2022 and beyond Social Media Thread

[RainMaker]

Originally Posted by Brian Swartz

Regarding TikTok, I would surmise that the percentage of users for whom privacy issues are a deal-breaker is quite small.

For what it's worth, almost all social media companies sell to foreign governments. They just do it through intermediaries while it looks like TikTok does it direct.

[RainMaker]

Originally Posted by whomario

"Oh no, they actually consider the shit i said and say as some sort of hint and aren't enthralled by my half hearted public statements while i continue to make ludicrous tweets and fire half the staff, how dare they!"



(Also: if you post this without the header you could play a good game of "Trump or Musk?" )

Well he's getting a crash course in capitalism. Running a business that doesn't rely on government handouts is a little different. Disney doesn't want ads for their new movie next to some guy posting about how we need to gas the Jews.

I don't think he was prepared to actually buy the company. Twitter called his bluff and then when he realized what a horrible deal it was for him, he thought he could litigate his way out of it.

The story about him asking all the programmers to print out the code they worked on over the past year and firing those who wrote the least is the best example of how ill-prepared he was and how little he knows about running the company. They'll be filing bankruptcy in the next 24 months.

[Atocep]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

Well he's getting a crash course in capitalism. Running a business that doesn't rely on government handouts is a little different. Disney doesn't want ads for their new movie next to some guy posting about how we need to gas the Jews.

I don't think he was prepared to actually buy the company. Twitter called his bluff and then when he realized what a horrible deal it was for him, he thought he could litigate his way out of it.

The story about him asking all the programmers to print out the code they worked on over the past year and firing those who wrote the least is the best example of how ill-prepared he was and how little he knows about running the company. They'll be filing bankruptcy in the next 24 months.

Not to mention his contest to see who works the hardest by forcing 84 hour work weeks while leaking that the plan is to lay of nearly half of his employees. That's the type of shit a bad manager does and almost always leads to losing your best employees because they'll have other options and motivation to leave. Waiting for him to use the "no one wants to work anymore" when they can't fill positions with qualified people.

[RainMaker]

I thought the "who wrote the most lines of code" thing was hilarious. The people with the least are the one's working on the more difficult stuff or are just more efficient. You're basically firing your most talented coders.

[Flasch186]

@rainmaker do you have a link to this?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[RainMaker]

There's some news stories about the printing of code out but this references one of the tweets about it.

.@mcmillen has hit the nail on the head here.

Microsoft got rid of the notion of evaluating developers based on KLOCs (thousand of lines of code) decades ago.

It penalizes coders who solve problems creatively/efficiently/both using fewer lines of code than their counterparts. pic.twitter.com/9G9wBv33TR

— Geoff Glave (@GeoffGlave) November 4, 2022

[sterlingice]

Originally Posted by albionmoonlight

If China told Musk “buy Twitter and destroy it or we’ll stop selling you the rare earths you need for Tesla,” would he be doing anything differently than what he’s currently doing?

Especially if they float him some of the financing. They get to kill it at a fraction of the cost and with a front man doing the killing.

SI

[whomario]

genius strategy: boycotting your customers pic.twitter.com/AwVlk9AFam

— tom, from myspace (@thetomzone) November 5, 2022

[whomario]

I think it makes a little more sense to post this here rather than the NBA thread, so ...

It's magical thinking that mis- and disiformation can be handled by debating it. Always much easier to make outlandish claims than dispute/correct them, always easier for those to be 'understood' than "well, it's complicated, here's the 10 reasons for this with background info".
And aside from all more obvious issues (like the whole "the lie is halfway round the world before ..." Thing) this, given finite ressources, effectively ensures that a ton of other important issues while the (often fabricated or embelished) issue chosen (!) by, say, the right wing claim industry (crt, trans-panic, caravans, free speech destroyed) dominates. It literally doesn't matter to them if they are right, they just need it to be talked about for their simple talking points to get broadcast and seep into peoples minds.

Some of the issues and possible strategies outlined here: Combining interventions to reduce the spread of viral misinformation | Nature Human Behaviour

Originally Posted by Atocep

I think the problem is when you give people like Kyrie and Kanye platforms doe hate on social media,ext that's going to have a far larger impact on society than those museums. It's not like the people that agree with or are on the fence about stuff like this want to hear both sides or are going to go visit a museum to get the full story.

That's one of the issues with speech and social media. It's a massive platform to spread misinformation that we haven't been prepared to counter. Just allowing them to have a platform under the false pretense of free speech and hoping followers become more educated isn't working. If anything they're actively choosing to be less educated.

This interview, the paper it's about and the researchers (bak-coleman especially, who is also on twitter and talks about the Musk Situation: https://mobile.twitter.com/jbakcolem...68134753910785 ) might interest you:

Why biologists like Carl Bergstrom are warning that social media is a risk to humanity - Vox

As someone with a media studies and communications background i found it really interesting to see it approached from a different direction.

[Brian Swartz]

Originally Posted by whomario

It's magical thinking that mis- and disiformation can be handled by debating it. Always much easier to make outlandish claims than dispute/correct them, always easier for those to be 'understood' than "well, it's complicated, here's the 10 reasons for this with background info".
And aside from all more obvious issues (like the whole "the lie is halfway round the world before ..." Thing) this, given finite ressources, effectively ensures that a ton of other important issues while the (often fabricated or embelished) issue chosen (!) by, say, the right wing claim industry (crt, trans-panic, caravans, free speech destroyed) dominates. It literally doesn't matter to them if they are right, they just need it to be talked about for their simple talking points to get broadcast and seep into peoples minds.

I agree with this, and also with having the discussion here rather than in the other thread. This is why I'm on the education/character side in terms of combating it. One analogy that I think it useful is how we train people to recognize counterfeit money. Teaching them to know all of the possible falsehoods is an endless and counterproductive rabbit-hole. Teaching them to know everything there is to know about what legal tender looks like, feels like, features of it, etc. allows recognition of fakes very quickly. Suspicion is immediately raised before you even discover what type of counterfeit it is, because you are so familiar with the real thing.

The authoritarian response is also possible - severe crack-downs on social media companies/platforms, strict guidelines on what may or may not be posted, etc. That effectively means the death of free speech; not that speech is being made illegal here, it's not technically that, but from a practical perspective if you can say approved things on the most-used platforms but cannot offer dissenting opinions or perspectives there, the entire point of free speech protections is lost and all you've done is substitute a different form of censorship.

The line in that link that we have no reason to believe good ideas will naturally rise to the top is something I every much agree with. I think social media generally promotes the opposite, but it promotes that because of who we are as people in society, because of our nature of looking for validation. The more marginalized a person is, the more likely they are to seek that validation, so those people tend to be over-represented on social media.

[whomario]

The problem is that it is inherently hard to educate in a way that anticipates future matters. I also have a history degree so i definitely believe there's value in teaching in a way that highlights commonalities in past, current and future events. And teach how overarching issues impact each other.
But it's still difficult to do that, same as it's difficult to teach media literacy. Not to mention those same forces that want to push hateful rhetoric are also working to prevent this. It's neither surprising nor a secret that far right wing movements always try to essentially dumb down education (look at Florida, read what a guy like Rufo openly lays out) under the guise of making it concentrate on 'real' education, making it "more efficient" etc. Where possible they remove capacity or oportunity to teach about complex issues. Which social issues of all manner invariably are.

But even others aren't actually willing to prioritize education or other social institutions for fear of loosing their mandate by alienating a few too many fence-sitters. This is of course an issue the world over but it's no coincidence that it Looks to be magnified for the US due to it's political system on all levels and the way it's institutions are financed, regulated and staffed, especially at the top.

----------

Some ways to combat it for social media on a technical and company level are adressed in the nature paper in the sense that it demonstrates that this can at least somewhat be combatted with existing tools, which of course requires those in charge of platforms to want to do it AND society accepts that a platform simply can't be just a blank space that not just regulates itself but ideally sorts itself out organically without input from either the state/law NOR the company. What many on the right want is literally a digital space without oversight because they know they are going to come out ahead here due to 1) offering the simple story and 2) being more ruthless,.less caring (about others as well as due to making it into a game), whatever.
Those clamouring for a "digital town square" never acknowledge that an actual town square was and is of course a regulated space, regulated by laws and also, you know, those actually in charge of the town (as well as, say, trade organisations or other entities).

Musk just fired a lot of the people whose departments worked on this. in the same vein a lot of newspapers and networks have a long time ago been set on paths that make them less effective here (some was of course forced on them but not aided by the aforementioned refusal to acknowledge the relevance of digital discourse for all areas of life including the way news is consumed and shared for a long time). Which again comes down to ressources which again comes down to one group trying to withhold it (for example in the fight over Public Broadcasting, a bigger deal in Europe) AND frame any support, financial or regulatory, as improper and others thus hesitant to provide it.

As a result you get tragedies like the death of independent local newspapers (and in the US local TV or radio channels, which never was much of a thing over here where that space was occupied by regional public broadcasting instead) , another pillar of a sort of education that has been absolutely gutted in the last couple decades.

[Silver Owl]

For people that have family and friends blocked on facebook because of political, religious or any other views, there is an app called SOCIAL FIXER that allows you to block individual posts with keywords that works pretty well.
I can still keep up with family without seeing all the political garbage.
I have zero affiliation with them other than as a user.

[GrantDawg]

I want whomario to list the degrees he doesn't have. Seems that would be a short list.

[Ksyrup]

Elon Musk definitely fits in with the snowflakes he seems to align himself with politically.

Elon Musk cannot handle being properly schooled. A tragedy in three acts: pic.twitter.com/MXSWQPWo2b

— Randi Mayem Singer (@rmayemsinger) November 4, 2022

[whomario]

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

I want whomario to list the degrees he doesn't have. Seems that would be a short list.

Same length as most everybody else who finishes University over here, X minus 2 system usually requires you to register for a double degree bachelor right at the start with an option to ditch one for your Masters or take an entirely new one if it's close enough to either. "media studies and communication" is a close enough translation for one of the two

[sterlingice]

"Smithers, I'm beginning to think that Elon Musk is not the brilliant tactician I thought he was"

SI

[cuervo72]

Originally Posted by whomario

And aside from all more obvious issues (like the whole "the lie is halfway round the world before ..." Thing) this, given finite ressources, effectively ensures that a ton of other important issues while the (often fabricated or embelished) issue chosen (!) by, say, the right wing claim industry (crt, trans-panic, caravans, free speech destroyed) dominates. It literally doesn't matter to them if they are right, they just need it to be talked about for their simple talking points to get broadcast and seep into peoples minds.

Man, I feel like I've seen this somewhere before.

[GrantDawg]

The new blue checkmark thing started today. As far as I can tell they haven't removed the verified checkmark yet. I can't help but think once they do, the only thing blue checkmark is going to symbolize is accounts to avoid.

Sent from my SM-G996U using Tapatalk

[QuikSand]

If paying Elon money becomes the principal way to reach the Twitter audience (i.e. they start burying content from non-paid accounts, in the name of crushing bots or whatever), that might prove to be a challenging proposition for a lot of us. I can afford a hundred bucks, but I might not be able to afford a public label as being on board with this asshole.

[Ksyrup]

Apparently if you don't pay $8, an algorithm is going to suppress your tweets so that even followers can't see them in their replies.

If that's truly the case, goodbye Twitter.

[GrantDawg]

That was my biggest fear. It will absolutely be the death of Twitter.

Sent from my SM-G996U using Tapatalk

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

It will absolutely be the death of Twitter.

Given the state it was in, I'm not going to cry a whole lot of tears about that.

Aside from quick hits on breaking events, it was largely a cesspool.

[Ksyrup]

No, not if you used it correctly. Regardless of the medium, it is always wise to never read the comments. If my timeline skips over certain tweets to only show me blue check tweets and I have to seek out the rest, then fuck him - it will be FBs algorithm-based timeline all over again.

[Kodos]

I wouldn’t give Elon 1 cent. Luckily, I wasn’t on Twitter anyhow, so no loss.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

No, not if you used it correctly. Regardless of the medium, it is always wise to never read the comments. If my timeline skips over certain tweets to only show me blue check tweets and I have to seek out the rest, then fuck him - it will be FBs algorithm-based timeline all over again.

Where it immediately goes cesspool -- and reveals what a cesspool it has been -- is when you click on something trending.

[Ksyrup]

That's why I basically stay within my curated follow list. When they start manipulating that, I'm out.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

That's why I basically stay within my curated follow list. When they start manipulating that, I'm out.

But you/me/us maintaining self-enforced seclusion doesn't change the existence of the cesspool.

[Ksyrup]

The world is a cesspool. Our existence in it doesn't change that either. It's all about your experience. It's not so much seclusion as having control over how much of the cesspool you want to see. Much of that is curation, but not all - you and I are still free to wade into the cesspool. I try not to, or when I do, I try to be as disciplined as possible and pull myself out before I get too sucked in.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

The world is a cesspool. Our existence in it doesn't change that either. It's all about your experience. It's not so much seclusion as having control over how much of the cesspool you want to see. Much of that is curation, but not all - you and I are still free to wade into the cesspool. I try not to, or when I do, I try to be as disciplined as possible and pull myself out before I get too sucked in.

We're not in any real disagreement at the micro / personal level, not that I can tell anyway.

Where we may differ is the responsibility to influence the existence (or at least depth) of the cesspool if we have an opportunity to make a significant difference.

[Ksyrup]

What difference? By leaving?

This kind of shit is ridiculous. Some dude clowns on Elon and his account is restricted. Free speech, huh?

Comedy is now legal on Twitter pic.twitter.com/jcMR6oLrX6

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 5, 2022

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

What difference? By leaving?

I didn't mean me & you, I meant (basically) Elon.

I'd consider it a net gain to civilization if he simply shut the thing down tomorrow as opposed to it continuing in the lunatic realm it operated in.

[Ksyrup]

Eh, something similar will/would take its place. You can't save humanity from itself.

[cuervo72]

So Devin Nunes' Cow can finally get verified, yes?

[Ksyrup]

At this point, Elon is the "I want my $2" kid from Better Off Dead. $8 now with inflation, I guess.

[Fidatelo]

I deactivated my Twitter account on Friday on word of the layoffs. Not that my dormant account matters, but if it adds to some overall count of people dissatisfied with the actions then I'll call that a win.

[GrantDawg]

They have started calling back some of the people they laid off Friday asking them to return. It seems they laid off half the people they needed to implement the changes Musk wanted to make. Genius, indeed.

[Ksyrup]

At some point, this has to affect Tesla stock, right? I don't pay much attention to Tesla news, but I assume he runs that with a decently tight ship as far as the public seeing how the sausage is made. So if all (or most) anyone sees is his management style as it relates to Twitter... yeesh.

[Ksyrup]

I really enjoy the word chucklefuck, and it certainly fits Elon.

Huh. If only there were a surefire way to make sure Twitter users are who they say they are. Like “substantiated” accounts. A process of “corroboration,” maybe. Something like that. https://t.co/8mBTW1bp5R

— andi zeisler (@andizeisler) November 7, 2022

FREE SPEECH!

[Atocep]

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

At some point, this has to affect Tesla stock, right? I don't pay much attention to Tesla news, but I assume he runs that with a decently tight ship as far as the public seeing how the sausage is made. So if all (or most) anyone sees is his management style as it relates to Twitter... yeesh.

It's down 35% since he announced he was buying Twitter.

[sterlingice]

This was pretty funny and actually does a decent 10K foot view of what crazy Musk got himself into and didn't realize. That said, it also assumes he's kindof acting in good faith and I think he still is just shotgun wedding this thing and is in way too deep.

Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve - Above the LawAbove the Law

SI

[whomario]

I like that analogy. It also has definite substitute teacher/cool uncle tries making up rules vibes. But yeah, the most likely explanation might be simply him wanting to make his personal dream platform (By adding shit from various others, from what is essentially blog posts to long videos), assuming that enough others like it as well. (Only instead of doing it from scratch and over time he crams everything into a short time frame because it's not a garage hobbyhorse but a 44 billion company).

It's also the quintessential capitalist worldview in action: For him everything comes down to money. Not just earning it or spending it but the sheer existence being seen as the solution to structural problems. Bots? Money solves it. Pissed of big accounts? Pay them.

(One of the interesting things that set Twitter apart was that, while obviously people in a sense used it to make money, there was no direct payment for content and in essence it was more of a communications and messaging platform. Without having that forced personal element of Facebook and it's"friends").

Also, he's throwing a hissy fit at not being welcomed as the great saviour.

Originally Posted by Atocep

It's down 35% since he announced he was buying Twitter.

When is the inevitable "they cancel him! Let's all buy his product!" push coming or is buying electric cars a bridge too far for that?

[whomario]

So far on this call, El*n says:

•We will ban impersonators and keep their $8
•Eventually impersonators will stop making accounts bc losing $ is a disincentive
•I have a lot of faith in humanity, most people are good

???

— Nandini Jammi (@nandoodles) November 9, 2022

Gets crazier in the thread

[GrantDawg]

Musk right now casually walking through his grand payments vision for Twitter:

Users could link their online bank account to Twitter, he says. Then the company will offer "extremely compelling money market account to get extremely high yield on your balance". Add debit cards etc

— Hannah Murphy (@MsHannahMurphy) November 9, 2022

[GrantDawg]

There is no chance I am "banking" with Twitter.

[whomario]

So now it's literally all a blue check mark and only once you click on it it will either say it is verified because of it's 'properties' (being notable in this or that) of the person/entity or " is verified because it's subscribed to Twitter Blue".
Like, he does know how to look up what words mean? "maybe kinda sorta proven not to be a bot" is kind of a low bar to clear.

I mean, it'll propably be totally different tomorrow anyway given he seems to change shit every 5 minutes.

[Ksyrup]

Not sure it's verified, but I see some activity on Twitter about it's CISO, chief privacy officer and chief compliance officer all resigning last night.

Losing is fine. Everything is fine.

[HerRealName]

According to messages shared in Twitter Slack, Twitter’s CISO, chief privacy office, and chief compliance officer all resigned last night.

An employee says it will be up to engineers to “self-certify compliance with FTC requirements and other laws.”

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 10, 2022

I can't even imagine. I would be job searching hard if I were still employed there.

[whomario]

Okay twitter blue has been such a success I need to do a thread. Feel free to add to the ��on the great launch of this product pic.twitter.com/cx1bEFp9Yn

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) November 10, 2022

pic.twitter.com/wXTlMuPrjV

— Patrick. (@NearandDistant) November 10, 2022

[GrantDawg]

SCOOP from @alexeheath: Twitter's chief privacy officer, chief compliance officer, and chief information security officer have all quit. Internal note warns that violating FTC privacy settlement could destroy the company but Elon doesn't seem to care. https://t.co/JLhugR9JvN pic.twitter.com/uyiPq6VmBx

— nilay patel (@reckless) November 10, 2022

[Ksyrup]

Twitter has verified Jesus Christ.

h/t @Shayan86 pic.twitter.com/gj6aUuCECr

— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) November 10, 2022