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What’s he fucking up in there

Twitter’s gone transparent! And the numbers are… well, they are.

Today, X released the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022.
Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter would release transparency reports every six months.These largely covered the same ground as the new X report, giving specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content removals, as well as data about which content was reported and, in some cases, removed for violating policies. The last transparency report available from Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages long. (X’s is a shorter 15 pages, but requests from governments are also listed elsewhere on the company’s website and have been consistently updated to remain in compliance with various government orders.) […]
While some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports—reports of abuse and harassment are, somewhat predictably, high—in other areas, there’s a stark difference. For instance, in the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. […] In the new X report, the company says it has taken action on only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.
But this may be due to the fact that X’s policies have changed since it was Twitter, which Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped put together its Moderation Research Consortium, says might change the way the numbers look in a transparency report. For instance, last year the company changed its policies on hate speech, which previously covered misgendering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation in November of 2022.
“As certain policies have been modified, some content is no longer violative. So if you’re looking at changes in the quality of experience, that might be hard to capture in a transparency report,” she says.

This is what it looks like when the new owner of a public forum fires most of the people responsible for ensuring the safety of said public forum, and cosies up to the far-right shits it had previously correctly banned. Not that we didn’t know things at whatsitsname weren’t worse than they used, but now have some concrete idea of how bad. And the other recent news about Oolong neutering the block function on Twitter doesn’t make the place any more attractive, does it.

Elsewhere in Birdland

This is the current state of political discourse chez Oolong. Matt Convente should clearly have made a racist remark in his post, he’d have got away with it then…

In other Oolong news, he’s suing people for not advertising on his platform:

This is slightly rich coming from the man who famously told advertisers to go fuck themselves, but hey, you do you, cuntface. It’s not like you’re smart enough to do anything else.

Also, in stopped clock news…

Piers Morgan has hit out at Elon Musk over his inflamatory remarks about Britain’s ongoing race riots.
Violent disorder has spread across the country in the wake of the stabbings of three young girls in Southport, after misinformation spread that the killer was a Muslim asylum seeker.
Hundreds of people have been arrested, with thousands of police officers deployed to prepare for further actions throughout the week. At least one person has been left seriously injured as a result of racist and Islamophobic attacks, with stabbings, street beatings, and mosques under siege.
The billionaire tech owner has been accused of fanning the flames of unrest, as he shared a video of a group of Asian men gathered around a pub in Birmingham with the caption, “Why aren’t all communities protected in Britain?” to X/Twitter on Tuesday (6 August).
He tagged UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer in the post, after the Labour leader condemned actions against groups based on their race or religion and called for mosques to be protected.
Morgan called out Musk for the comment as he chastised, “Elon, fake news was posted that the triple child-killer was a Muslim illegal immigrant who came in on a small boat and was on a terror watchlist.
“This prompted far-right rioters to attack Muslims & asylum seekers. I haven’t seen you mention/condemn any of this?”

Piers Morgan is one of the most genuinely baffling people in British media, in that he is transparently a piece of shit, but every so often the ideological scales fall from his eyes and he comes up against someone who’s just too big a cunt even for him and he puts forward a Good Take. The whole Southport situation has been so revolting I haven’t wanted to say anything about it, but Piers is being honest: the far-right shitheads that Apartheid Clyde insists on increasingly appealing too ARE the ones at fault in this awful case, all these fucking Yaxley-Lennon wannabes “taking their country back from immigrants” by looting stores that weren’t actually immigrant-owned and so forth… ugh. What a cunt Musk is, standing with these so-called people.

Of course he did

Jack Dorsey gave $10 million to an anonymous founder with a deep devotion to a fascist ‘guru’

Dorsey gave $10 million to a foundation supporting Nostr and 14 bitcoins, worth roughly $245,000, directly to Nostr’s founder, who until now was known pseudonymously as Fiatjaf.
Nostr “has no board, no company behind it, no funding,” Dorsey said in an interview with the Silicon Valley outlet Pirate Wires last month. “It’s a truly open protocol. The development environment is moving fast. And I gave a bunch of money to them.” Nostr has a relatively small user base of cryptocurrency and privacy enthusiasts, including Edward Snowden.
“We don’t know who the leader is, it’s like this anonymous Brazilian,” Dorsey said.
That anonymous Brazilian is Giovanni Torres Parra, a developer who has also built at least two webpages devoted to disseminating the work of the far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho. Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.

So not that long ago I posted something about Beardo quitting Bluesky because he was more interested in Nostr, and I noted my puzzlement at him funding this thing without even knowing who “Fiatjaf” was. I mean, that’s quite a lot of money to give to someone you don’t even know the identity of… evidently that identity is now known somehow (bet he’s thrilled about that), and for some reason I find myself suspecting that Dorsey was perfectly aware of who he was all along. The end of the article further says:

On a podcast last year, Parra, as Fiatjaf, mused about the likelihood that “Nazis or racists or whatever” could see Nostr as a home for hate speech because the nature of the protocol means it has no centralized content moderation.
“I want to tell these people to go somewhere else, but I think we need these people, too,” he said.

Giovanni, meu irmão em Cristo, NO ONE needs Nazis. No good comes from Nazis. And no good is going to come of Nostr if you think Nazis might be useful to it in any way.

Jack’s off

It was news to me that Jack Dorsey was still part of Bluesky until a few days ago, cos I could’ve sworn he’d actually left it a while ago (apparently that was just him deleting his account, not leaving the company), but never mind that. He’s out for real now and not just in my fevered imagination, and here’s why, apparently:

Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter, slammed the board that oversaw the social media firm during his tenure at its helm, saying the group had “always been a problem.”
“I was extremely challenged by my board,” Dorsey said during an interview published Thursday by Mike Solana, the head of marketing for VC firm Founders Fund and editor of digital media brand Pirate Wires.
“The board has always been a problem at that company, and I was happy to see it end,” Dorsey continued. “But there was only one way for it to end, which is going private. And I think that’s the greatest act.” […]
But Dorsey said he was also unhappy with the board because of an activist investor seeking to boot him, he said.
“I didn’t want to be on a board with an activist,” he said. I didn’t want to run a company like that. It’s just a Wall Street mess. It’s not creative, it’s diminishing.”

So now that Twitter is apparently much more like Beardo thought it should be, he’s recommending people use that instead of Bluesky, cos the latter’s become too much like what Twitter actually was:

This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.
That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.

So people being asked not to be cunts on the Internet is the real problem? Of course it is… and I’ve seen a few folks on BS frown at his choice of the words “very common crowd” to describe the people migrating there, which is indeed a somewhat odd phrase I don’t think he explained or expanded on. Were we all not elite enough for him or something?

And fair enough, maybe some people are offering uncharitable interpretations of what he meant, but maybe explain to us why he used the word “common” instead of those others…

Anyway, though he’s boosting Shitter again (it’s “freedom technology”, apparently, as long as Oolong likes you), Jack’s real interest is Nostr. You know, the social network that only crypto bros like Jack seems to be into. I mean, have you ever seen Nostr mentioned in any other context? Cos sure as shit I haven’t. Who uses it? What do people do with it? Why do you never see anyone talking about it or quoting what people have said on it? And who is the guy who invented it? We don’t seem to know anything about him other than that he’s a developer from Brazil in his early 30s who fell in love with Bitcoin after falling in love with Austrian economics. Maybe it’s just me but I’d be hesitant to give millions of dollars to someone whose identity was unverifiable. Still, libertarians gonna liberty, I suppose…

Less obviously

Elon Musk Asks Fellow Transphobe JK Rowling To Post Other Content

Astonishingly, Oolong is apparently as sick as the rest of us of Mr Galbraith hating trans folks all the time:

Harry Potter author and self-proclaimed TERF JK Rowling has been asked by CEO of X (formerly Twitter) and fellow transphobe Elon Musk to turn the transphobia down a notch.
In response to a lengthy tweet from April that saw Rowling employ much of her usual anti-trans rhetoric, such as invalidating trans identities and touting gender essentialism, Musk decided to step in and personally ask the author if she could perhaps pivot to other topics.
“While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex/gender,” he said, “may I suggest also posting interesting and positive content on other matters?”
Musk’s request is particularly ironic, given his previous attempts to lobby against gender-affirming care and current plans to sue Australia’s ESafety Commission after a request to take down an anti-trans post on his platform.
Rowling is yet to respond to Musk’s request, and though most people would probably pause to reflect if told to scale back the transphobia by Elon Musk, it’s not difficult to imagine Rowling will only be emboldened to quadruple down on her anti-trans rhetoric due to this request.
In fact, in the days since this reply, Rowling has continued to post transphobic content completely undeterred by Musk’s request.

According to The Humanist Report, she did in fact post one non-transphobia thing after making a snarky comment about Musk’s tweet, but does seem to have otherwise carried on business as usual after that. But yeah, when a champion transphobe like Oolong is saying “Jesus fuck, Joanne, can’t you talk about something else for once?”, you’d think she might take a bit more notice than that… but I suppose we’ve known for a while what really matters to her, and it’s not being remembered for the Potter books…