Blue Sky

[AndCoronets]

What do you make of it? I was all for a break from the cesspit that it is TwiX, but I'm getting dubious vibes. Set up my account, searched for a few of the accounts which I follow on Twitter, got to Kathleen Stock and all I found was transphobe, blah blah type posts. Depressing.

The line between censorship and protection of people is sometimes not an easy one to find.

People are amazed at Musk letting some posts stand and shout how amazing it because ‘free speech’.
I don’t think free speech should allow for bullying. Or racism. Or for that matter for letting some posts stand when Courts have found them illegal (aka racist or inciting violence).
I don’t think it’s ok to have bots all over the place (and X is full of them)
I don’t think it’s ok for accounts who will go and threaten other posters in DM to be allowed to stand.(and by that I mean violence, killing their child etc…)
I dint agree with doxxing either.

Free speech. Yep all the way.
Not at the detriment of respect or safety.

Also Twitter isn’t just about the US elections or TERF/TRA.
Im using Twitter to get information from researchers, publishing their papers. It’s about my own health, finding support etc…
And to get the news - like most people I think. But I never use newspapers for that. I’m more interested in individual journalists, in particular from other countries.
And yet, you can still see the algorithm at play - the one that make followers disappear (were they all bots unnecessary now Trump has won? Or is Mush deliberately ‘attacking’ accounts they dont support). I see posts appearing that make no sense re what I’m reading and engaging with (flat earth theory anyone? Conspiration theory too).

If you feel that X algorithm truly reflect what you want to see (which basically IS an echo chamber btw) then I feel you are mislead (by Musk)

They’re on Twitter too, have forever.
Have you refused to join a Twitter too?
And Facebook?

I have a deadline to meet, but I'm whiling away my time upsetting my X algorithm, by throwing random searches at it 😅
I posted using the word cisgender, nothing bad happened...yet! There seems to be plenty of recent posts containing the word on X too and no doubt I'll be recommended all of them now.

I was agreeing with you re the echo chamber btw, of course it is.

I don't take X seriously and don't use it in the way that you seem to do. If it's being used as a legitimate research resource or as a link to those resources then it's a whole different ball game.

Censorship and moderation worries me.
I'd agree with your second paragraph on the surface. But it's difficult to define what is bullying when disagreeing with someone is "literal violence". Who sets those rules? Racism - obviously we all think we know what racism looks like, but do we? Does a discussion on immigration stating that we need to limit it or a debate on how it should be managed constitute racism. Is thinking Israel is wrong anti semitism or right islamophobia/genocide? There seems to be no tolerance for reasoned debate anymore.

Interesting that you mentioned the followers/ likes "glitches" . There are so many bots on X. I read somewhere that their purpose is not to make us believe what they are posting, but to make us distrust everything that we do read. A distrustful public is easily manipulated. But that's probably a conspiracy theory in itself!

And as adults, sorry, you should be able to cope with seeing words you find unpalatable. It's a worthwhile tradeoff for being able to speak and read the truth about cheats like Khelif and Semenya. One million percent I'd take full free speech, the good, the bad and the ugly, over yet another stifling echo chamber.

YY.

Bluesky Will remove the mere idea that you might read something that doesn’t agree with the woke bro beardy echo chamber by putting a literal veil over it

Thank you for the link.
The GLP gives a round up of their best achievements.
No mention of trans anything.

Read the replies to this by Susanna Rustin: https://bsky.app/profile/susannajrustin.bsky.social/post/3latimqsttm2m

The hate is unreal. And upsetting.

I have a Bluesky account and it seems a load of TRA rubbish. I think I will just wind down the social media

I’ve joined Bluesky - the jury is still out on that. But I will definitely be leaving X because it’s now the propaganda arm of the Trump presidency.

The only thing Trump is right about is not sterilizing children. He's not pro women's rights - he's a rapist.

You can actually read what she wrote though. Just click “show”. As I say, jury is still out

That is disappointing. However, those are optional settings if you have an account. You can turn off their intolerance warnings and nothing will be hidden, no warning even. Annoyingly it doesn't seem to work when logged out.

Those labels are clearly being abused. I saw Naomi posted a photo of a beach and it was labelled as intolerant. It may even be against their own policy which says labels shouldn't be used to harass people.

It will be interesting to see what happens when other networks with different moderation standards appear on their framework. I could be tempted to move over.

If you didn't know who she was would you click on something labelled such without a pause to wonder just what horror was underneath? It is an obvious abuse of a well meaning system to throttle a woman's voice.

Well I usually checked what was under the throttled posts on X, so yes, probably. But I’m not really defending Bluesky - I’m still trying it. What I am doing is leaving X for the reasons above.

I joined Bluesky last year because Mastodon had me on blacklists so I couldn't find a server to host me and let me post. The infrastructure is run by people who are fully in the TWAW camp. I keep the nice place for cat pictures and do my TERFing on twitter.

I'm not on any SM, and yet I know all the latest about Imane Khelif, because I read it directly on the Reduxx website.

Wonder how that is going to pan out. Blacklists I assume 🙄.

Free speech is fine. But people don't Have to listen. Obviously it's good to hear a range of views for a healthy society. But if people don't like being on twitter and leave, that's not an attempt to shut down free speech. My partner has absolutely no interest in being on mumsnet. He isn't an opponent of free speech on mumsnet he just... Doesn't want to spend time reading threads here. I never liked twitter much but looking from other peoples accounts now it looks like it's just a lot of Elon Musk postings boosted onto people's pages. I support Elon Musk's right to free speech. I also support my own right not to read his musings.

I also think the whole idea that places like twitter etc are the best place to hear others opinions/get a wide range of views is flawed and always has been.

It's complicated, but otherwise moderators have to sift through endless amounts of really grim material. If you disagree maybe you could volunteer for the job of looking at beheading videos, monkey torture and weird porn for days at a time on one of the many social media sites.
I don't even have bluesky or care particularly. But I have had jobs which involve looking at really grim material all day and it takes it out of you. If you want an unmoderated website those exist. But most people don't want that and that is reasonable. (Mumsnet auto moderated posts using the c---o word for instance). Otherwise how do you expect sites to remove that material?

I've just joined BlueSky and started trying to replicate my TwiX account over there. Pointless. Either I accept that my BlueSky experience will be very different (I might actually try to curate something that isn't remotely to do with sex realism or GC perspectives, which wouldn't be a bad thing, perhaps) or I don't bother. I'm not leaving TwiX (yet) as I like to keep an eye on the bastards and what they're saying, but (and please don't sling me off here!) I'm finding X so polarised now. So many GC accounts I've followed for years seem to have drifted somewhere I'm not always comfortable with. I still care passionately about biology and fairness and being able to speak out about these things - but either I stay on X and swallow a lot of stuff I really don't like, or I hop on board BlueSky and just keep away from that whole discussion (which doesn't seem to be happening there anyway). I think perhaps the answer is just to ... drop this sort of social media, full stop. X hasn't been healthy for anyone for a long time and I'm quite sure BlueSky will be just as bad. Give it time.

That's fair enough, obviously no one wants to see traumatic stuff. You can't unsee these things.

I was really thinking of a lesser degree, words and not visuals, it's AI so I assumed more sophisticated than just scanning for certain words and phrases. Perhaps building up profiles of a certain type of poster.

I very much use each social media platform for a different purpose. My BlueSky feed is looking very wholesome at the moment, I quite like those algorithms, but I already have Instagram for that job. For me Blue Sky needs to work as a Twitter replacement or not at all.

@AndCoronets How much is Musk out for himself and how much is Musk just giving people what they ultimately want - a meeting place with like minded people, aka an echo chamber.

I don't think there can be any doubt that the world's richest man is out for himself.

James O'Brien is there.

Lucy Hunter Blackburn made me laugh.

https://x.com/LucyHunterB/status/1857756258230579324?t=nXW8bJCvfUzWzeLrw7ojbw&s=19

This bloke was one of the UK people offered up to me: I checked his feed and lots and lots of it was about much happier he was to be there, and there was nothing worth staying for here, a view to which he is quite entitled. And yet now he's just turned up in my Twitter feed. /

James O'Brien @mrjamesob .2h." lf you leave this place forever, you'll miss things like the freeze peach brigade findin g an undeleted tweet & dancing around for hours crowing about it actually being a deleted tweet from a completely different account at the centre of a racial incitement investigation .."

James tiptoed out of the dinner party. Averting his gaze from whatever was happening on the front lawn, he crossed the street to yell through the letter box of his X "YOU AREN'T WELCOME AT THE PARTY WHERE I'M HAVING LOTS OF FUN AND NOT MISSING YOU AT ALL."