Hey @annaleen did you see that The Stanford Internet Observatory has been mostly shut down? it "has shed most of its staff & may shut down amid political & legal attacks that have cast a pall on efforts to study online misinformation."
I learned a lot about it & Alex Stamos, from your book, Stories are Weapons. I'd like to hear your thoughts about what this means.
Gift link: https://wapo.st/3RuAlA5
The Stanford Internet Observatory provided real-time analysis on viral election falsehoods but has struggled amid attacks from conservatives.
ICYMI: this is my #Mastodon "origin story" – the reason why I'm going all in on the #Fediverse this year, starting with this platform: https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-is-federated/
I'm hoping to recruit more friends and professional contacts over here.
The post includes mentions of some of my favorite accounts including @bookgaga @molly0xfff @triketora @film_girl @fj (if you have advice about how to get more people on Mastodon, I'm all ears)
Singing the praises of the open social web and attempting to convince friends to migrate here
Mastodon friends: be aware that it’s very likely that your profile has been “imported”, posts and all, into Maven, a social media startup whose CEO is ex OpenAI.
For example, here’s my social.lol profile shamelessly dropped into their platform as if I’m a user there: https://app.heymaven.com/profile/66735
Ew.
Maven: Follow interests, not influencers
Discovered this morning that Maven https://heymaven.com (a social media startup who's CEO is ex OpenAI "Ken Stanley: leading the Open-Endedness Team at OpenAI") is mass importing public posts from the #fediverse with no links back to the original and no way to delete them. It seems there is no Opt-out or Opt-in mechanism at all. It also has posts from #Bluesky pulled in via @bsky.brid.gy that are also not linked back to the original.
Here's an example: https://app.heymaven.com/profile/66927
@sarajw this catalogue of search engines: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/#fnref:1
A cursory review of all the non-metasearch, indexing search engines I have been able to find.
The state of search in 2024:
Google: "We threw away decades of search knowledge and Internet indexing and just made an answer up :blobfoxgoogly:"
Bing: "Here's 100 tangentially related pages from 2010 that I only included because your query appears in a tag cloud in the website's footer"
DuckDuckGo: "Here are the Bing results, only with ✨privacy✨"
Reddit: (this user has deleted their entire post history using PowerDeleteMyShit. Fuck /u/Spez)
Yahoo: "Oh thank god, someone's actually using our search engine! No, we're not just Bing!" *frantically trying to cover up the giant Bing sticker* "NO DON'T GO TO GOOGLE!!!!"
Yandex: "Here are all of the Russian-owned resources on this topic. Only Russian sources are trustworthy. Everything else is fake ne—I MEAN, misinformation"
Kagi: "We'll give you what Google used to give you for free, for the low low price of $10/month!"
Ask.com: [hoarse screaming and clawing noises can be heard from the ground beneath a headstone that says "Here lies Jeeves: 1996-2006"]
@fediversity Hi well there's @interpeer ran by @jens , @librecast ran by myself and @dentangle.
@matrix
You have @nlnet and @T_X .
On the Fediverse itself you have @gotosocial , @chaoss , @dansup who created @pixelfed . @apps , @Tusky , @Framasoft , @Freenet .
@Codeberg , @drewdevault, @spritelyinst , @VeilidNetwork , @TheGibson , @josh
That's just the top off my head.