- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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”.
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The dumb masses always eventually follow the smart people. Reddit was full of mostly smart people in the beginning, if you can believe that.
isn’t that why the hippie movement ended?
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.
I remember that /r/all was actually pretty educational back in the day. There were specific users that you would know by their user names that always posted something insightful.
The decline started somewhere around 2011-2013.
I blame Digg for failing. It increased Reddit’s popularity too fast, which was a bad thing bringing too many people, fucking up the culture reddit had built (which wasn’t much, but it was ours).
Oh man, in 2024 I never thought I’d see some Reddit oldhead still complaining about the eternal September following Digg’s fall…
It got much, much worse a few years after that. I was amazed to see my first “conservative” on reddit.
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.
I gave her a follow. She seems like a nice lady. I hope she enjoys the fediverse a little more than the “nether world”
Is there a list of all scientists that made the move to Masto?
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!
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.
Is it actually better than nothing though?
Either these are tolerant folks or someone we might be better off if they stayed on 4twitter.
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.
Respectfully, you were the one who pointed out the impact of the Network Effect.
The adoption of a product by an additional user can be broken into two effects: an increase in the value to all other users (total effect) and also the enhancement of other non-users’ motivation for using the product (marginal effect).
Thus, users don’t need to understand the credentials of the platform if the network effect is strong enough, but as users leave the network, the value (credentials) of the platform as a whole decreases.
Another way to think about it is that the amount Twitter “matters” is directly related to how much we collectively agree it matters. While not directly transferable, I’d suggest that Keynes’ Animal Spirits concept can help us to understand why this might be the case - prevailing attitudes towards a platform can have a profound impact on their value.
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 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 conservatives…but perhaps they were playing 4D chess with us a bit.
What the fuck are you talking about man?
Made sense to me
Who do you think you’re talking to?
Everyone from the lemmy.blahaj.zone instance that I’ve interacted with or seen have been trolls. Those guys are super weirdos idk what their deal is. It’s baffling seeing what they claim to stand for
Ahh. Thanks for the heads up. I reported that stupid comment without prejudice.
I thought they were supposed to be a pro-trans, inclusive community but I’m thinking it’s mostly just astro-terfing trolls. Kinda like ml or lemmygrad or beehaw aren’t really leftists, just pro-authoritarian incoherent apologist edgelords.
It’s like they’re not even trying to interact with good faith.
I wouldn’t be shocked if it was astro-terfing
Tell me more about Beehaw, I know about the trouble with lemmy.ml and lemmygrad, but so far haven’t heard anything about Beehaw.
Well, beehaw is kinda like ml but less hinged at times. I don’t block instances, only users and communities. Some of beehaws communities are quite good and friendly. The politics ones…well, I don’t see those anymore.
Sometimes it feels like there grownups in there who grasp nuance and empathy and at other times it feels like it’s full of ex-4channers who think they’ve grown up.
You’re gearing up to drop the navy seal copypasta aren’t you?
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.
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.
It’s still usable if you’re not on English side of Twitter.
For example, recent Indonesian political movement relied on Twitter for discussion and updates. Mastodon or any fediverse is simply too niche and most people don’t have money to fund local general instance. There were several local fedi instance (Mastodon and Lemmy), but all of them quickly dead for low donation.
Japanese-side is still alive (in positive manner) but people are making backup account on Bluesky and Japanese Misskey instances.
Considering Meta is doubling down on disinformation, more people should go to Mastodon and Bsky over Threads or Twitter.
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.
Is blue sky really ok? Considering who started it…
i don’t think jack funded it he was just an original board member; but he left the board a month or two ago.
Yeah, it seems pretty good.
I’d agree. For now at least it’s pretty good.
The same Peter Gleick caught on forging documents to prove his point
I don’t even know who this guy is, but your screenshot plus a quick search says this guy added one forged document to a collection of legitimate documents released from the Heartland Institute. That was certainly not the right thing to do, but let’s at least be fully honest about it.
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.
I just wish there were a way to save 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 greed and 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.
If we can’t abandon Obvious Disaster Twitter we definitely can’t abandon the obvious disaster that is everything we think of as normal that’s driving civilization off a cliff.
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 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.
Honestly not sure why anybody gives two fucks about celebrities anyways, some are okay but the underground scene has the realist people, because they live in the real world. Seeing through the illusions that what people think or believe in regards to some highly regarded opinions because somebody is popular due to ‘pop culture’ is a blessing. I say let Elon Musk have them. I’m not going to read it. Only twitter I read is the twitter cross-post spam of screenshots people post.
Zuckerberg telling us all what we already knew about being pressured to censor COVID, Hunter Biden, and whatever other posts goes to show left is evil, right is swinging around monkey bars like school children. Social media is a giant playground where everybody’s being swayed by their emotions and being tricked and lead around likes horses.
It’s crazy.
At least Elon’s having fun with it all.
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
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
Pardon my ignorance. I may have a mild brain injury.
Could you perhaps rephrase?
I’m not sure if I understood what you said.
In IT (the movie and, i presume, also in the book) ::: spoiler spoiler The kids realize that IT feeds on attention and that the only way to fight it is by ignoring it :::
Imo, shitter (X) is a cesspool as it is now, but I dont believe that leaving it to the hordes is a solution to anything. We need a better approach to deal with this people.
Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant IT as in information technology. Was very confused.
Brain still good yey
edit: typo. perhaps I need to make that appointment
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.
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.
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.
Huh… “vituperative”, I like it.
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.
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 :((
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.)
Never understood why nobody calls him an “american oligarch”
I mean, he’s actively supporting the opposition (Trump) right now. Were Trump to win then he’d certainly be in a very good position within Trump’s desired oligarchy. Until then he’s just a very rich asshole whose main major concrete political power comes from his ownership of Twitter and (largely artificial) audience. If anything his support of Trump kneecaps him in his ability to run his businesses as the Biden and hypothetical Harris administrations are not as likely to let him keep getting away with all the blatantly illegal shit he keeps doing.
Michael Bloomberg OTOH fits the term pretty well, as he’s a very major donor to the DNC and that certainly makes him very close to the ear of the president and policy decisions.
Oligarchs are only for the rich outside of the Thirteen Eyes. American oligarchs are called lobbyists and job creators.
