@ThomasKnight
Oh yeah, this post reminded me that I just changed my rating of the #Twitter app from three down to one.
It sure would be cool proof of the growing power of non-profit social media if the thirteen million people on #Mastodon were able to lower the rating of ELoon's app.
@ThomasKnight Why people continue to use Twitter and Big Social, in general, is beyond me. These platforms don't care about you. To them, you're just another user, an addict who can't quit what's hurting them.
And although anyone on #Twitter could have told you that #Twitter has been taken over by bots and propagandists since #ElonMusk took over, the story this week about #TwitterBlue subscribers never having tweets removed even if they were overt #nazi propaganda is also backed up by stories of who the handful of TwitterBlue subscribers are. The #Taliban, #nazis, & #Russian misinformation apparently by and large. #Elon really knows how to choose his friends... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66113460
@ThomasKnight Sounds like #Mastodon and the #Fediverse are the solution to government agencies looking to provide social media status updates. Run their own (agency/state/federal) platform and allow people to follow them for updates with zero risk that a private company can impact their services.
@Brutus You're not wrong. I remember the days when all Americans would be proud to punch a #nazi. Now a lot of them want to elect them to office. Disgraceful.
@skye True, but when you used to report nazi propaganda, Twitter would remove it, and eventually ban the nazi. Now nothing happens, except that you get a report saying that it didn't break Twitter rules, when a nazi suggests burning all the Jews alive or something similarly heinous.
@ThomasKnight unfortunately, Twitter already had the "don't show in Germany" mechanism baked in long ago. The process of reporting tweets is/was even different if your location was Germany, as the report had some official legal consequences if it was hate speech, and you had to state under penalty of something or other that you were really you and this wasn't a false claim, etc.
@gavinisdie Agreed- it has been skating on thin ice with them even before Elon, and now that he's gone full nazi, I doubt they are going to humour him very much. I would be surprised if it lasts anywhere for very long now, to be honest. The amount of #TwitterDown that is happening and the deliberate throttling of tweets will drive users away, even when nazis won't.
@ThomasKnight Apartheid was Naziism in a different guise, so this is simply that evil bastard's nature, as demonstrated by his fealty to the GOP and their lies, as well as his own lies, eg: about Paul Pelosi's assailant. Most people simply lack the moral clarity to see beyond that kind of man's lies, for the simple fact that they have no real concern for morality, caring simply for their belly's contents, social status, and sex life. Becoming a moral human being requires difficult, honest work.
@lpah4all I don't know about most people; I like to hope that it is a minority who are morally vacuous. Republicans, for example, are a minority in America, and not all of them are as rabid as the open nazis we see on Twitter. The problem is that the worst ones are represented the most on Twitter, making it look like they are the majority, even though they are not. There are still WAY too many of them though, that's for sure.
@ThomasKnight The world is doing as bad as it is because most people of all persuasions have no interest in ongoing moral improvement of themselves or their societies; they're just satisfied that they're "better" than those they can point to as being "worse". That's the ego's trick of self-satisfaction and looking down upon others. And we Dems, while WAY better than the GOP, still have their problems and are not as radical as we need them to be, except for a small few like AOC.
@lpah4all Totally agree. This is why reality tv is so popular; people love to watch those dumpster fires, because it makes them feel better about themselves. It's a sad situation, for sure.
@ThomasKnight Go germany... /s
There was a time where we had competence to affect things, but it was used for evil.
Now, we have some set of laws against nazi shit, but no competence whatsoever.
The nazi dances in our face, we say "bad boy", but can't even fathom the nazi tweets are just hidden - just like the american police bamboozled by the bag around the alcohol.
Oh how those "anti hacking" laws have elevated us to the height of incompetence.
@ThomasKnight damn thomas i said elon hates everybody and everything blacks browns women and now you make me look like a fool because he likes nazi's oh,,,hahhahhah good stuff dude.
@ThomasKnight If he were to remove Nazi propaganda he would have to remove the entire GOP/Nazi machine that has found it’s home on Twitter. Almost everyone left there.
@ThomasKnight The ability to hide tweets by nation is a capability Twitter implemented long ago - not long after "Arab Spring", IIRC, back in the days when the Twitter C-Suite and the Obama-Clinton State Department had each other on speed dial.
To be frank, I'm surprised Musk didn't destroy that capability, either deliberately or in one of his blunderous rages.
@AlgoCompSynth Seriously. The important difference though is that pre-Elon, when you reported heinous nazi tweets, they would get removed & the user suspended eventually. Post-Elon, it stopped doing that completely. Now the only people banned are journalists, for reporting the truth accurately. Shows us what Elon believes.
@clarity3747 Even more than that, he was born rich into a family who got their money by exploiting poor people to death. This happens over and over again, and almost always with the same results. It is time to take the wealth away from these sociopaths.
@PirateJoie Yep; it's interesting how many of the planet's problems are caused by the same small set of people who share very similar backgrounds that way...
@ThomasKnight What a coincidence, right? Looking into the history of ‘classism’, it always appears to begin with a crime of property theft. The Scottish clan that stole the sheep, the South Africans that stole the mines…Generation after generation of inbreeding produces a family without conscience as to how their wealth was obtained = sociopathy, apparently!
@ThomasKnight well he in his infinite wisdom thinks that all sort of bigorty and even whatever terrorist shit he lets on twitter is free speech and leftists are after them.
@Jungekatz Yeah, his 'free speech' claims would be a lot more convincing if he didn't ban journalists for reporting the truth, and block Mastodon and Thread posts. He clearly doesn't believe in free speech. He just believes in nazi propaganda.
@Waterloo2 Yep, he sure does. He claims he's bringing #nazis back to #Twitter because he believes in free speech, but he also bans journalists for telling the truth, so it appears he doesn't actually believe in free speech at all. He just believes in #nazi propaganda.
@kkarhan Yep, or they might also ban Twitter form Germany, which would be really painful for him. Might free up some server space though so #TwitterDown only happens a few times each day.
@kkarhan No, and at this point I expect Twitter to collapse entirely from a number of different issues all competing with each other for the killing blow. I doubt it will be long before it follows Friendster.
@ThomasKnight Also since Musk illegally fired the Staff in Germany, I still hope they'll legally go after him.
That case seems very clear and I'm convinced top lawyers are willing to take it on pro-bono just because Musk will be in for paying several millions in restitutions in lieu of paychecks + severances & court fees as well as lawyer bills (cuz in Germany, the looser pays for everything unless judged otherwise)...
#NotLegalAdvice but that case will take like a day or two at courts...
@ThomasKnight cuz what #ApartheidEmeraldBoy & #SpaceKaren completely disregarded (as he presumably yeeted the #CLO and anyone else who said "You [legally] can't do that!" is that one can't just nilly-willy fire people in Germamy at will, espechally not under threat and duress with an employment contract offer that is flatout illegal by exceeding maximum working hours by a long shot. #NotLegalAdvice but that shit normally get's doors kicked in by cops with 3-hole-masks on and HK416 w/ safety off.
@ThomasKnight mind you that #NetzDG fines - like almost all other fines - are subject to the violators global income, and that income also inclides capital gains, and in case of Musk that could be even more expensive than Twitter...
Espechally that whole firing shit which coincided with massive wealth increase on his side.
So I'd not be surprised if he'd personally as CEO gets the largest court fine as individual in German History by a long shot...
@ThomasKnight I don't want to defend Elon, and I'm not, but as someone who worked at Twitter for four years:
Twitter has always known who the Nazis were, had their accounts/tweets marked, and blocked that content in Germany. It was referred to internally as Country-Restricted-Content, IIRC. The system has been used for many countries to handle laws like this. It's always been the way that Twitter balanced laws like that of Germany with a desire not to have content blocked globally.
@ThomasKnight The issue in question here is that Twitter-under-Elon no longer employs enough people / prioritizing identifying and labeling the content so that it's blocked in Germany, which means that they are no longer complying with German law.
Twitter has also separately had policies for removing questionable content and employed contractors for evaluating/handling content, and I'm sure that also is severely underfunded/deprioritized now.
@sangster True, but another thing which has changed is that Twitter used to remove posts when they were reported and eventually suspend accounts, but that is no longer happening under Elon. Well, not to nazis, anyhow. Now it happens to journalists. For Elon, the truth is what needs to be blocked, not nazi propaganda. I used to spend half an hour or so each day to reporting nazis, so I know it used to work. After Elon took over, the reports were ignored- that's when I knew it was time to leave.
@ThomasKnight Oh yeah, definitely. Most of the people who used to handle those reports are gone, so the only ones who are getting "addressed" are ones who specifically get Elon's attention.
@kierkegaank It sounds like a lot of investors are starting to do that now. He hasn't had much luck finding new investors for Twitter although he has been trying like crazy. They are watching him burn his own money as fast as he can and they're not eager to add theirs to his pile. The more people see how incompetent and unable to control his emotions he is, the less they will want him in charge of any of their money.
@ThomasKnight Twitter is in free fall so that’s a given. But he will drag tesla and whatever his ai company is down with his scam presentations, pump and dump activities and mercurial idiocy too
@kierkegaank Yep, that seems to be his current trajectory. I can't say that I will feel at all bad for him after he does that. He has asked for everything he has gotten so far.
@kierkegaank Yeah, hopefully they get good jobs when he tanks those companies as well. Fortunately for them, unlike Elon, they all have skills and are productive members of society.
@ThomasKnight I think on the whole I prefer freedom of speech to banning people you disagree with, and all that goes with that, especially having been through the toxic oppressive lockdown orthodoxy years.
@jtb I am not a fan of banning speech people disagree with, but banning hate speech I have no problem with. Encouraging people to kill all the Jews, or people with darker skin than you, or gay people, is not useful discourse, and should not be tolerated. Not against any person or group of people. That's what nazis do nonstop, try to spread hate and encourage violence, so I have no problem banning them. That's not acceptable behaviour against anyone. We need to have learned a few things from WWII
@jtb The problem, of course, is that #ElonMusk doesn't really believe in free speech. He is happy to ban journalists for telling the truth and reporting on actual events, for example, and happily bans #Mastodon and #Threads comments from being seen on #Twitter. So since #Elon bans what he doesn't like and refuses to ban #nazi propaganda, that tells us all that we need to know about his ideology.
@Twiglet@jtb Same, but I also think extreme hate speech should be banned. There is no reason to allow people to call for genocide against groups of people; it's not part of a healthy dialogue. We saw what happened when that nonsense was allowed, & culminated in WWII, and we shouldn't allow it again. As for revising books, publishers do that to try to boost sales; that's on them. The originals are always available still, so I don't worry about that too much. Banning books is bad though.
@jtb@Twiglet No, that law is an example of a hate crime. It is targeted against gay people, censoring them only. And it is not worried about protecting children, only keeping gay people hidden from society. It is purely bigotry. Like I said, most censorship is bad, apart from censoring people who are spreading hate. This is using censorship to spread hate, so is clearly the exact opposite.
Haven't read the book, but it sounds like an act of hate to me. The tell is whether the same story about a hetero couple would be banned.
I would like more done to clean up the adult hetero pornography trade. Graphic depictions of consensual sex for the consumption of adults are fine, but my observation is that a lot of modern pornography seems to intentionally demean women and looks to have been created with what I consider dubious consent.
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