Labour MPs have begun quitting X in alarm over the platform, with one saying Elon Musk had turned it into “a megaphone for foreign adversaries and far-right fringe groups”.
Over the weekend, newly elected MPs took to WhatsApp groups to raise growing concerns about the role X played in the spread of misinformation amid the far-right-led riots in parts of England and Northern Ireland.
Two Labour MPs are known to have told colleagues they were leaving the platform. One of them, Noah Law, has disabled his account. Other MPs who still use X have begun examining alternatives, including Threads, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and the open-source platform Bluesky.
In an article for the Guardian on Monday, a former Twitter executive, Bruce Daisley, said Musk should face personal sanctions and even an arrest warrant if he continues to stir up public disorder online.
Tbf - once the fediverse gets big enough it’s kind of open season for misinformation spreading groups. They can just join another server once the one they used got blocked. Worst case they get onto a server that actually gets used by normal people and produce a lot of casualties by getting the server defederated.
I think it’s a nice concept but for this type of misinformation it’s really not the best thing…
It really depends how well maintained the instances are. This extra work may come at a cost. Which may exclude some of the opportunists.
If by “well maintained” you mean keeping a whitelist of instances, then yeah. But I doubt anyone is doing that because it’s actually counterproductive to the concept of fediverse. By keeping a whitelist you are creating an in group and an out group and instances can live or die based on that grouping.
As for why you’d need a whitelist, you can’t defend against a malicious attack if they keep spinning up new instances with bots designed to spread misinformation. The moment you ban once instance another one gets spun up. The only solution is a whitelist so all new instances are automatically blocked. Of course that works if all “normal” instances also have proper registration policies and can’t become attack vectors.
If the fediverse becomes wildly popular defending the instance can become a full-time job as the open nature gives more attack vectors. Also most instances are ran by volunteers so it’s probably not going to be a good time for anyone.
I’ve been saying this for a year now but no one cares to listen.
Federating with all instances by default only works if admins and mods of all instances are acting in good faith. Sooner or later that won’t be the case.
Do you think systems like fediseer would help with that? As I understand it’s a voucher based reputation system.