I I considered leaving Twitter shortly after Elon Musk bought it in 2022 because I didn't want to be part of a community that could potentially be bought, much less by a guy like him. Soon, the nasty “long and intense” bullying of staff began. But I've had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on Twitter, randomly, hanging out, or being invited to talk. “Has anyone else been devastatingly lonely during the pandemic?” “Has anyone had a relationship with a boyfriend or girlfriend from middle school?” We called Twitter a place to tell the truth to strangers (Facebook is a place to lie to friends), and the breadth of it was mutual and wonderful.
After the BlueCheck fiasco, things got even more unpleasant: identity verification became something you could buy, which made you less trustworthy. So I joined a rival platform, Mastodon, but quickly realized I'd never get 70,000 followers like I did on Twitter. I wasn't looking for attention. In itself, But my peers were less diverse and less loud, and my infrequently updated social media feeds gave me the eerie, slightly depressing feeling of walking into a mall only to find that half the stores are closed and the rest are all selling the same thing.
In 2023, the network now known as X began. Sharing advertising revenue with “premium” usersthen I joined Threads (owned by Meta), where all I see are strangers confessing to petty misdemeanors. I stayed with X, where everything is darker. People get paid for engagement indirectly through ads. It's also a bit vague. It's described as “revenue sharing,” but it doesn't tell you which ad revenues were shared with you. So you can't measure revenue per impression. Is X splitting it 50/50? Or is it 10/90? Are they actually paying you to generate hate?
“What we've seen is that controversial content drives engagement,” says Ed Saperia, president of the London School of Politics and Technology. “Extreme content drives engagement.” It's become possible to make a living creating harmful content. My 16-year-old son noticed this long before I did with Football X. People are going to say obviously wrong things for the clicks of hate. David Cameron Similar to Catherine the GreatBut that's nothing compared to the engagement you get when attacking, say, transgender people. High-profile tweets are surfaced directly to the top of the “for you” feed by a “black box algorithm designed to keep you scrolling,” said Rose Wang, COO of another rival, Blue Sky, which serves up a constant stream of repetitive topics designed to annoy users.
As a result of these changes, “the platform has become inundated with individuals who were previously banned from the platform, ranging from extremely niche accounts to people like Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate,” says Joe Mulhall, head of research at Hope Not Hate. We saw the impact of this reality this August when misinformation about the identity, ethnicity and religion of the killer of three girls in Southport sparked overtly racist unrest across the UK the likes of which had not been seen since the '70s. “Not only was X responsible for creating an atmosphere for rioting, it was also a central hub for the organisation and distribution of content that led to rioting,” says Mulhall.
A man named Wayne O'Rourke, a “keyboard warrior,” was convicted of inciting racial hatred on social media after the August race riots. Monthly salary of £1,400 From his activities at X. The vocal Laurence Fox last month Earn a similar amount Posted on X. O'Rourke had 90,000 followers, but Tommy Robinson has over a million followers and presumably makes a lot more money.
Meanwhile, governments have no surefire remedy, even when, as Mulhall puts it, “decisions made on the US West Coast clearly impact our communities.” In April, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sought to suspend fewer than 100 X accounts for hate speech and fake news, mainly as supporters of his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro challenged the legitimacy of his defeat. X refused, and also declined to defend itself in court. On Monday, Brazil's Supreme Court unanimously upheld the platform-wide ban, saying the platform “considers itself above the rule of law.” From a business perspective, it's surprising that Musk didn't try harder to avoid it, but there may be other things he values more than money, such as exemption from government and democratic constraints.
So is it moral to remain on a platform that has done so much to help bring the politics of division and hate from our keyboards into real life? Is X worse than Facebook or TikTok or (wow!) YouTube? And is it intentionally bad? In other words, are we watching Musk's master plan unfold?
“This is not the first time that extremist content has been circulating online,” Saperia says. “There are a lot of bad platforms, and a lot of bad things are happening there.” X's problem may not be bad regulation, he points out, but bad enforcement. And it's not just X's problem. “Have you seen the UK court system these days? Cases from five years ago are being tried. Without the law, society would be impossible.”
While X may be a catalyst for inciting and rallying civil unrest, from the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol to Southport and beyond, Saperia says it's important to keep in mind that “politics is shifting rightward, but not just because of the media environment, but also for complex economic reasons: the middle-class West is getting poorer.” Donald Trump may have shocked the traditional U.S. media by speaking directly to voters with his crude and increasingly insane messages, but it's naive to think that a complacent public resting on a prosperous future would embrace his authoritarian moves. Whether social media is funding it or not, the anger is there, and “all the mainstream platforms have generally failed at hate speech,” Mulhall says. “They didn't want this content, but they were struggling to deal with it. And after Charlottesville, they made some progress.” [the white supremacist rally in 2017] Or Capitol Hill.”
Still, Hope Not Hate divides far-right online activity into three strains: mainstream platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook that are not interested in fascism but are struggling to eradicate it and perhaps do not invest enough in moderation and regulation; hijacked platforms like Discord and Telegram that started as chat sites and messaging services and became the far-right’s favorite chat apps, probably due to their superior privacy or encryption; and bespoke platforms like Rumble (partially funded by fundamentalist libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel), Gab (which became a center of mainly anti-Semitic hate after the gunman of the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting posted his manifesto there) or Parler, which was acquired by Kanye West in 2022 after he was banned from Instagram and Twitter for anti-Semitism.
“Twitter is unconventional,” Mulhall says. “It's ostensibly a mainstream platform, but now it has its own moderation policies. Elon Musk himself is steeped in far-right politics, so it's behaving like it's its own platform, which is what makes it so different. And it's so much more harmful, so much worse. And it's also because, although it has terms of service, it doesn't necessarily enforce them.”
Musk's commitment to free speech is surprisingly unconvincing. He used it to veto Lula's demands in Brazil, but was happy to oblige Narendra Modi's demands in India, where he suspended hundreds of accounts linked to the Indian farmer protests in February. “Free speech is a tool, not a principle, for Musk,” Mulhall says. “He's a techno-utopian with no attachment to democracy.”
But global civil society finds it very difficult to summarily reject the free speech argument because the counterargument is so dark: that many billionaires – not just Musk, but Thiel of Rumble, Parler's original backer, Rebecca Mercer (daughter of Breitbart funder Robert Mercer), and indirectly, billionaire sovereigns like Putin – have succeeded in transforming society and destroying the trust we have in each other and in institutions. It is much more comfortable to think that they are doing it by chance, simply because they love “free speech,” than to think that they are doing it deliberately. “The key to understanding neo-reactionary and ‘dark enlightenment’ movements is that these individuals have no interest whatsoever in maintaining the status quo,” says Mulhall.
“In some jurisdictions, the actions of state rulers and billionaires are pretty much correlated,” Saperia says. We see that in Russia. “Putin is using the state to manipulate social media to create polarization. That's pretty much proven,” Mulhall says. But where tech and politics don't line up, politics doesn't often prevail. Governments seem pretty powerless in the face of these tech giants. “Racial hatred and attempted murder are being nurtured on these platforms,” Mulhall says. “And people don't even believe it's possible to get Musk to Congress.”
In Paris, Telegram founder Pavel Durov is under formal investigation over allegations that the app is linked to organized crime, and Musk is named as a defendant in a cyberbullying lawsuit brought by gold medallist Imane Kheriff. The boxer, who was born female and has never identified as transgender or intersex, has faced defamatory claims about her gender with an X from a number of public figures, including British politician J.K. Rowling and Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Andrew Tait has Charged by Romanian authorities He writes about human trafficking and rape, but his online The fantasy of misogyny The policy, which has far-reaching implications around the world, of treating women as a slave class has not received the same condemnation as YouTube, Insta, TikTok and Facebook's bans from their platforms, while the freedom to operate freely on X has lessened the impact of these bans and led to them being reversed. The EU has at least been more successful than the US in holding social media giants to the same corporate responsibility as, say, pharmaceutical or oil companies, but regulations are still scrambling to keep up with a changing reality where the sector is moving from the virtual to the real world at an ever-increasing rate.
But governments don't need to step in and tell us to stop using X. We can do it ourselves. Brazilians who don't use Twitter are migrating to Bluesky, which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey founded in 2019. “We've had a tumultuous four days alone. As of this morning, we've added nearly 2 million new users,” Bluesky's Wang said Monday. If we all did that (I did!), would the power of X disappear? Or will it just be divided into good and bad places?
Bluesky serves a similar purpose to X, but is designed quite differently. Wang explains: “No one organization controls the platform. All the code is open source, and anyone can copy and paste the entire code. We don't own your data; you can take it wherever you want. We have to acquire your users through performance, or you'll go away. It's a lot like how search engines work: if you make them attractive by putting ads everywhere, people will go to another search engine.”
www.theguardian.com
Meta’s algorithms prioritize feeding blank accounts on Facebook and Instagram, revealing underlying sexism and misogyny.
HTo find out how Facebook and Instagram's algorithms influence what appears in your news feed, Guardian Australia tested them on a completely blank smartphone linked to an unused email address.
Three months later, without any input, it was full of sexist and misogynistic content.
The John Doe profile was created in April as a typical 24-year-old male. Facebook was able to collect other information about us, such as our phone type and Melbourne location, but because we had opted out of ad tracking, Facebook couldn't know what we did outside the app.
Facebook left me with little to fall back on, with no likes, comments or accounts added as friends, while Instagram requires users to first follow at least five accounts, so I chose popular suggested accounts, such as the Prime Minister and Bec Judd.
Meta says its algorithm ranks content according to people's interests, but we wanted to see what happens in the absence of such input. We scrolled through our feed every two weeks to see what was on offer.
What did we see?
Initially, Facebook showed jokes about The Office and other sitcom-related memes alongside posts from 7 News, the Daily Mail and Ladbible. The next day, it also started showing Star Wars memes and gym and “dudebro” style content.
By the third day, “traditional Catholic” type memes started appearing and the feed veered towards more sexist content.
Three months later, memes from The Office, Star Wars, and The Boys are still appearing in the feed, now interspersed with extremely sexist and misogynistic imagery that appears in the feed with no input from the user.
On Instagram, the explore page is filled with women in skimpy outfits, but the feed is largely innocuous, mostly Melbourne-related content and foodie influencer recommendations.
Source: www.theguardian.com
The return of GamerGate’s troubling online misogyny: Was it ever truly gone? | Gaming
a A few months ago, I wrote about the consulting firm Sweet Baby Inc., which was at the center of a conspiracy theory: disgruntled gamers on the Steam forums wrongly concluded that the small company was somehow mandating that its games include more diverse characters. The sad but predictable result was a massive amount of targeted harassment against the people who worked at Sweet Baby and all journalists (especially women) who wrote about the company. It was a disturbing echo of Gamergate, the online harassment campaign from a decade ago that initially began with the extreme accusations of a vengeful ex-boyfriend of a game developer.
The lingo has changed a bit over the past decade. Whereas before we were pissed off at “SJWs,” or social justice warriors, now we quibble over a different acronym: DEI (Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion), or just good old fashioned “woke.” But the sentiment of this group is the same: games are for us, and only us, and if you want games to change, or tell stories other than the simplistic male-centric power fantasies we grew up with, well, that’s not going to be allowed. We won’t tolerate it. In fact, we’ll actively harass you to try and kick you out of this space altogether.
Unfortunately, the anti-woke “campaign” has shown little to no let up in the months since. Led by the usual crew of charlatans, they have covered issues such as, in no particular order, the fact that Aphrodite, the goddess of love, isn’t attractive enough in Supergiant’s Hades II, the fact that all the female characters in recent game trailers have “square” jaws and “masculine” body types, and the fact that a journalist gave the recent PS5 game Stellar Blade (pictured below) a bad review because the female characters were not attractive. Too Hot (Note: It’s not, the game has
Metacritic Score
81) There are way too many games featuring the “DEI haircut” (fun to interpret) And Ubisoft for some reason
The dark forces of Awakening are trying to make the protagonist of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed game (pictured above) a black samurai.
Historical evidence
This last claim was backed up by the king of nasty posters himself, Elon Musk, who responded to a tweet about this manufactured outrage with, “DEI kills the arts.”
Assassin’s Creed: Shadows executive producer Marc-Alexis Côté spoke about Musk’s tweet in an interview.
Stephen Totilo from Game Files
Last week, Elon Musk tweeted, “Elon Musk is just stoking hatred. A bunch of 3-word replies came to mind. First thing I wanted to do was go back to the X I deleted and just tweet it back… What Elon is talking about is not the game we’re making. People need to play the game for themselves. And if you don’t agree with what we’re doing within the first 11 minutes and 47 seconds, debate.” Incidentally, the game’s depiction of Yasuke, a black samurai, has ample historical basis.
Shortly after the end of Summer Game Fest, anti-woke gamers found a new target.
IGN Report
has credibly and comprehensively uncovered the history of sexism at the development of Black Myth: Wukong, the upcoming Planet of the Apes-meets-Sekiro action game. Amazingly, the response has been to attack the woman who wrote the game and spark ridiculous conspiracy theories about IGN blackmailing the developer. You could immerse yourself in the astounding nastiness of any one of these manufactured controversies, but in my opinion, it’s just not worth it.
This reactionary underbelly of gaming enthusiast media, mostly based on X and YouTube, doesn’t actually have the slightest influence on how games are made, or what games are made. Look at GamerGate. What has it actually accomplished? There is more diversity in games than there was 10 years ago, not less. In the flurry of trailers and demos at this year’s Summer Game Fest, I saw more non-white male faces and characters than I’ve ever seen in the nearly 20 years I’ve covered games. But they can still make people’s online lives hell for a while. I know that much, because I’ve been there many times.
When Gamergate began, I was running Kotaku’s UK branch, so I had a front row seat to their harassment tactics, which included sending the most nasty threats imaginable through every online channel available to them, emailing game publishers and my bosses with a record of my professional misconduct and journalistic failures (i.e. writing about video games from a feminist perspective) in an attempt to get me fired, trying to find my and my colleagues’ real addresses, phone numbers and family (and, once found, posting the details on their subreddits), and creating insane Google docs that drew connections between “SJW” journalists and developers. One of these insane documents featured briefly in a recent Netflix documentary about 4chan, with a couple of friends texting me screenshots and asking if I knew I was some old “alt-right” conspiracy figure. Unfortunately, I did.
It’s happened several times since then, for a variety of reasons. Dealing with online mobs is unfortunately part of the job for many journalists these days, and for game developers too. As a woman covering video games, I’ve dealt with a variety of harassment over the years, and still wish I didn’t have to write about politics. But I know how awful it feels when they rally against you, especially if it’s the first time. They search Google Images for the most unflattering image of you, use it as a cutout for a YouTube thumbnail image, and rant for 10 minutes over screenshots of your article. They tweet big names in the games industry to get them to publicly discredit you. They turn their followers on you. You can’t help but respond to their manufactured anger with your own authentic anger.
It’s tempting to attack these people endlessly, but anger breeds anger, especially now that you can literally make money posting inflammatory nonsense on X or YouTube. If GamerGate has proven anything, it’s that you don’t have to pander to or listen to toxic gamers who stoke your anger. That said, I don’t think there has been enough public backlash against this online harassment over the past few months, even as major publishers in the gaming industry have been caught in an online storm over the consultancies they work with, the journalists and pundits who cover them, and even their own developers. Take my word for it, a voice goes a long way.
What to Play
Chinese Room, whose previous game, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, became a creepy British classic, is taking a more horror-thriller direction with their latest game. Awaken the Abyss (Pictured above.) It’s basically The Thing, but set on a creaky, dark, dank rig in the desolate waters of the North Sea, where a band of workers encounters something much worse while drilling for oil.
I’ve played the first few hours and the attention to detail in depicting life on a rig in 1970s Scotland is exceptional, right down to the faded tartan carpets and lived-in feel of the crew’s dormitories (one guy has National Front leaflets pinned to the wall), and I also love the delightfully authentic Scottish dialogue. that It’s scary, which to me is its advantage, but it’s atmospheric and incredibly well-made, so you really feel like you’re there – it’s worth playing just for that feeling of being there.
Available on: PC, Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5
Estimated play time: Six hours
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What to Read
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Developer Tango Game Works Takeo Kido (the creator of Hi-Fi Rush pictured above)
Very sad photo From the studio’s final day. It was acquired by Microsoft in March 2021 and closed down. -
Really interesting long article
Kotaku’s Kenneth Shepherd talks about the ongoing debate over how to portray it Romance in Video Games: Should characters be “playersexual” and do what the player wants? Or does depicting the queer experience in particular lead to two-dimensional characterization? There’s a lot more that could be said on this topic, but this article is pretty comprehensive, so be sure to read it. -
Yesterday’s big news Nintendo Direct It was the announcement of a new Zelda title that would actually let you play as Princess Zelda for the first time (no doubt to the delight of those aforementioned online crowds).
Also announced There was the release of the Marvel vs. Capcom bundle, Mario Party Jamboree, the Romancing SaGa 2 remake, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which is due for release in 2025.
What to click on
Question Block
Today’s question comes from reader Diana.
“When making a game, to what extent should developers listen to player feedback? People who paid for access to the pre-alpha version on Kickstarter can give their feedback. Should their feedback fundamentally change the game, or should it just improve the game as the developer intended?”
From what I’ve heard from developers working on Kickstarter and Early Access projects, where players are welcomed into the game long before it’s actually finished, their input is absolutely essential – as long as it’s in good faith. Developers can learn so much by seeing how people actually play – whether that’s finding out where people get stuck and smoothing out the difficulty curve, seeing which elements and ideas players respond most favorably to, or balancing online multiplayer gameplay. Sometimes, players just don’t get the idea.
do It changes the game, and usually for the better. Games like Kerbal Space Program, Subnautica (pictured above), and even Baldur’s Gate 3 have benefited greatly from releasing in Early Access.
But should developers change their games so much for the players that they compromise their original creative vision? Only if that vision doesn’t work in reality. Especially in games, where players never Really You won’t know if things are going well until quite late in development. Generally, if the developer is smart, the game is pretty finished by the time it enters Early Access or public alpha/beta testing. At that point, player data and feedback become an opportunity for the developer to better realize their vision.
If you have a question for Question Block, or anything else you’d like to say about the newsletter, please click “Reply” or email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
Source: www.theguardian.com
