…it’s not a promising start…or if it is then I don’t like the promise…or the premise for that matter

World’s conflict zones increased by two-thirds in past three years, report reveals [Guardian]

…but if it’s a question of…territory…proportionate or otherwise…some of it is harder to fight for on account of you can’t stand on it…for all that it seems mostly made of hills somebody somewhere is willing to die on

Under heavy pressure from the right, and with the help of X owner Elon Musk, the leading tech platforms opened the floodgates for propaganda to spread unchecked. The result was a flood of lies and distortions flowing through our social media feeds. That led to possibly the most misinformed electorate we’ve ever seen.

…of which more, anon

…”possibly”

…that’d be according to the brookings institute per that link…& to hear them tell it

For coming political battles, people need to be aware of how the current information ecosystem regularly is promoting falsehoods and skewing views about important issues. But we do not need to stand back and accept widespread misperceptions as the new reality. There are several things people and organizations can do to protect themselves for what will be a continuing wave of misinformation, disinformation, and false narratives.

There needs to be meaningful content moderation by social media platforms. Right now, many leading platforms are cesspools of rumors, false information, and outright lies. They are widely disseminated and seen by millions of people. If that continues, it will become increasingly difficult to discern fact from fiction—endangering our country’s ability to address major problems. Companies need to get far more serious about content moderation.

The disinformation risks have grown stronger in recent months due to new tech tools such as generative AI. There are easy-to-use tools that can create false pictures, videos, audio, and narratives. People no longer need a technical background to use AI tools but can make requests through prompts and templates and become master propagandists. We need digital literacy programs that train people on how to evaluate online information and spot fakes and deceptions.

We have to understand how changes in the contemporary political environment make people want to believe negative information about the opposition. In a highly polarized world, where people are divided into competing political tribes, millions of Americans admit they themselves have intentionally spread information they know to be false. If that continues, it will lead to disaster for our country’s politics and governance.

Finally, many individuals and organizations have financial incentives to spread blatant lies. Through websites, newsletters, and digital platforms, they make money from subscriptions, advertising, and merchandise sales. As long as spreading lies is lucrative, it will be hard to get a serious handle on the flood of disinformation that plagues our current system.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-disinformation-defined-the-2024-election-narrative/

…is it just me…or does that sound dismally like all the stuff that says “we could still do all the things we keep not doing that would help at least stop the climate getting worse faster, even if we probably can’t skip to making it better any time soon”?

Combine this lowering of guardrails with the tech chief executives’ obsequious public congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump after his resounding win, and it’s hard not to see this striking turnaround in political terms. “In Trump, Silicon Valley got what it wanted: a president that will kneecap antitrust efforts, embrace deregulation and defang labor laws,” the journalist Brian Merchant wrote in his newsletter, Blood in the Machine.

And with Mr. Trump soon in office, the landscape may get worse before it gets better. Brendan Carr, tapped by the incoming president to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, posted on X after securing the nomination a call to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”

…”may get worse”

…& the sun may rise again tomorrow

Even if the companies weren’t actively trying to game the election, a flood of right-leaning misinformation certainly was the natural outcome of a lack of intervention in this polarized moment. It was unrealistic to expect profit-driven social media companies to act as good-faith gatekeepers to facts that challenge power. After all, the excavation and marketing of facts are often dangerous and rarely lucrative. And yet, without them, we lack a shared understanding of reality that is needed to participate in a democracy.

…am I reading someone say…in a more circumspect manner than…even mine…which seems unlikely, I’ll grant…that whatever we’re participating in is more by way of parody than politics on account of the well being majority-poisoned

…or do I need to redefine the wrong side of the bed before the next time I get out of it?

After Mr. Trump’s surprise upset in 2016, buoyed in part by a covert Russian social media campaign and sneaky use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, the tech platforms vowed to do better. Facebook set up an oversight board to help decide which dangerous content should be taken down. Twitter offered cash bounties to hackers who could find bias in its algorithms. A crop of misinformation researchers popped up at universities and nonprofits. In their efforts, the social media companies even went so far as to suspend Mr. Trump’s accounts when he wouldn’t stop posting lies about the election being stolen.

A conservative backlash ensued. In 2022, Mr. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit goal of molding it to his political interests. He immediately set about dismantling Twitter’s content moderation team and relied instead on a crowdsourced fact-checking system that researchers have found wanting. Soon, Twitter — which he renamed X — was increasingly complying with censorship requests from the Indian government that it had previously resisted and letting known harassers and lie-purveyors it had previously banned back onto the platform.

At the same time, Republicans began working the refs, launching a legal and political campaign against what they said was tech platform censorship of conservative speech. After gaining control of the House of Representatives in 2022, they used their newfound power to issue a flurry of subpoenas and requests for documents to fact-checkers and disinformation researchers, forcing them to hire expensive legal counsel and spend countless hours responding.

Republicans passed laws in several states to prevent tech platforms from censoring conservative speech, even though the bans were often prompted by violations of longstanding platform rules against things like harassment, hate speech and incitements to violence. This past summer, the Supreme Court declined to overturn those laws, but sent them back to state courts for further adjudication.

…it’s no good

While nobody can say for sure what this did to our election, one thing we do know is that the opening of the social media floodgates benefits one side more than the other. A comprehensive study published last month in Nature found that conservatives shared more false information online in 2020, and therefore even neutral enforcement of platform policies against misinformation would disproportionately target conservatives.

…even if I’m pretty sure I understand that what they mean is that overall if you compare the numbers the statistical likelihood of finding someone is of a rightward persuasion is lower in the general population than the one in which you only deal with people who’ve been told they can’t post their shit the way they want to…I can’t get past the part where the phrasing…for me, anyway…stacks “disproportionately” with a lampshade about how mishapen that framing is…because the whole point of that exercise from a mathematical perspective is surely that…because they go in for bullshit more…policies designed to police bullshit will ping for them…fucking proportionally…& their proportion of the total pool will accordingly be fucking bigger…which…I can’t help but note…is the exact opposite of the policies targeting them…disproportionately or otherwise…since the policies are like the kid windmilling his arms that you can trivially sidestep…they connect if you walk into that shit of your own volition…& whining about how you got sucker-punched…requires you to be a whole other order of sucker…so…I know it makes no bones to most folks & maybe that means it’s a pointlessly dumb thing to get bent out of shape about…but…fuck it…I am…so…that’s how it comes across?

The wave of fake news was so bad that in the days leading up to this month’s election, the F.B.I. issued five press releases warning the public about lies circulating online — including fake claims about F.B.I. election monitoring activities and two rare joint statements with other intelligence agencies warning of Russian online efforts to influence elections.

Now we are in a situation where it is clear that the tech platforms are not going to risk their profits or their political power to protect high-quality information. And it’s equally clear that the Republicans will continue to push for fewer guardrails against falsehoods.

…no fucking shit, sherlock

Republicans renew push to expand government powers to punish non-profits [Guardian]

If we want a quality information environment, we have to build a new one beyond the walls of the existing Big Tech social media platforms.

…*sighs*

…ok…I give in…I guess we’re doing this, then?

We can do that by funding people who do the hard work of collecting facts (a.k.a. journalists) and by finding new ways to reach audiences beyond the grip of social media algorithms that are designed to promote outrageous content rather than sober facts. There is also a new movement brewing that aims to break open the gates of the closed social media platforms.

…in the context with my beef about the standing somersault this pulled out of its sense of proportion…this…the rest of it…well…it…”sends me”…& not to a good place

You may have noticed that a whole bunch of new social media platforms have popped up in the past few years with names like Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. These may look like X on the surface, but under the hood they are wholly different beasts than the social media platforms we grew up on. They are part of a movement called the fediverse, which some sources say derives its name from “federation” and “universe.”

It’s early days for the fediverse — which has around 200 million users collectively compared with the billions on Facebook and X — although Bluesky is growing fast, more than doubling in the past 90 days to over 15 million users. The goals of the fediverse are simple: to allow you to post to all the social media platforms from a single account.

…just…no

…in fact…fuck you, no

…you even say goals…but only mention one…that’s a by product not a goal…&…for a fucking start…two of the three networks you mention…aren’t…not in the sense the whole project that comprises the actual fediverse has actual goals…which this piece doesn’t mention anywhere I could find

…if the fediverse is wikipedia…then that would be like saying that because the encyclopedia britannica & mirriam-webster have agreed to allow reciprocal links between them those are parts of wikipedia

…mastodon…which is what the bulk of the fediverse that isn’t some homebrew hobby deal is built out from/with…including truth fucking social, which straight up copypasta’d the open source code before cutting out the functionality that would have allowed it to be a free & functional cluster of nodes in that network & walled off its snowflake users into a busted variant they had to tithe to be a part of…is a whole thing…the crux of which being that by not having a central core of servers on the “platform” model…any number of little pockets can accept or deny the option of a porous border between their respective domains…& you get to pick (provided the existing tenants are willing to let you share their space) which one you call home & what bits of the potential view from there they opt in or out of…it is…fundamentally…& in ways that it’s not impossible we may yet learn to consider of greater importance than we mostly do at the moment…not. the. same. as. threads. or. bluesky.

…really

…I’m not just splitting hairs…saying that bluesky is “in” the fediverse is only true in a narrowly defined sense…saying it is “of” the fediverse is just functionally bullshit from the ground up…it’s a propriatory network hosted by a private corporate concern that doesn’t just share a founder, a colorscheme & wings on the logo with twitter…the fact that you can stand up your own node on the thing doesn’t transubstantiate it into a thing that’s more mastodon than twitter…& you can’t even do that much on threads…you have to up the cost of leaving that one to wiping your account history on a whole other platform owned by the same asshole, for crying out loud

Mark Zuckerberg loves his wife? That’s nice – but let’s stop fawning over a guy who fawns over Trump [Guardian]

…& I’m not saying don’t use it…& certainly not that what used to be twitter is better…or that threads is literally the work of the devil…sure, it has daemons…as does every other thing on a network…but…in a thing that led off by sounding off about what a big fucking problem misinformation is…either I missed a whole sequence of memos…or…I have a problem with this pitch that “fediverse” = “ability to post on multiple networks from one account”…that’s beyond reductive & truncates into non-existence the raison d’être of the fucking thing while eliding it with examples that are definitively unfit for sharing that kind of yoke?

Currently, if you want to reach Threads users, you need to set up a Threads account and work slowly and painfully to recreate the network you had already built on Twitter. But in the fediverse, you can use your Threads account to post directly to your other social media accounts as well. The fediverse also allows users to become their own social media gatekeeper, choosing their own content moderation standards.

…I know this probably sounds like a nerd-whine about the sort of thing that “functionally” makes no difference from the perspective of the overwhelming majority of end users…& the potential benefits to a proprietary interface at a UX level are much closer to the surface of that experience so it’s not inherently shady that the really glaring differences are under the hood in places that people actively don’t want to be asked to have to get their head around…to the point where not having to do that is top of most people’s list of pre-requisites for not considering the barrier to entry insurmountable…but…indulge me?

It’s not a silver bullet for truth — plenty of people will still fall for lies and misleading content. But by seizing control of our social media environment, we can give the truth a chance.

The Right’s Triumph Over Social Media [NYT]

…that…*is* misleading content…you know…if we’re giving the truth a chance?

Bridgy Fed connects web sites, the fediverse, and Bluesky. You can use it to make your profile on one visible in another, follow people, see their posts, and reply and like and repost them. Interactions work in both directions as much as possible. See the docs for more info.

https://fed.brid.gy/

…that…bridges…the fediverse…& the “indieweb”…with bluesky…it doesn’t pleat the tectonics to make them a single landmass

…& it’s easy if you’re on bluesky

https://bsky.app/profile/ap.brid.gy

…follow that account & hey, presto…your bluesky account is now your portal to the fediverse

…no fucking about figuring out what server in a hard-to-navigate sea you want to call home…or how to hook your mastodon feed into all the bits you want & shut out the ones you don’t…just a quick follow & you’re off to the races…which is better…right?

An important step toward a more interoperable “fediverse” – the broader network of decentralized social media apps like Mastodon, Bluesky and others – has been achieved. Now users on decentralized apps like Mastodon, powered by the ActivityPub protocol, and those powered by Bluesky’s AT Protocol, can easily follow people on other networks, see their posts, and like, reply and repost them.

Those same people will be able to see the others’ posts in return, too.

The technology making this possible is Bridgy Fed, one of the efforts aimed at connecting the fediverse with the web, Bluesky and, perhaps later, other networks like Nostr.

Since the 2022 sale of Twitter to Elon Musk, who rebranded the app X, there’s been a surge of interest in decentralized social media. Apps like Mastodon gained a following in the wake of Twitter’s new ownership, as users explored what a network without a centralized authority may look like. Meanwhile, Bluesky – a startup originally incubated within Twitter – raised a seed round and grew its network to over 5.7 million users after launching publicly earlier this year.

Other decentralized social media networks are finding footing of their own, too, like the blockchain-based Farcaster, which just last month closed on $150 million in funding from Paradigm, a16z crypto, Haun Ventures, USV and others.

There’s just one problem these networks face in gaining traction against a rival like X or Meta’s Threads: Their users couldn’t talk to each other.

Though both Mastodon and Bluesky are decentralized social media efforts, they rely on different underlying protocols. That means a Mastodon user can interact with others who post elsewhere on the fediverse – that is, other apps that use the older ActivityPub social networking protocol. But they couldn’t interact with people who posted on Bluesky, because it uses the newer AT Protocol to operate.

…think of it like how eventually they managed to get PAL & NTSC systems to play the same DVD

Though the matter was originally fraught with debate over the bridge’s planned opt-out nature, Barrett listened to the community feedback and made the bridge opt-in on both sides for the time being.

That could shift in the future, however, to becoming opt-out for Bluesky users only. “The norms and expectations there are somewhat different than in the fediverse,” he told TechCrunch.

…or like a tourist visa…you can go there…you can mix with the locals…but your ride is still an @jack rental…you haven’t become an ex-pat from what the indieweb camp would call the “corporate web”

…& that’s from the before-times, anyway…early june of this year…so you got to remember it was a gentler time

Bridgy Fed itself soft-launched in mid-April and transitioned to a full launch over the past month. It’s now one of many different efforts to bridge networks in the fediverse, in addition to Sasquatch, pinhole, RSS Parrot, Mostr, and SkyBridge, though many are not as fully bidirectional as Bridgy is.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/05/bluesky-and-mastodon-users-can-now-talk-to-each-other-with-bridgy-fed/

…but…not least when it goes double for threads

Threads has entered the fediverse

…where you can flip the toggle in the global settings to really feel like it’s a native deal

https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/C8poYviPh71/threads-update-fediverse-edition-were-introducing-the-ability-for-users-who-turn?hl=en-gb

…that was about three weeks later when the roll out rolled over from beta to prod…& just about nobody gives a fuck what I’d be on about now…any more than they did then…but…while I’m beating my head against this metaphorical wall…might as well keep trying to make the dent, I guess

…it helps when you know what your car runs on, right?

…like…put gas in a diesel…or vice versa…or try plugging the tank on either into a 3-phase power-supply…& odds are somebody’s going to have a bad day…& fixing shit is gonna cost

…& if someone told you it didn’t matter if it was diesel, gas, electric or nuclear powered because their sole criteria for picking one over the other was how aesthetically pleasing they found the dashboard

…would you pick the car they designed to be just what they say you’re looking for?

…maybe you would…based on the electoral window onto the inner working of the american psyche…you’d have a lot of company…but if I’m honest…I’d be lying if I said it seemed like a smart move

Welcome to Opt Out, a semi-regular column in which we help you navigate your online privacy and show you how to say no to surveillance. The last column covered how to talk to your family about not posting your baby’s photos on the internet.

…no…I’m not re-christening the DOTs…or giving myo a shot at an I-told-ya-so about how there’s all these other sorts of posts I could be finding time I always seem to have lost before I start looking to knock up which people might very well prefer to this sort of nonsense…or be this sort of nonsense…that’s a guardian-based semi-regular column…& this one

There are few protections against the state surveillance apparatus that has been used by every administration in recent memory to monitor people in the US and will probably continue to be used under Trump. The US has no federal privacy regulations on the books that effectively limit how companies collect your data and what they can do with it. Tech companies have for years, and more recently with new fervor, been actively vying for national security and government contracts as they look to expand their bottom lines.

There are active efforts to organize against this surveillance system and “demand that tech companies and the government stop surveilling and criminalizing us”, says Hannah Lucal, a data and tech fellow at immigration legal firm Just Futures Law. There are also harm-reduction strategies people can employ in their daily lives.

“Digital security can feel really overwhelming because it feels like a lot of tasks to do,” Lucal said. “You should assume tech companies, law enforcement agencies, immigration enforcement can access anything that you message, post, search, look at, watch online if they want to. But there are ways to make it a lot harder for them.”

The following tips are not exhaustive but are some of the high-priority recommendations Just Futures Law and other organizations have suggested if you’re an asylum seeker or immigrant concerned about protecting your privacy. At a high level, you should be looking at minimizing how much data you’re storing or sharing, be especially vigilant about which apps you’re sharing your location with and deleting your data when possible.

…I haven’t got scared enough yet to be auto-wiping the shit I say to the people I say it to…so maybe I’m the naïf here…but…think of all the people you know who don’t find messing with the permissions…or liberties, you might say, since they help themselves without asking as far as they can by default & default to threatening not to work if you deny them even ones it somehow often turns out don’t break anything you actually wanted when you deny…or at least curtail…the ones that seem like a reach…the equivalent of “here be dragons“…& then ask yourself how many of that subset understand what is or isn’t running on a device that isn’t what they’re currently looking at on the screen?

On iPhones, you can go into your settings and search for “location services” at the top. Then click on “location”; that will bring you to the location services menu. There you’ll see a list of all of your apps and what your location preferences are for each. You’ll want to go through each of them and make sure your settings are set to “never” for apps that don’t need location data to function.

On Android, go to your settings, then “security and privacy”, then “privacy controls”, then “permission manager” and select location. From there you can revise the location settings of each app to either allow those apps to access your location only while using the app, not at all or to ask every time.

And for apps that definitely need your location to do its basic functionalities, Lucal suggests setting your preference to “ask next time or when I share”. The less secure option is to only allow the app to access your location while you’re using the app. “Keep in mind, oftentimes people have apps open even if they’re not actively using them,” Lucal said.

Opt out: how to stop tech companies spying on your phone as Trump promises mass deportations [Guardian]

…I’m no derren brown…but I’m thinking you don’t have a long list of names left…unless you hang out with some disproportionately tech-literate folks to an extent that makes you a statistical outlier

Trump’s science-denying fanatics are bad enough. Yet even our climate ‘solutions’ are now the stuff of total delusion [Guardian]

…carbon markets…the brid.gy connecting the bluesky thinking of extractive industry to the warm & fuzzies of being part of the solution

‘A little dirty’: inside the secret world of McKinsey, the firm hooked on fossil fuels [Guardian]

…you can’t spin up a plastics & petrochemical industry free zone on a thing you spent a lot of money on not so long ago that’s not worth much now you need newer shinier toys to play with others the way you can a mastadon instance…but…that doesn’t mean threads & bluesky are the same answer or even admit to the question needing to be asked…just like “a little” can be a big fucking deal

Five firms in plastic pollution alliance ‘made 1,000 times more plastic than they cleaned up’ [Guardian]

…&…I know this all sounds a bit guardian-heavy…but…that cadwalladr piece I’ve mentioned a couple of times…it hit this by point #3

3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.

…& she mentions the autodelete feature for messages, too…but later in the list…the next part goes like this

4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan. Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate.

…& in that kind of context there are genuine things about the fediverse approach that it would be helpful for people to understand the hows & whys of even if they don’t choose to use the stuff…she doesn’t specifically link those to this part

5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.

6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.

…or…you can hang out in zuck’s other-other-other back yard until he hooks you up for a ride around the places he doesn’t own…fuck a memo, amirite?

7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.

10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/17/how-to-survive-the-broligarchy-20-lessons-for-the-post-truth-world-donald-trump

…know thyself…it’s good advice…long dead greek guys back it up to the point of claiming an unexamined life is not worth living…pretty sure they didn’t mean you should cry if you don’t have enough followers you’ve never met juicing metrics…on a gauge in a dashboard that pays some dude you’ve never met on account of the stuff it lets them get you to pay other people for that maybe you wouldn’t otherwise…to keep you in externally validated dopamine hits…but here we are…in a world where talking about the importance of truth while extolling the virtues of eating apples to ensure you have enough oranges in your diet to be free of the bad apples that are “disproportionately” representative of the barrel you’re living in like a digital diogenes is the stuff of NYT columns aimed squarely at people who won’t miss what isn’t there

…&…I’m not doug stanhope…but…maybe that’s why I drink, all the same?

[…give me strength…TIL grimes has a song called player of games…I won’t be dropping that in the playlist I was pondering when I noticed that…but…that’s the title of an excellent iain m banks book…& if you check out the lyrics it’s clear she isn’t talking about jernau morat gurgeh…&…I might be misremembering my culture nomenclature…but I think it’s the morat part that’s the name he picked for himself that actually means player of games…so…if anyone cares…that’s why there’ll be at least one murat & jose track…iain had farts smarter than elon…yes…I am well aware I appear to be “in a bit of a mood”…what’s your point…& more to the point…did you bring fresh coffee?]