- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
EDIT: I didn’t notice in the original post, the article is from 2023
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19707239
Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 – and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.
Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.
Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.
While he is accustomed to “offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats”, he told AFP, “in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed”.
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I have no clue why all these normal, non-racist non-political people still use twitter. It was bought for the obvious purpose of providing a safe space for conservatives, racists, incels, and other outcasts to society. Mastodon is a perfect replacement for it, and you can pick an instance that suits you. It isn’t owned by a mentally unstable billionaire!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Twitter hasn’t dropped below the critical mass of users necessary for the system to become useless. It’s still a major artery of media and social commerce, just one that’s been littered with landmines. Yes, its far more dangerous and difficult to navigate now, but its still better than posting into the uninhabited wilderness that is Bluesky or the exact same basket of shitty engagement posts that is Threads.
Is it actually better than nothing though?
Either these are tolerant folks or someone we might be better off if they stayed on 4twitter.
The otherwise sensible people I know who are still on Twitter all say it’s because of a specific interest or group, and the community of people around it who are all on there as well. They all hate what it’s become but put up with it because nobody is sure where else to go.
There’s also a sense of FOMO when it comes to realtime news updates. Until government, news media, and personalities go somewhere and take all their followers with them, it will be hard to break away.
Very true, but at the same time I feel that it’s a place where I won’t get censored just because google randomly thought my comment was offensive
People get censored on Twitter all the time.
Reality: you can stop fascism by deleting the app
Everyone: doesn’t
Oh, i didnt know this was like IT. i’ll tell my russians friends just to ignore putin’s regime
If by ignore, you mean stop paying taxes and working in any capacity for government in one go, yes would work. The only fear is being singled out, if more than 0.5% of the people do it, army wont even have the guts to get tanks out, they will join.
Touché
Venezuela has ~70% of the people against the regime, (nearly 90% counting the 5M that were not allowed to vote) and the needle isn’t even moving.
And in Russia being “singled out” is apparently a national tradition.
Sorry, I may be over pessimistic today.
I guess that’s a fair example. But logically sounds impossible for such control over the population to be had. If a group went out to the streets to oust the government, you would say at least maybe 45% would join.
No. Dunno where did you take that 0.5% from, it’s not empirically confirmed by anything.
Like 20% if you want to see civil war. Like 40% if you want to see regime change.
There is the semi-usually-known research that suggests 3.5% is enough for non-violent protests to reach changes. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/chen15682
0.5% is 1 in 200 people, essentially everyone knowing personally one person who is against the government. Maybe it isn’t enough.
But also, 0.5% homogenously (instead of country-wide being concentrated in Moscow), would be 600k people peacefully marching in Moscow streets
It doesn’t work. It’s some urban legend that this is sufficient. Even those 600k may or may not be stopped by a threat of real ammo being used. I’m not even talking about coordination.
One can “prove” anything with selectively chosen statistics.
They werent selectively chosen. " An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims." As well as any researcher who isn’t a complete buffoon would only look at statistics that has only a 2-3 sigma chance of only being stochastic noise.
The set of indicators, of course, was selectively chosen. The authors, of course, have decided which of these they consider important and which don’t, that is, decided upon weights and criteria.
Pardon my ignorance. I may have a mild brain injury.
Could you perhaps rephrase?
I’m not sure if I understood what you said.
In IT (the movie and, i presume, also in the book) ::: spoiler spoiler The kids realize that IT feeds on attention and that the only way to fight it is by ignoring it :::
Imo, shitter (X) is a cesspool as it is now, but I dont believe that leaving it to the hordes is a solution to anything. We need a better approach to deal with this people.
Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant IT as in information technology. Was very confused.
Brain still good yey
edit: typo. perhaps I need to make that appointment
??? no he feeds on fear, the way they defeat it is not being afraid
We should as a community ensure Twitter\X lives forever…
If only as a place to keep certain social media users “entertained”
In all seriousness it does concern me how often I see such a wide variety of news agencies quote Twitter considering the amount of hate that goes on there
The irony of climate scientists ignoring a problem and waiting until it’s far to late to do something is honestly pretty funny…
At this point it’s wholly on you if you’re still using twitter.
You’d think smart people like science nerds would have left the Nazi bar ages ago.
That first line is so spot on. Brightened up my day
That’s dangerous. Look at what Fox is doing, as an entertainment company, to US politics across the country.
Disastrous, even
It’s because the news media industry as a whole has stuck with Twitter as their primary social media site. It’s kinda hilarious how much they seem to like it and how much time they spend there.
Your comment reminds me of that great tune by Pink Floyd.
X needs to start getting banned by governments and official governmental channels need to be moving out.
X is such a shitty social network, or at least its really disorganized, I get porn and gore in my home page without following people who share that kind of content, That doesn’t happen even in 4chan
The bit in the square brackets in the title was mine, because that’s what I went into the article to look for. If you’re on Mastodon and interested in that content:
The text from the article:
Glaciologist Ruth Mottram had more than 10,000 followers on Twitter but left in February and joined an alternative scientists’ forum powered by Mastodon -– a crowdfunded, decentralised grouping of social networks founded in 2016.
“It’s really been a revelation in many ways. It’s a much quieter and more thoughtful platform,” she told AFP.
On Mastodon, “I haven’t had any abuse at all or even people questioning climate change. I think we’d become far too used to it on Twitter… I had blocked loads of accounts over on the birdsite (Twitter),” she said.
Ruth is a very kind person, her posts are amazing!
I already accepted we’re already dead because oil & gas companies figured how to use doubt and false science to create a confusion among the general public (aided by the mass conservative Murdoch /Boloré media lol)…
It’s like tobacco companies in the 50s but we can’t afford so many years to wake the fuck up.
Yeah. I’ve been mourning the loss of Earth’s future for some time now. It’s very sad.
That said, we are not in a simple binary fucked vs fine situation. It’s a sliding scale. So even though things are very bad, we can always still take action to make them less bad. That is never not an option.
What do you mean? If it makes you feel any better, the Earth will be fine. Has been for a couple billion years. We did this to ourselves :(
I’m mean life on Earth, obviously. No one is saying that the planet is going to explode or disappear or anything like that. We’re talking about the climate, and life that depends on that climate.
And before you start coming at me with some “but but such and such life will still…” I’ll clarify again that there is a matter of scale here. A very large number of species that have been around for a very long time will soon be extinct (many have been lost already). So although we might still have mosquitos and jelly-fish for a long time to come, a lot of the complex life that is currently enjoying a comfortable and otherwise-sustainable life on Earth will no longer be able to do so; because of us. That’s what I’m referring to.
Yes, humans have does this to ‘ourselves’, but we are nowhere near the worst effected life in this situation. In fact, most of the ill effects on humans are just knock-on effects from other life failing. (In particular, reduced capacity to grow food is likely to be a problem for humans.)
Smoking companies still are with vaping (vaping companies literally sell to kids over the Internet and people literally are arguing it’s safe and healthy)
Which unfortunately shows that people don’t learn
Aaaaah i don’t want to be right :((
The dumb masses always eventually follow the smart people. Reddit was full of mostly smart people in the beginning, if you can believe that.
isn’t that why the hippie movement ended?
The Franklin Standards need to be on everyone’s radar. They don’t want your kids to learn about climate change.
Explain how and why Earth’s climate changes over time.
Climate changes continually at all time scales and Earth’s climate has never remained constant.
The Earth’s climate has varied greatly between glacial advances and retreats that correlate with cyclical oscillations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun (Milankovitch Cycles, precession).
In addition to being affected by the climate, the biosphere also has a significant effect on the climate, including self-regulation and resiliency (carbon-oxygen cycle, hydrological cycle).
Humans are just one of the many influences on Earth’s climate (urban heat island effect, wetland drainage, deforestation, agriculture).
Computer models of climate are simplified simulations of the real world, and make prognostications that are inherently uncertain.
Global weather forecast models (short term) and climate models (long term) are quite different in their design, their strengths, weaknesses, value, limitations, and uncertainties.
The wording is subtle, but you can see how they are attacking the idea of anthropogenic climate change. (There’s similar fuckery with evolution and some subtle anti-trans stuff.) Oil and gas companies have a lot of money and can afford a lot of propaganda. No states have adopted these standards yet - we think Florida and Texas will go first, then Oklahoma will follow. But this information warfare.
Thanks for pointing this out. The level of misguidedness is painful.
It’s frustrating, because you can tell they spent a lot of time making the words weaselly enough. The one about climate models especially enrages me, because yeah, they’re predictive tools with limitations (which I’ve discussed with students when I’ve taught with climate sims). But I know my old department head (who used to compliment kiddos for forgoing masks in 2020) is going to have those “uncertainties” do a lot of work.
That’s great news. Looking forward to having more climate scientists on Mastodon.
Hell, I would like to have ANYONE on Mastodon. It feels so dead.
Does it?
My Mastodon feed is more alive than my twitter feed used to be years before its demise. And also in my native language, if I were to follow english speaking people I’d be overwhelmed.
The trick is not to rely to much on the instance local feed and start following people from every instance.
Every time I give it another shot and look for things and people to follow, I find nothing.
Yes, and…
You can follow (and use) hashtags of topics you like.
That was a year ago.
I am on Mastodon for 5 years now (fuck it is really 5 years since August 2019, what the hell) and just can’t get into it. It just feels lonely over there. What am I doing wrong?
Tbh, I think it is the post statistics thing. It says “1 reply”, then I click at ot and it has 4 replies and it ALWAYS says “0 favorites” even when 10 people comment how great that post was.
The statistics thing is a downside of how Mastodon implements ActivityPub.
Two possibilites:
-
I think you can simply hide the counts if it irritates you.
-
You can install Fedifetcher to pull in missing interactions to your local server: https://github.com/nanos/FediFetcher
I’ll have a look at that fetcher thing. Thx.
-
Twitter’s format feels a bit like yelling into the void and waiting for replies…you may luck out and get some engagement from a hub or a small subgraph of the network. Mastodon makes that stronger by removing the algorithm (I’d like there to be a user-customizable feed sort algo by an array of parameters, not sure what the technical limitations to that are: processing, security?)
Comment trees feel better (to me at least), because there is a hierarchical origin, a native indexing by topic>post>comment>countercomment…it sort of resembles how we relate with the world or navigate maps.
For me, it was the interface. I found it rough around the edges and not as inviting as Twitter used to be. I know it’s seen as superficial but UX/UI is important.
Like, for example, to create a post or reply, the input was on the left navigation panel for some reason. I used to have trouble visually separating one post from the next in my head until I got used to it. Also, the way thread comments were nested could’ve been improved. And why did it only show me the top 5 trending news stories? Why couldn’t I browse more? Idk, overall I felt like I was fighting the UI mentally.
I think Lemmy did a better job subtly improving on the details. I didn’t see Mastodon doing that much when I was on there.
I know it’s seen as superficial but UX/UI is important to me.
Most of the people telling you it’s superficial are programming nerds who themselves are intimidated by UX design so use cope to justify its trivialness.
I know what you mean. I’ve had more than one conversation with devs who didn’t understand design basics.
What platform are you on? There are lots of alternative apps for both iOS and Android, and they can be customized beyond the defaults as well. I primarily use Moshidon on Android, and it’s great.
Did you use Twitter much before then? Some people just don’t like the format. I use it to get updates on some things, but I don’t use it as much as Lemmy (or Reddit before that).
If you did use Twitter, perhaps the content you followed back then still didn’t make its way to Mastodon (or it went to bluesky/threads?)
Last thing you could try is following more people. I find that fediverse platforms need you to seek out content more actively, while old profit driven social media platforms were constantly seeking engagement. On top of that there just isn’t as much content on any of the new platforms compared to the older ones.
That all being said, the quality of the content is equal or better every time
What sort of stuff do you like? Maybe some folks can make some good recommendations to jump-start a more interesting experience.
Recommendations and boosts from other users are how I’ve discovered interesting people there, and at this point, my feed feels just as full as my old twitter feed.
If you like news, a lot of breaking news is happening on Mastodon much more accurately and faster than on Twitter. There are a LOT of publications on there now, here are a few off the top of my head:
- Polygon (@polygon@mastodon.social)
- The Conversation (@TheConversation@newsie.social)
- The Intercept (@theintercept@jouna.host)
- Voice of America (@VOANews@mastodon.social)
- Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
- Semafor (@Semafor@flipboard.com)
- Kotaku (@Kotaku@flipboard.com)
- The Christian Science Monitor (@csmonitor@flipboard.com)
- Fast Company (@FastCompany@flipboard.com)
- The 19th (@19thnews@flipboard.com)
- Vox (@Vox@flipboard.com)
There are a lot more local news sources too, so depending on where you live, you can probably follow news for your specific area. The account @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services regularly bundles up follow suggestions for different regions, interests, and topics. If you go that account and search for a hashtag (i.e., #texas) you’ll get a lot of active and high-quality local accounts to follow.
If we can’t abandon Obvious Disaster Twitter we definitely can’t abandon the obvious disaster that is everything we think of as normal that’s driving civilization off a cliff.
4chan—>8chan—>Xchan?
Light speed -> ridiculous speed -> ludicrous speed
“They’ve gone to plaid!”
You can find utterly vile replies from blue checks on that site now, even on the most heavenly, innocent, morally correct tweet. It’s insane.
Ever since Nitter died I haven’t paid any attention to anything on musks’ little fiefdom at all.
I wish the political economics guys would move… I really miss Tim Sahay/70sbachchan & Mark Blyth.
deleted by creator
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
It appears to have ceased development. AFAIK it still works if hooked into a “valid” user account, but since I don’t have one and am increasingly less likely to consider that path, it’s a moot point.
