Notices by Tom Coates (tomcoates@me.dm)

Honestly it’s this Department of External Revenue thing that weirds me out the most. He thinks he’s going to get paid by foreign countries? Like… how? Tariffs are paid by importers in the US. Foreign governments are most likely to just respond in kind with similar tariffs.

@evan yeah I spent a lot of time during Trump 1 trying to persuade news organizations to post fact checking replies directly in the comments. It would have got them massive traffic and would actually have been useful. That’s why I think there might be value in having various services a user could subscribe to and clients could recommend.

@evan like I’d like to subscribe to Daniel Dale from CNN and directly see his fact checks under the posts they refer to. I think that would be way more useful than any community thing.

A better approach would be to do what Wikipedia does and have a large open community with strong rules, hierarchies and processes to determine what is true. But that’s a multi-year long process that requires considerable work to set up. And is based on people not algorithms.

@evan I have very strong negative feelings about community notes systems, because at their heart the principle behind them is that you can algorithmically determine which ones are trustworthy. My experience is that if you take that approach, what ends up happening is that any political tweet cannot receive a community vote as no consensus can be drawn on from public voting as to whether it’s accurate.

@evan I think their main function is to display a performative interest in fact checking while in fact their actual intent is to stop any political speech receiving any kind of fact check unless it’s *so* egregious that left and right can agree. That almost never happens.

It’s much more common for community notes to be displayed on posts that - for example - confuse an echidna and a platypus, than it is for one where a politician makes a politically statement with blatant misinformation in it. As such I think they’re fundamentally worse than worthless. They’re an active threat to good information.

I’m starting to think open fact checking services are a better way to do it. Like subscribe to CNN’s fact checker on posts if you want to. And then you just hope people are more likely to choose a reliable checker than Fox News. It’s risky, but I think more likely to be useful than community notes as designed today:

It’s a conversation about how we find a way for all human beings to be able to take part in a great public conversation, and take joy and create and organize and *feel safe while doing so*. In my opinion, everything else is just a means to an end and if we lose sight of that we are lost.

It stops one player having absolute control over our public spaces. It stops one player’s rules becoming the only choice for billions of people. It stops people confusing one provider’s rules for the law. Is it perfect? No. There’s a ton of work to do to get to that point, to provide an experience that is good enough for people to use, while also providing all of the choice and freedom and safety that we need for our public spaces.

A truly public space, not owned by any one company, will have awful people in it, just like the world around us has a lot of truly awful people in it right now. Some of them, in my opinion, are just about to take over the United States. I don’t like them. I don’t want to hear their opinions on me or the people I love. I don’t want to be attacked by them on a daily basis. But an open, free public space will include them too.

But the goal is open, free public spaces with a space for everyone, where you’re free to communicate with whoever you like and only the people you want.

And that’s why we need diversity in providers. We need providers who will stand up for LGBTQA+ rights, and will stand up for women’s right not to experience daily sexism and harassment. We need providers who will help young people and ban block Nazis and white supremacists and Islamophobes and anti-Semites.

And if we get that - if we get a range of interoperable providers of quality and scale offering different values and moderation strategies - then we’ve created a space where every day people get to choose if they want to be in a space full of Nazis or if they want to be in a space that celebrates the diversity of human beings in all their insane and beautiful difference. I know which one I’m going to choose:

This vision of the world - where we’re not all jammed into one or other massive social network at the mercy of a billionaire who either cannot understand our lives or one who actively wants to destroy them but where we can all operate in one space, owned by no one or everyone, with people able to make meaningful choices about how much of it they want to be exposed to - is what I’m working for and believe in.

Here’s what I want you to remember though. This is not a fundamentally a conversation about technology, or protocols, or clients, or business models, or regulation - although all of those things will have a huge part in how these ideas play out.

I think it’s important to keep reminding ourselves of the reasons we want decentralized social media or a Fediverse or anything like it to win. It’s because if implemented properly it makes the world a better place. It protects free speech, but it also makes it possible for people to choose the level of moderation they care about, to be in a place that corresponds with their values, and to feel safe in it.

I view edgy comedy that gets its thrill out of saying the unsayable (ie. mostly racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist jokes) as just a desperate admission of insecurity.

“I’m not clever enough to entertain you without finding someone vulnerable to attack and laugh at”

Trump’s appointees are dog murderers, Fox News hosts and rich sociopaths.

How are you guys doing? I’ve decided that I think Harris will win, but I’m *far* from certain and I basically feel like throwing up a lot. You guys?