State-controlled media gain Twitter followers after quiet platform policy change
dfrlab.org
dfrlab.org
To preempt "musk hate" arguments, I'm attributing this to Musk and not Twitter because the emails were sent directly from Musk to NPR.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/musk-threatens-t...
It truly boggles the mind why Twitter/Musk/wtv is so aggressively attacking the goodwill of advertisers and brands with this whole blue check and state/public/government media debacle.
Whatever Musk is it's certainly not worse off then before. NPR threw a tantrum because of a label that wasn't the same as what Chinese and Russian media had, which they disingenuously claimed was the same. Then they threw a tantrum when Musk in response removed all labels from ALL media organizations.
Musk is certainly not building trust with the advertisers, but neither are the advertisers acting in good faith. It was also quite the spectacle to see all those blue checkmarks flip out at losing something they got for free to the extent that they went around saying that peoples lives would end because of it.
NPR reporter should have replied back that NPR is held to the terms of service agreement and giving away a handle can only happen when both parties agree to a monetary exchange. Musk would probably change the TOS but without NPR using the website again, New TOS would not apply.
No news. No updates. Nothing that would help engagement on Twitter, but the account is active. It tweets.
Of course, Musk will try to force them to engage with Twitter as if it's business as usual and try to invent some other reason to either reap the account if they don't comply.
I basically just started posting on the first random client I found on Google (iris.to) and ... it works:
https://iris.to/npub14cxhrehjln8r4fqgc8uvatkjv5dlwzxvua2ym93...
No signup, no decision to make which host to use, no nothing. Just save the private key (which iris.to creates for you) and you are good to go forever. The content you post gets relayed everywhere:
https://snort.social/p/npub14cxhrehjln8r4fqgc8uvatkjv5dlwzxv...
So it does not matter if the client you used changes their policies, their algorithm, deplatforms you, goes down or whatever. You can just use any other client and keep posting.
And since the protocol is using websockets, one can write a client in a static html page without any server backend. And it needs surprisingly little code to do so. I really enjoyed this video of a guy writing a Nostr client in a simple html file with like 50 lines of code or so:
A massive usability hurdle for any hope of mainstream adoption.
People say Mastodon is hard to join because you have to pick a server. It’s on another level if you also have to pick a service to hold your private key, and you can lose your account if you don’t do this.
If someone is not capable of doing that, I am not sure I want to read their articles.
Not sure what you are referring to with "pick a service to hold your private key". The whole point of Nostr is that you don't need any service to hold anything for you.
Ordinary people expect to be able to reset forgotten passwords. And because people are bad at managing passwords, reasonable services try to get them to use 2FA so their accounts wouldn’t get stolen. A service that uses plain private keys has both problems.
Compared to, say, someone being able to compromise every account you have because you walked away from your desktop or phone while logged into email?
Everybody has some data they never don't want to lose.
So the Nostr key would be just another piece of such data.
Also, losing it would not that much of a desaster. Use a new key, and let people know about it via other channels.
There's no reason you need to use the same private key for every service, any more than you need to use the same password for every service.
In contrast to Twitter & Co, a compromised account does not mean you cannot post anymore.
Serious question: Didn't the cryptocurrency people say the same thing? Look how that went -- the tech nerds tended to do it "right," and the non-tech-nerds tended to use exchanges-or-similar that were a bit less than stable, to say the least. Am I misunderstanding?
But my post wasn't even about average users. The majority of people never publish anything.
Compared to managing passwords, screwing around with authorization codes sent by email and/or text message, and all the other folderol associated with that model?
With just a private key, no such protection. Unless you take active steps to store the key safely, you’re a few Backspace key presses away from losing your account forever (or at the other end, having it stolen if you leave the key lying around).
We're your one stop shopping for information. Want to know what Jones bought today? Here's a picture they uploaded (to their feed or w/e)! Want to know what the weather is? Here's an account for NYC weather!
It's a bit risky slotting ads next to random people's content but you'll know which feeds are very commercialable. The weather feed is always going to be SFW, etc. Plus you can always use unfilled ads slots with ads for your own content (just focus on ads for the lower tier-content to avoid associating Greys Anatomy with some beheading video).
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/11/23677946/substack-notes-t...
The same reason there isn't a traditional publisher with an Amazon clone. One-stop shopping does win, but very few traditional media companies would willingly distribute content for their competitors (probably you could replace "very few" with "none"). Even if they were willing to do that, the antitrust people would be on their butts in short order.
My take:
This happens just as another Tesla factory in China opens. Anyone who thought buying Twitter (now X corp) is about some free speech absolutism lives in a fantasy world. Musk has Teslas to sell (and make). CCP can single-handedly take away the 2nd biggest market and expropriate all IP from factories, and they know he owns Twitter.
Also, nah, free speech absolutism starts with removing algorithmic feed and stopping profiting from ads. By not having the guts to do that Musk already proved himself not a free speech absolutist. This incident is just icing on the cake.
But still I have to ask, those countries that themselves do not have free speech and do not allow their own citizens to read Twitter but spend big bucks on information war against the west? You see amplifying their content and giving it the same weight as regular personal accounts as free speech absolutism?
Imagine you removed all rules on people behavior and make it free for all, except some people have bare hands and a knife while others have tanks and rocket launchers. Ask yourself, is it absolute freedom? Freedom for whom exactly?..
> free speech absolutism starts with removing algorithmic feed and stopping profiting from ads
if you can't make money off it, the platform will cease to exist. its cherry picking to say that something isn't perfect because of this when its the same as everything else on the internet.
charge for it, if it's good people will pay
> you claiming that government accounts are amplified is a strawman
no, read the article, it is about that
> Platform Use Guidelines on state-affiliated accounts stated, “In the case of state-affiliated media entities, Twitter will not recommend or amplify accounts or their Tweets with these labels to people.” By 23:39 GMT that evening, however, Twitter had removed this sentence from its platform policy
and then they removed those labels altogether
The opposite can be seen in Kurt Vonnegut's 2081
I took a quick look - initially I was thinking they'd be doing something smart, like using CSS blending filters or a text-mask technique as to avoid duplicating HTML markup - but alas, no: duplicating HTM is exactly what they're doing: there's two copies of the sidebar HTML (`div.gta-article--scroller--top` and `div.gta-article--scroller--bottom`), the one with white-text is z-ordered above the scrolling gradient, the other (with green text) is z-ordered behind it.
I'm surprised at the extent people still compromise their HTML for CSS effects when it really isn't necessary - the curse of divitis still exists :/
Trying to do it in "proper" CSS could be fiddly to get right, and may or may not work the same in all browsers. (I don't know off-hand about this particular effect, but I've done some work with CSS gradients recently and they really don't compose well with other features.)
of all things, the extra few divs and css isn't gonna cause issues here.
>Four separate U.S. government donors were listed in 2021, with a total value between $1.5 million and $3 million. [1]
This is literally published by state controlled media lol.
[1] https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/atlantic-council/
> The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) at the Atlantic Council
“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
That doesn’t make this article any less interesting, to the contrary.
multiple politicians have already been caught lying on the spot and it points it out. any individuals, corporations, or state actors trying to do the same thing will face the same consequences.
personally, i care a lot about receiving and working off truthful and factual information. i can't think of a better platform for all these assholes to have to communicate through.
Account labels like "state controlled media" provides context for known bad actors.
"While open-source researchers cannot access Twitter’s algorithms directly,"
its been quite a long time for them to get that fact straight. that they're not just lying, they're gaslighting. this is disinformation, that's the point.
I do not see how saying "While open-source researchers cannot access Twitter’s algorithms *directly*," is disinformation.
In the mean time, Assange is still in prison. We need more journalist, this is why people don't trust media anymore. COVID Lies anyone?