smart as always from Cory Doctorow NONCONSENSUAL BLUE TICK on how closed platforms and social media companies screw over everyone, not just their users

pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kar…

New from 404 Media: we found a service called 'ReplyGuy', an AI that automatically plugs your product on Reddit. Shows that Reddit, basically the last social platform that heavily emphasizes human interaction, may also be soon overrun with AI garbage 404media.co/ai-is-poisonin…

Now that it's pro-Palestinian protesters who are getting suspended from college campuses and threatened with arrest, I don't hear a peep about cancel culture.

'The vulnerable' as a class of humans, only exists in a society where some people's needs are normalized & sufficiently supported while others are not. Creating 'the vulnerable' makes others feel better about their status & protects the system. This dooms us all.

well, it wasn’t at Columbia so it’s not a story I guess…

Saturday marked a year since I got laid off at Business Insider. I’ve tried and failed a few times to write something smart/poignant/helpful about it, but it doesn’t come out right. So instead, I’ll just express my gratitude for everyone who helped and supported me along the way.

my view of homeless people changed forever when i learned that more than half of them were foster kids who aged out of the system and were left with no family or resources.

28/But what our story does show is that to divert blame, politicians - such as Liang, China's Foreign Ministry, and others - sidelined scientists and promoted conspiracies that undercut China's credibility, damaged scientific collaboration, and fueled lab leak speculation.

16/China's foreign ministry and state media went on the offensive, spreading misinformation about the virus including unfounded speculation that the virus was brought to China by the U.S. military, as my colleague Erika Kinetz detailed in this investigation:
apnews.com/article/pandem…

13/Opportunities were sought to distance China from the virus. WHO officials avoided the name 'SARS-CoV-2' because it evoked the SARS outbreak in 2003, which Beijing botched badly.

The 2 massacres of Jews in U.S. synagogues were carried out by far right attackers echoing a Republican president’s antisemitic, conspiratorial rhetoric. That Republican president, since leaving office, has hosted a far-right Holocaust denier for dinner. But sure, it’s the left.

like why is some idiot writer for the Atlantic lecturing anyone on this stupid app about students protesting when he supported the fucking Iraq war?

we as a society should have decided long ago to never give anyone who supported the Iraq war any position of power or authority like why the hell should any of us be forced to listen to your odious takes on anything when you fell for WMDs?

The pandemic is so weird you see perfectly normal, empathetic, rational people telling you they love you and want nothing but the best for you while refusing to do even just the bare minimum to keep you safe from a deadly & disabling virus

Y Combinator’s CEO showing up to cheer on Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas overturning civil rights rulings, and acting like he’s a VIP at Coachella.

A Muslim student was hit in a hit and run at Stanford. Yet I can't recall any breathless reports from admins wondering about the safety of Muslim students, nor about the safety of the multi-faith coalitions of students putting their bodies on the line

The idea that protests about Israel at a college campus in New York are somehow worse for, or a bigger threat to, American Jewish communities than actual antisemitic massacres at synagogues should tell you everything.

I don’t remember huge chunks of even our ‘liberal media’ folks comparing America in 2018 to Nazi Germany in 1938, even as American Jews were literally being gunned down inside of Jewish places of worship by far right shooters echoing the rhetoric of the then *sitting president*.