content if 230 went away. Is he not involved in moderation at all? I am certain many experienced people have tried talking with him and have been dismissed.
I'm trying to better understand what Joseph Gordon-Levitt is advocating for with Section 230. Initially, I figured he must have a solution in mind. But it doesn't seem like he has one? It seems like he just wants a full repeal and then hopes people figure it out over the following two years???
I really liked Queen of Chess. It's an interesting story, well-told, and Kasparov serves as such a fascinating foil to Polgár.
A black-and-white promotional poster for the Netflix documentary "Queen of Chess." The image features a close-up of Judit Polgár staring intensely at the viewer, her face framed by her own blurred hands in the foreground. The title "QUEEN OF CHESS" appears in large white letters across her chest, with "A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY" at the top and "ONLY ON NETFLIX | FEBRUARY 6" at the bottom.
"Her skills forced the chess world to check its attitude about gender and genius. Get to know the game-changing grandmaster Judit Polgár in this documentary."
Queen of Chess is out today on Netflix, from the doc team @blammoair.bsky.social is on.
Just because the bigotry is overwhelming does not mean each act of bigotry is not worth noting.
But there are two ends of a rope that are constantly being pulled. On one, we have the constant lack of surprise expressed by many. "How can anyone be surprised?" On the other end is not letting deeply harmful things pass by, just because it's not the first time, the worst time, the right time, etc.
