Latest Twitter thing, X users don't need to be able to block other users.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-...tter/102751598
Musk calls it a 'feature', in quotes, the arrogant asshole. He basically doesn't want minorities to be able to create safe spaces on Twitter than trolls can't flood with hostile comments.
So much for being against bots. Now, you won't even be able to block them yourself.
I think I signed up for Twitter and lasted a day before I deleted my account, and that was years before Elon bought it. I just don't get why anyone wants to read or share that much detail of their daily lives so often. That being said I was just looking at Mastodon and it looks a lot like what Facebook was in the beginning. Not sure it's worth spending time on that app though. Also, the M in the logo for some reason makes me want McDonald's.
Now that everybody has seen him chicken out of a fight, he has to prove himself in some way.Originally Posted by Cipheron
Is it helpful to use words like 'safe' and 'hostile' regarding words people post on the internet? I think words like that exaggerate significance of trolls and other objectionable people.
Last edited by R Soul; 19th Aug 2023 at 15:00.
I think it's true that trolling is a lot more basic problem, and you often don't want to give a troll more credit than they're worth.
But I could see from the perspective of some people being targeted, they might not feel safe.
Actually one part of the law firm where I work represents women being sexually harassed on Twitter, when some wacko guy is relentlessly harassing a woman or even getting her address to stalk her and putting up proof in their Twitter feed, etc., things like that, bad enough that I had to figure out the process to get a subpoena from a Japanese judge to Twitter's International HQ, in Dublin at the time, for the Japanese guy's IP address so the judge could issue an arrest warrant. From the number of clients we get, it happens more than you'd probably like to know.
I could imagine an equivalent kind of case for certain minorities or minority groups badgered by hate speech and getting targeted IRL.
But anyway for a case like that, the language of safe and hostile is definitely fair and not being able to block people is going to make things a lot worse for people realizing they're entering that situation.
Those trolls are how we ended up with people storming the Capitol on Jan 6 and 5 people dead.
So yes, it matters. Damn near came close to toppling US Democracy, as in toppling the peaceful transition of power, all fueled by the online shit specifically because people dismissed it as mere words. It was really only AFTER Jan 6 that the media started to go "oh shit, maybe this 'QAnon' stuff is bad". Nobody exaggerated anything, they actually didn't pay attention until it was too late.
Similarly, how many people are actually dead now because of the spread of anti-vaccination disinformation? A lot, actually. Some areas had Republicans dying at twice the rate of Democrats. Purely because of online propaganda by people who don't give a fuck about their own followers. If you look at the actual numbers of excess Covid deaths on a party-affiliation basis, it's not a 911-scale event, it's like a Hiroshima-scale event, JUST killing US Republicans, and almost entirely fueled by social media.
That's not even getting into a plethora of other horrors that originated with some online shit talk. Like the guy into QAnon who killed his own kids with a spear gun, because he thought his wife was part of the conspiracy and his kids has reptilian DNA. He didn't come up with that himself, it's online stuff. Or mass shooters radicalized online. A lot of the us/them talk about "white replacement" and anti-whatever minority is almost guaranteed to radicalize some amount of murders. It's just the expected outcome.
We've played the "word don't matter, it's only the internet" game for a while now, but ... it's about 90% of why things are so fucked up now.
So, when I'm talking about safe spaces, I'm not talking about preventing "boo hoo my feelings are hurt" stuff, I'm talking about keeping far-right hate groups out of people's social media groups. The kind who literally do inspire people to murder the groups they target. There's a big overlap with people who think Russia is great and are salivating for the US to have a right-wing coup and butthurt that Jan 6 didn't play out that way as well. Maybe you can say these people are only speaking objectionably, but ... it did lead to a real coup attempt.
Last edited by Cipheron; 20th Aug 2023 at 07:19.
This is the world we live in now; words are violence, speech is violence, opinions are violence, everything is violence except, ironically, actual violence.
Seriously though, not being able to block anyone in this day and age is just insane... Personaly my first thought doesn't go to trolls or QAnon wackos but simply harassment. Harassment has always been a problem on the internet, people and kids suffer from it daily, got mentally ill for it, even killed or armed themselves because of it..this isn't even scratching the surface of the insanity, think of pedos, or creeps harassing women constantly.. all kind of sick stuff...
I know we are talking about Twitter, but it doesn't make it less crazy.
Most platforms don't consider blocking as an optionnal feature, it's a bare minimum safety measure.. I am not even entirely sure Elon can pull that off without legal repercussions, or his site getting banned in some countries.
He likely can't, as Apple and Google both have a requirement in their app store terms that social media platforms must allow blocking.
Though I'm not sure if they specifically require that users can block other users, or if the app itself blocking (e.g. censorship) would be enough. Would need to read the terms in a bit more detail (they're long and legalese.)
This doesn't really make any sense? Twitter is a platform for posting short updates on whatever you think is relevant. Most people don't actually use it to e.g. share what they had for lunch.
I feel it occupies a space similar to RSS feeds - where you can follow someone's snippets of news - but with the advantage of it being a single central site and people being able to reply.
Mastodon is exactly the same thing. It's explicitly modelled on Twitter, just that it's open-source and its UX is terrible.
I can't believe this guy... Like you thought you figured how dumb people like Musk are, you'd think they wont suprise you anymore with how insane and stupid they can be, and yet one day you just read the news in disbelief...
Made sense to me at the time. I'm pretty sure I was reading tweets about what people were eating for lunch. But maybe I was reading tweets from some cooking show star. Difficult to remember.
It's hard to keep up with what platform does what these days. I'm one the 'old' people that still use Facebook the youngin's talk about on TikTok.
Why not? Dumb people like Trump and Biden managed to get elected president and they've both said some really stupid things.
That will last until all of the people he's blocked over the years can read and respond to his posts. Like every other time he changes a policy without realizing it affects him too.
It's so stupid it's impressive is what I mean. I am amazed each freaking time even though I am thinking "but of course he'd do that !", it gets me speechless.. It's as if each time you discover a whole new level of stupidity.
And yeah, I wasn't only speaking about Musk, he is not alone in this category for sure, but damn if he isn't one fine specimen.
You're right for sure. Elon does do and say some really stupid things. Even if you align with his politics in any way you'd have to be scratching your head at some of his business moves and social media comments. Whenever I hear him talking in interviews I feel like I'm watching a snake oil salesman or a sociopath. Maybe even a psychopath.
I think I've talked about this before, but one of the reasons I never really had much of a problem with Twitter as a platform (before Musk) was that everything there is designed to be public - it's all like posting to a blog or even to a forum - rather than semi-private, which Facebook implies by limiting your visibility to friends.
I really don't trust the social media platforms with lots of private data, but that's not an issue when you're posting publicly.
The other reason is that you can view Twitter feeds chronologically - just showing what all the people you follow have posted, in order, with no algorithm picking and choosing what you see.
I don't trust algorithms, especially when they are provided by huge corporations with their own agenda (and we've seen a lot of dodgy stuff happening on Facebook - e.g. the Cambridge Analytica scandal - so that's a very justified distrust.)
Of course, Twitter does still have an algorithm, and it's enabled by default, so being able to turn it off just means that I will see what I want to see, not that it won't promote or suppress posts to push some agenda or other for the users who don't know enough to switch to chronological view.
Mastodon would be even better for the above. It doesn't even have an algorithm, it only supports chronological, plus everything is open source so you could see exactly what it's doing if you wanted to. Shame few noteworthy people actually use it yet (probably because of the aforementioned UX being bad, especially with regards to anything that crosses between different servers.)
This forum is semi-private if you take into account everyone's nicknames. You only have to share other info if you want. Most of this forum is public except for the Member's Chat. Of course almost nobody uses that chat area. I've always had a mistrust of this forum as I think people are stealing my freely given ideas.
I do like the idea of social media being viewable in chronological order. Maybe that's why I keep coming back here year after year. Social media platforms that bounce around based on whatever they are trying to market to you are very difficult to follow when you see stuff your friends and family posted weeks ago after stuff they posted today. TikTok algorithms seem like they are based on how ever someone fixed an issue while a supervisor is standing over them and yelling like a drill sergeant. Then the process gets repeated over and over until it's one giant mess. I should sign up for a Twitter account just for the entertainment value.
Oh yeah, I forgot that Facebook have a real-names-only policy. Don't think any of the other social media platforms have that?
Facebook does have that policy but they have a tough time enforcing it. I have several troll friends with completely made up names on FB. And lately FB seems to be having difficulty controlling all the fake scam accounts. Last week I added some items to Facebook marketplace and I was reporting at least two out of three scam accounts. Security seems to be a real problem on social media sites when they start to lose users and advertising dollars. TikTok takes the opposite approach with security by having crappy account security from the beginning and making it worse the more successful they become. I've started using Instagram more and more even though I'm not that comfortable with how it functions and I'm struggling to navigate it and its algorithms. I'm not that excited about using Instagram but so many people I know have pretty much ditched FB and other apps and are solely using IG. I'm waiting for the day when Tom calls back all his friends to Myspace and we can all go back to being frustrated as our systems crash due to the excessive coding allowed on that platform.
My sister's pet rabbits had Facebook accounts, which she used to boost her in various online games. I suppose they were technically real names, but they were certainly below the minimum age requirement.
Oh yeah, I totally forgot about all the pets that have their own Facebook accounts.
I used their page feature, meant for businesses, to set one up for my dog.
That's cool, and it's easier to manage than setting up a whole new FB account. I used to have two pages: one for a cycling blog and one for a museum I volunteered for. Now I use IG for the blog and have a group for the museum (That's defunct now). I have a couple of friends that have my phone number but never text or call but they light up my DM's on TikTok, IG and FB all the time. I don't really like Skype but I use that for work related stuff when I have to. For video games it's TTLG and Discord and that's pretty much it.
Please enjoy this Mastodon meme I made.
I got 22 likes for it which means I am now the funniest guy on Mastodon.
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