[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Ego Man wrote:

What was the comment ? The link only took me to the video

Prederick wrote:

This was a lot funnier before a solid 30% of the American populace began thinking the second half is entirely accurate.

So pretty accurate except the 30% is apparently low. Thanks for clarifying

Italian Mob Fugitive Caught In Caribbean After Posting Cooking Videos Online

NPR wrote:

An Italian organized crime suspect was caught in the Caribbean after police tracked him down through cooking videos he had uploaded online in which he managed to hide his face but not his distinctive tattoos.

Marc Feren Claude Biart had been wanted on drug trafficking charges since 2014 and was located by authorities who recognized his tattoos on video, the International Criminal Police Organization, Interpol, said. They believe he is a member of the 'Ndrangheta, a powerful and brutal crime syndicate that originated in the southern region of Calabria and has expanded worldwide.

Biart, 53, had been living in the Dominican Republic town of Boca Chica for five years, where he kept a low profile and posted cooking videos to a YouTube channel started with his wife, Italian authorities said in a statement reported by NBC News. They said his "love for Italian cuisine" made the arrest possible.

Police said Biart, who is accused of trafficking cocaine into the Netherlands, had been wanted since 2014. He was arrested last Wednesday and arrived in Italy this week, as seen in a video posted to Twitter by Interpol.

The 'Ndrangheta is described by Interpol as "one of the most extensive and powerful criminal organizations in the world," and it "is considered the only Italian mafia organization present on every world continent."

See, the thing is, I really, really, really despise Facebook too! Just for much different reasons than most of the people yelling about it.

Like other police departments throughout the country, Chippewa Township Police embraced Facebook for its ability to reach the community and aid in investigations, especially retail thefts. But Hermick never anticipated the headaches that might arise. The fake murderer-on-the-loose story was just the latest issue in what Hermick said was a larger "social media problem."

"It's just crazy. These people that sit around with nothing else to do except listen to a scanner and start sensationalizing stuff," Hermick said. "I don't think there's any accountability or checks in place to make sure these people are putting factual information out there."

Officers on duty posted to the thread, too, but the efforts to set the record straight only made things worse. The group members accused the police of organizing a "cover-up."

"It destroys our reputation, our community, confidence in the police department, and we have to regain that," Hermick said. "I never had a problem doing that, but let's hold people accountable for what they're putting out there."

But the question of just who is accountable for providing information in Beaver County is murky. The area's once-trusted news source, a newspaper with a 160-year history, was devastated in a few short months after it was swallowed up by giant corporate chains. The vacuum was filled by social media, namely Facebook.

Lawmakers and experts have been critical of Facebook's groups feature, claiming the mostly private spaces have become hubs for coronavirus misinformation and extremism.

But The News Alerts of Beaver County isn't home base for a gun-wielding militia, and it isn't a QAnon fever swamp. In fact, the group's focus on timely and relevant information for a small real-world community is probably the kind that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg envisioned when he pivoted his company toward communities in 2017.

And yet, the kind of misinformation that's traded in The News Alerts of Beaver County and thousands of other groups just like it poses a unique danger. It's subtler and in some ways more insidious, because it's more likely to be trusted. The misinformation — shared in good faith by neighbors, sandwiched between legitimate local happenings and overseen by a community member with no training but good intentions — is still capable of tearing a community apart.

This is the hardest I've laughed in weeks.

Looking forwards to checking out the "Best Racism Slider Set?" thread on Operation Sports.

Prederick wrote:

This is the hardest I've laughed in weeks.

Looking forwards to checking out the "Best Racism Slider Set?" thread on Operation Sports.

Just going to ctrl+c, ctrl+p something I said about it in a slack chat.

Allowing for a range perpetuates the idea that a little bit of human evil is okay in moderation and validates unacceptable behavior by its mere existence. Cringed my way through the vid. From the pan of the menu options it reads like someone who has heard of the thing without really experiencing the thing. Most troll-y micro and macro agressions aren't so overt that they would be easy for voice recognition software to pick up on. This is a dummy "solution" to a complex problem that it won't solve.

In an attempt to not throw the baby out with the bathwater, is there some goodness in there to celebrate? For instance, if I could have racial and homophobic slurs blanked out of voice chat, I'd take that in a heartbeat.

Like, I entirely agree with Meeb's criticism, but it feels to me like there's a good idea buried under a stupid implementation.

"It's Not Cancel Culture — It's A Platform Failure."

The whole affair is a perfect example of context collapse, which generally occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another — usually an uncharitable one — which then reads said information in the worst possible faith (You can read about the origins here from scholar danah boyd).

In this case, the collapse was substantially amplified by Twitter’s Trending widget, which took an anodyne opinion by a verified Twitter user and displayed it to millions of random people as if it was some kind of significant pop cultural event. “My imagined audience when I tweeted this was, ‘oh, we’re all at the bar and having this low stakes debate,” she told me recently. “In retrospect, that was totally naive to think anyone would have taken it that way.”

The point of Twitter’s Trending Topics is ostensibly to surface significant news and Twitter commentary and invite others to ‘join the conversation.’ Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage — an incomprehensible number of voices lecturing past each other. It didn’t matter how Hunt had intended the argument — whether it was cheeky fun or part of a high-minded indictment of the sci-fi horror industrial complex — it was amplified by others as ammunition to make whatever convenient point that interested parties wanted to make. As Ryan Broderick, who chronicles the internet in his excellent newsletter, Garbage Day, noted during the incident, “is this really how a website should function?”

“I think Trending Topics definitely made it much worse,” Hunt told me. “The choice to feature me had this effect of holding me up as a public figure in a way that would only encourage abuse. I was thinking about if it would’ve been a different situation if they framed it to reduce the focus on me. [As it was] it sort of validated an engagement with a quite flippant opinion that I held.”

I should pause here to note that this isn’t a dramatic story about unrelenting harassment that ruined a life. But it’s noteworthy precisely because it’s so familiar: a perfect example of our broken social media dynamics, which feel ever-increasingly designed to dehumanize us, polarize us, and make us all miserable.

When I spoke with Hunt recently, she was sanguine about the experience. She doesn’t want people to think she feels persecuted. “It feels wrong to even call what happened to me as harassment,” she said. “And yet when you look at the volume and frequency of how it comes in, it’s hard to talk about it as anything other than harassment. It’s just so many people engaging in bad faith — it just overwhelms you, and you start to see it as a reflection of who you are, and that’s really difficult.”

A 23-Year-Old Coder Kept QAnon Online When No One Else Would

Two and a half months before extremists invaded the U.S. Capitol, the far-right wing of the internet suffered a brief collapse. All at once, in the final weeks of the country’s presidential campaign, a handful of prominent sites catering to White supremacists and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy movement stopped functioning. To many of the forums’ most devoted participants, the outage seemed to prove the American political struggle was approaching its apocalyptic endgame. “Dems are making a concerted move across all platforms,” read one characteristic tweet. “The burning of the land foreshadows a massive imperial strike back in the next few days.”

In fact, there’d been no conspiracy to take down the sites; they’d crashed because of a technical glitch with VanwaTech, a tiny company in Vancouver, Wash., that they rely on for various kinds of network infrastructure. They went back online with a simple server reset about an hour later, after the proprietor, 23-year-old Nick Lim, woke up from a nap at his mom’s condo.

Lim founded VanwaTech in late 2019. He hosts some websites directly and provides others with technical services including protection against certain cyberattacks; his annual revenue, he says, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although small, the operation serves clients including the Daily Stormer, one of America’s most notorious online destinations for overt neo-Nazis, and 8kun, the message board at the center of the QAnon movement, whose adherents were heavily involved in the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Wait for it............

Lim exists in a singularly odd corner of the business world. He says he’s not an extremist, just an entrepreneur with a maximalist view of free speech. “There needs to be a me, right?” he says, while eating pho at a Vietnamese restaurant near his headquarters. “Once you get to the point where you look at whether content is safe or unsafe, as soon as you do that, you’ve opened a can of worms.” At best, his apolitical framing comes across as naive; at worst, as preposterous gaslighting. In interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek early in 2020, Lim said he didn’t really know what QAnon was and had no opinion about Donald Trump.

Wait for it..............................................

Lim argues that the real political crisis facing the U.S. is not extremist violence but erosion of the First Amendment. He says that restrictions on online speech have already brought the U.S. to the verge of communist tyranny, that “we are one foot away from 1984.” After a moment, though, he offers a sizable qualifier: “I never actually read the book, so I don’t know all the themes of the book. But I have heard the concepts, and I’ve seen some things, and I thought, ‘Whoa! That’s sketchy as f---.’ ”

Addendum:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EzBtm5qXMAEJj6J?format=jpg&name=large)

So. That thing that has always existed on the internet where people make additional accounts to "report" and to "like", to silence and to demoralize, that and those they care not for. Which works. Sadly. The Dissident documentary just smashed home an inevitable conclusion which I'd thought was perhaps my paranoia. Monarchies. Governments. The powerful. Attempting to elevate and plummet to shape what trends and what tanks. To influence the populace. Progressing to dissenters literally disappearing. F#©k!

I long for the days when it was just saddos on message boards.

Is this a good place were to post the Lindsay Ellis video?

Hobbes2099 wrote:

Is this a good place were to post the Lindsay Ellis video?

I’d say yes. I like Twitter. It’s exposed me to a lot of academic types I would not normally be exposed to. There is a definite thing where some people read in bad faith and take the most horrible interpretation of what was said.

Unfortunately a lot of people don’t have blogs. I wish everyone I follow on Twitter had a blog and I would RSS their blog. I want to hear what they’re working on and what they are thinking. There is almost 0% (but not 0%) value in me seeing the replies (I.e the comments).

There is a particular brand of..... well, it's hard to describe, but there are people I am now seeing fairly regularly on the Bird App these days who are ostensibly "on my team" and I would not want defending my black ass for a fraction of a goddamn second.

Example I Saw on the Bird App: Post-kerfluffle, another YouTuber (who happens to be a friend of Ms. Ellis) tweeted that he misheard a Lil Nas X lyric as being about roasted chicken.

An Interesting Twitter Person (who, to dovetail with Ms. Ellis' video, was apparently white), accused him of perpetuating harmful anti-black stereotypes.

If you're unfamiliar, the stereotype is that black people love fried chicken.

FRIED chicken. Not roasted chicken, fried chicken. Which we do! Because DAMN NEAR EVERYONE WHO ISN'T VEGETARIAN/VEGAN LOVES FRIED CHICKEN.

(If we'd like to drill down a little further, the accusation is absurd because first, the stereotype is, again, fried chicken. It's not all chicken, and acting as if saying a black person is enjoying chicken is racist manages to almost double back upon itself and actually be reverse racist. Not to mention it requires a reading of the original tweet in such forcible bad faith that it boggles the mind.)

Anyway, the aforementioned ITP continued to double and triple down on the accusation, despite it being a reach that Mr. Fantastic would look at and go "Holy sh*t." Said ITP then immediately flipped to playing the victim when the YouTuber replied to her and pointed out her argument was absurd (the weaponization of "don't punch down" I've noticed happening a lot), and blocked every single person who disagreed with her, including multiple actual black people!

I feel pretty sure that person was definitely involved with the aforementioned larger kerfluffle.

I think a big part of the issue was that this whole thing happened in the midst of #StopAsianHate, which, yes, obviously, but then it somehow mutated into people accusing friends of Ms. Ellis who had not spoken out about the kerfluffle (and by speaking out I mean condemning) as perpetuating anti-Asian violence, which.....

......there's a lot going on here, is what I'm saying. I don't agree with The Atlantic's Conor Friersdorf often, but I thought his take on "Concept Creep" points to some of the things brought up and the way language is used around both the initial article I posted and the Ms. Ellis affair.

Wow, sounds like she went down the crazy hole. That sounds like an absolutely innocuous beginning, someone saying that they heard a nonexistent 'roasted chicken' in song lyrics. You're not linking to the original context, so I have to imagine the whole thing, but it sounds like it was intended as 'hah hah, my stupid brain is doing funny things, check it out', i.e. lighthearted and harmless. This would be particularly true if others could listen to the song and hear the same thing. (consider the various threads in the past about misunderstanding the lyrics to the Star Spangled Banner, for instance. I've seen some hilarious interpretations, although I can't think of any now.)

Going straight from an admittedly misheard "roasted chicken" to racism is really looking for a reason to be offended, IMO.

The super progressive arm of liberalism is just making up rules, willy-nilly, and expecting other people to abide by them, and the outrage when they don't gets more shrill by the day. But then, on the other hand, you have actual marching Nazis in the street and insurrectionists storming the capital. Things are broken on both ends, but at least this woman is trying to do the right thing, even if she's missing the mark by some distance.

edit: I remember the "blacks love fried chicken" thing from when I was young, and it was dark and nasty imagery, at the heart of racism. It was one of the most loaded and scornful images I can remember. (and stupid, because as you point out, almost everyone loves the stuff. I sure as hell do, and I've eaten far more than I could ever remember.) People overreacting to that image is to be expected if that gets pulled out again today... but this lady's pattern sensor went badly awry. She was just vaguely reminded of that extremely racist image, and went off sideways.

It's all Twitter drama, plus it happened long enough ago that I don't feel like looking for it. And even as absurd as this person was, I don't want to provide a link in the off chance that others find the post and decide to go after her.

But she appeared to be part of a very loud minority of people on Twitter who are increasingly difficult to tell apart from a skilled right-wing parody of progressives.

Things are broken on both ends, but at least this woman is trying to do the right thing, even if she's missing the mark by some distance.

To be completely honest, increasingly I do wonder if these people's heart are in the right place and they're just lost in hte sauce, or if they are using the aegis of social justice as a cover.

FWIW, I really like her; her way of thinking and how she constructs her arguments.
I was googling her the other day because I remembered she used to be part of the Nostalgia video channel, and I learned about this cancellation two days before she posted this video.

Warning, it gets into very deep, personal issues.

Random tangent, I was on FB today doing a livestream for work, and boy howdy, FB's moderation is worthless.

Two of the top 3 "Popular Live Videos" were not-pornographic-but-would-get-you-punted-off-Twitch kind of sh*t, and the third was literally a couple f*cking, except you couldn't see anything but their shoulders/faces, but they were DEFINITELY f*cking.

That's what was immediately shown to me, a man who only uses FB professionally these days.

Facebook gonna Facebook.

Further evidence that youtube is the worst:
I work at a call center remote from my apartment. I can get 4 calls in 15 minutes and no calls for 30 or 40 minutes. That is just the way it is. I've tried to stay away from non productive sites but the environment is totally locked down from a schedule standpoint. So I am stuck at my desk staring at the screen.

I gave in a few days ago and fired up youtube but I am not logged in as I am avoiding logging in to personal accounts on a work computer. How long do you think it took for my suggestions to be riddled with anti-woman, anti-liberal, pro fascist, and pro libertarian videos? It has been 2 days and it is only getting worse because as a guest, I can't tell youtube to not recommend these channels or to block or report them. Of course I can mark add to queue...

It is so disgusting. Yet facebook and twitter are much more high profile. I guess at least for now, there is no way to mass share videos so the misinformation spread is somewhat limited. Unfortunately I'd wager it is much more convincing than a couple sentence tweet.

My pet conspiracy theory on the matter is that they're happy to let it become/stay horrible on purpose so you're more likely to log in and create profiles they can track and monetize.

Conservative internet media just has an ecosystem that liberals, progressives, and leftists haven’t really been able to build. You have big names like Ben Shapiro, Stephen Crowder, Charlie Kirk, etc, who are given virtually unlimited funding by aging oligarchs to cheerlead for their interests, and their audiences feed hundreds of smaller and more radical independent creators through donations, superchats, and fundraising. It’s a meme among left-leaning creators on youtube that they are tempted to start creating conservative content because of all the free money people will throw at them.

A large part of it is how (to me) conservatives and liberals have a viewpoint on things.

Conservatives are glad to work with people they find distasteful so long as it advances some particular viewpoint they like. They tend, (to my viewpoint) to be much more focused on one or two particular points of policy, and don't really give a crap about others.

Liberals, OTOH, are much more likely to sacrifice good because it isn't perfect. They will happily tear down someone who does not 100% fit their ideal candidate, to the point of sabotaging any hope of any liberal policies being advanced.

Conservative media plays into that mindset perfectly. It will pull you in and then let you wander around until you find the figure(s) that matches your interests. Liberal media, OTOH, will tell you "if you do not agree 100% with what I say, get out, you are not a true liberal." (Note that I am not talking about CNN or MSNBC media, I am more talking about the liberal talking heads you will see on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc)

ruhk wrote:

Conservative internet media just has an ecosystem that liberals, progressives, and leftists haven’t really been able to build. You have big names like Ben Shapiro, Stephen Crowder, Charlie Kirk, etc, who are given virtually unlimited funding by aging oligarchs to cheerlead for their interests, and their audiences feed hundreds of smaller and more radical independent creators through donations, superchats, and fundraising. It’s a meme among left-leaning creators on youtube that they are tempted to start creating conservative content because of all the free money people will throw at them.

And that's a very, very good thing because the last thing the Democratic Party needs is to become a party that's driven entirely by what political commentators say.

There was a day when the GOP told Fox News what the conservative talking points of the day were and Fox eagerly complied. Now, however, the GOP is being led by those conservative commentators.

Those conservative commentators determine what Republican policy is or isn't. They determine who's adequately following the party line (which is their line) and who needs to be cast out. They are literal king makers whose blessings can turn an empty suit into viable national political figure overnight.

My pet theory is this is also why Republicans really can't really govern anymore and only seem to exist to oppose anything Democrats do. Conservative commentators know there are easy levers they can pull to motivate their followers: racism, immigration, big government, etc. And conservative politicians respond in predictable manners.

It's why there's bills now screaming against the 1619 Project being used in schools. Or why Republicans are doing performance security theater on the border. Or why they're losing their minds that Americans are getting an extra couple hundred bucks in UI benefits after they made sure a handful of rich people got $1.5 trillion or that the corporate tax rate might go back up to where it had been for decades.

On these handful of issues conservative politicians know how political commentators expect them to behave and they comply. On anything else it's a crapshoot. So why would a conservative politician risk developing policy on their own that Hannity might poo-poo (and that might get them kicked from their seat of power)?

It's why we've all been waiting 12 years for Republicans to release their better and cheaper version of Obamacare.

OG_slinger wrote:

And that's a very, very good thing because the last thing the Democratic Party needs is to become a party that's driven entirely by what political commentators say.

Eh, it would likely result in policies closer to the “will of the people” than the out of touch gerontocracy we currently have.

ruhk wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

And that's a very, very good thing because the last thing the Democratic Party needs is to become a party that's driven entirely by what political commentators say.

Eh, it would likely result in policies closer to the “will of the people” than the out of touch gerontocracy we currently have.

You say that like it's a good thing.

The current state of the GOP is entirely down to "will of the people....who have swallowed wholesale the lies of the bullsh*t-industrial complex that's set up to exchange those people's money and attention for fictional information."

Jonman wrote:
ruhk wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

And that's a very, very good thing because the last thing the Democratic Party needs is to become a party that's driven entirely by what political commentators say.

Eh, it would likely result in policies closer to the “will of the people” than the out of touch gerontocracy we currently have.

You say that like it's a good thing.

The current state of the GOP is entirely down to "will of the people....who have swallowed wholesale the lies of the bullsh*t-industrial complex that's set up to exchange those people's money and attention for fictional information."

…and that relationship is uniquely Republican because it was engineered to work that way and Republican policies require a certain amount of delusion to sell- unless you think oil billionaires and hedge fund managers would start paying people millions to advocate for policies that would raise their taxes, restrict their influence, and regulate their power?

ruhk wrote:
Jonman wrote:
ruhk wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

And that's a very, very good thing because the last thing the Democratic Party needs is to become a party that's driven entirely by what political commentators say.

Eh, it would likely result in policies closer to the “will of the people” than the out of touch gerontocracy we currently have.

You say that like it's a good thing.

The current state of the GOP is entirely down to "will of the people....who have swallowed wholesale the lies of the bullsh*t-industrial complex that's set up to exchange those people's money and attention for fictional information."

…and that relationship is uniquely Republican because it was engineered to work that way- unless you think oil billionaires and hedge fund managers would start paying people millions to advocate for policies that would raise their taxes, restrict their influence, and regulate their power?

You say that like there aren't heavily-monied interests on the left.

Not in the same way or at the same level, and those interests don’t mesh as well with the Democratic platform. We’ve never had anything on the level of something like the Koch Bros, people who have literally spent decades and billions of dollars helping create the current conservative ecosystem. This disparity is what drives the current state of politics, it’s not a result of it.

ruhk wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

And that's a very, very good thing because the last thing the Democratic Party needs is to become a party that's driven entirely by what political commentators say.

Eh, it would likely result in policies closer to the “will of the people” than the out of touch gerontocracy we currently have.

Doesn’t that assume that said commentators are less out of touch with us common folk?

Me: /watches some Breaking Bad clips.

YouTube: "Huh! Breaking Bad eh? So I assume that, despite literal years of you tuning your recommendations against this, you'd like to see a Jordan Peterson video linked to the subject?"

I wonder, on a fresh account, how many clicks from top-ranked recommendations it'd take for YouTube to take you from "Video game Let's Play" to "Jews will not replace us."

I'm guessing no more than 10.