[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.

This dovetails nicely into postmodernism and why so many people hate it. There’s almost a Baptists and bootleggers phenomenon with a lot of postmodern art, where the left hates it for being nakedly, unabashedly capitalist - in some cases selling anti capitalism for profit - and the right hates it because of course they do.

There’s a fun podcast by left leaning folks on it!

I've always loved an aspect all art shares in that it acts as a mirror which reflects pieces of the observer. A narrow point of view is reflected right back in their face in the guise of a urinal, and it's evoking feelings. It's doing its job.

All one has to say is that "this means something". That's how any Rorschach test is presented.

Surprised they like any music newer than Wagner.

Mixolyde wrote:

Surprised they like any music newer than Wagner.

There’s always Ace of Base!

Seth wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Surprised they like any music newer than Wagner.

There’s always Ace of Base!

Jesus Christ. I'm a firm believer that there needs to be a path back from hate groups / far-right bullsh*t, because otherwise there's no incentive for any of that crowd not to just keep doubling down.

But this isn't "oh, he made an off-color joke about identifying as an attack helicopter on Twitter years ago." And if there is to be a path back from as deep in the bullsh*t as that dude apparently got, it needs to involve more than, "yeah that was Past Me, Present Me doesn't like to talk about it."

Instagram and Facebook remove posts offering abortion pills

AP wrote:

Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them following a Supreme Court decision that stripped away constitutional protections for the procedure.

Such social media posts ostensibly aimed to help women living in states where preexisting laws banning abortion suddenly snapped into effect on Friday. That’s when the high court overruled Roe v. Wade, its 1973 decision that declared access to abortion a constitutional right.

Memes and status updates explaining how women could legally obtain abortion pills in the mail exploded across social platforms. Some even offered to mail the prescriptions to women living in states that now ban the procedure.

Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across the U.S. were searching for clarity around abortion access. General mentions of abortion pills, as well as posts mentioning specific versions such as mifepristone and misoprostol, suddenly spiked Friday morning across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and TV broadcasts, according to an analysis by the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.

By Sunday, Zignal had counted more than 250,000 such mentions.

The AP obtained a screenshot on Friday of one Instagram post from a woman who offered to purchase or forward abortion pills through the mail, minutes after the court ruled to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion.

“DM me if you want to order abortion pills, but want them sent to my address instead of yours,” the post on Instagram read.

Instagram took it down within moments. Vice Media first reported on Monday that Meta, the parent of both Facebook and Instagram, was taking down posts about abortion pills.

On Monday, an AP reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.”

The post was removed within one minute.

The Facebook account was immediately put on a “warning” status for the post, which Facebook said violated its standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.”

Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words “abortion pills” for “a gun,” the post remained untouched. A post with the same exact offer to mail “weed” was also left up and not considered a violation.

Marijuana is illegal under federal law and it is illegal to send it through the mail.

Abortion pills, however, can legally be obtained through the mail after an online consultation from prescribers who have undergone certification and training.

In an email, a Meta spokesperson pointed to company policies that prohibit the sale of certain items, including guns, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals. The company did not explain the apparent discrepancies in its enforcement of that policy.

Seth wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

Surprised they like any music newer than Wagner.

There’s always Ace of Base!

all that she wants, is an aryan state
j*ws gone tomorrow

Ekberg has expressed "regret" about his supposedly-past neo-Nazi days, but still tries to deny the songs on the Uffe Was a Nazi album actually belonged to Commit Suicide, though there's no other music out there attributable to Commit Suicide (note: there's a couple 2000s metal bands with the same name, who are obviously unrelated to the Ekberg project).

hbi2k wrote:

But this isn't "oh, he made an off-color joke about identifying as an attack helicopter on Twitter years ago." And if there is to be a path back from as deep in the bullsh*t as that dude apparently got, it needs to involve more than, "yeah that was Past Me, Present Me doesn't like to talk about it."

Yeah, when you've associated yourself with heinous stuff like that, any redemption story needs to involve actions, not simply words.

f*cking Facebook of course.

That's funny, but I think people would prefer if it never came up in a search.

Mods can kill it if they like. I got mocking that band out of my system.

@jpbrammer wrote:

Internet radicalization is scary to me. it produces extremist violence, yes, but also it seems many people think it only happens -way over there- in the dark pits of the web and not something that, albeit on a different scale, is also happening to themselves

I've been trying and failing for years to articulate social media's impact on language, and how that language produces a certain lens for reality. it's weird we don't understand at all this thing we're constantly using

hmm it all escapes me I guess. life changed a lot for me tho when I understood that twitter (for example) is shaped like an arena and spectacle and brutality were its bread and butter. not just for political factions I have disdain for, but for all of us. all frightening!

https://www.androidpolice.com/ad-com...

A Google-backed ad company called Glance is looking to launch in the US, and it brings media content, news, and casual games to Android lock screens.

The service has taken it upon itself to monetize the lock screen, pushing news and ad feeds right into people’s faces before they even unlock their phones. It's a subsidiary of Indian advertising behemoth InMobi, focusing on mobile-first ads.

BRILLIANT!
IMAGE(https://brutalhammer.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/brilliant.jpg)

Christian Fascist Propaganda Is All Over TikTok

Patrick Bateman, the lead character in American Psycho, walks toward you as a rapid montage of images depicting Medieval-era religious wars between Christians and Muslims flashes in the distance. Madonna’s 2005 chart-topping single “Hung Up” is playing. You see the words “Fight for Glory; Western Man.”

This isn’t a fever dream. It’s a TikTok video with 11,000 views and part of a growing online subculture that’s propping up surging Christian nationalist and Christo-fascist ideology in the United States and beyond.

Christian nationalists believe that their country’s policies and laws should reflect evangelical Christian values, and culture war issues like LGBTQ rights, “critical race theory,” or immigration, are regarded as signs of moral decay that imperil their nation’s future.

Christo-fascists take that one step further, and believe that they’re fighting primordial battles between West and East, good and evil, right and left, Christians and infidels. These two labels, however, sometimes overlap.

On TikTok, ideologues from both ends of the spectrum are weaving together a shared visual language using 4chan memes, Scripture, Orthodox and Catholic iconography, imagery of holy wars, and clips from movies or TV featuring toxic male characters. Many of the videos, on their face, are innocuous enough, but they exist in close proximity to disturbing, violent, or explicitly white nationalist content.

It’s no accident that this community is expanding on TikTok, of all places, according to Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University in Iowa who focuses on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “You build your audience with a young demographic, and then you spread your ideas that way. This is how you build the next generation of fascists,” he said.

The biggest TikTok account in this space was Caitliceach_r, who claims to be based in Ireland and racked up nearly 30,000 followers and over 2 million views since posting their first video last September. TikTok removed the account after VICE News reached out for comment, but another account posting the same content was activated soon after. TikTok says they’re aware that banned users often try to return by creating alternative accounts, and will sometimes take steps to ban a person's device entirely.

As disturbing as that is, Vice also likes to write stories about mountains that end up being molehills. To put in context, 30,000 views wouldn’t even make it to your fyp (“for you page,” TikTok’s version of a newsfeed) unless you’d already engaged with similar content.

LefTok is pretty good at getting these animals booted, as TikTok wields a ban hammer with such aggression it would make your racist uncle on Facebook sh*t his pants. In fact, TikTok’s ban hammer is actually a significant issue, as - true to form - TikTok fascists find a lot of success stifling content they dislike compared to creating their own.

Their lives were documented online from birth. Now, they’re coming of age

When Tripp Ellis was born on 18 December 2008, some of the first words he heard were: “Oh, he is long!”. A nurse in a Santa hat rubbed his purple body with a towel as his mother, Lora, stared at him adoringly. “Hey,” she greeted her newborn son, wiping a tear from her eye. I — along with 5.2 million others — know this because Tripp’s birth was uploaded to YouTube on Boxing Day that year and regular vlogs of the rest of his life followed.

On 31 December 2009, Tripp took his first steps as a camera videoed him from the sidelines. In December 2011, he went to Disney World for the first time and shouted “I’m happy!” from the carousel (later, he was apprehensive when meeting Buzz Lightyear, bowing his head and chewing his thumb). In November 2013, Tripp got his first fat lip after someone pushed him at school. In March 2019, he beat his entire family at mini golf, but he didn’t gloat.

Ten years before Tripp was born, in 1998, Paramount Pictures released The Truman Show, a dramedy in which Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man whose life has been filmed and broadcast from the moment of his birth. Hidden cameras documented Truman’s every move; millions watched from diners, sofas and even bathtubs. In 2005, director Peter Weir noted that it was once “a dangerous film to make” because “it couldn’t happen”, but as reality television burgeoned in the years after its release, the movie came to be considered remarkably prescient. “It” happened, to some degree, on shows like The Real World, Big Brother and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The real Trumans, however, would be found on YouTube, which launched in 2005.

There are now hundreds of children whose everyday existence has been broadcast fodder since birth. ‘Family vlogging’ took off when Idaho father Shay Butler began uploading videos of his children in 2008. This means the world’s oldest ‘Truman babies’ are now hitting their teens. Unlike Truman, these children haven’t been misled, the people around them aren’t actors; they’re aware they’re on YouTube and that the world they live in isn’t a film set. But still, thousands of strangers have observed their every move.

Well, if you've followed some of the news recently, you'll be quite surprised to find out that Elon Musk knows how to pull out.

Elon Musk’s tumultuous $44 billion bid to buy Twitter is on the verge of collapse — after the Tesla CEO sent a letter to Twitter’s board Friday saying he is terminating the acquisition.

The chair of Twitter’s board, Bret Taylor, tweeted Friday that the board is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

Twitter could have pushed for a $1 billion breakup fee Musk agreed to pay under these circumstances. Instead, it looks ready to fight over the deal, which the company’s board has approved and CEO Parag Agrawal has insisted he wants to consummate.

The possible unraveling of the deal is just the latest twist in a saga between the world’s richest man and one of the most influential social media platforms. Much of the drama has played out on Twitter, with Musk — who has more than 100 million followers — lamenting that the company was failing to live up to its potential as a platform for free speech.

On Friday, shares of Twitter fell 5% to $36.81, well below the $54.20 that Musk had offered to pay. Shares of Tesla, meanwhile, climbed 2.5% to $752.29.

Love that this stupidity now has Twitter suing musk to COMPLETE the deal.

I hope Twitter is just being savvy to get Musk to offer billions more to back out. Who wants Musk to own Twitter?

JLS wrote:

I hope Twitter is just being savvy to get Musk to offer billions more to back out. Who wants Musk to own Twitter?

The people who would receive their cut of the $44 Billion dollars.

I don’t really think that want him to buy twitter, but I definitely think they’re confident that they can negotiate for more than the $1 billion break-fee that’s in the contract he signed. He has clearly regretted starting this procedure since shortly after he signed the contract, they’re just trying to take advantage of the fact that he’s an idiot.

Prederick wrote:

Well, if you've followed some of the news recently, you'll be quite surprised to find out that Elon Musk knows how to pull out.

Does he though?

Couldn’t resist the dunk on the IRL Homelander I mean Iron Man.

jdzappa wrote:

Couldn’t resist the dunk on the IRL Homelander I mean Iron Man.

I'd laugh but Popular Mechanics literally called him real-life Tony Stark.

He's not Tony Stark. He's not Bruce Wayne. If anything, he's trying to be this guy:

IMAGE(https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.8196a8fc276c717fe595300c4be210ef?rik=a0wv7MCH9YofIw&pid=ImgRaw&r=0&PC=EMMX01)

Cory Doctorow wrote a short story a while ago about a group of tech-bro libertarians who build an over-engineered bunker out in the desert when society starts to collapse. They discover a neighboring town that’s thriving because everyone pulled together to rebuild, but end alienating themselves after trying to bully the town into giving them food & medicine because they basically only stocked MRE’s and the area their bunker is in is too rocky to grow anything. Then they all die horribly of disease because the bunker they designed empties their sewage just a little too close to their water reservoir.
Elon would be one of those guys.

Prederick wrote:
jdzappa wrote:

Couldn’t resist the dunk on the IRL Homelander I mean Iron Man.

I'd laugh but Popular Mechanics literally called him real-life Tony Stark.

The magazine owned by the Hearst (as in William Randolph) Corporation simps for a sh*tty oligarch?

Ya don't say.

JLS wrote:

Who wants Musk to own Twitter?

Republicans who think Elon will bring back Trump while banning all the liberals.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

He's not Tony Stark. He's not Bruce Wayne. If anything, he's trying to be this guy:

IMAGE(https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.8196a8fc276c717fe595300c4be210ef?rik=a0wv7MCH9YofIw&pid=ImgRaw&r=0&PC=EMMX01)

"Four stones, four tweets. ZERO STONES, ZERO TWEETS!"

Prederick wrote:

Well, if you've followed some of the news recently, you'll be quite surprised to find out that Elon Musk knows how to pull out.

I kept seeing that phrasing yesterday both as jokes and as headlines and I keep thinking to myself that we collectively as a society are all 12 years old.

I meant to post this before, but Garbage Day had another banger about Abe's death.

A Legacy Of Angry Men Online

I was working in Tokyo the day Trump was sworn in. I’ve often compared it to a scene from a science fiction movie where an astronaut sees nukes going off from the window of a space station. To feel that far away from the chaos back home was disorienting. I felt bizarre pangs of guilt for not being there as I sat in a leopard print-themed dive bar in the Golden Gai neighborhood of Shinjuku and watched the “American carnage” speech with a Japanese dub, intercut with Japanese reporters explaining why people were burning cars in the capital. And I spent that following week having conversations with Japanese reporters about what the Trump era might be like. It was all anyone there wanted to talk about with me.

Out to lunch a few days later, one reporter offered up that the Trump presidency would probably be a lot like the early days of Shinzo Abe’s term. Abe may, at this point, be best known internationally for his cutesy Mario entrance announcing the Tokyo Olympics, but he was a virulent ultranationalist who spent his time in office calling for historical revisionism about Japan’s war-time atrocities in Korea and China. The reporter I sat with at lunch painted a picture of a soon-to-be America overrun by anonymous online trolls that abused and harassed women, leftists, activists, and journalists. He also said that Abe had figured out a way to weaponize the infamous message board 2channel (which was what 4chan was modeled off of directly). The reporter said that the New York Times would probably buckle under Trump and be pushed further and further right politically as more reporters were bullied by Trump’s administration. And he said the same thing had happened with the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest papers. Most of the things I heard during that lunch, at least partially came true.

In fact, Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, a fantastic book that was recently adapted into an HBO show, wrote last week in a reflection on Abe’s legacy that he was “‘Trump before Trump’—except he pulled it off.” Adelstein, in 2016, also wrote an essential piece on Abe’s links to the secret Nippon Kaigi, or the “Japan Conference,” which I highly recommend reading, as well.

“Imagine if ‘future World President’ Donald Trump belonged to a right-wing evangelical group, let’s call it ‘USA Conference,’ that advocated a return to monarchy, the expulsion of immigrants, the revoking of equal rights for women, restrictions on freedom of speech—and most of his pre-selected political appointees were from the same group,” Adelstein wrote in 2016. Yes, “imagine” that.

It also appears that Abe, and the rest of his Liberal Democrat Party, had ties to the South Korea’s Unification Church, an anti-communist religious group often referred to as “moonies,” that practice mass weddings and are regularly accused of being a cult. Abe’s assassin told law enforcement he killed the former prime minister because of the debts his mother owed to the church. I suppose Americans don’t have to work too hard to picture what it would be like to find out your ultra-conservative leader had domestic ties to a creepy right-wing authoritarian think tank as well international ties to an equally creepy and financially predatory religious cult!

While I was in Tokyo during that trip, I reported a story about how the online Trump movement resembled the one Abe had successfully harnessed into a digital attack dog years before — even down to the army of angry young men you can recruit from anime message boards. One thing I learned while I was working on that piece was that in 2016 Japan’s national broadcaster NHK discovered that Abe had paid a firm to activate online trolls to go after his political enemies. Any critics of Abe’s party would be targeted by the firm, which seeded out abuse on platforms like Twitter and 2channel. A study from The Asia-Pacific Journal found linguistic evidence that the Liberal Democrat Party and the far-right users of 2channel have been working together to overwhelm Japanese trending topics on Twitter since as far back as 2009.

Abe was a fundamentally different kind of leader than Trump, but it’s interesting to now see Abe’s death filtered back through the digital hellscape he was so adept at wielding as a cudgel. In fact, what could be more fitting than Abe’s assassination to immediately become the center of a 4chan hoax.

Soon after photos began circulating of Abe’s shooter, users on 4chan photoshopped graphics that claimed the shooter was Hideo Kojima, best known as the creator of the Metal Gear Solid video game franchise. A narrative quickly spread that Kojima was a far-left extremist that had orchestrated the attack on Abe. One of these graphics was shared by Damien Rieu, a far-right politician from France. It’s likely Rieu shared it after seeing it posted by a French comedian. Or maybe the French far right just hang out 4chan and blindly share whatever they see there, which is also very possible. Rieu has since apologized, writing, “I naively took a joke for information. I didn't think we could joke about the assassination of a man, but I was wrong not to check before sharing.” But that hasn’t stopped the misinformation from spreading. Now, Kojima is threatening legal action.

Americans tend to have a certain pathological need to view every other countries’ politics through a lens of our own. We want everything to fit into a model that somehow connects to our political battles. It’s why American conservatives were quick to try and use Abe’s death as an example why gun control cannot work. (Which is ridiculous.) And when Americans can’t fit something into our own political context we get bored and dismissive. But the truth is Abe was both absolutely part of a political wave engulfing our own country, but in ways that were unique to his own country’s politics.

Abe did not come to power thanks to some Steve Bannon-esque Facebook populism — Japan has one of the lower Facebook user bases in the world and its internet landscape could not be more different to our own. Nor was he some reality show influencer fascist ranting about meme magic on weird podcasts. But he was one of the first politicians in the world to figure out an innovation that has changed the way democracies function, maybe forever. He found a way to harness the rage and chaos of an anonymous message board like 2channel and point it at his enemies. He figured out how to attract the angry young men in the corners of the internet and activate them to fight in an endless culture war that poisons everything it touches.

So how high will the settlement be?