This is a big deal and will be very interesting internationally. Effectively Musk leaning into an approach to abuse that eschewed all responsibility, leaning into a very American view of free speech, is resulting in a likely substantial clamp down on speech freedoms.

https://twitter.com/christinafinn8/status/1821149335028990404

Americans often view the first amendment as the fundamental right without which there is no freedom, and find the idea of government intervening as inevitably totalitarian. Most of the rest of the world disagrees.

Quick high level interpretation of the Labour Manifesto’s implications for LGBTQA+ people. For gay and bi people, it’s generally positive news. For trans people, it’s two steps forward and two steps back, and I’m concerned that the two steps back are larger. If you want a high level survey of precisely what they’ve said, Attitude in the UK has summarized the core points. attitude.co.uk/news/labour-pa…

A link to an article from the Telegraph, performing its normal form of journalism, followed by some basic fact-checking..The background is that Rowling retweeted someone saying trans claims of being victims of the Holocaust are unfounded. telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/1… This is her retweeting the post:

I find this interesting. You may not. I have been trying to get ChatGPT to generate repeating patterns. It has not worked at all. So I started experimenting with asking it to generate me grids.





The prompt I gave it was very simple - a 3x5 grid, every square the same size, black lines on a white background.

An argument - if ANY were needed - for why we need government to come in and aggressively regulate the hell out of people like this, because otherwise who on earth is going to stand up for the rights of individual people. This is not why I got involved in technology or the web and I know I speak for a whole range of my peers and friends in tech that we got involved to make the world a better, more equitable, more interesting and excitingly creative place.

More vandalism from @elonmusk. Twitter has now removed all media posted before 2014. Thats - so far - almost a decade of pictures and videos from the early 2000s removed from the service.

For example, here’s a search of my media tweets from before 2014. twitter.com/search?q=From%… I was notified about this @firasd - you can do a search of your own tweets by using the structure “from:{your user name} until:2014-01-01” in Twitter search.

Okay that FT piece on San Francisco came out and it is every bit a pile of total bullshit as we all suspected it would be. I’m not going to link to it because I am not in any way prepared to help spread it. I will say a few things though… It attempts to weaponize Bob Lee’s death and the attack on Paul Pelosi as indications of the city’s lawlessness and attempts to connect that to liberal policies. Bob Lee was murdered by a tech professional.

Hey, friends reading this bullshit in the UK. San Francisco’s average property prices are twice those of Greater London. This area is around the corner from a high end tech private club.

https://twitter.com/ftmag/status/1658868771983949824

Any publication telling this story right now is revealing how little they should be trusted. San Francisco’s current main problem is empty offices and shops downtown. And that’s because tech companies moved towards distance working. It has nothing to do with crime or liberalism.

He *explicitly* says here that Twitter was on track to lose $1.5bn with a billion in the bank when he joined Twitter and then he *added* a BILLION AND A HALF in debt servicing (because of the loans he took out to buy it).

https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1658604712407490561

Or to put it another way.. For Twitter to break even *before* Musk bought the company, it needed to find $1.5bn a year in cost savings (assuming that this drop in revenue wasn’t partly his fault because he alienated advertisers). With his acquisition it needed to find $3bn!

One of the main reasons I kept coming back here - that being verified and coherent meant that I could post fact-checking replies or other responses under powerful people’s tweets and lots of people would see them - has now completely gone away, so it’s barely worth being here. I’m not leaving as such, but my usage has already dropped substantially and I can’t see it recovering any time soon. Meanwhile the Twitter Blue users are gradually realizing they get no benefits in having their bad tweets promoted to more people so their interest is dying too.

A few quick points for people confused about why Clinton’s legal settlement with Paula Jones did not result in him getting arrested but Trump might be arrested.

(1) It is generally not illegal to pay hush money to people. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. (2) It *is* illegal to falsify business expenses.
(3) It *is* illegal to not declare in kind campaign finance contributions

@blckndnerdy @JruGordon37 @TwitterDev Fundamentally, an API is a way for a piece of software to talk to another piece of software. So a Twitter app - for example - talks to Twitter’s servers through an API. The app will go, “give me the tweets posted from this time” and the server goes, “okay here they are” @blckndnerdy @JruGordon37 @TwitterDev The app can also say, “Okay API, the user has just liked this tweet” and the server responsds, “Got it, thanks” and updates its records.

Now, about fifteen / twenty years ago it became fairly normal for products to open up those APIs to people outside the company.

I’m a Briton living in the US. I’m not a royalist. I don’t really give a crap about them. But I also don’t really care enough about them to dismantle the institution. Like many Britons, I liked the Queen and the role she played in the country, not sure I care much now. So I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about royal weddings or infighting in the royal family. I don’t obsess about William vs Harry or any of that crap. I genuinely do not care about it. But I do care about the UK and there is something *deeply* sinister going on there.

A quick reminder to everyone that drag has been a core part of anglophone culture forever and that there is absolutely nothing inherently sexual or non-kid friendly about it. Drag performers are like absolutely any other kind of performer - some choose to emphasize their sexuality or perform adult content, others do not.

The weirdest thing about all the #twitterfiles crap is that I have some sympathy with the basic position that social networks shouldn’t have the power to define what constitutes freedom of speech for a country or a planet. I mean I even wrote an article about it, defending Twitter’s position not to replatform Trump a couple of years before Jan 6th attacks. (A point by which I too had changed my mind.) nbcnews.com/think/opinion/…

@mtaibbi Well thank you for letting us know that you’re done. I can only hope your later posts have something a bit more substantial than “Twitter decided to ban a story with no FBI input and then had a discussion about whether that was the right decision and wasn’t totally sure” @mtaibbi Now we all know these ‘controversial’ things:
(1) Biden and Trump’s campaigns alerted Twitter to things they thought deserved review - Trump was President when this happened
(2) No part of the government or ‘deep state’ told Twitter to do anything regarding the Hunter Biden Story

Participating in the Elon Musk ‘Twitter Files’ story thread and so far the epic reveal so far has been:
(1) Twitter Abuse flagged the HB story as hacked materials
(2) There was a debate internally about whether that was reasonable
(3) There was no government interference (4) After they censored the story, the first elected official to comment to them was a Democrat and she was concerned about the move
(5) A bipartisan group of members of congress were also concerned about it.

That’s it. That’s the big conspiracy. That’s the damn story?!

You want to know what ‘cancel culture’ really is? It’s people for the last eighty odd years saying that if someone said they supported Hitler and the Nazis we wouldn’t work with them, put them on TV or give them platforms to spread their fucking awful hateful crap.

https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1598406302106931200

This new position advocated by @elonmusk et al that — since the government doesn’t have the right to pass laws restricting free speech — we should all graciously and happily let people go around on social media and TV doing Holocaust denial… it’s WHY WE GET MORE FUCKING NAZIS.

<flat voice>Oh gosh. Who could have seen that coming. I am so surprised. Musk is a genius.

https://twitter.com/financialtimes/status/1598014468172152841

This stuff is so frustrating because anyone who knows the social part of the industry predicted every part of this. Apple and Google don’t like hate speech. The EU doesn’t prioritize gun rights and free speech over the right to life. Advertisers don’t like hate speech.

In response to SFPD deciding they needed exploding robots on the streets to fight crime (!!!) I decided to do a quick check on homicide statistics. Imagine my shock to discover SF has almost twice as many murders per year as residents! patch.com/california/san… According to these stats, the entire population of San Francisco is replaced much like cells in your body, but not once every ten years, but in fact almost TWICE PER YEAR!

@parismarx @TaylorLorenz Let's just be clear about why people like decentralization or distributed social networks. It's because *no one organization owns them*. That means people can run services around them for free, as commons, as charities or businesses, and no one person controls them all. @parismarx @TaylorLorenz There is no such thing as socialist social media and most likely there never will be. Not because socialism is bad but because it requires a centralized entity to run the service for the good of all, and that means government and government has shown no ability to do such things.