Twitter's Sensitive Media Policy bans the display of "symbols historically associated with hate groups" in your profile or banner, and of course that includes the covers of books that criticize hate groups, such as David Neiwert's 2017 book, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, whose cover features a stylized US flag in which the stars are all wearing little Klan hoods. Read the rest
South Indian indie publishing house Blaft Publications has tweeted a magnificent thread of hand-painted transportation signs from Kolkata and all around South Bengal, from taxi-door logos to bus-signs to danger signs to "for hire" signs. Read the rest
Federal convict and Trump crony Paul Manafort is to be held in solitary confinement at the notorious Riker's Island prison while he faces trial for fraud in a New York court (solitary confinement is standard procedure for high-profile prisoners); Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (whose district includes Riker's) publicly condemned the use of solitary confinement for any prisoner, including Manafort, adding that, "if people aren’t willing to apply principles evenly, no matter the person, then they aren’t fighting for criminal justice reform" and "a prison sentence is not a license for gov torture and human rights violations. That‘s what solitary confinement is." She concluded with "Manafort should be released, along with all people being held in solitary." Read the rest
F-Secure Labs used a bot to harvest and analyze high-ranked disinformation tweets aimed at influencing the EU elections; they found that some of the highest-ranked xenophobic/Islamophobic disinformation came from a pair of related accounts: NewsCompact and PartisanDE, both in "the top three most engaged accounts in the EU election conversation space on Twitter two weeks ago." Read the rest
Hashimoto Baku ("a Tokyo based video director/visual artist/developer") digs into fascinating depth on the "slit-scan" technique: "[imagine] a quite thick flipbook that all frames of a video are bound page by page. If you just rifle through it, the original video will be just played. Slit-scan intrinsically means slicing the flipbook diagonally." Read the rest
President Donald Trump uses Twitter to bully, mislead, and incite. Many believe that Twitter is wrong not to ban Trump because Trump constantly violates the site's terms of use.
But Ev Williams, who co-founded Twitter, today said in an interview he believes Fox News is “much, much more powerful and much more destructive than Twitter.” Read the rest
TOSsed Out is a new project from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that catalogs the myriad of ways in which Big Tech platforms' moderation policies backfire spectacularly, like the anti-terrorism policies that delete evidence of war-crimes needed by investigators and prosecutors. Read the rest
Software developer Chris Harris is experimenting with machine learning to remove cars from video footage; while the software isn't quite seamless, the results are pure, glorious glitch aesthetic. Read the rest
With 2,700 replies and counting, All On Medicare's tweet asking When did you become radicalized by the U.S. health care non-system? is now one of the most thorough (and thoroughly depressing) collections of evidence of the need for healthcare reform you're likely to encounter. Read the rest
Alphabet, parent company of Google and YouTube, told a U.S. House panel that it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on reviewing content each year, and claims to have identified at least one million “suspected terrorist videos” on YouTube in the first quarter of 2019. Read the rest
Every Monday, some poor "brand ambassador" at Chase has to post a "Monday motivation" tweet aimed at convincing people that one of America's largest, most rapacious banks is actually a cuddly, responsible business whose $12 billion bailout from Uncle Sam was perfectly justifiable and sure to be put to excellent use. Read the rest
Why haven't Jack Dorsey and other executives running Twitter figured out how to "ban the Nazis"? Read the rest
Kaitlyn Reed created a Twitter thread of videos of (mostly Chinese) workers performing manual tasks with incredible acrobaticism, dexterity and flair; the videos were ganked from Tiktok, the massively popular China-based video platform that is mostly know in the west as a place where tweens make and share elaborately choreographic lipsync videos augmented with a suite of skillfully applied video effects. Read the rest
Said Dorsey to staff: “Some of you will be very supportive of our meeting [with] the president, and some of you might feel we shouldn’t take this meeting at all." Read the rest
Today, Alberta is having one of its bitterest, hardest-fought elections, with far-right/xenophobic elements on the upswing through the United Conservative Party, led by Jason Kenney, who has been awfully cavalier about the white nationalists in his party. Read the rest
