Olives @olives@qoto.org

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/09/meta-political-content-moderation-threads From the looks of it, you can still opt into political recommendations, it's just not the default.

They're probably trying to avoid people getting mad at them.

Someone brought up that "China beats LGBT folks".

That is obviously not good, it also doesn't really surprise me. China is fairly traditionalist. The government is also known to censor some things related to "LGBT".

I honestly think Mozilla could have made a stronger case here, if they focused on the privacy angle, that one is pretty compelling.

I wouldn't say I go out of my way to delve into every nugget of knowledge about this, but I've seen quite a few people who like it. I don't think being judgemental is helpful here.

https://gizmodo.com/your-ai-girlfriend-is-a-data-harvesting-horror-show-1851253284 All the more reason to run things like this locally (and without the cloud service part).

"they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity"
I think that while they obviously have their #privacy issues (and that is a problem in it's own right), claims like this about technologies usually tend to wind up being wrong (or exaggerated). #ai

https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng/?i=001-230854 Well, here's the ruling.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/ Mozilla refocuses on the browser (although, they've jumped onto "AI", I suppose, because that is the hip thing to do nowadays) and winds down side projects.

https://ij.org/report/unaccountable/
https://ij.org/report/unaccountable/executive-summary/

"This study adds new evidence to the record using the largest ever collection of federal appellate cases, covering the 11-year period from 2010 through 2020. It is the first to use cutting-edge automated techniques to parse thousands of federal circuit court opinions and answer key questions about qualified immunity. The results suggest qualified immunity shields a much wider array of officials and conduct than commonly thought and add to a growing body of research finding the doctrine protects officials too much and our rights too little, all while failing to achieve its goals."

"Contrary to popular belief, qualified immunity is not just about police accused of excessive force. It shields a wide array of government officials and conduct.

While police were the most common defendants, fully half of appeals featured other types of government officials, either alongside or instead of police. Prison officials made up the next largest share, but in more than one in five of all appeals, or 21%, defendants were neither police nor prison officials. These other officials included mayors and city managers, university and school officials, prosecutors and judges, and child protective services workers.

Excessive force was alleged in just 27% of appeals, followed by false arrest at 25%; some alleged both. But the third largest category, alleged in 18% of appeals, encompassed violations of #FirstAmendment rights, including speech, association, and religious liberty.
Altogether, only 23% of appeals fit the popular conception of police accused of excessive force."

#HumanRights

It's funny how Facebook is really puritanical and "Meta's" logo looks like a pair of boobs.

Apparently, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) doesn't approve of weakening end-to-end encryption, so that's cool.

https://theintercept.com/2024/02/08/facebook-instagram-censor-zionist-israel/

"Meta’s internal rules around the word “Zionist,” first reported by The Intercept in 2021, show that company moderators are only supposed to delete posts using the term if it’s determined to be a proxy for “Jewish” or “Israeli,” both protected classes under company speech rules. The policy change Meta is now considering would enable the platform’s moderators to more aggressively and expansively enforce this rule, a move that could dramatically increase deletions of posts critical of Israeli nationalism."

They point to the fact that this person also wanted to kill someone they accused of being a "nonce" as evidence that they're indiscriminate. To me though, that sounds a lot like elements of QAnon. Regular people don't typically go around accusing random ass people of that.

Transphobia and QAnon type nonsense often go hand in hand, so this actually makes an *even more* compelling case to me that it was transphobia.

Meanwhile, the government would rather blame "gore" on a "fringe site", presumably, so they have an excuse to seize more Internet censorship powers (if what I put here is speculative, then that, only more so).

It's suspicious that someone who is trans gets murdered in the U.K. (which is known to be hostile against trans folks, that ain't a secret) and the government tries to put the blame entirely on someone watching "gore" on some fringe site (and it's supposed to have nothing to do with hostility for someone being trans).

No, Nadine wasn't the one who was really railing against end-to-end encryption (although, honestly, she probably doesn't like it either). That was the British Home Secretary Priti Patel (who is also no longer part of the Cabinet).

I don't think people actually realize just how toxic and destructive Nadine Dorries was to British Internet policy and the discourse around that. She's not even part of the Cabinet any more.