As Musk sullies up the place, and Trump throws his tantrum, and the Nazis, anti-Semites, racists, and other slobs throw their vacuous weight around, many people are considering leaving Twitter, or have already left. Others have chosen to stay until some threshold is reached, and still others don’t have solid plans to leave, and that lack of planning is often intentional, they’ve just decided to stay for one reason or another.

As intentions are declared, we sometimes see a virtue-based argument advanced, and in one out of five* of those cases, the virtuous justification for staying/waiting/leaving comes along with an urgent plea or even a demand that other so the same.

Stop doing that shit, please.

A friend told me he’d had enough, with Trump coming on (which he hasn’t actually done yet) and he can’t stomach being there. I get that. I have similar intestinal reactions. Today I had lunch with someone in the voting biz, who said, “I can’t leave Twitter, because so much of the election protection community is operating there, it would be irresponsible.”

Another person told me they’d prefer to leave behind Musk and Trump, but she also didn’t believe that Musk will own Twitter for much longer. Others have noted that they don’t want to be here but also want to see it collapsing from the inside. No one can turn away from the train wreck. This may be a unique opportunity to watch the train crash from inside the train.

Some have made the argument that their data will be stolen if security lapses. There’s a good argument there, if Twitter has your credit card, but I’m not sure how leaving protects the information they already have. So maybe that isn’t a good argument.

I’m simply asking people to note that there is a very small chance that your particular decision as to what to do with Twitter is the absolutely correct decision, and that the argument you are making to justify your choice is the best possible argument. One in five chance you have it right*. So when you make the argument, and then attach to it an admonition to others who have a different argument that you are doing the right thing and they are not, you have a four in five chance* that you are being obnoxious, not wise. So, the smart money is on stating your case but with a framework of openness to other ideas, rather than using your decision to signal your virtue and smartness.

*These are of course totally made up numbers, but you get the point.

Twitter seems to have no plans to enforce community standards. Between Alex Jones and Donald Trump, the place is a real dump.

“You are destroying freedom! I would give my life to protect the free speech of a Nazi”

Well, no, you wouldn’t. Don’t even say that.

And now fascism is starting to rise in America, and make no mistake that the two prongs of fascism are emerging, a fascist would-be dictator and friends, and a two digit percentage of the populous that want it.

Part of the rise of fascism in America comes from social networking. Social networks have become the easy place to advance the rhetoric, confused the opposition, create a movement, nurture the hate, and move a society in this direction. This is now speculation. It is what is currently happening.

Facebook and Twitter and similar venues are like abandoned homes turned into crack houses. I used to live across from one. The neighbors, in coordination with the police and city officials, shut it down using a standard procedure used across the US in many cities. Every time something happens at that house, from littering to loud noise to somebody passed out on the lawn, call 911. Don’t use your own address, only give the address of the house in question. That way the 911 calls all get logged to that address. There is generally a city ordinance that says that if a house has above a certain number or rate of 911 calls, the city or county can condemn the house. The owner has some options at that point, but since the owner is probably a slum lord properly company in Boca Raton, they won’t even know about it. So, the city or county takes the house, cleans it out, and either tears it down and sells the property to a developer, or auctions it off so a developer buy it, fix it up, and sell it.

Facebook is an example of a new sort of entity we have in society, but that serves the function of older forms such as homes or public spaces. If a social network like Facebook gets too many 911 calles (“911, what’s your emergency?” “A foreign dictator and posse of oligarchs, in coordination with a pretender to the US presidency, is trying to destroy civilization?” “OK, please give us the address so we can dispatch a car…”) and the owners of that network refuse to do anything about it, perhaps the social network should be taken down.

Think about a mall’s food court. Facebook is a little like a food court, in that it is a social venue. Imagine a food court where someone was killed about twice a year, someone was raped about once every two weeks, and someone was mugged a few times a day. (Not all the same person!) The pertinent governmental body would shut that place down. When my local school district (before our recent move) became a place where the suicide rate among mainly LGBT students was extraordinarily high, the CDC came in to shut the school district down, if nothing was done. Things were done.

Crack houses, food courts, school systems. This is how we do it in our society. But because of their newness, and possibly because of their tremendous hubris, places like Facebook are so far immune from such actions.

Until now. Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz is the law that says that the spread of fascist propaganda shall be illegal, in Germany, on social media sites. Fines can run up to $60 million dollars.

The government will identify hate speech, inform the network that it must be taken down, then the network has 24 hours to do so. The hate speech will be spotted by anyone who cares to look, who can then fill out a form of some kind. That starts the process.

I know a lot of you will immediately say that this can’t be done, that it should not be done, or that it won’t work because it will be gamed. I disagree. It should be done. It can be gamed, but that can be adapted to. And it is necessary.

Or, if I’m wrong about that, if the people can not be protected against this nefarious aspect of social networking sites, then social networking sites have to cease to exist. We’ll find some other way to socialize. Go to the food court. Sit on a neighbor’s front stoep. Maybe even pay attention to the people in your house. I think they’re around here somewhere ….

Trump’s latest violation of Twitter policy was probably his calling for the death of an American Citizen who had just been sentenced for a crime he had pled guilty for, but that was not a death penalty crime.

If I called for the death of someone, they would delete my twitter account, and I can’t really kill someone by saying “kill them.” But the President actually does have that power, and short of actually ordering a black op to have someone murdered, he can insist that someone should be killed, and one of his deplorable followers may well carry it out. If that happens in this case remains to be seen. At this point, anything bad that happens in part or fully due to a Tweet by Donald Trump is Twitter’s fault.

Following the homicidal terrorist attack on anti-White Supremacist demonstrators, trump saw fit to post the following tweet, memorialized here in a retweet by Kyle Griffin, an MSNBC producer.

Similar to an earlier contrived production in which Trump himself is shown in a video beating a CNN reporter, this shows a train labeled TRUMP running over a CNN reporter in cartoon form.

That tweet was deleted soon after being posted. I wonder how that happened. Did Trump think better of his choice? Did General Kelly storm the bathroom and wrestle Trump’s phone away from him? Did the NSA dive in there and delete the offending tweet in such a way that Trump will never see that it was deleted but the rest of us will? Can they even do that?

Meanwhile, a guy from the UK named Mike Holden, tweeted the observation that Trump is a fascist, so his alleged ikntent to pardon Arizona Joe Arpaio, Sheriff makes sense. Astonishingly, trump re-tweeted Holden’s remark.

I checked. Trump’s twitter account does not say “retweets are not endorsement,” and we know from the evidence of considerable prior practice that Trump’s retweets are, in deed, endorsements.

That tweet was also removed, and again, one wonders how that happened.

SNL, are you paying attention?

I found out about these tweets in this WaPo article.. So, it is probably fake, but whatever.

Trump’s people in the “press” room have bullied the press to the point that they are finally starting to lash out. This is what dictators do.

This is a moment to watch and remember. pic.twitter.com/Ld6EGfwiPx

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 27, 2017

Trump has attacked another female journalist, this time Mika Brzezinski, with another enigmatic blood coming out of her body parts comment.

This is what dictators do.

pic.twitter.com/8YhzcCUwM1

— Mika Brzezinski (@morningmika) June 29, 2017

DNC: Trump's "bullying tweets" about Brzezinski are "an attack on women everywhere" https://t.co/XPiJBZhVyn pic.twitter.com/1YYDoHLuK5

— The Hill (@thehill) June 29, 2017

Reminder: Back during the campaign, Trump called Ms. Brzesinski “crazy and very dumb”

“Just heard that crazy and very dumb @morningmika had a mental breakdown while talking about me on the low ratings@Morning_Joe. Joe a mess!”

Is anybody going to do something about this?

If you were previously following the President of the United States on Twitter, when it was Barack Obama, you followed @POTUS.

Twitter has created an account called @POTUS44, which is for President Obama. You are now automatically following that handle.

Twitter redesignated @POTUS to apply to President Trump, and left all of the President Obama followers on that account as well. So, you are now following President Trump at @POTUS.

The same applies, in parallel, to the First Lady and the Vice President.

Meanwhile, these folks have their own civilian twitter handles. President Obama is simply using his old handle (and, by the way, he follows me, just sayin’).

So, you may or may not want to update your Twitter accounts accordingly.

Well, you would find your way to a different highway entrance. But say that one was closed as well.Then, you check around and find out that all the highways in your state are closed because the state decided to close them. No more highways for you.

Or, one day you go to check the mail and there is a single post card, and nothing else, in your mail box. The post card reads “The United States Postal Service has permanently suspended operation. Sorry for the inconvenience. Have a nice day.”

Or one day you go to turn on the TV and … well, never mind, you get the point.

This morning I received an email from Socialite, a software application, telling me that the software app would not be developed further, could no longer be updated, and was no longer for sale. The main reason for Socialite’s demise is summarized in this text from their web site:

In 2012 Twitter announced API changes and made it clear that traditional Twitter clients, such as Socialite, should not be developed. Some of these new rules made developing Twitter support in Socialite 2 impossible, so after much deliberations we stopped the development of Socialite 2.
End-of-life of Google Reader in 2013 was the last nail in the coffin of Socialite, as without it Socialite loses much of its appeal.

Now, I don’t use Socialite, so this does not matter to me, but it is part of a larger problem that has been a difficulty for everyone. First, with respect to Twitter, it seems to me that Twitter does change its API now and then, which in and of itself causes havoc in the development community. Furthermore, it seems that these changes in Twitter API are not necessarily improvements, but rather, sometimes involve removal of functionality. One could even argue that Twitter has a policy of changing, and sometimes even “breaking,” it’s API in order that software projects that make use of it no longer work.

I remember a few years back when Twitter was still pretty new and there were all sorts of great ideas for using the Twitter environment to do things like citizen science. But it seems to be the case that any long term use of Twitter, especially if that use requires use of the API (but even if it does not), isn’t worth attempting because any investment one puts into the project could be obviated at any time by Twitters policy. That policy, it seems, is “Innovate with Twitter at your own risk.”

The second part of this is, of course, Google Reader being shut down by Google. This is a little different. I might be wrong, and do correct me if so, but Twitter seems to be somewhat arbitrary in its API changes, and seems to do very little to support and encourage development with its framework. Google, on the other hand, seems to encourage development of projects and activities based on its services. Nonetheless, a lot of people were surprised when the widely used Google Reader, which served as a key component of many development projects, was axed. Getting rid of a project few people use and that seems to not have really taken off is one thing (and Google has done that a number of times, which is an obviously likely outcome of diverse innovation which Google seems to do). But Twitter is not Google. Twitter is the kind of project that could easily have been one of many services offered by a company like Google. Twitter, when it changes itself in a way that destroys functionality, is not dropping support for one of many projects. It is making itself irrelevant and annoying as a tool for incorporation in other projects.

So, what is the difference between roads and mail service on one hand and Twitter and Google on the other? The former are public goods, funded publicly and regulated by the government. Similar projects exist in most countries around the world and they integrate across national boundaries. The latter are projects of private companies that have every right to change their services, restrict use, or even shut down entirely.

Amazon is similar. Over time, Amazon has become one of the major, if not the major, supplier of two things one does not usually associate with a book store: Servers and cash registers. If you use a service that requires computer servers and/or storage of data, such as Netflix, you may well be using Amazon indirectly because they provide servers for a gazillion clients. When a bunch of Amazon servers go down, the Internet can choke majorly, though fortunately this happens rarely. Similarly, when you make an on line purchase at any on line company other than Amazon, there is a reasonable chance that you are using Amazon indirectly, as they provide the on line purchasing system to a lot of other vendors. And, now and then, you might even buy a book from Amazon.

When Amazon decides to change what it does or how it does it, which they can do arbitrarily within the range of existing contracts, a lot of things can, potentially, change. A minor example of this happened recently to those of us based in Minnesota, when Amazon, not by necessity but simply to make a point, shut down associates in the North Star State. That was part of my income stream (though a very small part, I quickly add) and Amazon simply sent me an email one day saying that this would no longer be a thing, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Twitter, Amazon, Google, and similar things are like the railroad, mining, and lumber companies of yore, run by a small number of highly influential individuals who happen to be in charge by a combination of luck and whatever else makes you one of those people. The thing is, these corporations effectively serve as public goods, just like our roads, our power grid, our water and sewage systems, our public mail service, our fire departments, etc. but they are not public entities.

At the moment, we who use the Internet, software, etc. are at risk of the arbitrary decisions of a handful of modern Robber-Barons who got into their present position for reasons other than being thoughtful, sensitive, public servants. All hale the free market.

Is there anything that can be done about this? Possibly. Here are a few ideas.

1) The US Senate can pass a resolution requiring Obama to bomb Twitter. That would not solve anything, and of course it can’t really happen, but the debate in the Senate would be high entertainment.

2) The government can take over Amazon, Google, Twitter and a few other companies, sort of like how it took over the companies that built roads and canals (and to a lesser extent, railroads) in days of yore.

3) A version of the government takeover in which the government doesn’t really take over but “authorities” are created, like the ones that handle ports, airports, etc. today (those entities were originally private, in many or most cases).

(These two options, 2 and 3, seem impossible, many will think they are bad ideas. And they will be bad ideas right up until the moment Google is about to go bankrupt or is embroiled in some sort of scandalous legal difficulties of some kind, and a “bailout” is needed. A thing like Google will never need a bail out of course. Like banks. And car manufacturing companies. They would never need a bail out either.)

4) Alternative services, like Amazon, Google, Twitter, etc. can be developed by non-profits using an OpenSource GPL-like model. Those services would probably not be big, or widely used. But they would be there. Then, one day, when the big players falter or become too annoying in one area or another, the OpenSource alternatives can grow a little here and there, and eventually, become the norm.

5) See below (this is where you put your ideas in the comments):

Posts on Greg Laden’s Blog are automatically tweeted, and are automatically placed on Facebook as links, through two different services. The fact that the blog post titles are tweeted has changed the way I title them. Unable to assume that readers will see an excerpt or opening paragraph in a feed, I now do two things differently: I am somewhat more descriptive in the titles of the blog posts because on Twitter, all people are getting is the title and a link. This is, of course, foolish because fewer than one tenth of one percent of the hits on my blog posts come from twitter. The other thing I do is to more regularly use certain codewords in the title. If I write a post that is merely pointing to a blog carnival, I try to use the words to indicate that in the title. Same for “blogospheric” posts. (This second change in my titling strategy is of course a special subset of the first.) This is to avoid annoying people who may not want to come to the blog post to see a post on “How to please your man, ten easy hints revealed by ten easy experts” only to find that my post is merely pointing to a snarkily titled edition of the Carnival of the Vanities or something.

I hardly every look directly at my twitter feed. I do, however, regularly check a subset of my twitter feed, which includes the tweets of about thirty different people and no more.

I check Facebook regularly, so if I see anyone’s stuff I see it on Facebook. I have about 1,500 Facebook friends, but I only watch the feeds of a subset of maybe a couple of hundred. (See “Finding Facebook” for how Facebook has changed my life. Or not.)

I have a Friend Feed account. I don’t look at it and I don’t really know what it is.

So, the bottom line is that I watch Facebook regularly and see all this from a Facebook perspective.

One person I know twitters and each tweet becomes a facebook status update with a tinyURL link that is a link to the twitter feed. I’ve learned to not click on that person’s tinyURL no matter how interesting the status update is because all I get is the tweet, which is identical to what I already had. I’m not sure why that link is there.

One person I know writes extensive tweets (always using the maximum characters), often includes a link, and is always conversational, frequently asking for a response. Like “Tell me what you think about this old video of Carl Sagan.” (I made that up, but the person is an Astronomer). If I or anyone else responds to this conversation opener on Facebook, we are summarily ignored because this person is tweeting and the tweet is feeding over to Facebook, and I’m pretty sure she’s not reading Facebook feeds on any regular basis. So, really all I’m seeing is a replicate of a conversation going on somewhere else that I can’t participate in without changing my (above described) habits.

Another person I know produces a very large percentage of tweets that seem to be private messages or responses, and these tweets, once again, are fed over to Facebook. So I see a lot of “Oh, really? We’ll have to talk about that” and “No, I think you have to stir in the mayonnaise first or the hot tub jets will get clogged” and so on. I hardly ever have a clue what is going on. This person is also on my highly select twitter feed, and I still have no idea what is going on.

I do know one person who is a professional writer and who checks her very selected twitter feed regularly (she is not a slut like I am, with thousands of meaningless “friendships” and “followeees”) and regularly checks her Facebook account, and has her tweets become status updates automatically. I’ve not asked her but I’m pretty sure she writes her tweets cognizant of the fact that there is this mixed audience of tweet-readers and Facebook-checkers. So her tweets transmogrified into Facebook status updates are neither annoying nor ignored.

All of the above cases are females. Two guys I know seem to do something similar to what I do: Their blog posts become tweets, and that’s mostly it. One of them has his tweets also become Facebook status updates, the other does not, but does put links to his blog posts on Facebook, as I do, so the same result using two slightly different routes, is obtained. So there may be a consistent gender related pattern here where the females are being conversational in various ways, and the guys are just fucking mud, as it were, in an Internet sense.

I don’t like the disconnected conversation of my astronomer friend. I may have to stop stalking her on Facebook because she’s just taking up feed space that I can’t use. But she does have the occasional interesting link. I enjoy the tweets of the person mentioned above with the tinyURLs, and I’ve learned to ignore the tinyURLs (but I do think they should not be there to begin with since they make no sense). My writer friend who writes for the audience does not produce a lot of tweets or Facebook items, and they all seem to make sense. The two guys that I mention are redundant in that I check their blogs, get their tweets, and see the Facebook feed and it is the same thing over and over and over again. But that’s guys for you. Redundant.

The bottom line is this: Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, and other social networking sites are not the same thing as each other. If you want to use them all, either don’t automate or automate with the full knowledge of what you are doing on each feed, how it works, and how readers respond to it. I’m probably screwing up on Friend Feed. As I mentioned above, I “do” it, but I don’t look at it, don’t know how it works, and I’m not sure what it is. So there are probably people on Friend Feed who get annoyed at what I’m doing there, whatever that is. My two friends who spill twitter stuff over to facebook should probably not do that. Either write for both audiences or keep your conversation where it belongs. They sound like people talking loud on their cell phone in an airport waiting area. People who put their blog posts up on all these feeds are probably using a service, and if that is the main thing one is doing, people can understand that and decide to use that feed or ignore it.

I think maybe I’ll work on a bash script that converts a rudimentary feed-seed into appropriately developed text that reads right for various different feeds, with or without links as appropriate, and sends them out automatically to the appropriate social networking sites. I’ll make it available for other people to use. I’ll call it feed2feeds.

Check back later for that…