See, I am not the guy who will stop thinking for myself because experts say there is no evidence of sth. I am not saying that there is real time eavesdropping at all times, but I have not seen convincing arguments that a working microphone cannot be used for pushing ads by simple and widely available mechanisms. In fact, the sheer amount of people who complain about this should be considered evidence in itself, especially when they never had thought of a given topic before discussing it with someone. I have considered phone proximity and shared IP address but they don’t seem to make an exhaustive explanation. I think that some stories point to Meta doing this extensively, and that disallowing microphone access for Meta products alleviates the effect. Many privacy communities I believe they are infested by spooks and trolls pushing disinformation narratives, and one of them is that phones are NOT listening as a smart thing to say and/or believe. I might as well think that this is itself can be related to the redacted part in the rationale to ban Tik Tok. Having said that, I think that the only feasible to do this technically is by a regularly updated list of keywords, rather than other ways that would leave a processing or networking footprint.

1. Whether phones are listening or not

2. What is the redacted part in the rationale to ban Tik Tok

A note on the latter, it is presented as national security threat. They won’t say what it is. I presume because some of the shit they don’t want a foreign power doing is sth they very much do themselves.

This is not a matter of opinion, rather than centralized control of information.

Musk can shadow ban you, for example, nobody granted him that power except he was able to by it.

This type of social media are a power structure that is despotic in nature, and it is deeply problematic for democracies.

It is not like a nation state banning a religious minority or an anarchist site. That would be censoring of opinions.

In the case of Xitter, it is Musk and a team of political advertising engineers doing the censorship. So they are worse than Nazi apologists for example. The latter we only anticipate they will impose censorhip (let alone murder) once they are in power.

Xitter has that power already at orders of magnitude above what traditional media outlets have. He controls the flow of information. (And he made it a fucking nazi bar right enough).

But I will grant you that we should not expect nation states to ban Xitter. We should aim for its destruction.

In my opinion: abandon - yes. Ban - no

Perhaps it is time to bring this old post of mine back from the dead? I argue that we have to start a war of attrition on mainstream platforms.

Yes, you missed how social media algorithms work, having captivated the attention of whole nations, and carefully control every bit of information that pass in front of your eyes, then some billionaire buying said mechanism and taking part in the government he helped elected, then threatening the nations that have banned him that they will lose the next elections. Did I miss anything?

Real democracies need to shield themselves from this kind of corporate interference, yet most people don’t even understand how it works, or why Cambridge Analytica was a big hit, or where are these experts now and how they are making a living.

In such a scenario you have to carefully consider: are you locking them all up together with or without their pills? Think carefully.

Labor camps for organic food? Shit, I thought California Uber Alles was just an old, edgy punk song.

convince friends to switch to firefox from chrome

Ah yes, you reminded me of this gem https://contrachrome.com/ (It is Scott McCloud’s Webcomic against Chrome’s data mining)