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Paul Krugman: Conscience of a Liberal
The Confluence
Suburban Guerrilla Ian Welsh… for a good, mellow song.
Here is Sia Furler and Zero 7 before she became just Sia:
OT: You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on jeans to make your ass look great. These dirt cheap ones work just fine. Wait for a sale. I got mine for about $20 bucks.
Filed under: General |
Corrente (Lambert) Avedon’s Sideshow
The Confluence 
MAGA = Many Assholes Getting Arrested
I found that on Wonkette. 😈
Many more to come?
Of course! Swamp is brimming with them.
“Many more to come?”
RD, for your reading pleasure and don’t miss the last paragraph, 🙂
https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate
Tech hearings are underway. I wrote a comment about a starter solution about preventing inadmissible information dissemination and expanded it with a conversation with a friend later yesterday. We don’t let traditional media (TV, print, online media) put porn on their pages for everybody’s consumption including children. Same principle must apply to the SM platforms and their aiding and abetting of spreading fake news/ads (~ porn) and prevent them from reaching gullible people (~children) where otherwise civic societies are harmed. Especially with respect to ads, what happened to ‘truth in advertisement’ and why does it not apply to these SM companies? We need a special category for Fox and its ilk that is unrelated to traditional view of journalism and first amendment and comes with a warning.
And of course letting these SM platforms be used by foreign entities to subvert our election with or without active participation from these platforms and the candidates is a no-no (duh). DO SOMETHING.
I’m ok with this too.
It’s the same principle that is applied here at The Confluence. I don’t allow trolls and provocateurs to get a foothold in the comments section. There are words that trigger moderation. Sometimes they get thru anyway but I find that about an hour of troll cleanup gets the message across that I’m serious. There can be plenty of dissent. But if you want to discuss, you’re going to have to dispense with jargon and the latest meme du jour.
I instituted this policy in 2008. The trolls and operatives howled that I was censoring them, which is ridiculous. Only the government can be accused of illegal censorship. I’m not preventing them from saying any idiotic or psychologically manipulative thing they want. They can do that on their own blog. They just can’t do it here and I see no reason why I should give them a platform. WordPress is an equal opportunity platform. Go forth and colonize the blogoverse with meaningless and repetitive right wing and faux left wing crap. Get your own audience.
Agree with ‘get your own audience’ part. But what these (FB and Twitter) platforms have done is make it very easy to disseminate exponentially, the ‘bad’ stuff with their ‘sharing/RT’ mechanisms. The exponential ‘reach’ is the culprit in addition to producing bad/harmful content. That is where the Frankenstein monster resides.
Kinda disagree with you there. The mega SM platforms could be more vigilant to limit sock puppets. But users have to stop propagating this stuff. They don’t have to hit “like” or “retweet” simply because the message is from what they think is one of there’s. It doesn’t go anywhere without help. We need to learn to resist memes that trigger the audience and use commonly insider buzzwords and jargon even if they look like they are from one of our own.
I’ve had to do that. There are some stories out there that if true should make us outraged. And that’s just the problem. I don’t know who the sources are. And since I can’t pin that down, I have to pass.
Sure, users need to be restrained but we have already said they are gullible and stupid (and they will watch ‘porn’ if the opportunity exists) which is why we have to nip at the source. The bad actors (porn producing people) are the ones doing the like or retweet purposefully (in addition to others who do it unknowingly) to spread and are not restrained; there are no systemic restraints put on them like we do on other harmful things. The point is the system is too vulnerable to bad actors who want to generate exponential dissemination. Bad news travel fast and these platforms make it extremely easy.
Once more, with feeling:
Yes! make it easy to show them the door.