This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yet another demonstration of the dangers of allowing a communication channel to be controlled by an entity whose motives aren’t aligned with what the users of that channel actually want / need.
Fediverse is the best collective action I can think of against this kind of censorship.
It’s been wild over the last few years to see authoritarians cheering on corporate social media censorship, as though it will never be turned on them.
Fuck censorship.
Fediverse is the best collective action I can think of against this kind of censorship.
The ideal if the Fediverse, yes. The reality of it, with Lemmy in particular, is that we have admins with the power to censor or curate as they wish, and while they may not be able to censor the entire fediverse, if they control a large chunk of it, it still has an effect on what users can see.
Update (9/11/23): A TikTok spokesperson told Media Matters that “WGA has been inadvertently blocked as part of the platforms' protections against QAnon conspiracy theories.” Searches for “WGA” and related terms now appear to function normally.
For those fortunate enough to be out of the loop, one of the qanon catch phrases is "Where we go one we go all" which is some bastardized version of the three musketeers "all for one, one for all." It's often abbreviated as WWGOWGA, which you'll see on bumper stickers to helpfully let you know the driver has completely lost touch of reality so you should give them plenty of space. I've never seen it shortened to WGA, but that is plausible.
You left out the best part, which is like 90% of QAnon shit, they stole it from a movie. This is from the movie "White Squall."
QAnon people are fucking crazy man. How does anyone fall for this shit?
Because we have a cultic milieu and it’s an extremely syncretic conspiracy theory. Never quite got past the satanic panic? Q is fighting the Satanists who made rent too damn high. Think aliens control the government? They’re working with the Satanists but they’re on the beat of ensuring your kids disagree with you after going to college. Aware that the rich are the enemy? Trump is secretly at war with the elites. Just a massive fucking bigot? Who do you think the elites are? No seriously you can copy and paste the group you hate in there, it could be anyone that isn’t a majority, they could be redheads for all Q cares.
Qanon has absorbed everything from the new world order (alien edition, but also the other ones too) to flat earth to satanic panic to NESARA to the fucking protocols of the elders of Zion and cultural Bolshevism (though they call it cultural Marxism but still blame Jews). These are all things that used to get you laughed out of a room if not beaten up but now there’s an audience who will “yes and” the most deluded bullshit you can imagine.
Yeah this is a great point. I'd seen all the data points there but didn't really put together that's it's become this sort of meta-conspiracy that is almost infinitely malleable.
If it makes you feel any worse it’s not the first conspiracy theory to do that. Cultural Bolshevism fulfilled a similar role in the 1930s. It incorporated fears of Jews, Jesuits, Freemasons, homosexuals, communists… and yeah it went exactly how 1930s Europe went.
It’s important to remember, who and what only matters a bit. They aren’t attached to the fact that it’s aliens, they’re attached to the fact that it’s scary and unknown others who don’t think like them and they have to be responsible for everything getting worse. It’s why antisemitism is skyrocketing at the moment. Who that other is is absolutely irrelevant. Hate can be channeled where it needs gone.
A lack of critical thinking skills.
They probably used some bad RegEx like ^.*WGA$ because the QAnon people swap the “O” out for a “1” sometimes and the dev tasked with blocking QAnon shit was like, “Fuck it. I’m blocking it all.”
Ok yeah accidentally mistaking it for an abbreviation of wwg1wga makes sense actually
wwg1wga
Huh, what a terrible initialism.
Well that's good
This is good to know and I'm glad to hear.
As an aside, do we have a system for OP to pin this comment to the top? This context is pretty important.
Reminder: China isn't communist - it somehow cares about worker enfranchisement even less than the US.
My guess is that the studios and/or right-wing trolls reported WGA posts as abuse, and "the algorithm" did the rest.
Yep. Another problem with allowing content to be spoon-fed to us by The Algorithm.
Yeah my algo plays a fair amount of WGA content.
Hmm. How will I hack my Windows XP to activate it if I can't search for Windows Genuine Advantage?
WTF? What do they gain or lose from all of this!?
My guy do you really not understand the shared desire of corporations to prevent solidarity and organization among workers?
How often do you think organized protest goes uninterrupted by force in ~~mainland~~ China?
Probably money. Given enough money, I’m sure tiktok will ban any search term
Looks like it was an inadvertent block according to the update on that article. At least there's a reason for what's happened
China doesn't want people to know about the strength of unity
Not the World Canadian Bureau!
