Category: Hell in a handcart

  • The Grey Goo

    Following on from yesterday’s post about bots ruining social media, the excellent Ian Betteridge writes about what we can expect when creating crap is much faster than detecting it. This is the AI Grey Goo scenario: an internet choked with low-quality content, which never improves, where it is almost impossible to locate public reliable sources…

  • Death by a billion bots

    Via Joan Westenberg on Threads, here’s ReplyGuy. ReplyGuy is a bot that will find conversations on the internet and promote your product automatically by spamming those conversations while pretending to be people. Every day we take a step closer to the dead internet, where the bulk of online conversations are bots talking to bots and…

  • Dirty tricks, tested on trans

    England’s buffer zone laws, voted in by an overwhelming majority of MPs, will be deliberately undermined by new Home Office guidance. That’s according to the I Paper, which says that despite legislation banning religious groups from harassing women, the guidance says that forced birthers “would still be able to approach women attending clinics, conduct “silent…

  • A terrible echo

    In 2016, every major political party in Scotland stood on a platform that included gender recognition reform. The Scottish Government then threw the issue open to public consultation in 2017 (and again in 2019), during which social and mainstream media – with significant input from genital-obsessed weirdos – repeatedly lied about the proposed legislation, demonised…

  • Authors who don’t exist

    Meet Jason N. Martin N. Martin, the author of the exciting and dynamic Amazon bestseller “How to Talk to Anyone: Master Small Talks, Elevate Your Social Skills, Build Genuine Connections (Make Real Friends; Boost Confidence & Charisma)” Except you can’t meet him, because he doesn’t exist. He’s an AI-generated character with an AI-generated face credited…

  • Overreacting

    From the very beginnings of the war on trans people, we’ve been accused of overreacting whenever we report what anti-trans groups and politicians say they want to do to us – which in many cases is the complete elimination of trans people by any means necessary. Most UK anti-trans groups and key anti-trans figures have…

  • Who pays

    The newsletter publishing platform Substack has a Nazi problem: specifically, it publishes, promotes and makes money from actual Nazi newsletters as well as the more media-trained faces of far right propaganda. As ever, trans people have been trying raise the alarm about the platform for years: it’s where some of the most vicious, abusive and…

  • How we got here

    Jude Doyle is always worth reading, and his latest piece for Xtra Magazine is a good analysis of how a handful of powerful people have effectively destroyed US media’s ability or inclination to battle the far right. It’s written from the perspective of a trans person because, as is so often the case, trans people…

  • Guilt

    Two teenagers were found guilty of the murder of teenage girl Brianna Ghey today, after what the Crown Prosecution Service described as “one of the most distressing cases the Crown Prosecution Service has had to deal with. The planning, the violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief.” I had to stop following…

  • A hateful echo

    In the same week that we heard closing arguments in the trial of Brianna Ghey’s killers, two teenagers who brutally murdered the young girl in part because she was transgender, the Tory government has finally published its draft guidelines regarding trans and non-binary kids in schools. As expected it’s a bigoted shitshow. The Department of…