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When a woman like Sara Hossein speaks out at the UN against human rights abuse in Iran, and is disrupted by Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Russia, China, Syria,Venezuela, Cuba and Zimbabwe, you know every word is hitting home to the dictators club.

Full statement below.

#IRGCTerrorists
#StopExecutionsInIran
#MahsaAmini

https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2023/07/statement-ffm-chair-sara-hossain-53rd-session-human-rights-council

—@ProjectFearlessness

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Someone linked to an obviously ChatGPT-generated article and I realized the thing which makes it so obvious is how much it resembles an uninspired attempt at the 5-paragraph essay form, including the horrid formulaic phrases (“There are several reasons why…” / etc.).

As someone who did forensics (the public-speaking kind, not the crime-scene investigation kind) in school and had to listen to way too many people stumbling through the oratorical equivalent of this, it’s A) always going to stand out and B) always going to make me wince.

—@ubernostrum

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Just what kind of nonsense is this? I’m shocked. I’ve had to reboot my brain twice when I saw this. Not only is it terrible for accessibility, but it is also stupid. Registration, I can mostly understand. Login is stretching it dangerously thin. But searching? What kind of questions are those, anyway? It wasn’t enough to ask to break our brain decrypting the first part of that ridiculous challenge? #accessibility #blind #captcha #disability #wtf

—@xogium

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There’s this growing trend of certain video essayists (not naming names) editing things in a frenetic style with lots of flashing effects and quick cuts and it’s too much to handle as someone with #epilepsy

I expect nothing to change with big production media, but I’d hope smaller creators would have just a little consideration.

I swear one creator (or their editor idk) did it more in response to me saying it was too much for me to safely handle and just added a warning for flashing lights at the beginning.

I’m so tired. That warning might as well say “fuck you.”

—@Bec

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What are people envisioning when they wring their hands about one or another social media service becoming an echo chamber?

When they say “you can’t expect to only see things you agree with” I feel like they’re imagining a spirited debate centering on a fringe take on NAFTA rather than like, you know, someone posting a picture of your front door with a Bowie knife plunged into it.

—@andrew

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So let me get this straight… #Threads collects massive amounts of data, the platform is full of brands and celebrities, AND it uses an algorithm-driven feed. It tracks users, serves ads, and has quickly filled up, according to reports, with trolls, Nazis and the far right. Oh, and the site makes a shadow account for everyone with an Instagram profile, whether they want to participate or not. But still new users are flocking to the platform?? It’s a case of FOMO, and I don’t think it will last. F*ck Zuck and the corporate trojan horse he rode in on. Very disappointed in those I know who have bought the BS. That’s all I have to say on the matter. #TwitterMigration #TwitterMigrants #SocialMedia #Meta #Zuckerberg

—@CharlieMcHenry

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Me: there is an ongoing problem of a lack of empathy for disabled people within bike infrastructure advocacy circles.

Way too many bike people: deluge me with replies which directly and perfectly demonstrate that lack of empathy with its most common iteration: the assumption of what disability looks like, what disabled people need, and how the thing that’s exactly what they want must by all means be good for disabled people too.

—@amaditalks

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W3C is working on a charter for a Privacy Working Group
“The mission of the Privacy Working Group will be to improve privacy on the Web both by advising groups developing standards on how to avoid and mitigate privacy issues with Web technologies and by standardizing mechanisms that improve user privacy on the Web.” A formal AC Review is expected in August
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-new-work/2023Jul/0000.html

—@w3c

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Here’s a quote from a YouTube video I heard earlier today. ‘In the modern age of the internet, we live by the motto that if something is online, it stays there. But the truth is that our creations are bound, sooner or later, to be cast into obscurity and forgotten’. Truer words were never spoken, and that’s why, if you come across any you and/or others find valuable, I very strongly urge you to back it up and archive it anywhere you can, in as many places you can, be it OneDrive, Dropbox, the Internet Archive or your own website or file storage server. Let’s work together to fight #DataRot and preserve as much of our online creations and discoveries as we possibly can! #data #archival #backup #preservation #DataArchival #DataBackup #DataPreservation

—@seedy

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So, fun story. In the middle of ActivityPub’s standardization, the Social Web Working Group nearly got shut down because we couldn’t get the big corporate players to pay attention to us, and the W3C’s membership structure required paid membership participation.

We tried *desperately* to get Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc to look at us. They weren’t interested. What I heard was that they had written off the idea that decentralized social networks could exist or work by then.

Luckily, management agreed that the SocialWG’s work was interesting enough that we should continue. And later having seen what happened when big players entered a standards group… ActivityPub was probably a better spec for being written by people passionate about it instead.

But anyway. That’s all to say… it’s so *weird* now to be in the present moment, as you can imagine…

—@cwebber