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.
Chairman_Mao wrote:L. Ron Musk
Oo, I like that one!
Except Hubbard had charm. And knew he was scamming people.
Also had some surprisingly correct criticisms of the practice of psychology/psychiatry of his day. You can make the case that, second perhaps only to leaded gasoline fumes, BF Skinner’s appalling advice on how to raise children are why boomers are so f*cked up.
Do cops demand to see our hands to make sure we aren't AI's?
Do cops demand to see our hands to make sure we aren't AI's?
If they suspect we're AI, they'll probably just shoot us. If we're a machine someone can rebuild or reprogram us, and if not, oh well, honest mistake.
"RIP Twitter" is currently trending because Musk's fanboys can't stand he hired a woman from the mainstream media to take over as CEO. 
"RIP Twitter" is currently trending because Musk's fanboys can't stand he hired a woman from the mainstream media to take over as CEO. :lol:
And that she is currently one of the chairs of the World Economic Forum.
Twitter’s new CEO is NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino. She follows all of the worst people on the site. So I don’t expect any of the platform’s politics to change. Also, it’s not totally clear exactly what she’ll be doing, seeing as how Musk has said that he’ll still be “overseeing product, software, and sysops.”
Unfortunately for Musk, he’s spent the last two years building a stan army of right-wing weirdos and they did some digging into Yaccarino and they did not like what they discovered. You see, Yaccarino was a chairman for the World Economic Forum and the WEF is part of the illuminati. So they’ve branded her a globalist, are threatening to cancel their Twitter Blue subscriptions, and Catturd said she’s spreading the woke mind virus.
Welp, that seems like a big mess. I wish her the best! I hope that she does something about all the animal torture videos before she’s doxxed and inevitably quits.
A TikTok ‘investigator’ faces fallout after claiming to crack a serial killer case
Since early March, Ken Waks, a TikTok creator with 1 million followers, had been pursuing an investigation into a potential serial killer working in various cities in the U.S. The Chicago-based marketer has claimed that someone — or even a group of people — has been targeting men walking home from a bar or club at night and dumping them in rivers across the country.
However, Waks soon became an object of scrutiny himself, with other TikTok users now referring to his case as a “Kentroversy.”
Like many true crime sensations, his series garnered a lot of support and millions of views. But many viewers started to get suspicious when in late April Waks posted videos claiming that a private investigator had showed up to his house and recruited him into a team looking into the “Smiley Face Killers.”
The Smiley Face Killer case is a true crime theory alleging one or more killers murdered and dumped dozens of men into rivers; the investigation on this case was spearheaded by former New York Police Department detective Kevin Gannon. (A “Smiley Face Killers” docuseries was released on Oxygen, which is owned by NBC Universal.)
“The stories just started to get so big that I had to pause,” Meredith Lynch, a pop culture TikToker with 227,000 followers said of Waks' videos.
Lynch and others online then began expressing public skepticism toward Waks after they noticed he mentioned Foresyte, a social calendar startup where he worked as chief marketing officer, in two videos about his amateur detective pursuits. Critics called his motivations into question, sparking a debate on creator ethics.
Enthusiasts online have argued that true crime content can draw attention to unreported cases and help investigators. However, critics of so-called TikTok sleuthing have grown weary of the genre because they argue creators may inhibit investigations, exacerbate families’ pain and capitalize on other people’s traumas.
Waks told NBC News in an email statement that he started his series because he wanted to raise awareness about a potential public safety issue in Chicago. He said he was approached on two occasions by an individual trying to lure him into a car while he was walking home from a bar. NBC News reviewed the police report Waks filed regarding the incidents.
“I quickly learned that this was happening to many others in the Chicago area and beyond,” he said. “I began diligently collecting information and sharing it online, as well as with law enforcement, private investigators and other authorities in an attempt to bring awareness to these crimes.”
NBC News reviewed emails sent by a spokesperson for Waks that appear to show communication between him, private detective Jordan Scherer and Gannon discussing his research.
The streaming wars are over, and it’s time for media to figure out what’s next
I’m calling it. The Streaming Wars are over. 2019-2023. RIP.
The race between the biggest media and entertainment companies to add streaming subscribers, knowing consumers will only pay for a limited number of them, is finished. Sure, the participants are still running. They’re just not trying to win anymore.
Disney announced its flagship streaming service, Disney+, lost 4 million subscribers during the first three months of the year, dropping the company’s total streaming subscribers to 157.8 million from 161.8 million. Disney lost 4.6 million customers for its streaming service in India, Disney+ Hotstar. In the U.S. and Canada, Disney+ lost 600,000 subscribers.
It’s become clear the biggest media and entertainment companies are operating in a world where significant streaming subscriber growth simply isn’t there anymore – and they’re content not to chase it hard. Netflix
added 1.75 million subscribers in its first quarter, pushing its global total to 232.5 million. Warner Bros. Discovery added 1.6 million to land at 97.6 million.The current big media narrative is all about getting streaming to profitability. Warner Bros. Discovery announced last week its U.S. direct-to-consumer business turned a profit of $50 million in the quarter and will remain profitable this year. Netflix’s streaming business turned profitable during the pandemic. Disney on Wednesday announced streaming losses narrowed to $659 million from $887 million.
Netflix has curbed its content spending growth, and Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney have both announced thousands of job eliminations and billions of dollars in content spending cuts in recent months. Disney will “produce lower volumes of content” moving forward, Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy said during Wednesday’s earnings conference call, though Chief Executive Bob Iger noted he didn’t think it would have an impact on global subscriber growth.
There’s still some growth among the smaller players. NBCUniversal’s Peacock gained 2 million subscribers last quarter, giving it 22 million subscribers. Paramount Global added 4.1 million subscribers in the quarter, putting it at 60 million subscribers.
But the key question isn’t looking at the growth numbers as much as it’s about the investor reaction to the growth numbers. Paramount Global fell 28% in a day last week after the company announced it was cutting its dividend from 25 cents a share to 5 cents a share to save cash.
Disney+ Hotstar subscribers brought in a paltry 59 cents per month of revenue last quarter, down from 74 cents last quarter. It appears Disney is OK with losing these low-paying customers. Disney gave up its Indian Premier League cricket streaming rights last year. Those rights were acquired for $2.6 billion by Viacom18, of which Paramount Global owns a minority stake.
Disney also announced it’s raising the price of its ad-free Disney+ service later this year. Disney’s average revenue per user for U.S. and Canadian subscribers rose 20% in the most recent quarter after yet another price increase was announced last year. Big price hikes typically aren’t the strategy executives use if the priority is adding subscribers.
What’s next?
Raising prices and cutting costs isn’t a great growth strategy. Streaming was a growth strategy. Maybe it will come back a bit with cheaper advertising tiers and Netflix’s impending password sharing crackdown.
But it’s highly unlikely growth will ever return to the levels seen during the pandemic and the early years of mass streaming.
That probably means the media and entertainment industry will need a new growth story soon.
The most obvious candidate is gaming. Netflix has started a fledgling video game service. Comcast considered buying EA last year, as first reported by Puck. Microsoft’s deal for Activision is now in jeopardy after UK regulators blocked the transaction. If that acquisition fails, Activision could immediately be a target for legacy media companies as they look for a more exciting story to tell investors.
While Disney shut down its metaverse division as part of its recent cost cuts, marrying its intellectual property with gaming seems like an obvious match. One can easily envision the growth potential of Disney buying something like Epic Games, which owns Fortnite, and building its version of an interactive universe through gaming.
More consolidation will happen – eventually – among legacy media companies. But one major gaming acquisition could start a run in the industry.
Perhaps The Gaming Wars is the next chapter.
Quick note - The reason why Disney+ list 4 million subscribers? They lost the broadcast rights to cricket.
That's like 2% right? Maybe companies should stop setting unlimited growth year to year as the goal.
Maybe companies should stop setting unlimited growth year to year as the goal.
(We live in hell.)
I can't with this asshole anymore.
Twitter promoting animal cruelty videos in search
When NBC reached out for comment, poop emoji. And then autocomplete search was turned off completely.
As usual the supposed genius doesn't know how to fix anything so just shuts it down instead.
Best description of Twitter ever:
I've always thought of Twitter as a house party that I could visit or leave at my leisure. Different things were happening in different rooms, some of them for me and some of them very much not. Over time I learned how to find the scenes and conversations I liked, and came to recognize the people I saw in those rooms as friends. (The owners were of course not around.) This is a fine thing for a website to be, I think.
But if you are the sort of person who goes to parties aiming to win, or just spend your time there haranguing other partygoers to buy the supplements stacked in your garage or agree with your awful political opinions or just interrupt other people's conversations by saying "whatever!" or "sounds woke!"—in that case, you would not have fun there. Some of those people would leave. Others, because they are more ambitious or angrier or lonelier or some combination of the three, would stay while growing ever more upset about how they were being treated. They would also tend to avoid the other people who seem to be feeling the same way, due to not wanting to associate with less-successful types. They might forget that they could leave; things might get dark.
They might think, while circulating and periodically lobbing hate speech into rooms full of people they've come to regard as enemies, that it could be funny, or anyway not entirely undeserved, to just burn the house down with everyone inside it. The more those people navigated that rapidly emptying space—other people were leaving, things suddenly felt edgy and crowded and late—the less sure they would become that they were joking. Maybe they really did want to burn it down, on principle or just out of spite. But you'd need a lot of money to do that.
Full article: https://defector.com/burning-down-th...
Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block
A spate of child safety rules might make going online in a few years very different, and not just for kids. In 2022 and 2023, numerous states and countries are exploring age verification requirements for the internet, either as an implicit demand or a formal rule. The laws are positioned as a way to protect children on a dangerous internet. But the price of that protection might be high: nothing less than the privacy of, well, everyone.
Government agencies, private companies, and academic researchers have spent years seeking a way to solve the thorny question of how to check internet users’ ages without the risk of revealing intimate information about their online lives. But after all that time, privacy and civil liberties advocates still aren’t convinced the government is ready for the challenge.
But after all that time, privacy and civil liberties advocates still aren’t convinced the government is ready for the challenge.
It would be more appropriate to say that they are convinced that the government isn't.
Cheesier, Saucier, and Drowning in Caviar: How TikTok took over the menu.
The most important social-media food genre of the past decade is photos of avocado toast, bright and colorful and clean. But innovation is relentless, and the high-contrast gaze has been pushed off the timeline by videos like the 35-second review of the Odeon that was posted in the fall by the VIP List, an influencer account (with 480,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram) run by Audrey Jongens and Maeghan Radice. The duo offer scathing takedowns of restaurants they deem to have “peasant” vibes: “This is arguably the most iconic restaurant in New York, and it’s giving nothing but mid!” the voice-over declares as a disembodied hand stretches a layer of molten Gruyère on a tureen of French onion soup. “The kale Caesar was giving low-budget … and the lobster rolls were serving major tuna-salad energy.”
Ban TikTok. Immediately. I'll vote for Nick Fuentes, just ban it.
/s
//sort of
influencer noun
in·flu·enc·er ˈin-ˌflü-ən(t)-sər
plural influencers
: one who exerts influence : a person who inspires or guides the actions of others
often, specifically : a person that resembles a biological parasite in living off of, being dependent on, or exploiting another, who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media.
Synonyms
parasite bloodsucker free rider freeloader hanger-on leech moocher sponge sponger
influencer noun
in·flu·enc·er ˈin-ˌflü-ən(t)-sər
plural influencers
: one who exerts influence : a person who inspires or guides the actions of others
often, specifically : a person that resembles a biological parasite in living off of, being dependent on, or exploiting another, who is able to generate interest in something (such as a consumer product) by posting about it on social media.
Synonyms
parasite bloodsucker free rider freeloader hanger-on leech moocher sponge sponger
LOL @ Elon interviewing DeSantis on Twitter tomorrow and DailyWire announcing that all of its shows will now be streaming on Twitter.
It was an ideological op from the jump. Always was.
URL on Hundreds of Thousands of Maryland License Plates Redirects to an Online Filipino Casino
Hundreds of thousands of Maryland vehicles are unknowingly a mobile advertisement for a Filipino casino after a license plate URL recently began redirecting to the gambling hall.
Vice reports that in 2012, Maryland released a new license plate to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. That license plate was apparently the default license plate for Maryland cars between 2012 and 2016, and featured a URL at the bottom to www.starspangled200.org. Sometime last year, however, that URL began to redirect to globeinternational.info—the homepage of a Filipino online casino. There, a scantily-clad woman advertises “Phillippines Best Betting Site.”
/cackling
[url=https://gizmodo.com/online-casino-ma... on Hundreds of Thousands of Maryland License Plates Redirects to an Online Filipino Casino
/cackling
"Strong deeds, gentle words" indeed
YouTube stops deleting false 2020 election claims
YouTube will stop removing videos with false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, the social media platform announced on Friday.
The move, ahead of the 2024 elections, is a reversal of its policy put in place after the 2020 vote.
The company said it has deleted tens of thousands of videos questioning the integrity of past elections, but now "it was time to re-evaluate".
The policy goes into effect from 2 June.
YouTube and other social media platforms have faced intense pressure since the 2016 elections to safeguard against political misinformation.
The Google-owned platform says the new policy is being put into place because of today's changed landscape.
"In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm," the company said in a statement.
YouTube said it would continue to tweak its policies in advance of the 2024 election, but did not provide specifics about what led to the policy change. The BBC has contacted the company for comment.
The company added that it will continue to enforce other election misinformation policies - for instance, videos that include misleading instructions on where or how to vote.
Republicans lie so much, companies are just giving up. Great
It was an ideological op from the jump. Always was.
So, no way to totally confirm this, but you may have recently heard about some more high-profile resignations over at Twitter recently.
Again, there is not hard proof of this. But there is some circumstantial evidence that Musk wanted basically to send The Daily Wire's new "What Is A Woman" doc by Matt Walsh to everyone on Twitter, iPod/U2-style, and that those people were canned for not doing it.
Mind you, it's the left engaged in a grand conspiracy.
YouTube said it would continue to tweak its policies in advance of the 2024 election, but did not provide specifics about what led to the policy change.
They're a major corporation, so there's only one answer.
Specifics = $$$$$.
Now, while BlueSky or whatever the new Twitter alternative is may not be run by King Dipsh*t, let us not act like Jack Dorsey is all that much smarter and better, given that he is currently endorsing well-known sane person Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for President.
Anyway, AR headsets are back.
Apple has announced an augmented reality headset called Apple Vision Pro that “seamlessly” blends the real and digital world. “It’s the first Apple product you look through, and not at,” CEO Tim Cook said of the device, which looks like a pair of ski goggles. As rumored, it features a separate battery pack and is controlled with eyes, hands, and voice.
Vision Pro is positioned as primarily an AR device, but it can switch between augmented and full virtual reality using a dial. The device is controller-free, and you browse rows of app icons by looking at them. You can tap to select and flick to scroll, and you can also give voice commands. On top of that, the headset supports Bluetooth accessories and lets you connect your Mac to use inside the headset. Downward-facing cameras can capture your hands even if they’re resting low on your body.
The headset has a glass front and an aluminum frame, containing five sensors, 12 cameras, the display, and a computer that’s apparently cooled with a fan. The headset mask and strap are cloth-lined and modular, and Apple says they can flex to fit to a variety of face shapes and head sizes. The headband is ribbed and fits around the back of your head, and you can swap different sizes and styles of band. Zeiss has created custom optical inserts that magnetically attach to the lenses for people who wear glasses. It has an external battery that lasts up to two hours and can connect via a “supple woven cable” so it slips into a pocket. Apple promises that the display will be unprecedentedly sharp and can deliver 4K video.
Also, Blaseball is over.
Elon: "CSA is my top priority."
Twitter failed to prevent dozens of known images of child sexual abuse from being posted on its platform in recent months, according to Stanford University researchers who said the situation indicated a lapse in basic enforcement.
The researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who were investigating child-safety issues across several platforms, said they told Twitter staff about their findings, and that the problem appeared to have been resolved in May.
The researchers said Twitter told them last week it had improved some aspects of its detection system, and asked the researchers to alert the company if they ever notice a spike in such cases in the future.
Twitter didn’t comment in response to an email from The Wall Street Journal about the researchers’ report.
In just over two months, from March 12 to May 20, the researchers’ system detected more than 40 images posted to Twitter that were previously flagged as child sexual abuse material, based on a data set of roughly 100,000 tweets, said David Thiel, chief technologist of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a co-author of the report.
The appearance of the images on Twitter was striking because they had been previously flagged as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, and were part of databases companies can use to screen content posted to their platforms, the researchers said. “This is one of the most basic things you can do to prevent CSAM online, and it did not seem to be working,” Thiel said.
The challenge of blocking child sexual abuse material has long been a problem for many internet platforms, not just Twitter. After acquiring Twitter in late October, Elon Musk placed an emphasis on the issue, vowing in tweets that removing such material from Twitter is “priority #1” and “will forever be our top priority.”
Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.
I really, genuinely cannot underline how much of an obvious, politically-motived op this entire thing has been. It's everything they accuse their Soros/Marxist boogeyman of doing.
Pages