A fascinating read from Monica Westin at Aeon:

One weekend in March 1995, a group of librarians and web technologists found themselves in Dublin, Ohio, arguing over what single label should be used to designate a person responsible for the intellectual content of any file that could be found on the world wide web. Many were in favour of using something generic and all-inclusive, such as ‘responsible agent’, but others argued for the label of ‘author’ as the most fundamental and intuitive way to describe the individual creating a document or work. The group then had to decide what to do about the roles of non-authors who also contributed to any given work, like editors and illustrators, without unnecessarily expanding the list. New labels were proposed, and the conversation started over.

The group was participating in a workshop hosted by the OCLC (then the Online Computer Library Center) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in an attempt to create a concise but comprehensive set of tags that could be added to every document, from text files to images and maps, that had been uploaded to the web. Arguments about these hypothetical tags raged over the course of the next few days and continued long into the night, often based on wildly different assumptions about the future of the internet. By Saturday afternoon, the workshop co-organiser Stu Weibel was in despair of ever being able to reach any kind of consensus. Yet by the end of the long weekend, the eclectic crowd had created a radical system for describing and discovering online content that still directly powers web search today, and which paved the way for how all content is labelled and discovered on the open web.

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Via BBC:

Social media companies have failed to stop “large-scale” Russian disinformation campaigns since the invasion of Ukraine, the EU has said.

The EU Commission’s report said the “reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts” had grown further in 2023.

Russian disinformation has increased on X, formerly Twitter, since Elon Musk bought the company, the report added.

The BBC has approached Twitter, Meta, TikTok and YouTube for comment, but has not received a response.

The study, published on Wednesday, looks at attempts to deal with Kremlin-backed disinformation and suggests the rise has been “driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards”.

The BBC has previously reported that accounts belonging to official Kremlin social media accounts have propagated false information about the war in Ukraine. 

“In absolute numbers, pro-Kremlin accounts continue to reach the largest audiences on Meta’s platforms. Meanwhile, the audience size for Kremlin-backed accounts more than tripled on Telegram,” the report found. 

The study also concluded that no platform consistently applied its terms of services in several eastern European languages.