:fediverse: Fediverse Sprechstunde!
🗓️ am Donnerstag 27.02.2025, 19:30 Uhr!
ONLINE!

Bist du #neu oder #neuhier in der Welt des Fediverse? Kein Problem! Wir helfen dir bei den ersten Schritten: Profil einrichten, Sicherheitstipps, Posten und Vernetzung. Sei dabei!

Hauptthema: #Friendica mit Tobias tobias@social.diekershoff.de Ich freue mich darauf.

Eingeladen sind ebenso alle, die bereits Erfahrungen mit Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Misskey , Hubzilla oder anderen Anwendungen haben und ihr Wissen gerne weitergeben möchten.

:fediverse: Wissensaustausch: Deine Kenntnisse im Fediverse könnten anderen Teilnehmern sehr nützlich sein, besonders denjenigen, die noch neu in der Community sind.
:fediverse: Networking: Dies ist eine hervorragende Gelegenheit, sich mit anderen engagierten Mitgliedern der Gemeinschaft zu vernetzen und neue Kontakte zu knüpfen.
:fediverse: Ideen und Inspiration: Deine Perspektive als erfahrener Benutzer oder Betreiber einer Instanz kann dazu beitragen, innovative Ideen zu fördern und die Zukunft des Fediverse mitzugestalten.

Der Raum wird 10 Minuten vor Beginn geöffnet.
Der Link: kommt wird hier 1 Tag vor Beginn gepostet und steht in meinem Profil.

Das Online-Treffen findet auf unserem BigBlueButton-Server statt. Du benötigst keine zusätzliche Software, sondern nur einen Browser – vorzugsweise Firefox oder Chrome – ein Mikrofon (es handelt sich schließlich um eine Sprechstunde) und, wenn du möchtest, eine Webcam. Wir freuen uns auf einen lebhaften Austausch! 🎙️ 🙋‍♀️

Der Ablauf der Sprechstunde sieht folgendermaßen aus: Zu Beginn geben wir Tipps und Hinweise für Anfänger und Einsteiger. Anschließend geht es um Ratschläge für Instanzbetreiber und Moderatoren. Ein solcher Austausch ist wichtig und notwendig für eine gute Vernetzung untereinander. Die Welt des Fediverse ist Größer und vielfältiger. Mehr Miteinander statt Gegeneinander.

Je mehr mitmachen, desto besser!

#FediverseSpechstunde
#friendica
#MastodonBeginner
#Mastodon
#MastodonSprechstunde
#Fediverse
#socialmedia

Twitter’s Birdwatch is Fundamentally Flawed

Earlier this week, Twitter announced an initiative to combat misinformation on their platform that they call Birdwatch.

How Birdwatch works: Volunteers sign up (assuming they meet all the requirements) and can add notes to fill in context on misleading tweets. Other users can rate these contextual tweets as helpful or not helpful. All of these “notes” and ratings of notes are completely transparent.

Credit: the Birdwatch website
Credit: the Birdwatch website

At its face, Birdwatch is an attempt to scale up the existing fact-checking capability used during the 2020 U.S. Elections while also crowdsourcing this decision-making.

I will give Twitter credit for two things, and only two things, before I get into the problems with their design.

1. They’re distributing the power to fact-check bad tweets to their users rather than hoarding it for themselves.
2. They correctly emphasized transparency as a goal for this tool.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

The Fatal Flaw of Birdwatch’s Design

There’s an old essay titled The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security, that immediately identifies two problems with Birdwatch’s design. They also happen to be the first two items on the essay’s list!

1. Default Permit
2. Enumerating Badness

This is best illustrated by way of example.

Let’s assume there are two pathological liars hellbent on spreading misinformation on Twitter. They each tweet unsubstantiated claims about some facet of government or civil service. Birdwatch users catch only one of them, and correctly fact-check their tweet.

What happens to the other liar?

What happens if Birdwatch users can only identify one out of ten liars? One out of a hundred? One out of a thousand?! Et cetera.

(Art by Khia.)

To be clear: The biggest flaw in their product design is simply that their “notes” and “fact-checks” are negative indicators on known-bad tweets.

This will create a dark pattern: If a tweet slips past the Birdwatch users’ radars, it won’t be fact-checked. In turn, users won’t realize it’s misinformation. A popular term for the resulting conduct is coordinated inauthentic behavior.

This already happens to YouTube.

https://youtu.be/1PGm8LslEb4

Hell, this is already happening to Twitter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4

How To Fix Birdwatch

I wrote an entire essay on Defeating Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior at Scale in 2019. I highly recommend anyone at Twitter interested in actually solving the misinformation problem to give that a careful consideration.

(Art by Swizz.)

But in a nutshell, the most important fix is to change the state machine underlying Birdwatch from:

• No notes -> trustworthy
• Notes -> misinformation

…to something subtly different:

• No notes -> unvetted / be cautious
• Notes ->
  
  • Negative notes -> misinformation
  • Positive notes -> verified by experts

  
  

This effectively creates a traffic light signal for users: Tweets start as yellow (exercise caution, which is the default) and may become green (affirmed by notes) or red (experts disagree).

What Would This Change Accomplish?

Malicious actors that accomplish Birdwatch evasion will only manage to encompass their message in caution tape. (Metaphorically speaking, anyway.)

If their goal is to spread misinformation while convincing the recipients of their message that they’re speaking the truth, they’ll have to get a green light–which is ideally more expensive to accomplish.

Bonus Round

I would also recommend some kind of “this smells fishy” button to signal Birdwatch contributors that this tweet needs fact-checking. Users might self-select into filter bubbles that Birdwatch users are totally absent from, and in turn come across things that are completely unvetted and possibly ambiguous.

While I have your attention, here’s a quality of life suggestion, on the house:

Being able to link claims together (e.g. reposted images with a false claim, n.b. like how the minions memes on Facebook) to deduplicate their claims about reality would save a lot of unnecessary headache.

(Anyone who has used Stack Overflow will appreciate the utility of being able to say “this is a duplicate of $otherThing”.)

What If These Fundamental Flaws Remain Unfixed?

Although Birdwatch will probably meet the immediate goal of scaling up the fact-checking efforts beyond what Twitter can provide (and satisfy the public relations requirements of tangibly doing something to combat this problem), propagandists and conspiracy theorists will simply become incentivized to evade Birdwatch contributors’ detection while spreading their lies.

As I said above, coordinated inauthentic behavior is already happening. This isn’t some abstract threat that only academics care about.

To the aid of the malicious, most users will confuse tweets that evaded detection with tweets that didn’t warrant correction. This might even lead to users trusting misinformation more than they would before Birdwatch. This would be a total self-own for the entire Birdwatch project.

#bullshit #computerSecurity #enumeratingBadness #misinformation #SocialMedia #Technology #Twitter

:fediverse: Fediverse Sprechstunde!
🗓️ am Donnerstag 24.10.2024, 19:30 Uhr!
ONLINE!

Bist du #neu oder #neuhier in der Welt des Fediverse? Kein Problem! Wir helfen dir bei den ersten Schritten: Profil einrichten, Sicherheitstipps, Posten und Vernetzung. Sei dabei!

Eingeladen sind auch alle, die bereits Erfahrungen mit Mastodon, Friendica, Pixelfed, Misskey oder anderen Anwendungen haben und ihr Wissen gerne weitergeben möchten.

:fediverse: Wissensaustausch: Deine Kenntnisse im Fediverse könnten anderen Teilnehmern sehr nützlich sein, besonders denjenigen, die noch neu in der Community sind.
:fediverse: Networking: Dies ist eine hervorragende Gelegenheit, sich mit anderen engagierten Mitgliedern der Gemeinschaft zu vernetzen und neue Kontakte zu knüpfen.
:fediverse: Ideen und Inspiration: Deine Perspektive als erfahrener Benutzer oder Betreiber einer Instanz kann dazu beitragen, innovative Ideen zu fördern und die Zukunft des Fediverse mitzugestalten.

Der Raum wird 10 Minuten vor Beginn geöffnet.
Der Link: kommt noch

Das Online-Treffen findet auf unserem BigBlueButton-Server statt. Du benötigst keine zusätzliche Software, sondern nur einen Browser – vorzugsweise Firefox oder Chrome – ein Mikrofon (es handelt sich schließlich um eine Sprechstunde) und, wenn du möchtest, eine Webcam. Wir freuen uns auf einen lebhaften Austausch! 🎙️ 🙋‍♀️

Der Ablauf der Sprechstunde sieht folgendermaßen aus: Zu Beginn geben wir Tipps und Hinweise für Anfänger und Einsteiger. Anschließend geht es um Ratschläge für Instanzbetreiber und Moderatoren. Ein solcher Austausch ist wichtig und notwendig für eine gute Vernetzung untereinander. Es wird nicht nur um Mastodon gehen, denn die Welt des Fediverse ist weitaus größer. Mehr Miteinander statt Gegeneinander.

Je mehr mitmachen, desto besser!

#FediverseSpechstunde
#MastodonBeginner
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#socialmedia

Twitter wants your government ID and biometric data. No this isn't clickbait. X, I know, X has introduced new verification requirements for Blue users where they must submit a selfie and a picture of their government-issued ID.

I'm going to split this video into two parts. The first part looks at the real reason why Elon wants this data. The second part looks at, if we ignore the real reasons he wants the data... why we shouldn't give it to him.

Subscribe - http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0HAW8tgFA_xEmeUupuRwiA?sub_confirmation=1

Chapters -

📺 0:00 - Intro - Why is Elon Musk asking Twitter Blue users to submit their government ID's
📺 0:38 - Part 1 - The real reason Elon Musk is asking Twitter Blue users to share their government IDs.
📺 2:46 - Part 2 - Twitter X's proposed verification system for Blue Users

OTHER VIDEOS -

Facebook -

👉 The Evil Business Model of WhatsApp - https://youtu.be/YumfmeBYPhQ
👉 How Facebook uses your period data to sell you stuff - https://youtu.be/WazCiuVKlbY
👉 Facebook Shadow Profiles explained - https://youtu.be/sR8M8hZxuPo
👉 Every toxic thing Facebook did in 2021 - https://youtu.be/aRWB81qrzts
👉 Can Facebook be forced to delete the algorithm? Yes, here's why. https://youtu.be/fHZftxVdeGM

Amazon -

👉 Amazon Go's toxic longterm plan - https://youtu.be/YQCpHVWxUrE
👉 Every toxic thing Facebook did in 2021 - https://youtu.be/ha4_2GS2_HA

Twitter -

👉 Why is Twitter so toxic - https://youtu.be/lT7e_P8rfuk

Everything else -

👉 Why Tinder ruined your dating life - https://youtu.be/pNR2We-Srro
👉 The Rise of Dark Patterns - https://youtu.be/cjMbtDcHL7k
👉 All the privacy issues in Clubhouse app - https://youtu.be/HfZJZl22mg0
👉 8 counter-arguments to common privacy misconceptions - https://youtu.be/7RcjYdn3I5U
👉 You're wrong about the value of NFTs - https://youtu.be/zfPYMRbSne4
👉 How social media has changed how we talk - https://youtu.be/gZ-nW2kRkuY
👉 Here's why you don't read the terms of service - https://youtu.be/zni2DiCQ7rU

————————————

💬 let's chat about data / privacy / the internet on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/TheInternetExplorers
💬 I've also got a Discord - https://discord.gg/rGcht3SJyV
✍️ Follow on Twitter http://Twitter.com/Thismademecool
📧 Join the mailing list - https://bit.ly/30eHZ7I
✨ Join the internet explorers on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/SimonCaine
🎧 My podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/ask-the-industry-podcast/id946220937

————————————

All elements were created by me, comedian Simon Caine.

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#socialmedia #2023predictions #comedy

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My gear (affiliate links)

Camera - https://amzn.to/2YezaZl
Lens - https://amzn.to/2Y1yjuQ
Ring light/stand - https://amzn.to/3gTKhiI
Software - https://amzn.to/2Y449Hr
Graphic Tablet - https://amzn.to/3gOXGbX
Green screen - https://amzn.to/3ePYD1H
Phone - https://amzn.to/323MtPF

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This is the best for the algorithm... no need to read it (I've been told it's important / helpful)

Simon Caine is an English award-winning comedian, writer, author, podcaster and human based in Edinburgh Scotland. He makes a video a week, released every Sunday.

Over the last decade, he's performed all over the world, from London to NYC to Australia. His most recent show "every room becomes a panic room when you overthink enough" got 5* reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe where he sold out the run.

Previously he opened for Trevor Lock, Ben Miller and Henry Ginsberg as well as gigged on the same bill as people like Terry Alderton, Mark Dolan, Matthew Crosby and Bec Hill.

He's been featured in the Huffington Post “Tweets of the Week” feature several times and had jokes/writing appeared in The Poke and other publications. He hates writing in the third person.