Reddit, very famously, used bot traffic at its inception to create the illusion of a community big enough to compete with Digg.

It was the OG “fake it till you make it” business.

As the company implements an increasingly draconian “ban every account that looks at me sideways” admin policy, I’m not sure if “2/3rds of the traiffc” isn’t lowballing it. There are entire threads - from initial post to bullshit bottom comment - that get created by bot traffic on the modern site. It’s a full blown hall of mirrors over there.

Absolutely nothing in the rules against it. “Being Offline” isn’t a protected class.

Facebook marketing across high schools and colleges is intense. And because it’s such a pivotal platform, you kinda need to get one and build up a - let’s call it a social credit score - just so you can endure admittance counselors and employers demanding to see your account as part of the screening process.

Sort of like getting a credit card as a teenager so you can prove you’re credit worthy enough for an apartment or car loan in your twenties. You just have to post generic mundane bullshit on the timeline and join generic mundane groups so people see you as “normal”.

Guaranteed a bunch of ex-girlfriends are getting extra double stalked.

How is targeting dissidents a revenue source?

States with large pools of disposable income and businesses with big PR budgets will pay top dollar to squelch activists and opponents.

Not in most countries surely?

How much is Palantir getting paid? How much is Black Cube getting paid? There’s always a pricetag on this work and plenty of organizations - especially fascist governments - are happy to outsource the work to friendly contractors.

First Amendment was always a polite fiction of the regime. Americans get to pretend they have it until they upset someone with actual power.

But you’re always free to run scams, to slander the weak and vulnerable, and to rally bigots into a lynch mob. So the idea of Free Speech remains valuable to demagogues and unscrupulous marketing goons alike.

Cunnalingus appreciators win again

I mean, the title may be true, but I’d hardly call this a crazy law. Draconian censorship is routine and endemic globally. It’s the Free Speech policy that’s “crazy”.

As more media is heavily monetized, the real appeal of censorship is as a revenue source. Surveillance, draconian administration, and targeting of dissidents all become income streams for the platforms.

Nothing unusual about that, either

You don’t think they are already using the surveillance state/surveillance capitalism in this process?

A lot of people are being picked up at their immigration hearings, at traffic stops, and at their jobs. This is all information already in the public record. You don’t need surveillance to be marked as a legal immigrant.

Two men holding hands? A line of people marching in a pride parade? Anyone with Grindr installed on their phones?

Take your pick.

It’s literally just guys in vans cruising around town snatching people. You don’t need anything particularly high tech for that

People aren’t being “disappeared” for nebulous and secret reasons. They’re being disappeared because they’re brown, they speak a non-English language, or they have some minor criminal citation in the public record.

We’re making up hypotheticals to be afraid of surveillance when the modern state is already snatching people up for very superficial and arbitrary reasons

This is in India, but coming soon to a country near you

It came here first

Okay but that was very useful and generally beneficial

we’re not a dystopia

Wasn’t half your coastline on fire just a few years ago? Aren’t you bleaching the entire Great Barrier Reef with coal mine runoff that isn’t globally marketable anymore? Aren’t you guys on a mukti-century campaign to do eugenics on the Aboriginal Peoples of the continent?

Y’all just like us fr fr.

Everyone needs to start dressing like an ICE Agent

Labour hasn’t been anywhere near the left since Tory Blair became leader

Well, there was that brief bright moment with Corbyn. But then he got the Julius Caeser treatment for siding with the Radical Islamist Extremism of the anti-genocide movement.

now they are hostile to the working class and the poor

Okay, but have you considered all the new AI they are helping create.

They did the thing they were supposed to do. They voted for the Ultra-Far Left Woke Labour Party.

However the vast majority of human knowledge isn’t current events.

Broadly speaking, everything was a current event at some point. As Wikipedia calcifies, it loses the ability to capture and collate new information as it is produced.

Even if Wikipedia were to never get updated again it is still extremely useful.

In the same way as any dated encyclopedia, sure. I’ve got a copy of my dad’s childhood encyclopedia, dated to 1954. Lots of interesting factoids in there, assuming your interest in the world is satisfied by an English speaking editor’s ability to consolidate the information available to his firm at their publishing deadline.

I’m sure you read it pretty regularly

I’ve found it less and less capable of keeping up with current events. Enshittification truly comes for us all.

It’s easy to focus on the negatives and miss what an absolute treasure it still is.

As a historical artifact and a demonstration of the potential for open-sourced editing, it’s a milestone. But we’re clearly in the twilight of the Wikipedia era.

The real future of the Library as we know it. Everyone’s just going to be asking Grok “Is this true?”

I’m generally more annoyed at how the early enthusiasm of participation on the site has died out in the face of paranoia and moderator mania. There are so many gaps in both the modern and historical backlog of citations and categorizations. But do I want to invest dozens of hours contributing to a site where a few admins are just going to tear all my work back out again on a bureaucratic technicality?

It is a site that’s alternatively being strangled to death by admins fearful of malicious actors and tore apart by wave after wave of sinister propagandists and hostile agents.

On its face… maybe? Until the Foundation falls into the hands of malicious management, anyway.

But do I trust that a public website can’t have their security breached by malicious actors? Of course not.

The only rational decision, given the cost associated with a poorly defined and maliciously enforced legislative code. I wouldn’t trust the UK courts to fairly adjudicate an alleged breach of the law, particularly if Reform Party gets into office and decides to punish Wikipedia’s management for “Wokeness” or whatever.

Lolz. Didn’t Trump just pardon Ross Ulbricht?

What a joke.

if they successfully fully take over, those same supporters now become the new threat

Quite a few of the current crop of deputized ICE agents are MAGA goons from four years ago. So long as you’re actively doing the gruesome work of ethnic cleansing, you’ll be given a pass.

No, we were actually liberating it from oppression.

You can find my short form username: Anon.

What could they find?

Yes, what possible community full of people named “Anon” could they find that would get you in any amount of trouble?

Cash and Monero being on the same tier is very funny

For the proprietary software, a lot of it is front-doors. Literally just pay-to-prey. Government agencies pay the big data companies to access their warehouses of scrapped data that come directly off their clients’ machines through explicit information harvesting protocols.

That said, it is technically harder to have a covert backdoor in an open source system. But it isn’t impossible, or even particularly impractical, so long as the vulnerability remains reasonably obscure. It would be naive to assume your standard array of linux oses are unassailable.

Sure. Although that’s just a matter of unplugging your computer from the Internet. Also, at least in theory, Linux isn’t actively leaking all your data into various Cloud services. Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive are just invitations for the NSA to paw through your file system.

I just can’t imagine how Linux protects you from posting on Facebook.

Another option and a more long term solution would be to go back to the roots and relearn the basics of living !

That requires large plots of arable land.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_Valley

The valley, named after the Spanish Mission Santa Clara, was for a time known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight for its high concentration of orchards, flowering trees, and plants. Until the 1960s it was the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world, with 39 canneries. The growing high-tech industry in the 1960s transformed the area from farmland to densely populated cities, and it became referred to as the Silicon Valley.

But we paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.

There’s no unfucking that chicken. We are living in a world that is substantially less arable than it was a century ago. We do not have an Eden to go back to.

Less criticism and more pity.

Sheryl Sandberg seems like a Grade A asshole to work for - possibly the only woman CEO I’ve ever heard of getting #MeToo’d. Zuckerberg is an absolute baby-brain completely up his own asshole with delusions of grandeur, outright comparing himself to Roman Emperors.

But if you get into the tell-all released by Sarah Wynn-Williams, all you really take away from it is that this company is as corrosive to the body public as it is ravenous for economic expansion. There’s no “keeping close” that’s going to be good for you in the long run. Might as well try to keep a rabid dog on a short leash.

I am very much a left-winger, but I still read right-wing papers and articles, I like to know what the other side is thinking.

I’m not above peaking in on Citations Needed or QAnon Anonymous to see how the other side lives. But the actual right-wing material itself is really ugly stuff, particularly in the modern moment. When it isn’t nakedly xenophobic or Mean Girls callously cruel, its just pumping your eyeballs and ear holes full of the dumbest fucking advertisements imaginable.

Not good to ingest that stuff.

They just need to throw some bread and games at us and we go one living as nothing ever happend.

I mean, there’s not a whole lot of alternative. It seems like the only two “valid” avenues of resistance are retreating from society into a hermetically sealed bubble and starting a podcast.

And Facebook as an integrated part of the international surveillance state has been firmly established since Snowden leaked the PRISM program.

Like, there are a lot of reasons to switch to linux and plenty of them are compelling. But its an absolute fantasy to believe you’re somehow immune to surveillance because you’re using the same software as Amazon’s EC2. Does anyone really believe the NSA hasn’t cracked Linux Mint yet?

Or, for that matter, that using a linux desktop is going to insulate you from being spied on via a public facing 3rd party social media forum?

Meta will still influence people, because a lot of the influence is through news aggregators automatically ingesting what Facebook shows as “Trending” and regurgitates it elsewhere.

So much of Facebook is just automated accounts responding to automated accounts in order to milk gullible advertisers. If everyone logged off tomorrow, I don’t know if Zuckerberg would notice.

A bunch of government agencies are being told to do business exclusively on X, The Everything App.

Musk’s also trying to build out a financials tool within his ecosystem and to incentivize more people to do business in his preferred basket of shitcoins.

He’s a monopolist, working with other monopolists to corner the Internet as a marketplace. He’s not looking to give people a choice to use other tools.

Building my entire data model around the Tienanmen Square copypasta. I can run this thing on a Raspberry Pi plugged into a particularly starchy potato and it reliably returns the only answer I’ve thought to ask it.

This is Whataboutism and you are clearly a Wumao agent sent here to destroy democracy.