What did Parliament do? – politicalbetting.com

bondegezou said:

Right, I’ve got to go vote! Local by-election today. Hard fought between Labour and the Greens.

Leon said:

Sad news about Trump. RIP

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

kinabalu said:

A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Ghedebrav said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?

As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.

This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.

What twitter does have is oversized influence among people with power and influence. That is why they get so angry about Musk and Musk controlling it. He now owns "their" toy and they don't like what he is doing with it. The whole "its a private company, they can do what they like" line seems to have gone out of fashion rather quickly.

Nigelb said:

kinabalu said:

A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Ghedebrav said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?

As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.

This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.

What twitter does have is oversized influence among people with power and influence. That is why they get so angry about Musk and Musk controlling it. He now owns "their" toy and they don't like what he is doing with it. The whole "its a private company, they can do what they like" line seems to have gone out of fashion rather quickly.

Has it ?

It seems to me that it's Musk who's complaining about private companies removing their advertising.
He can, as far as the law and his urged shareholders allow, indeed do what he wants with Twitter. Complaining then about the self imposed consequences of his decisions is pathetic stuff.

I don't see why you have a problem with users of the site complaining that it's got worse ?

Taz said:

kinabalu said:

A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

Missing two of the five episodes also cannot help.

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

Andy_JS said:

eristdoof said:

bigjohnowls said:

RIP Margaret Hodge

It's a busy day for the obituary writers.

This one isn't true.

Nigelb said:

kinabalu said:

A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Ghedebrav said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?

As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.

This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.

What twitter does have is oversized influence among people with power and influence. That is why they get so angry about Musk and Musk controlling it. He now owns "their" toy and they don't like what he is doing with it. The whole "its a private company, they can do what they like" line seems to have gone out of fashion rather quickly.

Has it ?

It seems to me that it's Musk who's complaining about private companies removing their advertising.
He can, as far as the law and his urged shareholders allow, indeed do what he wants with Twitter. Complaining then about the self imposed consequences of his decisions is pathetic stuff.

I don't see why you have a problem with users of the site complaining that it's got worse ?

Ghedebrav said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sales of luxury kitchen and homeware brands have plummeted as the cost of living crisis continues to bite - with Aga cookers, Le Creuset cookware and Farrow & Ball wallpaper and paint among the goods falling out of favour.

Accounts for firms specialising in premium home products show, in some cases, a double digit decline in sales to the end of 2022, with no designer brand seemingly immune to the tightening of British wallets.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12808861/le-creuset-aga-cookers-farrow-ball-plummet-cost-living.html

Seems like Mrs U might be the one propping up these companies.

I know folk like to sneer a bit at Le Creuset but honestly their baseline casserole pots could make for an alternate version of the Vimes Boots Theory. I inherited ours, already decades old, from my mother-in-law who wasn't using it any more and I've been using it at least once a week, usually more, ever since, for over a decade since then. They are probably overpriced, but still good value at that.

FrancisUrquhart said:

TheScreamingEagles said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

When it comes to social media, TikTok is the one we should first and foremost be focused upon, but all because Trump said he didn't like it, there is all this tiptoeing around it.

Its spyware on your phone for the Chinese government, their claims about data / servers have been found to be BS and lots of suspicion about what the algorithm is tweaked towards.

It is pretty much a sackable offence to install/use TikTok on a work device.

Trump was 100% right on TikTok (I doubt from his own research, rather the intelligence community). But no government is strong enough on TikTok or the likes of Temu. When western companies do even a fraction of the shit they have, its a scandal of all scandals.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Nigelb said:

kinabalu said:

A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Ghedebrav said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?

As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.

This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.

What twitter does have is oversized influence among people with power and influence. That is why they get so angry about Musk and Musk controlling it. He now owns "their" toy and they don't like what he is doing with it. The whole "its a private company, they can do what they like" line seems to have gone out of fashion rather quickly.

Has it ?

It seems to me that it's Musk who's complaining about private companies removing their advertising.
He can, as far as the law and his urged shareholders allow, indeed do what he wants with Twitter. Complaining then about the self imposed consequences of his decisions is pathetic stuff.

I don't see why you have a problem with users of the site complaining that it's got worse ?

No there has also been this big push of twitter you aren't censoring people strongly enough. UK government have said it, Irish government have said it, the EU keep making a big noises about removing twitter from operating.

The its a private company, can't do nought about it deplatforming people, who it chooses to censor isn't our business, has turned into you must deplatform people, you must censor harder, disinformation yadda yadda yadda.

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

kinabalu said:

A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Ghedebrav said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?

As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.

This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.

What twitter does have is oversized influence among people with power and influence. That is why they get so angry about Musk and Musk controlling it. He now owns "their" toy and they don't like what he is doing with it. The whole "its a private company, they can do what they like" line seems to have gone out of fashion rather quickly.

Has it ?

It seems to me that it's Musk who's complaining about private companies removing their advertising.
He can, as far as the law and his urged shareholders allow, indeed do what he wants with Twitter. Complaining then about the self imposed consequences of his decisions is pathetic stuff.

I don't see why you have a problem with users of the site complaining that it's got worse ?

Has it got worse?

The OpenAI saga unfolded entirely on TwiX. Unless you are a TwiX user, and following the right acccounts/stories, you’d have been days behind the narrative

malcolmg said:

malcolmg said:

rottenborough said:

Sad news about Darling.

Someone I know knew him a little bit. He was a thoroughly nice fellah by all accounts.

Depends on your viewpoint , some consider him a real traitor

Still sad to pop your clogs at that age, would only give me 2 months to go.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

kinabalu said:

A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Ghedebrav said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?

As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.

This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.

What twitter does have is oversized influence among people with power and influence. That is why they get so angry about Musk and Musk controlling it. He now owns "their" toy and they don't like what he is doing with it. The whole "its a private company, they can do what they like" line seems to have gone out of fashion rather quickly.

Has it ?

It seems to me that it's Musk who's complaining about private companies removing their advertising.
He can, as far as the law and his urged shareholders allow, indeed do what he wants with Twitter. Complaining then about the self imposed consequences of his decisions is pathetic stuff.

I don't see why you have a problem with users of the site complaining that it's got worse ?

Has it got worse?

The OpenAI saga unfolded entirely on TwiX. Unless you are a TwiX user, and following the right acccounts/stories, you’d have been days behind the narrative

I definitely have the odd weirdo account pop up now that I wouldn't before. But was having bubble ecosystem good? Also Community Notes is absolutely brutal, you talk shit, you get recked. That is a great innovation.

What should definitely happen (I don't know if it does or is in the works) if you consistently get community noted, again the idea of you are free to scream, but you get down weighted even further. Reach reduction I think is a good balance between censorship and totally hands off free for all.

FrancisUrquhart said:

When it comes to social media, TikTok is the one we should first and foremost be focused upon, but all because Trump said he didn't like it, there is all this tiptoeing around it.

Its spyware on your phone for the Chinese government, their claims about data / servers have been found to be BS and lots of suspicion about what the algorithm is tweaked towards.

algarkirk said:

malcolmg said:

malcolmg said:

rottenborough said:

Sad news about Darling.

Someone I know knew him a little bit. He was a thoroughly nice fellah by all accounts.

Depends on your viewpoint , some consider him a real traitor

Still sad to pop your clogs at that age, would only give me 2 months to go.

“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away." Psalm90

FrancisUrquhart said:

Leon said:

Nigelb said:

kinabalu said:

A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

FrancisUrquhart said:

Ghedebrav said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?

As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.

This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.

What twitter does have is oversized influence among people with power and influence. That is why they get so angry about Musk and Musk controlling it. He now owns "their" toy and they don't like what he is doing with it. The whole "its a private company, they can do what they like" line seems to have gone out of fashion rather quickly.

Has it ?

It seems to me that it's Musk who's complaining about private companies removing their advertising.
He can, as far as the law and his urged shareholders allow, indeed do what he wants with Twitter. Complaining then about the self imposed consequences of his decisions is pathetic stuff.

I don't see why you have a problem with users of the site complaining that it's got worse ?

Has it got worse?

The OpenAI saga unfolded entirely on TwiX. Unless you are a TwiX user, and following the right acccounts/stories, you’d have been days behind the narrative

I definitely have the odd weirdo account pop up now that I wouldn't before. But was having bubble ecosystem good? Also Community Notes is absolutely brutal, you talk shit, you get recked. That is a great innovation.

What should definitely happen (I don't know if it does or is in the works) if you consistently get community noted, again the idea of you are free to scream, but you get down weighted even further. Reach reduction I think is a good balance between censorship and totally hands off free for all.

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

If Trump didn't want to be "dragged through courts" for fraud and insurrection, he shouldn't have committed fraud and insurrection.

I'm not saying any criticism of Soros is antisemitic. I'm saying that most criticism of Soros from the US and Hungarian right clearly is antisemitic. I gave you one reference above. Here's the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/soros-targeted-by-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-hatred-amid-trump-indictment/ Here's Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/09/12/the-troubling-truth-about-the-obsession-with-george-soros/ Here are some more academic analyses: https://academic.oup.com/book/43056/chapter-abstract/361481462 and https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003048640-9/eternal-george-soros-armin-langer

Putin ❤️ Rumble: see https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/24/russia-state-media-rumble-00020184 and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-russias-rt-is-embracing-canadian-video-site-rumble/

rottenborough said:

Sad news about Darling.

Someone I know knew him a little bit. He was a thoroughly nice fellah by all accounts.

Andy_JS said:

"Suella Braverman wins ‘disruptor of the year’ at Spectator awards"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/suella-braverman-wins-disruptor-of-the-year-at-spectator-awards-rg9mlmdhz

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

If Trump didn't want to be "dragged through courts" for fraud and insurrection, he shouldn't have committed fraud and insurrection.

I'm not saying any criticism of Soros is antisemitic. I'm saying that most criticism of Soros from the US and Hungarian right clearly is antisemitic. I gave you one reference above. Here's the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/soros-targeted-by-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-hatred-amid-trump-indictment/ Here's Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/09/12/the-troubling-truth-about-the-obsession-with-george-soros/ Here are some more academic analyses: https://academic.oup.com/book/43056/chapter-abstract/361481462 and https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003048640-9/eternal-george-soros-armin-langer

Putin ❤️ Rumble: see https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/24/russia-state-media-rumble-00020184 and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-russias-rt-is-embracing-canadian-video-site-rumble/

Putin loving Rumble, is most definitely not the same as Rumble loving Putin.

The fact that a bunch of racist idiots try and use Soros’ name as a conspiracy theory, doesn’t mean that valid critisicm of that particular individual is racist.

Andy_JS said:

"Suella Braverman wins ‘disruptor of the year’ at Spectator awards"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/suella-braverman-wins-disruptor-of-the-year-at-spectator-awards-rg9mlmdhz

MattW said:

viewcode said:

MattW said:

Northern_Al said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Security Minister [Tom Tugendhat] agrees Home Office losing 17,000 asylum seekers is an 'absolute shambles'
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/security-minister-home-office-missing-asylum-seekers/

He's right. I listened to extracts from yesterday's HO Select Committee hearing. I normally defend Civil Servants, but the two who appeared yesterday (Rycroft + another) were embarrassingly hopeless - ill-prepared and incapable of answering basic questions. This led to the bizarre scenario of both the Chair (Diane Johnson, Lab) and Lee Anderson joining forces to tell them how useless they were.

It would appear that in their desperation to meet targets for removing the backlog, at least 17,000 asylum seekers have simply had their claims discontinued. When asked where they were, the response was simply "no idea".

I'm not sure on that one.

My MP Lee Anderson came across to me as a grandstanding barrack-room-lawyer - asking statistical questions based on multiple sub-categories, then having a go at Civil Servants for not having the answers immediately available in their heads.

Perhaps if he had given appropriate notice (eg 48-72 hours) of his complex questions Civil Servants would have been in a position to provide him with an answer.

I am not convinced that he actually wants answers, rather an opportunity to indulge in performative outrage on GB News / social media.

I'm open to correction by anyone with a more complete knowledge, but that is my impression from coverage I have seen.

@MattW. Quick follow-up: how is your chemo bearing up?

Bearing up thanks - more or less out and about again, and doing my first trip around friends in the south a week before Christmas.

Physically I'm slightly worse - not enough exercise, and on a routine asthma review for my asthna in remission this morning my blower test was a little down on the normal. But I was a trumpet player at school, which seems to have added resilience by giving extra lung capacity (really).

Docs are happy.

Leon said:

RIP Jesus Christ of Nazareth, could have been a brilliant carpenter like his dad, now just a life wasted, really

DougSeal said:

RIP Edmund Ironside

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

If Trump didn't want to be "dragged through courts" for fraud and insurrection, he shouldn't have committed fraud and insurrection.

I'm not saying any criticism of Soros is antisemitic. I'm saying that most criticism of Soros from the US and Hungarian right clearly is antisemitic. I gave you one reference above. Here's the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/soros-targeted-by-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-hatred-amid-trump-indictment/ Here's Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/09/12/the-troubling-truth-about-the-obsession-with-george-soros/ Here are some more academic analyses: https://academic.oup.com/book/43056/chapter-abstract/361481462 and https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003048640-9/eternal-george-soros-armin-langer

Putin ❤️ Rumble: see https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/24/russia-state-media-rumble-00020184 and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-russias-rt-is-embracing-canadian-video-site-rumble/

Putin loving Rumble, is most definitely not the same as Rumble loving Putin.

The fact that a bunch of racist idiots try and use Soros’ name as a conspiracy theory, doesn’t mean that valid critisicm of that particular individual is racist.

Well, show me some valid criticism of Soros then. You just chucked his name in as if that proved Media Matters must be up to no good.

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

If Trump didn't want to be "dragged through courts" for fraud and insurrection, he shouldn't have committed fraud and insurrection.

I'm not saying any criticism of Soros is antisemitic. I'm saying that most criticism of Soros from the US and Hungarian right clearly is antisemitic. I gave you one reference above. Here's the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/soros-targeted-by-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-hatred-amid-trump-indictment/ Here's Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/09/12/the-troubling-truth-about-the-obsession-with-george-soros/ Here are some more academic analyses: https://academic.oup.com/book/43056/chapter-abstract/361481462 and https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003048640-9/eternal-george-soros-armin-langer

Putin ❤️ Rumble: see https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/24/russia-state-media-rumble-00020184 and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-russias-rt-is-embracing-canadian-video-site-rumble/

Putin loving Rumble, is most definitely not the same as Rumble loving Putin.

The fact that a bunch of racist idiots try and use Soros’ name as a conspiracy theory, doesn’t mean that valid critisicm of that particular individual is racist.

Well, show me some valid criticism of Soros then. You just chucked his name in as if that proved Media Matters must be up to no good.

My criticism of Soros, is that he’s been funding campaigns for elected offices of people with whom I profoundly disagree.

For example, the DAs in San Francisco and Los Angeles who decided to effectively decriminalise shoplifting and vagrancy, and the DA in New York who campaigned on a platform of “Get Donald Trump”.

JosiasJessop said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

If Trump didn't want to be "dragged through courts" for fraud and insurrection, he shouldn't have committed fraud and insurrection.

I'm not saying any criticism of Soros is antisemitic. I'm saying that most criticism of Soros from the US and Hungarian right clearly is antisemitic. I gave you one reference above. Here's the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/soros-targeted-by-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-hatred-amid-trump-indictment/ Here's Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/09/12/the-troubling-truth-about-the-obsession-with-george-soros/ Here are some more academic analyses: https://academic.oup.com/book/43056/chapter-abstract/361481462 and https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003048640-9/eternal-george-soros-armin-langer

Putin ❤️ Rumble: see https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/24/russia-state-media-rumble-00020184 and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-russias-rt-is-embracing-canadian-video-site-rumble/

Putin loving Rumble, is most definitely not the same as Rumble loving Putin.

The fact that a bunch of racist idiots try and use Soros’ name as a conspiracy theory, doesn’t mean that valid critisicm of that particular individual is racist.

Well, show me some valid criticism of Soros then. You just chucked his name in as if that proved Media Matters must be up to no good.

My criticism of Soros, is that he’s been funding campaigns for elected offices of people with whom I profoundly disagree.

For example, the DAs in San Francisco and Los Angeles who decided to effectively decriminalise shoplifting and vagrancy, and the DA in New York who campaigned on a platform of “Get Donald Trump”.

Yet you're a very keen fan of Musk.

FrancisUrquhart said:

NickPalmer said:

rottenborough said:

Sad news about Darling.

Someone I know knew him a little bit. He was a thoroughly nice fellah by all accounts.

Yes, that's what I thought, though we were never in close contact. Very much free of the ego-promoting self-centred approach of some.

I am not sure he got enough credit for his actions during the banking crisis. Many reports at the time that he was able to moderate Gordon Browns more irrational demands while still finding solutions.

Brown went on to claim he saved the world, Darling rather kept a lowish profile and retired without much fanfare both from MP and Lords.

Luckyguy1983 said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

Whether you regard his influence as benign or malign, George Soros and his organisation are intensely politically active, and should be open to criticism and/or praise on that basis.

It also makes me smile to myself when people lampoon the idea of 'those woke left-wing financial markets' bringing down Liz Truss, when you only have to look at Soros as an example of an investor who spends billions to achieve his desired political outcomes.

algarkirk said:

Andy_JS said:

"Suella Braverman wins ‘disruptor of the year’ at Spectator awards"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/suella-braverman-wins-disruptor-of-the-year-at-spectator-awards-rg9mlmdhz

Politico commented thus (don't know I wasn't there):

Disrupter of the Year Suella Braverman could not suppress her grin as she walked on to I Predict a Riot. The sacked home secretary said she’d won the title over the Supreme Court, the ECHR … and “for disrupting my plans to cut the numbers and deliver a manifesto pledge — the prime minister.”

The only problem … was her drive-by landed worse than a wet thud, with audible suckings of breath and not one laugh. “That’s her leadership hopes gone in 2 mins,” one of her many detractors texted gleefully. Said another: “I would say she bombed but you have to take off first.” One attendee called it as “avant-garde” … another described it using only wincing noises … and a Cabinet minister said simply: “Pathetic. Pathetic.”

Stark_Dawning said:

algarkirk said:

Andy_JS said:

"Suella Braverman wins ‘disruptor of the year’ at Spectator awards"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/suella-braverman-wins-disruptor-of-the-year-at-spectator-awards-rg9mlmdhz

Politico commented thus (don't know I wasn't there):

Disrupter of the Year Suella Braverman could not suppress her grin as she walked on to I Predict a Riot. The sacked home secretary said she’d won the title over the Supreme Court, the ECHR … and “for disrupting my plans to cut the numbers and deliver a manifesto pledge — the prime minister.”

The only problem … was her drive-by landed worse than a wet thud, with audible suckings of breath and not one laugh. “That’s her leadership hopes gone in 2 mins,” one of her many detractors texted gleefully. Said another: “I would say she bombed but you have to take off first.” One attendee called it as “avant-garde” … another described it using only wincing noises … and a Cabinet minister said simply: “Pathetic. Pathetic.”

I don't want to seem too po-faced, but it's a sad reflection of our times that 'the oldest and most venerable political magazine on earth' thinks that Braverman's antics are just jolly japery and deserving of a celebratory piss-up. The nation really is poorly served by these jokers.

viewcode said:

MattW said:

viewcode said:

MattW said:

Northern_Al said:

DecrepiterJohnL said:

Security Minister [Tom Tugendhat] agrees Home Office losing 17,000 asylum seekers is an 'absolute shambles'
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/security-minister-home-office-missing-asylum-seekers/

He's right. I listened to extracts from yesterday's HO Select Committee hearing. I normally defend Civil Servants, but the two who appeared yesterday (Rycroft + another) were embarrassingly hopeless - ill-prepared and incapable of answering basic questions. This led to the bizarre scenario of both the Chair (Diane Johnson, Lab) and Lee Anderson joining forces to tell them how useless they were.

It would appear that in their desperation to meet targets for removing the backlog, at least 17,000 asylum seekers have simply had their claims discontinued. When asked where they were, the response was simply "no idea".

I'm not sure on that one.

My MP Lee Anderson came across to me as a grandstanding barrack-room-lawyer - asking statistical questions based on multiple sub-categories, then having a go at Civil Servants for not having the answers immediately available in their heads.

Perhaps if he had given appropriate notice (eg 48-72 hours) of his complex questions Civil Servants would have been in a position to provide him with an answer.

I am not convinced that he actually wants answers, rather an opportunity to indulge in performative outrage on GB News / social media.

I'm open to correction by anyone with a more complete knowledge, but that is my impression from coverage I have seen.

@MattW. Quick follow-up: how is your chemo bearing up?

Bearing up thanks - more or less out and about again, and doing my first trip around friends in the south a week before Christmas.

Physically I'm slightly worse - not enough exercise, and on a routine asthma review for my asthna in remission this morning my blower test was a little down on the normal. But I was a trumpet player at school, which seems to have added resilience by giving extra lung capacity (really).

Docs are happy.

Some happy news on a cold day. Good to know!

CatMan said:

Leon said:

RIP Jesus Christ of Nazareth, could have been a brilliant carpenter like his dad, now just a life wasted, really

His "Dad"?

numbertwelve said:

algarkirk said:

Andy_JS said:

"Suella Braverman wins ‘disruptor of the year’ at Spectator awards"

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/suella-braverman-wins-disruptor-of-the-year-at-spectator-awards-rg9mlmdhz

Politico commented thus (don't know I wasn't there):

Disrupter of the Year Suella Braverman could not suppress her grin as she walked on to I Predict a Riot. The sacked home secretary said she’d won the title over the Supreme Court, the ECHR … and “for disrupting my plans to cut the numbers and deliver a manifesto pledge — the prime minister.”

The only problem … was her drive-by landed worse than a wet thud, with audible suckings of breath and not one laugh. “That’s her leadership hopes gone in 2 mins,” one of her many detractors texted gleefully. Said another: “I would say she bombed but you have to take off first.” One attendee called it as “avant-garde” … another described it using only wincing noises … and a Cabinet minister said simply: “Pathetic. Pathetic.”

I think there’s a good chance Braverman would have managed to become leader, if she hadn’t just taken it that step too far with ProtestGate and Lifestyle Choice.

I suspect she is now destined to forever be on the fringes, complaining endlessly to anyone who will listen.

TheValiant said:

A lot of deaths today.
Shane MacGowan
Henry Kissinger
Alaistar Darling
And Jimmy Corkhill!

Selebian said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Don't panic Mr Mainwaring...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12808991/Denmark-battles-surge-pneumonia-sparking-fears-China.html

Well, "SSI senior researcher Hanne-Dorthe Emborg said the outbreak wasn't unusual and experts had been predicting one for some time in the wake of Covid", but that didn't stop the headline "Now DENMARK battles surge in same type of 'white lung syndrome' pneumonia sparking fears in China". Bit disappointed they didn't capitalise CHINA or add "HOME OF COVID, China".

Sandpit said:

JosiasJessop said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

bondegezou said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Sandpit said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

viewcode said:

Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

"Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.

Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.

I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.

Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.

Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.

There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.

Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?

He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.

Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.

The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.

I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.

Today’s news isn’t about Twitter, it’s about Rumble.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1

Soros as an individual has been funding Democrats for decades, trying to call any criticism of him as an individual antisemitic is half of the problem. Just as it’s possible to critisise Netanyahu without being anti-Semitic, yet few on the left seem to manage it.

Soros has funded the campaigns of judges and district attorneys in the US, who now oversee record crime rates in cities, and see Trump and other conservatives dragged through courts for what in many cases are clearly politically motivated charges.

I’m not going into bat for a bunch of Putinists, I’m trying to provide some balance to the debate here on US politics by following loads of people on all sides of the debate. It’s clear that the US focus is now on China as the primary enemy, and that European governments are going to need to step up and fund NATO properly, rather than relying on the US. On that matter, Trump was right.

If Trump didn't want to be "dragged through courts" for fraud and insurrection, he shouldn't have committed fraud and insurrection.

I'm not saying any criticism of Soros is antisemitic. I'm saying that most criticism of Soros from the US and Hungarian right clearly is antisemitic. I gave you one reference above. Here's the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/soros-targeted-by-antisemitic-conspiracy-theories-hatred-amid-trump-indictment/ Here's Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/09/12/the-troubling-truth-about-the-obsession-with-george-soros/ Here are some more academic analyses: https://academic.oup.com/book/43056/chapter-abstract/361481462 and https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003048640-9/eternal-george-soros-armin-langer

Putin ❤️ Rumble: see https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/24/russia-state-media-rumble-00020184 and https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-russias-rt-is-embracing-canadian-video-site-rumble/

Putin loving Rumble, is most definitely not the same as Rumble loving Putin.

The fact that a bunch of racist idiots try and use Soros’ name as a conspiracy theory, doesn’t mean that valid critisicm of that particular individual is racist.

Well, show me some valid criticism of Soros then. You just chucked his name in as if that proved Media Matters must be up to no good.

My criticism of Soros, is that he’s been funding campaigns for elected offices of people with whom I profoundly disagree.

For example, the DAs in San Francisco and Los Angeles who decided to effectively decriminalise shoplifting and vagrancy, and the DA in New York who campaigned on a platform of “Get Donald Trump”.

Yet you're a very keen fan of Musk.

Not at all, I’m just not someone who thinks of him as evil. The world would be better with more Elon Musks, but someone needs to take his phone off him when he’s on drugs.