Reviewer 2 @reviewer2@qoto.org

Repost with alt text (thank you, @erty!)

It was said that Charlie Chaplin was the only person in Hollywood Albert Einstein wanted to meet. In 1931, he got his chance to talk to the actor at the premiere of the film 'City Lights'.

"What I most admire about your art, is your universality," Einstein said to Chaplin. "You don’t say a word, yet the world understands you!"

"True. But your glory is even greater!" he told the physicist. "The whole world admires you, even though they don’t understand a word of what you say."

via @NobelPrize

For anyone who thinks social media offers a level playing field for creators:

Algorithms and content moderation are frequently biased against consumers & creators who are black, LGBT+ or disabled.

https://theweek.com/briefing/1023338/algorithm-ai-discrimination

https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/10/20893258/youtube-lgbtq-censorship-demonetization-nerd-city-algorithm-report

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/algorithmic-bias-especially-dangerous-teens/616793/

@mos_8502

My girlfriend's kid considered the possibility for a time that he was trans, and identified as female for a few weeks. Eventually he decided that he wasn't trans; so be it.

Here's what I'm seeing in that: it's not like GenZ admits to being trans only after they have no choice; they are accepting enough of the possibility that they explore it. Sometimes, like my girlfriend's kid, they'll decide that they aren't trans at all; but on the other hand, those kids who actually ARE trans will find a great deal of acceptance is already there for them, no battle required. Not everywhere in America, not every family, but a lot of them and more and more by the day.

I grew up GenX and I'm cishet. The thing is, in GenX days, there was enough pressure to be cishet that you WERE cishet unless you absolutely could not be. That's not how this should work. People should be free to explore without shame, discover who they actually are. I feel very comfortable as cishet, but I can't deny the possibility that it was simply so hammered into me that any non-cishet tendencies I otherwise might have had are no more.

One other random rambling thought: one thing we should prepare for, is the possibility of fluidity. Like, people may go through periods of being cishet but then they're gay or lesbian; or they may identify as male but then as female; and it's not a matter of rejecting identity, so much as fluidity is part of their experience. Keep an eye open for that and be accepting when you see it, because I suspect we're going to collectively realize it's a thing.

We all admire Amsterdam for having the vision to replace car infrastructure with bike infrastructure. We see the positive uplift in small business activity, and livability. 🙂👍🏿

Now imagine doing that in reverse. Replace relatively safely walkable and bikeable infrastructure with car infrastructure. In fact, put in freeways. Demolish entire thriving wealthy neighborhoods with freeways that don't serve the neighborhood.🙃

That's what we did to Black folk. That's how we destroyed Black wealth.

So take this post about twitter bots from @jsrailton one step further:
https://mastodon.social/@jsrailton/111869872361186177

Whats in it for the people running the bots?

Since twitters on-platform monetization is much lower than the cost of the bots, its not that.

This is bot seeding - you cant just stroll up brand new with a thousand new accounts, thats way too easy to detect and filter. You need to prepare the bots long beforehand, give them lots of organic-seeming activity, get them some algorithmic placement.

In other words, this is what an actively adversarial information platform looks like: the constant manufacture of informational weapons in plain view. These bots are prepped and ready to be deployed whenever a war needs to be sold, an election swung, a story drowned out, and so on. Bots dont exist because twitter is bad at moderation, they exist because it's extremely lucrative to rent bots to manufacture consent (also counting state actors, where profit and power are hard to disentangle).

In addition to the perverse incentive @jsrailton points to re: twitter not wanting to ban the paying bot customers, bots on twitter is also a symptom of its status as a theater of informational warfare, and how that is now core to its profit model.

When a government attempts to discredit The Hague, it's a sign something has gone terribly wrong in that country. My latest:

#cartoon #comic #politics #war #humanrights #gaza

Called it.