Goldkin @Goldkin@awoo.space

So, what is to be done?

Here, the author provides a few cursory suggestions, including policy changes, general preparedness for smear campaigns, and stepping away from sites like Twitter and Facebook entirely and to "rebuild civil society on the ground, not online." I'm inclined to agree, though I think this argument is somewhat extreme, and it ignores the notion of rebuilding these platforms without making them amenable to marketing campaigns and legions of online trolls and bots.

I shy away from calling this a "fake news" problem, because the problem isn't sources of disinformation, but rather the structure of the platforms themselves. And here, the author launches into how adversarial actors -- including incubator fora like 4chan, terrorist organizations, and nation states -- use these ecosystems to push their preferred narratives. Unmoored from other sources of truth, these actors cultivate or create opinion leaders that can weaponize preferred narratives.

The narrative trips over and self-congratulates itself in several places, detracting from what is otherwise an astute observation. Early adopters of online discussion fora and media still had centralized sources of truth to turn to, be they news sites (ie, via RSS readers) or blogs concentrating expertise. This is not true for the current social media environment, with sites like Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, and Twitter instead choosing to elevate the loudest voices in the room.

Specifically, it lays out the premise that, in the context of pervasive attempts to create filter bubbles -- both by social media companies trying to divide marketable segments of a population, and by populist opinion leaders and state-sponsored actors trying to push particular narratives -- social media has come unmoored from the sources of truth that normally bind societies together. Instead, these sites are now creating irreconcilable tribes of self-enforcing confirmation bias.

I have been doing a lot of dark reading lately on social media, which coincidentally, is why I've been so scarce. I've been revisiting my relationship with how I post online and what sources of media I consume, in the context of troll armies and other afflictions over on birdsite and its brethren.

In that context, I ran across this book: https://www.amazon.com/Messing-Enemy-Clint-Watts-ebook/dp/B072HLRW6Y. While provocative and redundant in its narrative, it provides a fair summary of what's happening to online social fora.

@mawr PS: thank you for articulating why I fled SO and Reddit. Same observations, in re, gamification by assholes.

@mawr Oof.

I think we’re learning that scalable moderation vs mobs and bots is A Major Problem, and that explaining this in a way that pierces technocratic “wisdom of crowds” arguments requires having The Talk on how less privileged groups are targeted and intimidated.

Which has a low chance of ever going well, given how far tech filter bubbles deviate from the needs of queer communities.

@frameacloud I’m not sure if the extreme amounts of tribalism both platforms are experiencing are a sign of the times, an untenable privacy landscape, or sweeping popularity of social media in general. But, it factors into how I approach using each platform.

Agency over my private data has become chiefly important until there are better ways to mitigate dox-and-mob scenarios. To that end, and to my surprise, Twitter still has the better tooling.

@frameacloud FWIW, I just deleted the official Twitter app from my phone last week and migrated fully to third-party client software. I cannot deal with Twitter’s ads or algorithmic timeline, so having both filtered from my feed is a huge bonus. It’s also nice to be able to take control over blocking and filtering at the client level.

Unfortunately, abuse scenarios have caused me to pull way back from posting on either platform. Still sorting that out.

@mawr *gleam!*

Hi, I’m Goldkin, and I dramatically overthink this kind of thing when it’s okay to just be a person.

In a nutshell: the concept that everything I say, even in direct communication, may feature in public aggregation, without context, has substantially chilled my speech.

That is something that _does not happen_ in privately maintained Masto instances (in fact, it’s one of the main benefits of the platform). But I constantly need to remind myself of that, and that it’s okay to have frivolous conversations again, without expecting it to train algorithms on my behavior.

So I’ve been deviling with a more substantive post to explain why I’ve been so quiet and sparse on replies. Some of that is personal, and some other part of that is wrapped up in keeping my antenna up while watching the second season of Watergate in uspol (ugh, ugh, ugh).

But there’s this other bucket of stuff best described as having been trained by birdsite, most notably “likes are shares” and “polls are marketing data”. And it’s led to habits I need to reprogram.

Traediras did a super cool thing for me (as part of a commission), and I feel the need to share it:
https://awoo.space/media/PtO3OtwUUoSigy-J5nY

Also, can anyone following here recommend a good crosspost tool that can manage multiple Masto instances (+ birdsite)?

Bitlbee is good for reading in plain text, and Amaroq is good for mobile, but neither do multimedia crossposts.