By "social media" we mean any large computer network that allows people to interact in shared communities. The big ones of course are Facebook, Twitter (X), and Instagram, but we can't forget newer platforms like Discord and Slack.
Dedicated video sites are off-topic here and YouTube has its own separate thread
.
What we should discuss in this OTC topic are news items, business operations, and activities by the networks themselves, not specific things posted by users. Those should go into threads appropriate to the subjects of those posts. For example, if an actor tweets about a film, we'd discuss that in the Media forum topic for the film, not here. If Facebook changes its policies, that could be discussed here.
The politics, motives, competency and wider business activities of the owners and leaders of social media companies (e.g. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg) are also off-topic — except in situations where they are directly making specific policy for the platform.
Talking about a particular Instagram policy change (or a high-profile ban on a specific user) directly announced by Mark Zuckerberg would be acceptable in this thread, speculating about Zuckerberg's wider motivations wouldn't be.
The thread's also not about "dumb thing [public figure] said on [social media platform]". If there isn't a specific thread related to the subject of the statement (e.g. US Politics), then it's probably gossip and not worth talking about.
created back in 2020 that we never opened. Unfortunately, it's a little stale, so bumping it isn't going to work very well, but I would like to restart it. The reason I'm doing so is that the Computer Thread seems to have become the de facto place for this sort of talk, and it's a big tonal clash with talking about computer tech.
The hot topic of the day is Elon Musk's bid to acquire Twitter. We first discussed it in the Computer Thread, starting roughly here, and I am not going to rehash the entire discussion. Instead, I am going to resume from the last post:
CNBC: Twitter is reportedly taking another look at Musk takeover bid
Twitter's board is reportedly meeting with Elon Musk and may seek to negotiate on his buyout offer. Musk claims to have secured $46 billion in funding to buy the company at a valuation of $43 billion and is preparing to make a tender offer to its shareholders.
While the board has passed a poison pill, it could be facing resistance to that from groups of shareholders and will want to talk things out rather than face a hostile takeover. It's also possible that Twitter's stock could crash if the offer fails to go through.
Another possible topic was originally posted here.
Ars Technica: EU to unveil landmark law to force Big Tech to police illegal content
Following on from the recently passed Digital Markets Act, which requires large tech companies to unbundle first-party software from hardware platforms, the proposed Digital Services Act will require medium and large social media platforms and search engines to police hate speech and disinformation while adding additional protections for children against targeted marketing.
It also bans "dark patterns", which manipulate or trick people into clicking on ads or other content. The article doesn't explicitly say what that means, but I assume it includes things like disguising ads to look like parts of a site's user interface, hiding "close" buttons, and such.
For large companies, the requirements would go into effect immediately. For medium companies, they would have a grace period to implement the changes.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner, has warned that Big Tech has become “too big to care.”
This phrase, "too big to care", intrigues me. It's an indictment of the idea that these companies have decided that growth and engagement metrics overwhelm any sense of social responsibility.
In my opinion, a law like this would be impossible in the United States, since it would be challenged (likely successfully) on First Amendment grounds.
Edited by Mrph1 on Dec 12th 2023 at 11:24:56 AM
Shadow Bug
Reminds me of a art piece about a guy at his computer, calling out to his wife: "Honey, look! I've found true information the world's expert scientists and doctors missed!"
"That we continue to persist at all is a testament to our faith in one another."
Bots are using paid for premium accounts; this idea of charging users isn't doing to do anything to curb them.
Surrounded by weirdoes
It's just a few bucks more expensive to be an annoyance.
Wake me up at your own risk.
Team Rocket Boss.
What exactly do bots achieve on Twitter? I never go there.
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
That's a broad question to answer, but usually they're trying to either make something look more popular by boosting engagements on tweets or trying to lure people to clicking on links and despite the internet being decades old yes people do still fall for that.
Oh, bother.
So basically astroturfing and phishing?
Disgusted, but not surprised
Jupiterian Local
Not phishing so much as just spamming ads, basically. It's presumably cheaper and has wider reach doing it that way than just buying ads from Twitter.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
It's why all of Elon's talk of "the fee for new users and the fees for blue checkmarks are to dissuade bots" holds no water. The bot owners just paid the fees as they considered the rewards to be worth the cost.
A few pages back in this thread, there was an article about bots driving up engagement with ads on the site. Superficially, it looked like Twitter ads were valuable to the advertisers, but when looking into it, they found that a lot of the "clicks" were just bot traffic. I don't know enough about this to say if this is a side effect of bots that the Twitter administration fails to get rid of or if this is a different type of bot that Twitter actively employs or passively allows to exist to fake engagement with their customer's ads. Either way, it's another thing that bots do.
(Is it correct English to "employ" bots or does that make them sound like human employees?)
"He betrayed the Staaarks" is not the only problem here.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
You can also employ tactics, for instance. I personally didn't notice anything unusual about the phrasing, so I'd say it's fine.
Team Rocket Boss.
Using bots or employing bots really mean the same thing, but if you want to differentiate them from humans, then using bots is closer to what you want.
Because using implies you are referring to them as a resource to be used up rather than employing them as you would humans.
Edited by RedHunter543 on Apr 16th 2024 at 6:05:52 PM
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
I wonder where social media influencers live, because the internet makes them sound like they're everywhere but I have yet to encounter one in the wild.
Never trust anyone who uses "degenerate" as an insult.
I actually wanted to be Resileaf
Bots are also a lot more effective at disseminating misinformation. It's a lot easier for a program to scour social media for the proper keyword and mass post bullshit.
Oh, bother.
How do you know you haven't seen them around? You just haven't seen them while they are setting up shots and vids.
Lost in Space
I would imagine that this new policy is to eliminate the spambots that people notice the most: the ones that pollute replies with N U D E S I N B I O and shit. Those don't pay for subscriptions because why should they?
The misinformation spreading bots tend to be more "engaged", for lack of a better word, and they've already demonstrated that they're willing to pay $8/month for amplification. Different problems, different solutions.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I am not sure what a delay in how long before you can post will actually do to a bot, a bot isn't a person... its incredibly easy to program a script to wait 3 months before it begins its spam attempts.... and the machine just wont care.
Its going to inconvenince onboarded users more then bots and there operators.
Oh, bother.
Not to mention the bot makers can just pay the fee if needed.
Edited by M84 on Apr 16th 2024 at 9:30:15 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Thanks for the answers to my language question @ RedSavant and RedHunter543
and , That might be the intent behind the policy. How well it works, well, we will see in three months. Or maybe this is just a stop-gap to give tired Twitter moderators a break to come up with and/or implement a more permanent solution.
Or maybe it is just the Twitter leadership's newest idea about how to extract money from the userbase, and trying to combat the bot problem is an excuse for that. Who knows.
Who, exactly, is even the target audience for a new Twitter/X account in 2024? Young people starting out on social media? People who left the site (or were banned from it) at some point in the past and now want to rejoin? People who were not interested before but want to join now because... reasons, I guess? Business accounts? I see why people who have already built a network there want to stay, but I don't really see the incentive for your average 16-year-old to join now.
"He betrayed the Staaarks" is not the only problem here.
Agian, because every one else is already there.
Why would you go join say Mastadon when your favorite you-tuber like Mr. Beast or whoever is the big one now is over there on twitter and not on Mastadon.
Your thinking of it completely backwards if you think any tangible features of the service mater to the vast majority of social media users.... as the name says it is social media, the big selling point is who is already there.
Edited by Imca on Apr 16th 2024 at 11:16:54 PM
Lost in Space
Correct. It's about who's there and what value you can gain. While there is a subset of social media users who make choices based on moral or ethical principles, the majority do not. If I had to guess, I'd say most users join social media to follow specific accounts, and expand their interests from there. That's how I joined both Facebook and Twitter.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I'm not sure if there is that big of an incentive for the average internet user to join Mastodon or other fediverse platforms either, especially when there isn't a big scandal or protest on one of the commercial platforms right at the moment. But that's maybe a different discussion.
For a new user to join Twitter, I'd assume that they a) have a reason why they want to be there and b) have a reason to not have an account already. "I'm a self-identified fan of Elon Musk" is a reason why someone would want to be on his platform, but why wait until 2024 for that? "I'm just starting out because until recently I was a child and not allowed to use social media" is a reason to be in the position of joining now, and so is "This is a business account of a recently founded business". Therefor my question what the incentive was for these cases.
It is possible for people to just not use social media, or not use a specific type of it (you don't have to have Mastodon or Bluesky just because you are not on Twitter). If someone is old enough to be a longstanding internet user and has never felt the need to have a Twitter account and is not actively a fan of Musk nor into the whole "Free speech means unblock everyone!!" mentality, but is still somewhat aware that Twitter exists, I don't know what reason that hypothetical person would have to join now. It's not like the site got particularly good press for the last year or two.
I mean, there are probably genuine new users joining Twitter/X. It can't be 100% bots, right?
I didn't think of people using it to follow celebrities, YouTubers etc., but that actually is a good explanation. Now that I do think about it, there are YouTubers that I watch who use "follow me on social media" as part of their end-of-video monologue. And if people join to follow big name users, that might be an incentive for their friends to go there, too. So that could account for some of the (actual, non-bot) new users.
But, second question, how likely are these people to want to pay a fee to access all the features? Or how likely are they to be turned away from the platform entirely? Because how good a business decision that is hinges on how it impacts genuine users, not just how good a measure it is to combat bots.
"He betrayed the Staaarks" is not the only problem here.
Lost in Space
I don't know if I'm an outlier — certainly I am on the TV Tropes forums, but I don't consider that a representative sample — but I chose to pay for X's basic premium plan as an experiment to see if it could indeed amplify my posts, and overcoming the character limit alone is worth something.
I have no intention of paying for the higher tiers because they offer nothing of advantage to me (other than removal of ads, but that's way too pricey to be worth it). I'm not running a business or trying to build a personal brand, and that's who the blue checks are aimed at.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
he/him
X is in legal trouble in Australia.
The Australian eSafety commision ordered them to remove footage of the Sydney attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel.
X responded by hiding them from Australians but leaving them online. An Australian federal injunction then insisted they at least hide them globally, pending another court appearance.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Elon Musk are both getting pretty vocal about it. One of the rare occasions when opposition leader Peter Dutton and the Green party both agree with the government, too - united front from Australia's major political parties.
Edited by Mrph1 on Apr 23rd 2024 at 8:40:30 PM
Oh, bother.
Is Twitter X trying to piss off every country that isn't run by a dictatorship?
Edited by M84 on Apr 24th 2024 at 3:34:42 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Oh God, this.
I can't even count just how many times I had to fact-check/debunk some of the more outrageous things my parents saw in SNS or/and Youtube. And it's not even that they are uneducated - they both are tenured professors.
I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.