Leaving aside discussion of the public dumpster fire going on at Twitter, or the constant shrieking about "free speech", or the weird culture warrior turn its CEO has taken...
I've actually been reasonably pleased with Mastodon. It's got its rough edges for sure, but it's weathered the Twitter expatriation storm better than expected, and lots of folks I follow are mirroring their content there. The Fedifinder tool (fedifinder.glitch.me) is a really quite painless way to update my follow list as people move over.
I don't know whether or not Twitter is going to be "replaced" any time soon, but right now this does have sort of the feel of a Digg moment to me.
Can confirm. I didn't see a flag. I unchecked that setting and refreshed. Now it's hidden behind a message that says "The following media includes potentially sensitive content."
I wonder how many instances Twitter will be (soft) censoring? New instances can pop up at any moment, does Twitter plan to deplatform all of them, just ones that host objectionable content, or just those that are big enough to notice? This is a game of whack a mole. Good luck swinging that heavy ban hammer, Elon.
Wow that would be a scorched earth policy, would it not? You would then be deplatforming video and image hosting sites, discussion forums, and blogs. Including people.kernel.org, the Linux kernel developer blogging platform.
Sure. I don’t know the ActivityPub spec; maybe there’s some way to disambiguate further. But I think Elon would be fine with deplatforming anyone for whom he could get away with it.
For those who don't know what @ElonJet is: It is not a human's account, it is an account where a bot posts locations in the world of Elon Musk's jet (which it gets using publicly-accessible data).
TBH, I believe that bot activity regulation and censorship of people are two distinct issues. Still, the search-shadowbanning of @ElonJet is quite inappropriate.
I think the idea is that BitChute tries to position itself as an alternative to YouTube, and Google (as the owner of YouTube) is doing its damnedest to prevent people from using the alternative. Replace BitChute with Mastodon and Google/YouTube with Twitter and its a similar pattern.
Sure, but the commenter said that this has been operating procedure for Twitter. But that does not seem to be true -- mastodon links have not been (soft) censored up until this point.
I was responding to the question about what link OP was trying to draw between BitChute and Mastodon, no idea at all about the second question re censoring Mastodon links on Twitter.
But again, responding to your parallel comment, OP is not saying that BitChute is a competitor to Twitter. It's that entrenched player <a> is (soft) censoring new competitor <b> where <a>, <b> are filled in with (Google/YT, BitChute) and (Twitter, Mastodon).
That's the most charitable read I could come up with, too. It's such a tenuous connection, though, that one wonders why it's even worth mentioning in this context.
That is quite a stretch. Bitchute is video hosting, so it's not a Twitter competitor. And you're ignoring that it's well known as a host for hate speech. [1][2]
Mastodon is also known for hate speech, with whole instances seemingly devoted to it.
Meanwhile, the ADL is also well known to push an agenda far beyond addressing hate speech, acting as an apologist for crimes against humanity in service to Israel's colonial regime.
Some people in Texas have been known to be outspoken with their hateful views; does that make Texas a host for hate speech too?
I hope you warmed up before stretching like that, as I'm afraid you'll hurt yourself.
I agree with you that the ADL's recent Israel positions are often short-sighted and terrible. But their century of tracking and fighting hate is solid work, and even if you didn't want to listen to them here, plenty of other groups agree with them on Bitchute. I even linked to one of them for you.
As to the rest, I'm not even sure what your point is. If you figure one out, let me know.
And the internet isn't print journalism, yet it struck a near-fatal blow to newspaper budgets. That's the economic side of it. The other side is, as you say, established media discreetly [1] censoring alternatives that don't toe the line. But I don't care to have my web browsing be censored by the ADL, no matter how they justify it.
All this Reddit/Bitchute/newspaper stuff is a non sequitur — we're talking about Twitter and Mastodon, not any of those other things. Censoring Mastodon is a new policy under Elon.
The point of the "hate speech" comment is that there's a plausible reason to suppress Bitchute that doesn't involve stifling competition (especially because, as GP mentioned, Bitchute isn't actually a competitor to Twitter). So it's not even analogous to what's happening here.
I've actually been reasonably pleased with Mastodon. It's got its rough edges for sure, but it's weathered the Twitter expatriation storm better than expected, and lots of folks I follow are mirroring their content there. The Fedifinder tool (fedifinder.glitch.me) is a really quite painless way to update my follow list as people move over.
I don't know whether or not Twitter is going to be "replaced" any time soon, but right now this does have sort of the feel of a Digg moment to me.