In the Dorsey interview, our hero goes on about whether Australia has the right to ban content it doesn't like.
Australia is a nice vanilla choice as the censorship "bad guy", but you don't need to swap "Russia" or "China" in for "Australia" to see why it's problematic.
Let's imagine the world before the internet.
Town A is a peaceful, largely pleasant and prosperous place.
It's neighbour, Town B, wants to meddle in Town A's affairs. So it hires dozens of planes to drop leaflets on Town A. Endlessly.
Not one single Town A citizen has to be swayed by the message for the campaign to bear fruit.
Town A is now knee-deep in leaflets. The litter is blowing around everywhere, causing accidents when they land on car windscreens, causing plants to die for lack of sunlight, generally making Town A's inhabitants unhappy. (Besides anything else, their taxes are being used for the ill-equipped clean-up efforts.)
The townsfolk become angry, and many leave. Those that remain are constantly stressed.
This is Jack Dorsey's "freedom".
Fuck him. I told you he was the real cause of Twitter's problems.
Here's an example of one of Bluesky's new idiot labellers.
Note that this account can be blocked, but the labeller itself is unaffected by the block. Also note that these accounts' follow/followers do not appear.
If you subscribe, you can select moderation levels for all of the labels shown.
Now imagine if this load of bollocks was falsely labelling people or being used to direct harassment.
Here's how this affects people.
The first image is from my account, where I see no label - because I don't subscribe.
The second shows that this guy has been labelled for "simping".
I checked the account and saw nothing of the sort. This is a harassment label aimed at anyone who interacts with any category that offends the person behind the labeller.
Quite amazing how completely techbros can fuck up without really trying.
Take BlueSky's new labelling system, released late last month. It allows users to create labels for accounts and individual posts.
So you can warn your pals/subscribers about, for example, transphobic accounts or content.
Sounds good, right?
There's two little catches.
Anyone with a few tech skills can set up a labeller. So the transphobes can target trans people, too. And if you feel you've been mislabelled, you have to subscribe to the labelling account to even report it.
But the real lulu is that you can't block a labeller from seeing - and labelling - your account or your posts. A block merely means YOU can't see them on BlueSky.
Way to go to open a whole new harassment vector, dipshits.
Quite ridiculously, the devs are listening to a group of idiots who want to make it impossible to "hide" certain labelled content.
The racists, other assorted fash, misogynists, and antisemites are rubbing their hands in glee.
Post from venture capital vulture (or "super angel") investor Marc Andreessen on the future of AI in Big Tech.
If "enshittification" - the ruin of platforms to extract payment to shareholders - were a social media account, Andreessen would be its avi.
See how he claims Musk (yeah, him), startups (Andreessen's new pets), and open source (us) are the future.
And how regulators ("pressure groups") are the enemy.
Doesn't mention that he's on the board of Meta and so many other Big Tech firms.
Please let's stop pretending these fuckers have our interests at heart.
The El Dorado of Africa story is a good way to understand how Musk succeeded so well in North America.
Telling it to South Africans makes it immediately apparent that the whole family are lunatics. They really did go hunting - year after year - for this mythical place, and everyone knows there's no mountains like that in the Kalahari.
Americans do not necessarily know this, so it can be spun as a thrilling Boys Own adventure instead of something that should attract Child Protection Services.
It would be like going to Moscow each year in search of the Winter Palace. That's in St Petersburg, and the more you insist on Moscow the crazier you seem. Unless your audience knows very little about Russia.
Musk rose to fame on playing on such ignorance in many areas.
Meta's processes can be deeply weird.
I reported a Facebook ad for an app that exploits a known WhatsApp vulnerability.
The ad was deleted and gone (not just for me - I checked with friends elsewhere) in seconds. As I said, it's a known exploit, so that's what I expected.
What I didn't expect was any thanks from Meta for alerting them. Nor did I get any.
What I also didn't expect was a notification (which I did get) two weeks later that their review process had rejected my "complaint" as it had found nothing wrong with the ad.
The ad page is still listed as deleted, so it's difficult to tell whether this is merely bureaucratic bungling or the system is so royally screwed that it's being overridden by external influences.
Are users being actively discouraged from reporting problems?
The origins of "fake news" (as a phrase). Remember what I keep telling you about how the bots, etc, are commercial - not political?
Everyone still falls for it, then blames the NYT.
