• 0 Posts
  • 120 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 11th, 2023

help-circle





  • Wikipedia is one of the last, best sources of information on the Internet that isn’t biased, corporate-sponsored bullsh*t.

    Instead it’s bullshit built upon elaborate bureaucracy which has it’s own layers of issues depending on exactly what topic/field we’re talking about.

    The biggest and most obvious flaw being that it’s more or less explicitly designed to fail spectacularly as regards any topic that the media doesn’t want to talk about (for example, anything that might make the media look bad) because there’s going to be an intentional lack of “reliable sources” on those topics.

    The definition of a “reliable source” is another - there’s a fair bit of jockeying on that which functionally biases WP. Especially when you start looking at what disqualified a given source from being “reliable” and start to notice that the bar seems to be set very unevenly depending on the particular source and how well liked it is by certain power-editors.

    It’s good enough for anything that’s not politically contentious to anyone, but I would never use it for anything other than a vague overview and starting point for other sources to dig into.


  • I mean, the viewpoint these folks operate from is that there’s no need to discuss consent because you should never consent prior to marriage (aka abstinence before marriage is always saying no, so there’s no need to discuss any other answer) and that marriage is always implied consent at all times (so there remains nothing to discuss because now it’s always yes) - the whole idea of talking about consent is built on the implication that there isn’t a preordained, socially determined answer but instead that it’s a question that needs to be discussed.




  • The ADL considers Pepe a hate symbol, which I agree with is daft but that’s kind of key to their data and they are considered experts in the field by most. They scanned Steam with some automated tool looking for hate symbol images, came up with like a million hate symbols detected. If something contained more than one detected hate symbol, it got counted as however many hate symbols the tool detected (so for example Pepe saluting a swastika would count as a Pepe and a swastika).

    Almost 55% of those were Pepe. The next highest was the swastika at 9%. A literal majority of hate symbols they detected with that tool were Pepes, at more than 5 times the rate of the next most common symbol. It’s literally included to make the problem bigger in the hopes that most readers either won’t look that deep or won’t know what Pepe is.

    EDIT: Another fun one is if you go look at their hate symbol index, about an eighth of two digit numbers are either hate symbols or part of a hate symbol.


  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.worldItch.io games site taken down
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    2 months ago

    I am a big GOG enjoyer myself, but when I need to use steam for anything, I have never encountered such content.

    You’ve never seen a Pepe meme on Steam? I’m not kidding there either - if you dig into that ADL link and follow it to the research, they have a list of top extremist and hateful symbols on Steam and the swastika is number 2 at 9 percent of detected symbols. #1, representing something like 55% of extremist and hateful symbols their automated detector found on Steam was Pepe.

    Perhaps there is such content in private or otherwise not very visible spaces (such as user profiles), where they will not get reported, but that is true for any site with user content. I call BS on this being an issue.

    If you dig into their research, it’s mostly private user groups and profiles. Game discussion pages are moderated by their respective devs or whoever the devs appoint but user groups are moderated by their owner/appointees and user profile pages aren’t really moderated at all unless you’re doing something actually illegal in the US.

    So unless you go looking at the user profile pages of white supremacists, or go searching for white supremacist user groups you won’t run into much of it.



  • The President and Legislature are elected at the federal level. All the various major executive branch figures below that are appointed by the President, and at best require the Senate to approve them. Most aren’t as ridiculous in their picks as Trump, but he’s a narcissistic megalomaniacal buffoon so he has to ensure to himself that’s he’s surrounded with people who are well known and popular (hence why he seems to be mostly picking based on media experience rather than anything pertinent, save a couple of Project 2025 authors and Tulsi Gabbard) but that he can see himself as above and will stroke his ego by affirming that.







  • instead of blocking advertising data, we should embrace it IMO.

    imagine a world where users shove so much information at these tools that they can’t even tell what’s real or not. camouflage works better when everyone participates.

    There’s an ad blocker that does exactly this. Called Ad Nauseam. Chrome blocked it from their store super fast, then blocked it from being installed in Chrome from 3rd party sites, then blocked known versions of it from being manually installed in developer mode. I used to run it set to a low percentage - if I “clicked” every ad they’d know to throw my data out, but if I click say 3% of them…