Media

Late Night Open Thread: Adieu, @DPRK_News

by Anne Laurie| October 21, 202112:24 am| 43 Comments

This post is in: Media, Open Threads, Assholes

whoever narced on the dprk account needs help finding jesus for costing us the best content on here https://t.co/JJmrNBFang

— kilgore trout, defective towel (@KT_So_It_Goes) October 20, 2021

It might have been content like this that got it narced…

American soldier with lactation difficulties relentlessly mocked by large-breasted Fox News dancer. pic.twitter.com/Yeflw5TDv2

— DPRK News Service (@DPRK_News) October 17, 2021

(Explainer)

But more likely, it was this:

you motherfuckers. you gaping digital anal fissures. we’ll have our revenge. pic.twitter.com/sM5bS6RDih

— kilgore trout, defective towel (@KT_So_It_Goes) October 21, 2021

On the snark-positive side, TFG has a new social media site planned, but how long are his minions gonna be able to keep *this* one up?

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Late Night Open Thread: Adieu, @DPRK_NewsPost + Comments (43)

FaceBorg Open Thread: Markus THEE Funopticon

by Anne Laurie| October 20, 20217:27 pm| 133 Comments

This post is in: Media, Open Threads, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, Tech News and Issues, Assholes, Sociopaths

Facebook is thinking of rebranding itself with a new name. What should it be?

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) October 20, 2021

FUNOPTICON https://t.co/E80HF4bm1R

— kilgore trout, never attended a decision-point mtg (@KT_So_It_Goes) October 20, 2021

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… The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that, over the next several years, “we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.”

A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense scrutiny Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to The Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress. Antitrust regulators in the US and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling…

I got a sneak peek. https://t.co/Bn8AjyB7iT pic.twitter.com/VcRiutXTWE

— Jim Stewartson, Antifascist, #RIPQ ????????? (@jimstewartson) October 20, 2021

Eric Lutz, at Vanity Fair, on Zuckerber’s ‘metaverse’:

… On Sunday, the company announced it was hiring 10,000 people in Europe to help build its metaverse, which it has—predictably — cast in utopian terms. “At its heart is the idea that by creating a greater sense of ‘virtual presence,’ interacting online can become much closer to the experience of interacting in person,” Nick Clegg and Javier Olivan wrote in a statement. “The metaverse has the potential to help unlock access to new creative, social and economic opportunities.”

Ah, but will it? Facebook insinuated its way into millions of peoples’ lives on a similarly optimistic promise; over the last decade, though, we’ve watched as this supposed tool of interconnectedness promoted hate and conspiracy theories, exacerbated divisions, and turned otherwise normal people into compulsive scrollers and posters. The notion that what’s missing from contemporary life is more Facebook seems absurd. But such is the manifest destiny of Mark Zuckerberg, just one of an increasingly out-of-touch class of tech barons who seem to have convinced themselves that we might best solve the issues facing our planet by blasting off to a new one and improve our current reality by augmenting it. Zuckerberg hasn’t even been able to justify the existence of Facebook in this reality; now, he’s intent on imposing its dominance on the meta-reality he wants to usher in, whether anyone wants it or not. This, of course, has always been at the core of Facebook’s problems: an unchecked hubris that can’t be masked by a new name.

FUNOPTICON SEES ALL https://t.co/Emadv5818K

— kilgore trout, never attended a decision-point mtg (@KT_So_It_Goes) October 20, 2021

Can you find me something that combines ‘Eye of Sauron’ and ‘gaping anus’? Maybe with a suggestion of a hidden 6-6-6, for the OG conspiracy nutters?

FaceBorg Open Thread: Markus *THEE* FunopticonPost + Comments (133)

Open (Speculation) Thread: FaceBook Wants Us to Pay No Attention to Those Grubby Scriveners

by Anne Laurie| October 19, 202111:00 am| 54 Comments

This post is in: Media, Open Threads, Tech News and Issues

Facebook is upset about misrepresentations.

I just rolled my eyes so hard, I saw my childhood memories. https://t.co/tDtykcbdQf

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) October 18, 2021

I find it hard to imagine a better way to get everyone’s attention focused on the proposed Big Upcoming Story! But then, if I were smart like Mark I’d be rich like him, at least according to the many highly-paid Mark minions…

I've written dozens of stories off internal Facebook docs and discussions and I've never seen the company issue something like this. The only logical conclusion is that the company sees all my stories as 100% accurate. https://t.co/rV2YoyHP8W

— Ryan Mac ?? (@RMac18) October 18, 2021

Apropos of nothing, struck by this column two years ago from @ProfGalloway:https://t.co/WRscjQQteC pic.twitter.com/JII5VDJwcf

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) October 18, 2021

Open (Speculation) Thread: FaceBook Wants Us to Pay No Attention to Those Grubby ScrivenersPost + Comments (54)

Late Night Open Thread: The Political Horseshoe Is Real!

by Anne Laurie| October 19, 20211:22 am| 38 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Grifters Gonna Grift, Media, Open Threads

Bari Weiss has no access to a major media platform except for the one she quit voluntarily and the many other ones she appears on constantly #cancelculture https://t.co/SHzaKDAKvf

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) October 18, 2021

And very marketable!

david attenborough voice-over: as the life cycle of the common american media grifter comes to an end, she nestles comfortably among her far right companions and closes her eyes, her journey complete pic.twitter.com/CMwhXAdVLU

— ?? the cates of hell ?? (@caitlinmoriah) October 17, 2021

Just look around…

i can't even really make fun of him anymore because he's an artist. any dipshit can get paid half a million to take zoomcalls on Fox a few times a year. it takes a true poet to constantly sound like that, for free, from a Brazilian favela mansion. he's like Burroughs in Morocco

— halloween display name ?????? (@MenshevikM) October 18, 2021

I’ve said before that “the media” is the ideal destination for rich, well-connected mediocrities. You don’t have to have passed the bar or made it through med school (etc), but you do need the money to do internships and then live in NYC or DC on little to no pay https://t.co/RRvfigTC34

— Matthew Sitman (@MatthewSitman) October 15, 2021

Late Night Open Thread: The Political Horseshoe Is Real!Post + Comments (38)

Open Thread: All the News That Fits (Our Narrative)

by Anne Laurie| October 11, 202111:57 pm| 45 Comments

This post is in: Media, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment

“Why isn’t there a New York Times of the right,” with a large staff of reporters to turn up new facts and information, instead of primarily being commentary and opinion organs, asks @brianstelter on @cnn.

Intriguing question.

— Paul Farhi (@farhip) October 10, 2021

The obvious answer is that you can’t build a century’s reputation for probity within a single election cycle. (The corollary being that it’s much easier to destroy such a reputation than to build it in the first place.) And that’s before getting into whether that reputation was ever deserved — the NYTimes was, and to some degree remains, ‘the paper of record’ in America.

They had the Wall Street Journal but the journalist side is regularly subject to human sacrifice rituals by the Op/Ed board.

— zeddy (@Zeddary) October 10, 2021

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No one asks why there isn't a leftist hedge fund or a left Special Forces unit. Certain professional functions, behaviors, and interests align with certain views of the world. A symmetrical right-wing NYT is nonsense because that symmetry is impossible https://t.co/EBAysvlaWS

— Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) October 10, 2021

If we are talking about Opinion sections here, then sure. But I think the proposition suggested above is tethered to newsrooms and a stereotype that most MSM journalists are left-leaning.

— Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) October 10, 2021

the only thing intriguing about the question is that people still get paid suitcases full of money to ask it, when the answers are very obvious and have been for more than a decade. https://t.co/pQJ2pEtWWy

— BESTCOASTMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) October 10, 2021

right wing media is, itself, a *reaction to objective, fact-based journalism*. right-wing media exists, in part and in whole, as an offense and defense *against information that could otherwise harm the movement*. that was the point of it's creation. it always has been.

— BESTCOASTMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) October 10, 2021

and if you ask questions like these to "provoke discussion", you're just retreading the same cartwheel paths that have been cut into the ground since i was in high school over twenty years ago. no one who knows anything about this is unclear on how or why it's happened.

— BESTCOASTMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) October 10, 2021

there isn't an NYT of the right because the movement teaches young conservatives that the highest form of "journalism" is opinion-page trolling and funnels them to do that

— Max J. Rosenthal (@maxjrosenthal) October 10, 2021

asking why there isn't a "NYT of the right" is like asking why dogs don't have tentacles or why wasps can't sing an aria. if you are asking the question, you're making a category mistake.

— BESTCOASTMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) October 10, 2021

because every time it's asked, some EIC or publisher who doesn't actually care about any of the consequences of this sees dollar signs scroll in their brain about different ways they might be able to make money by grafting tentacles onto golden retrievers.

— BESTCOASTMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) October 10, 2021

Open Thread: All the News That Fits (Our Narrative)Post + Comments (45)

Friday Night Fights Open Thread: Both Sides!…

by Anne Laurie| October 8, 202110:11 pm| 71 Comments

This post is in: Media, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment

… Craven *and* venal = SAVVY!

Dems Disarray, part infinity

bonus: classic Beltway media theater criticism here, passing for analysis https://t.co/lZhR3hSbna

— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) October 8, 2021

contemporary political journalism as i understand it is the republican party flying the plane into the mountain and democrats attempting to stop it and journalists trying to debate the relative merits of flying the plane into the mountain.

— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) October 8, 2021

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Friday Night Fights Open Thread: <em>Both Sides!… </em>Post + Comments (71)

Media Mudlarks Open Thread: Anklebiters Assemble!

by Anne Laurie| October 3, 20218:36 pm| 109 Comments

This post is in: Media, Open Threads, Media Mudlarks, Our Failed Media Experiment

You can delete this disrespectful tweet, @AnnieLinskey, but the damage was done. You must have known that Joe Biden’s late son, wife and daughter are all buried in that cemetery. You owe Joe an apology. Oh, and by the way, his legislative agenda isn’t dying—it’s being negotiated. pic.twitter.com/5kGJwDKs2c

— Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 (@joncoopertweets) October 3, 2021

First time I noticed Linskey was when the Boston Globe assigned her to fangirl for Scott Brown by nipping at Elizabeth Warren’s ankles. Then the Washington Post, to their shame, recruited her (along with her coatholder, Matt Viser) to do the same job during Warren’s presidential campaign. Last ‘news’ I remember from her, she was gleefully assuming the Biden’s dog Major would be euthanized for nipping a WH staffer…

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One of many… pic.twitter.com/M1rFboZnFs

— Dawn M. (@dawn_macc) October 3, 2021

"Tee hee, I'm so edgy!" pic.twitter.com/y93TY2Mb1E

— Salad Boo-ter👻👻👻 (@shooter_salad) October 3, 2021

They chew ankles when that’s as high as they can reach. Just a klassy, klassy journamalist, that one.

I'm glad you deleted the tweet, but it wasn't just offensive, its entire premise is false.

What was the basis for you claiming Biden's legislative agenda is "dying"? Any rational person would look at last week as progress toward it passing.

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) October 3, 2021

I'm just here for the ratio, but as long as I have the floor, a quick question: Are you incapable of actually apologizing? The fact you deleted the tweet means you realize that it was grossly inappropriate and at a minimum you should say the words "I'm sorry."

— Ed Bott (@edbott) October 3, 2021

She’s still got the loyalty of Politico comrade-in-calumny:

@AnnieLinskey is not only a great reporter but a truly nice and generous colleague in an industry often full of egotistical jerks.

She apologized. We all make mistakes. Move on.

— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) October 3, 2021

She may be very nice but her tweet revealed either that she doesn't know her subject matter (Biden) well enough to know why he visited that cemetery or that she knows but decided inflammatory language would get more clicks. Either way, move her to a different beat.

— edgery #VaccinesAreSafe #WearAMask (@edgery) October 3, 2021

subtext of all of this is these freaks don’t like that they have to go to Wilmington https://t.co/7GcQXEJTfY

— Centrist 🤝Madness (@CentristMadness) October 3, 2021

DANG stands for Delaware Air National Guard. Their base is a two hour drive from DC. This is what I meant about how half the reason they're mad at Biden taking their war away is because they just fucking love these vanity shots riding in a military vehiclehttps://t.co/rcoKZqJC6B

— Syndicalist Weedle Collective (@Weedledouble) October 3, 2021

And we have reached Stage 5: pic.twitter.com/H89akpBpYU

— California Dem™️ (@moonbeamvotes) October 3, 2021

It was a badly conceived and insensitive tweet. I’m sorry.

— Annie Linskey (@AnnieLinskey) October 3, 2021

Maybe he was paying his respects to your dignity.

— AntifaHat (@Popehat) October 3, 2021

Media Mudlarks Open Thread: <em>Anklebiters Assemble! </em>Post + Comments (109)

zhena gogolia on Friday News Dump (Open Thread) (Oct 22, 2021 @ 1:37pm)

Ksmiami on Friday News Dump (Open Thread) (Oct 22, 2021 @ 1:36pm)

zhena gogolia on Friday News Dump (Open Thread) (Oct 22, 2021 @ 1:35pm)

eclare on Friday Morning Open Thread: Catching Up (Oct 22, 2021 @ 1:33pm)

schrodingers_cat on Friday News Dump (Open Thread) (Oct 22, 2021 @ 1:33pm)

This really is a full service blog.

Everybody saw this coming.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

We still have time to mess this up!

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

What fresh hell is this?

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

They are all Michael Cohen now.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

This blog will pay for itself.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Good luck with your asparagus.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Late Night Open Thread: Adieu, @DPRK_News

FaceBorg Open Thread: Markus THEE Funopticon

Open (Speculation) Thread: FaceBook Wants Us to Pay No Attention to Those Grubby Scriveners

Late Night Open Thread: The Political Horseshoe Is Real!

Open Thread: All the News That Fits (Our Narrative)

Friday Night Fights Open Thread: Both Sides!…

Media Mudlarks Open Thread: Anklebiters Assemble!