New on 404 Media: verified Twitter 'OSINT' accounts are destroying the Israel-Palestine information ecosystem. What used to be a network of reliable experts has been taken over by profit and click driven verified accounts. Everyone loses out. "Unprecedented" levels.
I spoke to multiple respected OSINT experts who have been tracking conflict on Twitter for years. Now after Musk's changes on verification, profit:
@josephcox The comments from #OSINT experts are good and bringing light on how changes at X may be having a negative impact on it is important but tying this to the Hamas claims about the hospital strike is not really the most effective way to make a point since even if the mentioned blue checkmark OSINT account is making overly confident statements there were lots of issues with the early reporting of that story as well. Ones that have been corrected in part by OSINT work.
@josephcox also have to wonder why @CalibreObscura still stays on #twitter / #x and is inactive here if the policies of the place are having this negative impact on his field.
It occurs to me that #BlueSky is so decentralized and open that one can't even link directly to posts there without having an account. It's literally a garden more tightly walled than :birdsite: !
People put up with it, of course, because it's not a "login-wall", but "oh that's just how the protocol works!" Completely different thing! 🤣
And who designed the protocol, one wonders? :thinking_fierce:
@auschwitzmuseum So sad. Hungary’s Jewish population remained safe for such a large part of the war too, if only they had fought Hitler’s invasion instead of submitting to it.
Russia has waged full-scale war against Ukraine for 600 days. But Russia’s war against Ukraine began 3,525 days ago in 2014. Since then, Russian has murdered, tortured, captured, imprisoned tens of thousands of Ukrainians, destroyed entire cities as it tries to subjugate Ukraine. This
Since leaving Twitter, I've been trying to figure out what my journalism-y socials look like. (Threads: A sad Potemkin village where I just share articles. Bluesky: A fun, bitchy hotel cafeteria that still seems ill-suited to news.) I've been trying to use Mastodon for more hard news stuff, but I'm having a hard time getting my feed to be both active and relevant.
So I'm trying a few experiments to see if I can rejig my good. If you've got good journalism follow suggestions, send em my way.
@justinling Have to say it might be good to have people who offer these big lists of users to offer a version that already removes the dormant accounts.
Been thinking of ways to make them more useful, at the very least the large open lists like the one of journalists that @tchambers has facilitated could be a good starting point for more detailed/curated ones or things similar to the #icymibot mentioned here.
#wordpress integration with the #threadiverse is, imo, far more useful than masto. That's where structured discussions happen. It's unfortunate to see all the fediverse services always taking a mastodon first approach
The point about mapping to a community/group rather than a user is interesting but I don’t think the WP ActivityPub plugin is posting specifically to Mastodon as such. I assume it would be possible in principle for it to work with both threadiverse and the wider fediverse.
@fenarinarsa interesting demonstration by @MikeBeas but 3 months later I’m just wondering when this could be live and why grow bsky.social to be huge before enabling it
I think it will remain to be a significant thing because most people aren’t going to migrate. There will exist a significant power imbalance that requires you to trust the VC funded company for a long time to come…
Talking to folks who’ve dialed down or ceased their Twitter activity but haven’t adopted one of the microblogging alternatives, I realize that many people in my virtual cohort today are effectively leaving the space altogether. They don’t want a service like this at all anymore.
Personally, I think that’s a bummer, but I understand it. I wonder if this is a generational moment and the whole medium is dying, or if it just means it’s an era of new faces stepping into the limelight...
@kevinrothrock that’s interesting. Why do you think they find each other more easily on Bluesky?
From my experience the initial setup is somewhat easier in that the site suggests users and “feeds” to follow and I think Mastodon could learn from that but I also did not actually find any users to follow that way and the only feed suggested for finding journalists seems very barren.
Maybe they’ve simply found it easier because of the invite system? I noticed you automatically follow whoever invited you and might be that the suggested accounts to follow also come from their network.
@tommi this is really about the wordpress.com hosting service Automattic runs. Making it trivial for anyone with even a free blog to enable AP there is significant.
@auschwitzmuseum she must have been the victim of the puppet government that Hitler installed in the German-occupied Italy after Italy’s fascist government deposed Mussolini and tried to pull out of the war. Before that the Jewish population in Italy was relatively safe.
Other than ITAD, we've also developed Augmented Steam, a free browser extension which improves Steam with many useful features, such as global store pricing, MB inventory tools, historical lows, etc: https://augmentedsteam.com
@isthereanydeal didn’t you adopt it so ITAD aren’t the original authors? Not to say I don’t appreciate your work with keeping it maintained and developed further.
@stux not every war criminal kills civilians, there’s other ways to become one, but everyone knowingly targeting civilians to kill them is a war criminal
@w7voa glad to see Mastodon is at least given a fair mention but the article’s comments on its moderation seem a bit confused:
“Mastodon’s moderation relies on individual server operators and admins, so it may be able to keep up on those it runs itself, but not on smaller instances.”
I think they are saying instances like mastodon.social associated with Mastodon GmbH are more likely to be able to do a good job moderating than the smaller ones but I don’t really see this as being necessarily true at all.
@rolle my attitude towards bluesky federation is the same as threads. It could potentially help the fediverse and they probably will enable it at first but I would not trust them to keep it on if they have a reason not to at some point. They might also end up being strict about who they federate with for similar reasons.
Twitter was once the go-to app for up-to-date news, first-hand accounts and quality journalism on the ground. But over the weekend, as users sought information about the Israel-Hamas conflict, they found platform X flooded with misinformation. So they turned to Threads, as Platformer editor @caseynewton explains.
@osma Plenty of instances etc. do not brand themselves as Mastodon. Mozilla using their own name is mostly a result of them already having their own strong brand to rely on.
@osma I don’t doubt that there is plenty of that but it isn’t like there aren’t many examples to the contrary too.
For a small instance using the Mastodon name can be attractive because it is well known and they don’t have anything comparable to use themselves. It does also help users who heard of Mastodon know what they are dealing with.
At the end of the day you also can’t really expect there to be some kind of a unified effort to brand everything when you’re talking about a piece of software that anyone can set up. That’s a pretty inherent weakness of letting people do what they want with the software and only preventable if you take away some of that freedom.
A lot of this is analogous to email which might lead one to conclude it isn’t really a major problem. People should already be familiar with this model at least in principle even if the past few decades have unfortunately seen lots of success for walled gardens and the like.
@osma Eh, I don’t see why you want to deride me. You’re the one who was expressing a certain view of how things should be done and I replied with my thoughts on why it is pretty much impossible.