#article is by chris stokel-walker | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

titles-for-tangents · 1 year

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I’m bringing this up because this seems to be the only article I’ve read so far that really addresses how much of human history we’d be losing. To quote:

“Musk himself acknowledges that Twitter is a public forum, and it’s this fact that makes the potential loss of the platform so significant. Twitter has become integral to civilization today. It’s a place where people document war crimes, discuss key issues, and break and report on news.

“It’s where the US raid that would result in Osama bin Laden’s death was first announced. It’s where people get updates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s where news of the downing of flight MH17, a Malaysia Airlines plane that was likely shot down by pro-Russia forces in Ukraine in 2014, first surfaced. It is a living, breathing historical document. And there’s real concern it could disappear soon.

“‘If Twitter was to “go in the morning”, let’s say, all of this—all of the first-hand evidence of atrocities or potential war crimes, and all of this potential evidence—would simply disappear,’ says Ciaran O’Connor, senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a global think tank. Information gathered using OSINT (open-source intelligence) has been used to support prosecutions for war crimes, and acts as a record of events long after the human memory fades.”

The article notes how even the Library of Congress tried documenting stuff on Twitter for eight freaking years and simply had to stop in 2018 just due to the sheer deluge of information. Think about just how much has happened post-2017 in particular, post- the #Me Too movement. The #Black Lives Matter movement. How many crimes actively caused by the police that people captured on camera and help fuel #Defund the Police. How former President Trump would howl random insanities, instructions, and declarations in a complete breach of protocol both security and otherwise and Twitter was instrumental in deplatforming him, and not only did we get to have five minutes of peace for once, suddenly it opened up the conversation about how large social media sites can and should deplatform hate speech. Twitter is where we all noticed someone cracked into the CDC’s account in one of the first of many moments where the public’s trust in them began to wither and crumble during a pandemic. According to William Kilbride, executive director of the Digital Preservation Coalition, “There’s no indication that those formal records of government agencies have ever been archived, or indeed how they’d go about doing that.”

If you use Twitter for any reason, please find a way to back up your data now. The article goes on to say, “Many users have taken it upon themselves to independently back up their data, while the Internet Archive can be used to permanently store snapshots of Twitter’s webpages in a more reliable place than Twitter’s own servers. But both methods are not without their own issues: multimedia often isn’t stored alongside such methods of archiving tweets—something that would impact the vast numbers of accounts posting images and videos from Iran’s revolution, or documenting Russia’s invasion of Twitter—while accessing the information easily requires knowing the exact URL of any given tweet to access it. ‘You may have trouble finding that if it’s not already been preserved in some way somewhere else on the internet,’” says Eliot Higgins, whom the author notes as the “founder of open-source investigators Bellingcat, who helped bring the perpetrators of the downing of MH17 to justice.”

Storage already was a very real problem, and the recollection of that data is going to be far, far hairier if possible at all. I’m not on Twitter so I’m sure someone much more versed in legal and I.T. issues would be able to clarify if users will be able to get their data back. Don’t get me wrong: watching Elon Musk go bankrupt and his empire burn all around him has been and will continue to be cathartic as hell, especially over the class action lawsuits coming against him. But that will be just the first half of the parade before people try to get back their records of lost art, lost journalism, lost quotes, lost photography and films, lost records of how people have been faring during the pandemic across all walks of life. There’s a very real chance we’re not going to get those back. Yes, much of Twitter is full of brainrot. It’s also full of celebrities, artists, and organizations where their accounts can be as professional as they want it to be. Think about how many tweets you see copy-pasted to Tumblr and copy-pasted Tumblr posts get retweeted back to Twitter. Think about how Eli Lily just had to confront their horrible insulin prices this past week alone and how once again, the conversation turns to accountability and how life can simply be better than this dystopian, sick age we’re living in. This is arguably bigger than even the loss of Vine; I would say it’s a wee bit closer to the burning of the Library at Alexandria.

While there absolutely is worth in having community corkboards, the next social medial empire that will fall like Facebook is going to care even less about you and wipe out even more important moments in human history. Social media sites like Twitter are (again I need to use this word) instrumental as fuck for helping to instigate very real social change, even if they’re created for dumb and/or fun reasons and get quickly grandfathered into serious issues simply because they’ve been popular for so long they’ve just stuck around long enough to see them. Sites like Twitter have allowed people to get out the message out to vote and directly interact with politicians for better and worse. Sure, something will take its place, and Mastodon is already there to try to do just that. We should have healthy competition and no one should run a monopoly to encourage their status as billionaire (we shouldn’t have billionaires in the first place for that matter, but that’s a discussion for another day). The point is the fate of this closing era is going to be at the whims of a very particular twit this weekend, and the window of time to save what we can from the already burning pyre is rapidly closing.

I really, really don’t want to see Twitter to go up in flames. The best outcome for this would be to see all of its employees get much better-paying, unionized jobs and Elon Musk continues to peel and reveal himself for the insufferable jackass that he is.

#twitter #current events #history #human history #important #mit technology review #long posts #article is by chris stokel-walker #social media

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biglisbonnews · 8 months

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An 800-year-old Belgian city is at the forefront of tech innovation, using 5G to power a smarter city The Belgian city of Wavre is installing smart meters in city energy infrastructure to enable peer-to-peer energy sharing and more. https://www.businessinsider.com/wavre-belgium-using-5g-power-smarter-city-2023-8

#Tech Insider #belgium #5g #smart-ciites #5-g-playbook #edit-series #sp-freelance #editorial-sponsorship #es-article-rbs-bvp-att2023 #sp-2023-5gpb-lp #Chris Stokel-Walker #All Content from Business Insider

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crossdreamers · 4 years

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Trans teens are using TikTok to raise money for their surgery

After struggling on Instagram and other platforms, transgender people are using TikTok’s unique attributes to bypass waiting lists and raise money for expensive gender affirmation operations, Josua Zitser writes over at Wired:

It’s not only American teenagers who are fundraising their transitions through TikTok. In the UK, trans teens are choosing to fundraise on the app instead of being subjected to incredibly long waitlists on the NHS. While the NHS does offer free hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery to a select few, the waiting time for a gender clinic appointment can be up to three years from the point of referral. Trans people, therefore, are choosing to self-fund as a speedier alternative.

Both trans men and trans women often go for “top surgery”, and it can be very expensive. Genital surgery even more so. In the US, the full cost of transitioning can be more than $100,000. Unless you live in a country where you have a good chance of getting government coverage getting the necessary funds can be very hard.

“On Tik Tok, there is less of an us vs them attitude than on other social media platforms,” Chris Stokel-Walker, the author of an upcoming book on TikTok tells Zitser.

“You can interact with some of the biggest names, either through comments or duets, and be brought to the attention of both the big influencers and the big influencer’s audiences.”

Read the whole article here! It contains tips on how to succeed on tiktok.

Illustration: Sloop Communications

#transgender #trans #lgbt #lgbtqa #tiktok #social media

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years

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The gloomy saga of Article 13 just got a whole lot worse

Chris Stokel-Walker/Wired UK:

It’s a crucial week for the future of the internet, as European politicians debate further changes to the controversial Article 13 copyright proposals. An already contentious change has become even more so, with modifications to how the directive would work potentially making more people liable to massive fines.

The European Union digital copyright directive, and Article 13 in particular, has become a major point of debate between creators, artists, tech companies and bureaucrats across Europe and the wider world. The purpose behind it is to hold platforms that rely on user-uploaded content – think YouTube – responsible for any copyright infringement they host.

“Article 13 would require platforms to automatically detect and prevent copyright infringements by their users before they even happen,” says Julia Reda, a German MEP representing the Pirate Party who opposes the copyright directive. She argues that the article would require the use of “upload filters”, which check content against copyrighted-content databases at source.

Mary Honeyball, a British Labour MEP who supports Article 13, disagrees. "Some [online platforms] fear that Article 13 requires the implementation of automated ‘upload filters'. However, Article 13 makes no such requirement and in fact states that automated blocking should be avoided," Honeyball says in a statement. "The text only requires that [platforms] either license or remove copyrighted material."

Article 13 has been tabled as part of a wider package of copyright rules aimed at tackling the flouting of copyright law and intellectual property rights on social media platforms. A so-called “trilogue” (a meeting of European member states, the European presidency and the European parliament) has been meeting this week to try and thrash out a deal on the directive's details.

“Unfortunately, trilogue negotiations are behind closed doors, so we know very little about the debates or the concessions that institutions are willing to make in order to reach an agreement,” explains Sebastian Felix Schwemer of the Centre for Information and Innovation Law (CIIR) at the University of Copenhagen.

We do know, though, that in the latest round of negotiations, European parliament lead negotiator Axel Voss has given up on a threshold that would have meant that firms with less than €10 million revenue wouldn’t be expected to install upload filters. “To Axel Voss, the entire internet only consists of YouTube and Facebook, and he is trying to regulate all platforms as if they were such internet giants,” says Reda.

Other changes have been made that destroy a legislative shield meant to protect small competitors from the largest multinational platforms. Now, only platforms that are less than three years old, have a turnover below €10 million per year, and have fewer than five million unique visitors per month would be exempt from the obligation to use upload filters.

“The non-profit exemption has basically been withdrawn and so now it’s not related to turnover, it’s related to longevity,” says Cory Doctorow, a special advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Though there is a turnover requirement, once you’ve been in business for three years you are required to implement filters.”

Doctorow thinks that, initially, Article 13 was meant to be so egregiously impractical that big tech companies would feel they had no alternative other than turning up and negotiating with the EU.

But that tactic quickly got out of hand. The latest changes have even caused some industry bodies to oppose the proposals currently tabled. Several rights holders released a public letter saying that, following the latest changes, they “are not able to support it or the impact it will have on the European creative sector.”

But some politicians are determined to press on with a bad deal rather than push pause on the process. “There’s a possibility that this thing, [which] I think is best understood as a bit of political posturing, might become the law of the land for 500 million people,” says Doctorow.

Almost everyone agrees the rules enshrined by Article 13 risk being applied too broadly. An attempt to prevent illegal copyright infringement on big platforms, put in the hands of bureaucrats and suits that don’t understand the digital world, might become a blunt instrument that could stifle the remix culture of the internet.

We’ve recently seen the weaponisation of current copyright laws on YouTube, with copyright strikes by some creators being used to hobble their peers, or big Hollywood studios stifling fair criticism of their films through copyright claims. Article 13 would make it even worse.

“Article 13 creates more or less limitless liability with extraordinarily narrow exemptions,” says Annemarie Bridy, an academic intellectual property and technology lawyer at the University of Idaho. “The result will be that a few platforms will be positioned in terms of resources to operate with the related risk and expense. The rest will either stop hosting user-generated content, which would be a shame, or continue to do it until they get hit with an existentially threatening lawsuit, and fold.”

YouTubers are fretting, too: Daniel “Keemstar” Keem, an outspoken personality who hosts the DramaAlert YouTube news channel, says that “Article 13 is a threat to the entire YouTube community.”

Artists disagree. “Nobody wants to break the internet,” says Crispin Hunt, chair of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA). “We just want to make the internet work. Good, successfully made, professional content drives a massive amount of revenue for the internet but only a tiny portion of that revenue comes back to the people that drive the value.”

The so-called “value gap” – that is: the fact that rights holders of cultural work have long lacked negotiating power with platforms like YouTube – is a valid concern, says Schwemer, CIIR’s legal expert. “Our current laws are quite old, and if you look at the internet back then and how it’s changed, things are significantly different. It’s a really good idea to revise that.” But he feels Article 13 goes about in the wrong way.

“Instead of this notice and takedown regime that we’ve had for almost 20 years, it suggests that, from now, in order to not to be liable for the behaviour of users uploading content, these platforms need to have made their best efforts, whatever that means, to obtain a licence and to ensure that works that aren’t licensed aren’t available,” he says.

Whatever the trilogue decides this week, that doesn’t mean Article 13 is a done deal. Any proposals will have to be passed by the European parliament – which is where things get interesting.

All hope is not yet lost. Europe-wide elections for the continent’s parliament are coming up in May, and the public petition to block Article 13, signed by 4.7 million people on Change.org, is the largest in European history and the second-largest worldwide.

“We know a lot of insurgent parties are going to be standing for seats and saying remote European technocrats are only benefiting private companies and vested interests,” says Doctorow. “If they pass this deal in the teeth of the largest petition in European history asking them not to do it, that is a message that is really going to resonate.”

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-article-13-copyright-saga-just-got-worse

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fandom-after · 5 years

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Fandom gets closer to the metal - issue 8: #documentation

Mar. 3rd, 2019 by hit_the_books posting in post_tumblr_fandom Reposted to tumblr on March 28th by Wings (who is behind)

This week: thinking about a post Article 13 world in #documentation and tweaking things over on the wiki.

#documentation and Article 13

A new channel has been created on the distributed_fandom Discord. According to samshinechester, the channel has so far been discussing what Article 13 may mean for fanworks in Europe and whether archiving has a role to play.

It should be noted that Article 13 has not yet been settled in the EU [note: as of this reposting on tumblr, Article 13 has in fact passed - bad news]. It has far reaching consequences for the fandom experiences of many, which wasn't the aim of Article 13 directly, but a potential consequence. It's problematic nature is well described by Wired UK correspondent Chris Stokel-Walker:

"Almost everyone agrees the rules enshrined by Article 13 risk being applied too broadly. An attempt to prevent illegal copyright infringement on big platforms, put in the hands of bureaucrats and suits that don’t understand the digital world, might become a blunt instrument that could stifle the remix culture of the internet." (My emphasis.)

#documentation discussion has also discussed the tenuous relationship that archivers and creators hold. If you want to join the discussion head on over to the Discord.

Tweaking the Mothership section of the wiki

Wings has spent time this week updating and editing the Mothership page over on the Federated Fandom wiki. You can check out the Mothership page here.

Don't forget... To check out post_tumblr_fandom on Dreamwidth and thank hit_the_books for this ongoing newsletter! [Note: all complaints about delayed reposting go to Wings here on tumblr!]

Got something you want mentioned in these updates? Head to #announcements-roundup channel on the distributed_fandom Discord and post about it before the end of Saturday each week. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this issue.

#Dispatches #fandom gets closer to the metal #hit_the_books #catching up on my reposting over here #sorry friends!

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ayazminmendezworld-blog · 5 years

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#Where’sTheTrust?

Hello again! Thank you for taking the time to read my posts. My last post was a bit long so I hope to be brief with this one. For today’s post, I wanted to share my thoughts on a recent article I read from The Guardian titled, “Instagram: beware of bad influencers...” written by Chris-Stokel Walker of the Observer. In his article, Walker brings up the recently released and might I say controversial Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. He mentions that this documentary not only showed one of the greatest scams of recent times but also brought up a new side of thinking about Instagram Influencers. Are influencers becoming in some fashion like the Fyre festival organizer Billy McFarland, whom might I add is now serving six years in prison for fraud? Based on the documentary, some would say yes since as Chris Walker wrote, “social media influencers helped promote the campaign into the news feeds of users, who paid thousands of dollars for tickets, turned up expecting gourmet food, luxury accommodation and A-list headliners but found emergency tents, cheese rolls and squalor instead”. This begs the question, where’s the trust? Users are looking towards influencers to influence their lives in some way and trust that the content that they are producing is not only accurate but also genuine. This is where I think influencers fall short on is not selling themselves out for the sake of money and fame. The have gained a following and with it the power to inspire others. It is really up to them how they choose to represent their personal brand: Are you good or are you deceitful? So, I would agree with Chris Walker in that Instagram and other social media platforms should hold some power in regulating fake accounts but it should be the brands that should focus on choosing influencers that have proved to be trustworthy to advertise their brands. In other words, finding influencers that adhere to a company’s values or mission could make selling a product or service that much more trustworthy and sincere.

#where'sthetrust #influencermarketing

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