Labour MPs begin quitting X over ‘hate and disinformation’
Labour MPs begin quitting X over ‘hate and disinformation’
Exclusive: MPs leaving platform or scaling back use over its ‘deterioration’ under Elon Musk’s ownership
Labour MPs have begun quitting X in alarm over the platform, with one saying Elon Musk had turned it into “a megaphone for foreign adversaries and far-right fringe groups”.
Over the weekend, newly elected MPs took to WhatsApp groups to raise growing concerns about the role X played in the spread of misinformation amid the far-right-led riots in parts of England and Northern Ireland.
Two Labour MPs are known to have told colleagues they were leaving the platform. One of them, Noah Law, has disabled his account. Other MPs who still use X have begun examining alternatives, including Threads, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and the open-source platform Bluesky.
In an article for the Guardian on Monday, a former Twitter executive, Bruce Daisley, said Musk should face personal sanctions and even an arrest warrant if he continues to stir up public disorder online.
No shit. The amount of far-right propaganda, hate and disinformation it's pushing is so much that it's pretty much over the line as an extremist site now, and I expect it to start getting flagged as that with a lot more organisations.
Musk wants to set the world on fire and X is his box of matches.
How powerful a tool X is depends on how much legitimacy it can gain. If politicians are leaving the platform it can't be long before advertisers also leave. I'm old enough to remember Myspace. Even Facebook is a bit pacé nowadays.
I think you mean Twitter.
Thank you for your service, Twitterenoclast 🫡
Of course, none of them are going to the fediverse, because social media that’s not owned by a corporate entity and ready for algorithmic enshittification is not a thing for normal people.
Tbf - once the fediverse gets big enough it's kind of open season for misinformation spreading groups. They can just join another server once the one they used got blocked. Worst case they get onto a server that actually gets used by normal people and produce a lot of casualties by getting the server defederated.
I think it's a nice concept but for this type of misinformation it's really not the best thing...
I could imagine Labour HQ running their own Lemmy server for their MPs and staff.
Would be interesting, but Lemmy and Mastodon would both need some work to tick some security and compliance checkboxes.
On the plus side, we could get proper 2FA support (i.e. Yubikeys or TOTP tokens) as a result. I'd love to get some more use out of that old yubikey.
I really wish Bluesky could federate with other Mastodon servers.
Also, fuck Threads.
No offense but you guys are on almost no-one's radar. I only found out about the fediverse by googling reddit alternatives last year, and I WORK in IT.
Don't the french and german people use it? I swear I saw that post somewhere.
Took 'em long enough. Everybody should've ditched Twitter like a year ago.
Stopped using it the moment it became "X". Realized a few weeks ago that I still had an account and that I hadn't missed it once. Deleted the account and now happily live in a Twitter free bubble.
That place was toxic before musk got a hold of it. I can't imagine how bad it is now.
I ditched it entirely the day they admitted that killing third party apps was a feature not a bug.
I used Tweetbot for ten years, so the idea of having to raw dog a fascist’s plaything didn’t appeal to me.
Whenever I reminisce about Twitter I gotta remind myself that I'm probably gonna run into 90% of what's going on there on IG anyway, two thirds of my explore page is just screenshots of tweets lol
I wish own/governments/journalists started running their own mastodon instances.
For authentication more than anything else.
If I see kier.starmer@mastodon.gov.uk I'd know it was him. I see therealkierstarmer on twitter and it could be any joker with $8 to spare.
On the contrary they are starting to use Twitter to declare war and post about resigning as presidential candidate.
Who declared war via a social media platform? That sounds like horrible military strategy
But that's not where the average voter is. It's not really where any of their constituents are.
Build it and they will come. The media will follow for the story and people will hear the message. Maybe.
As should everyone. At a certain point you're sticking around a place that literally promotes racism and hatred and pedophilia and actual nazis well it says things about you. And I've heard the arguments before about how convenient Twitter still is, about how it was just easier. I've heard those kind of arguments about hanging out with Nazis before. Came from Germans who pretended like they weren't Nazis.
the news SHOULD be everyone is quitting twitter, and get rid of the scare quotes around hate and disinformation
Most public facing organsations quit it when they started requiring an account to be logged in to see tweets.
What's the use of it as an official announcement platform if only logged in twitter users can see it?
I never created an account on xitter. I tried on Mastodon, and the tool was designated for people who love attention. The reason they are afraid to switch is losing their audience.
Maybe labeling them something embarrassing like Nazi sympathizers could help, but I even doubt that would do anything.
BTW: what do you call 9 Nazis and one non-nazi sitting together? 10 Nazis.
Meanwhile, Trump is going to DeSantis himself on Twitter tonight with an "uncensored" live conversation with Musk.
Oh my god, he DeSantised all over himself! That's fucking disgusting. I haven't DeSantised myself since the fourth grade. I mean, sure, I've Gulianied myself, but who hasn't eaten too much Taco Bell and then Gulianied themselves on a regrettably hot day?
Oh boy, all them Jan 6 tweets right up there, it's a great reminder!
Should never have started with Twitter. Not everything has to be on social media
Yet they've been there for the last year and not noticed this, anyone with sense quit as soon he became owner.
That government agencies are staying with them just makes them seem like jackasses that just care about the views by any means necessary. Anne Frank would be a nobody today, nothing but a banned account in today's social networks, a lot of the intentional disinformation, narrative shaping, and hidden incontestable moderation these social networks are getting away that can completely lock away your work from any access except their own should be prosecutable and have legal recourse.
The Guardian - News Source Context (Click to view Full Report)
Information for The Guardian:
MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: Medium - Factual Reporting: Mixed - United Kingdom
Wikipedia about this sourceSearch topics on Ground.News
Over the weekend...
Oh, you mean after the official UK Xitter account was banned because the Police Commissioner displayed zero understanding of their laws boundaries and managed to completely embarrass themselves and their national government by threatening extra-judicial extradition?
I don't like Elon but fuck that noise. We fought a whole fucking war to not be subject to the UKs laws and I have yet to find an expiration date on the Deceleration of Independence.
I think these MP's are dining on a fresh bowl of sour grapes.
It’s rare to see a comment that is so absolutely, completely, confirmably wrong.
the official UK Xitter account was banned
No, it wasn’t. That is fake news spread by right-wingers.
threatening extra-judicial extradition
No, they didn’t. They threatened UK-based Twitter users promoting violence and hatred that they could be prosecuted for it. The tweet in question was not intended for an international audience.
We fought a whole fucking war to not be subject to the UKs laws
Welcome to the globalised economy, if you want to trade in the UK, you are subject to the UK’s laws.
That is fake news spread by right-wingers.
Guess I'll have to start fact checking on Mastadon.
No, they didn’t.
They threatened UK-based Twitter users
“We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told Sky News.
That's the direct quote and it is what I am reacting to.
Welcome to the globalized economy, if you want to trade in the UK, you are subject to the UK’s laws.
You sure you want to play this game? You, as the symbolic UK, aren't exactly coming with the best of hands.
Deceleration of independence
Lmao
Oh Man, what an embarrassing place for a spelling mistake! Oh well, I'm going to own it and move on. :)
Yeah, I can't really agree with the Brits on this one.
I think that what might happen in the long term is that different countries wind up with at least semi-separate social media platforms. Trying to create a least common denominator that everyone can live with just runs into too many problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splinternet
The splinternet (also referred to as cyber-balkanization or internet balkanization) is a characterization of the Internet as splintering and dividing due to various factors, such as technology, commerce, politics, nationalism, religion, and divergent national interests. "Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it", wrote the Economist weekly in 2010, arguing it could soon splinter along geographic and commercial boundaries. The Chinese government erected the "Great Firewall" for political reasons, and Russia has enacted the Sovereign Internet Law that allows it to partition itself from the rest of the Internet. Other nations, such as the US and Australia, have discussed plans to create a similar firewall to block child pornography or weapon-making instructions.
I mean, I'm not going to have the British government censoring what I can see on political grounds. No way. And I'm sure that there are Brits who are appalled at seeing politically-extreme material that's constitutionally-protected in the US showing up in front of their eyeballs.
And this is just the UK. Like, they're maybe censorious by our standards, but it's not even getting into stuff like Islamic countries and blasphemy law or Russia wanting state control over media because they don't like criticism of the government.
Like, the best you might get is a common platform but with not everyone having the same view of the content on it, with some people having content censored in various ways, kind of like you get on the Threadiverse with defederations. Like, the government gets a kill switch over particular content on the view that their citizens have of information, but cannot disrupt communication between people outside of their jurisdiction.
It's kind of unfortunate, because it decreases the gain potentially you get from leveraging network effect, where the value of the network rises with the square of the number of users.
Extra judicial what now?
If you're claiming the head UK police officer said he'd kidnap people off the street of a foreign country like the fuckong CIA you've made a mistake.
Probably from reading too much crap on twitter
If you’re claiming the head UK police officer said he’d kidnap people off the street of a foreign country like the fuckong CIA you’ve made a mistake.
"We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you," Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told Sky News.
Probably from reading too much crap on twitter
Fuck Xitter, I been on it maybe 4 times in the past decade.