A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
I can no longer tolerate the environment of tolerance for a wide range of speech that Elon Musk has established on Twitter. It is time to leave for Mastodon. Who’s with me?
It looks as though there is already a “Philip” using the service. So my username will be @PhilipTheSecond@Of.Mastodon
Related:
Full post, including commentsFastCompany says that Apple and Google will kill Twitter by removing the app from their respective monopoly stores if they see anything on Twitter that they don’t like.
Twitter, obviously, will remove anything and anyone that the company deems objectionable. Historically this was people who did not follow the Democratic Party line, e.g., the New York Post for the Hunter Biden laptop story.
“Twitter must comply with Europe’s platform rules, EU digital chief warns Musk in virtual meeting” (CNN Business):
… the social media platform must take significant steps to comply with EU content moderation laws, …
Twitter has “huge work ahead” to meet its obligations under the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new platform regulation, said Thierry Breton, the EU’s digital chief, in a readout of his meeting with Musk.
“Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation and protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising,” Breton said…
I would love to learn about this law! To “protect freedom of speech”, it is necessary for a service to prevent anyone from speaking in a way that the European Union bureaucrats don’t like (“reinforce content moderation”)? And who decides what is “disinformation” that violates EU law? Sticking with the Hunter Biden laptop story, above, all of the Washington, D.C. expert insiders said that it was disinformation. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say” (Politico, just before the 2020 election on 10/19/2020):
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings.
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
While there has been no immediate indication of Russian involvement in the release of emails the Post obtained, its general thrust mirrors a narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies have described as part of an active Russian disinformation effort aimed at denigrating Biden’s candidacy.
Facebook hasn’t faced the same scrutiny, perhaps because they are still censoring in accordance with the ruling politicians’ wishes. But they could also be taken down by the smartphone duopoly or the EU.
In summary, there are now at least four filters through which content must pass before it can be distributed via the only practical modern means of reaching a substantial number of people. Folks in China might have more practical freedom of speech because there are only two filters: the operator of a service and the government.
This is an interesting illustration of how the early Internet nerds’ predictions turned out to be 100 percent wrong. None of them would have imagined a world in which there was no practical way to sell a book if a single bookstore (Amazon) didn’t like it and in which multiple bureaucracies exercised veto power over the online existence of any individual user and his or her (there was just two gender IDs back then) speech.
My question is why the same standards aren’t applied to web sites and email. Google and Apple can program their browsers to reject attempts to visit web sites that contain disinformation, e.g., that COVID vaccines do not prevent infection and transmission. Or at least augment web pages with context, as Twitter and Facebook already do. Google and Apple also control email systems. Why allow Deplorables to share misinformation and disinformation via email? The idea is that the companies, out of the goodness of their corporate hearts, will ensure online safety when on Facebook and Twitter, but will make zero attempt to prevent people from being led astray when reading email? How does that make sense? At a minimum, shouldn’t Gmail add context? If a personal friend gets an email from Rochelle Walensky about becoming sick with COVID a month after receiving the bivalent booster, Gmail could display “MISSING CONTEXT. The latest bivalent COVID boosters have been proven to protect against all SARS-CoV-2 variants. Visit cdc.gov for more information about COVID.” If someone is reading about how New York State is #1 in the nation in percent of residents’ income taxed away to fund state and local government, Safari could add a banner “Visit www.governor.ny.gov to learn how New York provides abortion care and protects you from gun violence with the taxes that you pay.”
Sculpture from the Louvre below titled “EU online safety expert deplatforms Nick Fuentes.”
It has been a month since Elon Musk closed his acquisition of Twitter. Changes are happening at a fast pace, potentially proving SR-71 pilot Paul Crickmore’s point “You’ve never been lost until you’ve been lost at Mach 3.”
According to President Biden, this is a platform for lies. FoxBusiness:
President Biden mentioned Elon Musk and Twitter during a fundraiser Friday night …
“Elon Musk goes out and buys an outlet that sends — that spews lies all across the world,” Biden remarked. “There are no editors anymore in America. There are no editors.”
The president seemed to suggest there was no longer any moderation on Twitter, a claim echoed by several others on the platform who are also critical of Musk.
“How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake? What is at stake? So there’s a lot going on, a lot going on. But we have an enormous opportunity, enormous opportunity,” Biden added.
Biden’s comments soon after a White House tweet bragging about the Social Security cost-of-living increase was flagged by Twitter for lacking “context.” The White House later deleted the tweet.
If there are lies there must also be truth, right? Here are some lies that ultimately resulted in Marjorie Taylor Greene being “permanently suspended” from Twitter:
The Truth at the time (August 2021) was that vaccines do prevent infection and spread of COVID-19. As of November 5, 2022, the above tweet remained inaccessible via a search for “the fda should not approve the covid vaccines (from:mtgreenee)”. Twitter returned the following screen:
For those who sought to read something critical of the Federal government, in other words, Twitter reminded them to cease their thoughtcrime and read only official Federal government sites.
I guess it was fair to say that there was a Ministry of Truth operating within Twitter in August 2021 and even earlier this month.
But if Joe Biden and the rest of the U.S. government want Twitter to prevent lies from being published, does it makes sense for each social media platform to decide what is a lie and what is the truth? Advertisers are supposedly demanding that Twitter eliminate lies from its platform (yet the cash-seeking Democrat running against Ron DeSantis was allowed to lie with impunity; see Twitter won’t suspend a politician who lies to get money?), but how can they have confidence unless Twitter follows an official source of truth and flags anything that contradicts that source? We don’t want Facebook and Twitter to have different concepts of lie vs. truth, do we?
Related:
In a document written, I think, well before the Elon Musk takeover, Twitter wanted to hit the following quotas:
(Grammar police: Not “WHOM you work with?”)
They already had 46 percent “women”.
So they just needed to fire men and non-binary workers in order to achieve the 2025 dream in 2022. (Note that the quota of 50% for “women” necessarily meant that “men” would be less than half of the workforce because at least some of the workers would identify with the other 72 gender IDs recognized by Science.)
I wonder what Twitter meant for “At least a quarter of our US Tweepforce will be under-represented populations”. Would “over 60” be “under-represented”? How about 2SLGBTQQIA+? Members of the LGBTQIA+ were 13.5 percent of the workers before Black Friday:
If LGBTQIA+ qualifies as “under-represented”, Twitter could have filled its 25% quota simply by firing only workers who admitted to cisgender heterosexuality.
Who wants to guess what the diversity stats will look like the next time they’re released? (Or maybe part of Dark Elon’s plan was to fire the people who prepare these stats?)
Speaking of quotas, the United Nations is working toward a quota of 0% for the killing of journalists identifying as “women” (alternatively, a quota of 100% for the killing of journalists identifying with gender IDs other than “women”).
Elon Musk fired a lot of people from Twitter today (CNN). But the advertisers are leaving even faster, now that there is the potential for users to utter misinformation, e.g., that COVID-19 “vaccines” don’t prevent infection and transmission.
Appeasement doesn’t work, apparently. Government-funded General Motors and Pfizer, for example, will no longer advertise on a platform that allows people to say things that are contrary to what the Biden administration wants residents of the U.S. to hear.
Let’s look at the overall quality of the product that the pre-rightsizing crew developed. Suppose that we are searching to see if Kanye West has been unpersoned. A search for “kanye west” does not yield Kanye West’s profile:
How about “@kanyewest” as a search string?
What if we type “kanye west twitter profile” into the Google?
There is an account and it exactly matches one of our search strings (“@kanyewest”), but Twitter couldn’t find it! Maybe this is because Google hired everyone competent? Bing also shows the @kanyewest account as the number 1 result. So does Duck Duck Go.
How soon do we think we can start seeing the kind of big improvements in Twitter that a good product manager could drive, e.g., “If you type ‘Kanye West’ it has to return Kanye West’s account as the first result.”
How did Elon Musk and team zero in on the low-productivity workers? You’d think it would take a few months for new management to figure out which programmers on the search team were the good ones.
Also, when do we get a high-quality remake of the following:
Elon Musk can play himself.
Some lines:
Update, November 5:
Twitter banned Marjorie Taylor Greene for saying, without seeking cash, that the COVID-19 “vaccine” did not prevent infection and transmission (CNN). Let’s look at a politician who asks for money and supports his request by saying that he’s 1% behind in the polls:
Charlie Crist and ActBlue wouldn’t lie to us, surely? The FiveThirtyEight summary of the polls, captured on November 1:
The $5 sought doesn’t seem as though it would help bridge the 8-14-point gap in the polls. More likely, Crist would need the miraculous help of Christ in order for Science (with the explicit promise of mask orders, forced vaccination, school closures, and lockdowns) to prevail.
Why aren’t Crist and ActBlue deplatformed for spreading misinformation, particularly since they seem to be spreading misinformation in order to get money.
Maybe the argument is that Representative Greene was putting lives at risk spreading misinformation about COVID-19 by falsely claiming that the pandemic-ending vaccines would not end the pandemic. But people with less money live shorter lives. Every person who donates to Charlie Crist can expect to live a slightly shorter life as a result. Maybe the sacrifice of lives would be worth it in order to avoid the Nakba of a second DeSantis term. But if there is no practical chance of a Crist victory, lives will be shortened without any compensating benefit.
Full post, including commentsHere are frames that Facebook offers me. #1, of course, perhaps based on my search history, is a “Pride 2022” frame. If we expand the selection to include frames created by Facebook affiliates, such as the U.S. Government, there is a rich selection of COVID-19 vaccination frames:
Monkeypox is a global health emergency, according to WHO. Why doesn’t Facebook offer us the chance to express pride in our monkeypox vaccination status?
In the Department of Vaccine Pride, here’s one from a month ago:
And then a month later… “CDC director tests positive for COVID-19” (NBC).
Full post, including commentsHere’s a Facebook profile photo of a person in the San Francisco Bay Area software industry (UC Berkeley grad and former academic!) whom Facebook thinks would want to be friends with me:
Of course, it is good that he/she/ze/they got his/her/zir/their first COVID-19 vaccine shot. That’s something we can bond over. But if the purpose of these profile photos is to encourage people to comply with CDC instructions, no matter how absurd or in conflict with what the Science-following European technocrats have decided (e.g., no vaccines or boosters if you’re under 50 in Denmark), shouldn’t there be a frame for those who’ve gotten what is, I think, their 5th shot?
What’s in this person’s feed? Rage against “Judge Qannon” who is being too friendly to Donald Trump. A note about a female identifying Italian Prime Minister: “Sudden realization: Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister of Italy in 1922.” More about the aftermath of Joe Biden’s raid on Donald Trump’s house. Rage against the illegitimate Supreme Court: “For the record, four of the current court Justices (including the Chief) were nominated by Presidents who lost the popular vote. At least three were confirmed by a Senate majority that represented a minority of the US population. And it was THAT Court that decided that, hey, we don’t like a half-century of American jurisprudence.” Praise for the Inflation Reduction Act (timely, considering that my friends in Berkeley say they’re paying $7 per gallon for gasoline). More rage against Trump. Something about Matt Gaetz going to prison for having sex with “children” (age of consent in Science-following Maskachusetts is 16; were there cash-oriented ladies younger than 16 hanging around Matt Gaetz and getting paid to work?). Rage against the Supreme Court for allowing a state to impose a 15-week limit on abortion care for pregnant people. Excitement that a person identifying as a “woman” has an important job in the U.S. Navy. (answering the question Are women the new children?) COVID-19 statistics and how the vaccinated are impervious to death via SARS-CoV-2. Rage against “Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for her unilateral decision to overturn the mask mandate.” (It is not always glorious when those who identify as female hold important jobs.)
How about a frame that says “I got my 5th booster and I’m as healthy as the Pfizer CEO“?
Full post, including commentsIt has been about 1.5 years since “Facebook lifts ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made” (Guardian, May 27, 2021):
Facebook has lifted a ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made, following a resurgence of interest in the “lab leak” theory of the disease’s onset.
The social network says its new policy comes “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin”.
In February, Facebook explicitly banned the claim, as part of a broad policy update aimed at “removing more false claims about Covid-19 and vaccines”. In a public statement at the time, it said: “Following consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines.”
What’s the truth this week? Due to my failure to become a virologist, I express no opinion on the origin of this or any other virus. What about people who are virologists? Fortunately, there are still plenty of limits on what they can say:
Facebook is keen to ensure that a change in one rule doesn’t lead to a free-for-all for Covid misinformation. On the same day that it lifted the ban on lab-leak theories, it tightened up restrictions on users who “repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook”.
What could happen to ruin this happy marriage between Science and censorship? “Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?” (Atlantic, 9/28/2022):
Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can’t moderate the content on their platforms.
Part of this fiasco touches on the debate around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, despite its political-lightning-rod status, makes it extremely clear that websites have editorial control. “Section 230 tells platforms, ‘You’re not the author of what people on your platform put up, but that doesn’t mean you can’t clean up your own yard and get rid of stuff you don’t like.’ That has served the internet very well,” Dan Novack, a First Amendment attorney, told me. In effect, it allows websites that host third-party content to determine whether they want a family-friendly community or an edgy and chaotic one. This, Masnick argued, is what makes the internet useful, and Section 230 has “set up the ground rules in which all manner of experimentation happens online,” even if it’s also responsible for quite a bit of the internet’s toxicity too.
What do we think will happen? Until this Texas situation arose, Facebook was immune under Section 230 from the liability that a publisher or speaker would have, but the company also could enforce an editorial point of view on whatever topics it chose. It has enjoyed the immunity of a phone company with, actually, tighter control of point of view than the New York Times (which sometimes invites a Republican or fake Republican onto the editorial page just to stir things up). It seems too good to be true, but maybe Facebook is big, rich, and influential enough to hold onto this status?
A young relative’s Facebook account was hijacked (via social engineering) and below is my message exchange with the new person behind the old persona. The hijacker initially asked for my mobile number, presumably hoping to complete the conversation via text message instead of on Facebook. I was immediately suspicious given that we were already in an application that allows text, voice, and video. When the request was for $100 I knew that it was a scam because 100 Bidies rounds to $0 in 2022 purchasing power.
I am a little confused…
Fortuitously, it turns out that I am good friends with Tito Rodrigueze:
The hijacking victim’s mom spent days trying to recover the account. Facebook is not easy to deal with, it seems.
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