Planning Our Escape from Twitter to... Where?

Well, after six months of insane mismanagement by Elon Musk, this past weekend of enforcing data limits on viewing is pretty much the death knell of Twitter. It's now a question how quickly this ship will sink into the Atlantic. Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice has a number of details - especially how Musk is failing to pay his bills - which would be better to read at her article before returning back here, please and thanks. Here's a GIF of Titanic failure to pass the time until you return.

via GIPHY

Ever since Musk overpaid for Twitter - seriously, 44 BILLION?! - he has fired most of his workforce, tried to cheat employment safety guidelines, sought to make Twitter users PAY for something that had been free for them for more than a decade, allowed haters and racists back in order to spike reader interest, and eventually committed to this act of self-immolation as if to drive even addicted Tweeters - sighs and points to mirror - to flee for their lives.

I mean, I know I promised to walk away from Twitter, and I tried... for about a week, before I got pulled back by the fact most people I know were still using it, and because it was still a quick and powerful way to gain near-instant news. A lot of people pledged to get off the ship back then, and yet... We were too used (too addicted) to the app.

But we're looking at the likely abandonment of Twitter within this month as more people get frustrated with Musk's growing incompetence at managing things. It does not help Musk that more alternatives to his app are cropping up.

I had for example jumped onto CounterSocial last November. Only because a favorite for everyone else - Mastadon - was too frustrating for me to install and set up. It wasn't intuitive or helpful. Sadly not a lot of people I knew crossed onto CS, there was no audience to share, so I hadn't kept up with it.

Soon after, an alternative called Spoutible showed up, and I was able to register onto that relatively easy. It mimics a lot of features on Twitter and it should be the easiest app to shift to, except not everybody has, partly because of early controversy with Spoutible's owner being a jerk and mostly because (see below)...

Another app called BlueSky showed up a couple months ago, promising to be the best possible replacement, and it's using the Beta testing process to encourage users to invite their friends in order to make BlueSky more desirable (for those of us who never sat at the cool kids' table, this is high school all over again sigh) to join. As Twitter collapsed this weekend, BlueSky invites skyrocketed (pun intended).

And just this Monday, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I mean Meta announced the speedup of a new app tied into the Facebook/Instagram services called Threads, which dropped this morning late Wednesday night and already got 30 million users to where Musk is threatening to sue Zuck out of spite. While shifting over to an app most people already have - Facebook has 2.99 billion users globally and Instagram which ties into Threads has 2.35 billion - would be a no-brainer, there are security and privacy concerns about the transition that makes me wary.

As you see, while Twitter is sinking, we humans are overwhelmed with choices we didn't have when Twitter started back in 2006. The instant sharing of tweets - faster than newswires and RSS feeds, easier to send to millions of readers than emails or texts - was a novel and unique software app for its day. But now that Musk is punching holes into his own luxury liner to make it sink faster, the survivors queuing for the lifeboats can't make a clean decision on which arriving cruise ship to join.

I mean, we could even go join up on Discord and tie-in to our multiplayer gaming habits, but that just breaks down to such specific cliques that general sharing could never be a reality. And hell, I am digressing here.

So, if you're keeping up at home:

Twitter: still there at https://twitter.com/PaulWartenberg playing the trumpet with the band until the ship sinks for good.

CounterSocial: Can be found at https://counter.social/@pwartenberg but I'm not sure how often I will show up, but send me a tell when you get there.

Spoutible: I'm at https://spoutible.com/PaulWartenberg and I am trying to make it a habit of cross-posting my blog flogs to increase traffic from there.

BlueSky: (I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not one of the cool kids I'm not... /cries)

Threads: Nope, not unless they PAY me to do it.

And I'm curious, are there OTHER social apps out there playing for Twitter's market share...?

(Keeps playing Herb Alpert's "Rise" until the waters reach the deck)

"Gentlemen, it has been a priv---" (suddenly gets invite to BlueSky) "Every sucker for himself! I'm out of here!" (flees)

Update 7/21/23: Holy sh-t I DID get an invite to BlueSky. You can find me there as @paulwartenberg.bsky.social 

Mind Games With the PSYOP Crews

At Midnight all the Spambots
And the Facebook crew
Come out and analyze everyone
That knows more than they do
-- Bob Dylan, updated Desolation Row

Today - building off of a weekend's worth of news reports regarding a data-mining corporation Cambridge Analytica taking too much private info out of Facebook to use as campaign data for Russia and trump to abuse - there's been more revelations that CA was using more than just data to manipulate the political landscape. Via Adam Silverman at Balloon-Juice who starts off linking to the British Channel 4 reporting:

Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.

In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.

In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.

In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”

Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.

The admissions were filmed at a series of meetings at London hotels over four months, between November 2017 and January 2018. An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.

Um, let's start off with HOLY SHIT and work from there.

Silverman gives much-needed clarification:

What Nix and Turnbull are caught describing as their standard operating practice is separate from whatever program Christopher Wylie built for Cambridge Analytica. Rather, they’re describing a hybrid of privatized human intelligence and what are sometimes referred to as black psychological operations (black PSYOP), which is a misuse of the term. Initially black PSYOP was used as short hand for the highly compartmented covert form of PSYOP necessary to support special operations. This is not surprising as Cambridge Analytica is subsidiary business development unit of SCL Group, which claims to provide these services to the British Ministry of Defense and the US DOD. Several boutique companies were created to do this type of work in support of coalition operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and people eventually left these companies and started their own boutique shops. All they’re really doing is creating propaganda and then trying to insert it into the news and social media space without it seeming to come from non-natives...

For my understanding, just on this report alone, I'm thinking Cambridge Analytica are a bunch of hyped-up pimps looking to fuck up other peoples' governments for their own gain and profit. Not to cast any aspersions or anything...

The bribery issue itself is a huge concern. As Channel 4 noted, that tends to be illegal. But the thing catching my eye is the part where they bring in Ukrainian sex workers to tempt/blackmail pols. This begs the question "How did they have access to THAT particular resource?"

'Cause the first thing I think of when I hear something crooked related to Ukraine, my first thought is "Manafort." Considering how that guy was playing on the political global stage, I wonder how tied to CA he could be.

All that thinking aside, this brings up a serious problem about our Social Media world, and how tied into our networks we've become. I've been a user on Facebook for ages, since 2006 or so. I've used it to make and keep track of friends from high school, college, work, and shared interests. To find out - no to have my fears confirmed - that all my social activity and postings can be used against me by foreign agencies looking to disrupt my nation's political arena is horrifying.

I am tempted to cut off Facebook right now. I can't because of work-related reasons - we use Facebook to let other users know about my library's programs and events - but I am seriously looking into other Social Media apps to replace our Facebook page.

Just not Snapchat. Those sons-of-bitches disrespected Rihanna. What the hell were they thinking?

To everyone else I know on Facebook. We need to find a safer way to stay in touch.

And we need to shut those Cambridge Analytica crooks down.