X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links (opens in new tab)

Humans aren’t in the loop for automated bans. That has no relationship to staffing size.

This is likely a problem with the link banning algo not treating signal.me as high volume enough to prevent an automated ban.

That same logic most definitely exists at well-staffed companies and the internet is full of stories of people getting screwed by these systems. Google sinking legit companies with no recourse, locking out Gmail users who had decades of their life there, etc.

You can actually post links of the form https://signal.me/asdf. But https://signal.me/#asdf is blocked. That supports you point of view, I guess?

After a review, the program works as coded.

"The purpose of a system is what it does."

This is only true for systems that works perfectly. If the implementation if flawed, the system can do something different from its purpose.

Claiming "The purpose of a system is what it does." is like claiming that software bugs do not exist.

Seems reductive.

This ties in with something that took me far too long to recognize: Trust has two pillars.

One pillar is alignment of values, and therefore intent. The other pillar is competence.

These are the same issues faced by AI development, as well as representative government, or anything regulating a dynamic with competing elements or agents.

Yet our plurality voting system would be insufficient even to keep a car on the road and driving within the speed requirements. If only the founding fathers had recognized the need to have more information included in ballots so that negative campaigning wasn't as effective if not more effective than positive.

If we voted with {+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, 0...} weights, without duplication of non-zero values, the smartest, most constructive candidates would have a better chance. Each district would have its own blend of 3-4 viable parties, and the nation would be all the healthier for it. (Side note: Yes, this is still one person one vote--you could imagine voting with a single checkbox for a single permutation of all possible assignments of the scores, as an intermediate form.)

Back to your point, though: Yes, incompetence and malice can have the same effect in the short term. The long term is what determines the difference, both in effect and our responses to it.

I like to add the statement, "Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice."

> Didn't they wanted to beat each other up in the public?

Isn't that like ultimate bro code for "I love you man"?

Are links to mastodon still banned on twitter? Because that was a thing after Musk took over. So much for being a free speech absolutist.

You're making the mistake of taking a (communal + antagonistic) narcissist at face value. They are known to lie to suit their current goals and when those goals are achieved, they will lie to suit their new goals, whether the lies are congruent with each other or not.

This is a guy who:

- publicly called a rescuer "pedo guy", then falsely claimed it's a common insult from South Africa

- in a private email called him a "child rapist" and made up allegations of a 12 yo bride

- hired a PI to dig up dirt on him (which failed to corroborate any of his allegations)

Western society really needs to destigmatize discussion of mental illness, including diagnosing public personalities based on their behavior. Give them an opportunity to defend themselves, sure, but at some point, they become a danger to others (usually not to themselves) and should be required to seek treatment or be committed to a mental institution.

The reason absolutely matter : a mistake can happen to anyone, and be fixed within a short time, while censorship is deliberate and will probably not be fixed

OP meant people though, not organizations, which I assume are not that easy to migrate.

In the end it's a void question though. users will flock to where opinions resonate with theirs.

I guess those smart, insightful people are staying on X because

- their targeting audience are on X

- they are rich and do not really care what the platform owner does

- they will be very happy to join the owner when offered such opportunities

For people who are the target audience of those people, I guess

- they voted for this, and they are happily watching the federal gov falling apart

- they convinced themselves that X is the place to grow / learn from smart and insightful people (I don't think one has to be on it for more than 10 min a day to grow & learn, unless one is a crypto trader)

- they convinced themselves that it is really nothing political about using X

> non-bot and non-fake and non-clickbait material of substance

This is if you actively stay off politics. Taking just a small step in and it suddenly turns into 4chan /pol/

> i think elon is a deeply problematic person not especially more so than a million other business leaders and billionaires, his bullshit is just a lot more visible

I don't disagree with you. But the big problem -- and the reason why people like me are so upset -- is that Elon is now in a much more powerful position than any of those other business leaders, a position in which he is directly impacting the lives of Americans whether they use his products or not. That's quite different than Bezos, Zuck, and all the rest. If he had stayed out of politics I wouldn't have much issue (I can choose not to use X, drive a Tesla, etc.)

mind sharing your feed?

I feel only MAGA are happy & comfortable staying on X, voting for trump != maga

hence the question

It's not just about Trump though. I jumped ship the second Musk pushed the change to increase the weight of tweets made by a paying account. Also the first thing he did when he took over was cut the entire a11y team. Then he login-walled Twitter and broke the API. Reddit communities went crazy when the Reddit team paywalled their own API.

There's an incredibly long list of reasons to ditch x beyond musk's political activity

quite frankly, your argument is dishonest, whether intentionally or not. I do not trust anyone repeating online, and no one else should. Especially since its repeated verbatim every time it comes up, its clear that this is "the play" and propaganda.

> I suggest looking at the nov election results.

What should we be looking at exactly? How the curiously 100% flipped swing states voted? I agree, theres much to look at there.

> The votes for Trump were for this (his relationship to Elon and intention of “having him make the government efficient” were well known in advance of the election

That is an outright lie.

No one knew Musk would be running amok dismantling government institutions like a rabid dog, while side stepping all government processes. Project 2025 had something like a 6% approval rating. What is being "implemented" right now is Project 2025.

The US is in a constitutional crisis, and the saving money is a farce to permanently disable the US as a functioning body.

You think the US is bankrupting you by stealing your money? Specifically: USAID, FAA, Government Watchdog agencies, and whatever other group that has been dismantled by now? Those are the high priority agencies stealing our hard earned money?

Not the guys who all of a sudden have a 100 billion dollars since 2010?

I’m reminded of this line from Stewart Lee, when talking about the disillusioned British working class voting for radical political parties/causes:

“A protest vote for UKIP is like shitting your hotel bed as a protest against bad service, then realising you now have to sleep in a shitted bed.”

Do you expect that money will be worth very much after the entity that issues it is destroyed?

the people who ensure government is broken and stealing from you are now in charge. they recently requested $4.3 trillion in deficit spending for tax cuts and the dissolution of medicaid.

This aspect of America has always struck me as the most bizarre: the most vicious enemies of the American state are Americans.

You voted for a $4T increase in deficit as a tax gift for billionaires, to save you money?

Please explain the logic.

Then federated governments with local currencies, or what?

I saw your comment and saw it getting downvoted or flagged but it is useful to have a discussion so that others similarly inclined can potentially learn something that they obviously don't already understand. I reproduce that comment here in case it somehow disappears.

>i voted for that, i voted for the destruction of the federal government because it's bankrupting us by stealing our money

If you're concerned about the federal government bankrupting "us" by stealing our money then ask yourself why one of the first things that happened was the firing of OIG personnel. The Inspectors General and their OIG employees are the federal employees with the mandate to identify waste, fraud, and abuse in every federal program regardless of size. They have the power to audit any recipient of taxpayer monies and to work with US Attorney federal prosecutors to prosecute those who steal, waste, or otherwise violate plan guidelines in disbursing money. US Attorneys will not even take a case to trial unless agency auditors can document in detail that a crime has occurred and that crime fits within prosecutorial guidelines and a conviction is nearly guaranteed. To take a case that has any weaknesses risks wasting public money prosecuting a case you might not win. The whole point is to make sure you have the evidence that forces the defendant to either make restitution or to spend some time in a federal lock-up.

It's suspicious to me that the first thing they do is fire all the people who not only can watch, but who have the Congressional mandate to seek out waste, fraud, and abuse of federal programs that disburse money to individuals, small businesses, cities and other non-federal entities, non-profits, and corporations.

Though I am not a doctor, I do think that you should seriously work on your mental health. Start by changing your diet to include less kool-aid as the sugar high you're on can cause metabolic changes that lead to seriously bad health outcomes.

My spouse has spent a career in a federal department working to insure that the money Congress allocates to specific programs ends up being spent for purposes that are allowed under the guidelines of those federal programs. If you think the federal government is the one stealing your money you are sadly mistaken.

Federal programs are full of fraud but the fraud occurs at the recipient end, not within the department.

If you or anyone else are so concerned about where your tax money goes then the last agency entity that you would eliminate would be the one charged with insuring that all the monies in all the programs administered by the agency are disbursed lawfully according to plan guidelines which were approved by Congress. These people, as part of their job, have to read and internalize all the nuances, conflicts with existing programs, and contradictions in all the programs that they serve as watchdog over and it is their skills that allow federal prosecutors to take fraud cases to trial and to convict those who have abused federal programs for personal gain.

You voted for someone who has a documented history of fraudulent use of federal money who made it a point in both of his administrations to remove the specific persons and agencies that would guarantee oversight so that they can do anything without worrying about accountability. Internalize that.

= Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face

No. Signal groups are advertised with signal.group URLs.

OK, I couldn't find any specific documentation just floating around about group links. It appears that the base64 value is specific to the group and is only exposed through the link. I didn't see any way to munge the "signal.me" domain and fix it again. So for groups Twitter/X seems to have won.

Phone numbers and usernames are sent in the clear in signal.me links. So in this particular case, they can't be hidden. Perhaps it is not a good idea to post such links on a hostile system.

They declared that the DOGE stuff is official presidential records and thus not subject to FOIA.

https://www.businessinsider.com/musk-doge-records-public-inf...

Sometimes, the simplest explanation is the right one: they're fascists and the rules are not applicable to them.

If you think they're going to follow FOIA law I have a bridge to sell you.

* Unless you're secretary of state.

I can’t edit the original comment but it looks like sharing signal links is back, but some now have a spam warning. https://x.com/jeremiahdjohns/status/1891554583756845526?s=46

Tariff the world, devalue the dollar

Tell me more. I live here and have never encountered a situation where I was not allowed to express my opinions in a systematic way. So I don't know but would be delighted to

The US ranks #55 in press freedom, all positions in the top 10 are EU countries.

It's probably just a spam filter going awry.

Signal links are odd, in that all the identifies are after the #, so to a spam filter this just looks like a single url, https://signal.me , being sent out in mass.

what does „from mistral“ mean in your comment?

While you’re correct as to his intentions, it’s still important to point out his hypocrisy as he called himself “a free speech absolutist,” and claimed to want Twitter to be part of that vision. He explicitly called left wing and right wing views as things he wants.

Yes, we know it was all lies but not putting out the evidence allows people like Musk and his acolytes to make it the new truth without a fight.

No, he did not misunderstand. This is 100% malice.

What makes you say that? I've started using X recently and I would argue it's pretty free, you see a lot more range of opinions than on a site like reddit. Aggressively pro-trans posts come across my feed all the time, including some right-wing content

The biggest problem with the term "Free Speech" is that almost everyone makes exceptions for things that they believe should be restricted/censored.

Therefore the only standard should be the legality of that speech in a particular country. In the US those things you put as exemptions are permitted. So pre-musk Twitter wasn't about free-speech as those exemptions are restrictions on speech that are greater than US law restricts (which isn't much tbh).

Generally you have a trade off on any of these platforms between what you can say without breaking terms of service and the popularity of that platform. Generally less popular platforms are less restrictive.

If you don't want your speech restricted, you should probably just go back to hosting your blog and using a mailing list.

I would argue it appeared after the Twitter purchase. Originally Twitter had been dying through excessive bans, now you can find major political influencers on both sides of the spectrum

> about free speech, except it was trying to fight bots, hate speech

> about free speech

> fight hate speech

Do you realize how absurd you sound?

Also how liberals were celebrating Elons "genius" just a decade ago will never not be funny to me, they also don't seem to mind Gates at all. I don't think they have much of a problem with oligarchy, they just want a liberal oligarchy instead.

Good point, and I strongly hold if you can explain something by incompetence, it's profoundly more likely to be true than cunning.

OTOH, I recall Elon's comment about "vote Dem in House and GOP in Senate, divided is better", something like that. Given his position as Donald's right hand man, that comment takes on new meaning.

The parent post is by and large correct, except for the right-hand man of Donald Trump stuff. Musk was indeed trying to buy influence, which is definitely not a "5D chess move" but simply common sense for extremely wealthy people if they can get away with it. He also wanted to ensure that he is always the center of attention and intended to use twitter as the marketing arm for his brand. He only wanted to back out once US and global economic indicators started going south and made his offer look ridiculously overpriced, and also made himself look like a sucker. And Musk does not like being the sucker. But his wanting to back out later doesn't cancel out his initial intentions. And once he was forced to buy it, he started playing high stakes poker and managed to turn it into a great investment for him personally by the end of 2024, becoming one of the most powerful men in the world in addition to being the richest. How long it will last might depend on how many consecutive presidential terms the Republicans can hold on to.

The righthand man for Trump stuff was never the intention initially. Musk went gaga for Trump rather late, he was a DeSantis supporter after all, with DeSantis launching his terrible presidential bid on Elon's twitter.

Direct connection, nothing special or fancy.

If it's at the bottom, people will keep submitting more Elon Musk news.

You get to moderate up or down. Otherwise people say what they want.

up/down vote is the laziest form of moderation. you get what you pay for.

How do you mean do we "believe this nonsense"? I don't use twitter regularly, but I have two accounts for reasons. I just signed in, I typed out a (fake) signal URL, and... posting was blocked.

It doesn't appear to be nonsense, it appears to be entirely true that any tweet with "signal.me" in it is blocked.

Occam's razor says they're blocking Signal. Hanlon's razor says they're just idiots. Either way: An important tool for communication is being blocked by twitter, which is both dangerous and not "nonsense".

Given Elon Musk's current propensity for authoritarianism and censorship, I'm leaning towards Occam's explanation. If you have evidence otherwise, I would genuinely like to see it, but honestly Hanlon's explanation that it's incompetence is not much better.

Politics in general. Because everyone has an opinion, often based on their values rather than cold facts, and people do not like their values being questioned. The discussion is more civil than on other forums, but the difference is not night and day. Disappointing.

Bluesky is owned by cryptocurrency grifters. It's disheartening to see people flock to it like it's the greener pasture.

At best it's less toxic, but only marginally. They implemented even more dunk mechanisms that X has, so it's primed to be a terrible place long-term.

User-owned, federated social media is absolutely the safest bet if you want low toxicity and freedom from corporate control.

bsky is decentralized, in theory more so than Mastodon, which is federated (a variant of decentralization that requires you to trust the server admins of a server of your choice)

"In theory", because so far, there are very few nodes (one?), very few (if any?) alternative implementations, most is controlled and operated by a small team paid for by a.o. Jack Dorsey and other funds. Mastodon (using the ActivityPub protocol) has one main repo, managed by one person under a non-profit that also operates the biggest instance. But also has dozens of other implementations in other languages, with other niches, with more, less, other features and so on.

So, "best bet" would probably be to:

- Sign up at both a Mastodon and Bsky. Try them both for while.

- See which one fits your needs, style and practical needs best. Stick with that one.

Bsky doesn't train AIs using your data. They're warning you that your data may be scraped and used as such by third parties.

>>Do they believe free in free speech

No they don't, blue-sky belongs to the former twitter owner, aka THE BUBBLE ;)

BTW: He was not welcomed at FOSDEM because he is billionaire, when a movement eats itself ;)

https://drewdevault.com/2025/01/16/2025-01-16-No-Billionares...

> allowing hate, racist, homophobic, and transphobic language to run rampant

Are the people with these views not also entitled to free speech and equal rights to express themselves the same as everybody else?

Aren't racists a minority who struggle to express themselves?

How did you come to these conclusions about the goals and future of Twitter? My naive expectation was that Musk is mostly interested in enriching and aggrandizing himself, and that a crusade against some social group is only interesting as long as it serves the primary interests.

Name it X because old Twitter is dead.

Just because some people use "freedom of speech" as a veil, doesn't make it bad.

Prior to Musk's purchase of Twitter, feminists who expressed the view that women and girls need single-sex spaces, and that males who identify as women aren't actually women and therefore shouldn't be allowed in these spaces, would be banned from the platform under the guise of "transphobia".

They were literally being silenced for expressing their criticism of the ideology of gender identity and how it is being used to disadvantage and oppress women and girls.

On X, however, they are free to state this without fear of censorship, due to the broadening of permissible speech on the platform. So while it might not be the "free speech absolutism" that Musk disingenuously claims, it's an improvement to the pre-Musk era of censorship.

Freedom of speech, at least in the US, is a concern specifically with the government censoring citizens' speech. The Twitter files are a recent example of the government partnering with private corps to censor, so that's a fair argument, but in general a private company can't violate free speech by deciding what kind of content they want allowed.

Is it shitty that they censor? Absolutely. But is it a constitutional violation? Not unless I've horribly misunderstood my rights for more than 35 years.

> In reality, the goal has always been to silence minorities who already struggle to express themselves

This particular clause seens very unlikely. One could want an increase in racism and homophobia on a platform without specifically wanting there to be less black people (for example) speaking out. That the -isms cause said people to speak up less would likely be a (pleasant?) side effect rather than the primary goal.

X/Twitter should publicly provide a suspension reason - that would help a lot in verifying whether the account did/did not break TOS.

A justification [0] of sorts is provided for the journalist suspensions:

> Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2022_Twitter_suspensi...

A couple of journalists broke Twitters rule on doxxing, and were briefly suspended.

Wikipedia cops a lot of criticism for being politically biased. The fact it has a whole article around this seems to support that.

"Free speech" on a centralized platform always seems fishy. One can't expect it from Elon at least. He always has extreme/polar thoughts on various subjects.

If they were actual gaslights, self-powered gaslighting would solve the world's energy issues.

> The Arab spring was a populist uprising. It's not clear that there were actually positive outcomes

Tunisia is now arguably better off, but even beyond that: the longterm effects of such things aren't always immediately apparent. The French Revolution led to terror, then to an Empire and devastating wars and finally back to the old monarchy, but it cast a very long shadow on the 19th century and beyond.

The point is that social media was used by people to connect and organise which led to the overthrow of a number of dictators/military junta.

What has happened since is the old order has mostly reasserted itself - with a clamp down on social media, and mechanisms put in place to cut access if things get too fiesty.

Take Egypt - they kicked out a miltary juntu - forced elections - then the 'wrong' people won the elections and the military took over again, clamped down on the media and are in still in place today ( president has been in power for 10+ years with no signs of stepping down ) - and they are so representative of the people that the US think they might be able to persuade the Egyptian leader to take part in ethnic cleansing of it's neighbour.

Whether that's a good thing depends on whether you think people like el-Sisi know what's best for their country, whether the people agree or not.

At least at the time, we thought it could be a tool for populist uprisings in authoritarian countries. Now it seems like they just want to promote populist uprisings in democratic countries.

Twitter was a net positive for many. Millions of people around the world relied on it for timely news and updates in the absence of other avenues. This was particularly pertinent in places like Africa where state infrastructure wasn't able to provide or indeed, the middle east, where censorship prevented accurate news being disseminated.

So your assertion that "Twitter was _never_ a net positive for anyone" is not only false but an absurdly biased and frankly wrong view on how the world accesses information.

Also, the Arab spring overthrew several decades-long brutal dictatorships. Given that overthrowing The Taliban (lol) and Saddam is hailed as a positive of the trillions of dollars and millions of lives spent on the GWOT, at least give the people of the Middle East the courtesy of acknowledging the overthrow of Ben Ali, Assad, Mubarak and Gaddafi.

I think some people are so motivated by "hate" (for lack of a better word) they they pretty much would shoot their foot off with a sawed-off if someone told them it would "own the libs". It's like you say: there is not even need of justification, Musk is "our guy" and that's that.

There is plenty of criticism of Elon Musk coming coming from both sides of the political spectrum. I am consider myself right of centre and I hear plenty of criticisms of Elon Musk coming from the right. The complaints are completely different though.

The big problem with any of these discussions (especially online) is that a lot of people are intellectually lazy and assume the other-side is comprised of brain dead zealots who only support the most extreme positions.