Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Category: Technology

Shiny gadgets and clever computers

  • 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 hateful anti-trans bigotry is published, with Substack taking a hefty cut of all of it. In some cases, bigots’ Substacks are the primary source of their income, generating large sums from which Substack takes a 10% cut.

    As a high profile critic of the platform’s support for the world’s worst people, Jude Doyle’s writing attracted a response from the firm’s CEO – and the offer of a lucrative publishing deal if he were to stop pointing out the genuine harm Substack helps pay for. Doyle said no, telling the CEO:

    If you have money to invest in me, then you have money to create and enforce a content moderation policy, stating that you do not host or fund content that promotes hate speech and/or targets marginalized groups.

    But Substack has no interest in doing that. It’s making too much money from hatred.

    Substack’s response to accurate and measured criticism – effectively, “we don’t like Nazis but we like their money so fuck you” – has led a lot of people to demand creators stop using the service. And while I understand why – I won’t pay for a Substack for the same reasons – I also understand why many creators are loath to leave.

    The problem for many people who publish on Substack is a problem we’ve previously seen on other platforms, including Twitter. It’s enabled people to establish an audience and in some cases a career, and that means leaving could cause financial harm to people who abandon the platform. Even if other platforms were morally pure, and very few of them are, the people demanding moral purity from their newsletter creators are rarely the people who will be financially harmed by it.

    In addition, many of the people being urged to quit are marginalised people – the very people who can least afford the financial hit.

    I’ve experienced this myself. I quit writing for a particular publisher over its support for bigots, a decision that cost me about £1,000 in lost commissions a year. I left another media organisation for similar reasons, passing up something close to £4,000 a year. I’ve turned down work from other outlets because I don’t share their values. And I don’t have an active presence on Twitter any more, which has damaged my networking and no doubt cost me work too. And while I’m okay with those choices, it hasn’t made a damn difference to any of those platforms because I’m completely insignificant to them.

    Writing on her Substack, Cathrynne Valente explains it very well.

    It is exhausting just trying to exist with any level of moral consistency online nowadays. And the people who keep being handed the keys to several kingdoms don’t ever bother to worry about it. They just let us tear ourselves apart trying to do the right thing while they feast. It’s all a game to them. It’s not remotely a game to us. So there’s no equivalence.

    Take social media for example. If you leave Twitter for a smaller social network, abandoning the network you may have spent more than a decade building, where do you go? Threads? Its current moderation is just as bad as Twitter’s, enabling nazis and transphobes to abuse people without consequence. Bluesky? It doesn’t have a Nazi problem purely because it’s too small so far, and it’s very clear that the platform creators aren’t very interested in protecting their users from bad actors. And so on.

    So for many creators, it’s far more complicated than “this place is bad and you should quit”: if almost everything is a bad choice, then by removing your voice from a particular platform you’re letting the bigots win. The bigots thrive, the platform continues. The only person who suffers anything negative is you.

    Valente:

    I don’t want to support the Badness by being here. And yet, if I go, does that not just abandon another space because bad people are also here, handing them control of yet another hugely-recognized platform, control they could never achieve on their own just on numbers and popularity, while the people who have any moral compass whatsoever have to continually start over from scratch?

    Which one helps the goblin horde more, staying or going?

    There’s a famous cartoon in which a man says “we should improve society somewhat” and another man pops up to say “Yet you participate in society! Curious! I am very intelligent.” And that’s a pretty good description of the discourse around some of this stuff.

    There are lots of things that are very wrong with tech platforms. Facebook has been complicit in genocide; Instagram (owned by the same company) in the rise of the anti-vax movement. Twitter, pre-Musk, was instrumental in the rise of the far right and in stirring up racial and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred. And that’s just off the top of my head. It’s not impossible to work only on ethically pure platforms. But it’s close to impossible if you want to be where most people – your friends, your colleagues, your readers, your listeners – are and communicate with those people.

    Like Valente, I don’t know what the answer is on an individual level: in the absence of group action, we’re powerless. For now I’m comfortable with the choices I’ve made, because I’m in the fortunate position of not having to choose between having a conscience and having a roof over my head. But I also realise that that’s a luxury that others don’t necessarily have. Many of us think we should improve social media somewhat, yet have to participate in social media.

    Update, 9 January: Substack now says it will remove some, but not all, Nazi newsletters. Reports on social media suggests the total number of removed newsletters is… five.

  • 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 are the canaries in the coal mine.

    The impact of these platforms has not just been to spread bigotry, but to flood the field with junk, to make social media gossip and un-fact-checked blog posts the main vector for information—to make it harder to know what is real. In an emergency, you need to know where the exits are, but at least half of the signs you’ll read in 2024 are lying to you. 

    It is always in the best interests of the powerful not to have a robust press that can hold them accountable.

  • Islands in the streams

    Most of my tech writing these days is news reporting, but from time to time I get to write something a little more reflective. Here’s a piece on how streaming services have persuaded me to get back into buying music I can touch.

    I think streaming is like a fast food drive-through, serving up cheeseburgers that are quick, cheap and convenient. And that’s great; it meets a need, satisfies a craving. It fills a hole. But food can be so much more than just fuel, and music can be so much more than Muzak. 

  • Throw a block party

    As we once again move to new social networks, an old and very boring trope raises its head once again: is it okay to block people? And the answer, of course, is: no. It’s more than okay. It’s essential. Block early, block often, block the bigots and the blowhards and their fans and their followers, block for any reason you choose or for no reason whatsoever.

    Your social media feed is yours to control, and that includes deciding whose voices you want to hear.

    The “it’s bad to block” trope has been around at least since the 1990s when I first ventured online, and it’s the same bad faith argument it’s always been: usually deliberately, people pretend that the US first amendment applies worldwide and protects their right to be an absolute arsehole on the internet. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t. Your right to free speech doesn’t trump my right to completely ignore you.

    Here’s Joan Westenberg:

    There’s a crucial difference between silencing someone and choosing not to engage with them. Blocking someone isn’t about denying them their right to speak. It’s about asserting your right not to listen.

    Some of the very worst people online believe that they have the right to your attention whenever they demand it, and that alone is an excellent reason to block them. Because as Westenberg says, they are the weeds of your online garden. Time spent reading their unsolicited shit is time better spent on more beautiful things.

  • Ad nausea

    Twitter informs me that it’s 15 years today since I first posted on the service. I don’t post there at all now; I’ve unfollowed everybody and locked my account, and unless there’s a change of ownership and a huge change in culture I don’t anticipate returning.

    It’s sad. For its first decade or so, Twitter was net positive: for all its flaws – and I’ve been reporting on and giving talks about the misinformation and disinformation on the service for many years now – it was an incredible communications platform for everything from breaking news to ridiculous flights of fancy. What Elon Musk has done to it in just one year is as tragic as it was predictable.

    Over the last few days big brands such as Apple, IBM, Sony Pictures, NBC Universal and many more (but not, so far, the BBC) have pulled their advertising from the service in response to Musk endorsing a blatantly antisemitic tweet. It’s a welcome move, but it’s also an overdue one: Musk has been endorsing, amplifying and paying money to the worst bigots on Twitter for a long time now, and these brands were quite happy to have their advertising dollars used to finance that.

    There are two things worth pointing out here. The first is that despite widespread publicity around Twitter’s lurch into bigotry the brands seemed perfectly happy with Twitter as recently as Friday, before a Media Matters investigation highlighted specific examples of the brands’ ads being positioned next to pro-Nazi content and even tweets praising Hitler. And secondly, the brands have not said they’re cancelling their advertising; they’re just pausing it. What we’re seeing here isn’t brands developing a backbone; it’s brands trying to ride out what they hope will be a short-lived PR storm.

  • A fountain of fakes

    The hype around artificial intelligence tends to focus on extreme scenarios of Terminator-related apocalypse, but there’s a very worrying kind of AI that’s already causing a lot of trouble. It’s the use of AI tools to create realistic fakes. The same tech that makes Johnny Cash sing Taylor Swift, that pulls John Lennon’s voice out of an old demo tape or that puts actors into movies they were never in can be used for considerably more wicked purposes.

    Here’s the Houston Chronicle on the elderly man who was called by the police about his son-in-law, who the caller said was in jail. The phone was passed to the son-in-law, who begged for bail money. The money was transferred, but there was no son-in-law and no police officer; the son-in-law’s voice was reportedly created by an AI tool good enough to fool his relatives.

    I can’t vouch for the veracity of the story, although I assume the newspaper fact-checked it. But I know enough about AI and things-called-AI to know how powerful and realistic these tools can be. Here’s Johnny:

    In New Jersey, teenage boys have been accused of creating fake pornography of their female classmates. As the WSJ reports, there is a lot of confusion about the legality or otherwise of this, and disagreement among parents regarding how it should be addressed: some are (rightly, in my opinion) demanding serious consequences while others are shrugging it off with “boys will be boys”. Given how realistic the results can be, I don’t see why this should be treated any less seriously than if the images were real: it’s still a form of sexual abuse.

    And this tech isn’t just used for sexual abuse. Earlier this year, students in New York used AI to make a fake video of a school principal making a racist rant; last week, a deepfake showed model Bella Hadid apparently supporting the Israeli government and apologising for previous remarks supporting the plight of Palestinian people.

    This is a new version of an old problem, which is technology’s ability to introduce new threats faster than we can decide if or how the technology should be regulated. And while it’s still possible to spot fakes, it’s getting harder to do that with each new generation. And as these systems evolve, they require less and less input to do what they do. The fake video of Bella Hadid used an existing video she’d been in (she was talking about Lyme disease) and repurposed it. Future fakes will only need a couple of photos.

    The solution, I think, isn’t just to regulate the technology – although the howls of protest by the pro-AI crowd just make it more clear that we need to do that too. It’s to regulate the behaviour. The law may not know its ChatGPT from its DALL.E, but then it doesn’t have to any more than it needs to know the difference between an AK-47 and an AR-15; it’s not the tool that matters here; it’s the person who wields it to harm others.

  • Dead cats

    In 2013, then-London mayor Boris Johnson described an Australian political trick which would come to be known as the dead cat strategy.

    There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.

    Johnson himself has used it many times when in self-inflicted political peril, but the most recent example of it was yesterday when it was deployed by Elon Musk to distract from news that under his leadership Twitter has lost $25 billion in value in just one year. His dead cat of choice, like that of many politicians, was anti-trans bigotry – and it worked. There’s much more discussion online of whether, as Musk claims (bizarrely), “cis is a heterosexual slur” than of Musk’s disastrous time in charge of the social network.

    As Evan Urquhart writes in Assigned Media:

    What he’s doing so transparently is the same thing the entire right wing media establishment, backed by conservative billionaires, has been doing with the entire anti-trans panic.

    In many cases the people pushing anti-trans nonsense don’t necessarily believe it; it’s just convenient and when it stops working they’ll find another kind of cat to throw. But while I think this is absolutely a dead cat strategy, I also think that with Musk it’s coming from a more personal place: one of his children is trans and wants nothing to do with him. Which is worth bearing in mind whenever Apartheid Clyde, Space Karen, Poundland Iron Man or whatever else you’d like to call him embarks on another round of transphobia. He’s the trope made flesh of the racist, vaccine-denying, gammon-faced Fox News viewer furious that their kids don’t visit any more.

    On a slightly related note, Musk also announced yesterday that he intends to turn Twitter/X into a dating app. Suggested names in my social media feeds so far include OKStupid, Plenty of Fash, OKKKupid and my own contribution, Fash-ly Madison.

  • AI won’t save publishing

    A wise post by Ian Betteridge on AI as a “burning platform moment” for publishing: publishers who see AI in editorial solely as a way of reducing costs aren’t seeing the big picture. AI reduces barriers to entry too: if you’re publishing “good enough” AI-written content, your rivals are everybody else with access to AI. And that access is cheap.

    You cannot gain competitive advantage at the cheap, low-cost end of the market. Trying to do so will not only make you vulnerable to anyone else with the same tools (at $20 a month) but also devalue your brand over the long term.

    As tech writers of some vintage, Ian and I have both seen many technological waves disrupt publishing: the move to digital, the pivot to video, the rise of search engine optimisation, the rise of reviews that aren’t reviews and many more. Each time, some publishers – including very big and successful ones – have sacrificed long-term credibility and ultimately viability for short-term returns, only to see those returns disappear as a new disruptor comes to town. There are countless formerly great publications that have lost significant readerships, or disappeared completely, because of that short-termism.

    And AI isn’t the only disruption that’s here right now: the current obsession with Google traffic and affiliate revenues that means everybody covers the same product stories and deals is running out of time too.

    As Betteridge rightly points out, publishers have assets that AI and cheapskate rivals don’t: “decades worth of experience, context, contacts and knowledge of audiences in your editorial teams.” Wise publishers will be thinking of how to empower and amplify them, not replace them.

  • eXodus

    I’m technically still a Twitter/X user, because I maintain an account there. But if you want to chat with me on social media, that’s no longer the place to do it. I’ve unfollowed absolutely everybody and deleted all my personalisation data so I’m not tempted to use it.

    It’s interesting to see what happens to the algorithmic For You feed when you do that: my feed is now made up largely of English football, Miley Cyrus fan sites, horrific anti-Black racism from known hate groups, plenty of transphobia and the occasional open-crotch porn photo. That, apparently, is what Twitter thinks you’re interested in if you’re an adult in the UK.

    I unfollowed everyone much later than I should have, based on something I just learned the name of today: an exodus shock. An exodus shock is an event that makes people leave a service for rivals, and in my case the latest one was Elon Musk’s blatantly antisemitic attacks on the ADL. Musk’s far-right views have been well known for a long time, but it’s his use of his Twitter account – an account that, unless you block him, will frequently appear in your feed – to actually publish antisemitism, racism and transphobia that was the final straw for me.

    There will be many more such shocks, because Twitter is too big to disappear overnight: there are too many users with too much to lose for it to lose everybody in one go. But with each new exodus shock, more people will move to Bluesky, to Threads, to Mastodon, to Instagram. And while none of those services is likely to become as big and central as Twitter was, that doesn’t mean they can’t be incredibly vital and commercially successful.

    I’m on quite a lot of social media sites now and I’m trying to make sense of them all and work out what to post where; so far I think Bluesky has the most irreverent old-Twitter vibes, Instagram is the best place to talk music and books, Threads still feels a bit half-finished and Mastodon just doesn’t seem to gel for me. So there are different social networks for different groups of people, with no clear winner so far. And that’s okay; I’m used to it. My first online adventures were on places like CompuServe and USENET and bulletin boards; this is the same thing with better typography.

    One thing I have noticed since essentially quitting Twitter is the effect on my mental health. It turns out that tuning in all day and all evening to some of the most toxic content on the internet isn’t great for you. That’s a lesson I should probably try to remember when, inevitably, the new Twitters start to resemble the broken one.

  • Flickring out

    I joined the photo sharing site Flickr in the early 2000s and closed my account this week, nearly two decades later. I’d have closed it a couple of years ago but I’d forgotten all about it: the only reason I still had an account was to share photos with my mum, who at the time could still use a tablet computer, and to easily share byline photos with publishers and publicists. What used to be a social network had become little more than file storage and I’ve long since moved to better options.

    If you’re as old as I am you’ll remember the days when Flickr was talked about in the same sentences as MySpace and Blogger: it was part of the Web 2.0 boom when what became known as user generated content began to populate the online world. We’d been sharing stuff before, of course: my first experiences online were on USENET and CompuServe, which relied on content provided by service users. But Web 2.0 felt different, because the sites that enabled sharing (and hoped to profit from it by selling ads around it) made it incredibly easy and friction-free. Posting a photo to Twitter or a blog to Blogger was the beginning of a conversation. These were the days when Friends Reunited was a UK phenomenon and nobody had heard of Facebook.

    What went wrong at Flickr is pretty much what went wrong with many social media hits: owner Yahoo!, which acquired the service in 2007, neglected it and took its users for granted. It either didn’t see Facebook and Instagram coming or just suffered from Not Invented Here Syndrome, which is when a firm refuses to see the iceberg that’s about to sink it. Blackberry famously had Not Invented Here Syndrome when Apple showed off the very first iPhone.

    Where the original Flickr led the pack, the Yahoo-owned version lagged behind. It didn’t even have an app until 2009, by which point Facebook wasn’t so much eating its lunch as sneaking into its kitchen and clearing out the fridge. The app was terrible, and remained so through 2010 when Instagram turned photo sharing into an extremely big hit. Yahoo took another two years to make a similarly decent app but updates to the service were few and far between; it increasingly felt abandoned by its owners, its forums full of complaints from unhappy early adopters.

    Eventually Yahoo, which itself had been bought by Verizon, sold Flickr to SmugMug, who clearly didn’t have a clue what made the site work in the first place and didn’t have much money to throw at it either. Without Yahoo’s deep pockets the new Flickr removed the unlimited storage for free users and hiked the price of Pro accounts. Users fled in their millions.

    Of course the whole story is a bit bigger than that, and includes Meta (formerly Facebook) being very aggressive in its “if it’s a competitor, buy it or bury it” strategy; it bought Instagram and chucked serious money at it, and it’s doing the same with its Instagram spin-off Threads now. But many – most – of Flickr’s wounds were self-inflicted.

    Today, like Blogger, Flickr is still going – but it’s limping rather than sprinting. It still has its loyal users, mostly the keen photographers who loved it from the start. But most of us share on Google Photos, or iCloud Photos, or Instagram, or Facebook. At its peak Flickr had around 90 million monthly users; it’s believed to have around 7.6 million now, of which roughly 30% are in the US – so just over 2 million, with a further 87,000 in Europe according to Flickr’s own EU reporting. By comparison, Instagram has 2.35 billion.

    It’s interesting to compare Flickr to Twitter, or X as only Elon Musk and his sycophants call it. Because what we’re seeing with Flickr, and what I think we’re seeing with Twitter, is very much like Mike The Chicken of Fruita, Colorado. Mike became famous in the late 1940s because he managed to run around quite happily despite having been decapitated. The killer blow happened in late 1945, but Mike didn’t actually keel over until early 1947 – and he might have lived even longer if he hadn’t suffered the accident that finally killed him. I think the fatal blow for Flickr was the Yahoo takeover, and the Twitter one was the Musk purchase. Both networks are dying, but they’ve still got a little bit of running around to do.