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”.

  • ohellidk@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    I have no clue why all these normal, non-racist non-political people still use twitter. It was bought for the obvious purpose of providing a safe space for conservatives, racists, incels, and other outcasts to society. Mastodon is a perfect replacement for it, and you can pick an instance that suits you. It isn’t owned by a mentally unstable billionaire!

  • don@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

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

    • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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      2 months 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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        2 months 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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          2 months 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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            2 months 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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              2 months 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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                2 months 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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                  2 months 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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          2 months 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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            2 months 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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        2 months 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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          2 months 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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            2 months 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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    2 months 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.

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

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

    • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months 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.

        • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          2 months ago

          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.

            • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              2 months ago

              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).

      • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        2 months 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.

  • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.world
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    2 months 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.

  • Bappity@lemmy.world
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    2 months 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.

  • gcheliotis@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Among the sad stories about climate scientists having to deal with misinformation and abuse on the regular, suddenly, a unicorn: a statement purportedly by Musk that I wholeheartedly agree with:

    Musk wrote in January: “People on the right should see more ‘left-wing’ stuff and people on the left should see more ‘right-wing’ stuff. But you can just block it if you want to stay in an echo chamber.”

    Of course with the average Xitter post becoming ever more toxic, most people that have anything of value to add will probably leave sooner or later, whether lefties or righties or whatever.

    • madjo@feddit.nl
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      2 months ago

      When I still used Twitter, I followed people and that was the only content I wanted to read. I didn’t care about content from people I wasn’t following.

      That’s why I’m now on Masto. No algorithm to decide that I should also get the very much not valuable opinions of xXx_nOnwoke_1488 in my timeline.

  • fiend_unpleasant@piefed.social
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    2 months ago

    I think this is going to happen more and more. As the delta semi-morons continue to erode civilization we are just going to “take our ball and go home” so to speak. We can science, tech, and culture around them and they will eventually be left out in their echo chamber desert fighting each other over the last minions meme scraps.

    • Queue@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      Oligarchs are only for the rich outside of the Thirteen Eyes. American oligarchs are called lobbyists and job creators.

    • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      I mean, he’s actively supporting the opposition (Trump) right now. Were Trump to win then he’d certainly be in a very good position within Trump’s desired oligarchy. Until then he’s just a very rich asshole whose main major concrete political power comes from his ownership of Twitter and (largely artificial) audience. If anything his support of Trump kneecaps him in his ability to run his businesses as the Biden and hypothetical Harris administrations are not as likely to let him keep getting away with all the blatantly illegal shit he keeps doing.

      Michael Bloomberg OTOH fits the term pretty well, as he’s a very major donor to the DNC and that certainly makes him very close to the ear of the president and policy decisions.

  • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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    2 months 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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      2 months 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.