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.
Wasn’t sure where to post this since I’m not sure it belongs in the transgender thread. There’s an online campaign to make super straight a new gender/sexual preference. And it’s a total garbage dump fire. Supposedly, it’s pushback against transgender activists saying that if a man isn’t sexually attracted to a transgender woman then he’s transphobic. I don’t think that’s an actual stance most transgender women believe in, but at any rate the real reason is to sow discord and sneak in a not so subtle reference to the SS.
Obviously absurd, but if superstraight were a thing, you would also need supergay, and that amuses me immensely. 
Obviously absurd, but if superstraight were a thing, you would also need supergay, and that amuses me immensely. :)
Don't worry, there are plenty of gays and lesbians who also hate trans people. Gay men who won't date trans men, and lesbians who won't date trans women. I doubt they'll take up some kind of "supergay" mantle, but transphobes can sadly find support among queer people.
This is almost certainly a 4chan op.
One day, the day will come when trans people are treated like people. I hope it's soon. I just don't understand all the hatred. It doesn't make any goddamn sense. And again, to paraphrase Jon Stewart "if it's exhausting for you, just imagine what it must be like for people who have to deal with it every day."
Oh and "super straight" is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb ideas.
Chumpy_McChump wrote:Obviously absurd, but if superstraight were a thing, you would also need supergay, and that amuses me immensely. :)
Don't worry, there are plenty of gays and lesbians who also hate trans people. Gay men who won't date trans men, and lesbians who won't date trans women. I doubt they'll take up some kind of "supergay" mantle, but transphobes can sadly find support among queer people.
Sorry; re-reading, I should clarify. The term “supergay” amuses me. I didn’t mean that there should be a homosexual analogue to the “superstraight” ridiculousness, and I apologize if it came across that way.
This is almost certainly a 4chan op.
Sort of. It was started by a viral video on tiktok and then picked up by the chans, where a lot of the nazi imagery was added.
EDIT: lol. I guess the article says that too. I should have read it first.
One day, the day will come when trans people are treated like people. I hope it's soon. I just don't understand all the hatred. It doesn't make any goddamn sense. And again, to paraphrase Jon Stewart "if it's exhausting for you, just imagine what it must be like for people who have to deal with it every day."
Oh and "super straight" is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of dumb ideas.
It’s obvious they are going for the initials SS hence the dumb moniker.
I wanted to discuss though the idea that not wanting to seriously date a trans person is bigoted. Obviously saying trans people can’t be physically attractive is wrong but I mean your sexual preference seems hard wired. I don’t like this idea that what turns you on is bigoted, with exceptions of course. And I’m saying that for all orientations.
(edit) The message I'm picking up is that it's the question of whether bigotry is about establishing an individual code of conduct vs. the societal struggle to equalize power. I think I saw a line somewhere about how if something *feels* empowering, that's you finding a choice you can live with among the options society limits all of us to, while power *itself* is a positive change in the options society presents to us in the first place.
No one's sexual preferences are free of bigoted influences. It's the water we all swim in. On the other hand, it's neoliberalism perniciously exported to human sexuality to assign too much importance to your individual tastes and needs.
I'd say the question is less whether you as an individual measure up to some eternal moral code, and more about the choices you make in balancing your role as part of a group that has an impact on the world against the resources you can spare while still making it through the day.
(edit) which, yeah, is basically true of everything, from where you shop to where you live. What makes it complicated is how much more personal and private and intimate our sexual lives are to us vs. the other dimensions of our lives, yet how we as a society talk about sexuality has, well, a society-wide impact.
Sorry; re-reading, I should clarify. The term “supergay” amuses me. I didn’t mean that there should be a homosexual analogue to the “superstraight” ridiculousness, and I apologize if it came across that way.
I didn't think you were, and I didn't mean to come across as accusing you of that. I was using your comment as a jumping off point to (bitterly) acknowledge that there's plenty of transphobia even among other members of the broad LGBT community. I can easily see some queer people taking up the same arguments as this "super straight" bullshit.
But I wasn't trying to say you specifically said or did anything wrong, and I'm sorry it read that way!
I wanted to discuss though the idea that not wanting to seriously date a trans person is bigoted. Obviously saying trans people can’t be physically attractive is wrong but I mean your sexual preference seems hard wired.
It's a really complicated topic for a lot of reasons.
Part of it is historical: there's a lineage of stories about trans people "tricking" others into being attracted to them. It's one of the most damaging and pernicious myths about trans people that they're all about seducing people (usually men but sometimes women) away from their "real" sexual orientation into something that's somehow wrong or inappropriate. Inherent in this narrative is a rejection of a trans person's gender as their actual gender—a man attracted to a trans woman is presented as being tricked into being gay, i.e., being attracted to another man, thereby implicitly rejecting a trans woman's identity as a woman—as well as an implication that being sexually attracted to or involved with a trans person is abnormal.
The other part of it is that blanketly saying "I don't date trans people" essentially narrows your sexual orientation and attraction down to what's between a person's legs and how that combines with their presentation of gender. Let's say you're attracted to big dudes with big beards and big muscles. You meet a big bear dude that you really wanna get down with, but when you get undressed you discover that he has a vagina. If at that point you reject this guy who you were otherwise wildly attracted to until he took his underwear off, that's transphobia. Clearly, the issue isn't attraction (because you wanted to f*ck him) but body parts and how they adhere to your expectation of gender.
Wait a minute, you might say, it's not that I have a problem with this dude's vagina, I just only attracted to c*cks. You're not transphobic; you're just c*cksexual or something. But if that's the case, are you ready to jump a trans woman's bones if she looks nothing at all like the beardy dude you were lusting after, but she's got a penis when she gets undressed? It's possible, but in my experience this kind of "attracted to the organ, not the gender" thing is extremely rare.
Beyond that, what about someone who has had bottom surgery? Is a trans woman who has a vagina okay to sleep with but one without isn't? If you get jiggy with a woman who has a vagina and then later discover that she's trans, does your feeling about her change? That's where preferences turns into transphobia.
No one is saying that your sexual preferences need to include all kinds of people (although there's a related topic about how much social constructs around body types, gender presentations, and race dramatically affect people's attractions that they would say are hard-wired) but if you're attracted to a person physically or romantically right up until the moment you find out that they're trans, then there's some transphobia at play.
As point of curiosity, and I pre-pologize if it comes out weird:
At what point does preference become phobia? (I recognize that nobody is suggesting one can’t have preferences.) If I don’t want to date short women, I don’t think that makes me short-phobic. If I don’t want to date people that like olives, I don’t think that makes me... a term that I don’t actually think exists but means olive-phobic. If I don’t want to date people that stuff their bras or shorts, I don’t think that makes me something-phobic. If I don’t want to date people with penises, does that me transphobic, anymore than not wanting to date men makes me homophobic?
I’m not trying to be dismissive, I’m asking from a place of pure curiosity. (I have no horse in this race, nor do I have an agenda to spread.)
Clocky, I know that it 1,000,000% none of my business or the rest of the Internet's, but I have always been curious what your relationship with your was spouse was like before and after telling them and that whole process. On one hand, you'd think it would be strange or uncomfortable, but maybe they knew all along and didn't care.
Feel free to ignore this.
Also, it may be time to change your tag to Real Gamer Girl.
Chumpy_McChump wrote:Sorry; re-reading, I should clarify. The term “supergay” amuses me. I didn’t mean that there should be a homosexual analogue to the “superstraight” ridiculousness, and I apologize if it came across that way.
I didn't think you were, and I didn't mean to come across as accusing you of that. I was using your comment as a jumping off point to (bitterly) acknowledge that there's plenty of transphobia even among other members of the broad LGBT community. I can easily see some queer people taking up the same arguments as this "super straight" bullshit.
But I wasn't trying to say you specifically said or did anything wrong, and I'm sorry it read that way!
jdzappa wrote:I wanted to discuss though the idea that not wanting to seriously date a trans person is bigoted. Obviously saying trans people can’t be physically attractive is wrong but I mean your sexual preference seems hard wired.
It's a really complicated topic for a lot of reasons.
Part of it is historical: there's a lineage of stories about trans people "tricking" others into being attracted to them. It's one of the most damaging and pernicious myths about trans people that they're all about seducing people (usually men but sometimes women) away from their "real" sexual orientation into something that's somehow wrong or inappropriate. Inherent in this narrative is a rejection of a trans person's gender as their actual gender—a man attracted to a trans woman is presented as being tricked into being gay, i.e., being attracted to another man, thereby implicitly rejecting a trans woman's identity as a woman—as well as an implication that being sexually attracted to or involved with a trans person is abnormal.
The other part of it is that blanketly saying "I don't date trans people" essentially narrows your sexual orientation and attraction down to what's between a person's legs and how that combines with their presentation of gender. Let's say you're attracted to big dudes with big beards and big muscles. You meet a big bear dude that you really wanna get down with, but when you get undressed you discover that he has a vagina. If at that point you reject this guy who you were otherwise wildly attracted to until he took his underwear off, that's transphobia. Clearly, the issue isn't attraction (because you wanted to f*ck him) but body parts and how they adhere to your expectation of gender.
Wait a minute, you might say, it's not that I have a problem with this dude's vagina, I just only attracted to c*cks. You're not transphobic; you're just c*cksexual or something. But if that's the case, are you ready to jump a trans woman's bones if she looks nothing at all like the beardy dude you were lusting after, but she's got a penis when she gets undressed? It's possible, but in my experience this kind of "attracted to the organ, not the gender" thing is extremely rare.
Beyond that, what about someone who has had bottom surgery? Is a trans woman who has a vagina okay to sleep with but one without isn't? If you get jiggy with a woman who has a vagina and then later discover that she's trans, does your feeling about her change? That's where preferences turns into transphobia.
No one is saying that your sexual preferences need to include all kinds of people (although there's a related topic about how much social constructs around body types, gender presentations, and race dramatically affect people's attractions that they would say are hard-wired) but if you're attracted to a person physically or romantically right up until the moment you find out that they're trans, then there's some transphobia at play.
I see where you're coming from Clocky and fully agree that we need to get away from stereotypes about who can be attractive.
How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation
By the time thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol in January, organized in part on Facebook and fueled by the lies about a stolen election that had fanned out across the platform, it was clear from my conversations that the Responsible AI team had failed to make headway against misinformation and hate speech because it had never made those problems its main focus. More important, I realized, if it tried to, it would be set up for failure.The reason is simple. Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth. Quiñonero’s AI expertise supercharged that growth. His team got pigeonholed into targeting AI bias, as I learned in my reporting, because preventing such bias helps the company avoid proposed regulation that might, if passed, hamper that growth. Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth.
In other words, the Responsible AI team’s work—whatever its merits on the specific problem of tackling AI bias—is essentially irrelevant to fixing the bigger problems of misinformation, extremism, and political polarization. And it’s all of us who pay the price.
“When you’re in the business of maximizing engagement, you’re not interested in truth. You’re not interested in harm, divisiveness, conspiracy. In fact, those are your friends,” says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who collaborates with Facebook to understand image- and video-based misinformation on the platform.
Zuckerberg himself is hard right-wing, almost for sure. Any edict that comes from upper management will support the alt-right, and will usually lean heavily against leftists.
This only changed briefly during an actual insurrection, and as soon as they thought they could legally get away with it, they were back in the misinformation business.
I don't know if he fits into that box specifically, but from what I've read he definitely considers himself a "hyper-logical" dude, which almost always ends in crap.
He's squarely libertarian. His attitude reeks of "shoot them all and let god sort them out."
How else can you frame "we don't want to be the arbiter of truth"?
As I recall it, Facebook's policies often end up muzzling the left. Anytime an idea from middle management would muzzle the right, Zuckerberg overrules them.
As I recall it, Facebook's policies often end up muzzling the left. Anytime an idea from middle management would muzzle the right, Zuckerberg overrules them.
Yeah, this is quantifiably accurate. Personally I think it stems from Zuck’s poisonous “both sides” philosophy which is informed by a disgusting Overton window in that “we should genocide” and “we should have healthcare for everyone” are viewed as opposing forces.
Before I left the boomer wasteland of fb, I was pretty deep into Marxist-Leninist leftbook. NONE of them were advocating violent revolution. (Gatekeepers can have a discussion about whether you can be a ML without advocating armed overthrow of the bourgeoisie in another thread). The point is that there is absolutely no comparison between right-violence and left-violence on social media.
Facebook must tackle 'Spanish-language disinformation crisis', lawmakers say
Members of Congress and activist groups have called on Facebook to address its “Spanish-language disinformation crisis”, urging the company to make major policy changes on the platforms it owns.In a new campaign launched on Tuesday, the Democratic representative Tony Cardenas of California and groups including Free Press Action, the Center for American Progress and the National Hispanic Media Coalition charge that Facebook is not doing enough to combat “rampant Spanish-language disinformation” circulating on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram that is putting Latino communities at risk.
“[Facebook has] allowed their platform to be used to amplify hate and disinformation about and at our community,” said Jessica J González, co-CEO of the media reform advocacy group Free Press at the launch of the #YaBastaFacebook campaign. “It shows a complete disregard and complete disrespect for the Latino community.”
The calls come amid growing warnings from advocacy groups that Facebook removes Spanish-language misinformation less consistently on its platforms than it does misinformation in English.
Facebook in past years has introduced several policies to address misinformation, hate speech, and violent organizing including militias on its platforms. But researchers previously told the Guardian that the company does not appear to enforce those policies equally when it comes to misinformation in Spanish.
While 70% of misinformation in English on Facebook ends up flagged with warning labels, just 30% of comparable misinformation in Spanish is flagged, according to a study from the human rights non-profit Avaaz.
Misinformation in Spanish covers a variety of topics, but most common are posts about vaccine misinformation and political misinformation. Cardenas, the congressman from California, said on Tuesday that he had seen the impact of Spanish-language misinformation in his own family, fielding questions from his 70-year-old mother-in-law, who primarily speaks Spanish, about whether the Covid-19 vaccine would implant a microchip inside her. She told him she got the information online.
“It is a perfect example of how vulnerable this community can be,” he said. “I have found in my own district, my community, we are seeing that it is affecting willingness to get a vaccine. Facebook cannot ignore a community of 60 million people in America.”
Okay, so I know people grossly overuse "this is like Black Mirror!" to describe basically any bad thing in our modern world.
However.
This is, uh... not-NOT like that.
A rash of new start-ups are making it easier for digital creators to monetize every aspect of their life — down to what they eat, who they hang out with and who they respond to on TikTok.Tens of millions of people around the globe consider themselves creators, and the creator economy represents the “fastest-growing type of small business,” according to a 2020 report by the venture capital firm SignalFire.
But as the market gets more and more competitive — and the platforms and their algorithms remain unreliable — creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams.
One comes in the form of NewNew, a start-up in Los Angeles, that describes its product as creating a “human stock market.” On the app, fans pay to vote in polls to control some of a creator’s day-to-day decisions.
For example, a creator can use NewNew to post a poll asking which sweater they should wear today, or who they should hang out with and where they should go. Fans purchase voting power on NewNew’s platform to participate in the polls, and with enough voting power, they get to watch their favorite influencer live out their wishes, like a real life choose-your-own-adventure game.
“Creators are burning out, but their fans want more and more,” said Jen Lee, 25, the founder of a popular creator economy community on Discord. “By monetizing each aspect of their life, they can extract value from everyday interactions.”
Courtne Smith, the founder and chief executive of NewNew, said the company was “similar to the stock market” in that “you can buy shares, which are essentially votes, to be able to control a certain level of a person’s life.”
“We’re building an economy of attention where you purchase moments in other people’s lives, and we take it a step further by allowing and enabling people to control those moments,” she said.
The platform began beta testing with a select group over the last week, and several TikTok and YouTube stars have already begun earning money.
“Have you ever wanted to control my life?” Lev Cameron, 15, a TikToker with 3.3 million followers, asked in a recent video posted to NewNew. “Now is your time. You can actually control things I do throughout the day and vote on it and then I will show you if I end up doing the stuff you voted for.”
He proceeded to ask his fans what game he should play with friends: dodgeball or catch. In the background of the video his friends shouted “catch!”
Alas, 78 percent of fans voted dodgeball. (Mr. Cameron said he didn’t really want to play dodgeball because it could damage a fence in the yard, but the fans had spoken.)
“When they vote, I do the thing they vote for,” he said. “It’s not like, oh, I secretly do the other thing. It’s surprising how many people vote and what they vote for.” (Mr. Cameron has also allowed fans to dictate what he watches, what video games he plays and the name of his pet hamster.)
Ms. Smith said the platform reserves the right to ban users who post polls that are offensive, inappropriate, dangerous or break the law.
While the beta test is still invite-only for creators, Ms. Smith hopes that eventually everyone — from celebrities to average people — will be able to leverage it to monetize their lives.
“Sure, it’s fun to control a famous influencer or celebrity, but it’s honestly just as entertaining to control someone you go to school with, or your boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend, or an author planning their next sci-fi novel, or a beauty founder creating their next makeup palette,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how boring you think you are, there’s someone out there who would find your life interesting to the point that they’re willing to pay.”
Prederick mentioned in the Cyberpunk 2077 thread that YouTube recommended to him a ridiculous five hour long takedown of the game. A lot has been made about how YouTube and social media have commodified political outrage, but Pred's post reminded me of just how much those sites have commodified aesthetic or artistic outrage.
There's an entire cottage industry of creators dedicated to excruciatingly detailed takedowns of mass market media and the people who create them. Probably because of my own areas of interest, most of the ones I see are related to film and filmmakers, but I'm reasonably confident that any other artistic medium probably has the same outrage industry at work.
It's all built on the twin pillars of offering an explanation for dissatisfaction and confirming people's opinions as the correct one to have. If you weren't happy with the new Star Wars film, you can easily find any number of videos that will tell you that not only are you right that it's not a good film, but here's an audio-visual Gish gallop about why it's one of the worst films ever and how that is the personal fault of J. J. Abrams. Didn't love The Hobbit films? Here's a series of takedowns longer than any of those films expounding on the 100 ways that Peter Jackson doesn't understand Tolkien.
It's remarkable, and it's surprising to me how often I'll see those kinds of videos handed around in response to any expression of positivity toward something someone liked. I've seen someone say that they liked the last season of Game of Thrones only to be given in response a multi-hour video dissecting why they are wrong to do so.
And to be clear: these are not deconstructions of problematic elements in films, like the Feminist Frequency videos or an analysis of racism in Star Wars. These are built entirely from seemingly high-brow arguments about purely aesthetic choices and appeals to the authority of source material (where such exists). It's all about a mile wide and an inch deep.
But it reinforces to people that not only are they right to be dissatisfied but that they should be angry about it. Which keeps people watching.
It's all built on the twin pillars of offering an explanation for dissatisfaction and confirming people's opinions as the correct one to have. If you weren't happy with the new Star Wars film, you can easily find any number of videos that will tell you that not only are you right that it's not a good film, but here's an audio-visual Gish gallop about why it's one of the worst films ever and how that is the personal fault of J. J. Abrams.
Minor quibble, videos like that generally aren't blaming J.J. Abrams, but Kathleen Kennedy and SJWs.
I see this a LOT in #GamerVideos, where I find it super-duper interesting. If you look at YouTube, boy howdy, does everyone hate this year's Sports Game releases. Multiple videos taking down why "This is the worst Madden yet" or "This is the worst NBA 2K yet," et cetera....
....and then you look at the sales numbers and see they're as high if not higher than before and that all the people doing the griping pre-ordered the damn game (the $125 version that came with a shitty fake locker or something and $50 of the in-game virtual currency which gets you like three stat upgrades and a shirt) and have spent 500 hours playing it and had all the same gripes last year and the year before that and one begins to realize it might be performative.
I should say, my criticism of the CP2077 video being five hours long isn't completely fair, because Tim Rogers (formerly of Kotaku) over at ActionButton has been releasing equally long deep-dives on games that are "reviews" only in the most general sense:
...but I am skeptical the video I mentioned is as much of an interesting dive into the history of Cyberpunk as a genre, Cyberpunk the TTRPG, a look a CDPR as a company, an explanation of game development in Eastern Europe and a discussion of the game as it is just five hours of wanna-be CinemaSins.
I could totally be wrong though, but I'm not interested in using five hours of my life to find out.
EDIT: Oh and speaking as someone who came to GoT late, and never got past season 2, I watched Lindsay Ellis' post-mortem on the final season, and between that and the astonishing fact that a show that I remember everyone used to talk about literally being wiped off the cultural map, I would not argue with anyone who enjoyed how it ended, but I feel like D&D truly beefed it at the end there.
I skipped ahead a bit in the Action Buttons review, and I could not perceive it in any other way than that of the Onion's Peter Rosenthal. I think it might be the frequency with which he repeats the title of the game. Like he's trying to drive home that these sounds have no meaning.
Tokimeki Memorial. Tokimeki Memorial. Nope, nothing.
The commoditization of hate.
I skipped ahead a bit in the Action Buttons review,
wait, Action Button moved to video? That's why there are no more written reviews?
Hey! Did you see that whole "Prince William is the world's sexiest bald man" article doing the rounds recently?
Well good news, it's a f*cking borderline psyop.
So, two months ago, I left this comment on the YouTube music video for Weird Al's song "Foil."
And I swear, if you view the replies, every two weeks I get notified that yet another person is aggressively proving my point.
@Prederick Well shit why you gotta be so close minded? Lol.
not_sure_if_serious.gif
Responses like that also appear any time you post a comment about the prevalence of any kind of bigotry on social media. People line up to prove you right.
What was the comment ? The link only took me to the video
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