Oh look, another historic building going up in flames shortly after it was bought by developers. Coincidence, I'm sure.

"Last week we got a letter from Elon Musk’s X. Corp threatening CCDH with legal action over our work, exposing the proliferation of hate and lies on Twitter since he became the owner. Elon Musk’s actions represent a brazen attempt to silence honest criticism and independent research in the desperate hope that he can stem the tide of negative stories and rebuild his relationship with advertisers."

[With apologies to anyone who dislikes endless Musk/Huffman spam in this community. I put it here because misusing the law to silence independent tech researchers this has wider implications.]

"As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media applications all linked together by common protocols. The most common software used in this area is Mastodon, a Twitter-like social networking service with around 2 million active monthly users. We are now running an experimental BBC Mastodon server at https://social.bbc where you can follow some of the BBC’s social media accounts, including BBC R&D, Radio 4 and 5 Live. We hope to be able to add more accounts from other areas of the BBC at some point."

And, at the risk of crossing subLemmy boundaries, here's Mekka Okereke (@[email protected]) on that achievement, and Mastadon's loss:

"And when she tried to join the Fediverse, she was greeted with a barrage of hate, sexism, racism, and anti-semitism that should have never been allowed to happen.

"So now no one on Fediverse gets to interact with her directly about her work on here. Our loss. 😢

"Which is why we'll make it so that this type of terrible welcome is unlikely to happen again. Allowing it to happen to her was a choice. We will make better ones."

#BlackMastodon

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110793385293203842

"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird.

"My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space."

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn't its cars, it's Tesla's business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

This is a staggering story. This jobsworth closed the doors on her because she forgot her bus pass the week before. Despite knowing that she definitely has a bus pass because all pensioners in the UK get one. Just a total loss of humanity.

More toilet hysteria.

A manufactured panic about trans people using the toilets they feel safest in, making them (and any other gender non-conforming individual) unsafe regardless of which choice they make, also makes it unsafe for parents to take their young or disabled children to the toilet if the child happens to be a different sex from the parent.

We need to bury these establishments in costly litigation that force these laws to be repealed. Ridiculous people.

Charles Burton, who represented Hewson, had argued that the sentence was not unduly lenient and should not be increased.

Appeal judges heard that Hewson had convictions for violence and, when a juvenile, had been convicted of sex offences.

He had also admitted possessing an "extreme" pornographic image.

Lady Justice Macur said appeal judges had concluded that there had been "significant flaws" in Recorder Hardy's approach to sentencing.

She said he had indicated when passing sentence that evidence suggested Hewson was a "Jack the lad character".

"We deplore the judge's description as indicating that the defendant was 'Jack the lad'," she said.

"This offending was predatory."

Every right-wing accusation is a confession.

"Kemi Badenoch, the minister for women and equalities, is said to be pushing for the non-statutory guidance to include a ban on social transitioning by pupils, meaning that transgender children would not be able to use another name and pronoun or wear uniform of the opposite gender.

"But the Times said legal advice from Victoria Prentis, the attorney general, found that a ban on social transitioning in schools was unlawful under the Equalities Act and would require the government passing new legislation..."

"New legislation could delay the guidance until the 2024 general election. Alternatively, the government could issue guidance that drops the controversial clauses.

"On Sunday Badenoch told the BBC that the guidance would compel schools to inform parents if their child was questioning their gender. “What is right is that parents know what is going on with their children at school,” she said.

"But on Monday the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, declined to tell MPs when the guidance would be published, saying that she was working with Badenoch to produce it “in the near term”."

"The BBC claims that it had “full editorial control” over Follow the Food. However, an award submission by BBC StoryWorks – a studio that produces paid content for commercial clients – shows that the Follow the Food was tailored to hit key performance indicators and meet specific “objectives” for Corteva, potentially in breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines.

"The award submission claimed that the BBC applied its “lens” to the project, which “[focused] on the client’s objectives and what our audiences would want to know about a sustainable food future, to create an end-to-end strategy for Corteva Agriscience”.

"The BBC’s editorial guidelines state that editorial content must not become “a vehicle for the purpose of promoting the sponsor”.

"Environmental journalist Amy Westervelt told DeSmog that these sort of partnerships are “selling the public’s trust”. Corporations are able to piggyback on the BBC’s reputation to “lend them credibility”, she said.

"The BBC and other publications increasingly need to raise money from corporations, she said, “making it possible for the media to be used as a disinformation tool”."

"What the ultra-rich want is to sustain and extend the economic system that put them where they are. The more they have to lose, the more creative their strategies become. As well as the traditional approach of buying media outlets and pouring money into the political parties that favour them, they devise new ways of protecting their interests.

"Corporations and oligarchs with massive fortunes can hire as many junktanks (so-called thinktanks), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to devise justifications and to demonise, demoralise, abuse and threaten people trying to sustain a habitable planet. The junktanks devise new laws to stifle protest, implemented by politicians funded by the same plutocratic class."

"Hawley typically cites Big Tech, Hollywood and academia as the unholy trinity of elites that has laid masculinity to waste. He likes to quote the titles of old feminist essays from obscure journals to imply that all college professors and all Democratic politicians hate men. But even as he blames this ruling-class syndicate for depriving men of their ancient reason for being, his own fears sync with ruling-class fears from time immemorial. Elite men are anxious that their wives, workers and children will gain financial and intellectual independence, take their property and flee. And then the unkindest cut: Someone new — a lowly outsider who has been waiting in the wings — will take their place at the top of the social order."

It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:

1. Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)

2. Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)

3. Defederate (wait and see)

4. Defederate with the intention of staying defederated

5. Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too

It's all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.

In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?

I'm not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.

False and misleading posts about the Ukraine conflict continue to go viral on major social media platforms, as Russia's invasion of the country extends beyond 500 days.

Some of the most widely shared examples can be found on Twitter, posted by subscribers with a blue tick, who pay for their content to be promoted to other users.

Useful Masto thread on strategy.

"The research refutes Rishi Sunak’s insistence that the pandemic caused the record number of 7.2 million people waiting for treatment – for example for hip and knee replacements – that hospitals are facing. Covid has simply exacerbated a decline in quality of care, especially in access to urgent and emergency care, that was evident before the virus emerged in early 2020 and was also closely linked to staff shortages.

"“Most indicators suggest that the pandemic has heaped unbearable pressure on services that were already struggling to meet expectations for quality and access prior to the pandemic,” Morris said."

US researchers have spent years studying how conspiracy theories spread. Now they are accused of helping to suppress conservative opinions.