EDIT: I didn’t notice in the original post, the article is from 2023

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/19707239

Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 – and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder.

Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform.

Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism.

While he is accustomed to “offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats”, he told AFP, “in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed”.

  • hector@sh.itjust.works
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    19 days ago

    I already accepted we’re already dead because oil & gas companies figured how to use doubt and false science to create a confusion among the general public (aided by the mass conservative Murdoch /Boloré media lol)…

    It’s like tobacco companies in the 50s but we can’t afford so many years to wake the fuck up.

    • auzy@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      Smoking companies still are with vaping (vaping companies literally sell to kids over the Internet and people literally are arguing it’s safe and healthy)

      Which unfortunately shows that people don’t learn

    • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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      20 days ago

      Oh, i didnt know this was like IT. i’ll tell my russians friends just to ignore putin’s regime

      • Eximius@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        If by ignore, you mean stop paying taxes and working in any capacity for government in one go, yes would work. The only fear is being singled out, if more than 0.5% of the people do it, army wont even have the guts to get tanks out, they will join.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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          19 days ago

          No. Dunno where did you take that 0.5% from, it’s not empirically confirmed by anything.

          Like 20% if you want to see civil war. Like 40% if you want to see regime change.

          • Eximius@lemmy.world
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            19 days ago

            There is the semi-usually-known research that suggests 3.5% is enough for non-violent protests to reach changes. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/chen15682

            0.5% is 1 in 200 people, essentially everyone knowing personally one person who is against the government. Maybe it isn’t enough.

            But also, 0.5% homogenously (instead of country-wide being concentrated in Moscow), would be 600k people peacefully marching in Moscow streets

            • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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              19 days ago

              It doesn’t work. It’s some urban legend that this is sufficient. Even those 600k may or may not be stopped by a threat of real ammo being used. I’m not even talking about coordination.

              One can “prove” anything with selectively chosen statistics.

              • Eximius@lemmy.world
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                19 days ago

                They werent selectively chosen. " An original, aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 is used to test these claims." As well as any researcher who isn’t a complete buffoon would only look at statistics that has only a 2-3 sigma chance of only being stochastic noise.

                • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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                  19 days ago

                  The set of indicators, of course, was selectively chosen. The authors, of course, have decided which of these they consider important and which don’t, that is, decided upon weights and criteria.

        • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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          20 days ago

          Touché

          Venezuela has ~70% of the people against the regime, (nearly 90% counting the 5M that were not allowed to vote) and the needle isn’t even moving.

          And in Russia being “singled out” is apparently a national tradition.

          Sorry, I may be over pessimistic today.

          • Eximius@lemmy.world
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            19 days ago

            I guess that’s a fair example. But logically sounds impossible for such control over the population to be had. If a group went out to the streets to oust the government, you would say at least maybe 45% would join.

      • tourist@lemmy.world
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        20 days ago

        Pardon my ignorance. I may have a mild brain injury.

        Could you perhaps rephrase?

        I’m not sure if I understood what you said.

        • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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          20 days ago

          In IT (the movie and, i presume, also in the book) ::: spoiler spoiler The kids realize that IT feeds on attention and that the only way to fight it is by ignoring it :::

          Imo, shitter (X) is a cesspool as it is now, but I dont believe that leaving it to the hordes is a solution to anything. We need a better approach to deal with this people.

          • tourist@lemmy.world
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            19 days ago

            Ah, that makes sense. I thought you meant IT as in information technology. Was very confused.

            Brain still good yey

            edit: typo. perhaps I need to make that appointment

  • Otter@lemmy.caOP
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    20 days ago

    The bit in the square brackets in the title was mine, because that’s what I went into the article to look for. If you’re on Mastodon and interested in that content:

    The text from the article:

    Glaciologist Ruth Mottram had more than 10,000 followers on Twitter but left in February and joined an alternative scientists’ forum powered by Mastodon -– a crowdfunded, decentralised grouping of social networks founded in 2016.

    “It’s really been a revelation in many ways. It’s a much quieter and more thoughtful platform,” she told AFP.

    On Mastodon, “I haven’t had any abuse at all or even people questioning climate change. I think we’d become far too used to it on Twitter… I had blocked loads of accounts over on the birdsite (Twitter),” she said.

  • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    The Franklin Standards need to be on everyone’s radar. They don’t want your kids to learn about climate change.

    Explain how and why Earth’s climate changes over time.

    Climate changes continually at all time scales and Earth’s climate has never remained constant.

    The Earth’s climate has varied greatly between glacial advances and retreats that correlate with cyclical oscillations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun (Milankovitch Cycles, precession).

    In addition to being affected by the climate, the biosphere also has a significant effect on the climate, including self-regulation and resiliency (carbon-oxygen cycle, hydrological cycle).

    Humans are just one of the many influences on Earth’s climate (urban heat island effect, wetland drainage, deforestation, agriculture).

    Computer models of climate are simplified simulations of the real world, and make prognostications that are inherently uncertain.

    Global weather forecast models (short term) and climate models (long term) are quite different in their design, their strengths, weaknesses, value, limitations, and uncertainties.

    The wording is subtle, but you can see how they are attacking the idea of anthropogenic climate change. (There’s similar fuckery with evolution and some subtle anti-trans stuff.) Oil and gas companies have a lot of money and can afford a lot of propaganda. No states have adopted these standards yet - we think Florida and Texas will go first, then Oklahoma will follow. But this information warfare.

    • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
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      20 days ago

      Humans are just one of the many influences on Earth’s climate

      Proceeds to list a bunch of other things that are the fault of humans.

  • don@lemm.ee
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    20 days ago

    Ah Twitter. Nearing its evolution as the internet’s premier perpetually-full septic tank.

  • Dave field@lemmy.world
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    19 days ago

    We should as a community ensure Twitter\X lives forever…

    If only as a place to keep certain social media users “entertained”

    In all seriousness it does concern me how often I see such a wide variety of news agencies quote Twitter considering the amount of hate that goes on there

    • xenoclast@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      The irony of climate scientists ignoring a problem and waiting until it’s far to late to do something is honestly pretty funny…

      At this point it’s wholly on you if you’re still using twitter.

      You’d think smart people like science nerds would have left the Nazi bar ages ago.

    • ansiz@lemmy.world
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      19 days ago

      It’s because the news media industry as a whole has stuck with Twitter as their primary social media site. It’s kinda hilarious how much they seem to like it and how much time they spend there.

    • PhAzE@lemmy.ca
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      19 days ago

      That’s dangerous. Look at what Fox is doing, as an entertainment company, to US politics across the country.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    20 days ago

    Considering Meta is doubling down on disinformation, more people should go to Mastodon and Bsky over Threads or Twitter.

      • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        20 days ago

        i don’t think jack funded it he was just an original board member; but he left the board a month or two ago.

    • Hell no, fuck Bluesky. There is no reason not to adopt ActivityPub when trying to build an open, federated Twitter alternative. Except for power and control over the platform, its core protocol and ecosystem. Screw these guys, use Mastodon or anything on the Fediverse.

        • This is their stupid excuse. They could still implement ActiviyPub as a secondary federation protocol. (Bluesky <-> Bluesky via ATProto, Bluesky <-> Fediverse via ActivityPub). They decided against it. It’s an intentional choice, and they’re just making up excuses.

            • There are 3 issues with this:

              1. This is a third-party project, not an official part of Bluesky. Bluesky was never meant to work with ActivityPub, that was a clear design choice. This is just a workaround.
              2. It’s opt-in, meaning most accounts will never get federated, because people just aren’t aware that something like this exists. This especially applies to new users.
              3. It relies on a centralized service, Bluesky and ActivityPub servers don’t talk directly to each other, which would be required for true federation. Federation is always decentralized, this is the exact opposite.

              I don’t understand why anyone should use Bluesky with cheap hacks to attempt to fix Bluesky’s poor design choices and or utter incompetence, if they could just use Mastodon and federate with the Fediverse over ActivityPub by default.

              From a user perspective, Bluesky is just Mastodon with a recommendation algorithm. There is no other protocol required for this, everything could easily be done using ActivityPub exclusively. I will never care about Bluesky, since it tries to be the new Twitter, but the enshittification of Twitter began when they introduced their crappy algorithm, instead of just displaying tweets of accounts you follow in chronological order (like Mastodon does it).

  • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    If we can’t abandon Obvious Disaster Twitter we definitely can’t abandon the obvious disaster that is everything we think of as normal that’s driving civilization off a cliff.

    • gallopingsnail@lemmy.sdf.org
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      18 days ago

      I don’t even know who this guy is, but your screenshot plus a quick search says this guy added one forged document to a collection of legitimate documents released from the Heartland Institute. That was certainly not the right thing to do, but let’s at least be fully honest about it.

  • Disaster@sh.itjust.works
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    19 days ago

    Ever since Nitter died I haven’t paid any attention to anything on musks’ little fiefdom at all.

    I wish the political economics guys would move… I really miss Tim Sahay/70sbachchan & Mark Blyth.

    • Daemon Silverstein@thelemmy.club
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      10 days ago

      Nitter died? I’ve been using it days ago. It’s not as before the Twitter’s API restrictions, tho, because it started to using data scrapping to fetch Twitter profiles and posts.

  • Bappity@lemmy.world
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    20 days ago

    You can find utterly vile replies from blue checks on that site now, even on the most heavenly, innocent, morally correct tweet. It’s insane.