4 ms·

Threads backtracks flagging right-wing users for spreading disinformation

11 points by cratermoon 3y ago

tonetheman 3y ago
[dead]
phatskat 3y ago
I hope they turn this back on - seems like a good idea. I can’t fathom the right wingers who spread misinformation being surprised. Also “this isn’t a free speech platform” is hilarious - neither is Twitter, Musk just allows bigotry.
jtode 3y ago
Watching these guys twist in the harsh reality that nobody actually wants to hear from them is rather gratifying. "It's not a free speech platform!" Gab is a free speech platform, and truth.social, right? If simple free speech on a platform was all they were after, they would simply be posting there, it seems to me. So, what could it be, other than free speech, that they are looking for on these sites? Could it be... legitimacy? We know they want reach of course, but quite a lot of the world has made it clear they prefer to be out of their reach, including a lot of companies that understand who is actually buying their products and services. Forcing oneself in front of eyeballs, on the old internet we called that spamming and regarded it as the lowest form of bad behavior. Well, other than sharing CSAM, they were definitely the lowest. But the spammers, they're actually people who are probably not into images of child abuse for their own enjoyment, but would think nothing of trafficking in them in order to make money. True story actually, by the way - I know a guy who used to run warez servers waaaay back, and sometime in the mid-aughts he went to jail because one of his servers had a bunch of the bad kind of nasties on it. I don't know whether he was secretly into that during the brief period that I played warcraft at his place or whether he just got used by some random scumbag, I haven't talked to him since a long time before that story made its way round to me. These people all achieved their momentary delusion of legitimacy through behavior that they would describe as "clever" or "effective" or some other value-free chessboard assessment whereby they identified that a gameable system was being used as a source of truth, and set to gaming it. Their actions were the catalyst for a lot of people waking up to the reality that we can never trust our communities to capital, because capital will always choose the money over the ethics, every single time. Welcome, nazis, to The Great Smartening Up.
mighmi 3y ago
What's Threads like? Is it all influencers etc. trying to gain as much space and influence as possible while it's new? Is the UI janky? Are load times poor? Or is it a relatively smooth transition into Twitter 2.0?
mbStavola 3y ago
It's hilarious to read things like: ”[Threads] is not a free speech platform." Where the implication is that Twitter is, somehow, more free-speech oriented. A company which since the acquisition: - suspended journalists without violation of any Twitter rule - complied with foreign government requests to remove tweets (something which Elon had been critical of the previous execs) - banned ElonJet - declared cis and cisgender to be a slur and a bannable offense (free speech absolutism for misgendering and dead naming but not this, interesting) - banning users who posted about #BlockTheBlue - prevented people from posting, seeing, liking, replying to, or retweeting tweets with Substack links - threatened to suspend accounts with Mastodon or Instagram links in their profile or in tweets, additionally marking links to Mastodon as malware - is currently preventing Threads from trending (supposedly) Twitter is not a free speech platform and that's okay, the owner can do whatever he wants with it. To say it is when the actual track record says otherwise is ridiculous. Elon's posturing and virtue signaling about this has been the most annoying part; just say it's yours and you'll do what you want! This is no different from Threads by the way. Zuck has his own goals, biases, and whims that he'll bend Threads to. Again, that's okay, we just need to acknowledge that!
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  > - is currently preventing Threads from trending (supposedly) I've independently noticed this. It's extremely pronounced, hard to miss, and impossible to ignore. I don't mean just the trend list, but when you search "Threads" you get only the most obscure and irrelevant content, it's near impossible to find Threads commentary, despite I see it in prominent accounts I follow, they talk about it a lot.

11 points by cratermoon 3y ago

[dead]

I hope they turn this back on - seems like a good idea. I can’t fathom the right wingers who spread misinformation being surprised. Also “this isn’t a free speech platform” is hilarious - neither is Twitter, Musk just allows bigotry.

jtode 3y ago

Watching these guys twist in the harsh reality that nobody actually wants to hear from them is rather gratifying. "It's not a free speech platform!" Gab is a free speech platform, and truth.social, right? If simple free speech on a platform was all they were after, they would simply be posting there, it seems to me. So, what could it be, other than free speech, that they are looking for on these sites? Could it be... legitimacy? We know they want reach of course, but quite a lot of the world has made it clear they prefer to be out of their reach, including a lot of companies that understand who is actually buying their products and services. Forcing oneself in front of eyeballs, on the old internet we called that spamming and regarded it as the lowest form of bad behavior. Well, other than sharing CSAM, they were definitely the lowest. But the spammers, they're actually people who are probably not into images of child abuse for their own enjoyment, but would think nothing of trafficking in them in order to make money. True story actually, by the way - I know a guy who used to run warez servers waaaay back, and sometime in the mid-aughts he went to jail because one of his servers had a bunch of the bad kind of nasties on it. I don't know whether he was secretly into that during the brief period that I played warcraft at his place or whether he just got used by some random scumbag, I haven't talked to him since a long time before that story made its way round to me. These people all achieved their momentary delusion of legitimacy through behavior that they would describe as "clever" or "effective" or some other value-free chessboard assessment whereby they identified that a gameable system was being used as a source of truth, and set to gaming it. Their actions were the catalyst for a lot of people waking up to the reality that we can never trust our communities to capital, because capital will always choose the money over the ethics, every single time. Welcome, nazis, to The Great Smartening Up.

mighmi 3y ago

What's Threads like? Is it all influencers etc. trying to gain as much space and influence as possible while it's new? Is the UI janky? Are load times poor? Or is it a relatively smooth transition into Twitter 2.0?

mbStavola 3y ago

It's hilarious to read things like: ”[Threads] is not a free speech platform." Where the implication is that Twitter is, somehow, more free-speech oriented. A company which since the acquisition: - suspended journalists without violation of any Twitter rule - complied with foreign government requests to remove tweets (something which Elon had been critical of the previous execs) - banned ElonJet - declared cis and cisgender to be a slur and a bannable offense (free speech absolutism for misgendering and dead naming but not this, interesting) - banning users who posted about #BlockTheBlue - prevented people from posting, seeing, liking, replying to, or retweeting tweets with Substack links - threatened to suspend accounts with Mastodon or Instagram links in their profile or in tweets, additionally marking links to Mastodon as malware - is currently preventing Threads from trending (supposedly) Twitter is not a free speech platform and that's okay, the owner can do whatever he wants with it. To say it is when the actual track record says otherwise is ridiculous. Elon's posturing and virtue signaling about this has been the most annoying part; just say it's yours and you'll do what you want! This is no different from Threads by the way. Zuck has his own goals, biases, and whims that he'll bend Threads to. Again, that's okay, we just need to acknowledge that!

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
> - is currently preventing Threads from trending (supposedly) I've independently noticed this. It's extremely pronounced, hard to miss, and impossible to ignore. I don't mean just the trend list, but when you search "Threads" you get only the most obscure and irrelevant content, it's near impossible to find Threads commentary, despite I see it in prominent accounts I follow, they talk about it a lot.