[Social media] – INANIMATE CARBON GOD

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?

RIP Tiktok… or not?

The slightly strange saga of Tiktok being banned in the US took a curious twist today… the story is kind of long and that Wiki piece sums it up; it boils down to the US government being wary of it collecting users’ data to misuse and being Chinese-owned and so do espionage (despite the fact that even the CIA found they hadn’t actually done so), which American companies would never do now, would they… And a certain Lord Dampnut was the prime mover in insisting it be banned when it all started, but now he’s… all for it?

Tiktok were given until the 19th to divest or shut down in the US. They did the latter yesterday, i.e. the 18th in US time. Then they came back today with the above message thanking tne guy who… wasn’t actually president yet. Now, Mushroom Cock did promise to do something to save Tiktok once he actually was—some have said it was because he belatedly realised a lot of his cultists used the thing and he wouldn’t want them to not be able to praise him in every possible way, would he—but he won’t be for a few more hours, whereupon it appears he’ll be more excited about rounding up foreign muck to expel it back to Mexico. I wonder what deal has been done here, and what the felon-elect expects from it. Cos you don’t do things out of the goodness of your heart when you have none.

Anyway, senator Ed Markey is happy:

Not sure why he’s so pleased, given that he apparently actually voted in favour of the ban despite having a Tiktok account himself… And how are the right reacting? Well, this is Charlie Kirk in 2020:

Versus Charlie Kirk in 2025:

Got to love a freethinker who’s clearly not at all swayed by the whims of his cult leader and happily agrees with everything the latter says and does of his own free will and rational thought, and the 180 degree shift in position is something we don’t need to bring up because it doesn’t really exist (except when Ed Markey does it, probably). We have always been at war with Oceania, or something. Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how many people will be glad that Drumpf saved Tiktok and for how long, especially with his nibs having already expressed an interest in the US government being the 50% joint owner… on the other hand, there’s rumours that Apartheid Clyde has also been approached, and frankly I don’t know which alternative is worse. Fuck all of these people.

Moving on from Meta?

So Mark Zuckerberg’s going back to his roots, rating girls’ attractiveness… er, “free expression”, apparently. Who knew Facebook as ever meant to be a hub of free speech? Certainly not Facebook themselves, who have enough of a history of censorship that Wikipedia has a whole page devoted just to that…

Community notes instead of actual fact checkers. Just like Twitter. Almost feels like there was no point leaving.

As for removing restrictions on those not even remotely hot button issues, well…

In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
In other words, Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation.

Fantastic. The article also notes these other changes:

Removing language prohibiting content targeting people based on the basis of their “protected characteristics,” which include race, ethnicity, and gender identity, when they are combined with “claims that they have or spread the coronavirus.” Without this provision, it may now be within bounds to accuse, for example, Chinese people of bearing responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic.
A new addition appears to carve out room for people who want to post about how, for example, women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military or men shouldn’t be allowed to teach math because of their gender. Meta now permits content that argues for “gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.” […]
Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy previously opened by noting that hateful speech may “promote offline violence.” That sentence, which had been present in the policy since 2019, has been removed from the updated version released Tuesday. (In 2018, following reports from human rights groups, Meta admitted that its platform was used to incite violence against religious minorities in Myanmar.) The update does preserve language toward the bottom of the policy prohibiting content that could “incite imminent violence or intimidation.”

On the plus side, you still won’t be able to deny the Holocaust or accuse Jews of controlling the media and you can’t do blackface and you can’t be overtly racist… and does any of that matter when you see the stuff that Facebook lets slide? The overtly racist hate groups it keeps saying don’t violate their community standards? When Zuck talks about working with Mushroom Cock, I feel like he’s being at least a little disingenuous about what that means…

(via)

Anyway, people are wondering whether or not the time has come or is coming to get the hell away from Meta’s services, or at least from Threads and Fessebouc (I don’t know why but Instagram feels less corrupt for some reason, and I am probably wrong about that), if not social media altogether. I don’t know. Saw someone on Threads saying “hey, don’t forget Reddit’s still a thing”, which… yeah, that‘s an appetising thought, isn’t it? I don’t suppose Meta’s really going to go down or anything, I mean, Twitter’s still there and me leaving that made no real difference except I could feel smug about myself for not using one billionaire’s social media while using three of another billionaire’s.

And Bluesky, of course. No idea how long that’ll take to get enshittified, but I’ve no doubt it’ll happen eventually. Still seems like it might be the best option for that sort of Twitter-esque short form thing. But maybe proper blogs really are the way ahead? This is where most of my activity takes place these days, if I have anything to say it tends to be here… I have a feeling this sort of thing will yet see a resurgence as long as our social media providers insist on “working with” the Right…

Also, Zuckerberg was the Zodiac Killer, not Ted Cruz.

So much for the tolerant… right?

Wasn’t expecting the year to end with MAGA melting down, but that’s what it seems to be doing… Mushroom Cock appointed some Indian guy to be the government advisor on AI, professional racist Laura Loomer (who you may recall cosying up to Trump not that long ago) started bitching about furriners terkin’ err jerbs and all that, and Oolong just had to get involved because obviously:

“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, on Christmas Day.
In a later post, he wrote: “It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE. End of story.”

I find it awfully hard to believe that this shortage is actually a thing, at least to the extent that he seems to want us to think, and the real shortage is of people who are willing to let Oolong exploit them by, you know, paying them nothing. Which is why there’s also been a lot of sniping about the H1B visa in this discourse, which is a special visa tech companies use to import foreign workers, and which would kind of allow Oolong to exploit said foreign labour in the way he wants. Ann Coulter, of all people, wasn’t having it:

Of course, I don’t believe for a minute that Coulter gives a flying fuck for the welfare of those imported workers; the real problem for her and the rest of the MAGA mob is the imported workers terkin’ err jerbs. Would they care as much about American workers in the same sort of indentured servitude? Why do I feel not? Loomer didn’t even bother hiding it, per the Graun article:

“@VivekGRamaswamy knows that the Great Replacement is real,” she wrote. “It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H1B visas. Not an extension.
“The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar-a-Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so they can have unlimited slave laborers from India and China who never assimilate.”

Meanwhile, Oolong is apparently getting fed up with people arguing with him and responded in the funniest way he could:

And Laura is NOT happy:

FREE FUCKING SPEECH! Where was this cunt when Musk was banning left-leaning Twitter accounts for talking back to him? Was it OK then, Laura? Does it only bother you that he’s a censorious shit when he does it to MAGA chuds? Laura, of course, famously got banned from Twitter in its pre-Musk era, leading to that ludicrous incident where she handcuffed herself to the front door of the Twitter building. Maybe she should try that again.

Obviously, though, I find it slightly rich that Oolong is having this hissy fit at his presumable political comrades for being racist to immigrants when, a few days ago, he went full mask off (was the mask still on? Was it ever?) by endorsing Alternative für Deutschland, who don’t exactly love immigrants and who have been so awful even fucking Marine Le Pen wants nothing to do with them. That takes some effort. Oolong is going to be an interesting part of the new regime, though I suspect it may not be for long; Trump’s already had to make some remarks about not “ceding the presidency” to Musk following the recent government shutdown shenanigans which I doubt he was happy at having to do, and if Oolong keeps this sort of shit up I expect that even his lordship will only tolerate so mmuch of it…

X-odus

Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after the US election

Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 700,000 new users in the week since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.
The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach 14.5 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said. […]
The platform has previously benefited from dissatisfaction with X and its billionaire owner, Elon Musk, who is closely tied to US president-elect Donald Trump’s successful election campaign. Twitter shed millions of users after rebranding to X and usage in the US slumped by more than a fifth in the subsequent seven months.
Bluesky reported picking up 3 million new users in the week after X was suspended in Brazil in September and a further 1.2 million in the two days after X announced it would allow users to view posts from people who had blocked them.
“We’re excited to welcome all of these new people, ranging from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners,” Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu said.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor at New York University, had 250,000 followers on X but picked up 21,000 followers in her first day on Bluesky this week.
“I am still on X but after January, when X could be owned by a de facto member of the Trump administration, its functions as a Trump propaganda outlet and far-right radicalization machine could be accelerated,” she said.

Unsurprising. There’s been a ton of new posters on Threads in the last week, too, no idea how many but it certainly felt like thousands… That said, I’ve also seen suggestions that a lot of Twitter’s losses in the last few days have actually been bot accounts that have served their purpose, they don’t need to keep spreading election misinformation any more now that Apartheid Clyde got his desired results…

Talking of Threads…

Threads has been quite interesting so far as a social media experiment, cos I do find myself having a somewhat different relationship with it to what I have with the others, especially when it comes to blocking other users. On Twitter, I tended to mostly block ads and right-wing shitheads when one occasionally got thrown up at me, but more often what I’d do was go into trending hashtags, and in many such instances you just knew they’d be overrun with the aforementioned shitheads and I’d block as many of them as I could there, so I wound up blocking quite a lot. (Of course, given Oolong’s determination to kill the block function, I wouldn’t have been able to do that much longer, another thing which drove me to kill my account.)

Conversely, I almost never do this on Mastodon or Bluesky. Part of that is that I just don’t use Mastodon that much now, and also I think the nature of it keeps the idiots away. Obviously there are idiots, but the defederating thing stops them spreading. Similarly on Bluesky, there’s stupidity but it’s easy to keep out of one’s feed; handily, it’s also easy to make lists of accounts and share them with everyone else, so when someone makes a list of MAGAts or other right-wingers, I can subscribe to that and automatically block the mongrels en masse. That sort of list for pre-emptive blocking is one of my favourite features of Bluesky. I don’t use it often, but it’s handy to have.

On Threads, however, there seems to almost be a culture of “block early, block often”, and blocking at the slightest provocation is kind of encouraged, cos the “For You” page is the default setting rather than the accounts you actually follow. So you open the site and you basically get whatever the algorithm thinks you’ll like rather than what you necessarily want… and though the Threads algorithm is actually pretty good in that regard, I will sometimes encounter someone having a conversation with a dickhead or cluster thereof and that gives me something to block. Indeed, sometimes I’ll just block people for being mildly annoying, even people whose accounts I’ll look over and they might be OK but they post one or two stupid things that irritate me and BOOM. Away they go. And, like I say, the general culture of the place seems to encourage this sort of thing and I’m fine with it.

Continue reading “Talking of Threads…”