Somebody, somewhere, is updating their list of all the old pre-fascism movies and TV shows that will need to be erased from the culture.

Social media takes hundreds of different forms (including e.g. Lemmy) and any study pretending that they’re all the same is useless — unless you can simply replace “social media” with “Facebook”, “TikTok”, or whatever they’re actually about.

For example the first of the studies linked above finds that using “Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram” more than they normally would makes people depressed, and the second finds that an unspecified mix of whatever people normally do that they think of as “social media” did not. Those findings do not contradict each other and do not represent a meaningful controversy.

Politically it’s a controversy, or a tangled mess of controversies. Scientifically it’s just a complete mystery that will — at the speed of science — take decades to unravel. With any luck all the findings about fucking Facebook and Twitter will be obsolete much sooner than that because at some point the enshittification will finally get so bad that people come to their senses and stop using them. The free-world versions of social media, such as the fediverse, continue to get better and will win in the long run.

Thinking back to my own youth when the problem was teenagers talking on the phone for hours at a time, I wonder why we didn’t just force the phone company to ban young people from using telephones.

It’s almost as if the “trade deal” isn’t really about trade.

hostile messages posted on the social media network X

If you have a burning hate for Spanish meteorologists, consider joining X.

Giorgia Meloni, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel, Herbert Kickl, Andrej Babiš, Aleksandar Vučić, Javier Milei, Benjamin Netanyahu.

They’re all so eager to make it clear that they’re enemies of humanity.

“Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands have confirmed deployments as part of the same multinational operation” according to Newsweek, citing “multiple outlets.” I’m pretty sure I heard about it on CBC radio news.

I don’t know, but it would be pretty strange for Canada to be left out.

The technology they’ve come up with sort of works, some of the time, and can make for an impressive demo if you ignore its failings. If you suspend all disbelief and assume that because computers have learned this one new trick they’ll soon be smart enough to magically transform themselves into hyperintelligent AGI monsters straight out of science fiction, if you learn to really believe it, you can convince a lot of people that you might be right. Nobody can prove that it won’t happen, therefore it’s inevitable. Therefore it is existentially important for the future of humanity and it only makes sense to bet the entire economy on it right away without hesitation.

There got to be enough money involved in blogging that someone finally succeeded in replacing it with a convenient, easy, well-advertised platform that they could enshittify and extract maximum profits from.

I don’t trust Mark Carney much and he’s doing a shit job of managing things in Canada so far, but if there’s one thing he ought to be good at it’s negotiating a trade agreement with China.

How else is Science going to pay the rent? They keep raising it. People ask a lot from Science, and to be fair it’s always come through for us in the past, but these days Science is working two jobs just to get by. Science hasn’t even had time to relax and play Crysis since last August.

Maybe, until three years later they’re playing in a band and someone says “okay let’s try it in F.”

You’re missing a few.

Maybe it’s been about 65 years since people started routinely driving cars every time they needed to go somewhere, and thus we no longer get so much practice walking around and tripping over things. The “vehicle miles traveled” data only goes back to 1970 but since then per capita driving in the USA is up by 80%.

To be more precise, the reason it’s getting called “sexual abuse” is that this has proven effective in affecting people’s emotions and forestalling any annoyingly controversial philosophical nitpicking about whether or not creating images resembling some real person counts as abuse of that person even if they know nothing about it. Since this form of it is a new thing we don’t have a better name for it yet.

You may head to Instagram instead, or give Threads an honest go, or start writing down your thoughts on smooth rocks then throwing them at various windows across your neighbourhood. It doesn’t matter.

Recommending Instagram as an alternative to X is sort of like recommending Mussolini as an alternative to Hitler. It does matter. Of those ideas, the rock throwing will probably do the least damage.

I’d like to know how things would’ve turned out if they hadn’t made the decision to start allowing commercial traffic on the Internet.

Toronto police say … Anyone with information is asked to contact Toronto police

Apparently the CBC, normally the closest thing Canada has to good journalism, knows only what the police have told them about this event.

Given what they’ve been up to lately I’m not entirely sure that gov.uk is a credible source on this topic either. They’re saying that Ofcom “will now consult on new codes of practice” but it’s really unclear what they could possibly come up with that would cover all of “social media” (including e.g. fedi) without being either completely ineffectual or a legally unacceptable violation of human rights.

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