https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm 2025-10-24T11:26:20+00:00 https://archive.ph/rNupQ#selection-1683.0-1721.415 jmThis week’s violence has raised serious questions for some of the main social media platforms. Livestream content depicting violence outside Citywest was broadcast on YouTube, TikTok and Twitch, with streamers rewarded by viewer donations, as they captured protesters shouting racist expletives towards Citywest. In one eight-minute segment of an hour-long livestream I watched on YouTube that night, the user broadcast the burning of the Garda van, referred to migrants in horrific terms and proclaimed they were there to show people “the real truth”. During the video, they received the equivalent of €56 in donations from viewers around the world. The notion that violence can be monetised on social media illustrates a glaring failure of platforms to adequately enforce their own community guidelines around violence. Individuals from the UK and Canada travelled to Ireland specifically to attend and create content from the protest. Other international agitators followed events online. [...] In recent years we have witnessed the mainstreaming of anti-migrant hate and extremism in this country. That has been facilitated, in part, by platforms failing to enforce their own community guidelines. Amid the anger and outrage that follows an alleged sexual assault, it is now a recurring pattern that online platforms will play host to attempts to publish and promote incitement towards hatred and violence. ]]> hate racism monetisation streaming video tiktok youtube facebook twitter x social-media livestreams twitch citywest far-right https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2f155acceff2/ 2024-07-12T09:46:18+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/9/24195228/doj-bot-farm-rt-russian-government-namecheap jmThe Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that it seized two domain names and more than 900 social media accounts it claims were part of an “AI-enhanced” Russian bot farm. Many of the accounts were designed to look like they belonged to Americans and posted content about the Russia-Ukraine war, including videos in which Russian President Vladimir Putin justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The Justice Department claims that an employee of RT — Russia’s state media outlet — was behind the bot farm. RT’s leadership signed off on a plan to use the bot farm to “distribute information on a wide-scale basis,” amplifying the publication’s reach on social media,” an FBI agent alleged in an affidavit. To set up the bot farm, the employee bought two domain names from Namecheap, an Arizona-based company, that were then used to create two email servers, the affidavit claims. The servers were then used to create 968 email addresses, which were in turn used to set up social media accounts, according to the affidavit and the DOJ.  The effort was concentrated on X, where profiles were created with Meliorator, an “AI-enabled bot farm generation and management software”. “Russia intended to use this bot farm to disseminate AI-generated foreign disinformation, scaling their work with the assistance of AI to undermine our partners in Ukraine and influence geopolitical narratives favorable to the Russian government.” Looks like it used a lot of now quite familiar bot attributes, such as following high-profile accounts and other bot accounts, liking other bot posts, and using AI-generated profile images. It's not clear but it sounds like the content posted is also AI-generated based on defined "personalities". More on Meliorator and the operations of this AI bot farming tool, in this Joint Advisory PDF: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/News/2024/240709.pdf ]]> bots russia bot-farms twitter x meliorator ai social-media spam propaganda rt ukraine https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:854152e896b3/ 2024-06-28T09:32:43+00:00 https://www.404media.co/perplexitys-origin-story-scraping-twitter-with-fake-academic-accounts/ jm perplexity ai morals scraping twitter startups aravind-srinivas bird-sql https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fd94569535c7/ 2024-05-27T10:05:34+00:00 https://www.thejournal.ie/x-irish-anonymous-accounts-influence-operation-6385526-May2024/ jm twitter x ireland politics trolls disinformation russia https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c2b17df8359e/ 2024-01-04T11:49:17+00:00 https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4380369-the-eu-should-support-irelands-bold-move-to-regulate-big-tech/ jm ...a simple, easily enforceable rule that could change the game: All recommender systems based on intimately profiling people should be turned off by default.  In practice, that means that the big platforms cannot automatically run algorithms that use information about a person’s political views, sex life, health or ethnicity. A person will be able to switch an algorithm on, but those toxic algorithms will no longer be on by default. Users will still have access to algorithmic amplification, but they will have to opt in to get it. Great idea. The toxicity driven by "personalized feeds" has been extremely harmful.]]> cnm regulation ireland tech personalisation algorithmic-feeds tiktok instagram facebook twitter social-media https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:aece7c98ad57/ 2023-12-05T11:16:22+00:00 https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/2023/12/05/most-ireland-is-full-and-irish-lives-matter-online-posts-originate-abroad/ jm The research showed the use of the phrases increased dramatically, both in Ireland and abroad, once word started spreading that the suspect in the knife attack was born outside Ireland. “Users in the UK and US were very, very highly represented. Which was strange because with hashtags that are very geographically specific, you wouldn’t expect to see that kind of spread,” said Mr Doak. “These three hashtags have been heavily boosted by users in the US and UK. Taken together, UK and US users accounted for more use of the hashtags than Ireland.” Other countries that saw use of the phrases on a much smaller scale include India, Nigeria and Spain. ]]> ireland politics far-right agitation racism fascism trolls twitter facebook tiktok instagram https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2114c2e28b5d/ 2023-10-27T15:06:05+00:00 https://archive.ph/20231027115521/https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2023/10/28/he-broke-the-culture-in-a-week-how-elon-musk-changed-twitters-dublin-operation/#selection-1905.0-1926.0 jm“We were, in many ways, an afterthought ... the decisions he made and how he made them, were made as if they were only impacting America,” says the source. “I think one of the toughest things for a lot of the Dublin people was [that] we were spectators at our own demise. We were like collateral. [Musk] was attacking Twitter in the US, and we were collateral damage -- which was a strange feeling for a place that had been so integral to the global footprint of the company.” ]]> elon-musk twitter ireland dublin working business acquisitions https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fcd2b76984fe/ 2022-12-28T15:39:12+00:00 https://bird.makeup jmOne of the things I would miss here on Mastodon was all of the alerts from my local infrastructure and government twitter accounts. These will likely take a very long time to make the migration. With https://bird.makeup, you can create bot accounts that put those tweets in your Mastodon timeline. ]]> twitter mastodon gateways bots tweets https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bf3e1413bfee/ 2022-11-22T09:47:13+00:00 https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109383845633490300 jmAt a meta level, something I find mildly interesting is how many people [jm: ex-Twitter staff specifically] are writing stuff on Mastodon about how it's impossible for Mastodon to scale up without using an ad supported model (b/c server costs), it's better to have ranked feeds because most people want them, etc. The thing I think is interesting is that the people writing this stuff, implicitly, seemingly cannot conceive of a model where the organization is not growth and profit maximizing. ]]> engagement twitter social-media metrics kpis mastodon profit capitalism https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b884b503a471/ 2022-11-11T10:19:57+00:00 https://twitodon.com/ jm fediverse mastodon twitter social-networks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c3c84a0ec2e5/ 2022-09-15T09:06:02+00:00 https://github.com/dylanpdx/BetterTwitFix jm telegram twitter discord web workarounds https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f96ab594ae06/ 2022-08-27T13:38:25+00:00 https://twitter.com/thezedwards/status/1562321634295312384 jm custom-audiences targeting twitter china surveillance intelligence-agencies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7f9b6d2e0d2c/ 2022-04-19T10:19:14+00:00 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/ jmWhat changed in the 2010s? [..] A mean tweet doesn’t kill anyone; it is an attempt to shame or punish someone publicly while broadcasting one’s own virtue, brilliance, or tribal loyalties. It’s more a dart than a bullet, causing pain but no fatalities. Even so, from 2009 to 2012, Facebook and Twitter passed out roughly 1 billion dart guns globally. We’ve been shooting one another ever since. ]]> communication culture democracy politics social-media facebook twitter trolls https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:06a2ad42f8ab/ 2022-02-22T09:39:37+00:00 https://robmanuelfuckyeah.substack.com/p/how-to-create-a-simple-twitter-bot jm python twitter bots rob-manuel https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2ba50652268d/ 2022-02-14T11:44:53+00:00 https://danluu.com/cache-incidents/ jm caching architecture twitter ops outages history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d68b10aa04ed/ 2022-01-10T17:18:43+00:00 https://gist.github.com/IanColdwater/88b3341a7c4c0cf71c73ac56f9bd36ec jm timeline twitter muting killfile spam https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c97457edbc54/ 2022-01-06T09:55:04+00:00 https://twitter.com/IanRicksecker/status/1478611650760437765?t=ZxpeKEc85DohOwB0FTsS8g&s=19 jm covid-19 health long-covid sars-cov-2 papers twitter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b94c26a97034/ 2021-08-11T09:08:12+00:00 https://blog.twitter.com/en_gb/topics/company/2020/combatting-online-racist-abuse-an-update-following-the-euros jm anonymity abuse racism twitter social-media id-verification https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1346b1d20c20/ 2021-05-05T13:03:01+00:00 https://megablock.xyz/ jmDon't like a bad tweet? Block the tweet, its author, and every single person who liked it—in one click. Genius. ]]> twitter blocking killfile https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b15cb7668525/ 2021-04-12T09:51:35+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/indian-government-using-tech-destroy-democracy jmI love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November. ]]> india technology whatsapp facebook twitter scary authoritarianism dystopia tech https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4fbaf295eccc/ 2021-01-10T21:43:15+00:00 https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi20/presentation/yang jmModern web services use in-memory caching extensively to increase throughput and reduce latency. There have been several workload analyses of production systems that have fueled research in improving the effectiveness of in-memory caching systems. However, the coverage is still sparse considering the wide spectrum of industrial cache use cases. In this work, we significantly further the understanding of real-world cache workloads by collecting production traces from 153 in-memory cache clusters at Twitter, sifting through over 80 TB of data, and sometimes interpreting the workloads in the context of the business logic behind them. We perform a comprehensive analysis to characterize cache workloads based on traffic pattern, time-to-live (TTL), popularity distribution, and size distribution. A fine-grained view of different workloads uncover the diversity of use cases: many are far more write-heavy or more skewed than previously shown and some display unique temporal patterns. We also observe that TTL is an important and sometimes defining parameter of cache working sets. Our simulations show that ideal replacement strategy in production caches can be surprising, for example, FIFO works the best for a large number of workloads. ]]> caching memcached memory twitter usenix via:marc-brooker https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1d9a9c5c485a/ 2021-01-06T10:28:04+00:00 https://twitter.com/dazult_pdempsey/status/1346583436811759621/photo/1 jm covid-19 travel flying medicine sars-cov-2 pcr twitter graphs https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1846d78634e0/ 2020-12-10T10:32:34+00:00 https://twitter.com/DrZoeHyde/status/1336612124835995648 jm schools covid-19 transmission kids children research twitter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:87a59af08adb/ 2020-11-09T21:16:27+00:00 https://twitter.com/florian_krammer/status/1325887332428505090 jm covid-19 vaccines florian-krammer twitter virology https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f25b9cf09389/ 2020-10-09T09:41:15+00:00 https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/952335944291528704 jm screamers soldiers nazis twitter social-media harassment https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8b0b969c1f53/ 2020-10-07T22:01:47+00:00 https://twitter.com/marietcasey/status/1313896089376956416 jm twitter contact-tracing public-health pandemics covid-19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1ef6816f9730/ 2020-09-30T10:31:17+00:00 https://twitter.com/gnievchenko/status/1310544553024327682 jm h2 hydrogen green climate-change future eu europe twitter via:ftf https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f7f426b0dc46/ 2020-09-24T09:41:35+00:00 https://twitter.com/janeruffino/status/1309025112449048577 jm sweden covid-19 threads twitter jane-ruffino lockdown https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:069335002e56/ 2020-09-17T10:50:38+00:00 https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1298648756200636416 jm michael-levitt covid-19 covidiots twitter andrew-flood science https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6f7ca53f7640/ 2020-09-17T09:38:16+00:00 https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1306456291905159168 jm twitter threads mabs monoclonal-antibodies immunity covid-19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:de8f6a15ec2a/ 2020-09-14T12:04:34+00:00 https://twitter.com/CillianDeGascun/status/1305250887246458880 jm ireland covid-19 testing ct-levels viral-load viruses cillian-de-gascun twitter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6c88f66d42e2/ 2020-09-06T11:19:45+00:00 https://twitter.com/ewanbirney/status/1302010931480793088 jm twitter threads covid-19 ireland uk europe https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:74f948f9883e/ 2020-08-20T12:02:07+00:00 https://twitter.com/firefoxx66/status/1296080742607355904 jm twitter threads covid-19 epidemiology age ifr cfr https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6ee6bc8b9914/ 2020-08-17T21:13:47+00:00 https://www.thejournal.ie/four-nurses-paddy-cosgrave-covid-19-twitter-timeline-5155876-Aug2020/ jm covid-19 paddy-cosgrave twitter misinformation tweets https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9d9ce13a62e8/ 2020-06-03T22:22:50+00:00 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkypdg/were-all-living-in-the-cool-zone-now jmThe Cool Zone is usually defined by people on Twitter as a period in history that's super cool to read about, but much less cool to live through. This definition is usually attributed to Matt Christman from the leftist podcast Chapo Trap House. Looking back on what parts of history I like to read about, it makes sense. Reading about the long, protracted war in Vietnam is fascinating, for instance, but I do not wish to live through any part of the Vietnam War. Nor do I wish to live in Vichy France, or be part of the original Black Panthers movement, or to wage a revolution against the King of France, or be tossed in jail for a lunch counter sit-in like my father was in Selma. I counted myself lucky to be able to read about resistance leaders who took stands without being forced to make such a stand myself. Except, well, now I am, as I march in the streets with thousands of others all across New York City and the country. ]]> cool-zone history change twitter chapo-trap-house https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ee1e0ba29042/ 2020-05-07T15:51:51+00:00 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/what-are-we-doing-doctors-are-fed-conspiracies-ravaging-ers-n1201446?fbclid=IwAR0DSbMLOjzWRfkx-cMqDI--4vjsWm6jMxrW8QcAHm7dASP9_wCWtglN-uc jmWhitney Phillips, a assistant professor of communications who studies the spread of disinformation at Syracuse University, said the coronavirus outbreak offers a look at how conspiracy thinking is now, in some ways, more organized. "With conspiracy theories, the reason they're impervious to fact-checking is that they have become a way of being in the world for believers," Phillips said. "It isn't just one narrative that you can debunk. It is a holistic way of being in the world that has been reinforced by all the other bulls--- that these platforms have allowed people to consume for years." ]]> conspiracy-theories facebook social-media covid-19 conspiracies stupid twitter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8cf242a52c0b/ 2020-04-29T22:28:58+00:00 https://twitter.com/rodolfoalmd/status/1255203098764730369?s=19 jm twitter funny comic dataviz graphs visualisation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5514ad010ce/ 2020-04-15T12:00:27+00:00 https://twitter.com/Farzad_MD/status/1248573813610209285 jm twitter threads contact-tracing apps tools covid-19 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6ec58686bdcd/ 2020-04-01T19:57:38+00:00 https://twitter.com/WSMIreland/status/1245296675209478146 jm wsm twitter threads hse covid-19 reagents testing chemicals https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:33da45abba74/ 2020-03-26T21:52:46+00:00 https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1243252341756669953 jmthe fight against misinformation is not merely a scientific communication issue. It's a vital public health necessity. [...] In all the years of studying infectious disease and planning for this day, I never dreamed that when it came I'd be opposed by my own federal government, a non-trivial fraction of my fellow citizens, and as yet undetermined fraction of hostile foreign actors. ]]> disinformation misinformation propaganda trump covid-19 scicomm science public-health social-media twitter pandemics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5e4c198d44e7/ 2020-02-13T14:59:57+00:00 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/you-cant-say-that-policing-the-long-tail-of-public-opinion-on-facebook-tickets-92904081609 jmPresented by Tech Won’t Build It Ireland and School of Multidisciplinary Technology TU Dublin and the TU Dublin Critical Media Literacy Group: Social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter employ around 100,000 people worldwide to vet content posted by their users - online bullying, hate speech, extreme violence, pornography, fake news, and worse. Most content moderators are employed by third-party companies who provide services to the major Internet companies. Thousands of those content moderators are based here in Ireland. It’s becoming increasingly clear that many moderators experience trauma and PTSD as a result of the volume of disturbing content that they’re exposed to, often without adequate preparation or support from their employer. In late January this year, one contractor (Accenture) even asked employees to sign a document acknowledging the risk of PTSD, and making them individually responsible for dealing with it. Two groups of current and former employees are suing Facebook over this issue, in both California and Ireland. Chris Gray is the lead plaintiff in the case against Facebook and contractor Cpl Resources that is now going through the Irish High Court. Chris will walk us through how content moderation works, how moderators are trained, conditions on the job, and how moderators make decisions. He will tell us about the psychological impact of this work, and his experience taking a legal case against his former employer Facebook, one of the world’s largest technology companies. We’ll also discuss the tradeoffs between free speech, hate speech, censorship and fake news; and the role of regulation versus corporate responsibility for content on Internet platforms. ]]> facebook google content-moderation chris-gray social-media media twitter moderation vetting ptsd work https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4442027eb6b0/ 2020-02-03T14:41:28+00:00 http://twitter-likes-deleter.glitch.me/ jm likes twitter social-media snooping via:anildash privacy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:911668910adf/ 2020-01-24T16:41:15+00:00 https://www.salon.com/2020/01/24/cyber-rambo-how-a-us-army-vet-aided-the-right-wing-coup-in-bolivia/ jmJulián Macías Tovar, a social media coordinator for the Spanish left-wing party Podemos, analyzed the data from the hashtags and found that thousands of accounts were created in the days before the election and spiked after Bolivian military leaders called on Morales to resign. According to his data, 48,000 accounts were created in a matter of just four days to amplify the hashtags. Tovar also discovered that a single account contributed more than 13,000 retweets to the hashtags. The account belonged to US Army veteran Luis Suarez, who automated his account to retweet posts with the hashtags using a custom app. Data scientist Rubén Rodríguez Casañ similarly found that Suarez's account was able to retweet as many as 69 posts in a single second. ]]> twitter hashtags bolivia propaganda botnets bots coups https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3f06ce0b0433/ 2020-01-09T10:33:35+00:00 https://twitter.com/royvanrijn/status/1214162400666103808?s=19 jm chairs furniture funny hardware emi esd monitors twitter video https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a5f470e744e5/ 2020-01-08T18:10:53+00:00 https://theoutline.com/post/7295/buckle-up-twitter-is-cancelled?zd=1&zi=nf5sh77k jmI am thinking of the response to February’s “Beau Brummell invented toxic masculinity” episode, in which the 19th-century English fancy man Beau Brummell, as infamous a dandy as one can be, was “taken down” in a grueling thread which neatly encapsulated all the worst qualities of Buckle Up Twitter: bewilderingly irate, laden with a combination of baroque linguistic flourishes and performatively subversive swearing, assumption of complete ignorance on the part of the audience, fondness for the word “gaslighting,” a powerful youth pastor-like eagerness to “meet people where they are,” high likelihood that it will be retweeted by people who refer to themselves as “Scolds” in their twitter bios, strong urge to lay the blame for the ills of the 21st century firmly at the foot of a basically random actor or event, total erasure of most things that have ever happened. ]]> twitter threads bores social-media funny https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c558a8bb4f12/ 2019-12-04T12:54:32+00:00 https://twitter.com/Hannahdouken/status/1201853553050038273 jm funny art theft bots twitter tee-shirts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:994cdd32be42/ 2019-10-14T16:06:11+00:00 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1183398352148484097.html jm solar solar-power power electricity generation renewables future factoids twitter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c7713501176a/ 2019-08-08T10:32:35+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/7/20759191/white-house-trump-administration-social-media-bias-executive-order-report jmOne shooting was apparently an act of far-right terrorism, based on an anti-immigrant screed posted online. There was a fine line between its rhetoric and the views of major conservative figures like Tucker Carlson or Trump himself. Preemptively flagging the shooter — or one of several far-right killers before him — could have looked like egregious anti-conservative bias. And since predictive AI has sky-high error rates, it would probably catch a lot of non-violent conservative accounts (alongside those of non-conservatives) purely by accident. That’s already a recipe for a PR disaster, and it gets even dicier if Trump adds new legal punishments. (via JK)]]> filtering ai terrorism far-right fascism nazis trump twitter social-media https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3fe0493a26e9/ 2019-08-08T10:31:45+00:00 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too jm gop corruption twitter politics filtering ai fascism republicans https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:038061c5ca96/ 2019-06-17T13:55:22+00:00 http://ifyoulived.org/moss.html jm gardening home plants moss gardens thread twitter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0911e36767a9/ 2019-04-03T15:15:54+00:00 https://twitter.com/sbarolo/status/1036685010869407744 jm twitter thread humor mansplaining sexism misogyny reply-guys funny https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ed3a20b504a8/ 2019-04-01T21:12:47+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikemonteiro/we-built-a-broken-internet-now-we-need-to-burn-it jmThe promise of the internet was that it was going to give voice to the voiceless, visibility to the invisible, and power to the powerless. That’s what originally excited me about it. That’s what originally excited a ton of people about it. It was supposed to be an engine of equality. Suddenly, everyone could tell their story. Suddenly, everyone could sing their song. Suddenly, that one weird kid in Helena, Montana, could find another weird kid just like them in Bakersfield, California, and they could talk and know they weren’t alone. Suddenly, we didn’t need anybody’s permission to publish. We put our stories and songs and messages and artwork where the world could find them. For a while it was beautiful, it was messy, and it was punk as fuck. We all rolled up our sleeves and helped to build it. We were the ones who were supposed to guide it there, and we failed. We failed because we were naive enough to believe everyone had the same goals we did. We failed because we underestimated greed. We failed because we didn’t pay attention to history. We failed because our definition of we wasn’t big enough. We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer. ]]> design ethics internet web twitter social-media https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4b0be05e86cf/ 2019-03-15T17:00:45+00:00 https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1106484542058180609 jm alt-right fascism media politics internet social-media twitter reddit ash-sarkar https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f02ead9b62c7/ 2019-02-17T12:23:54+00:00 https://www.wired.com/story/soothing-promise-our-own-artisanal-internet/ jm facebook twitter internet web social-media mastodon fediverse anil-dash https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:43e0287d8d85/ 2018-12-05T10:42:01+00:00 http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/rudy-giuliani-doesnt-seem-to-know-how-the-internet-works.html jmTwitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message. The same thing-period no space-occurred later and it didn’t happen. Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers. Time Magazine also may fit that description. FAIRNESS PLEASE Giuliani composed a tweet with no spaces after full stops, and a broken regexp at Twitter auto-linkified "G-20.In". An internet prankster registered this domain and Giuliani lost his shit in a spectacular display of incompetence. The best bit? Here's a thread with the original devs: https://twitter.com/hoverbird/status/1070142045140877312 -- 'Hey @tw and @bcherry, remember all the debates we had about the linkifying regex around edge cases like this?' (via Waxy and pretty much everyone on twitter)]]> edge-cases bugs twitter regexps regular-expressions links urls us-politics trump rudy-giuliani security funny https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c9783da8c79c/ 2018-11-30T14:41:01+00:00 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18564246 jm newsy messaging infrastructure twitter kafka pubsub ops architecture prdd performance-reviews https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6a5adfb4891c/ 2018-11-27T10:54:35+00:00 https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1067111872225136640 jm cryptocurrency npm packages open-source twitter flatmap-stream packaging security backdoors https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8987652c1261/ 2018-11-08T16:20:15+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/acosta-video-trump-cnn-aide-sarah-sanders jmTo sum it up: A historically unreliable narrator who works for a conspiracy website tweets out a video in order to show alleged bad behavior on the part of a journalist. The clip goes viral. The White House picks up and disseminates that video and uses it as proof to ban the journalist from reporting at the White House. Outraged journalists decry the White House's use of a video taken from a historically unreliable narrator. Then, users attempt to debunk the video as "actual fake news." Others, unclear if the video is fake, urge caution, suggesting the media may be jumping the gun. An argument breaks out over the intricate technical details of doctoring a clip. The entire ordeal is a near perfect example of a scenario disinformation experts have predicted and warned of, where the very threat of video manipulation can lead to a blurring of reality. "These technological underpinnings [of AI and photoshop, and editing programs lead] to the increasing erosion of trust,” computational propaganda researcher Renee DiResta told BuzzFeed News in early 2018. “It makes it possible to cast aspersions on whether videos — or advocacy for that matter — are real.” ]]> twitter disinfo disinformation buzzfeed video reality fake-news photoshop https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:388d17be0d69/ 2018-10-31T14:42:52+00:00 https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1057042085029822464 jmAssuming this all works out, the image in this tweet is also a valid ZIP archive, containing a multipart RAR archive, containing the complete works of Shakespeare. This technique also survives twitter's thumbnailer :P (via JK)]]> via:johnke cool compression image jpeg twitter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:406cf4a38933/ 2018-10-30T10:27:42+00:00 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1057017343438540801.html jmOk. tweet thread time! Too long ago I promised to write a screed explaining how much I hated mutual-auth TLS and why. I got distracted, and I wasn't happy with the writing, so here it is in tweet thread form instead! But basically: Client certs and Mutual-Auth TLS is TERRIBAD. When I say TERRIBAD, I mean that unless you've got the resources of a big security dept and folks who comb threat models for a living, using clients certs and mutual auth probably materially lessens your security. That's NUTS! (source: https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1057017343438540801 )]]> terribad rants twitter threads tls ssl authentication mtls security https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:39c131ac7d5f/ 2018-10-22T09:36:59+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/20/18003644/saudi-arabia-twitter-jamal-khashoggi-twitter-employee-spy jm root spies twitter saudi-arabia privacy espionage cia https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:529622716ee1/ 2018-10-19T13:19:47+00:00 https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1053031892734242817 jm cryptol saw formal-verification twitter threads colmmacc security s2n https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3012492b37c7/ 2018-09-18T09:37:52+00:00 https://twitter.com/EmmaKinema/status/1041419623386644480 jmMuting suggest_recycled_tweet_inline and suggest_activity_tweet actually has fixed my timeline. It's all chronological and there are barely any "x and y liked" tweets. ]]> twitter feature-creep muting hacks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:64a8d77863cf/ 2018-09-05T09:19:01+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/17777330/internet-of-garbage-book-sarah-jeong-online-harassment jm dystopia fake-news internet spam harrassment abuse twitter gamergate politics books free to-read https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1fa9b11841c6/ 2018-09-03T10:20:25+00:00 https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/ jmSimilar to this thread by CJ Silverio, I’m not thinking about this in terms of whether Wil Wheaton or his detractors were right or wrong. Rather, I’m thinking about how this incident demonstrates that a large-scale harassment attack by motivated actors is not only possible in the fediverse, but is arguably easier than in a centralized system like Twitter or Facebook, where automated tools can help moderators to catch dogpiling as it happens. As someone who both administrates and moderates Mastodon instances, and who believes in Mastodon’s mission to make social media a more pleasant and human-centric place, this post is my attempt to define the attack vector and propose strategies to prevent it in the future. ]]> mastodon abuse twitter wilw harassment moderation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c165b0fb9453/ 2018-07-03T21:46:20+00:00 http://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/ jmthe sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros. Remember that elections are generally knife-edge affairs, even for politicians who’ve held their seats for decades with slim margins: 60% of the vote is an excellent win. Remember, too, that the winner in most races is “none of the above,” with huge numbers of voters sitting out the election. If even a small number of these non-voters can be motivated to show up at the polls, safe seats can be made contestable. In a tight race, having a cheap way to reach all the latent Klansmen in a district and quietly inform them that Donald J. Trump is their man is a game-changer. Cambridge Analytica are like stage mentalists: they’re doing something labor-intensive and pretending that it’s something supernatural. A stage mentalist will train for years to learn to quickly memorize a deck of cards and then claim that they can name your card thanks to their psychic powers. You never see the unglamorous, unimpressive memorization practice. Cambridge Analytica uses Facebook to find racist jerks and tell them to vote for Trump and then they claim that they’ve discovered a mystical way to get otherwise sensible people to vote for maniacs. ]]> facebook politics surveillance cory-doctorow google twitter advertising elections cambridge-analytica racism nazis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ee6b36f3dc47/ 2018-06-14T21:10:09+00:00 https://twitter.com/martinkl/status/1007320751463124992 jm twitter threads gdpr compliance law eu append-only logs blockchain event-sourcing architecture storage kafka kinesis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a66f2ec82c4c/ 2018-06-02T17:21:31+00:00 https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/01/abortion-referendum-how-ireland-resisted-bad-behaviour-online/ jmIn practice, while these recognizable attempts to disrupt the democratic debate with microtargeted ads, bot activity, and misinformation were active, they appear to have been relatively ineffective and may even have turned voters away from those employing them. Given the battleground online discourse has become in democracies across the world, this small country’s resistance to it may offer some cause for hope. The resilience offered by the small size and close-knit nature of the Irish electorate may be difficult to reproduce in larger democracies. But the active measures taken by media, volunteer groups, and campaigners against potentially corrosive techniques can be a powerful inspiration. +1 -- it's heartening that we were able to defeat these 21st century dirty tricks after the damage they did with Trump and Brexit.]]> brexit elections trump fake-news propaganda bots dark-ads facebook social-media repealthe8th referenda abortion ireland repeal-shield twitter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7fa6d59ac179/ 2018-05-30T11:34:57+00:00 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1001740417057067010.html jm repealthe8th repealshield twitter blocklists gdpr law ireland eu abuse https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b378df48db21/ 2018-05-28T14:14:45+00:00 https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/1001085191627079680 jm twitter antisemitism george-soros nazis alt-right ireland prolife repealthe8th https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c02bd677cd40/