Olives @olives@qoto.org

Bluesky. Is. Not. Decentralized.

Or Neptune is headed towards the Earth, we have to send a small crew of people in a capsule to use this device someone put together in their garage to reverse the magnetic field to stop it.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/india-rupay-upi-payment-push-is-cutting-out-visa-and-mastercard/
"Regulators around the world are notching up scrutiny on Visa and Mastercard over the fees they charge merchants, but India has chosen a different path: Creating rival payment networks that are increasingly sidelining international card networks.

India’s strategy builds on the Unified Payments Interface, known as UPI, a nine-year-old system that lets consumers and merchants bypass traditional card networks by connecting bank accounts directly through QR codes and phone numbers."

Hollywood disaster films be like the Australian continent is headed towards America really fast destroying every island in it's way.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/metas-new-content-policy-will-harm-vulnerable-users-if-it-really-valued-free It's a good piece, although could've focused on FB's failings (focusing on a specific kind of speech) rather than stepping on the #FreeSpeech org landmine of what they ought to remove.

While I could continue to comment on Facebook, I don't think it'll be fruitful to do so without first waiting a while to see if anything happens / any further information comes along.

Now, local politicians across Japan seem to be concerned about financial censorship.

It's tricky to figure out how to react to Facebook here because there isn't really a precedent for their current behavior. So, a lot of it winds up being watch and see.

"random third party org" might come off as a bit harsh, but practically speaking, that is how they might appear.

For context, I only noticed the newer article after I started this thread.

In that light, it is tempting to promote something like this as a superior avenue to go down (or largely in part), however, this too has it's issues.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/metas-new-content-policy-will-harm-vulnerable-users-if-it-really-valued-free For the most part, the article is pretty good (I tend to comment on the negatives first).

Particularly, the more facts that they have to process, the higher the chances there are of things going wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_creep Scope creep can also be an issue.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/metas-new-content-policy-will-harm-vulnerable-users-if-it-really-valued-free Calling out the double standard (what they're focusing on) is smart, but I'd be hesitant to make a piece like this appear like it is calling for any particular kind of censorship.

I get it. No one wants Zuckerberg to be the arbiter of truth, and demoting content based on the say of a random third party org can be problematic. It would also always be a point of friction and contention, particularly when a fact check is considered to be inaccurate.

The EFF's proposed fact checking alternative isn't even that good. Let's suppose someone makes a post debunking an American myth like sex trafficking statistics. A small group of people might decide to "correct" that.

https://www.eff.org/tossedout/twin-horror-filmmakers-soska-sisters-suspended-twice-twitter
"Jen and Sylvia Soska are identical twin filmmakers known as The Soska Sisters. The sisters specialize in horror and have a cult following, with more than 50,000 fans on Twitter. But in July 2019, they faced a horror of their own: Their Twitter account was suspended right after they released the trailer for their upcoming film, a remake of 1977's "Rabid."

Stills from the film were featured on the cover of two magazines but were too much for Twitter's moderators, who suspended the account for containing too much "gore, violence, and hate,""

Making moves to lower the error rates (it's something which several civil society groups have called for for years), and addressing a politician's concerns is one thing (being diplomatic there is his job). Talking of moving to Texas is very specific.

On the other hand, it's hard to ignore the political moves which the company has made. We will have to see what happens. I suspect we might hear more in the coming days.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/eff-statement-metas-announcement-revisions-its-content-moderation-processes Since there have been enough comments on why this post isn't that good, maybe it's time to comment on why it's good.

I see quite a bit of discourse on free expression, which is frankly empty. For instance, "if only everyone used the fediverse, then we would live in a socialist utopia" or something, all the while ignoring how Facebook's algorithms censor people here in the real world (the fediverse has inter-instance censorship issues of it's own, although there aren't intrusive algorithms).

Facebook taking concrete steps to avoid relying on algorithms are real steps away from the techno-solutionist dream that Mark Zuckerberg has wrapped himself in for the past ten years (by his account, it might even be the past twenty years). They are not a dream. They are not an abstract concept. They are not a philosophical argument.