jocanib

"What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. As well as the traditional approach of buying media outlets and pouring money into the political parties that favour them, they devise new ways of protecting their interests.

"Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class."

"Hawley typically cites Big Tech, Hollywood and academia as the unholy trinity of elites that has laid masculinity to waste. He likes to quote the titles of old feminist essays from obscure journals to imply that all college professors and all Democratic politicians hate men. But even as he blames this ruling-class syndicate for depriving men of their ancient reason for being, his own fears sync with ruling-class fears from time immemorial. Elite men are anxious that their wives, workers and children will gain financial and intellectual independence, take their property and flee. And then the unkindest cut: Someone new — a lowly outsider who has been waiting in the wings — will take their place at the top of the social order."

It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:

1. Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)

2. Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)

3. Defederate (wait and see)

4. Defederate with the intention of staying defederated

5. Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too

It's all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.

In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?

I'm not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.

False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia's invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days.

Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.

Useful Masto thread on strategy.

"The research refutes Rishi Sunak’s insistence that the pandemic caused the record number of 7.2 million people waiting for treatment – for example for hip and knee replacements – that hospitals are facing. Covid has simply exacerbated a decline in quality of care, especially in access to urgent and emergency care, that was evident before the virus emerged in early 2020 and was also closely linked to staff shortages.

"“Most indicators suggest that the pandemic has heaped unbearable pressure on services that were already struggling to meet expectations for quality and access prior to the pandemic,” Morris said."

US researchers have spent years studying how conspiracy theories spread. Now they are accused of helping to suppress conservative opinions.

I thought this was a hoax the first time I saw this story. But apparently not. The man is becoming a parody of himself.

12ft.io link for those who cannot be arsed with the Indie: https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fuk%2Fpolitics%2Flabour-green-climate-change-starmer-miliband-b2372012.html

One of the most difficult problems for instances which do federate with Threads (full support for both them and the Fedipact) is the lack of moderation and very large number of bad actors on Threads. The ability to share block lists and automatically apply certain types of block would help a lot. Does anything like this already exist, or is anyone working on it?

So Kamath went to Florida, where she identified individual anoles and tracked their movements day in, day out. Kamath studied the anoles “in a larger area, in a longer period of time than anyone else had ever done,” says Losos, who is now at Washington University in St. Louis. But instead of revealing territorial differences, this massive dataset showed that the anoles weren’t actually territorial in the first place.

Kamath looked into the historical record to see where the idea of anole territoriality originated. It started with a 1933 paper that described frequent sexual behavior between male lizards in the lab. The authors had concluded that this lab behavior must be “prevented by something” in the wild, Kamath says, which they inferred was the males protecting territories. “The very first conclusion,” she says, “was based on a homophobic response to observing male-male copulation.” That shaky conclusion caught on, and later researchers assumed it to be true.