3227

Gotta sow those disinformation bots in the fertile ground of apps on the upswing.

3228
3229

Sad.

3230

LOL, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay goes to town on Parler and Gab.

As one of the original co-founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi knows a little something about keeping controversial services online. Kolmisoppi and his colleagues spent decades battling a global coalition of corporations, governments, and law enforcement agencies intent on wiping the file sharing website from the face of the internet. Unsuccessfully. Kolmisoppi took to Twitter this week to share some thoughts on Parler’s recent deplatforming for failing to seriously police death threats and illegal content before and after the fatal Capitol riots.

“The Pirate Bay, the most censored website in the world, started by kids, run by people with problems with alcohol, drugs and money, still is up after almost two decades,” Kolmisoppi said. “Parlor and gab etc have all the money around but no skills or mindset. Embarrassing.” […] Platforming white supremacy and hate speech is a tougher proposition than serving users pirated copies of the Prince discography. But Kolmisoppi was quick to laugh at the fact that despite being backed by billionaires and parts of the US government, Parler didn’t seem remotely prepared for the justified firestorm it found itself at the center of. “The most ironic thing is that The Pirate Bay’s enemies include not just the US government but also many European and the Russian one,” he said. “Compared to gab/parlor which is supported by the current president of the US and probably liked by the Russian one too.”

“In all honesty, the reason we did The Pirate Bay was to bring freedom and take back control from a centralised system,” Kolmisoppi said. “The reason that Gab et al will fail is because they’re just whining bitches that have only one ideology: egotism. Sharing is caring y’all.” In more recent years, Kolmoisoppi has moved on to fund Njalla, a privacy-centric domain name registration service. One he says was already asked to host Parler, and refused. “Of course we wouldn’t,” Kolmisoppi said. “We’re pro human rights, which includes the right to not be killed by extreme right wing terrorists.”

3231
3232

That CEO is pathetic and deserves to lose his business. He had no plan for how to handle shut downs that were inevitably coming because they had a backlog of 25,000 takedown requests for violent content.

There is no question there are hosts who would be happy to take his money. Russia would take them for sure.

3233

When you’re fighting for God and the white race, you don’t have time for details.

3234

Plus, you would think Jesus could judo the fuck out of a takedown.

3235

Prayers, thoughts etc

3236

Naturally, these ads contain guns and are designed to sell the “good guy with a gun fighting the corrupt government” fantasy.

Internally, employees flagged one of those ads for body armor:

Didn’t find enough violations?

The account these ads were served to followed a bunch of far right bullshit groups but never posted. Facebook algorithms decided the fake guy was all in on some light insurrection. Facebook is rotten to the core and needs burned down.

3237

Although the piece linked below profiles only three people, it illustrates I think the main problem with social media: It doesn’t in itself radicalize people, instead it hatches them. IOW, they were already radical, they just need a place where they can find other like-minded individuals who won’t challenge them - because they don’t want to be challenged; they want, need acceptance (and, well, fame or more accurately, notoriety. It’s not all that different from middle school, really, the fear of being a reject.)

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life

― Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth

Facebook groups for like-minded people are where lies begin to snowball, building momentum, gaining backers and becoming lore. Organizers refine their messages and titillate followers with far-fetched predictions and analysis, often recasting Mr. Trump’s loss as part of a master plan to get re-elected.

It’s hard to determine the extent to which Facebook caused this hyperpartisanship or simply stumbled into it. Did Facebook cultivate more extreme beliefs or simply take what was already simmering and thrust it into the open?

Mr. McGee argued that he always thought this way. Before Facebook, he said, he watched conspiracy-laden videos on YouTube. Facebook merely helped him find his people.

“People are engaging me, encouraging me to share what I think, but these are the inner workings of my mind,” he said. “I’ve been feeling this way for years. That’s why it’s so easy for me to make posts, because I’ve been suppressing this stuff forever.”

And yet when he talks about Facebook, he focuses on algorithms and optimization, not community or ideology. It’s worth considering: Would he be attempting to influence others so forcefully without Facebook’s incentives?

3238

I think Jack Dorsey’s thread is worth reading.

A question for the board lawyers which is a follow on to some of Jack’s points… I read the first few pages of Amazon’s lawyers response to Parler’s lawsuit. In the brief they document numerous threats made by Parler users to various elected officials.

My question is what is the legal status of the threats?. Clearly when your wife says “I’m going to kill you”, that is not a crime (although depending on the context it might be dangerous to your happiness). But I would guess that many of the specific threats, if they made were in person would qualify as assault.

Does the law change if they are made on online?

3239

The dynamic I’ve observed is much more subtle:

  • peer group starts to see victory in common partisan cause of as utmost importance.
  • Therefore anyone seen to oppose this should be attacked, and anyone helping this cause should be encouraged - there is strong social pressure to support the cause.
  • This means that pushing back against the least-egregious conspiracy theories becomes socially awkward. The people who do disagree are often seen as “contrarians”.
  • Because of the cognitive dissonance and peer pressures associated with seeing untruths gain social capital, people choose to believe the untruths.
  • What would previously be seen as extreme, beyond the pale untruths and conspiracy theories are now less far from things that are believed, and start to be seen as acceptable ways to push the cause - return to step 3 just with more outlandish ideas.

It’s possible left and right radicalisation follow different trajectories of course.

3240

Looks like the Trumpies I have on my facebook are moving to “MeWe” now that Parlor is gone. I’ve never heard of that before.

3241

This is more or less a description of human nature. I guess social media just accelerates the process.

3242

Absolutely, yes. I guess I am saying that with social media instead of your peer group being people in your neighbourhood groups or work colleagues (which would normally have quite a broad view), it’s self-selecting groups on the internet.

Previously the only people who were exposed to this process in this way were those who went into politics, and mainstream political parties had fairly strong counterincentives to pull to the center. But now the same processes at work in a fringe political grouping are working on anyone who is part of a facebook friend network with active political posters, or who chooses to follow and respond to a couple of polemicists on twitter.

3243

Ken did an explainer a few years ago

And actually he’s done many many (many) posts about this. There’s a “true threat” tag for content on that website. (Which, to be clear, is archived. He’s no longer active there. He uses Substack now.) Here’s another that concerns a recent Supreme Court decision about true threats made on the internet

3244

It’s a troublesome question to be sure, when threats are “mere threats” and no action should be taken.

But suffice to say if my wife were to tweet “someone should shoot my husband” and someone does try to shoot me - I would say that there is a pretty good case that on balance someone should look into her ability to tweet further.

3245

Well Jack that’s where we clearly differ.

I can’t agree with a thing from that thread. “Oh no, we banned the President who has been breaking our rules and doing things that would’ve seen anyone else banned years ago! Now he won’t be able to get his message out!”

How many times have they trotted this bullshit out? Not fooling me this time, Lucy.

You know what fragments the public conversation? When I click through one of the people peddling lies and fabrications - usually with a “verified” checkmark that lends an air of authority - and Twitter’s shitty algorithm decides to show a dozen tweets that it thinks I’ll like by increasingly batshit accounts. And I suspect it has the same problem as YouTube where once you’re started down that rabbit hole it’s impossible to climb out.

Fucking hell.

3246

I don’t have a Twitter account, but I believe if you click the “sparkle” icon at the top of your feed, you can make it show it shows only your follows, in reverse chronological order.

I’ve totally turned off my viewing history on YouTube. I get recommendations based on my subscribed channels (and sometimes recent google searches) only.