iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

and of how a concern with "safety" is made compatible with the disruption ethos of Silicon Valley. i tried to answer this drawing from interviews with T&S professionals and observation at industry conferences. here's the link, open access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

i have a new paper out in Social Media+Society about Trust & Safety specialists! 📝 i argue that they construct online harms by presenting themselves as advocates for users, creating risks, and publicizing this work. my goal was to make sense of the inherent instability of T&S work...

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

successfully found this borges banger dedication, by the way

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

just had google search’s autocomplete fill out “we live in times” with “we live in times where objective thinking dominates.” the phrase doesn't appear anywhere on the searchable internet. i don't think it means anything. fascinating.

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

reporting from the field to say that Claude Design has reached CS conference poster designs which are now all becoming conspicuously beige and using suspiciously tasteful type combinations. we haven’t seen a seismic change in scientific aesthetics like this since the introduction of latex.

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Reposted by Tomás G.

Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 31/03/2026

bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-man... a) amazing investigation of something you won't have consciously noticed but immediately realise is true and b) brilliant example of how game design is interaction design is safety design

bethmathews.substack.com

Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green

The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green

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Reposted by Tomás G.

Kate Sim @katejsim.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Latest from me and @juliapowles.bsky.social for @projectsyndicate.bsky.social on the social media ban and age-checks: It's not just that this proposal is faulty, unreliable, and unfit for purpose. It's actively harmful. www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/onl...

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

eBay's story shows how the cyberlibertarian dream died: founder Pierre Omidyar’s (left) vision of a self-governing community was supplanted by ex-Bain Meg Whitman’s (right) idea of a well-lit marketplace. an emerging discipline called “Trust and Safety” would come to synthesize both.

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

my (first!) article, “From the virtual community to ‘Trust and Safety’: eBay (1995–2007) and the rise of platform governance” is out on Big Data & Society! it is a history of content moderation at eBay, where they coined the term Trust and Safety 🌐 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Article abstract: Early enthusiasts imagined a cyberspace free from centralized control. Today, Internet platforms surveil and regulate user activity through systematic governance mechanisms, including content moderation. This article examines how centralized control became the taken-for-granted solution to platform challenges, a shift that abandoned the dream of self-governance. By analyzing the rise of “Trust and Safety” at eBay between 1995 and 2007, I show that platform governance emerged to align eBay with corporate pressures as it transitioned from a startup to a public, multinational corporation. Trust and Safety at eBay came to designate a department, a discipline, and a philosophical approach to questions concerning the governance of users, synthesizing two competing visions: Pierre Omidyar's cyberlibertarian ideal of community self-governance through mutual surveillance, and Meg Whitman's corporate vision of a centrally regulated “well-lit marketplace.” Drawing on internal and external company documents, I demonstrate how Trust and Safety provided a moral justification for centralized governance by framing corporate vigilance as user protection, making control of users compatible with the “community” ethos of early Internet culture. As an early commercial platform, eBay acted as a laboratory for platform governance, where the visions and practices of Trust and Safety were developed and then exported to other major platforms.

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Reposted by Tomás G.

Becca Lewis @beccalew.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Everyone should read @tomasgna.bsky.social's brilliant article about eBay and its creation of centralized "trust and safety" efforts!!! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

latour's/jim johnson's sociology of a door closer! or derrida's the animal that therefore i am

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

fantastic article by federico perelmuter (not here yet!) in @parapraxismag.bsky.social on the depoliticization of psychoanalysis in argentina

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

two images i hope to talk about -- marcos galperin's mythical founding site of mercadolibre in a parking garage, and this very emblematic and random photo shoot with ebay's pierre omidyar and meg whitman.

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Tomás G. @tomasgna.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

hello blueskiers! reporting here to say i’ll be in #aoir2025, presenting a paper on latin american startup entrepreneurs (which got the honorable mention for best paper award 🥳) and another one about the history of “trust and safety” at eBay (and everywhere!) 📦 excited about the panels, rio, all!

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