***THREAD***

I’ve been on the phone with colleagues about the hack all morning. None of us can figure out why #CISA chose this particular response to the breach. Couple of things struck us as curious.

The agencies targeted are not responding how you might expect...

More from Internet

We’ve spent the last ten months building #CitizenBrowser, a project that aims to peek inside the Black Box of social media algorithms, by building a nationwide panel to share data with us. Today, we are publishing our first story from the project. /1

.@corintxt crunched the numbers and found that after Facebook flipped the switch for political ads, partisan content elbowed out reputable news outlets in our panelists’ news feeds.
https://t.co/Z0kibSBeQZ /2

You can learn more in our methodology, where we describe how we did this and what steps we took to ensure that we preserved the panelists' privacy. https://t.co/UYbTXAjy5i /3

Personally, this project is the culmination of years of experiments trying to figure out how to collect data from social media platforms in a way that can lead to meaningful reporting. I’ve described a couple of highlights below 👇 /4

My first attempt was in 2016 at Propublica, when I was working with @JuliaAngwin . We were interested in seeing if there was a difference in the Ad interests FB disclosed to users in their settings and the interests they showed to marketers. /5

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.