Hacker News Reader

one of the big things about mastodon to me is how do you tell someone faking an account from the actual "person" like a journalist. Go to their web page? The profile on their "magazine"/"news site"? Is it unique or is there some way via mastodon to find them?

There's no formal way for consistent verification of a person across activitypub but Mastodon provides a way of verifying ownership of one or multiple webpages by a specific account. If an account has any links in their bio - if those links are accompanied by a checkmark they're the verified owner of that linked page.

Journalists could potentially do this with author pages on their publication's websites if the publication added support. Alternatively many journalists have personal websites/blogs which they may already have verified.

For example, Micah Lee & IGD News have both done this on their Mastodon profiles listed above.

The other approach is just to self-host your own personal single-user instance as Tony Webster has done.

> It's Going Down is a digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist + anti-colonial movements across so-called North America. Our mission is to provide a resilient platform to publicize and promote revolutionary theory and action.

so-called North America? Yikes! Good riddance.

I think they're pretty cringe and LARPy, but rather doubt they have violated the Twitter TOS in any way. They mostly publish cranky op-eds and overdramatic accounts of political demonstrations.

I don't know what's "cringe" about the excellent "It's Going Down" podcast[0], which opens every episode with a lightning-round of under-reported headlines that answer the question of what, exactly, is "going down."

0. https://itsgoingdown.org/category/podcast/

Perhaps. I think it's funny to lump them with Washington Post reporters in this instance.

Keith Olbermann covered sports for a lot of his career. Not familiar at all with the publication mentioned here, but some news is just entertainment.

Seems that Facebook removed them back in 2020

Weren't they the ones that posted instructions on derailing trains?

Source? That doesn't sound very journalistic to me.

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