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[EuchreJack]

I did say "African Courts do what American Courts won't"...

[scriver]

All the power to Kenya. The more of us stand up against international corporations the better.

[Duuvian]

While generally it's easy to agree with that, Scriver, it's important to distinguish whether such opposition does indeed reflect your own principles rather than being a general opposition in principle to international corporations (being the example).

For example, from the article linked:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Meta and Sama are facing two other suits in Kenya; Daniel Motaung, a South African, sued the company for labor and human trafficking, unfair labor relations, union busting and failure to provide “adequate” mental health and psychosocial support. Motaung alleges he was laid off for organizing a 2019 strike and trying to unionize Sama’s employees.

Ethiopians filed another suit in December last year over claims that the social media giant failed to employ enough safety measures on Facebook, which, in turn, fueled the conflicts that have led to deaths, including the father of one of the petitioners, and 500,000 Ethiopians during the Tigray War.

I haven't looked into the details of any of these cases, but on principle and in my ignorance I would lean towards favoring against Meta in the first spoilered paragraph. However in the second, while the victims of this wrong are extremely sympathetic, siding against the corporation in this case actually weakens the public's ability to comment upon current events if the result were to carry a broad scope (without knowing the details of the case but on it's overlapping subject of internet freedoms; perhaps the suit is particularly well-crafted and would avoid ancilliary concerns but usually this is not the route lawyers in these cases seem to tend to take). For an example that I just made up and didn't spend much time on, early on in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars criticism of the wars in the US was deeply frowned upon. If such critics could be placed through public opinion molding campaigns and policy into such a criteria that they are to blame for the conflict not being the promised swift and easy victory; could such critic's views at that time be penalized through this while ardent supporters of the conflict are not or even be elevated despite being in error? Of course, this is an example of the most extreme sort and I have spoken in ignorance of the case at hand. However the overlapping subject again suggests that should decisions in a case like these be broadly applicable that it will be applied in controversies of a nature far less extreme than a state of war or conflict as well, such as various culture warrior goofballeries.

[lemon10]

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/

Facebook owner Meta’s dangerous algorithms and reckless pursuit of profit substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people in 2017, Amnesty International said in a new report published today.

The Social Atrocity: Meta and the right to remedy for the Rohingya, details how Meta knew or should have known that Facebook’s algorithmic systems were supercharging the spread of harmful anti-Rohingya content in Myanmar, but the company still failed to act.

“In 2017, the Rohingya were killed, tortured, raped, and displaced in the thousands as part of the Myanmar security forces’ campaign of ethnic cleansing. In the months and years leading up to the atrocities, Facebook’s algorithms were intensifying a storm of hatred against the Rohingya which contributed to real-world violence,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

Facebook is kinda shit and actively to blame in cases like this.
---
Your general point isn't wrong, but Facebook is the very picture of a scumbag corporation that doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt in anything.

[sofanthiel]

I only use Twitter to keep up with game development and art stuff.  Not currently aware of any good alternatives, but it's working fine for me either way!  Sure, some off-topic posts now and then, but I personally just ignore them 

[lemon10]

Jesus.

The website is now limiting the number of posts all viewers can read. Even people paying him have a limit they can totally reach in a single day.
And as part of a different thing they just did you need to login to a twitter account to read anything there at all and those users get to read only a few hundred tweets a day.
So people not in the ecosystem will no longer be exposed to twitter and even people within it are going to start leaving as its rate limiting them and go find other stuff to do instead.

This feels completely insane from a business standpoint. Is twitter truly so close to collapse?

[Grim Portent]

It certainly looks like it. For a service that uses users as it's product and ads for it's revenue it's an extremely strange and seemingly desperate move.

[Starver]

Yeah, I nearly necred with that news, myself, earlier. Except I'd only heard a few lines about it (on the news) and I wondered if I'd heard/extrapolated correctly. (Not wandered onto your link, yet, but your post-text basically does confirm my coclusions about what it means for me[1].)


I can sympathise with them needing to put off excessive scrapers because of server capacities, but it rather dents the business model that everyone has come to expect. And even if the immediate lower-limit is going to raise later, it makes everyone appreciate (again!) how beholden everybody is to the "(mal/ben)evolant dictator" du jour for their social media provider...


[1] i.e. that if anybody posts a "something has happened, see <url=twitter>here</url> for someone's opinion on it!" message, then I'm not now going to ever see that.

[Telgin]

Some news is circling around now that it was motivated by Twitter not being able to move their systems out of a Google Cloud platform account before the terms expired, so they had to cut usage to a level they could handle until then.

So, still comical and terrible, but at least the motivation doesn't sound quite as brain dead.

[Frumple]

For bonus points, folks have figured out that "read" means "load in any way, shape, or form", and includes things like replies to a post that loads. People are hitting the rate limit from nothing, sometimes on loading literally one post (due to it having a lot of replies). It's wildly broken.

It's worth noting, google was due to cancel cloud services because of non-payment, well. Yesterday/today. There's reporting some sort of deal was made to continue functionality on that front, but this whole mess looks a lot like their hosting services (quite possibly involving more companies than just google) decided they were tired of musk's shit and stopped providing, with twitter's reaction being to drastically cut traffic in a very short period to keep their in-house stuff from buckling entirely.

... though do note, the uptick in scraping is largely self-inflicted due to twitter playing fuck-fuck games with API access and such. The issue* was manageable before the management in question decided to intentionally screw the pooch.

* To the extent it actually was one, mind; it's a big claim to say one of the biggest social media websites in the world was being meaningfully impacted in regards to server capability by what scraping efforts existed, and one of the only sources making that claim is, well. Twitter. Currently lead by a prolific liar, one known for doing things like not paying their bills and firing a great deal of what staff might have been able to navigate the problem, heh. It's more likely server capability's been kneecapped by poor admin decisions than anything related to scraping.

[eerr]

All I'm hearing, is 'ding dong twitter is dead'

So did elon musk kill twitter, or did he give it a just death?

[Frumple]

I mean, it might not be dead quite yet, depending on how quickly and how thoroughly the rate limit nonsense gets pulled back. But if the current state of things lasts more than a day, maybe two? If the rate limit shite sticks around? Stick a fork in it, it's done. Some shadow of twitter may hang around, but it'll hemorrhage users like blood out a stuck pig.

The way things are right now is just outright nonfunctional for the vast majority of the users, they ain't gon' stick around.

[eerr]

Yea and if musk expects someone to use his upcoming twitter-derivative app, he's gonna need to keep the freemium twitter online.

His actions might just be power moves, to sus out who is going to stick with him on his long journey to that crabcake.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/twitter-dead-x-corp-now-131200978.html

[Strongpoint]

Twitter was my main way to get news from all over the world quickly. It is unusable for this now.

[scriver]

All I'm hearing, is 'ding dong twitter is dead'

So did elon musk kill twitter, or did he give it a just death?

When the knight who slew the beast turned out to be a really shitty knight