A $750,000 a month advertiser has left Twitter. One of hundreds. But in her post she explained the bases for the decision vis-a-vis her advertising investment in a neutral, non-ideological way.
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Tom Coates
@tomcoates
New product strategy & development for the BBC, Yahoo, Time Out, Nokia, Jawbone & Eero. I’ve founded a couple of things too. mastodon.cloud/@tomcoates
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An advertiser explains why they’re pausing their Twitter ads campaigns:
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Here’s your ‘free speech’ America - it’s whatever Musk thinks is okay. If he doesn’t like it, then it’s not free speech.
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For anyone still wondering how content moderation is going to work on here now, here’s what Elon Musk said at an employee Q&A about his planned moderation council:
“This is an advisory council. I will hear what they have to say and I will either agree with it or I won’t.”
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Good lord. I worked for McLaughlin in my early 20s and eventually had to testify against him in a sexual harassment trial. He was an unrepentant sexist & truly the cruelest boss I ever had. The show was utterly cooked, scripted to be like pro wrestling. I know cuz I scripted it.
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This man is quite delusional: he seems to think HE'S The Doctor from the future. [ #LCCWinter #TheDoctor ]
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So I inquired of this charming woman if she would kindly confirm that I was indeed The Doctor from the future. Her answer . . . lacked credibility. [ #LCCWinter #TheDoctor ]
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They think we’re snowflakes but the LGBTQA+ community is tough as nails. We’ve had to be.
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An Army Veteran Says He Went Into ‘Combat Mode’ to Disarm the Gunman nytimes.com/2022/11/21/us/ A drag dancer stomped on the gunman with her high heels.
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The final nail in the coffin for public health on Twitter. Twitter will now verify purveyors of misinformation who cough up $8. Their followers will as well. Meanwhile, most of those actually in public health will not pay for verification and their tweets will be suppressed.
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Under Elon Musk’s new direction for Twitter, several anti-vaccine accounts with tens of thousands of followers are now verified by paying $7.99 a month for Twitter Blue. My latest for @GuardianUS theguardian.com/technology/202
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Go Volk, go broke.
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"Anti-woke" bank GloriFi has laid off most of its employees and told them that it is closing up shop
wsj.com/articles/anti-
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World Cup reminder: if you’re in any non-US country when the home team is playing that is a *great* time visit a launderette, go to the supermarket, pop out for some DIY materials, drive somewhere without traffic. This is the best thing about sport.
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In the meantime, all we can do is keep reminding people of the risks and complexities of running these services and try and steer these powerful products in ways that do the most good and the least harm. Twitter is now moving in the wrong direction. Hive and Mastodon are not.
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The answer to the dangers of social media is not to stop building it, even if that was something we could legally enforce. In fact I think the solution is to build more of it, but thoughtfully, with its dangers front of mind from the earliest moments of its inception.
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This is wrong. You get this stuff wrong and leak data that’s private or make it accidentally possible to find out where someone lives, or refuse to act when a vulnerable person is subject to a torrent of abuse and harassment, and *people die*.
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And when I look at I see a lot of work about protocols and distributing information and being able to find and search it and rapid transmission of information. And there is *nothing* in their founding documents about how you’d run the spaces and deal with abuse.
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You *have* to have this stuff at the foundation of your working practice when you’re building or maintaining social products. You have to. The *first document I wrote* when I was working on (which I do not talk about much for other reasons) was about types of abuse.
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But human social behavior is not always positive. It’s not always good. It includes ostracizing people, it includes threatening people, it includes putting people at risk, harassing them, attacking them, denying them rights, publicly shaming them and a lot of other stuff too.
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It’s from 2005 and I think it’s both right and perhaps a bit overly optimistic. “Social Software can be defined as software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behavior.”
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I’m a strong believer in the power of social media to be a force for good. Always have been. I actually wrote one of most commonly cited definitions of social software, cited in over 80 papers and books. scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=
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Afterwards a couple of people said it should have had a stronger content warning and they were probably right.
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I did a talk just about the dangers and risks of social media that wasn’t properly run at a decentralized conference once. Beforehand I told people that it was going to be a bit hardcore and they should be careful.
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This thread is the thread of anyone who has spent any serious time digging into what it takes to run social media products (or has done it at pretty much any level for any period of time).
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Okay, look, I can't sleep so you all get the cranky rant: I have seen multiple people responding to my criticism of Cohost and Mastodon, and Shep's criticism of Cohost and Hive, saying that we're just "haters" who are trying to destroy alternatives to Big Tech. twitter.com/neolithicsheep…
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Good. Keep the pressure on.
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An advertiser explains why they’re pausing their Twitter ads campaigns:
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Here is Musk articulating how ban decisions are made now; his own feelings based on personal tragedies. And while anyone decent would agree that Alex Jones should be banned, the specific justification given here is the opposite of good policy.
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On the day the trans community remembers those it has lost, and hours after a massacre in an LGBT+ nightclub, the LGB 'Alliance' expresses horror at some, but not all, of the killings.
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Club Q, a queer nightclub, was shot up hours after posting about their drag brunch to mark the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
5 people were murdered including Daniel Aston, a trans man.
The JK Rowling endorsed LGB Alliance chose to exclude trans people from their "solidarity".
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watching all these people that engineer anti-queer massacres like Colorado Springs every day post thoughts and prayers for the victims whose deaths they made with their own hands on a platform that is redesigning itself to deliver that bile and poison more freely and widely
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Was talking with four e-car enthusiasts and likely buyers today - none will now consider a . "It just screams asshole." This is a recent phenomenon.
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My next car is a Rivian twitter.com/mollyjongfast/…
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Me and my twitter friends looking for a new place to hang out
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And why does he feel unsafe? Because the country is more anti-gay than ever before? No. The opposite is true. He feels unsafe because a bunch of far right assholes, Libs of TikTok, Fox News etc. are inciting lunatic fringe extremists on the edge to kill us.
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I’ve never felt less safe as a gay person in this country.
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Hate speech breeds violent acts.
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hard to imagine a more compromised space for getting news about a mass shooting at an LGBTQ club than a platform owned by a guy who boosted an unhinged homophobic conspiracy theory less than a month ago and who has since gutted what once passed for its content moderation staff
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And what’s the response of people like Musk? It’s to throw the doors open wide to all this fucking rhetoric, to give it a platform and help it reach every disillusioned angry loner living in a basement somewhere in America. Because a place without rules is ‘more fun’.
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And why does he feel unsafe? Because the country is more anti-gay than ever before? No. The opposite is true. He feels unsafe because a bunch of far right assholes, Libs of TikTok, Fox News etc. are inciting lunatic fringe extremists on the edge to kill us.
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I’ve never felt less safe as a gay person in this country.
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Breaking my self-imposed Twitter silence to offer some context for last night's mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs. Since early 2021, the right has increasingly mobilized against the queer community, with drag shows being a particular focal point. countingcrowds.org/2022/09/30/esc
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Sickened and horrified by the shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs.
The LGBTQ+ community is once again the target of the most terrible violence.
And devastating attacks like these will only become more common if we don’t fight back.
It must stop.
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That's it, I've seen enough. Security, please remand Elon Musk to the brig immediately.
He seems to have wandered over from the Mirror Universe and is making a huge mess.
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I mean if you’re not sure what’s going on here, here’s Musk’s response to the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League which is an organization directly focused on fighting anti-Semitic hate, the day after he throws the doors open to Trump et al.
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Watching people trying to inhabit this place like it was still the same. Outside in the garden, tea-cloth on the table, drinking a cup of tea during the blitz. Brave, but sad.
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You know that story about the bar owner who throws out the nice Nazi because otherwise the bar becomes a Nazi bar? This place is now self evidently owned by the far right and the doors are open for all of them. It’s no better than Parler or Truth Social now.
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