Twitter Dee & Twitter Dumb

[Thad]

Man, it's a reference to an old meme AND it's a takedown of Christmas, my least favorite time of year and holiday?

Not really a takedown of Christmas so much as a takedown of the phony War on Christmas.

I can't find the complete segment, but the beginning is the best part (and probably my favorite Sam Bee segment OAT). Bill O'Reilly had played a clip of Bee joking that "Christmas is the only government holiday that's also a religious holiday, so Christians can celebrate Christmas and everyone else can celebrate the true meaning of separation of church and state" to stir up the usual annual outrage at those godless liberals, not bothering to mention that the clip was a year old. Stewart says "I don't really remember that, I don't think it was recent. Sam, do you remember that?" and she comes out, wearing the same outfit from the clip only now she's nine months pregnant, and says "Yeah, you know, I think that clip might have been from last year. It's subtle, but it's my highlights; they're kind of a honey in that clip, and obviously they're more of an auburn now."

Or words to that effect.

[Friday]

"God, those leftist snowflakes get offended at EVERYTHING," says man who is currently having a full-blown meltdown temper tantrum over overhearing someone say "happy holidays" to someone else at a mall

[Yoji]

There have been longer and better takedowns, but the War on Christmas is kind of a gimme for grifters like Bill O'Reilly and Alex Jones. Saying someone in specific is an evil puppet master can open you up for libel lawsuits, which Jones is finding out HARD.

But saying some nebulous nefarious "them" is attacking Christmas, it's so ridiculous and vague that nobody can really consider themselves defamed by it. And it still pushes enough anger buttons to get their audiences to keep buying their eagle tear boner pills or whatever.

As usual, it's not clear how much they actually believe this and it doesn't really matter. They're toxic and dangerous whether they're stupid and/or evil.

[Thad]

Saying someone in specific is an evil puppet master can open you up for libel lawsuits, which Jones is finding out HARD.

But saying some nebulous nefarious "them" is attacking Christmas, it's so ridiculous and vague that nobody can really consider themselves defamed by it.

Eh, "evil puppetmaster" isn't really defamatory either; it's an opinion, not something quantifiable.

When you start getting into specific factual claims, that's where stuff can get defamatory.

(Of course somebody can sue for defamation even where there's no merit to their claims whatsoever, but that's true no matter what the statement is, whether it's vague or specific, etc.)

Alex Jones is also a less-than-ideal example because he didn't lose those defamation suits on the merits, he lost by default because he didn't bother showing up to court. I think he still would have lost on the biggest counts even if he'd had good counsel to defend him, because he very definitely was making false factual claims that caused harm and which he had good reason to know were false, but I think he could have successfully defended against some of the counts that veered more on the side of name-calling and rhetorical hyperbole.

[KingRoyal]

The latest incident on Twitter is that a conservative account with half a million followers tweeted out images of a violent child sexual assault, got banned, only for Elon to quickly intervene and reinstate the account after deleting the images

[Büge]

mmmyup

[Mongrel]

I will not describe it, but not only was it CSE imagery, it was the highest legal severity CSE imagery.

[hngkong]

I will not describe it, but not only was it CSE imagery, it was the highest legal severity CSE imagery.

So, this whole thing is really, really bad. The guy who posted it has flipped between "I never posted it, where's the proof" and an argument that he posted it to bring awareness to the crime in the video. The crime of which the guy who made the video is already in jail for. The guy who posted it also decided to put watermarks of his logo on the images. He also was one of the Nazis that Elon paid. And of course, the blue checks are out defending both of them.

[Mongrel]

I will not describe it, but not only was it CSE imagery, it was the highest legal severity CSE imagery.

So, this whole thing is really, really bad. The guy who posted it has flipped between "I never posted it, where's the proof" and an argument that he posted it to bring awareness to the crime in the video. The crime of which the guy who made the video is already in jail for. The guy who posted it also decided to put watermarks of his logo on the images. He also was one of the Nazis that Elon paid. And of course, the blue checks are out defending both of them.

Yeah, using the word "bad" here is akin to using the word "big" to describe the entire known and unknown universe.

[hngkong]

I will not describe it, but not only was it CSE imagery, it was the highest legal severity CSE imagery.

So, this whole thing is really, really bad. The guy who posted it has flipped between "I never posted it, where's the proof" and an argument that he posted it to bring awareness to the crime in the video. The crime of which the guy who made the video is already in jail for. The guy who posted it also decided to put watermarks of his logo on the images. He also was one of the Nazis that Elon paid. And of course, the blue checks are out defending both of them.

Yeah, using the word "bad" here is akin to using the word "big" to describe the entire known and unknown universe.

I used a different word initially, but yeah. Just at a loss of words and shocked that it's basically not being reported on.

[Mongrel]

Not reported on, I can get because the news media is just fucked regarding Muck, like full pants-on-head idiotic pandering to him, as they've been for years, but FFS, I at least want to hear that somewhere a DA or PD is opening a case into this. Couldn't aim cops at a better target than Elon.

EDIT: I was gonna fix that "Muck" typo, but now that I think about it, nah, that stays.

[Thad]

Not reported on, I can get because the news media is just fucked regarding Muck, like full pants-on-head idiotic pandering to him, as they've been for years

washingtonpost.com has it on the homepage: Twitter under fire for reinstating account that posted child sex abuse (article dated yesterday with an update today)

But yeah I couldn't trivially find it on the other major news sites I checked.

[KingRoyal]

The Duck Duck Go news tab for searches of both "Twitter" has articles at the 8 and 9 position, one from WaPo and the other from a site called The Street, but that's all, a search for "X"* turns up nothing. It's certainly a bit suspect that an account can disseminate CSAM to his 500,000 followers, Musk can attempt to cover it up and no one seems interested in picking it up

Especially since a few days ago a bunch of sites were running with a story that Mastodon had a "child porn problem" because an instance in Japan that was poorly moderated was allowing users to post it, even though the instance had already been removed from the federated master list. Seeing sites like The Verge mislead on how Mastodon works was particularly egregious considering they should know better

[Mongrel]

Not reported on, I can get because the news media is just fucked regarding Muck, like full pants-on-head idiotic pandering to him, as they've been for years

washingtonpost.com has it on the homepage: Twitter under fire for reinstating account that posted child sex abuse (article dated yesterday with an update today)

But yeah I couldn't trivially find it on the other major news sites I checked.

I'm honestly confused about the incredibly cushy ride Musk gets in the media (relatively speaking - some things he does can't be ignored by anyone). First because, as I said, he doesn't always get this treatment so it's inconsistent, but second, AFAIK he doesn't specifically court or try to buy or influence media in a comprehensive way?

Some media personalities, sure - but like his Twitter payouts, he's at most using a lopsided scattergun that usually only hits targets he sees in the moment. That should in theory leave many media workers outside, where they would profit handsomely not from lionizing Musk, but from tearing him down.

If nothing else, "Musk reinstates banned account which posted child porn" is one hell of a clickbait title, and better still, it's true!

[Upthorn]

It's almost like capital interests have captured the reporting industry, and they now fear to run stories criticizing any rich person

[Thad]

It's almost like capital interests have captured the reporting industry, and they now fear to run stories criticizing any rich person

I won't deny that's a problem in general, but given that "Musk does something stupid" has been the news media's favorite chew toy for the past eight months or so I'm skeptical that's the cause in this specific case.

If I had to guess, I'd say reporting on a specific person posting CSAM is the kind of thing that makes the legal department nervous. It's one thing to report that Twitter has a CSAM problem in the aggregate; it's another to name names. That's the kind of thing where even if your reporting is true and accurate, it's still probably going to get you sued for defamation.

[Mongrel]

Also it's not entirely down to capital. As (I think?) Sharkey described it earlier, journalism has suffered immensely by going from a vaguely disreputable job where high school or college dropouts who could write reasonably well and had a talent for sticking their nose where it didn't belong could find a home, to a career for moneyed families to steer their otherwise useless third or fourth sons into.

I mean, that's still capital having a negative effect, sure, but not directly or as part of any particular plan.

[KingRoyal]

Accidentally hit my Twitter bookmark and noticed that all of the X branding had been removed and the Twitter branding put back in its place, which means that one of Musk's lawyers finally got through to him

[Thad]

It could mean a lot of things. It could mean somebody pushed some old code to production. There are so many potential points of failure for something implemented this quickly with this little planning.

I know we talked about the big stupid X already, but did we cover the part where it's a permit violation?

[KingRoyal]

It could mean a lot of things. It could mean somebody pushed some old code to production. There are so many potential points of failure for something implemented this quickly with this little planning.

True! Though I also noticed that x.com is redirecting back to twitter.com rather than the other way around, and that's presumably something that's not gonna happen because of the CI/CD pipeline

I know we talked about the big stupid X already, but did we cover the part where it's a permit violation?

This is the other thing that makes me think it's an intentional switch back. That and Musk's history of saying "From now on Twitter is going do things this way" before switching back to the old way a few days later

Though realistically the two options are either incompetence or incompetence with extra steps