In a sit-down interview, Trump is invited to opine on a topic near to his heart, which has become the theme song of Republicans: horror over the idea that a nation of immigrants should accept more immigrants. Meidas Touch News has the video.“Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country.” — Read on www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/5/2196058/-Donald-Trump-uses-Nazi-propaganda-to-support-abhorrent-views-on-immigrants
myth: everyone should blog I sometimes see advice to the effect of “blogging is great! public speaking is great! everyone should do it! build your Personal Brand!“.Blogging isn’t for everyone. Tons of amazing developers don’t have blogs or personal websites at all. I write because it’s fun for me and it helps me organize my thoughts.
Overall the thoughts here on blogging are great, and apply to how you share your thoughts across the board… If people want to share stuff, it should be in a place where you own your thoughts, and can control what you produce… A blog, ActivityPub/Fediverse/Mastodon, etc.
Apollo to shut down; developer has receipts – Six Colors:
I gotta be honest, this Huffman guy sure looks like a lying creep, and all of Reddit’s public statements about honoring third-party apps seem like an attempt to lie to Redditors so they don’t look like the bad guys. But the bottom line is that Reddit repriced its API in order to bankrupt third-party apps. (Selig says he’ll lose $250,000 in the shutdown.)
No Apollo, no Reddit. I deleted everything I had ever posted save for the last Goodbye to the dev and a hope he moves his attention to ActivityPub related services like Lemmy… And deleted my account. When the refund offer comes up at the end of the month I intend to decline, he’s more than earned that for putting up with Reddit management.
Twitter removes policy against deadnaming transgender people | MPR News:
Twitter has quietly removed a policy against the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,” raising concerns that the Elon Musk-owned platform is becoming less safe for marginalized groups.Twitter enacted the policy against deadnaming, or using a transgender person’s name before they transitioned, as well as purposefully using the wrong gender for someone as a form of harassment, in 2018.
On Monday, Twitter also said it will only put warning labels on some tweets that are “potentially” in violation of its rules against hateful conduct. Previously, the tweets were removed.
It was in this policy update that Twitter appears to have deleted the line against deadnaming from its rules.
Mastodon Ownership · weblog.masukomi.org:
A group calling itself “Mask Group” has purchased three of the largest mastodon instances.
I don’t know if it’s better or worse… The brand seems to be a conglomerate of web3/NFT/crypto hucksters who are very excited by every digital MLM scheme around, and want to use every social media method they can to reach new people. If you’re allergic to BS buzzword salad, a visit to their site at mask.io might actually kill you.
I don’t believe a group like that can be a long-term steward, but I don’t know that anyone can be really. I would really like to see a simple composable package that sets up an activepub compatible server and matrix (or even XMPP) compatible server, with proper certs, in a way that anyone can setup federated social and chat on their domain for small communities in a way that we really do leverage the decentralized federated services for anyone.
A Rebuttal to Scaling Mastodon is Impossible · weblog.masukomi.org:
Armin Ronacher wrote that Scaling Mastodon is ImpossibleI’d like to offer a rebuttal. As someone who’s been doing professional web development since 1995, with most of that time being spent in Rails jobs, or doing Rails work on the sidelines, I think i have a pretty good perspective on the situation. For those who don’t know, Mastodon is written in Ruby on Rails.
A great read on how ActivePub solves the problems of social networks in smart ways, some of which aren’t really being used as best practices yet but have potential.
No sarcasm intended: I love this idea. Federate with Mastodon via ActivityPub and let people do it using their existing Instagram IDs. Keep it clean and simple and destroy what’s left of Twitter.
I agree - I love this idea. I just hope it holds out longer than facebook messenger federating with XMPP, which I think was the last time I remember a Meta platform interoperating with open protocols.
If you’ve been staying away from Twitter, you’re smarter than me, but you might have missed this saga, and it is, I promise you, worth your attention.
Facebook, Google Give Police Data to Prosecute Abortion Seekers:
As abortion bans across the nation are implemented and enforced, law enforcement is turning to social-media platforms to build cases to prosecute women seeking abortions or abortion-inducing medication — and online platforms like Google and Facebook are helping.Through data collected by online pharmacies, social media posts, and user data requests from law enforcement for message and search logs, cases for prosecution can be built against women for seeking abortion — and it has been happening since before Roe was overturned.
The Case For Shunning - by A.R. Moxon - The Reframe:
There has to come a point when we finally insist to take the evidence before us and to draw moral conclusions—because unless we do, we won’t ever be able to address the problems before us. If we don’t make moral judgments about speech, we’ll find ourselves on a treadmill of discourse, always running but never getting anywhere, endlessly compelled to apply an indestructible skepticism to the evidence, and an indestructible credulity to specious conjecture and lies.It’s time for us to understand people for what they insist on being. To understand that participation with the popularized genocidal urges gripping our country is an unacceptable moral failing, as is support for the politicians and pundits who are pursing it, as is membership in the political party around which it is organized and energized. To understand that unforgivable moral failings deserve not our ears, but our backs.
Believe people when they tell us who they are - If we did that sooner, Scott Adams finally saying the quiet part out loud wouldn’t really be a surprise.
Mastodon: A New Hope for Social Networking - TidBITS:
Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry you’ll never be able to capture that sense again? If so, it’s worth wading gently into the world of Mastodon microblogging to see if it offers something fresh and delightful. It might remind you—as it does me, at least for now—of the days when you didn’t view online interactions with some level of dread.
jwz: What the Jan. 6 probe found out about social media, but didn’t report:
Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms -- especially Twitter -- failed to heed their own employees' warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. [...]“The sum of this is that alt-tech, fringe, and mainstream platforms were exploited in tandem by right-wing activists to bring American democracy to the brink of ruin,” the staffers wrote in their memo. “These platforms enabled the mobilization of extremists on smaller sites and whipped up conservative grievance on larger, more mainstream ones.” […]
That focus on Trump meant the report missed an opportunity to hold social media companies accountable for their actions, or lack thereof, even though the platforms had been the subject of intense scrutiny since Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, the people familiar with the matter said.
Confronting that evidence would have forced the committee to examine how conservative commentators helped amplify the Trump messaging that ultimately contributed to the Capitol attack, the people said – a course that some committee members considered both politically risky and inviting opposition from some of the world’s most powerful tech companies, two of the people said. […]
The Washington Post has previously reported that Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s co-chair, drove efforts to keep the report focused on Trump. But interviews since the report’s release indicate that Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose Northern California district includes Silicon Valley, also resisted efforts to bring more focus in the report onto social media companies.
jwz: Facebook fires worker who refused to do ‘negative testing’:
The practice, known as "negative testing," allows tech companies to "surreptitiously" run down someone's mobile juice in the name of testing features [...]“I said to the manager, ‘This can harm somebody,’ and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses,” said Hayward, 33, who claims in a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit that he was fired in November for refusing to participate in negative testing. […]
“Any data scientist worth his or her salt will know, ‘Don’t hurt people,'” he told The Post.
Killing someone’s cellphone battery puts people at risk, especially “in circumstances where they need to communicate with others, including but not limited to police or other rescue workers,” according to the litigation filed against Facebook.
Ending Suspension of Trump’s Accounts With New Guardrails to Deter Repeat Offenses | Meta:
The suspension was an extraordinary decision taken in extraordinary circumstances. The normal state of affairs is that the public should be able to hear from a former President of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office again, on our platforms. Now that the time period of the suspension has elapsed, the question is not whether we choose to reinstate Mr. Trump’s accounts, but whether there remain such extraordinary circumstances that extending the suspension beyond the original two-year period is justified.
The normal state of affairs is that presidents don’t attempt coups, traitors who violate their oath of office get arrested and are barred from being re-elected. There’s nothing normal about lord dampnut, and giving him a voice or any kind of attention other than illuminating his crimes is a problem.
From the via
So no matter what Trump does, the longest they’ll suspend him is another two years? This is whistling past the graveyard. Trump wasn’t suspended because he posted something, say, racist or untruthful or hateful. It’s not about Trump and his supporters being on the political right. The man tried to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States while serving as President of the United States. He still insists he was correct to do so, and quite obviously intends to try again. If there were only one person in the world suspended from Facebook’s platforms, it should be Donald Trump. No one is more dangerous. No one is more deserving of being outcast as a pariah.
Inside Elon Musk’s “extremely hardcore” Twitter - The Verge:
In three months, Musk has also largely destroyed the equity value of Twitter and much of his personal wealth. He has indicated that the company could declare bankruptcy, and the distraction of running it has caused Tesla stock to crater, costing him $200 billion.
I read this as “…of ruining it…” and it made far more sense.
Daring Fireball: The End May Be Nigh for Third-Party Twitter Clients:
(Twitterrific for Mac is still functioning, though — at least as I write this. Unlike Tweetbot, Twitterrific uses different app IDs for iOS and Mac, and whatever is going on, it seems to have affected only the most popular third-party apps.)
The fact that certain apps/API IDs haven’t been swept up in this reads to me that it’s an intentional shut-out, and that Twitter has shot itself in the foot deliberately. Even before taking hiatus over the antics of their Austin Powers Villian leadership, I never willingly interacted with the service via their website, only through third-party clients… And I’m absolutely not alone in that.
Mastodon Brought a Protocol to a Product Fight | by M.G. Siegler | Dec, 2022 | 500ish:
But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
I mean, who thinks this “Web” thing is ever going to unseat Prodigy or CompuServe - I’m don’t trust these link things, and it’s ludicrous to think people are going to host their OWN servers.
Snark aside - It’s probably dubious to expect everyone to host their own ActivityPub/Mastadon servers… But the idea should be sharding much more by identity/community rather than jumping onto the same service. That’s where the power begins, taking the control of identity and server control closer to people you trust, and spreading the social footprint far enough that no single pillar can take down the roof.
Daring Fireball: I Wish I Could Tell You This One Is Not All About Twitter:
I would love to regale you with fun links and clever commentary about subjects other than Twitter “2.0”. I really would. I’m as thirsty for such subject matter as you surely are. But, alas, the continuing saga is simply too entertaining, and moving too fast. If you’ve been successfully ignoring the drama, I salute you.
MarsEdit 5 - Powerful web publishing from your Mac.:
Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them. Web browsers are wonderful for reading articles, but not for creating them. If you're writing for the web, you need a desktop blog editor. And if you're lucky enough to have a Mac, nothing is more powerful, or more elegant than MarsEdit.
Marsedit is such a great app for interacting with weblogs. On every other platform I’ve touched - Windows, Linux, even iOS and iPadOS - I have searched for something similar, or even close, and fallen short.
My only wish in relation to this is that there was an iOS/iPadOS version so I can keep up my workflow across my more personal devices. It would be an insta-buy for me, and I’m sure many others.
Left-Wing Activists Banned From Twitter After False-Report Campaign:
Several left-wing activists on Twitter have been suspended from the platform after far-right users launched a false-report campaign.Prominent left-wing accounts have been banned from Twitter since Musk’s takeover, the Intercept reported first. This includes Chad Loder, an anti-fascist researcher who identified a Proud Boy member involved in the US Capitol Riots on January 6 2021; Vishal Pratap Singh, a journalist who has reported on far-right protests in Southern California; Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, a group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in Texas; and CrimethInc, an anarchist organization that publishes books and podcasts.
Twitter is now Musk’s toy, and he can use it however he wants, but he isn’t defending free speech, and nobody should feel like it’s the “World’s Town Hall” to be defended from regulation anymore. He can’t have it both ways.
jwz: PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet:
As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web. tl;dr avoid Hive and Post.If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.
Consign that app to oblivion.
Elon Musk uses Twitter to tell Independents: “Vote for a Republican” | Boing Boing:
There’s no way to spin this except that Twitter is now in its darkest timeline. Apologists about the purchase can have their own circle in hell.
In Contra Chrome, Leah carefully charts this road and its terrain in a funny and easily accessible way. In webcomic form, she documents how over the last decade, Google’s browser has become a threat to user privacy and the democratic process itself.With her meticulous rearrangement of Scott McCloud‘s Google-commissioned Chrome comic from 2008, she delivers what she calls „a much-needed update“. Laying bare the inner workings of the controversial browser, she creates the ultimate guide to one of the world‘s most widely used surveillance tools:
Contra Chrome – a webcomic – How Google’s browser became a threat to privacy and democracy
Daring Fireball: The Washington Post: ‘Facebook Paid Republican Strategy Firm to Malign TikTok’:
Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.
Our Fundamental Right To Shame And Shun The New York Times:
I’m going to offer a working definition for the purposes of this essay: “cancel culture” is when speech is met with a response that, in my opinion, is very disproportionate. Perhaps that sounds cynical, and I could certainly give you a Justice-Breyer-seven-factor balancing test, but that’s what this discussion boils down to: just as we constantly debate norms of what speech is socially acceptable, we debate norms about what responses to speech are socially acceptable.
Missing from most definitions of “cancel culture” is the relationship to the target… A traditionally minority or under-served group using social-media amplification to “Punch Up” against someone who’s “Punching Down” from a position of authority based on celebrity, status, wealth or other source of power, to try for some degree of accountability, should be encouraged. Privileged people using their legions of followers to beat down those with less power, often already disenfranchised, not so much.
Let’s discuss some examples, because when I criticize sloppy use of “cancel culture” I’m accused of denying that there are ever any unfair, disproportionate, or evil responses to speech. I don’t deny that. What happened to Justine Sacco was, in my opinion, very disproportionate. What happened to David Shor was disproportionate and maddeningly stupid. What’s happening in the community of Young Adult Fiction seems like a complete shitshow that makes me want to avoid everyone there. What happened to Professor Greg Patton was disproportionate and anti-Asian bigotry to boot. Shouting invited speakers down so they can’t speak and attendees can’t listen is fascist and contemptible. I could go on, but you get the point.
The “YA Twitter” thing is harder, because YA lit very often is written for people of some vulnerable group, at an age where they really don’t have the emotional training to deal with intersectionality… But is also a part of the larger publishing social media wasteland where plenty of people are more interested in getting the “hot take” viewer numbers than any real conversation about the works themselves.