I have to admit, Barbie becoming a Chinese feminist icon was not on my 2023 bingo card. Anyone taking bets on when we're gonna get a kpop version of this classic?

This article stinks of an agenda. The author goes out of their way not to mention the term Fediverse (pluriverse? wtf is that?), and they clearly haven't done their due diligence on Activity Pub. Either they skimped on the research or this article was heavily edited afterwards to remove any concept of the Fediverse being a viable alternative to centralized platforms. Doesn't surprise me coming from Business Insider.

That being said, the overall dynamic the article speaks to is valid, as is the discussion it engenders, so have an upvote despite my gripes with the writing.

Hi - mod of a small kbin.social mag here - @13thFloor - and a lemmy.world user. Is there anything we can do on our end to help mitigate the problem, or make it easier to flag spam that makes its way to Lemmy? I'd be more than willing to include a note to the lemmy.world admins if a spam post is deleted off of a mag I mod here- just need to know who to contact.

Side notes - Ernest (kbin.social admin) just responded on the spam issue here. The community has been actively working over here to flag and remove spam accounts (I've personally flagged close to 100). According to the most recent news from @ernest earlier last week, we've got a software update incoming, and a magazine cleanup in the works that will hopefully make an impact.

Newsom, we get it - you want to run for president. But don't fuck up my state to do it.

You've done ok in CA when you've kept your mouth shut and followed in Brown's footsteps, but this latest bullshit display of throwing widely popular progressive initiatives (this one passed 66 to 9) under the bus is a slap in the face to all Californians, proving yet again that you're an empty neo-liberal suit playing progressive to pander to the public.

California is not your billboard for a future presidential run. Do your damn job and stop using your veto pen to try to appeal to voters who aren't even your constituents yet.

What wonderful news to start the day with!

As a side note, my son (who's currently in high school) reports that the Tatetification of the younglings has ceased to spread, and raggedy Andy is now openly mocked. Mad props to @gretathunberg for developing such an effective fungicide against Mildew Tate from nothing more than a slice of pizza.

If someone tells you they want to kill you, believe them.

Since this kind of rhetoric always leads to violence, please stay safe out there, and don't be hesitant to report harassment.

Justice.gov links:

• For criminal reports
• For civil reports

This is like an incel posting on a dating site after calling all women whores.

They committed treason for less than $15k a pop. This indicates to me that either the CCP was threatening their family members in China, or that they're just dumb as rocks.

Okay, before people start beating me up, I'm not arguing for complacency, but this headline is more than a bit click-baity.

This is a small poll, and per the poll's methodology (scroll down, keep scrolling.... nope keep going... ok... there you go - emphasis mine):

The New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,329 registered voters nationwide, including an oversample of 818 registered Republican voters, was conducted in English and Spanish on cellular and landline telephones from July 23-27, 2023. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.67 percentage points for all registered voters and plus or minus 3.96 percentage points for the likely Republican primary electorate.

Not only did they over sample Republicans, their margin of error is almost 4% within that group.

This feels like the NYT attempting to establish a narrative based on a very small, biased sampling of data. Remember that the mass media wants to amp up the uncertainty levels (which drive engagement and advertising revenue), and with Trump basically blowing out the primary, they'll need another spectacle to ensure that it appears to be a close contest down to the finish line. The timing of the poll release and the headline is also suspect, especially as this poll was taken before the news of the latest indictment, yet presented as if it's a reaction to today's news.

That being said, I think it is an accurate portrayal of sentiment from those who still consider themselves Republicans. I don't believe, given the small sample sizes and admitted bias, that it's an accurate picture of the country.

Again, that's not an argument for political complacency - rather, it's one against media driven narratives relying on biased polling that make you scroll down six pages of tables to find their methodology.

This is not going to stop porn. All it will do is criminalize the actors, producers, and viewers.

I'm reminded of the drug war, where they took a relatively harmless narcotic used disproportionally by minority populations at the time (Marijuana), and used it to criminalize and imprison large swaths of the population, especially within the black community.

It's no coincidence that most of the folks targeted by this effort are women and sex industry workers, which skew liberal by a large degree. Note I'm not just talking about prostitution or porn actors, but the entire sex industry, including toys and books.

The GOP is scared shitless of the rising power of women in modern society, and being able to criminalize and consequently attack the revenue stream of sex industry workers is a way to blunt it. There's also an element of class warfare involved, as OnlyFans or similar sites are often the most economical way for a young woman to lift herself out of poverty if she has no other marketable skills.

My personal ones for corporate use:

• Never use I when you can use we.

• Even if you're the only one working on a project, never refer to it as yours. Always refer to it as ours.

• Don't apologize, present solutions.

• Don't say "read my fucking email again you goddamn illiterate moron", say "As previously noted in our communications...."

@Bendersmember Content generation has slowed and from what I can tell, comment participation is way down. Right now, after going through and subscribing to a number of magazines, my kbin feed is more useful and active than reddit ever was, although the audience is clearly smaller (but seriously growing since last week). The quality of the content is better, and it's much easier to filter out the shitposting.

The clearest place to see content drought this is in /r/all - the top posts are all 3 - 15 hours old. Before the blackout, it would refresh in a matter of minutes, not hours.

These are teenagers - if you make a law telling them not to do something, you're just making them want to do it. There's a reason why young Russian hackers are some of the best - it's a direct result of the restrictions Putin put on the Russian internet. The CCP just made the dark web cool, and I have a feeling that once this law goes into effect, we're going to see a whole generation of Chinese hackers inspired to hone their craft as a result.

Thanks to @m0bi13 who posted this breakdown for context :

Data collected by #threads:

• Health & Fitness
  

• Financial info
  

• Contact info
  

• User content
  

• Browsing History
  

• Usage Data
  

• Diagnostics
  

• Purchases
  

• Location
  

• Contacts
  

• Search history
  

• Identifiers
  

• Sensitive Info
  

• Other Data
  

Oh fuck no. The very first line is basically a HIPAA violation. It gets worse from there. We require less disclosure from Supreme Court Justices and Presidential nominees.

This is a trainwreck waiting to happen - even if Facebook itself doesn't abuse this level of power, you know that bad actors within the organization will. And once the information is collected, you know that tyrannical governments all over the world will be falling over themselves to get access to the data. This is a stalker's wetdream, an Orwellian orgasm of truly grotesque proportions.

Keep the Fediverse from Zucking. Just say no to Threads.

Man, the ACLU is gonna have a field day with this one. And Newell should be charged with making a fake police report:

The search warrant identifies two pages worth of items that law enforcement officers were allowed to seize, including computer software and hardware, digital communications, cellular networks, servers and hard drives, items with passwords, utility records, and all documents and records pertaining to Newell. The warrant specifically targeted ownership of computers capable of being used to “participate in the identity theft of Kari Newell.”

She's claiming that because Meyer did research on her, he's participating in identity theft. Great job at keeping this story out of the papers, Newell, now everyone knows you're a drunk-driving criminal with no respect to for the rule of law or freedom of the press. Welcome to the Streisand effect.

For all the Redditors now breathing a sigh of relief, grab a beer, take a load off, and remember, remember, the 5th of November.

Let's call out the particular global investment vampire in this story, KKR - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, because it's the Count Dracula of hedge funds, and also the company that killed Toys 'R' Us:

This whole thing smelled like enshittification to me, so I kept digging, this time into OverDrive itself. Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR.

With that sentence, my audience just divided into two types of people

• the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction,

and

• the ones like my friend who happens to be a business journalist at the New York Times, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream.

The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong.

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile.

KKR was the subject of the famous 1989 book (and subsequent movie) Barbarians at the Gate, in which a pair of investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal detail what one Times reviewer called the “avarice, malice, and egomania” of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco with “all the suspense of a first-rate thriller”. The ultimate result: KKR’s private equity barons raked in the cash, while thousands of employees were axed and consumer prices of RJR Nabisco products soared.

More recently, KKR teamed up with two other private equity firms to execute a leveraged buyout of Toys ‘R’ Us. They deliberately weighted down the company with a crushing level of debt in order to begin feeding on its profits; they sucked out half a billion dollars as the company staggered along for another dozen years. When Toys ‘R’ Us finally collapsed and died in 2018, the vultures flapped off, unconcerned, leaving 33,000 desperate workers unemployed and without severance.

Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.

...and now it's come for your local library.

Whoa - read the article. This is much worse than what's been commonly reported:

More than 30% of U.S. adults that used Twitter between March and May reported seeing content they consider bad for the world, according to a survey conducted by the USC Marshall Neely Social Media Index. That percentage was higher than rivals Facebook, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. Many users reported seeing tweets that condoned or glorified violence towards marginalized groups or explicit videos easily accessible to underage children.

Earlier this year, researchers at the Stanford Internet Observatory found that Twitter failed to take down dozens of images of child sex abuse. The team identified 128 Twitter accounts selling child sex abuse material and 43 instances of known CSAM. “It is very surprising for any known CSAM to publicly appear on major social media platforms,” said lead author and chief technologist David Thiel. Twitter responded to the issue after being contacted by researchers. This year Twitter removed 525% more accounts related to child sexual exploitation content than a year ago, according to the company.

Twitter has been slow to catch and remove some harmful content since Musk fired or faced resignations for nearly 75% of Twitter’s staff, including the bulk of the trust and safety team, which is responsible for managing responses to content reports. On average, only 28% of antisemitic tweets reported by the ADL between December and January were removed or sanctioned. The group found the posts by drawing a 1% sample of all posts from Twitter’s API, or application programming interface. Twitter has since restricted the reported tweets that were found to violate policies, the company said.

"Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, we have seen the platform go from having one of the best trust and safety divisions in the industry, to one of the worst,” said Nadim Nashif, director at 7amleh-The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media.

During Musk’s tenure, content from extremist political groups and misinformation related to national politics have increased. QAnon-related hashtags rose 91% in May compared with a year earlier, with the majority of those tweets occurring in the last six months, according to research from the ADL. In the first six months under Musk, nearly a quarter of the top Covid-19 related tweets included information about vaccines that is unproved and untested, according to research done by Media Matters, a left-leaning nonprofit media watchdog group funded by donors. In November, Twitter removed bans against Covid-19 misinformation.

The challenge with the freedom of speech, not reach policy is, “there’s no way to verify what’s actually de-amplified,” said Yael Eisenstat, head of the Center for Technology and Society at the ADL. Meanwhile, Musk himself has also engaged with extremist voices, replying to antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-trans narratives, which boosts those posts because he is followed by 148 million people.

So advertisers, remember, if you're paying for ads on twitter, you're directly funding racism, sexism, Qanon, and pedophilia. Yep, that's right - Musk is paying far-right content creators to post on Twitter - so your advertising dollars are going directly to rapists and sex traffickers like Andrew Tate.

You're right - this is very reminiscent of the Microsoft Antitrust suit of 1998. Technically, per that ruling, Google could be subject to an AT&T style breakup. However, it's pertinent to note that on appeal, the Justice Department chose to settle with Microsoft on the issue of splitting the company rather than go back to trial.

Clearly, in the real world, the ruling didn't stick, as today Microsoft, Apple, and Google all package their browsers on their operating systems. As such, I don't think it likely that enforcing an API standard would exceed the current antitrust abuses that we've come to accept as a fact of daily life, and highly unlikely to attract a serious case from the Justice Department.

That being said, I fully support your effort - we've needed stronger antitrust enforcement for a long time, and AT&T shouldn't have been the high watermark of the Justice Department's efforts in this arena.

I'm loving this bit of info:

In this case, Trump is also facing a serious Washington, D.C., federal judge with years of experience, Tobias said. The case has been assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan.

According to The Associated Press, Chutkan stood out for her tough punishment for Jan. 6 rioters. In at least seven cases examined by the AP, Chutkan imposed harsher penalties than what federal prosecutors sought for those rioters.

The AP wrote, "Chutkan, a former assistant public defender who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, has consistently taken the hardest line against Jan. 6 defendants of any judge serving on Washington's federal trial court, which is handling the more than 800 cases brought so far in the largest prosecution in Justice Department history.

This is Trump's worst nightmare - on trial for the crime of the century before a judge appointed by his nemesis, who just happens to be a black woman from Jamaicia. I betting you could make a Jackson Pollock painting out of all the ketchup on the walls at Mar A Lago right now.