the evil of Twitter

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oranges33
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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by oranges33 » Mon May 09, 2022 10:46 am

Twitter also for whatever reason, gives enormous power to far-right-wingers and powerful interests.

If they don't get banned, they tend to succeed on that platform, more than others, no matter how many obstacles Twitter throws their way.

I don't know why that is honestly. I would not argue the same is true of Facebook and Reddit, or even free-speech platforms like Fediverse.

One guess is Twitter, by design, gives disproportionate voice to powerful people and those who aggressively brand. And the far-right puts more effort into branding than the far left.

Another is that far-right-wingers tend to thrive on anonymity, and Twitter offers both awful sock-puppetry control, and more anonymity than most places. In theory, if Musk ID's everyone like he said he would, that could be a blow to far-right-wingers and accounts representing legally-sketchy people currently cheering on Elon. Depends on how he implements it.

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by ericbarbour » Tue May 10, 2022 1:53 am

oranges33 wrote:
Mon May 09, 2022 10:46 am
Another is that far-right-wingers tend to thrive on anonymity, and Twitter offers both awful sock-puppetry control, and more anonymity than most places. In theory, if Musk ID's everyone like he said he would, that could be a blow to far-right-wingers and accounts representing legally-sketchy people currently cheering on Elon. Depends on how he implements it.
Like Facebook, they have also tolerated numerous Russian government sockpuppets, plus socks operated by various other countries. Google it if you have the patience.

This is why the WMF and Twatter share employees back and forth: WMF projects and Twatter are giant sock drawers, run by loonies.
The solution to all of the faults of the fediverse, is the fediverse telling users to 'run their own instance' of the Fediverse, instead of complaining about other instances. This seems to be not worth it. The Fediverse is apparently overrun with child pornography, and hosting a portal to the Fediverse means anyone can route child porn through your server. And as any server owner knows, that is a nightmare scenario.
Any links to examples?

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by oranges33 » Tue May 10, 2022 8:45 pm

ericbarbour wrote:
Tue May 10, 2022 1:53 am
Any links to examples?
Well it's basically public hearsay as I'm not going looking for seedy Fediverse instances
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14158565
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showt ... id=3942967

Corgski from SomethingAwful.com said the following for example about Plemora, a Fediverse hosting software, but it would apply to any current Fediverse hosting software is my guess
"I hosted a pleroma instance for a short while and I will never do it again. Updating blacklists to block out the nazis and "free speech" was a near daily task and once I ran across a stupidly long list of child porn-hosting mastodon/pleroma instances that needed to be added to my blacklist I said gently caress it and made my instance whitelist only, defeating the entire supposed goal of the fediverse. A few months later I pulled it offline entirely because it saw gently caress all traffic and I didn't have the time or energy to moderate it, nor did I want the liability of people potentially using it to distribute disgusting things."
The Fediverse is sort of like Twitter + email. A technology anyone can use for a wide variety of activities. Because anyone can host an instance, there will inevitably be criminals and seedy people using it. The question is, how can you avoid that stuff?

From what I can gather, if you host your own Fediverse instance, anyone can search for anything in the entire Fediverse on your server, and then whatever junk they search for will come back with your IP, just because you host a portal. I'm not 100% sure that's how it works, but I'm pretty sure.

Although a server owner isn't necessarily breaking the law if someone does illegal shit on their server against the server owners rules, it'd be annoying to have to explain to a law enforcement or a judge wtf the "fediverse" and "federated social media" is. A lot of those people probably don't understand what a web server is. If a protocol or web service is bad at keeping child porn from emerging and spreading, I try to stay away.

Like Corgski said, a server owner, could, in theory, limit what users can access on their server by going for a 'whitelist' approach to other fediverse instances, rather than a 'blacklist' approach. This makes the fediverse a bit more safe to use, but one could not be able to keep up with adding new legal instances to whitelist.

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by wexter » Sat Jul 09, 2022 10:15 pm

Some similarities I see between Wikipedia and Twitter
--Very few folks creating content
--Folks consuming information as entertainment
--Lots of Bots and Socks
--Tons of low quality information
--Marketing
--Value of metadata
--Limited value of the platform
----IMHO Wikipedia has negative value
----Twitter has no value, or perhaps $16 a share

Similarities have/are obvious

https://thewikipedian.net/2016/02/08/co ... wikipedia/

Google has attached itself to Wikipedia like an intubaition device; Twitter is not so lucky

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/twitt ... n-relevant

Image
Wikipedia - "Barely competent and paranoid. There’s a hell of a combination."

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Aug 13, 2022 11:15 pm

This was "charming"

J.K. Rowling posted on Twitter her horror at the recent attack on Salman Rushdie. (Remember, he was stabbed in the face, for writing a book 35 years ago that offended some Muslims.) And this was one of the responses.
rowling-threat.jpeg
rowling-threat.jpeg (38.82 KiB) Viewed 1616 times
Apparently nothing "legally material" will be done to Mr. Aziz, because he's in Pakistan right now. But Twitter did kill his account quickly. (As in, it took them several hours....)

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1 ... 5284481024

Yes it made the news--an all-out HELLSTORM in fact.
https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/j ... ath-threat
https://deadline.com/2022/08/rowling-de ... 235091660/
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-w ... t-27733292
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/13/jk-row ... ack-threat

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Feb 20, 2023 9:51 pm

Should you ever be insane enough to want to be the Premier of Alberta, do what Danielle Smith did. Hire a "professional sockpuppeteer" to run bots and drown Twitter with phony followers. Despite being a disliked conservative, it worked for her. This time.

Shortly after this gent posted his analysis of the fake Smith followers (but not because of it since there had been days of warnings), Twitter disabled the API that made his analysis possible. Musk is "probably" mismanaging it, although it WAS mismanaged before him anyway.

https://twitter.com/SeanDunn10/status/1 ... 7082307584

maybe she hired this guy?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/ ... -tal-hanan

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Feb 27, 2023 9:38 pm

Just another example of a "pro journalist" watching Twitter for something scandalous to report.
Nothing to see here, keep moving.

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/ ... 234687349/

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by Strelnikov » Mon Mar 13, 2023 5:16 am

Twitter might collapse as a website this month because they fired another 200 engineers recently. During the Oscars, the site was hard to deal with. They have tweaked the algorithm so that you run across a lot more blue-check GOP ranters, and a lot of the people I follow have already set up Mastodon accounts as a hedge if Twitter implodes.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by ericbarbour » Sat Mar 18, 2023 12:10 am

This is hilarious to me.
https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/si ... ntrum.html
Sacks’ podcast co-host Jason Calanacis worked a bit harder for it and spent days posting incessantly that there must be a bailout or else the entire economy would die. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, Calanacis prostrated himself without shame and fomented hysteria about a bank run—probably making the very banking contagion he was warning about more likely.

I WATCHED PEOPLE TELL ME SVB WAS FINE, THEN FRB WAS FINE… WHILE MORE INTELLIGENT/CUT THROAT FOLKS WERE WIRING OUT OF BOTH PLACES — THIS IS THE PRISONERS DILEMMA
— @jason (@Jason) March 12, 2023

Who knows if the hysteria made the difference, but on Sunday, the FDIC announced it would be backstopping SVB and providing full access to all depositors to their funds on Monday. The VCs could rest their Twitter thumbs.
Yes, Calacanis did carpet-bomb Twitter over the weekend with increasingly-bizarre rants in ALL CAPS. I just had to log into my useless Twitter account to mock him. Fuckin' techbros.
https://twitter.com/metasonix/status/16 ... 0768862209

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Re: the evil of Twitter

Post by ericbarbour » Mon Apr 10, 2023 7:58 pm

Not only did he paint over the "w" on the Twitter sign
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-twitter-h ... 1850318181
and change the bird logo to a doge
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/compani ... r-AA19wbUZ

but he also changed Twit code so you couldn't search for "Substack"--because apparently Lordo Elon doesn't like Substack.
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-feu ... 023-4?op=1

I tried it yesterday and yep:
twitter-blocks-substack-searches.png
twitter-blocks-substack-searches.png (102.72 KiB) Viewed 990 times

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