Notices by Erik Moeller (eloquence@social.coop), page 3

Hate is a continuum of horrible things. Once a group of people is dehumanized, perpetrators of hate will do things that range from "well, that person just doesn't _belong_ here" to the most horrible crimes imaginable.

Platforms that foster hate-bait loops will lead to such dehumanization not only taking place, but being amplified and shared and reposted. (Musk is also organizing his own hate campaigns every day.)

That has real-world consequences, whether anyone observes them or not.

When Meta explicitly adds stuff like "We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality" to its hateful conduct policy (yep, that's in there now), they're opening a door to hate-bait loops that will get people killed.

People may read about Myanmar and think "that couldn't happen here". I think that's bullshit (there is no exceptionalism), but it's also not the only question. The question we should be asking, wherever we are, is: what _could_ happen here, as a result of this? What _will_?

I should add, since I mentioned Myanmar, that the crisis is still very much ongoing and not just "history". There are many ways we all can help, including via UNHCR:

https://giving.unhcr.org/en/rohingya/

Oh boy, @dansup is going to get a lot of Streisand effect traffic 😅

https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

@cwebber @elipariser @wearenew_public foreshadowing

The https://freeourfeeds.com/ FAQ is missing one question that's actually being asked frequently: How does this approach relate to existing nonprofit, open source, standards-based efforts centered around #ActivityPub?

@elipariser @wearenew_public Can you fix that? It's a bit tone-deaf to promote this effort here without speaking to how it intersects.

It's hard to keep up with everything Musk is doing to undermine democracy in Europe and to promote 21st century authoritarianism.

For anyone making the case to organizations, colleagues, and friends, this article from The Guardian is a useful summary:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/11/how-elon-musk-has-meddled-in-european-affairs

An Open Letter to All European Politicians and Leaders to Abandon X/Twitter:

"By abandoning X/Twitter, leaders can reduce its credibility, promote fairer alternatives, and take a stand against the spread of disinformation, ensuring democratic principles are upheld."

H/T to @everton137 for organizing this - already close to 1,000 signatures:

https://www.openpetition.eu/petition/online/an-open-letter-to-all-european-politicians-and-leaders-to-abandon-x-twitter

#Europe #EU

The Meta developments make it even clearer why so many of us are wary of #bluesky, while welcoming the migration off X in principle.

It's very much born from the same Silicon Valley soup as Facebook and Twitter, with some decentralization cosplay masking that they are absolutely in charge of who can speak and who can't.

Early test cases include Jesse Singal (see https://glaad.org/gap/jesse-singal/ - still not banned on Bluesky), Vagina Museum (forced "adult content" labeling), and probably more.

For corporate platforms, "Community Notes" is just a transitional stage to AI-added "context" (and the "AI" label will increasingly be dropped or footnoted).

Meta and X have already begun blending human & AI-generated content towards this end.

Above all, the temptation of controlling the models which annotate and "check" posts will be too great to resist. AI will be framed as being "objective" in ways humans can't be, while serving those who control the models.

I'm very proud of my colleagues at @freedomofpress for publishing this guide for journalists who want to write about people behind bars:

https://freedom.press/issues/covering-the-mass-incarceration-system-part-1/

https://freedom.press/issues/covering-the-mass-incarceration-system-part-2/

American prisons are crime factories that perpetuate harm and violate human rights. They are also a highly normalized form of injustice.

We need more courageous reporting about America's vast prison population of 1.9M people -- the size of a small country.

Musk is a con-man like Trump, and he's fooled plenty of well-meaning people into thinking that they have a shot at persuading some "undecideds" to their point of view on his turf.

He may even let them win a few fights here and there. But it's his show. Civil society will not win ground on a platform that's designed for it to lose.

Anyone still posting on X thinking otherwise is playing a mug's game.

Musk is now weaponizing X to promote far-right narratives and leaders in the UK, Germany, and Canada. He knows that every time he does this, X bleeds some users. But he is moving quickly, and he counts on the bleeding to be too slow to matter.

So far, most politicians, journalists and civil society organizations have proven him right, hemming and hawing about having to "maintain a presence" and "make our case" or similar such rubbish, legitimizing the platform with their continued presence.

What's astonishing to me about that WaPo editorial decision is how fucking tame that cartoon is. No offense to the artist, of course. But if WaPo isn't willing to publish an inoffensive cartoon of billionaires bending the knee to Trump, that says a _lot_ about where they draw the line.

(This is re: https://anntelnaes.substack.com/p/why-im-quitting-the-washington-post)

For 2025, I hope

- that the people who spread hate and fear lose ground because of our collective resistance, and because of their infighting and incompetence;

- that we find new ways to use emerging technologies for good and not just to entrench power;

- that we don't just keep fighting the same old battles, but continue to build a better tomorrow.

I wish you all peace & happiness in the new year!

Incidentally, I found it somewhat amusing to discover that before executives started talking about "blue sky thinking", the term "blue sky" in a business context was primarily associated with fraudulent business ventures, which led to "blue sky laws" to protect investors.

I don't think Bluesky is a fraudulent venture, but I also don't think it is anymore imaginative than the modern use of the term in C-suites. It is simply business as usual -- blue sky, incorporated.

When speaking of scams, I often think about the 1973 novel "Momo" by Michael Ende. In it, cigar-smoking beings with grey skin in grey business suits persuade humans to "invest" their free time in a "Timesavings Bank". It's a scam: the Greys literally smoke people's time (the cigars!), robbing people of their rest, their imagination, their lives.

In the real world, we, too, have fallen for a scam: the idea that if we place our faith in "the system", things will work out. They will not.

We can imagine a world where every news organization has a fediverse server just like they have a webserver; where governments communicate through open protocols with the people who put them in power; where new kinds of cooperatives will arise naturally because the infrastructure is _built_ for cooperation.

The fediverse is not a bunch of magic beans; it's built by people, after all. But it's much more fertile ground for the imagination than any other experiment in social media.

I have nothing against #Bluesky per se and am glad some folks are finding it useful as a drop-in replacement for the site that would like to use a swastika as its logo but settled on "X" for now.

But if we want to face the challenges ahead (climate change, fascism, and the daily weaponization of hate and fear), we need to imagine and try out new ways of doing things, not just replicate old ones.

The fediverse gives us a unique opportunity to do that. Bluesky doesn't.

Humanity is in dire need of a new operating system that rejects the old definitions of success. We need cooperation over competition; shared ownership over new monopolies; true openness over "let's just hold on to this bit of secret sauce to make money".

The reason that people with power or a stake in "the way things are" tend to dismiss the fediverse (a bunch of hobbyists! can't scale! no business model!) is the precise reason to embrace it fully and wholeheartedly.