Twitter’s ‘Fixed’ Blue Verification Program Still Horribly Broken, As The Taliban Gets Verified
from the all's-well-in-twitterville dept
As you’ll recall, Elon Musk’s first “big idea” for “saving Twitter” was to get rid of the existing verification program, oddly and uncomfortably merge it with Twitter’s subscription program, Twitter Blue, and… um… profit? Lots and lots of people (including Twitter’s existing trust and safety team) explained why this was a stupid idea, but Musk insisted that the team of developers he was likely going to fire anyway had to get it ready in a week or he’d fire them.
Hilariously, Musk pretended that his new system was somehow less elitist than the old system, when the reality is that the new system was just more fucked up, and the company almost immediately brought back the “elitism” of special verified accounts as advertisers flipped out. This was, in typical Musk fashion, because he never bothered to understand the reasons why every social media eventually comes up with a true verification system (which Twitter pioneered, and then everyone else copied).
So, just as everyone predicted, the initial verification system was a hilariously funny disaster, with tons of important people and brands impersonated (sometimes convincingly, sometimes hilariously). Musk shut the program down the next day and promised it wouldn’t come back until the problems were solved… in about two weeks. It took a little longer than that, but the program did come back. And yet… it doesn’t look like they actually fixed the problems.
Last week, the Washington Post revealed that they had (for the second time) successfully impersonated Senator Ed Markey (to the point that a semi-viral tweet by Senator Fetterman’s wife linked to the fake “verified” Ed Markey) rather than the real one.
After Blue 2.0 (my term for it) launched on Dec. 12, I made another faux Markey and applied for verification. Some of Twitter’s new requirements slowed down the process — and might dissuade some impatient impersonators — but the company never asked to see a form of identification. Last week, up popped a blue check mark on my @SenatorEdMarkey account. Oops! I did it again.
Also, new research has found that the newly minted “Blue verified accounts” have become a leading source of disinformation on Twitter in the last month, especially medical disinformation.
And, then, this week, it came out that Taliban members had successfully bought their way to respectability with a verified blue check.
Previously, the blue tick indicated “active, notable, and authentic accounts of public interest” verified by Twitter, and could not be purchased.
But now, users can buy them through the new Twitter Blue service.
At least two Taliban officials and four prominent supporters in Afghanistan are currently using the checkmarks.
Hedayatullah Hedayat, the head of the Taliban’s department for “access to information”, now has the tick.
Cool. Cool. No problems there. No problems at all.
Of course, as that story went viral, it appears that Musk’s minions scrambled to remove the check marks. I’m guessing he didn’t refund their $8.
Filed Under: ed markey, elon musk, taliban, twitter blue, verification
Companies: twitter
Comments on “Twitter’s ‘Fixed’ Blue Verification Program Still Horribly Broken, As The Taliban Gets Verified”
The Taliban aren’t active, notable, and of public interest?
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Only if you like blowing people up.
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As if Twitter had a problem with overinflated egos.
Re: Re: We already good, They need killing untill they good
Nov 18, 2022 — Biden ruled that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has immunity for ordering the killing of an American Journalist and cutting up his body to fit in suitcases. Saudi Arabia is the second largest customer (behind our international wars and our never-ending invasion of “Sovereign States”) for US built human killing machinery.
Biden signed Northrop’s fresh contract for $100 billion in taxes for NEW solid propellant ICBMs, iterated from our 60 year old Minuteman & $11b for NEW H-bomb designs. One percent of Lockheed sales are non-government or non-weapons sales. SpaceX, maybe five percent of 204 orbital launches were for the NRO and DoD. If refused, they would be forced out of business. Boeing:”The U.S. DoD, including foreign military sales through the U.S. government, accounted for approximately 84% of Boeing’s 2021 revenues”
Congressional Democrats have never failed to vote for war since 1930, in 2022 the US spent more on “national defense” than China, India, Russia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea combined.
We good, They bad….. Kill them with a 70,000 pound carefully targeted bomb load from our B-52
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technically they’re an actual government now, once Biden just gave them the country.
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Trump*, you would say if you had any capacity for honesty over Republican revisionism.
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Re: Re: Re:2
I know you guys like to make stuff up but that’s a lot.
Re: Re: Re:3
Who negotiated the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners, which included the current leader of the Taliban?
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Only an imperialist would think Afghanistan was Biden’s to give as if America owned the sovereign nation of Afghanistan. And it was Trump who ordered the withdrawal and it was already in motion when Biden was sworn in. Perhaps if Trump had shared information with Biden’s team during the transition they could have better removed ourselves from there.
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Well, there go the Department of Defense twitter accounts, then.
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Even funnier is that those DoD and CIA accounts dared to ask for protections. Before Elon.
Re: Re: Re: DoD, State Department, WeGood twitter accounts
They’re still there, I’ve “FOLLOW” them for a decade.
50% misleading and false information.
More than 20 percent of Vietnam’s land remains contaminated with anti-personal mines, which have killed or injured more than 100,000 people since 1973
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So, you don’t want to know who those people are if you don’t like that?
Maybe it’s because I grew up in the UK, so I knew who the main IRA terrorists were despite not agreeing with what they did, but why would you want that information to be hidden?
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Are you wearing your headgear properly?
You must show us all that your hat is proper on your head.
And no education for you we are too busy blowing up amusement parks for your continued safety of course.
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This seems entirely built on Mike’s belief that a blue checkmark is a sign of respectability. I don’t know how he arrived at that conclusion but I certainly hope it’s not a widely held belief.
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“Mike’s belief that a blue checkmark is a sign of respectability”
citation needed
Why ban the Taliban?
I bet I could blind some tweets from the Taliban and the MAGA crowd and you couldn’t tell who wrote which ones
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The Taliban would probably show a better understanding of spelling and grammar.
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Because it’s right there in their name!
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Language barrier would be a dead giveaway. The Taliban use proper English.
Elon loves far right opressive regimes and those who would install them, verifying the Taliban isn’t an accident, it’s by design.
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historically it’s the oppressive regimes (right or left is in your head) that like all the censorship you guys like so much.
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He says, between licks of the boot of a man who started banning left wing groups and journalists the first chance he got.
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Tolerance doesn’t mean we have to tolerate the intolerant. Sorry not sorry if their voices get minimized in a tolerant society.
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In fact, it means we shouldn’t tolerate them. Popper’s paradox and all, we tolerate them, at some point we no longer have the choice.
Well, the “Free Speech Absolutist” better leave them on Twitter, or is he a liar?
'Our ads were posted next to WHAT?!'
No worries, I’m sure events like this will in no way impact Elon’s desperate attempt to draw advertisers back to the site to put their money and reputations on the line…
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Old Twitter allowed all sorts of horrible dictators on
Gave them blue check marks, too. This was never a problem before, why is it a problem now?
Answer, cuz Musk owns it an you hate him, that’s literally it.
Maybe you can get the FBI to pressure Musk to ban the Taliban, or something. (◔_◔)
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Elon isn’t going to fuck you or give you money because you whiteknighted him online, dude.
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I have no idea why you think that’s funny. You’re a hostile little man who can’t do math but you have to resort to homophobic jokes? Intriguing.
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I don’t see how it’s homophobic to say Elon isn’t going to fuck you only because you keep trying to defend your favorite oligarch with the fervor of a K-Pop stan defending their favorite group…but hey, you do you, dude.
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The joke is only homophobic if you start off with homophobic views. Nobody who views gay people equitably would see that as a homophobic joke.
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It’s not a joke, because I’d really rather you suck him off. And it’s not homophobic, because it portrays the act as desirable. If anything, it’s homo-enabling.
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Link to your sobbing “Leave Elon alone!” video please.
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I can’t get over how the commentariat here gangs up on a single user, “Matthew M. Bennett,” and actively endeavours to suppress and hide his posts critical of Mike’s perspective on Musk’s ownership of Twitter.
That MM preferred the old, censorious Twitter regime is obvious…iirc, Mike even wrote at least a post or two praising how enlightened the “Trust & Safety” team’s speech suppression efforts were.
But it’s frankly pathetic how you all vote to suppress seemingly /all/ of Matthew M. Bennett’s posts. It’s beyond petty. You could simply ignore him, but instead, because he dissents, you reply to him and then /still/ go to the trouble of voting to hide his comments.
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Yup, basically exactly what I’m saying. I could post under another name too, of course, but I refuse.
I find it especially hilarious when I post on the occasional topic where I largely agree with the crowd (not too often, I am contrarian), leading to non-controversial posts and someone will still show up and flag everything from 5 different browsers or whatever.
They REALLY hate dissent. Which is of course why they hate Musk so much. I mean Musk agrees with them on half their crazy shit.
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It’s beyond petty. That even the first comment of yours that I saw in this thread was flagged (noting, “Old Twitter allowed all sorts of horrible dictators on … Gave them blue check marks, too. This was never a problem before, why is it a problem now?…”) is just pathetic.
I honestly don’t remember how diverse techdirt readers are in the viewpoints they expressed via commenting (since pre-Musk taking over Twitter so few TD posts generated significant comments). But it’s cowardly and so weak how people knowingly abuse the “Flag this comment” feature to suppress your [Matthew M. Bennett’s] posts.
Heck, they even flagged and suppressed my comment complaining about their flagging!!
Honestly, I’d challenge anyone reading this blog, including Mike M. himself, to articulate in very clear language with specific examples how their experience of using Twitter has been degraded by Musk’s purchasing the site. I get that he could harm Twitter’s business by making poor strategic (and operational) decisions, but seriously – how has anyone who’s complaining about Musk (including Mike…and Popehat, btw!) been harmed via Twitter by Musk’s takeover?
I’ll wait…
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Strawman. Nobody has claimed that they have been harmed by Musk’s takeover; only that Musk seems to be making one stupid decision after another since the purchase, and criticizing him for that.
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No, it’s not. Matty B has continually proven himself to be in the same league as Chozen, Hyman Rosen, and several other trolls who are also flagged on sight. He offers little in the way of meaningful discussion, insults anyone who dares to talk smack about his favorite oligarch (to the point where he has demanded that Techdirt stop writing about Musk in any capacity), and rarely backs up his claims of fact with credible sources/proof. The only thing he does “right” is post without an account, and that’s only because he’s smart enough to realize that posting with an account means he won’t have a trackable comment history that we can hold against him.
I held a good conversation a week or so ago with someone who disagreed with my ideas on censorship and moderation. They disagreed, I disagreed back, and a hopefully enlightening time was had by the both of us. But the key difference between their comments and Matty B’s is that the person in that conversation didn’t act hostile and defensive when I disagreed with them. They were willing to hear me out and offer a new angle from which I could consider my ideas (even if it didn’t actually change my ideas). We didn’t trade insults or threats or other such bullshit—we had a discussion where we disagreed and ended it without animosity on either side.
We don’t flag people like Matty B, Chozen, etc. only because we disagree with them. We flag them because they’ve proven over and over that the only thing they have to offer is disruptive behavior. If you can give me any meaningful reason why we shouldn’t flag people who only come here to commit an act of psychological self-harm by insulting and threatening people they hate on a site that no one is forcing them to read in any capacity, now would be a swell time to do exactly that.
Re: Re: Re:3
These people are not committing self-harm.
They are, at best, vandalizing the place. For white supremacy, big oil and whatever the Republicans stand for.
Re: Re: Re:2
That is the same as being a troll.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Well, of course woke ideologues are being petty. They cannot stand when popular opinion goes against them, and will do whatever they can to censor and silence and cancel their opponents. TD let’s them flag, so they flag. If they could do worse, they would. They hate Musk because he did away with the viewpoint-based censorship they adored and readmitted the wrong-thinkers to Twitter.
Re: Re: Re:3
To paraphrase Toom:
“…said nobody not taking copious amounts of drugs.”
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Honestly?
Gimme the drugs. At least I won’t have to deal with the likes of Hyman Rosen and the white supremacist club for 5 minutes.
Re: Re: Re:3
“They cannot stand when popular opinion goes against them”
Problem: you assume your ideology of hate is the popular one. Just because you’re loud, that doesn’t mean you’re right, or a majority.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Rob DeSantis explicitly campaigned against woke ideology and won Florida 60-40. It’s hardly an unpopular point of view. Whether it achieves majorities everywhere remains to be seen.
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Re: Re: Re:5
“Ron”
Re: Re: Re:5
It’s also a view based on the idea that teaching children that queer people exist, the United States enslaved and denied equal rights to Black people for centuries based on their skin color, or anything else that upsets straight white cisgender conservative Christian males is a horrific evil that should be made illegal and require those who violate such laws to undergo “corrective measures” such as a jail sentence.
That you defend DeSantis and his censorious bullshit—the kind of bullshit that has led to a noticeable dip in (among other things) book sales—instead of thinking it’s censorship is ridiculous, but it’s also par for the course for someone whose own anti-queer rhetoric is of the same exterminationist strain as DeSantis, TERFs, and probably even the guy who did the Club Q shooting.
Tell me something, Hyman: How can any teacher in Florida avoid teaching the idea that “racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons” and still teach the history of both slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, both of which literally involved white people using legal and sociopolitical systems (including the actual goddamn Constitution) to uphold white supremacy?
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They should avoid teaching that idea because it’s false. That does not prevent teaching accurate history, though, just tendentious history. Woke ideologues want to teach lies, and when they are prevented from doing that, they lie further and claim that it is the truth that cannot be taught.
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Except it isn’t. Slavery was upheld by American society as a legal institution only until it caused a civil war. Even after slavery was (mostly) outlawed by way of a constitutional amendment, Black people still weren’t able to access the same civil rights as the white people who once enslaved them. Even after the Civil Rights Movement delivered that access (in theory), the fact remains that the United States was founded, if only implicitly, on the idea that Black people were, are, and should always be second-class citizens at best.
Enslavement based on race. Redlining. Lynchings. “Separate but equal”. Race massacres such as the bombing of Black Wall Street. Acquitting white people of crimes against Black people based only on race. Gentrification of Black neighborhoods. If such things weren’t illegal, they sure as shit weren’t considered immoral. And they all happened at some point in the history of the United States, be it distant or recent. You tell me I’m wrong or lying and I’ll cite every last bit of evidence that I can find to tell you otherwise, you racist son of a whore.
No, fascists want to teach lies—like, say, that all queer people are groomers or that slavery was just a special living arrangement that Black people should have appreciated better.
Besides, what the fuck even is a “woke ideologue”? You’ve never given a definition of the term that can objectively identify as small a group of people as possible. I mean, if we go only by the way you’ve used it, it could legit refer to anyone who has ever said that “the enslavement of Black people based largely (if not entirely) on their skin color was at one point a wholly legal American institution” is a historical fact. I mean, dude, several of our Founding Fathers enslaved Black people—and at least one of them repeatedly raped and impregnated one of the women he enslaved. That’s a historical fact you can’t actually dispute unless you’re sincerely ready to rewrite American history so white people don’t have to deal with that uncomfortable reality.
If you’re reading history and you’re not uncomfortable at any point, you’re not reading history—you’re reading propaganda. History should make you uncomfortable. It should make you feel bad. That’s how you learn to avoid the mistakes of the past and create a better future. Or you can turn to the curriculums of Florida and Texas so you can imagine a past where Black people were thankful—downright grateful, even!—to be whipped, raped, beaten, forcibly separated from their families, stripped of their cultural heritage and traditions, and ultimately worked to death. Your call, shitbird.
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There is no problem with teaching accurate and factual history. That is not what teachers, fed critical race theory and all other forms of woke ideology in their schools of education instead of subject-matter knowledge and teaching skills, are plying their students with until they’re caught. Critical race theory has become the woke ideological way to ignore the shortcomings and dysfunction in the Black community and heap all the blame on white people, resulting in no improvement for Black people and fed-up disdain from white people. Woke race ideologues now classify everything that a society needs to do to preserve the social order as “whiteness”, bringing ever further ruin and death to the lives of Black people.
Re: Re: Re:9
And yet, Ron DeSantis has essentially outlawed the teaching of accurate and factual history in re: the existence of Black people in the United States since…oh, I’d say the year 1619 CE. After all, if it’s against the law to tell a student that “racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons”, a teacher literally can’t talk about America’s history of slavery. Or at least, they can’t do that without watering down the subject so much that it becomes essentially meaningless.
Racism is what drove American slavery. That racism was embedded into American society and its legal systems when the Founding Fathers did nothing to make sure the enslaved racial minority were freed from slavery and given the exact same rights as the dominant racial majority what was doing the enslaving. Ain’t no point in trying to teach students about slavery if so much as even implying anything that I said in those prior two sentences is a historical fact would land a teacher in jail.
Yes, yes, you think every college is a hotbed of liberal dicksucking where every course is about “woke [x] theory” and you saw two liberal professors in the closet making a conservative cry by reading all the MLK speeches beyond That One Line™ and the conservative looked at you and begged you to shoot all the liberals, we get it. Come up with something original that doesn’t rely on empty, “Welcome to Coneria!”–level NPC bullshit to make your empty-ass argument seem like it’s more than what it is.
No, it hasn’t. To the extent that the “Black community” has any shortcomings and dysfunction—and to the extent that the “Black community” exists in the monolithic state that you clearly imagine it is—those are influenced by, but not completely the result of, the historically documented racism visited upon Black people by white people. And if you’re going to bitch about that, hey, let’s look at the “white community” for a bit, because holy shit is there some dysfunction in there! (I mean, for starters, how many perpetrators of mass casualty shootings in the past 20 years have been white?)
Let’s examine that idea.
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Re: Re: Re:10
Go to school, pay attention, and learn knowledge and skills. Form stable relationships, get married, do not have children out of wedlock, stay married, and raise children in two-parent families. Use what was learned in school to find productive jobs. Do not glorify crime and misogyny in poplar culture. When others commit crimes or behave antisocially, call them out and report them to the police as necessary. Do not commit casual low-level crimes such as littering, shoplifting, or fare-beating. Do not use drugs or alcohol to the extent that it interferes with the rest of life excessively. Do not fight with other people. Do not use excessively foul language.
Re: Re: Re:11
Okay, this seems good (and it would help if we funded schools and stopped trying to stop kids from reading anything with “knowledge” that some assholes don’t want kids to learn, but whatevs).
…and here’s where you go off the rails. Just two sentences in, goddamn.
Some people don’t want to be in relationships. Some people in relationships don’t want to get married. Some people don’t want to have kids, in or out of marriage. Some people are forced by circumstances beyond their control to raise a child (or multiple children) in a one-parent household. Yes or no: Is anyone who falls into any of those descriptors literally destroying American society for that reason alone?
Maybe people would be more open to finding jobs if those jobs paid enough to, y’know, help people live without feeling desperate. And it would certainly help if corporations would pay people higher wages instead of hoarding profits for executives, raising prices on goods to keep making insane profits, and keeping wages so stagnant over the past few decades that a single full-time job isn’t enough for any one person to pay all their bills.
Well you’re gonna have a hell of a time enforcing that. I mean, a good chunk of American pop culture is steeped in misogyny. And as far as “do not glorify crime” goes? Well, how about you call for a national ban on distribution of Scarface or the Grand Theft Auto franchise; I’ll be happy to see how well that move works out for you in the long run.
And how, pray tell, would you define “antisocial” behavior, and to what extent does such behavior require police intervention? From what kind of perspective does your definition of “antisocial” come from, and how might that perspective limit you in re: seeing certain behaviors in other communities as social behaviors?
Okay, this is fine. But it’s hilarious that you don’t immediately follow this up with “don’t commit high-level crimes”, if only because that would end up precluding a lot of the crimes you like being, especially when they’re done by the kind of people you respect and admire (e.g., the murder of queer people for being queer; the bilking of poor people and the destruction of the economy by fraudsters, right-wing grifters, and the rich assholes who see hoarding more money than God as an essential social good).
See, now you’re starting to sound normal-ish again.
Define “fight”.
Fuck that shit, fam, I’ll fuckin’ swear as much as I fuckin’ want. Try and fuckin’ stop me, you goddamned dried-up cunt.
…oh, and I’d like to ask you one more question, which I missed the last time around and only came to me as I was reading my comment back:
Who, exactly, gets to decide what makes up the “social order” that should be preserved—and why should they get to make that decision for everyone else?
Re: Re: Re:12
The social order makes the rules for itself, through spoken and unspoken consensus. Part of the social order is having the self-control to live life in a way that may not maximize personal satisfaction but contributes to wider benefits for everyone else; this is something that, in a proper society, is inculcated into children from the moment they are able to understand what they are told.
Depending on how society chooses to organize itself, people may be free to abandon the social norms that maintain it, but they cannot be free from the consequences of doing that, and we who are not willfully blind woke ideologues see those consequences every day.
Re: Re: Re:13
No, it doesn’t. The social order isn’t a conscious entity; it’s a theoretical framework for how human beings craft the society in which they live. At the time of the founding of the United States as a sovereign nation, the social order called for Black people to be enslaved and have few (if any) civil rights, white women to have barely more rights than enslaved Black people, and white men to have all the power and privilege in society. Guess who got to uphold that social order as if it were what God/nature intended.
Under that social order I mentioned above, Black people were treated as property—as objects to be traded or discarded as their “owners” pleased—so what did white people have to give up in that time for the social order to “benefit” Black people? (If you say “well Black people had places to live” or any sort of slavery-justifying bullshit, I swear to to every god imaginable that I will find a way to punch you through TCP/IP, you racist prick.)
Again: Under that social order I mentioned above, Black people were treated as property. When Black people tried to abandon the social norms (i.e., slavery) that maintained that social order (i.e., white supremacy), they were often hunted down and killed for their transgression. Yes or no: Do you think that sounds like a good social order for any time period, let alone now?
…never mind, I see that you’ve answered my question already. Go back to Stormfront, you Nazi bitch.
Re: Re: Re:14
You really are an idiot, aren’t you? The social order is how people choose to live their lives from the choices they have the power to make. People who are deprived of freedom and choice by force don’t get to be criticized for choices they cannot make.
Neither is the social order immutable. It may be critiqued and disputed and thereby changed from within if the reasons are sufficiently convincing. That’s exactly what happened in the US with respect to racism and homophobia and pornography, just to name a few.
Re: Re: Re:15
…says the guy who gets told by everyone to fuck off and leave them in peace but keeps coming back to shove shit in their face as if that might somehow make people more receptive to eating it.
Fuck off, you Nazi bitch.
Re: Re: Re:13
“Part of the social order is having the self-control to live life in a way that may not maximize personal satisfaction but contributes to wider benefits for everyone else”
Yet, you decide to spend your time acting like a moron in a place you know people will immediately tell you hoe you are wrong about verifiable facts…
“Depending on how society chooses to organize itself, people may be free to abandon the social norms that maintain it, but they cannot be free from the consequences of doing that”
For example we tell tell you to STFU and GTFO of places where your hatred is not welcome among the majority of people.
Re: Re: Re:11
Dude. You behave antisocially every fucking day here. You obsessively abuse and harass people, obsess over their genitalia, misleadingly present statistics, deny basic history and blame people for things that are not their fault at all.
You are literally one of the worst, most offensive, harassing and abusive commenters we’ve had here.
Seriously, fuck off.
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Re: Re: Re:12
I also “obsess” over gravity by not stepping out of windows. No amount of yelling at clouds is going to change physical reality one bit. No improvements to society will be made by woke ideologues if they remain willfully blind to reality.
Without Star Trek levels of technology, men can never become women nor women men, no matter how much woke ideologues wish it were otherwise, and no matter how much they gaslight young people into having themselves mutilated into a caricature of what they can never be.
Chest Reconstruction
Without removing criminal scum who prey on the innocent from society, no amount of going after banks for redlining and/or gentrification is going to stop people who have the means from fleeing neighborhoods where those people are allowed to remain.
The Truth About White Flight
Woke ideologues favor the dregs of society over the normal people those dregs prey upon. They urge “ban the box” so that people will be unable to protect themselves from criminal scum that they urge be released from prison. This is the result – two Black ex-cons rob and murder a 74-year-old Latina in her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One of them had been hired to work in her building as part of a post-prison program.
Murderers Leshawn Mackey and Terrence Moore
Woke ideology is poison, and it most hurts the people who imbibe it – the people who believe in wokeness, and the people who could be helped by policies that are not insane, but which policies the woke seek to block because it runs counter to their false beliefs.
Re: Re: Re:13
This all comes off like the deranged rantings of Tucker Carlson. You sound like an exterminationist TERF and someone who thinks slavery may have been a net positive for Black people. I award you no points, may God have mercy on your soul, and I wish you’d stop bothering everyone else here with your bullshit because you’re not going to win friends by being an alt-right asshole around here.
I concur with Mike:
FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF AND STAY THERE, YOU NAZI-FUCKING FASCIST.
Re: Re: Re:14
Maybe if those letters were just a little bit larger…
Re: Re: Re:13
Hey Hyman: let me be perfectly fucking clear: you are a horrible human being who needs serious help. You are either too fucking stupid to understand how things actually work or too fucking scared, and you blame the things you don’t understand on “woke ideologues” rather than recognizing that it’s bigoted assholes like you who have spent centuries setting up the conditions that have done so much harm that created these things that you now blame on the very people who you have suppressed, silenced, killed and destroyed.
You’re a terrible human being and I hope, one day, you get the help you so obviously need.
Re: Re: Re:14
As I’ve said before, criticism from people I don’t respect means nothing to me.
Woke ideologues believe false things about reality. No matter how much you hate people who point that out, and rant and rave at them, it well not change anything, because the universe does not care what people believe about it.
Re: Re: Re:15
…as proven by the fact that the site owner is telling you to completely fuck off from a site where you’re not welcome and you keep shitting on the floor as if that will somehow improve your situation here.
Fuck off, you Nazi bitch.
Re: Re: Re:16
My situation here does not need improvement.
Re: Re: Re:17
… would say nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Re: Re:15
That’s your moral failing, garbage, not Mike’s.
Re: Re: Re:13
lol. The BBC futas are coming for your ass, Hyman, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Wave goodbye to your anal purity.
Re: Re: Re:14
While the usual idiotic one-liners don’t normally merit a response, this does provide a useful place to point out that sexual perversions which are fun for individuals are also destructive to the social order and then to the individuals themselves when taken to excess. We saw Stone (I think it was) defending “Kink at Pride”, for example.
Lying in a gay bathhouse with a tub of lube to take on all comers might have seemed fun and liberating to the people who did it. It resulted in a generation of gay men dead of AUDS (who then blamed the government for not saving them from themselves quickly enough).
Taking heroin and fentanyl and meth and everything else seems like a fun escape from living a normal, socially ordered life. The consequences of that are, once again, death.
As Kipling pointed out a long time ago, The Gods of the Copybook Headings don’t care what people want or think. The universe imposes physical reality and physical consequences regardless.
Re: Re: Re:9
“There is no problem…bla..bla…death to the lives of Black people.”
Your comment is the stupidest shit I have ever read on TD
Re: Re: Re:3
More like when popular opinion goes against you, you feel like you are being censored and cancelled because nobody wants to listen t, or associate with you.
Re: Re: Re:2
“how has anyone who’s complaining about Musk (including Mike…and Popehat, btw!) been harmed via Twitter by Musk’s takeover”
“Harm” is subjective, but Popehat quite publicly ditched Twitter. I’m not sure if all his followers went with him, so he has less reach now.
Re: Re: Re:3
That may have been the desired outcome – increased reach for people we like, decreased reach for people we don’t.
Re: Re:
Hi Matthew!
Re: Re:
…said nobody not on hallucinogens, ever.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
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You’re an actual moron and you have the gall to constantly leave these inane comments.
Re: Re: Re:2
The projection is going strong today, huh?
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FWIW, I don’t agree with the flagging and hiding of posts that aren’t actual spam or genuine abuse, and I’ve never flagged one of his comments. But I’ve also got zero time for people who whine about comments being hidden and call them “censorship” or suppression”. If you think your comment being literally one click away from visibility is actual censorship or suppression then you have absolutely no experience with or understanding of the real thing.
Sometimes, when I read about, listen to, or watch Elon Musk, from afar (my preferred method since, in theory, distance makes the heart grow fonder, although in this case it’s probably closer to more tolerable*).
I wonder if his curious decisions, choices, antics? Whatever.
Aren’t the direct result of a longing for a better, simpler time, before the end of South African apartheid and the subsequent hardships and struggles it brought to the enormously rich, privileged and influential white South Africans it devastated**.
Alternatively, and this seems far more likely given the circumstances, maybe he’s just a spoiled, rich, narcissistic dick.
You decide.
*For a very specific level of tolerable.
** Once again, for a very specific, possibly microscopic, level of devastation
Twitter. Banning journalists and verifying the Taliban since October 27, 2022.
So, Twitter is now a terrorist megaphone.
GOP are all terrorists now (by their own admission)
It follows that many Twitter users would be terrorists.
What do we do with terrorists? We laugh at their funny hats. Hey, is it true you guys don’t use toilet paper?
Fomerly, Twitter Blue Checks were for people who were ““active, notable, and authentic accounts of public interest”” – doesn’t say they are only good people, who obey international law or are not accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity, and are not bigoted religious zealots.
So the Taliban fits that, so do a lot of pretty awful people all over the world, as long as they don’t violate conditions of getting the blue check, they get their blue check…
Of course, being awful people, they’re likely to post something that would get them kicked off the service, but well then they’re gone from all of Twitter, and their Blue Check with them…
(Side note, Vladimir Putin seems to refrain from this, so that’s why he’s still on..)
Now, Twitter Blue Checks are for people who shell out $8 and arn’t spammers or bots.
Don’t see how the Taliban can’t meet that standard too…
So the problem here, with the Taliban getting the blue check is that people still think the Blue Check means something more than “I paid 8 Dollars to get my posts higher up in people’s feed”
Taliban *should* be on Twitter and verified, unless we ban many many more accounts
As an organization that runs an entire country, they meet the stated criteria for verification even before Elon relaxed the rules with the $8 option. If we’re gonna ban accounts because they’ve committed real-world atrocities, I can’t see how for example the CIA could stay on. I can agree that the Taliban, any U.S. military account, Trump, most if not all members of the British and Saudi and countless other royal families, etc etc should be banned from social media services in an ideal world. But barring that, it’s probably better that they’re verified as themselves.
And on that note, the fact that it’s still trivial to trick people into believing your dummy account is a sitting U.S. senator is a much bigger issue IMHO.
I confess, I’m a bit confused. Twitter Blue isn’t a verification system.
The blue checks no longer mean anything other than ‘someone paid Twitter eight bucks’, which I’m pretty sure someone running a country — however much I would prefer that they weren’t — could put together.
Doing business with the Taliban isn’t a great idea in that, you know, you’re doing business with a murderous and oppressive regime (and not only that, but one that’s operating under sanctions), but it’s a matter of eight dollars. Nobody’s gonna come ’round and shoot Twitter in the back over that.
And insofar as actual verification go, I’m not fully up on the latest systems at Twitter because the clown in charge keeps reshuffling his circus, but if you’re not going to remove, say, the Russian government from your platform either, there’s at least value in trying to clarify who is and who is not whom they are claiming to be.
Re:
“The blue checks no longer mean anything other than ‘someone paid Twitter eight bucks’”
That is the main issue. A blue tick used to mean “Twitter verified that the person tweeting is who they claim to be”. But, at some point the far right noticed that people who had a blue tick tended to agree with each other on news (because they were verified, reliable reporters), so they decided that a blue tick meant that Twitter approved or filtered the tweets. Musk comes along, he believes a lot of the conspiracy nonsense, thought he’d make. bunch of money by charging $15 for it, halved the amount after a public mocking by Stephen King, removed the requirement for verification, and here we are.
“it’s a matter of eight dollars”
$8/ month. For something that used to be done for free, and the details of which didn’t change at all for the most part after the initial verification.
Right now, it’s just another scam, and Musk just doesn’t want the explicit enemies of his marks or the government of his biggest targets to block the income stream.
“there’s at least value in trying to clarify who is and who is not whom they are claiming to be”
Which, again, has nothing to do with the current system. In the old system, you could trust it to a point. Now, there’s no value because you don’t have to prove who you are.
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It is my understanding that, after making the subscription system show the same symbology as the old verification system, other verification stuff was done using new symbols (gold and grey checkmarks, I believe). Is that not correct?
I don't get it...
If they are the Taliban, and have bought a checkmark that says authoritatively they are the Taliban, then what’s the problem? If they Tweet offensive stuff- well, that’s a separate issue. Anyone, checked or not, should be sanctioned for offensive material. I’m sure they have important things to say, given they are running their country, which we couldn’t do for a trillion dollars.
As for the initial failure of checks – it seems a pretty “DUH” move that buying a check allowed you to change your name to anything instead of limiting you to the name you checked in with (sorry). Hopefully Musk kicked butt in the programming department over that – unless the person responsible did that programming on the way out the door.
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