Trouble With a Capital T

 

Spooky things are happening in the world of social or semi-social media, not just at Twitter. I saw this note about Facebook's Instagram platform today

Instagram "removed" one of my stories from 2 years ago that showed one of those old timey KKK warnings for Africans to not go to communist meetings because it "violates guidelines" and barred me from using paid branding tools lol is there a purge on the horizon?

— Flying Chaucer (@lelianadelrey) April 8, 2023

and in fact last week I went through something similar myself at Blogger, the Google subsidiary that generously provides this space for free to me and Steve and Roy (Alicublog) and huge numbers of people like us to expose our thinking to public notice; I had three old posts "unpublished" on grounds that it had been flagged by some anonymous user and found on review to violate Blogger's "Malware and Virus Policy", which is weird, because I'm not aware of passing on any malware or viruses at all, though I can imagine being found offensive from time to time to some sensitive soul and getting in trouble with the community guidelines that way.

Indeed, in the first two cases, that's certainly how it looked: the first related to a very old piece (March 2013) on an obnoxious David Brooks column that I thought was infected by a lot of horrible racial stereotypes about Chinese people, and the second even earlier (January 2012), a report on the "Obedient Wives' Club" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which had published a guide to Islamic Sex: Fighting Against Jews To Return Islamic Sex To The World (according to the Wikipedia article on the club, which has since shortened the reference) which didn't have much purpose other than to share something horrifying and grotesque with readers. In both—I was just learning how to do this—I may have done a poor job of calibrating the snark to make it clear that I was deeply opposed to racial stereotyping of Chinese people in the first and certainly not advocating "fighting Jews" for any purpose in the second, if that's what somebody thought.

Blogger invited me to try revising them to meet their requirements and hit the publish button, whereupon they would review the posts and reinstate them if they passed muster, but they weren't that important to me, and it seemed like a lot of work I didn't feel like doing (maybe I'll think about fixing the Brooks one eventually), and I just let it go.

The third post was originally posted January 23 2017, shortly after the Trump inauguration and Kellyanne Conway's introduction of the concept of "alternative facts" (as a justification or explanation of press secretary Sean Spicer's false statements about the size of the crowd in the National Mall, if you'll recall), which I thought was a pretty interesting occasion for revisiting the rightwing claims that "postmodern" relativism is destructive of the concept of truth, and I'd been pretty pleased with that one. And couldn't see anything that could be considered to violate the Malware and Virus policy or anything else, except that it addressed a tweet by a particularly nasty Hasbarist called Omri Ceren to whom I have occasionally addressed a message.

Ceren has never addressed me directly in return, but I briefly wondered if he could be my anonymous denouncer, systematically looking through the blog for things to discredit me, and it kind of gave me the willies. On the other hand, I still really did like the piece and what it had to say about the "alternative facts" theory, and the rather fancy references to Foucault and Baudrillard. So what I did was to write a first version of these paragraphs you are now reading as a preface, and then submit it with a very slightly revised version of the old post (not revised to pacify my accuser, just to clarify some overdense syntax).

That passed Blogger's review, and they republished it, and now I've cut off the preface and you can read it again at this link in its more or less original form, if you're interested. But the whole experience was pretty disquieting.

Then there's Twitter under the despotic management of Noel Skum. Steve M has virtually stopped posting there, but I've held tight—I love the international Twitter community, as I've said before, and feel it belongs to us, not the person who bought the software. Now I'm starting to wonder, especially after they revealed something about the famous algorithm that decides what things to promote and what things to bury:

This is amazingly bad. Providing evidence for your claim downranks you and pulling it out of your ass pushes you up. A real disinformation factory.

I think it's going to be the thing that finally drives me out. https://t.co/PHxtHxMtdZ

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) April 8, 2023

Then another thing is that Skum seems to be engaged in some kind of war with the Substack platform, which is about to launch a new service that will do some Twitterish things, and Twitter is trying to stop its users from going there:

On Thursday, Twitter prevented Substack writers from sharing tweets in their newsletters. And on Friday, Twitter took steps to block Substack newsletters from circulating on the platform.

Twitter’s move to swat an upstart was an abrupt deviation from normal behavior among internet companies and publishers. It also provided more grist for critics who say that while Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has often hailed the importance of free speech, he has not shied from restricting competitors and content that he doesn’t like.

Among other things, if you click on a Substack link from a Tweet, Twitter now gives you an idiotic warning suggesting it's too dangerous to go there.

As ever, Elmo is 12 years old.

Anyhow the long and the short of it is that I have decided it might be prudent for me to have a more active Substack presence myself (I like the look and feel of the Chat function it recently introduced, and I think the new Notes may be the thing most likely to replace Twitter's place in my heart, and I really like how it's based on understanding that the content produced by users is the source of a platform's value, so it exists for subscribers rather than advertisers). I'm certainly not planning to abandon this ship I've been sailing for 11 years, but I'm going to be ready should that become necessary, and my first post is up there (for free). Go read it!

Cross--posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.