Noah St. Amand @NoahStAmand@mastodon.cloud

Some of you may have seen Elon Musk's endorsement of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s crazy antivax conspiracy theories today.

Over at post.news, I just posted a long-form piece about this, and about how science education needs to adapt to online disinformation.

Please a look. If you like it, boost it there or here or — if you dare — over on the birdsite.

https://post.news/article/2J7VEapSIpNWsrC0EawD8CopYqo

Sometimes it takes an outsider to point out the obvious. So, as a Chinese immigrant in Canada I feel the need to say something:

If you feel a sense of loyalty to a specific political party, then you really don't understand how democracy is supposed to work.

A democratic party is not a sports team and you are not their fan. A party is like an internet service provider - if their quality of service diminishes, you should switch providers.

#Democracy #politics

Protocols, not platforms. That we let ourselves get suckered into platforms over protocols is one of the biggest unforced errors in the history of the net, and if Musk makes that widely obvious, it will be a significant silver lining in his sophomoric conflagration.

There's A LOT of discussion about content moderation right now and very little of it touches on the fact that we've all lived on the big social sites for the last decade-plus thanks to the massively exploitated labor of mostly-invisible moderation workers. The social web at scale wouldn't have happened without these laborers, who in addition to shit wages, have been exposed to literally every imaginable horror.

If we're remaking this world, let's do better on that front.

As a security professional, not much scares me. I've seen my personal data stolen numerous times, watched nationstate hackers spray zerodays across the internet, and I'm a shameless user of TikTok. But now you have someone sitting on top of the personal data of several billion users, someone who has a long track record of vindictive harassment, someone who has the ear of the far right, and someone who has just shown us his willingness to weaponize internal company data to score political points. That scares me a lot.

Proposal to stop referring to covid in the past tense and climate change in the future tense.

This feels like a good time for lots of non trans people to loudly state the truth that trans people are good and more out and visible trans people is good for society.

Economics: Humans only value things monetarily.
Sociology: Uh, I don't ...
Economics: Humans are always rational and value is calculated by a complex inner calculus.
Sociology: Uh, Psy, can you help?
Psychology: That's not how humans ...
Economics: ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!!
Physics: *drops teacup*

50 WAYS TO LEAVE YOUR TWITTER

You just pin your last tweet, Pete,
Request your archive, Clive,
You don’t need a blue tick, Vic,
Just get yourself free.

Hop on the tusk, Gus,
You don’t need to delete much,
Except your DMs, Jen,
And get yourself free.

Use Debirdify, Di,
Provide some alt tags, Mags,
Add a content warning, Tim,
To post sensitively.

Remember to boost, Ruth
You don't need to deny truth,
Just drop off the perch, Dirk,
And get yourself free.
#VerseThurday #TwitterMigration #FediTips

I cannot emphasize this enough, if you've ever used Twitter credentials to log into anything else you need to figure out how to get out from under that as soon as you can.