Apropos of absolutely nothing, let me note that bombardier beetles, when threatened, defend themselves by expelling jets of noxious, caustic, steaming fluid from their backsides, around 500 times a second.
— Ed Yong (@edyong209) May 27, 2020
Trump is a classic example of the message board loser who keeps harassing other users and breaking the rules so he can act like a martyr and whine forever about being censored and discriminated against when his account is suspended.
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) May 27, 2020
And if you don't drop the hammer on abusers, it encourages worse behavior. The "good" people feel they need to jump in and defend others against the trolls, etc and eventually it eats the board. It's a vicious cycle. Have clear abuse rules and ban early, if not often.
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) May 27, 2020
Who do you think blink first if:
Trump threatened Facebook, Google and Twitter; and they responded by deleting pro-Trump propaganda?
Facebook, Google and Twitter could make any problem he causes go away by simply making him go away.
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) May 28, 2020
what do you think he’s rather watch his teevee friends talk about, a half-hearted spin job of 100K+ dead americans and 20% unemployment or some slithering deep state obama judges trying to cut out the heroic godking’s tongue
— kilgore trout, potato thief (@KT_So_It_Goes) May 27, 2020
Trump loved Twitter until it became an arena for his constant humiliation and a reminder of his myriad failures.
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 27, 2020
Americans have #HadEnough.
End this trainwreck presidency.
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) May 27, 2020
Villago Delenda Est
It really is a shame that there is no Tywin Lannister in the White House to send the whiny ass titty baby to bed without his supper of hamberders and diet Coke.
Mary G
Zuckerberg is showing his true self, but Jack seems to have had enough. Hope he holds on.
NotMax
Not happy about being put into a stance of defending Twitter but so it goes.
Elizabelle
I guess tear gas still hurts when it contacts the eyes, but I wonder if these COVID masks are protecting the protesters, in some manner.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
If Dorsey wanted to make a mark he’d say “OK, the Trump account is going to be subject to the same algorithms as everyone else. No more targeted harassment as we’ve allowed that account in the past. Do it, and it will be subject to the same suspension rules.
We’re not Stormfront.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Elizabelle: Not much. The COVID masks are basically to prevent one from spreading the virus via aerosol, not protecting you from a gas attack. Anyone who has served in the Army has been through chem warfare training, to include stepping into a gas chamber with tear gas present and removing their mask, to experience just what the gas mask does for you. I used to experience the same thing during Seoul’s spring when the students faced off against the riot police and the pepper gas wafted in the general direction of Yongsan, formerly the US headquarters in Seoul.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Elizabelle:
Not really. I’d be tempted to show in a SCUBA rig – mask, BC, regulator, full tank. At sea level and only bringing up the reg for the gas, you’d get about two hours out of it.
Villago Delenda Est
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: The catch is they have an algorithm for Nazis, but they won’t use it because Rethuglicans get hoovered up by it.
Jeffro
So Twitter adds some (factual) free speech to trumpov’s (lying) free speech and somehow this is censorship?
Why doesn’t Orange Hitler go to his buddy Zuck’s truth-free site and start spouting off there? It’s free, right? Why not just switch over to OANN exclusively too while he’s at it, instead of Fox? It’s almost like the principle isn’t free speech, or even a free platform to spout BS, but the idea that the Ill Douche can be challenged on his “facts”.
(Great, now I’m rooting for Twitter and Fox News…thanks a lot, 2020!)
Frankensteinbeck
I still think they’re designed to get Trump to stop yelling at his aides by presenting him a win he’s too stupid to understand is fake.
EDIT – @Villago Delenda Est:
Yep. Which they have said. In so many words. And elected Republicans, specifically.
Elizabelle
@Villago Delenda Est:
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Got it.
NotMax
“Number of tweets allowed for Lincoln – ZERO! Number of tweets allowed for Reagan – ZERO! HORRIBLE history of Censorship!!”
//
Adam L Silverman
Thread!
bluefish
God bless, Mr Velshi. One knew 5-6 years ago it would come to this. Heartbreak. And obscene thrill. Folks are done. Am one of those folk. Just enough. We knew, We told em. Born in 55. Fuck these mfers.
Bill Arnold
Have any lawyers here read today’s “Executive Order”?
Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship – Issued on: May 28, 2020
It reads to this non-lawyer like an embarrassing wingnut crank screed. It appears that it could be gamed by progressives quite easily, even if the (current) executive branch didn’t cooperate.
As part of its ranting it says that a provider’s decisions in “good faith” to restrict access to content that it considers to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.” are acceptable.
The realDonaldTrump account regularly engages in harassing behavior. Many of D.J. Trump’s “defenders” (many of whom are low-touch bots) also engage in harassing behavior.
Kay
@Mary G:
Zuckerberg is a terrible person. The Trump ass-kissing is a minor offense compared to what Zuckerberg and Facebook did to the Sandy Hook families.
They had to hide – move- change their residences several times– to protect themselves from the conspiracy nut predators Zuckerberg was making money off of.
Anyone who doesn’t know who and what Zuckerberg is by now doesn’t want to know.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
In light of the horrible George Floyd murder, I have to wonder if a white person, given white privilege, could have stepped in and stopped that piece of shit cop from sitting on Floyd’s neck by shoving him off. Obviously, white privilege only goes so far and would not prevent them from being arrested for “assaulting an officer” but given that the altercation was filmed, I would hope the prosecutor would decline to prosecute
Juju
I wish we could call a vote of no confidence.
Searcher
@NotMax: I don’t feel the need to defend anyone with a net worth over a billion dollars. They can afford plenty of defense.
Bill Arnold
@Elizabelle:
Learn from Hong Kong?
HumboldtBlue
Minneapolis is burning in righteous anger, I wonder how far and just how it spreads.
Anya
Zuckerberg is a money hungry soulless scum. I hope one day he will get his karma. He is best friends with despots. He is complicit in anything that horrible regime do.
Ruckus
@Villago Delenda Est:
The most fun of gas house day in boot camp was being the next to the last person out of the room, out of 80.
Kay
It’s interesting to watch Facebook destroy their own brand by seeming to encourage a connection with conspiracy crazed stalkers, far Right nutjobs, actively harmful “medical” advice, and scams and rip offs of all kinds.
It’s like they set out each day working as hard as they can to make it disreputable and sleazy. Really a management triumph. Good job, multi-millionaire managers. Took that right into the crapper.
Bill Arnold
@Villago Delenda Est:
Their AI classifier can’t (reliably) distinguish between Nazis and Republicans? LOL. Is there documentation or a report/paper on this?
CaseyL
@HumboldtBlue: I’m following this on Twitter. The 3rd Precinct was captured by protestors, and set afire (everyone inside had fled). Latest is that the National Guard is en route.
My sympathies, frankly, are with the protestors… but this is going to get ugly (uglier?). I don’t know that the protestors have an end game beyond “Burn it all down.”
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Bill Arnold:
American protesters need to get gas masks and filter canisters. The tear gas would be useless then. Perfectly legal for civilians to purchase and use. Can be expensive though. This model runs around $250 before S&H and taxes
Villago Delenda Est
@Bill Arnold: I would not be surprised if SMOTI himself was consulted on it.
CaseyL
It is really downright WEIRD to be following a civil insurrection on Twitter in the first place, and to be scrolling through reports of police fleeing, buildings breached and burned, and celebratory fireworks going off… interspersed with ads for allergy medication and the importance of hydration… just makes it weirder.
Bill Arnold
Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive – The social-media giant internally studied how it polarizes users, then largely shelved the research (May 26, 2020, Jeff Horwitz, Deepa Seetharaman)
Title is a good summary.
Villago Delenda Est
Here ya go!
Steeplejack
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Someone on Twitter (@Hoarsewisperer?) pointed out that @RealDonaldTrump is a personal account and there is an official @POTUS Twitter account. Trump wants to have it both ways: free to spew his unhinged bullshit but have it be subliminally perceived as somehow “official” by his base.
He won’t use the @POTUS account because then it would be official and it would emphasize what a clown he is.
Twitter could preserve some special treatment for the official @POTUS account and treat @RealDonaldTrump like everyone else’s personal account. Problem solved.
Chris T.
@CaseyL: Well, it’s very important to stay hydrated while you’re wading through tear gas…
Villago Delenda Est
@Bill Arnold: This is why chemical warfare is so problematic. Targeting sucks. Even in an urban riot control context, the stuff might very well blow back on you. Leaf blowers would serve that purpose well.
Kay
@Bill Arnold:
It isn’t just that it’s “divisive” though- divisive obviously makes them money so they encourage that. What they should worry about is that it’s toxic, lying garbage that will eventually repel normal people. I don’t know – do normal people want to post baby pictures and say hello to their high school friends (or whatever they do on Facebook) if the whole place is an insane Right wing conspiracy/grifter marketplace? Are Trumpsters and their associated cons and ponzi schemes a big enough group to sustain Facebook?
It’s an odd business decision to take a larger group of users and work as hard as you can to make it smaller.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@CaseyL:
Sounds like a dystopia, doesn’t it?
Kay
In a way I’ve been pleased that Donald Trump, the Trump Administration, and all congressional Republicans keep lying about absentee voting and voting by mail because it’s a fairly boring thing, absentee voting, but it’s popular – VOTERS like it- and now we get detailed explanations of how it works.
Last week we learned the difference between “a ballot” and “an application for a ballot”. That’s an important distinction! :)
Bill Arnold
Thanks! Here’s the original motherboard report, a little less filtered, and sounds plausible (specifically the all-hand’s meeting description):
Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too. – A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians. (Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler, Apr 25 2019)
(It does seem like a difficult classification problem.)
Cameron
I don’t have a lot of Facebook friends, so I’m lucky that only a couple of them have gone off the deep end. I don’t bother responding to the nuttiness – I can share pics of baby chimps, but don’t feel compelled to ask what kind of conspiracy is covering up the ‘fact’ that COVID-19 is bacterial, not viral (no, it doesn’t even begin to make sense). There’s no point in engaging with lunacy.
Another Scott
Look out for time-traveling assassins…
Cheers,
Scott.
mrmoshpotato
Who is Kilgore thieving potatoes from?
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
@Hoarsewisperer explains it in this thread:
CaseyL
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): It looks and sounds like a dystopia because it is one. The US is a very sick place.
Vhh
Trump should be encouraged to take his verbal excretions somewhere else. One choice is the Russian vKontakt site. He can post in English and will get plenty of followers.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
Yes, but aren’t you worried that platforms like Facebook are fundamentally changing society for the worse, radicalizing it? “Normal” is relative their “normal” could become mainstream. That’s the most scary part of growing up imo; it’s realizing that civil society as we know it relies on there being enough decent people to ensure organizations/institutions are equitable, that they work and don’t cruelly fuck people over people.
I’m terrified that I could wake up one day and not recognize the country or world I live in. It wasn’t all that long ago that chattel slavery was legal and the abolitionists were a small minority
Bill Arnold
@Kay:
Excellent point.
(Let’s keep encouraging everyone else to leave FB. :-)
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Bill Arnold:
Personally, I’ve never liked Facebook. I much prefer using pseudonyms over my real name and FB is terribly boring imo
rikyrah
bluefish
So fraking sick and tired. Remember as a young girl, 7-8, JFK being killed when we lived in Chevy Chase before hauling ass to Rio, which is a whole non essential story, ever. We always knew this horrific night was coming. And here it is. Astonishing. And bout time. 45 is addicted to Nazi fetichisms, and fish rotted from the head. Plus tons of cash. Started anew with St Reagan. Back to Civil War. Why are we taking our crazy into space? Fuck these folk.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That’s what I got from this, Trump wanted to shut down Twitter by executive order and his aids had to talk him down from something that stupid.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack: Yup, but the POTUS account has Obama on it.
Bill Arnold
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I’ve never had a Facebook account. Twitter has its virtues. One is that it allows anonymous accounts[1], which while grossly abused, also allows activism where/when doxxing has possible consequences for one’s physical well-being. I follow (well, via the tabs in the web interface) several truly anonymous and quite interesting twitter accounts, with personas that have been stable for years.
[1] As in with some effort and discipline one can create and use a twitter account this is difficult for state actors to dox.
rikyrah
@Kay:
He is scum ???
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: What? Actually learn about something instead of munching on tiger shrimp at Sally’s? GET OUT!
HalfAssedHomesteader
Here’s hoping Twitter has an October surprise for Trump and suspends his account in the last weeks of the campaign.
Kent
Fire fighters have the correct gear for that. Full face masks and regulators.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Those muthaphuckas ? in Texas, voting that fear of COVID-19 isn’t a valid reason for receiving a mail ballot. All the while issuing this decision REMOTELY ???
Kattails
@mrmoshpotato: Suspect this is a reference to Trump’s telling Virginia potato farmers that gun control will leave their crops defenseless. Gov. Northam suggested that Don should perhaps stop taking hydroxychloroquine.
bluehill
@rikyrah: They will all vote by mail too.
Mandalay
A Trump tweet from earlier this evening:
I suspect this is directly related to a poll result from Tuesday:
I’m really trying hard not to get too excited.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Never been to Facebook. Never been to Twitter.
And plan to keep it that way.
Mike in DC
America is burning, yet again. 60+ years of failing to check police brutality. If 60% of white Americans and 60% of white politicians wanted to put an end to it, it would be done in a week. Bigfoot the police union contracts with overriding federal legislation. Establish federal prosecutors specifically tasked with going after law enforcement violations. End qualified immunity. Incentivize community policing. Require bias training and deescalation. Expand noncustodial arrests.
I am white and I am so done with this shit.
Steeplejack
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Ooh, ick! Forgot about the cooties.
Laura Too
Until now I didn’t really see the use to Twitter. Now, I am so grateful for it. I am watching my city burn and can monitor if they move in to the neighborhood. I am 2 blocks from it. The n-95 helped with the smoke but not so much with the teargas.
James E Powell
@HumboldtBlue:
This kind of stuff causes white people to lose their minds. Trump loves it because it’s taking COVID off the top of the news.
I’m not completely against violence or property destruction in all cases. But it’s got to be targeted against people or organizations that are most responsible for the evil being challenged.
Laura Too
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): 3 other officers watched him Murder Mr. Floyd. If anyone would have tried to intervene they would have taken them out. MPD is bad.
James E Powell
@Kay:
I’d urge everyone to deactivate facebook accounts, but based on the response to my calls to give up the NYT, it would be pointless. Amusing ourselves to death, we are.
Laura Too
@Mike in DC: Yes, and us white people need to step up and deal with it. They are burning a lot of minority owned businesses. And they broke in and vandalized a lot more. It wasn’t protesters who did that. Burning the precinct is appropriate, I just hope it’s enough.
Geoduck
Maybe this has already been mentioned, but Twitter just slapped a content warning on one of the Shiatgibbon’s tweets. (Didn’t delete it.) He’s gonna take that really well when he finds out.
evodevo
@CaseyL: Well, I’m old enough to remember the riots in the ’60’s – once they get going, NO ONE can rein them in. Tt always ends in tears…And nowadays you have the undercover agitators doing what the regular protesters won’t do. You have to have a disciplined movement in order to recognize them and root them out ongoing, and you don’t have that with spontaneous demonstrations. The way to stop this is to reform the police from the bottom up, and that takes money, time, and commitment.
SteverinoCT
Just what I was thinking of… Navy Boot camp, same deal. I blew snot all over the back of the guy in front of me. That was in an enclosed space, not open air, but it is uncomfortable to say the least: which is the point– non-lethal but (moderately) incapacitating.