platforming palestinian joy is just as important as sharing the suffering they're enduring during this genocide. despite continued displacement and bombardment, you cannot steal their joy and spirit. happy birthday to this sweet baby 🖤🇵🇸 may they grow up to see a free palestine
PSA: the guardian is not working on a hit piece on diy hrt, and claims they are are misinformation
on the 18th, this post appeared on 4chan's /lgbt/ (slurs in thread: link). a screenshot was posted to reddit, then to tumblr. you've probably seen it:
today, the 23rd, another screenshot popped up on various discord servers, then was reposted variously to twitter. it shows a supposed email from guardian journalist and notorious TERF Susanna Rustin, claiming as the original 4chan post does.
it's now been shared around, and it's with good intentions. the message is useful: don't share your personal information or medical data with journalists, especially ones that happen to be TERFs.
but the post does this through misinformation and fearmongering. i'm still waiting on my response by email from Rustin, but she's reiterated twice (once, twice) that she did not write the email and is not working on such a story. on the 19th, i talked to other guardian newsroom journalists, who said they also did not know of a story's existence.
the moral of the story: this is misinformation, and it's dangerous. it spreads a fine message here, but it does it through spreading anxiety and terror.
you can follow along with this post on my parallel thread on twitter. also calling on @wakewithgiggli to delete their original post!
attention this is your captain speaking chag sameach pesach to all celebrating and a reminder do not open the airlock to greet elijah the vulcan rabbinic council ruled that opening the door to the room where the seder is occurring is sufficient elijah can get on a starship just fine himself he just likes to be personally invited in to your seder we dont need another incident like last year thank you
About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning
If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:
These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:
But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.
Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.
If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.
Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.
Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.
Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.