[Social media] – INANIMATE CARBON GOD

Substack still has a Nazi problem

A while ago I posted about Substack’s Nazi problem, and, well, nearly three years later nothing uch has changed from what I’ve seen:

Oof. Now, let it be said that not every creator on Substack, not even the righ-leaning ones, is a Nazi. OBVIOUSLY. There are good and useful people using the service, even if Substack’s algorithm has hitherto been determined to hide them from me in favour of the complete gits. And the latter do seem to come in various flavours. You get the ordinary person who just wishes things were less shit (which I think describes an awful lot of people these days). You get the conservative who’s accepted some amount of progress but not happily. You get the aesthetic nostalgists mooning over what they see as the lack of beauty in the world (these are people I’m wary of, cos I’ve encountered several of them on Tumblr whose outward passion for classical art and so forth concealed some hideous political beliefs). You get the more hardcore capital-T Traditionalist for whom the passage of time itself is evil and why aren’t things more like they were in the far past we wish existed but probably didn’t. You get the “SAVE THE WEST!” reactionaries and racists for whom the problem is “Abdul” and/or Jews, liberals, women, etc.

And, frankly, you get the overt neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

I’ve actually been considering using Substack as a side-project of sorts, now that I’ve taken down the old Important Images series posts (for reasons you may wish to guess at), I’ve lately considered doing that over on Substack. Now I really don’t know if I should or if I even can. It bothers me that some people I actually know use it for their work, but I don’t feel like I can judge them cos I am sure the good users on there outnumber the bad ones. And I do know that, yeah, there’s probably right-wing shitheads being hosted by WordPress just like I am, and I still use WP without that bothering me. (Hypocrisy, moi?) I’ve shared Tumblr with any number of white supremacists (1488 of them, perhaps? Ho ho!), and, well, look at FB and Twatter… I’m almost certainly overthinking all of this, because I am me and that is what I do best, but that doesn’t change that Substack still has a Nazi problem. And as long as the Nazis are making bank from posting on there, and as long as Substack are getting their cut of that, they’re always going to have one. Bah.

Insert Carl McCoy here

On a lighter note, Threads (which I still check out most days) has turned particularly silly in the last few hours…

So, the weather in the US has been quite foul lately, even for this time of year, and someone somewhere was inspired to develop the idea that the US “government” has engineered the weather to stop the Biblical Leviathan from awaking and to drive it back into its frozen slumber. This is FUCKING MAGNIFICENT, especially cos no one seems to know how it started nor whether (nearly wrote that as “weather” HO HO) the people who started it mean it or not. A lot of people do seem to be invoking it sarcastically as a meme, but the funnier and sadder responses come from people not getting the joke (if it is one), e.g.:

Well, in spite of my own education (Matraville Primary 1980-86, Sydney Boys High School 1987-92, University of NSW 1993-97, and two TAFE courses 2001-03), I’ve never seen satellite imagery off the tip of Argentina/Chile before because there’s never been any reason why I SHOULD have done. I generally don’t NEED satellite imagery of anywhere, let alone the arse of South America, my interests and activities generally don’t require that sort of thing. I imagine MOST people are in a similar position to me, in that they don’t take a regular active interest in this sort of thing, but when someone shows them a cool picture like this they’ll say “oh, that’s a cool picture”, they’ll acknowledge it positively despite that… and then some prat comes up and screams at them for not being more interested in science.

Then there’s Paula here:

Here’s something else she seems to be serious about:

I think I’ll pass on that offer, thanks. At least some people are retaining their senses of irony:

And this is hard to argue with too:

As a respite from the horrors, this whole Leviathan thing certainly has been one. And, as a final note, this is also hard to argue with:

Leave those semicolons alone!

Haven’t had an awful lot to say of late, just having one of those occasional lulls; there’s enough stuff happening that I could talk about (like the US government shutdown and the chaos resulting therefrom) but haven’t wanted to. But I must note this story, at least…

So the author Joyce Carol Oates posted this on Twatter the other day, and a bit of a storm erupted thereafter… and I recognise the tendency she brings up, I wrote about it a while ago; it’s the “art won’t fuck you” thing. These things don’t get these people anything, there’s no material benefit for them. You may notice, though, that Oates doesn’t specfically identify any individual “wealthy man” that she might be thinking of, but someone made it all about himself…

EDOLF! I haven’t had anything to say about that cunt in ages, haven’t missed him for aome reason, but anyway he felt the need to make himself the main character of the Internet again after Oates posted that tweet about him that didn’t even name him, and he was fuming like this for ages, apparently…

…to the point of being all “SEE? I do SO read books, Joyce!” like this, making an ad to promote an old Blinkist list of some of his favourite books (which I had seen before; he’s been a reader at some point but I feel like he hasn’t been one for a very long time)…

…and though this post did predate the current nonsense, it’s been revived as a result of same. You may notice the book in the link is conspicuously not the one he mentioned.

As for Joyce:

Which I do believe is a rather more concise and brutal burn than the one that kicked this off. To be honest, I don’t think the “art won’t fuck you” thing really works with Edolf. I don’t know if he’s actually that interested in sex per se; he’s obviously invested in spreading his genes as far and wide as he can, but I don’t know that sex in and of itself otherwise interests him… we’ll leave aside entirely the question of whether or not he’s even functional Down There (most if not all of his many kids seem to have come from IVF or susrrogacy, though), but anyway, I suspect he’s more interested in power than anything really. But there’s equally no denying a hollowness at the heart of him; he may not be bothered that art won’t fuck him, but he evinces no real interest in it anyway that I can see. He really is all he has, and when you’re him, that’s a pretty fucking awful thing…

Wait until they hear about the rest of the Internet…

Tanzania announces shutdown of X because of pornography

Tanzania has decided to block access to social media platform X because it allows pornographic content to be shared, the information minister has said.
The content was contrary to the East African state’s “laws, culture, customs, and traditions,” Jerry Silaa told a local TV station.
Tanzanians have reported that access to X has been restricted in the last two weeks after political tensions rose and the police account was hacked, but there has not yet been a total shutdown of the platform. […]
In its post, the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) said that X, then known as Twitter, faced a similar shutdown in the run-up to the 2020 election, and the “recurrence” of restrictions raised “serious concerns about the openness of digital space” in Tanzania.
The popular social audio app Clubhouse and messaging service Telegram are also inaccessible without the use of Virtual Private Networks (VPN), the rights group added.
It said it was troubling that while the minister confirmed the government’s role in blocking X, government officials and public institutions continued to use the platform.
“This inconsistency confuses the public and undermines the credibility of the government’s position,” LHRC added.

Yeah, but governments don’t seem to care about consistency as a general rule. Hypocrisy of some sort is almost invariably part of the package even with “good” governments.

In his interview, Silaa linked the ban to X’s announcement last year that it would no longer block “consensually produced and distributed” adult content.
The minister was quoted as saying that X has “permitted explicit sexual material, including same-sex pornographic content” in breach of Tanzania’s online “ethics guidelines.

Ahhhhh. And why do I feel like “same-sex pornographic content” just means “showing gay people just existing normally”, not even doing The Dirty, Dirty Thing? Tanzania’s unpleasant LGBTQ+ rights record may not be as bad as Uganda’s, insofar as Tanzania won’t kill you for being gay, but that seems to be about it. Either way, I can’t wait until they discover Pornhub now…

That’ll work

Mark Zuckerberg once suggested wiping all Facebook friends lists to boost usage

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a “potentially crazy idea” in 2022 to get people using Facebook more: deleting everyone’s friends’ lists. The possibility was discussed on Monday via internal emails shown by the FTC as Zuckerberg testified during Meta’s antitrust trial.
Zuckerberg floated the idea of considering “wiping everyone’s graphs” — their friends lists — “and having them start again,” possibly once a year, noted The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, who observed the testimony inside the courtroom. Meta’s CEO said he was concerned that Facebook’s “cultural relevance is decreasing quickly.” Zuckerberg proposed a staggered approach, like starting with an experiment in a smaller country, in case too many people quit Facebook in response to the move. “Even if [Instagram] and [WhatsApp] do well,” he said, “I don’t see a way for our company to succeed in the way we need if FB falters, so we need to get this right.” […]
Meta has taken a different approach to revitalizing the Facebook experience lately, with the recent introduction of a revamped friends tab that doesn’t show algorithmic content to users. In January, Zuckerberg said that a big focus for the company this year would be to “get back to some OG Facebook.”

I can’t speak for anyone else, but “OG Facebook” for me was about finding other people I knew and interacting with them, not the other way round. This sounds like a plan to force people to engage with content by people they don’t know and don’t want to interact with (and forcing them to do so more than once to boot). Look at how well that works on Twitter and Threads. This would KILL Facebook and he knew it, as his “staggered approach” idea indicates. Was Zuck on Edolf’s stash when he came up with this?

Category: [Social media]

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