In the age of disinformation, this is the most important episode of Last Week Tonight yet.
John Oliver uncovers how Elon Musk took over Twitter and began funding accounts who spread disinformation, creating movements that cause serious trouble in the real world based on Twitter falsehoods โ even causing the Trump regime to launch security operations based on conspiracy theories invented by random Twitter users.
Twitter was shit long before Elon came along....
That's what made it attractive to him.
I happened to be watching it as your post came up in my feed.
I'd be interested in a poll as to whether people think the service is called X or Twitter. Twitter as far as I'm concerned.
It's run by a twit after all.
Xitter is the best of both worlds
@Cyberoutsider @randahl good! :D
im still dying to know if my internal security servers are still there. probably not. i built a system to scan the entire lan every day to find weird scary shit staff would light up without telling anybody
Chances are Elon's team knew about your servers before they set foot in the building, or at least knew what to look for. I think he's been paying people to fuck with Twitter for a loooooong time.
Awesome, hilarios and also scary.
Everybody - should leave Twitter / X and all of Elon Musks enterprises.
Star Trek next generation made the Borg much more appealing
YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED
Pros:
- free health care
- free living accomodations
- free nutrition
- automatic job placement
Cons:
- captain Janeway
- no upward mobility
- itchy rash from vinyl outfit
I go through the manual discipline of removing the tracking information for everything I link, which is everything from the โ?โ to the end of a share link offered by YouTube.
You can also simply post the share link to your own browser where he gets removed when the browser goes to the site and then you can just copy and paste whatโs in the search bar afterwards.
Because fuck Google
Late last year @Daojoan remarked that big tech lost the nine-year-olds because โthatโs AIโ signifies bullshit.
We need to add another phrase to our lexicon โ thatโs Twitterโ
Twitterโs chief attraction as a source of breaking news is gone. The reason to go is gone and the reason to leave is everywhere.
@randahl Today, in Nature, link at the end. The article is open access. Therein: Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects.
There is no excuse for being active on X with the single exception of attempting to actively fight disinformation.
Among users initially on a chronological feed, 7 weeks of exposure to Xโs algorithmic feed in 2023 shifted political attitudes and account-following behaviour in a more conservative direction compared with those remaining on a chronological feed, whereas switching the feed setting in the opposite direction, from algorithmic to chronological, had no effect.
@randahl A national treasure is John Oliver even though not from our nation originally. #PBS is near to my โค๏ธ as I have been taking donation calls for many years, but I learned tons from his recent schelacking of our gov for withdrawing ๐ธ๐ฒRural areas only source of emergency ๐ฆบ alerts and local news.
and Big Bird.
@randahl just visiting twitter makes you complicit with Musk's agenda through engagement and ad views that makes revenue.
I did recently stumble on this browser extension
https://github.com/DoingFedTime/PrivacyPlease
It redirects any twitter link to Nitter. Also, with Nitter you can generate RSS feeds of any account you still might want to follow. I generally don't like browser extensions, but this is actually pretty useful. Only downside, not on mobile, yet.
@randahl @percepticon A platform takeover is never just about speech. Itโs about who gets to subsidize which narratives, and at what scale. Once amplification is cheap, disinformation stops being โliesโ and becomes a logistics problem: routing belief through attention infrastructure. The scarier part is institutional responsiveness, when agencies treat trending as actionable intelligence, the feedback loop closes.
I love that you insist on calling it Twitter.
Randahl Fink
Clinton Anderson SwordForHire
Hamish Buchanan
Hiker Geek ๐ฒ๐ป๐ฒ
Ron Bowes
GhostOnTheHalfShell
skaphle
Viss
Dave ๐ถ
Orb 2069
Diabolic Preacher โ
Per Jakobsen (no anonymity)
๐โโฌDavid Sommerseth
Bruno Nicoletti
Adam Bullock
Stefan ๐ง
Frank Quednau
FossThought
brandoncarey
Robin Barton
Frank Heijkamp
Chery (Great Australian Pods)
TheNovemberFella โ๐ณ๏ธโ๐ ๐บ๐ฆโธ๏ธ๐ฐ๏ธ๐
leftofcentre
Crystal_Fish_Caves
glutto
AlexanderMars
๐ฏ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐โข
Justbeep