Mark Zuckerberg lies about content moderation to Joe Rogan’s face
In fact, many of the controversial moderation calls Facebook made in the pandemic were during the Trump administration. Take, for instance, the “Plandemic” video hoax: Facebook removed the video in 2020. Joe Biden took office in 2021. If Zuckerberg was dealing with an administration pressuring him about this, it was the Trump administration. The Biden White House may well have engaged in similar outreach, but it was joining what was already an active discussion about Facebook moderation.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation is planning to target Wikipedia moderators. So there’s that.
Flat tax rate is an ‘attractive idea’, Kemi Badenoch says | Kemi Badenoch
From the department of batshit Tories, we bring you this:
At the moment, we are a welfare state with a little bit of a productivity attached to it. We’ve got to turn that around.
I’m going to make a subclause of Betteridge’s Law for this one which changes “no” to “nothing good”.
Meanwhile, the billionaires would very much like you to know it’s now illegal not to give them your money.
It’s nearly November and I’m wearing a t shirt. Global warming, eh? Not a fan.
The jay is visiting
Bunny ears biker
If you know you know
Matt Mullenweg in "shuts up" shock
Mullenweg Criticized for 1st Amendment Claims
Mullenweg on Sunday published a blog post claiming that WP Engine’s lawsuit against him and Automattic is an attempt to “curtail” his “First Amendment rights.” He wrote: “WP Engine has filed hundreds pages of legal documents seeking an injunction against me and Automattic. They say this about community or some nonsense, but if you look at the core, what they’re trying to do is ask a judge to curtail my First Amendment rights.”
Mullenweg ended the post by stating he will no longer comment on the lawsuit filed by WP Engine but encouraged others to speak up in support of his side of the dispute.
Mullenweg ended his post because his lawyers have finally managed to make him stop saying boneheading things which act only to strengthen WPEngine’s case. And because of that, he’s sulking and claiming the whole thing violates his free speech rights.
What’s the betting he comes out for Trump at some point?
Oh god oh god the NHS Change project has a website where members of the public can suggest ideas for the NHS AND ALL OF THEM ARE BEING PUBLISHED. At least one “idea” is a scene from “The Thick of It”.
Elon Musk knows nothing
Opinion | I ran Twitter’s civic integrity team. Elon Musk knows nothing about how elections are run.:
Musk also called it “weird” that Dominion voting machines were supposedly uncommon in much of the country, but used in key precincts like Philadelphia and Arizona’s Maricopa County. “Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?” he asked.
The answer is “no,” because this “coincidence” is a myth. First, Musk’s implication that Dominion Voting Systems has technology only in strategically important locations is easily disprovable. The voting technology marketplace in the U.S. is in fact highly concentrated, and Dominion is one of the top two vendors in the U.S., with a market share of approximately 40%. There is no basis to suggest that Dominion has somehow cherry-picked only strategic jurisdictions.
I’m unsure whether Musk is so incredibly off the charts dense that he will believe anything he reads online, or he just doesn’t care even slightly about the truth as long as what he wants to happen – a government by Trump, which is pliable to his will - happens.
One of the things which makes me believe he’s incredibly stupid is that is he had any knowledge of history, he would know that when you elect an authoritarian demagogue – which is what Trump is – they very rarely fail to bite the hands of those who brought them to power.
Sauce, goose, gander
Regarding our Cease and Desist letter to Automattic | WP Fusion:
The events of the past month have made me realize a few things: I don’t trust Matt. Matt doesn’t appear to be taking advice from legal counsel. Always defend your trademarks.
With those points in mind we sent a cease and desist letter to Automattic and WordPress.com on October 12th, asking for WP Fusion Lite to be removed from WordPress.com due to the potential for confusion regarding the affiliation of the WP Fusion brand.
It is absolutely hilarious that in its letter, Automattic dispute what is a very clear trademark violation, given its history of weaponising trademarks.
Fashion Renagades of 80s London, at the Fashion + Textile Museum.
On Safari (Matt Mullenweg edition)
Samantha Cole at 404 Media – Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos:
In July, before the latest WP Engine blowup, an Automattic employee wrote in Slack that they received a direct message from Mullenweg sending them an identification code for Blind, an anonymous workplace discussion platform, which was required to complete registration on the site. Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing. Mullenweg said on Slack that emails sent from Blind’s platform to employees’ email addresses were being forwarded to him. If employees wanted to log in or sign up for Blind, they’d need to ask Mullenweg for the two-factor identification code. The implication was that Automattic—and Mullenweg—could see who was trying to sign up for Blind, which is often a place where people anonymously vent or share criticism about their workplace.
I cannot understand how any manager, any leader, can get themselves into a position where they believe they should redirect employee email to themselves in order to monitor who is signing up for a site of any kind. What’s almost worse is that to anyone with half an idea about human beings, it should be obvious this would do more harm than good:
One Automattic employee told me that Mullenweg’s interception of Blind emails was the thing that made them start looking for a new job. “For Matt to do that, without prior announcement, was equivalent to spying on his employees. And for him to think it’s ok to tell people to message him for their verification code is ridiculous—I’ve never questioned an employer’s judgment as much as I did in that moment (although it has happened many times since),”
What Mullenweg – like all insecure leaders – appears to be craving isn’t an effective team, but a monoculture of people who believe in him, personally, and his vision.
“There is a vocal group of sycophants who are cheering on Matt’s actions via Anonymattic,” they said, “drawing favorable comparisons to how Elon Musk and Donald Trump operate. Their morale seems high, but I can’t relate.” Screenshots viewed by 404 Media show some staff having changed their Slack usernames to include “[STAYING]” to signal their support of Mullenweg and intention to remain at the company.
Companies that have this level of leader cult fanaticism inevitably fail. And what this monoculture entails is a situation where “the emperor’s new clothes” becomes a leadership manual, not a warning:
A recently-departed employee told me that the WP Engine legal drama wasn’t their final straw. “But in hindsight, it should have been,” they said. “The escalation since then just confirmed I made the right choice. At the time, I thought Matt might have a point about the trademarks (something I know little about), but he did say at the time he was going to treat this like a war and continue escalating it, because the truth was on his side. I guess we’re now seeing what that really meant."
Dave W
Dan Gillmor on Dave Winer’s 30 years of blogging:
I became a blogger because of Dave.
So, in a sense, did I. The first blogging platform I used was Radio Userland, which Dave created. I moved on to web-based blogging applications — first Blogger, I think, then Movable Type — but Radio Userland made it easy.
But my use of Dave’s software goes back even further. Back when I worked at Apple UK in the late 80s, the company had a site license for MORE, the outliner/presentation package which Dave also wrote. MORE was great because it made it super-easy to build your ideas using an outline and then turn them into something visual. It was a mile ahead of anything else, and conceptually I still prefer that method of building a presentation to the “visuals first” approach of PowerPoint.
Matt Mullenweg and WordPress Hijack the Advanced Custom Fields Plugin – Pixel Envy
It is nearly impossible to get me to feel sympathetic for anything touched by private equity, but Mullenweg has done just that. He really is burning all goodwill for reasons I cannot quite understand. I do understand the message he is sending, though: Mullenweg is prepared to use the web’s most popular CMS and any third-party contributions as his personal weapon. Your carefully developed plugin is not safe in the WordPress ecosystem if you dare cross him or Automattic.
Nick’s post really speaks to the level of exasperation many are feeling about this situation. The disagreement between WordPress – which means Matt Mullenweg – and WP Engine has managed to burn a huge amount of goodwill towards WordPress. You don’t get to build open-source software and use it (as Nick puts it) “as your personal weapon”.
Mullenweg’s conduct isn’t just dangerous to WordPress, it’s a danger to the entire open-source community. And what’s most worrying: he apparently can’t see it. He keeps escalating and escalating, and it will not end well for his company or for WordPress as a product.
Because I might be moving from WordPress to Micro.blog, I have imported all the posts from my main domain – so if I do switch off WordPress, nothing will be lost (although there might be a bit of redirecting to be done…)
This was probably about the time that I first discovered Linux. It looks very old-fashioned now, but at the time, GNOME was pretty comparable to Windows and (pre-OS X) macOS.