Wikipedia Sucks!

Team YouTube
‏Verified account @TeamYouTube
4h4 hours ago

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The why, from team: “We send an invisible background notification to the app with badge counts (mainly unread notifications, DMs, etc.). The issue caused these notifications to become visible for a short period of time. We don't know exactly why, but quickly reverted.”

Strelnikov wrote:They still haven't said why YouTube crashed.

Dysklyver wrote:

Strelnikov wrote:They still haven't said why YouTube crashed.

Maybe they are just keeping quiet because it's something embarrassing or secret, but it is possible they don't actually know.

Strelnikov wrote:No, I think you are on to something - we know that there are large colonies of Indian and American children's video spammers on YouTube, possibly a series of 'bots dumped a huge cache of new crud videos on the system and it seized.

But if that is, in fact, the given, then the last thing that Twitter should be doing is policing decorum, or trying to leech hostility from the platform. Why? Because the appropriate response to overt racism, to anti-Semitism, to libel, to organized disinformation campaigns is not to politely reason with such in long threads of fact-sharing. All that does is lend a fundamental credence to the worst kind of speech—which, grievously, seems to be the paradigm that Twitter prefers at present. It’s a paradigm that offers two basic choices: Ignore the deplorati—which allows the dishonesty or cruelty to stand in public view and acquire the veneer of credibility by doing so. Or worse, engage in some measure of serious disputation with all manner of horseshit, which also grants trash the veneer of credibility. In 1935, the reply to Streicher or Goebbels quoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and asserting that Jews drink the blood of baptized Christian babies is not to begin arguing that “no, Jews do not drink Christian baby blood” and deliver a long explanation of The Protocols as a czarist forgery in chapter and verse. The correct response is to call Julius Streicher a submoronic piece of shit, marking him as such for the rest of the sentient, and move on to some more meaningful exchange of ideas. So it is with Twitter. If I’m gonna exist there, I’m not going to let the most rancid shit stand on my feed as if it’s plausible, but nor am I going to treat it as deserving of serious argument. I’m gonna call it out quickly and block—and do so with as much flair and performance as I can so at least the process won’t be boring. But effectively, what I am doing is marking the [land mines] for the rest of the platoon to block as well. It’s a permanent, quotidian task—but given that Twitter is not going to become a responsible news organization that fact-checks the commentary and regulates it on that basis, what else can we do?

For years I've been calling Jack Dorsey a slimy character and his creation a sewer. Now here's David Simon, one of the world's leading TV producers and owner of a MacArthur grant and a mountain of Emmy awards, saying the exact same thing.

According to the Times, western intelligence officials contacted the social media company, saying that the Saudi government was “grooming” one of its employees, Ali Alzabarah, “to spy on the accounts of dissidents and others.” Alzabarah worked at Twitter beginning in 2013 as an engineer with access to user accounts, and was convinced by Saudi intelligence officials to look into several accounts.

Once alerted, Twitter reportedly placed Alzabarah on administrative leave while an investigation took place, and while “they could not find evidence that he had handed over Twitter data to the Saudi government,” he was fired at the end of 2015. The company then notified a “few dozen accounts” that they might have been targeted. Following his dismissal, Alzabarah returned to Saudi Arabia.

ericbarbour wrote:Meh, "weird Twitter" isn't really weird enough, because it doesn't make up for shit like this:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/20/180 ... ployee-spy

According to the Times, western intelligence officials contacted the social media company, saying that the Saudi government was “grooming” one of its employees, Ali Alzabarah, “to spy on the accounts of dissidents and others.” Alzabarah worked at Twitter beginning in 2013 as an engineer with access to user accounts, and was convinced by Saudi intelligence officials to look into several accounts.

Once alerted, Twitter reportedly placed Alzabarah on administrative leave while an investigation took place, and while “they could not find evidence that he had handed over Twitter data to the Saudi government,” he was fired at the end of 2015. The company then notified a “few dozen accounts” that they might have been targeted. Following his dismissal, Alzabarah returned to Saudi Arabia.