EDIT: I didn’t notice in the original post, the article is from 2023
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19707239
Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 – and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.
Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.
Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.
While he is accustomed to “offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats”, he told AFP, “in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed”.
I already accepted we’re already dead because oil & gas companies figured how to use doubt and false science to create a confusion among the general public (aided by the mass conservative Murdoch /Boloré media lol)…
It’s like tobacco companies in the 50s but we can’t afford so many years to wake the fuck up.
Yeah. I’ve been mourning the loss of Earth’s future for some time now. It’s very sad.
That said, we are not in a simple binary fucked vs fine situation. It’s a sliding scale. So even though things are very bad, we can always still take action to make them less bad. That is never not an option.
What do you mean? If it makes you feel any better, the Earth will be fine. Has been for a couple billion years. We did this to ourselves :(
I’m mean life on Earth, obviously. No one is saying that the planet is going to explode or disappear or anything like that. We’re talking about the climate, and life that depends on that climate.
And before you start coming at me with some “but but such and such life will still…” I’ll clarify again that there is a matter of scale here. A very large number of species that have been around for a very long time will soon be extinct (many have been lost already). So although we might still have mosquitos and jelly-fish for a long time to come, a lot of the complex life that is currently enjoying a comfortable and otherwise-sustainable life on Earth will no longer be able to do so; because of us. That’s what I’m referring to.
Yes, humans have does this to ‘ourselves’, but we are nowhere near the worst effected life in this situation. In fact, most of the ill effects on humans are just knock-on effects from other life failing. (In particular, reduced capacity to grow food is likely to be a problem for humans.)
Smoking companies still are with vaping (vaping companies literally sell to kids over the Internet and people literally are arguing it’s safe and healthy)
Which unfortunately shows that people don’t learn
Aaaaah i don’t want to be right :((
I have no clue why all these normal, non-racist non-political people still use twitter. It was bought for the obvious purpose of providing a safe space for conservatives, racists, incels, and other outcasts to society. Mastodon is a perfect replacement for it, and you can pick an instance that suits you. It isn’t owned by a mentally unstable billionaire!
The otherwise sensible people I know who are still on Twitter all say it’s because of a specific interest or group, and the community of people around it who are all on there as well. They all hate what it’s become but put up with it because nobody is sure where else to go.
There’s also a sense of FOMO when it comes to realtime news updates. Until government, news media, and personalities go somewhere and take all their followers with them, it will be hard to break away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Twitter hasn’t dropped below the critical mass of users necessary for the system to become useless. It’s still a major artery of media and social commerce, just one that’s been littered with landmines. Yes, its far more dangerous and difficult to navigate now, but its still better than posting into the uninhabited wilderness that is Bluesky or the exact same basket of shitty engagement posts that is Threads.
Counterpoint: Twitter will continue to maintain a critical mass of users until enough people move somewhere else to make it irrelevant. Continuing to use it only serves to further credentialize the platform, making it even less likely that users will find a new home someplace else.
Continuing to use it only serves to further credentialize the platform
The vast majority of users don’t care whether the platform is credentialized or not.
Idk either. But it’s really easy to stay where you’re used to, rather than do the work to set something new up
I agree with this assessment for the most part but one side of me plays devil’s advocate on this:
I sort of came to realize in the end that it was possibly purchased to push all leftists off the platform, allowing Musk to compete with Google and Facebook in heavily manipulating and censoring discourse in American society (and let’s be clear, they did. Just because it was an attempt to help “the good guys in the DNC” by Google and Facebook doesn’t make it not an open and shut case of treasonous manipulation of discourse.
As an absolutely prolific Twitter user pre-2016, I was very quick to leave….but at the same time, I eventually came to the sad conclusion that Xitter (pronounced Shitter) actually does need leftist voices as long as it exists. IMO, it (and Google and Facebook) should be dissolved, open sourced, decentralized, and socialized for the crime of treason/undermining democracy.
We (people of the fediverse with a strong sense of integrity) basically fled to our own decentralized, open source platform where we have 1 millionth of the reach with our voices. Being around such a cesspool where astroturfers working for Progressive think tanks and their conservative buddies would gaslight me about the popularity of things like Single Payer or student loan reform…which was not great for my well-being…But let’s not pretend that leftists that remain on the platform are bad people for doing so. An echo chamber has a way of brainwashing people. So, conservatism would be even stronger had more of our brethren not stayed.
Just a small counterpoint. I strongly dislike conservatism and the conservative ethos of “fuck you, got mine”…but perhaps they were playing 4D chess with us a bit.
Very true, but at the same time I feel that it’s a place where I won’t get censored just because google randomly thought my comment was offensive
People get censored on Twitter all the time.
Considering Meta is doubling down on disinformation, more people should go to Mastodon and Bsky over Threads or Twitter.
Is blue sky really ok? Considering who started it…
Hell no, fuck Bluesky. There is no reason not to adopt ActivityPub when trying to build an open, federated Twitter alternative. Except for power and control over the platform, its core protocol and ecosystem. Screw these guys, use Mastodon or anything on the Fediverse.
except they adopted atproto because it fixed issues with activitypub portability and sharing
This is their stupid excuse. They could still implement ActiviyPub as a secondary federation protocol. (Bluesky <-> Bluesky via ATProto, Bluesky <-> Fediverse via ActivityPub). They decided against it. It’s an intentional choice, and they’re just making up excuses.
i mean that’s pretty much already done via third party and endorsed by the bsky team (i can already follow mastodon users on bsky and bsky users on mastodon);
https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed
(shameless self promotion; my bsky account on my mastodon instance: https://tech.lgbt/@netkitten.net@bsky.brid.gy)
There are 3 issues with this:
- This is a third-party project, not an official part of Bluesky. Bluesky was never meant to work with ActivityPub, that was a clear design choice. This is just a workaround.
- It’s opt-in, meaning most accounts will never get federated, because people just aren’t aware that something like this exists. This especially applies to new users.
- It relies on a centralized service, Bluesky and ActivityPub servers don’t talk directly to each other, which would be required for true federation. Federation is always decentralized, this is the exact opposite.
I don’t understand why anyone should use Bluesky with cheap hacks to attempt to fix Bluesky’s poor design choices and or utter incompetence, if they could just use Mastodon and federate with the Fediverse over ActivityPub by default.
From a user perspective, Bluesky is just Mastodon with a recommendation algorithm. There is no other protocol required for this, everything could easily be done using ActivityPub exclusively. I will never care about Bluesky, since it tries to be the new Twitter, but the enshittification of Twitter began when they introduced their crappy algorithm, instead of just displaying tweets of accounts you follow in chronological order (like Mastodon does it).
to be fair it was originally not opt in but it was mastodon users who made an issue about it and forced the opt in version
and bsky has multiple algorithms because individual issues can create lists and feeds tailored to their needs.
it also has a straight forward following feed
X needs to start getting banned by governments and official governmental channels need to be moving out.
X is such a shitty social network, or at least its really disorganized, I get porn and gore in my home page without following people who share that kind of content, That doesn’t happen even in 4chan
Wow 4chan really changed huh
That was a year ago.
I just wish there were a way to preserve these records in a format with enough longevity to survive until the next sapient species evolves after we destroy ourselves and the human habitability of the planet for a couple million years.
They could use the warning against indulging greed and willful ignorance, and we deserve to have others laughing at our species’ expense through time. We inherited paradise just to set it on fire eyes wide open. It’s an extremely low bar, but I hope the next global apex predator chooses to do better.
We’re currently rhyming with history from less than 100 years ago (the rise of fascism), I don’t think having a warning is enough to prevent it from happening again.
We should as a community ensure Twitter\X lives forever…
If only as a place to keep certain social media users “entertained”
In all seriousness it does concern me how often I see such a wide variety of news agencies quote Twitter considering the amount of hate that goes on there
That’s dangerous. Look at what Fox is doing, as an entertainment company, to US politics across the country.
It’s a containment site; has been for a while.
This is why we need the SCP Foundation.
Not what you intended, but:
scp /dev/zero root@x.com:/path/to/databases
You can find utterly vile replies from blue checks on that site now, even on the most heavenly, innocent, morally correct tweet. It’s insane.
The bit in the square brackets in the title was mine, because that’s what I went into the article to look for. If you’re on Mastodon and interested in that content:
The text from the article:
Glaciologist Ruth Mottram had more than 10,000 followers on Twitter but left in February and joined an alternative scientists’ forum powered by Mastodon -– a crowdfunded, decentralised grouping of social networks founded in 2016.
“It’s really been a revelation in many ways. It’s a much quieter and more thoughtful platform,” she told AFP.
On Mastodon, “I haven’t had any abuse at all or even people questioning climate change. I think we’d become far too used to it on Twitter… I had blocked loads of accounts over on the birdsite (Twitter),” she said.
The Franklin Standards need to be on everyone’s radar. They don’t want your kids to learn about climate change.
Explain how and why Earth’s climate changes over time.
Climate changes continually at all time scales and Earth’s climate has never remained constant.
The Earth’s climate has varied greatly between glacial advances and retreats that correlate with cyclical oscillations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun (Milankovitch Cycles, precession).
In addition to being affected by the climate, the biosphere also has a significant effect on the climate, including self-regulation and resiliency (carbon-oxygen cycle, hydrological cycle).
Humans are just one of the many influences on Earth’s climate (urban heat island effect, wetland drainage, deforestation, agriculture).
Computer models of climate are simplified simulations of the real world, and make prognostications that are inherently uncertain.
Global weather forecast models (short term) and climate models (long term) are quite different in their design, their strengths, weaknesses, value, limitations, and uncertainties.
The wording is subtle, but you can see how they are attacking the idea of anthropogenic climate change. (There’s similar fuckery with evolution and some subtle anti-trans stuff.) Oil and gas companies have a lot of money and can afford a lot of propaganda. No states have adopted these standards yet - we think Florida and Texas will go first, then Oklahoma will follow. But this information warfare.
Humans are just one of the many influences on Earth’s climate
Proceeds to list a bunch of other things that are the fault of humans.
The size of Twitter’s user base and its ubiquitous use by celebrities and the media gave the platform an air of legitimacy that is what Musk vaporized his billions to get. He obviously didn’t value the brand or the workforce.
We need that false sense of legitimacy to keep getting chipped away in the eyes of mainstream society.
Ever since Nitter died I haven’t paid any attention to anything on musks’ little fiefdom at all.
I wish the political economics guys would move… I really miss Tim Sahay/70sbachchan & Mark Blyth.
Nitter died? I’ve been using it days ago. It’s not as before the Twitter’s API restrictions, tho, because it started to using data scrapping to fetch Twitter profiles and posts.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
It appears to have ceased development. AFAIK it still works if hooked into a “valid” user account, but since I don’t have one and am increasingly less likely to consider that path, it’s a moot point.
Among the sad stories about climate scientists having to deal with misinformation and abuse on the regular, suddenly, a unicorn: a statement purportedly by Musk that I wholeheartedly agree with:
Musk wrote in January: “People on the right should see more ‘left-wing’ stuff and people on the left should see more ‘right-wing’ stuff. But you can just block it if you want to stay in an echo chamber.”
Of course with the average Xitter post becoming ever more toxic, most people that have anything of value to add will probably leave sooner or later, whether lefties or righties or whatever.
“Both sides”.
The dumb masses always eventually follow the smart people. Reddit was full of mostly smart people in the beginning, if you can believe that.
And this is why I’m perfectly happy with Lemmy being the size that it is. There certainly are trade-offs - I wish niche communities were bigger - but is it worth bringing in all the other crap that comes in, like all the shit you see on Twitter? No, in my opinion.
Reality: you can stop fascism by deleting the app
Everyone: doesn’t
Oh, i didnt know this was like IT. i’ll tell my russians friends just to ignore putin’s regime
If by ignore, you mean stop paying taxes and working in any capacity for government in one go, yes would work. The only fear is being singled out, if more than 0.5% of the people do it, army wont even have the guts to get tanks out, they will join.
Touché
Venezuela has ~70% of the people against the regime, (nearly 90% counting the 5M that were not allowed to vote) and the needle isn’t even moving.
And in Russia being “singled out” is apparently a national tradition.
Sorry, I may be over pessimistic today.
I guess that’s a fair example. But logically sounds impossible for such control over the population to be had. If a group went out to the streets to oust the government, you would say at least maybe 45% would join.
No. Dunno where did you take that 0.5% from, it’s not empirically confirmed by anything.
Like 20% if you want to see civil war. Like 40% if you want to see regime change.
There is the semi-usually-known research that suggests 3.5% is enough for non-violent protests to reach changes. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/chen15682
0.5% is 1 in 200 people, essentially everyone knowing personally one person who is against the government. Maybe it isn’t enough.
But also, 0.5% homogenously (instead of country-wide being concentrated in Moscow), would be 600k people peacefully marching in Moscow streets
It doesn’t work. It’s some urban legend that this is sufficient. Even those 600k may or may not be stopped by a threat of real ammo being used. I’m not even talking about coordination.
One can “prove” anything with selectively chosen statistics.
They werent selectively chosen. " An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims." As well as any researcher who isn’t a complete buffoon would only look at statistics that has only a 2-3 sigma chance of only being stochastic noise.
The set of indicators, of course, was selectively chosen. The authors, of course, have decided which of these they consider important and which don’t, that is, decided upon weights and criteria.
