Category: [Social media]

Don’t lose your head(line)

This is Oolong’s latest thing for Twatter, and I find it baffling. I dimly recall him justifying it by saying it would ease the burden on T. and make it load faster, or something like that, or am I getting confused with that time he limited the amount people could post/read there… I don’t know, I don’t see much point to it…

…and if some T. users have their way, he’s going to live to regret it very quickly. I did see someone saying this’ll just make the spread of misinformation a lot easier, and we know how much of a problem misinformation has been over there, and how little interest Oolong has in fixing that, and they could be right but at the same time, as you can see above, I rather enjoy the potential for using it against him. Perhaps he will rethink sooner rather than later…

Obviously

X makes cuts to disinformation and election integrity team

X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has slashed the number of people on its disinformation and election integrity team just weeks after it said it was hiring for new positions to help it guard against foreign interference.
The cuts, first reported by the tech-focused media outlet The Information, included Aaron Rodericks, the head of the team, said a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns about professional consequences.
The person familiar with the cuts said four people had been let go — the entirety of X’s election integrity unit in its Dublin office. It’s unclear how many people remain on the team. […]
The cuts, which were reported on the day of the second Republican presidential primary debate, are part of X’s broader pullback from its efforts to address false information and foreign interference that once ran rampant on the platform. Owner Elon Musk instituted broad layoffs when he took over the company, some of them on its once-sizable “trust and safety” team. […]
Musk has also aggressively criticized the company’s previous moderation efforts, releasing internal documents that he and conservative commentators have claimed showed a liberal bent to how it handled elections and misinformation.

Two shocking details stand out from this story:

One, it’s taken Musk until now to whack most of his integrity team;
Two, he’s not getting rid of it entirely for some reason. But I suspect that’ll change.

The detail that Shitter is cutting back on policing misinformation is, of course, saddening but not exactly shocking as such. I do, however, continue to be amused by the way every news article about X keeps calling it “the platform previously known as Twitter” or something like that… world’s most successful corporate rebrand ever, clearly…

Joooooooooos did it

I know the Anti-Defamation League is problematic on various levels, and I think it can be fairly critiqued without resorting to antisemitism, but the current Twitter shitstorm surrounding them seems… excessive. I saw a few days ago a hashtag “BanTheADL” was trending there, some dickhead started it and then you-know-who liked it so obviously that just amplified it for days. Here’s an example from a particularly shining beacon:

This is why I say I’m not really a free speech advocate, because I actually don’t believe everyone automatically and naturally deserves that right, not if their speech is essentially about causing harm. The difference between me and Charlie, and all these other “free speech absolutists”, is that I’m honest about that. These chuds are always really about free speech for themselves, not for people they don’t like. “I don’t want to ban anyone’s free speech, but fuck these guys”.

Anyway, Oolong has been upping the stakes:

I don’t know if Oolong is a proper antisemite or racist or not, but it’s kind of undeniable that he’s enabled people who are, which frankly makes him as bad as them. And don’t think they don’t appreciate his efforts on their behalf:

Andrew Torba is the founder of Gab, which was, of course, Twitter for the far-right before Twitter became that itself. “Our largest enemy”, eh? And I feel weirdly certain that he’s not referring to the ADL in particular (though I’ve no doubt he considers them an enemy just for having a page about him), but, you know, the people behind the ADL. The people the ADL was formed to support. Sometimes also called “our traditional enemies” by people like David Irving.

Over on Bluesky, Yair Rosenberg reckons Musk wouldn’t actually sue the ADL cos he would lose, which I suppose is a fair point, but equally I can see it working for him either way… if he wins, that’s great for him and makes him look strong, and if he loses, well, it’s not exactly going to bankrupt him and his friends, and the latter will get some nice propaganda out of it about how of COURSE them perfidious Yids WOULD win, they bought the best lawyers, the best judges, etc. Whatever else happens, at least I suppose it’s nice to know the far right may be obsessed with trans folk these days but they haven’t forgotten the old hatreds…

Oh, look who’s still a thing

Meta to soon launch web version of Threads in race with X for users

WHY DIDN’T YOU FUCKING HAVE THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE, MARK? Honestly, the rollout of Threads was a fucking joke, clearly released before it was fully ready, and I’m not sure it’s improving:

Threads, which launched as an Android and iOS app on July 5 and gained 100 million users in just five days, saw its popularity drop as users returned to the more familiar platform X after the initial rush to try Meta’s new offering.
But in just over a month, its daily active users on Android app dropped to 10.3 million from the peak of 49.3 million, according to a report by analytics platform Similarweb dated Aug. 10.
Meanwhile, the management is moving quickly to launch new features. Threads now offers the ability to set post notifications for accounts and view them in a type of chronological feed.
It will soon roll out an improved search that could allow users to search for specific posts and not just accounts.

…What the fuck is a “type” of chronological feed? Is it chronological or not? And this improved search “could” let users do that… so it also could not do that? I’m not surprised by the drop-off in user numbers cos that was bound to happen, a lot of people were signing up out of curiosity and a lot of those were bound to not bother sticking around once that curiosity was satisfied, given how little Threads seems to have had to offer… on the plus side, I suppose I’ll soon be able to satisfy my own curiosity about Threads cos at least now I’ll actually be able to use the fucking thing, but I feel like it’s probably too late to make a difference now…

Free speech

Will THIS finally be the straw that breaks the X’s back? …Eh, probably not. Considering the other shitty thing’s he’s said and done that haven’t hitherto deterred people from using Twatter (including me, let’s be honest), I can’t see even this making much difference. Indeed, I’m seeing one source claiming that Oolong actually can’t do this, cos if he did then the Apple Store and Google Play would refuse to stock the app; apparently the ability to block users is a key requirement of theirs for making social media apps available. Whatever, though, it’s just another thing making Shitter unappealing… I mean, I suppose the mute button is still there and for some accounts that really is all you need, but other times blocking is absolutely necessary. Wonder how long the mute option will last…

Talking of things making Twitter unappealing: the end of Tweetdeck came about the other day, as threatened a few weeks ago… I discovered this when trying to go there and it redirected me back to Twitter immediately, whereupon the latter just as immediately tried to convice me to pay $135 a year for the privilege of having a functional way of using the service… and then when I angrily clicked that off I found it then opened on the “for you” colum rather than my actual follow list. So yeah, so much for me and Twitter at last, it would appear… there’s still a handful of accounts there I still want to follow, which is why I’m not deleting the account entirely (can’t follow them without one), although one of those is a friend who’s now saying she’ll be on Bluesky (which I still can’t get onto) and Tiktok (which I am, though I rarely use it) more often from now on. So that’s at least one less Twitter account I’ll need to check regularly, I suppose.

More Mastothoughts

Here’s an interesting essay from the other day, written by Erin Kissane (who has a couple of other Masto meditations) on the theme of why people have stopped using Mastodon… basically she popped the question on Bluesky (still waiting for that invite, JACK), collated the 500-odd responses she got back, and the title “Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t” kind of sums up the whole thing. An excerpt:

The most common—but usually not the only—response, cited as a primary or secondary reason in about 75 replies—had to do with feeling unwelcome, being scolded, and getting lectured. Some people mentioned that they tried Mastodon during a rush of people out of Twitter and got what they perceived as a hostile response.
About half of the people whose primary or secondary reasons fit into this category talked about content warnings, and most of those responses pointed to what they perceived as unreasonable—or in several cases anti-trans or racist—expectations for content warnings. Several mentioned that they got scolded for insufficient content warnings by people who weren’t on their instance. Others said that their fear of unintentionally breaking CW expectations or other unwritten rules of fedi made them too anxious to post, or made posting feel like work. […]
There obviously are unwelcoming, scoldy people on Mastodon, because those people are everywhere. I think some of the scolding—and less hostile but sometimes overwhelming rules/norms explanation—is harder to deal with on Mastodon than other places because the people doing the scolding/explaining believe they have the true network norms on their side.

There’s definitely something to this. One of my own least favourite aspects of Masto is the evangelising (one thing about Twitter is I almost never see anyone arguing how great it is; no idea if this is also true of Bluesky or Threads, cos as noted I still haven’t had an invite to the former (JACK) and I can’t even download the Threads app to see what it’s like cos my phone is such a piece of shit the Google Play store refuses to add it); it’s like, yeah, if we’re happy on here we already know why, we don’t need to be further convinced and you just look like you’re trying to convince yourself more than anyone else… and the bit about “true network norms” is a part of that, a sort of “the way, the truth, the life” thinking; we’ve found a thing that works for us, therefore it’s the way everyone should follow.

The responses I’ve seen so far on Mastodon itself have been interesting, including one chap who seemed to miss the point of the exercise and take some offence at it:

Like, good for Wyatt and the other people who have no issues with Mastodon, but… they weren’t the subject of Kissane’s question. The question was about people not happy with their Mastodon experience, and about 500 people on Bluesky reported dissatisfaction. Think that it might be YOU, Wyatt. Anyway, he attracted a certain amount of irritation, leading to a bit of a pile-on… of the sort you might have found on Twitter. Who says Mastodon’s nothing like Twitter at all…

Twitter’s pining for the fjords…

Oh good GRIEF. This bullshit is Oolong’s latest… I don’t even know what to call it, “business decision” seems wrong somehow. Basically he’s decided it’s time to get rid of the last thing that’s worth anything about Twitter, namely 17 years of brand name recognition, by rebranding it as X Corp. This is evidently not a sudden decision, as he was thinking about forming a holding company of that name for Tesla and SpaceX as early as 2012 and he apparently started forming the holding company when he started on his epic quest to… do whatever it was he was thinking when he offered to buy the birdsite. Why now? Why anything that Musk does?

Because the letter X by itself is such a unique and immediately recognisable logo that will make the company stand out because there aren’t dozens of other companies whose corporate logo resembles an X in some way… apart from these ones, anyway. Similarly, it’s not like the bird wasn’t one of the most recognisable corporate symbols in the world, if you don’t count the fact that it was:

…as I saw someone post on Twitter. As for supposed CEO of …whatever the fuck it’s now called, here’s what she had to say:

I don’t really know what purpose Linda Yaccarino serves. Dickhead is clearly still the one making all the decisions, and since she’s only been CEO since June, she can’t exactly claim any credit for this X thing in any way. What is she even there for? I don’t even see her drawing fire away from Oolong, which I thought would be her main task…

As for the logo design…

…this seems weirdly hard to beat somehow.

EDIT a few hours later: just saw this on Mastodon:

Join what? I think there’s a mixed message in that for all of us…

Come to our dark side!

In other use, a bunch more Twitter employees could soon be ex-employees…

Ever since Meta launched its competitor to Twitter last week, Elon Musk has been attempting to tear it down, denouncing Threads’ approach to content moderation, threatening to sue for the supposed theft of “trade secrets,” and even challenging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a penis-measuring competition.
Some of his employees, however, are thoroughly enjoying the new app.
“I’m going to get fired for this, but I work at Twitter right now and have never really used it. Threads is just better,” a current staffer wrote on Threads last week. “Here’s to a new world!”
“[Not gonna lie] the signup flow was really nice,” another Twitter employee posted, referring to the process by which users register for an account.
The Daily Beast took a random sample of 133 current Twitter employees, identified by their LinkedIn accounts, and found that 31 of them—nearly a quarter—appeared to already be on Threads. Musk said in April that Twitter employed roughly 1,500 people, suggesting that hundreds of its workers may be using its rival.

Yeah, “random samples” like this always get blown up to produce a spurious number, and I suspect this “hundreds” is really as bullshit as all these other reports you see in media about how 64% of Inner West residents believe in land rights for gay whales, that sort of thing. Still, I suspect that those 31 Twitter staff are indeed not the only ones, and Oolong will use this information to find out who they all are and sack the lot of them, cos if there’s one thing Twitter really needs it’s even less people working there…

Won’t someone think of the journalists and politicos?

John Naughton has a question…

…and he’s using his position at a major media outlet to ask it. I’m not as qualified as John apparently is to answer his question, but I’m going to take a stab at it anyway:

HOW

ABOUT

FUCKING

ANYWHERE ELSE,

JOHN?

I mean… where did they all go before Twitter was a thing? Twitter’s only been around since 2006, so only 17 years. There had to have been options before that, surely? Like, you know, the aforementioned major media outlet for whom you wrote this thing… or even Threads which you specifically name in the title, I don’t see anything stopping journalists and politicians from using that. Twitter isn’t the only option and never has been. John concludes:

All of which leads to the thought that, in our current media ecosystem, if Twitter had not been invented, someone would have to invent it now. The tweet has become the contemporary version of the soundbite. And if Musk does eventually succeed in driving Twitter into bankruptcy, some smart political operator will buy it and make something from its smoking ruins.

Oh bullshit. Other things were invented in the past, then OTHER THINGS were invented that superseded them. Just look at Myspace, for fuck’s sake. The latter still exists for some reason that I frankly don’t understand, and Twitter will probably do the same… it’s just not going to be the biggest of its kind, something else will take its place, with Threads certainly looking like the biggest contender. I do not understand Naughton’s insistence that Twitter specifically has to be, you know, it.

It descends into insanity

Via Taylor Lorenz on Masto. Threads is the literal work of Satan, apparently. The Satanic Panic never fully goes away in the US, does it? Although in this case it’s just been reduced to a particularly shitty tool in a shitty corporate battle between two shitty billionaires, one of whom has evidently inspired some of his his shitty cultists to… whatever the fuck this nonsense is. There is, of course, no dog-whistling involved in using this Satan bullshit to attack Oolong’s business rival when the latter just so happens to be, you know, one of THOSE people. Maybe not a practising or believing one, but one of THEM anyway. Nothing remotely antisemitic going on here at all.