Yes, the solution is to label everything. You should label your comment as known to the State of California to cause cancer, or birth defects or other reproductive harm.
If the whole point of your account is to make people laugh with the imaginary pretense that your posts are coming from another person/institution then yes, the potential readers should know it's fake.
A comic strip artist that I follow constantly puts fake words into famous peoples' mouths in his newspaper sections, but even tough I know it's fake I can still partake in the momentary delusion and get a good laugh
If potential readers cannot differentiate between reality and parody they're either deep in a conspiracy rabbit hole, or reality has become too crazy. Both these cases would again be a valid reason for parody to point out this fact.
Jokes work by surprising the audience. Pretending to be someone else before revealing the truth is just one method of doing this, and requiring to label it as parody is like explaining the punchline before the joke. The Onion recently wrote an actual legal document on exactly this and how required labelling of parody violates free speech.
Can you impersonate someone as a joke? No.
Parody is not identity theft.
When a comedian "impersonates" a politicians we all partake in a temporary delusion aided by the comic's ability to mimick the politician. Everyone knows it's fake but we laugh nonetheless.
Making a hyper-realistic deep fake video of a politician saying absurd stuff is not free speech without appropriate labelling.
You've characterized this as "impersonation" in order to exclude the possibility of parody, it's merely sophistry. This is a view of parody that falls apart when you look at actual parody. There have been many times I've been absentmindedly reading an article, been incredulous, and then realize it was from The Onion.
I have characterized it as impersonation because this is exactly what has been done in this case.
It's funny that you mention The Onion, because they are impersonating nobody since there is no legitimate news outlet named "The Onion". Their articles might mimick the writing style of legitimate ones, but they are not claiming to be CNN or Fox.
> Can you impersonate someone as a joke? No. Parody is not identity theft.
Can you point to case law that makes this clear? Intent highly matters and I don't see anyone facing legal repercussions for impersonating someone for comic intent or even politically motivated intentions. Not to mention, Twitter already has a mechanism identifying verified accounts, doesn't it?
> Making a hyper-realistic deep fake video of a politician saying absurd stuff is not free speech without appropriate labelling.
Lying is mostly not against the law and is covered under free speech. In fact in 2012 the Supreme Court ruled that lying can be Constitutionally protected under free speech. [1] Whether or not such video would be ethically wrong is another matter. But I think you are wrong is in saying it is not free speech.
If "they" try to stop him from voicing his opinions, you'd have a point. But "they" only stopped this person from imposing his opinions on people who had chosen instances whose policies involved a certain style of moderation.
The benefit of the fediverse is exactly that any moderation or blocks do not stop your speech - no matter if it's actually abhorrent or just unpopular with the wrong people - it merely lets people opt out of listening to you.
"style of moderation"? what does that mean? I don't agree with what GP said, but on what basis could you moderate his posts? Because they aren't "true"? In that case why not say that your instances bans all "untrue" things? how simple!
Consider HN. Try to post a thread of puns here, and you will be flagged. Do it often enough, and you will be blocked. That is a style of moderation.
Consider Reddit. Post pun threads there and you'll likely be heavily upvoted instead. That is a different style of moderation.
To take more extreme examples, there are fediverse instances that consider racism to be ok, and there are instances who don't consider it ok but won't block other instances as a matter of principle, and there are instances who will block whole instances if they don't moderate racism. Those are all styles of moderation.
You have a choice in which rules are right for you. You might want a highly curated environment (like HN), or a more freewheeling one (like Reddit), or a near total free-for-all (like 4chan). Which one you pick may determine who else are willing to talk to you, because some dislike eachother - whether justified or not - enough to not want to talk to each other. If I want an instance that blocks people who like dogs on sight, I'm free to do so, and you're free to consider it an idiotic policy and not join my instance.
Nothing stops you from having more than one account if you want a mix of environments who don't get along.
Christ. This isn't the government censoring opinions. This is people kicking others out of their bar for not following the social rules and norms in that bar. They can go to another bar. The basis is: "we don't want that behaviour here" and that is ok when there are alternatives.
But now your post won't be taken down by a paid employee of a corporation with actual contractual obligations and custom made moderation tools to limit collateral damage, instead a 17yo Discord friend of the admin will have complete access to your account!
I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk himself and all of his friends have full access to your Twitter account, with no protections whatsoever. You don't own your account, Musk does.
I hate to break it to you, but Elon Musk and Twitter at large have more to lose from a reputational damage caused by blatant moderation misuse than an anonymous kid with an anime profile picture has
Looking at the last events, Musk sure seems unaware of that.
First he whined about advertisers leaving. Then he threatened to publicly shame them. Then he asked for feedback, got some constructive feedback from some huge ad exec, and promptly blocked him.
He appears to have messed with AOC's account because he didn't like her arguing with him.
He already seems to be reversing on his free speech ideals and is instituting permanent bans that he said he was opposed to.
I don't know what's up with him, but it's hardly a shining example of reputation management that's for sure.
Allowing people to join Facetime calls through a browser is not "opening up" the platform. Until they have an API I can write a custom client for it's just a different kind o
closure
It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it.
I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse
For Mastodon to 'work' in a way I'd enjoy, it would need a culture that it just does not have, and that has never emerged from any microblogging platform. The Fediverse as a whole is filled with enraged culture warriors, going out of their own way to be upset and exclude others.
I don't buy into the "Well, you can just grow YOUR OWN island!" spiel. I don't want to make an echo chamber, I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion. And I know for a fact that the large instances that operate in that way would immediately defederate for wrongthink.
> I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion.
I'm pretty sure that this qualifies as an "island" - one that you would need pretty harsh moderation to maintain too, not unlike HN itself. And of course you'd likely want to defederate from the largest instances, to get away from their toxic attitudes.
Just wait until people start realizing the privacy problems that Mastodon have unless you make your own instance.
You don't like the new twitter moderation? oh wellcome to Mastodon where a 12 year old can be a moderator of a instance. Global guidelines for moderation? No in Mastodon since each instance can have their own rules, 10/10 if you love being in echo chambers.
Created your account in a random instance? oh well maybe all your messages end in doxbin because the 14 year old who made the instance have access to all your messages.
I just can't get myself to see this as a genuine disadvantage.
On Mastodon you can choose the server to use (and thus the moderation). Sure, this means you can choose a server run by a 12-year-old who moderates poorly. But if you don't want that... don't pick that server!
The problem (no, ONE of the many problems) with creating good moderation is that different people have different definitions of what constitutes "good" moderation so it's impossible to satisfy all of them. If Mastodon allows the user to choose, that seems inherently better.
So let's say a lot of people think in that way and avoid instances managed by nameless accounts. Where does that leave us?
Well, maybe people will flock to the few instances ran by transparent, accountable and competent people. Maybe some apolitical non-profit? Maybe a group of passionate engineers with spare change?
In any case those instances would become pretty massive and the costs would skyrocket and......
well, we're at square one: few instances will have total control over your data, they will either inject ads or require payment to keep the servers running and nothing will have changed
.....or they would find an equilibrium that doesn't require massive centralization. Your analogy gets from point A to point be with a lot of empty speculation and hand waving.
My only assumption is that most people will choose an instance based on its reputation and that reputable instances will be far fewer than amateurish and unreliable ones. This is a very generous assumption and if we suppose people will choose even more randomly then the situation can only get bleaker.
On the other hand you hand waved everything I said without specifically refuting any points, so what does that make your reply?
You're making assumptions about collective behavior leading to a runaway process. Your second sentence isn't coherent "hand waved everything [you] said", but I'm guessing you mean to suggest I'm handwaving away what you said. I am not doing that. I am saying I see no reason to assume one possibility over an equally plausible alternative, especially just reasoning from speculation.
AFAIK fosstodon.org, social.librem.one and mastodon.technology (and likely more) have more or less similar reputation, so your argument is purely theoretical, not supported by the reality. They all have a reasonable number of interesting posts (i.e., users) if you look at some common tags.
It can totally not be a disadvantage for you, I'm not debating that, I even encourage others to explore Mastodon, there is probable a market for a product like Mastodon for a small subset of individuals. But that doesn't mean it isn't a disadvantage for most people.
In the context of this thread, the blog starts by justifying the authors choice by citing the laid off of the accessibility team, the alternative for the author is Mastodon which brings the complexity of selecting which instances you trust, even when you find a good instance, at some point the owners can shutdown it and you will need to migrate to another instance. If a rogue employee sent your messages to another person, they can be prosecuted, have fun trying to do that to the owner of the instance, yes, you can have your own instance which have a monetary/time cost. Using a commercial product? Oh I really hope you instance never angry the mob or they may go to your commercial provider to demand they drop you. Obviously this doesn't make the accessibility any worse /sarcasm.
Popular Mastodon instance?
* Moderation takes time, who is going to do that for free, everyday?
* Who is paying the infrastructure cost?
Mastodon
* Daily active users is 655k spread in multiples instances 1º
* Private owned instances, self moderate.
* User base of the extremes of the gaussian distribution, the extreme privacy oriented and the politically motivated.
* User base is a subset that will split into another few subsets, high tendency to form echo chambers.
* Difficult to scale, closed system with rapidly increasing entropy (no accountability, highly susceptible to the instance owner desires (affected by time))
* Hard to attract people with a big following social media since the user base is small and the opportunity to grow is very small but the leak of followers to other users with small following base is high. (High cost/Low return)
I love that Mastodon exist, that it brings to the market different types of social media experiences, at the end, the market (people) will choose what is the more efficient version.
I personally doesn't use Twitter or Mastodon, I use rss with a CA instance of nitter in a RSS reader to check what a few people in the data science space tweet and my personal opinion is that the author is motivated by his political beliefs instead of the accessibility or quality of the product Twitter.
I mean, what instance did you register on? Because I've been using it for a couple years and uhh, the toxicity is nearly non-existent for me. I see some stupid crap once in a while in a response to some highly-followed user, but then I just mute the person's entire instance (if I find that similarly-toxic crap is a common sort of output from there).
Simultaneously, I've had more meaningful communication on Mastodon in the past week than I've had on twitter in the past year. I have just over 200 followers and Mastodon, and nearly 1400 on Twitter.
So yeah, I've thoroughly explored it, and I am definitely investing myself into it -- and have no intention of going back.
I have already stopped checking Twitter for weeks at a time or longer. I only open it to see if I have a message from a friend (since I turn off email notifications for basically everything), or maybe tweet at some brand whose service has made my day crappier.
Since I made the above post (two days ago) I now have 243 followers. All people who I'm in contact with on other platforms - I'm not even sure how they found me, but either way. The momentum is honestly accelerating. Sorry, 244 followers - just got another follow request.
Twitter is usually the only reliable, direct way to ask a question of a faceless corporation because they happen to prioritize actually answering tweets. I don't know why, but it's become the only way I ask questions of some service that has millions of users, because I don't feel like signing up an account on a service portal or filing a ticket with a convoluted customer support system. Or even worse, "chatting" with a bot that will just funnel me to poorly-written FAQs that don't even remotely help me with the problem I'm encountering.
It's possible that it's just the broadcasting format that makes things suck, rather than Twitter's specific content/moderation policies. It's like handing a ton of people in a room all megaphones to talk to each other; the incentive is always going to be that you should be 'louder' to get more attention over everyone else.
people with megaphones are the point, the problem is when there are mechanisms of moderation to manipulate them and make them into groups, if there is no such mecanisms and moderation is up to the user completely(unfollow/block) things function very differently
Moderation that is solely user-based doesn't work well at scale. It means you expect every user to block every asshole they come across, and each time they have to endure some asshole first before blocking them.
for me that would be completely reasonable, but it isn't necessary, you can have many decentralized filters like automatically block people that are blocked by a % of people I follow and many similar mechanisms
We know many things about Musk because he's a well known public figure which has attracted the attention of plenty of investigative journalists.
But what do you know about the owners of the Mastodon instance you registered your account with? Are they accountable? Are they sensible? Are they competent? Do they even have a real identity?
You say this like he's quietly minding his own business and some pesky journalists are revealing what a dickhead he is. That is not the case, he is outspokenly a dickhead. He wants to broadcast what a dickhead he is _so_ badly, that he bought the worlds foremost social network to control the medium.
What Musk says publicly is basically useless. All the truly important information about him has been the result of deep investigations through papers and documents and third party accounts.
So yeah, Musk gets investigated very often so we know things that he would rather keep hidden. Now what about your Mastodon admin with an anime profile picture?
A Mastodon instance owner can read everything you've ever posted, log everything even if you deleted it, doxx your IP and your private messages, delete or modify everything about your account on a whim and block you even if you make an account elsewhere. Plus they can keep very quiet about it since they have zero accountability.
So yeah, you can go to another instance, but better keep some kind of backup because you could be gone without notice
That's exactly right, to a point that decentralize app like Mastodon would be valid alternatives when everyone run its own instance (and is able to secure it), of course that's in theory already possible, but in practice it's difficult.
>until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters,
Not even close to my experience as a Mastodon user and I've been on it for years. I guess this shows the limited predictive value of any single individuals experiences.
big tech layoffs are actually very good because they release into the wild a slew of competent workers with great credentials who will hopefully get hired by a company which does something useful for humanity instead of selling ads
Big tech layoffs are never really "good." Even in the way you're describing. Its a nice notion... but I imagine most of the laid off workers will be doing the same thing, just at another company.
Why is it so difficult for trading companies to simply keep the money in the reserve and never touch it unless your client wants to liquidate his share?
I know, having that huge pile of cash and not doing anything with it can lead to huuuuuge temptations, but that's what I'm paying the company to do. If I wanted to invest my funds into something I would move my money to a separate investment account that the institution can play with as they please (with some client-defined risk restrictions) and give me a percentage of profits
Because they don't make as much money that way. History has repeatedly shown us that asking companies to voluntarily forgo profit-earning opportunities does not work. Companies exist to make money and this why regulators like the FDIC exist, to ensure that financial institutions are liquid enough when things go south.
This is simply not something that financial institutions are capable of doing themselves.
This doesn't even seem like a financial regulation issue. More like a "I'm paying you to store my stuff so please store my stuff" issue. If I paid for a storage unit and the company running it sold all the stuff in it while promising "don't worry, when you want your stuff back we'll buy it back for you", I'd be pretty peeved.
“Huuuuge temptations” is the answer. At that level, the temptation is too much to bear except enforced by an external hand.
That’s why there are regulations against playing with customer’s deposits in the traditional banking sector, or else greed will make banking executives do similar things as the crypto companies.
Do you think a streaming website which barely has actual categories to browse from, routinely autocompletes unlicensed shows in the search bar as if they were available and doesn't have a database to search which show is available in which country will actually provide those details to the public?
