onfocus

"During testing, with every response — such as clicking a button to indicate feeling depressed “more than half the days” over the last two weeks — a pixel sent Facebook the text of the answer button, the specific URL the user was visiting when clicking the button, and the user's hashed name, email address, phone number."

The targeted advertising industry has set up some ridiculous incentives for people to behave horribly toward other people.

"Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, to make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish."

Go for the bot mishap but stay for the excellent personal reporting in It’s time to start leaving Twitter behind.

"Beyond Musk’s political affiliations, his actual political convictions—by which I mean the bedrock set of values, ideologies, and organizing principles through which he sees the world and wishes it to be structured—are a slightly different conversation. Here, I tend to agree with The Verge’s Liz Lopatto, who wrote recently that Musk doesn’t really have political beliefs, only personal interests. But one can have vapid or nonexistent political beliefs and still be a political activist. Political activism is about actions."

If someone behaves exactly like a far right activist it doesn't matter what they believe in their heart. Debate should center around known actions, not unknowable motivations.

"The post-Twitter platforms like Mastodon and Tumblr are E2E platforms, designed around the idea that if someone asks to hear what you have to say, they should hear it. Rather than developing algorithms to override your decisions, these platforms have extensive tooling to let you fine-tune what you see."

History is repeating in the social media world and Cory Doctorow provides the context. Chokepoint capitalism is a good term for something I didn't have a term for before.

"I’m not sure yet where I personally lie on the spectrum between the fediverse view and my default of learned helplessness in the face of unrelenting capitalism, but exposure to Mastodon changed my thinking about this project. I stopped referring to the people who would fork my repository as “users” and started calling them “participants”—a term which assigns them more agency and a sense of belonging to a collective whole."

Thoughtful essay by Liza Daly about how the existence of an alternative way of being online helped inform decisions about protecting people online.

"The debt financing around Twitter is gob-smacking. I cannot for the life of me understand what the creditors were thinking, but the game of finance is a next level sport where destroying people, companies, and products to achieve victory is widely tolerated. Historical trends suggest that the losers in this chaos will not be Musk or the banks, but the public."

Failure is a process—it doesn't happen overnight.

"This isn’t just a problem for Stack Overflow. In pretty much every other example where you see ChatGPT screwing up basic facts, it does so with absolute self-assurance. It does not admit a smidgen of doubt about what it’s saying. Whatever question you ask, it’ll merrily Dunning-Kruger its way along, pouring out a stream of text. It is, in other words, bullshitting."

Effortless bullshit. At scale. What could possibly go wrong?

"The likelihood that Congress will impose a deal along the lines of the presidential panel’s recommendations, or the tentative agreements, means that management has little incentive to agree to union demands."

Pretty wild that congress can just force a labor contract for rail workers. Knowing that congress will side with management means negotiating was never meaningful.

"The lack of action extends to new accounts affiliated with terror groups and others that Twitter previously banned. In the first 12 days after Mr. Musk assumed control, 450 accounts associated with ISIS were created, up 69 percent from the previous 12 days, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms."

Same name, completely different site.

“I’ll have to repair nearly every article I’ve ever written since my tweets got wiped out,” journalist and videographer Vishal Singh wrote on Mastodon on Monday, after being banned from Twitter. “Hundreds of articles written by countless journalists used my tweets. From all sides of the political spectrum. Academic papers that cited my tweets. These links and embeds are now all broken.”

The ability to purge the public record is a good argument against citizens relying on private companies to host/protect the public record.

”Passing this bill is our chance to send a message to Americans everywhere: No matter who you are, who you love, you deserve dignity and equal treatment under the law. That’s about as American [an] ideal as it comes.”

More like this please.

"Between January 2020 and September 2022, Twitter suspended more than 11,000 accounts for breaking Covid misinformation rules and removed almost 100,000 pieces of content that violated those rules, according to statistics published by Twitter."

Not any more. Those accounts are back and there’s no effort to remove misinformation. "Public square" now considered actively harmful.