Tag: Twitter

Dopamine Thirst Trap – Pirate Wires

As with almost everything on the internet, misleading headlines are not a new phenomenon. What’s new, and notable, is the scale of our exposure to the phenomenon. Today, on Twitter, many of us now spend a significant portion of our lives inside a virtual world of headlines.

Source: Dopamine Thirst Trap – Pirate Wires

Well, not me. I deactivated my Twitter account again. I can’t, in good conscience, continue to be manipulated by the platform. That being said, I’ve been fighting the urge to reactivate it, because I enjoy the thrill of seeing all the drama unfold in real time. That’s the problem, and why “the only winning move is not to play.”

This guy points out that Twitter’s censorship has not been fair, so they’re going to crowdsource it, and then, rightly, makes fun of the idea:

Anyway, Twitter said “fuck it” this week and decided they could crowd source the truth.

I publicly critiqued Birdwatch for what I believed the obvious danger inherent of determining “truth” by popular vote. Like, from science to civil rights literally when has this ever worked out? A handful of commenters expressed frustration with the point, and asked what I would do about the problem of misinformation were I in charge. But misinformation is as old as human civilization. What’s new is the phenomenon of instantaneous information virality, and this is where we should focus.

Where does someone go to defend themselves from cancellation if hosting providers follow suit, and won’t let them back on the internet? You can say that Parler had other alternatives besides AWS to host their site, but I venture to say, given prevailing public sentiment, that Microsoft and Oracle wouldn’t have let them use their clouds either, for fear of being labeled “Nazi sympathizers.”

You can say — as I have — that they could buy some servers and rent space in a co-lo facility, but who’s to say that public pressure wouldn’t cause the hosting company to give them boot, or their ISP’s to cut off network access, or their WAN providers to remove their BGP routes, or their DNS registrar to delete their entries? We are all dependent on access to the internet at this point, and there are many gatekeepers involved. The mob can apply pressure at any one of these points.

My approach to the news has been to read alternating reports about controversial stories until they “converge” on a consistent set of most-likely facts. Not coincidentally, I cribbed this approach from how I go about implementing a new programming technique. I read a lot of documentation, Q&A’s, and blog posts about it, until I see a consistent, reliable, and understandable implementation emerge. How will I be able to read original sources and make my own informed opinion about some of the most important, yet controversial, issues of the day, when platforms acting as de facto common carriers eject people from their services when the mob gangs up on them?

Either we’re a county that believes in freedom of speech, or we’re not. You can say that we shouldn’t allow speech calling for violence. We don’t. There are all sorts of legal remedies for this already. You can say that the speed by which this particular form of speech makes it impossible to react quickly enough to avail ourselves of our existing legal tools. That’s why “Pirate Wires” here is advocating slowing everything on Twitter down, and admitting up front that this idea runs in stark contrast to all the profit motives driving the company.

I think banning people you don’t like because they said something which might be legally actionable is the wrong approach. For every single example you can show me where some “conservative” said something legally objectionable, you can find some “liberal” who said exactly the same thing. The “liberals” I’ve traded comments with about this say “it’s not the same thing” because you have to consider the size of the audience of followers. Fine. Put that into the algorithm then, and then do it. It’s just popular, right now, to go after the conservatives. What happens when the same rules get applied to the next big Antifa or BLM protest, and “leaders” of those movements suddenly find themselves without the platform on which they’ve relied? I suspect we’re going to find out, and pretty quickly.

Take the Profit Out of Political Violence – BIG by Matt Stoller

Repealing Section 230 or reforming it so platforms who profit via advertising are not covered, would reduce the incentive for social media to enable illegal behavior. If we did so, a whole range of legal claims, from incitement to intentional infliction of emotional distress to harassment to defamation to fraud to negligence, would hit the court system, and platforms would have to alter their products to make them less harmful. There are other paths to taking on targeted advertising, like barring it through privacy legislation, a law for a real Do Not Track List, or using unfair methods of competition authority of the Federal Trade Commission. But the point is, we need to stop immunizing platforms who enable illegal behavior from offloading the costs of what they inflict.

Source: Take the Profit Out of Political Violence – BIG by Matt Stoller

These “platforms” driving all discussion and conversation today are, by definition, common carriers. The phone company was a common carrier. They couldn’t discriminate against anyone. They had to provide service to everyone, because they were 1) essential to modern society, and 2) had a monopoly on the service. In the same way, Twitter and Facebook are essential, and monopolies in their respective spaces. Like the phone company, they should be required to just carry everything that’s not clearly and always illegal, and let the court system sort out behavior that requires any sort of legal interpretation.

I could see making exception for blocking groups or people identified by the government as terrorists or criminals, but that’s the point. The government — i.e., our system of laws — would be making that determination, not a bunch of un-elected modern day kings and princes of our neo-feudalistic capitalism.

I don’t trust them. Their influence over our country, news cycle, and opinions is too great to leave to profit motive. It’s already been credibly demonstrated that Russia (at least) interfered in the 2016 election through these two platforms, because it aligned with this profit-seeking motivation. What guarantee do we have that this is not ongoing? There’s no accountability, and no visibility into their systems, hidden behind trade secrets for the banal purpose of making obscene profits.

Facebook is making $20 billion dollars a year, and paying about 8% tax. The older I get, the more liberal I get, and the more I resent the squandered opportunity cost of another round of tens-of-millions-of-dollars bonuses for a bunch of execs, while human beings pile up on the sidewalks in the city which hosts the company’s headquarters. It’s immoral. I don’t know when the line was crossed, but the whole thing is simply immoral, at this point.

Twitter doesn’t make nearly the money that Facebook does, but they are arguably more directly important. It seems that half the news articles I read these days are about a tweet, or reference tweets as part of the story. Their influence is overarching all news organizations now. That’s a dangerous situation for a democracy. These companies are ruining the world by — dare I say it: “inciting violence” — through driving everyone crazy with anger and division about every issue, no matter how big or small, evading meaningful oversight, and not giving back commensurately. I tire of it.

UPDATE: Right after posting this, I read Continuations by Albert Wenger : Welcome to the Government-IT Infrastructure…

I believe there is a high likelihood that we are witnessing the visible emergence of the government-IT infrastructure complex. Government will be even less inclined to try and generate competition in this space. It is so much more convenient to have just a few large entities that an executive agency can influence behind the scenes rather than having to bother with the rule of law. We have already had this in the payments space for a while where instead of targeted interventions against actual abuses payment providers withdraw wholesale support for companies in certain categories (most prominently anything related to sexwork).

Matt Stoller thinks that there’s a shot at doing some serious anti-monopoly regulation under a Biden administration, but Albert Wenger makes me realize that Facebook and Twitter don’t just have government “cover” because of campaign contributions. They also are manipulating their systems in subtle ways for the government’s benefit (besides giving them access to all the personal data they want, of course). I realize now that the relationship goes deeper than I have previously, cynically concluded. There’s not going to be some sort of noble, united urge from Congress to reign these companies in and hold them accountable for their influence on our democracy. A few of the “radicals” may make some noise, but only because they haven’t been briefed on the whole dynamic. And they won’t be. Their political theater is useful to those actually in power. Or, cynically, maybe they do know the real situation, and they just volunteer to be the token voices against these companies, to string along the public’s desire that they do “something” about them.

The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming – Glenn Greenwald

No speculation is needed. Those who wield power are demanding it. The only question is how much opposition they will encounter.

Source: The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming – Glenn Greenwald

Glenn wrote a long article about how all political speech is going to be painted as “inciting violence,” in order to stifle opposition to whoever is in power. He identifies a lot of historical examples from the left, which we are calling “incitement” today, which people are forgetting.

You don’t need to look any further than the popular reaction to a tweet made by Ted Cruz to see that he was correct:

The “hot take” here is that he’s “trying to incite,” and I was provoked into blogging about this because it was the third such hot take I saw on Imgur about this tweet in my doom scrolling. Here’s an elected member of Congress saying the same thing:

The problem, of course, is that there’s literally and absolutely nothing in Ted Cruz’s tweet that could be construed by a rational, reasonable person as an incitement to violence. The whole thing just proves Greenwald correct, and in record time.

As a followup, here’s The Daily Caller, hosting a former Facebook exec, who is complaining about not being able to control the flow of information, and suggesting that we need to get AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast to block right-wing news sites from their internet service. Regardless of hosting provider, they would simply not be able to reach Americans, because of the regional monopolies on local internet providers, and the duopoly of phone service.

My Friends the Complot Theory Believers · Jacques Mattheij

But I just can’t deal with the degree to which they have slid off into the abyss, it is too hard to watch, remembering them as they were seems to be the easy way out. For those two there are probably 100’s of thousands if not millions (more?) of others who are equally detached from reality.

Source: My Friends the Complot Theory Believers · Jacques Mattheij

This essay is a nice summary of why I say #SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety. Before the informational overload days, before the internet and the rise of social media, people generally didn’t have access to fringe ideas: sparse “facts” strung together to form specious narratives. You had to really go out of your way to get to them.

Probably the biggest conspiracy theory before the internet was the assassination of JFK, right? But even that whole phenomenon arose because of the availability of facts. The real-time TV and radio coverage of the event led to a lot of speculation of what had happened, and people rushed to fill in holes with their own interpretation of events. Because of the public view of the event, and all the bizarre things that happened (uh, umbrella man, anyone?), and the doubt turned up by the plot-hole-riddled narrative the government was trying to peddle, the government was publicly forced to do an inquiry, which turned out to contain even bigger whoppers than the previous explanations.

Now, literally everything of importance that happens can be dissected and analyzed like a huge government conspiracy. Take any big news story, like the recent invasion of the Capitol building. There are a couple articles about it on every major news site, but the thing is just exploding on social media. Social media has become more important than the news.

Social media. Really? Where everyone is supposedly equal, but which is quietly a gigantic popularity contest? We’re going to let the prevailing sentiment and direction of our country be decided by blue-checkmark “influencer” celebrities? Is this appropriate? Is this desirable? Social media. Where every timeline and information stream is being manipulated by whoever is writing the biggest checks. Did Trump’s election teach us nothing? In one sense, it did. They “fixed” the algorithm, and preventing Trump from abusing the platform this time. In another sense, the 2016 election taught us nothing, because we’re still allowing Twitter and Facebook to invisibly program society, and manufacture public consent. But, hey, as long as it’s working in your side’s favor, it’s cool, right?

And “social media” is not just Twitter and Facebook. Imgur is about 70% reposted Twitter hot takes at the time of this writing. I can only imagine what Reddit looks like. (I stopped going there, if I can avoid it, a long time ago.) I’m morbidly curious to see what my wife’s Facebook looks like.

Twitter and Facebook are throwing Trump off their platforms, along with identified people who took part. It might look like something substantive, but this is just cover for their own exposed culpability in this mess. They’re trying to prevent legislative blowback on their revenue and influence.

For decades, I’ve watched people on the internet complain about censorship on various platforms, and the answer is always, “It’s a private company. If you don’t like it, go start your own platform.” So people did. They went and started Parler. But now that the MAGA crowd has a place to go, people are calling on Apple and Google to deplatform the Parler app. Those poor MAGA people just can’t win! 🙁

A lot of people have been crowing that rescinding the FCC’s Section 230 would cause an undue burden on social media, and essentially force them out of business. Aww, poor babies. I say good! Remove that law, force platforms to take accountability for illegal speech on their services, and let it all shake out. Inciting a riot is illegal, but claiming that the election was stolen is not. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to be hypocritically trying to use the law against speech they just don’t like.

Another thing that people like to point out is that the First Amendment only restricts government, and private companies can do whatever they like. That’s fine, but it shows just how dangerous the outsized influence of Twitter and Facebook have become when we’re arguing about whether the President of the Unites States is allowed to have an account. They have become a de facto governing body now, and I just don’t think that should be allowed. I have a hard enough time with how disconnected I am with my government as it is, and how little influence my one vote has on our process. When I think about the influence my government has on FAANG companies, it makes me despair to be so far removed from something that has become so vital to the national infrastructure.

When Standard Oil started basically running the entire country, the government jacked up the income tax to take NINETY PERCENT of Rockefeller’s income, and he is STILL the richest person to have ever lived, accounting for inflation, beating Bezos or Musk by a factor of over two times. They did this to at least float the country on his success. It is said that his income taxes funded 25% of the government by himself.

Social media companies want it both ways. They get to control the political discourse of the country, while raking in unprecedented profits, but pay essentially zero corporate tax, and their executives probably pay less, on a marginal basis, than I do. They’re breaking how democracy works, and we don’t even get a “kickback” to help, say, fund a proper social safety net during a global pandemic which has caused the highest unemployment since the Great Depression. There’s something seriously wrong with this picture.

Playstation 5 and Twitter

I have a very tolerate/hate relationship with Twitter. I think I’m literally on my 14th account, and I’ve deactivated my current one, only to reactivate before the 30-day time-out period, about 10 times now. There are many reasons.

One is that it’s just depressing. “Doomscrolling” is very much a thing, especially after something as tumultuous as people storming the Capitol building, or people storming the Portland police station, and attacking the mayor.

Another is the absurdity in the swings of the takes. Back and forth it goes, between hard-left and hard-right, while people always presume to read other people’s minds, in what has become the logical fallacy of the age.

Another is the brevity. You get just enough characters to make one point, without context. This leads directly to the problem above, in forcing people to make a contrary statement on a presumption of the conclusion of the statement they’re responding to.

Another is that ephemeral nature of it. Even if you can find a good exchange, it disappears “like tears in the rain,” and quickly gets lost. If you don’t bookmark it somehow, good luck finding it with Twitter’s “search” feature.

Last, but certainly not least, is the porn. I’m tired of the porn. You can tell Twitter to hide most of it from you, but it still leaks through. I’ll come back to this point.

For about 20 years, I’ve built (or bought) gaming PC’s, but a few years back, I decided to give my rig to my son, and try just using a Playstation 4 Pro for gaming. What I found surprised me. Besides a work computer for the past 6 years or so, I’ve only used Windows for gaming, personally, for about 25 years. Even with just this specific focus, I was always fighting to keep it up to date: BIOS updates, Windows updates, antivirus updates, video driver updates, mouse driver updates, keyboard driver updates, game updates, Steam updates, GoG updates, etc. The weekly maintenance on the thing was a not-so-invisible burden.

When I want to play a game on a console, I hit a button on the controller to turn it on, and within seconds, I am playing right where I left off. Updates are very rare. There are no intermediaries (like Steam) to patch. Occasionally, there will be an update to a game, but the system intelligently notifies me about them, and then waits for me to update them. If there are driver updates, they’re buried in the system updates. (It’s amazing how little code it takes to get input from a mouse, when you don’t need to be able to program a light show inside of it, program its 32 buttons with macros, and track every movement to sell back to the 3rd-party personal data market exchange.)

It’s just a completely different world. Just like when I finally moved from Gentoo Linux to Ubuntu, and realized how much of my time was being spent keeping Gentoo happy, moving to a console was eye-opening about how much time I was spending on Windows for gaming. (Don’t even get me started on the care and feeding of Windows for programming.)

On top of all of that convenience and streamlining, there are no cheaters! Glory hallelujah! When playing a game like Battlefield on PC, I could always safely assume that there would be at least one cheater, and if I wasn’t already, my one and only goal in the game would be to switch to the cheater’s team, so that at least he wouldn’t aggravate me.

The downside, of course, is that you can’t have some super-specced monster running the game at 120 FPS in 4K. But $400 vs $1,500? $2,000? $3,000? And the knuckle-skinning hassle of building the rig and keeping it up to date? You can keep your graphics. Besides, if you tell me I’m missing something, graphically, when I’m playing, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Horizon Zero Dawn, I’m going to laugh in your face. Those games look incredible on a PS4 Pro, no matter what you say.

So, yeah, I’ve been trying to “cop” a Playstation 5. Specifically a digital edition. (I only have one disc. It’s the Arkham bundle that I got for $5 at a second hand shop. I’ve seen it on sale on the Playstation store for $5, and I’ve almost just bought it again so I can throw away the disc. I will probably play through both games again before I die.) Anyway, at this point, the only way to try to get in on a “drop” is to watch some select Twitter accounts which make publicizing when they go on sale their only purpose in life. So I reactivated my account. Again. I installed Tweetbot, added the PS5 drop-tracking accounts to a list, and turned on notifications for that list.

Yesterday, a notification went out that Best Buy was going to do a drop. I don’t know why I was bothering, because I’ve gotten one in my cart twice before, only to be told that none were available within 250 miles of my location. But I saw the notification, and I tried again, and nothing was working for anyone. I commented in the thread the same thing I said here, and several people liked the tweet. I gave up.

About an hour later, another notification came through that it was actually working, and even though I had to take the time to enter a new credit card, I managed to get one on order. So I commented back to the Twitter thread that I had, and an obvious cam girl (from her avatar and name) commented on my comment. This is what I mean about porn just being pervasive on the platform. You can limit it, but it’s everywhere. There are so many porn site come-ons. I’ve seen hard-core clips as comments for this sort of thing, so I was actually thankful it was just an honest comment.

And, yes, for curiosity’s sake, I went ahead and took the gamble with the click. At that point, I just had to laugh. If a girl that average looking can make money on OnlyFans, then good for her, and God Bless America.

Anyway, for all of these reasons, now that I’ve secured a PS5, I’m deleting my Twitter account again. The trash-fire-you-can-see-from-space will just have to burn without my attention again.

It’s not like half of Imgur isn’t Twitter reposts anyway.

The 2020 Election, Benford’s Law, and Twitter

In response to allegations of rampant voter fraud, and subsequently digging into the details of the voting, Scott Adams tweeted (and I’m embedding static images, for reasons which will become clear):

Knowing what he was talking about, I laughed, and bookmarked the link. Sure enough, this post went viral on Reddit. In it, someone demonstrates that the votes for Biden in highly-contested areas do not fit the expected statistical pattern.

Someone forwarded me a link to this article, in Gnews — whatever that is — but, again, something that will become clear later. That article references the Reddit post.

The article includes a link to the data, and the math to produce the graphs, hosted at GitHub. The top left graph demonstrates the issue at hand.

Since the most concise place to link into all of these seems to be the Gnews article, I linked it in Twitter, with a comment: “Absolutely fascinating.” I hit refresh in my browser, and got this suspension:

I was also immediately emailed a notification that I had been suspended for — get this — posting nudes.

I’ve since looked around the Gnews site for more about what they’re all about, and they have several articles showing Hunter Biden in various… extremely compromising pictures. So I’m guessing that’s what the ban is all about. But if they want to ban me for posting a link to a news site that they’ve blocked entirely because they don’t want to hurt the Bidens, well, they can have their stupid service.

As for the actual content of the story, and the implications of the statistical math, I agree with the interpretation that it is a smoking gun for fraud. Up till now, I was willing to assume that the allegations of systemic vote manufacture were just paranoid delusions of a party desperate to hold on to power, and I was confident that, once reviewed, problems would be easily attributable to normal human error. Even though all the questionable counts seem to only be going one way, I assumed that the courts would ensure that it was all sorted out.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot. If this is all true — if the data really shows this statistical anomaly in many hotly-contested areas — especially where Biden “extended” his “lead” in after-election-day counting — then it changes the equation. This would make it incumbent on the Democrats to put all of the votes on the table, and prove that they haven’t fudged the numbers.

UPDATE: Wondering how widespread these Hunter Biden pics/videos were, I searched Reddit for “Hunter Biden sex tape.” There are dozens of posts with headlines saying that you would be banned for posting any link to it/them, because they were leaked against someone’s will. Meanwhile, at the top of the search results, in the “related subreddits” section, was a link to an entire subreddit devoted to… leaked sex tapes. What a bunch of hypocritical tools. “Sure, you can post intimate videos of people without their consent, just not of anyone powerful, who could afford to sue us and make a dent in our revenue.”

Cruz in heated exchange with Twitter’s Dorsey: ‘Who the hell elected you?’ | TheHill

Dorsey noted that every person or organization that signs up to have an account on Twitter agrees to its terms and services.

Source: Cruz in heated exchange with Twitter’s Dorsey: ‘Who the hell elected you?’ | TheHill

In a world of weasel words, said about so many things, this one has to be in the running for taking the cake.

Alas Imgur

I killed my Twitter account for the umpteenth time a couple days ago, so I tried looking at Imgur for amusement purposes. I didn’t get far. It seemed like a solid chunk of the top posts were screenshots of tweets that perfectly encapsulated the utter insanity that drove me away from the site. I guess there is no escaping it on any sort of social media. War Games had it right, 35 years ago: “The only winning move is… not to play.”

Alas Twitter

I’ve tried to work with Twitter. I’ve tried pruning my follow list. I’ve tried blocking terrible people and muting terrible subjects. I’ve tried turning off retweets for people who, otherwise, had interesting things to say. But all of this is hopeless. Even the people who are left coming through in my feed only want to talk about the people and things I’m specifically trying to prevent coming through my feed.

Look, I get it. I do. The world is pretty messed up. But I don’t want to hear about the terribleness of everything all the time, and I really don’t want to see petty, stupid, ad-hominem attacks, literally non-stop. It may not seem like it, but I really do have better things to do than get dragged down the rabbit hole into yet another stupid and pointless argument that takes 72 tweets to make sense of, which changes nothing, and only leaves everyone more angry than when they started.

Not only will Twitter not give me the tools to prevent this, it feels like they’ve gone out of their way to make it seem like they do, while not actually doing so. The best change they could make is that if someone quotes or retweets someone I’ve blocked, or a keyword I’ve muted, I don’t want to see it. At all. Don’t show me a tweet with a quoted block that says, “This tweet has been hidden…” I don’t care about the tweet, nor do I care what someone else has to say about that tweet. To wit: I don’t want to see what Donald Trump tweets, and I REALLY don’t want to see what people say ABOUT those tweets. To me, that’s kind of the whole point of muting and blocking. And the fact that Twitter continues to shove stuff you’ve specifically said you don’t want to see in your face tells you a lot about their objectives.

<Andy Rooney>And another thing</Andy Rooney>, Twitter is supposed to be the people’s answer to traditional media. Why is it, then, that most of the substantive discussion on the service seems dominated by blue checkmarks from “print” and broadcast media outlets?

The even more-worrisome thing about this generally-acknowledged terrible situation is that these aren’t just little niggling details, or unfortunate side effects. This has all been specifically engineered to exacting standards. Like, hundreds of thousands of man-hours of meetings and coding — not to mention billions of investment capital — has been devoted to making this work precisely as it does. This is exactly what they want. How messed up is that? So, for (I think) the 14th time, I’m out. At least for now. I can’t find a way to live in peace while using the service any more.

For what it’s worth, the Bible predicted the general social trends that are happening right now, 2,000 years ago. Twitter (and Facebook, et. al.) is just another tool which accelerates the degeneration. But saying this on social media would, of course, immediately get me reviled. There was a time where the internet was cool, and interesting and respectful discussion about various topics could be had in many places. All of that is now gone. I know how to get it back, but the mechanics of how to do it will be left for another time.

Dunbar’s Number – Wikipedia

Dunbar’s Number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Dunbar explained it informally as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

Source: Dunbar’s number – Wikipedia

I have finally run across the term for my problem with Facebook: Dunbar’s Number. Old relationships from decades ago should be allowed to die off as you make new relationships. 150 people feels about right. Having 1,000-2,000 “friends” on Facebook makes literally no sense. Similarly, following 4,000 people on Twitter makes literally no sense. People require context to make sense of comments and pictures, and when you have that many people on a feed of any kind, context becomes impossible to distinguish.