Social Media is for the Birds #nobodycares

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[Cristiano]

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

There's actually an industry now around going there; this costs from 1-500 US$ from Kiev. The number of tourists is in the tens of thousands a year.

How to Visit Chernobyl: The Ultimate Guide (Updated 2021)

A city hauntingly frozen in time, Chernobyl's devastation draws tourists in the thousands each year. Its remnants are chilling and provocative – here's how to plan a Chernobyl visit yourself.

thriftynomads.com

 

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[Brenda Archer]

 

[Brenda Archer]

Tumblr’s Vital Queer Community Is Disintegrating - OneZero

 

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Apple joins Google, Facebook, and Twitter in data-sharing project

The Data Transfer Project wants to make it easy to move data between services.

www.theverge.com

Just over a year after its official launch, the Data Transfer Project is announcing a new set of partners and features. Today, Apple announced that it will be joining the project, developing interoperable systems to bring data in and out of iCloud. A number of alternative social networks have also joined the project, with Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project enabling the import and export of contacts, and Mastodon allowing for the import and export of posts.

An open-source project aimed at making it easier to transfer data from one service to another, the Data Transfer Project has mostly consisted of back-end coding to make data export tools like Google Takeout and Facebook’s Access Your Information tool compatible with each other. Right now, those tools let you download data directly to your hard drive, but the hope is that the project’s code could allow the data to be ported directly to another service.

 

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[Dakota Tebaldi]

TECH DRAMA

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Context: Twitch is a streaming video service you've probably heard of, and is owned by Amazon. Mixer is a newer, competing service which is owned by Microsoft. Ninja was a streamer who used to run on Twitch, and in fact was one of their most popular streamers with 14 million followers. At the beginning of this month (August), Ninja surprised everyone by announcing that he was moving to Mixer exclusively. Twitch appears to have maturely retaliated for Ninja's jumping ship:

Twitch's CEO Emmett Shear has now responded to the controversy, stating that they were testing new systems to surface recommended content in offline channels. Although this doesn't explain why they had included text on Ninja's channel that cryptically referred to the fact he'd moved to Mixer, while hiding all of his channel branding and social links in the process. Twitch's CEO also apologized for the "lewd" content displayed on Ninja's channel, noting that the offending channels had been permanently banned.

....

It was a huge loss for Twitch, given that Ninja is credited with helping bring live game streaming into the mainstream. The move has legitimized Mixer to some degree, potentially giving Twitch some real competition for the first time. Up until now, Twitch hadn't really reacted to the move, but it has begun abusing Ninja's channel page on Twitch, turning it into an advertisement platform for other recommended streams — a "feature" which exists in no other pages on Twitch.

If that wasn't bad enough, Twitch added insult to injury by recommending a highly NSFW channel on the URL, which is undoubtedly frequented by youngsters. While Twitch is within its right to change its website as it sees fit, the fact it streamed adult content on Ninja's page without any form of age-gating potentially violates various laws. It shows how utterly haphazardly Twitch vomited this new "feature" onto its platform to take advantage of Ninja's dormant Twitch page, recommending streams completely incongruent with Ninja's brand.

 

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When life interrupts...

 

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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked

Update: Twitter has now explained how the hack occurred

www.theverge.com

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was hacked on Friday afternoon by a group that calls itself the Chuckle Squad. The hackers tweeted racial slurs, antisemitic messages and at least one Holocaust denial from Dorsey’s account. Some offensive tweets were up for about 10 minutes, though not long after the hack began, those tweets were already being deleted, and they’re all gone now.

Oh, so a fairly run-of-the-mill hack. I was about to ask if people were tipped off that his account was hacked by him actually banning a nazi from Twitter.

 

[Free]

Oh, so a fairly run-of-the-mill hack.

Someone hacked Jack Dorsey's Twitter account to say even dumber stuff than usual

Heh.

 

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Send 'em if you got 'em.

 

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[Veritable Quandry]

Famous Authors Reply to Your Unsolicited Dick Pic

OSCAR WILDE

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting a dick pic, and the other is getting yours.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

PewDiePie, who has had a history of what he considered to be harmless edgelording on his channel flirting with racist and antisemitic memes, was evidently severely f'd up by the fact that a mass-murderer gave him a shoutout right before his mass-murder (the Christchurch massacre). He has just announced a donation of $50,000 to the Anti-Defamation League, which has previously heavily criticized him, along with an implication that the Christchurch situation has helped shock him into some personal growth.

Of course, the alt-right sector of his fanbase has gone absolutely nuts over this development.

In a Twitter message on Wednesday, PewDiePie wrote that the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand, during which the gunman who killed 51 people shouted out the “Subscribe to PewDiePie” meme, greatly affected him. The incident made his alt-right ties impossible to ignore, but it also led PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg, down a path of realization.

In part, he blamed the media after “years” of “misrepresenting headlines.”

“Previously, it hasn’t bothered me much, I know who I am,” PewDiePie wrote. “But after the Christchurch travesty a few months ago, my own clash with [mainstream media] was manipulated as a tool for destruction. I’m not OK with this situation any longer and I’ve felt responsibility to make changes.

“Making a donation to ADL doesn’t make sense to everyone, especially since they’ve outright spoken against me. I wanted to show publicly that I can move past it and move on. I think that it’s important, this just isn’t my fight anymore.”

But some of his fans aren’t in agreement—especially since the ADL pressured Disney to cut ties with him in 2017 after anti-Semitic imagery was found in one of his videos.

“It doesn’t make sense to support the anti defamation league when their MO is defamation. The only organizations more hypocritical are PETA and the SPLC,” wrote one Twitter user, referring to the Southern Poverty Law Center and People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Wrote another, “You can donate them every penny in the world and it wouldn’t be enough to them. They are using a tragedy to manipulate your emotions, you’re playing straight into their game.”

Some even have posited the notion that the ADL is blackmailing PewDiePie.