herid @herid@qoto.org

Made this for all the people who pay Elon Musk $8/mo to feel important:

Tucker Carlson, Useful Idiot.
Today's NY Times piece below further confirms my scoop from March: The Russian government instructed pro-Putin media to feature Tucker Carlson in their reporting on the Ukraine war.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/exclusive-kremlin-putin-russia-ukraine-war-memo-tucker-carlson-fox/

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/technology/russia-state-tv-ukraine-war.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that the incident with the supposed Musk stalker appears to have nothing to do with the jet tracking account. It occurred 26 miles from the airport, and a full day after ElonJet placed the plane in Los Angeles. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/18/details-of-musk-stalking-incident/

Morning #COVID numbers from #China:

🦠10: % of world’s population effected.
🦠16: R value now (High to date 10-11.)
🦠90: % of the population >18 yo who are vaxxed (50% of elders boosted)
🦠800 million: new cases in next 90 days
🦠500,000 to 1 milllion: likely deaths in 90 days.
🦠Doubling time: hours. (Worst here was 3 days.)
🦠New COVID mutations: 🤷🏻‍♀️

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/12/15/1143002538/china-appears-to-be-facing-what-could-be-the-world-s-largest-coronavirus-outbrea

https://t.me/liveukraine_eng/3095 🇵🇱🇺🇦 Polish support for Ukrainians and Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia may reach $9 billion (40 billion zlotys), of which almost $2 billion is military aid.
According to the most conservative estimates of the publication, $ 3.6 billion (15.9 billion zlotys) is state aid. Private aid only in the first three months after the (more) #Ukraine #News #War #Russia

If this holds as more eyeballs are on him, this is bananas:

Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, the marquee Wall Street firms on Mr. Santos’s campaign biography, told The Times they had no record of his ever working there. Officials at Baruch College, which Mr. Santos has said he graduated from in 2010, could find no record of anyone matching his name and date of birth graduating that year.

Who Is Rep.-Elect George Santos? His Résumé May Be Largely Fiction. |
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/19/nyregion/george-santos-ny-republicans.html

This is the #Facebook death-spiral: charging to people to follow to reach you, and burying the things they say in a torrent of payola-funded spam. It's the vision of someone who thinks of other people as things to use - to pump up your share price or market your goods to - not worthy of consideration.

As #TerryPratchett's #GrannyWeatherwax put it: "Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."

32/

Musk sees Twitter as a publisher, not a social media site:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604588904828600320

Which is why he's so indifferent to the collateral damage from this payola/hostage scam. Yes, Twitter is a place where famous and semi-famous people talk to their audiences, but it is primarily a place where those audiences talk to each other - that is, a #PublicSquare.

31/

This is why governments are handing down new #interoperability mandates: the EU's #DigitalMarketsAct forces the largest companies to offer APIs so that smaller rivals can plug into them and let users #walkaway from Big Tech into new kinds of platforms - small businesses, co-ops, nonprofits, hobby sites - that treat them better.

20/

Or you might claim that it's like "running Wendy's ads [on] McDonalds property," rather than turning to your friends and saying, "The food at McDonalds sucks, let's go eat at Wendy's instead":

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1604559316237037568

The truth is that any service that won't let you leave isn't in the business of serving you, it's in the business of harming you.

17/

Facebook downranks content that links to other sites on the internet. Instagram prohibits links in posts, limiting creators to "#LinksInBio." Tiktok doesn't even allow links. All of this serves as a brake on high-follower users who seek to migrate their audiences to better platforms.

10/

But social media sites stay big thanks to high #SwitchingCosts: the more you have to give up to leave a social media site, the harder it is to go:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Nature bequeaths some in-built switching costs on social media, primarily the #CoordinationProblem of reaching consensus on where you and the people in your community should go next.

3/

#ContentModeration is fundamentally about making social media work better, but there are two other considerations that determine how social media *fails*: #EndToEnd (#E2E), and #FreedomOfExit. These are much neglected, and that's a pity, because how a system fails is every bit as important as how it works.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free/ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

1/

In the lead up to, during, and following the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, Mandiant identified information operations activity from various foreign state-aligned campaigns, including those it assessed to be operating in the interests of #Russia, #China and #Iran

A few interesting examples in here
https://www.mandiant.com/resources/blog/information-operations-2022-midterm-elections

I cannot repeat this enough right now.

Musk has given journalism, and the news business a once in a generation gift.

Don't squander it.

Take control and ownership of your audiences in a way that only federated social media like Mastodon affords.

Do the two-step:

Step 1: Get onto Mastodon.

Step 2: Launch your own server to go with your website.

#news
#journalism

⚠️​It appears that #Paxlovid is not as easily obtained as the #Ontario Government process listed online would indicate.

You cannot just walk into a pharmacy & ask for it like cough syrup.

It's at each pharmacist’s discretion to dispense and most will NOT if the patient does not have recent kidney function labs or a prescription from their doctor or a #Covid assessment site. 👇​https://www.ontario.ca/assessment-centre-locations

#WearAMask #CovidUnderTheXmasTree

https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1002565/ontarians-can-now-visit-local-pharmacies-for-paxlovid-prescriptions

I sense that when most people think of "canned music," they think of Muzak in the grocery store or the soft jazz station that's always on in their dentist's office. But the term, which comes from John Philip Sousa, was originally coined to refer to a much earlier phenomenon. A thread…

Welcome, new people of Mastodon!

Some of the servers are so excited you're here that they're a little overwhelmed (with joy). Please be patient with them and know this isn't normal.

They'll be back to normal soon, like a dog that settles down a few minutes after company arrives.