Bobson Dugnutt 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2024 @ 03:51pm

    OnlyFans, the most trusted name in peer-to-peer porn!

  • On the post: ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2024 @ 03:49pm

    We're all the spectators into the endless golden shower that is Trump's reality. If you're not a spectator, you're an eager and consensual participant.

  • On the post: ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2024 @ 03:47pm

    Truth is English for pravda.

  • On the post: ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2024 @ 03:45pm

    Truth Social, like all far right social media before it, is like that dungeon in "The Silence of the Lambs" where Hannibal Lecter is confined with other similarly wretched psycho criminals. They never became the cultural phenomenon that talk radio or Fox News did. Twitter being transformed into Elon Musk's $44 billion Nazi Bar just turned it into a clone of Truth Social, the key difference between the cult of personality at the center (Musk for Twitter, Trump for Truth Social).

  • On the post: ExTwitter Users Getting Fed Up With The Crypto Spam And AI Bots Elon Promised To Clean Up

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2024 @ 03:36pm

    How far it has fallen

    Charlie Warzel, who now writes newsletters for the Atlantic, noted that under Elmo's reign, the fastest-growing category of user-generated content was crypto and porn. That's the sad evidence that Twitter has entered irreversible decline. What's sadder is that crypto and porn content is needed to class up the place.

  • On the post: Plagiarism Is Fine

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 10 Jan, 2024 @ 06:06am

    Tyranny of the organization chart

    Managers taking the glory for their subordinates' work is a consequence of the "tyranny of the organization chart." Aaron Renn explained the tyranny on his old Urbanophile blog. He saw it firsthand when he was a consultant for one of the big accounting firms. In any workplace, as a worker, you are the function you occupy on the organization chart. A talented subordinate who comes up with a great idea might be seen as a promising candidate for promotion, and they could pose as competition for the manager. So the manager gets or takes credit for the subordinates' idea. Executives understand this dynamic at the worker-manager level, and develop a skepticism (if not outright distrust) of their managers' abilities. They hire outside consultants to gather "intelligence" from workers and managers, and the better ideas get filtered by the consultant and presented to executives, who get ultimate credit for an idea should it succeed.

  • On the post: New Japan Pro-Wrestling DMCAs Its Own Channel Over Video It Uploaded

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 10 Jan, 2024 @ 05:46am

    NJPW is starting to expand its reach beyond Japan. Thousands of Americans have its streaming service, and it has a brand, Strong, with live shows in the U.S. It also shares talent with AEW and Impact Wrestling, the No. 2 and 3 U.S. federations.

  • On the post: ‘The Messenger’ Promised To Revolutionize Journalism, Then Fell Flat On Its Face

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 10 Jan, 2024 @ 12:30am

    I love the word "brunchlord."

  • On the post: ‘The Messenger’ Promised To Revolutionize Journalism, Then Fell Flat On Its Face

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 10 Jan, 2024 @ 12:23am

    Maga fallacy

    The slogan inspired me to coin the maga fallacy. "If America needs to be made great again, why do you want to give work to the same people who did the job wrong the first time?" In other words, you ought not to use the same reasoning that caused the problem to fix the problem.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 27 Dec, 2023 @ 01:31pm

    I said it's hostage-taking. I never said what's after "you're saying," and upon a word search no one else did either. False attribution. Flagged.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 27 Dec, 2023 @ 01:26pm

    Space roaching

    C: Refuse to let them dictate terms and redefine words
    This. You have to be aware of the semantic battlefield when engaging in rightwing conversation. There's a tactic practiced by them called Space Roaching. Once you see it, you notice it everywhere. Take a word with a commonly understood dictionary definition -- freedom, elite, liberty, family for instance -- hollow out the commonly understood meaning with a completely different meaning and use it in conversation as if nothing was ever changed. That's Space Roaching. It comes from 1997's "Men in Black", where the archvillain was a roachlike alien that crash lands on Earth. A bigoted, abusive farmer comes out to confront the intruder, and the Space Roach devours the farmer from the inside out but wears his skin like a costume. The dark humor in the film was that the roach and the farmer were so alike in demeanor no one could tell the difference. As the skin started to sag and decompose, people suspected the farmer was sick and lot a literal monster in disguise.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 27 Dec, 2023 @ 12:32pm

    Until there's some evidence that someone within Substack is boosting and funding Nazis -- there would be a document, email, screenshot, or whistleblower leak -- block, ban and avoid Nazis. I did have my own Substack Nazi problem. You might have had this too. This one account, posing as a Nordic, would follow my comments and reply with some Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit in English and Spanish and link to their Substack. They followed me to the George Lakoff Framelab Substack and that's where the community swarmed upon them. It warranted enough attention that the hosts had to write an apology letter to readers (now deleted), and I was able to copy the letter link to all of the Substacks they posted to and got them deleted and banned. I don't know whether Substack has completely banned the account from the platform.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2023 @ 10:01pm

    Free-speech as hostage taking

    The collateral damage of all this is that the rightwing gained legitimacy for fashoid ideas by learning to take free speech hostage. Gab, Truth Social and all other failed e-klaverns never gained traction with a critical mass or even as central to the zeitgeist as Facebook and Twitter had been and TikTok is now. What the rightwing figured out was to claim "free speech" as its personal brand because it required no intellect or courage to actually defend the substance of Nazi ideas. It also frame-flips Actual F'n Nazis as censorship victims. It's hostage-taking. The rightwing basically forces you to concede what it wants: Either you have to let them control the conversation on their terms, or basically force you into censoring them to shut them up (letting them kill the hostage and being responsible for the victim's death).

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2023 @ 07:01pm

    Yes I did read the article. I still don't know Hamish McKenzie's mens rea behind his justification. I don't know if he's gone full Elmo -- he identifies with Nazis and wants to use his powers to boost their signal. I don't know if it's a strategy credit -- eyeing profitability and brand hegemony by couching his action in principle. I don't know if he's carrying the bags of Peter Thiel or other Silicon Valley overlords who are fashoid but also at the center of power in technology. It's up to us anti-Nazis to finish the job Substack is ill-capable of.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2023 @ 06:52pm

    Fictitious in the corporate-legal sense, not in the sense that it not existing. Substack is a corporation, not a flesh-and-blood person. When Substack was established, there was a document called a fictitious business name that gave its identity as a company.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2023 @ 06:46pm

    ‘You can act as civil as you want but as soon as you start pushing nazi ideology your ass is out the door’ is absolutely an option they could, but have chosen not to, take. Just because a platform might not be able to immediately spot them all isn’t an excuse to ignore the ones they are aware of.
    There is a practical problem with this approach when it becomes a policy. How can it be applied consistently and fairly? Do we explicitly limit Nazi ideology to a list of red lines that need to be crossed to get banned? Don't cross this line and everything is cool. Or can it be Nazi ideology by implication, to cover any sort of eliminationist ideology by concealing intent, like through leading questions, JAQing off, etc.? An overly broad sanction is also prone to abuse. Like, it would be a practical impossibility to have such a policy in place without having to shut down all communication about, say, the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza right now. You'd need a Trust & Safety team as large as a midsize state to handle every point of data that's flagged and appealed. Even trying to enforce the policy and being scrupulous about it ends up coming down on one side or the other, and it could change the trajectory of a literal war. Either with a precise or broad interpretation on what constitutes Nazi ideology to warrant a ban, there is always going to be a number of them who will survive a policy change and inherit the followers of a turfed Nazi. Followers are a problem because they have agency and their lurid curiosity leads them to seek out the remaining stock of Nazi ideologues.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2023 @ 04:28pm

    To Point 1, Substack is a fictitious entity and any rules enforced by it must ultimately track to a chain of custody or command. You'd have to do the legal legwork to see if a key decision-maker, like an executive or trust and safety manager, gives the green light to platform certain content and give an explanation why. I doubt that Substack has thrown this decision to an AI, but even then, the go/no-go decision has a human brain behind it. Substack enforces the ban on sexual content because of the legal threat they pose. The U.S. cracks down hard on adult material, whether it's legitimate or not. CSAM purveyors and traffickers exploit norms and laws over free speech just like Nazis exploit norms and laws over political speech. Fights over sex are a lot harder to win when on the defensive.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2023 @ 04:16pm

    Yes, but you don’t have to offer them service of any kind.
    Substack as an institution then runs into the Nice Nazi Bar problem. Substack knows it has Nazis on its platform, profits off of them by taking its vig, and seemingly generally delegates the responsibility of censorship or moderation on individual publishers and their comment community. Substack knows it can also go away by explicitly banning Nazis in its TOS, or bow to public pressure by turfing objectionable figures. You'll still have Nice Nazis. They are the ones who'll read the rules closely and test how far they can bend the rules before breaking them. They are the ones who'll make tendentious appeals and form alliances of convenience with Hill Martyrs and Principled Standers. It's this group where the lines get blurred, and by decentering Nazism and recentering around first principles of free speech and civil liberties, you've already normalized Nazism by making them deserving of consideration and debate.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2023 @ 02:37pm

    To torture the tortured analogy

    The problem with the tortured "Substack as a Nazi bar" analogy is that Substack is the wrong agent to bear ultimate blame for Nazis. Substack is more like a county rather than a bar. A county has residents, businesses, their interactions, and services to facilitate them. A county inevitably house a Nazi bar. Does that make the county itself, and by extension everyone, Nazi by virtue of taint by association? No. That's because There Will Always Be Nazis. A county could have an outlaw Nazi bar that decides to come to town, put its symbols everywhere, and attract skeevy characters to patronize it. The county cannot stop the Nazi bar by free association alone, but it can use the pretext of not paying taxes or obtaining the proper licenses to shut it down. The denial of free association is a consequence of other laws, and the First Amendment is not a shield against criminal conduct or administrative compliance. The successful Nazi bar is the problem because the proprietor will go out of their way to be above board in the law and in social custom. They'll pull all the right permits, disguise their symbolism and code-switch, and they'll be sure to make friends in the right places. They'll give free drinks to cops and military veterans, they'll pal around with the elected officials and the town burghers, they'll donate to charity to prove they're not so bad after all. At their cores, the outlaw and the nice Nazi bar are in the end Nazis. The nice ones take the garden path to get to their desired outcome.

  • On the post: Substack Turns On Its ‘Nazis Welcome!’ Sign

    Bobson Dugnutt ( profile ), 26 Dec, 2023 @ 02:11pm

    I think what does help is the invisible norm that most Techdirt commenters are anti-Nazi. We have the little flag button that does contain some of the most odious trolls and shitposters. And like 99.999999% of the time the "This comment has been flagged by the community" warning works as intended. Like clicking through and seeing the comment for yourself reveals it for the garbage fart it is. It's seldom that you'd ever cross a comment like that and steelman it to say it deserves our attention and merits consideration.

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