I have spent the last two weeks in conferences with other science communicators and the general consensus in discussions was that (1) Twitter is dying and (2) it’s not clear what will replace it. (And not much enthusiasm about Mastodon, it seems.)
@AstroKatie I think the big hangup is that people want a centralized platform as that's what they're used to, but too many popped up at once prevent any one of them from gaining critical mass. Ideally someone needed to just stick to what works and make a clone as close to Twitter as possible for the mid term, but everyone tried to reinvent the wheel.
Just in case you ever need the context, there was an anti-AI guy on Twitter calling for a global treaty agreeing to air-strike datacenters that had too many GPUs. To stop the machines from becoming superintelligent and killing everybody.
@SwiftOnSecurity Yudkowsky is the tech equivalent of those doomsday preachers, except since it's tech they mistook him for an expert on AI safety instead of just crossing the street to avoid him.
You might be good at shitposting, but have you ever shitposted so hard that you convinced people you're a cybersecurity expert and got flow to Africa to defend an Authoritarian Regime's use of spyware? Jonathan Data has.
It took me like 10 minutes to stop laughing when my friend sent me this photo. It's extremely bad, but also extremely funny. I did not have "the biggest idiot on infosec Twitter has somehow managed to grift his way into hosting a press conference with the head of Morocco's privacy commission" on my 2023 bingo card.
As a security professional, not much scares me. I've seen my personal data stolen numerous times, watched nationstate hackers spray zerodays across the internet, and I'm a shameless user of TikTok. But now you have someone sitting on top of the personal data of several billion users, someone who has a long track record of vindictive harassment, someone who has the ear of the far right, and someone who has just shown us his willingness to weaponize internal company data to score political points. That scares me a lot.
We spent all this time saying what if China abuses user data harvested by TikTok, or what if China uses TikTok to manipulate public opinion. Now basically all that is happening but it's not TikTok and China, it's Twitter and a single emotionally unstable billionaire. Maybe the real threat wasn't TikTok after all, it was our reliance on social media in general.