Schadrach

This seems like it would be pretty possible - you’d just need an instance that basically just takes in all the data and just marks moderation/deletion as such rather than actually altering the posts. The hard part would be not getting it defederated by half the instances out there specifically for providing unddit/reveddit functionality.

Lemmy does slightly better, but essentially proves that when you have shitty administrators and moderators, the only thing that’s going to be transparent is the quickest and easiest excuse, and when it’s a lie it remains it remains incontestable. You only need to look at threads titled “Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem” and read the comments to get a sense of the scale of the problem.

Forums are only as good as their moderators. Always have been, always will be. I’d love something akin to Reveddit for Lemmy though.

Eh, some of them. You weren’t generally banned for “merely” being right wing. But pre-Elon you generally had to toe the line a lot more to avoid being suspended or banned if you were overtly right wing than if you were liberal or left and now it’s the other way around.

Just like how the blue check started as an “I am a public figure and this account is definitely who I appear to be” mark and that’s it, then it became a mark of who you knew/could bribe at Twitter to move the process along and could be revoked for saying the wrong things on Twitter (for example everyone’s least favorite gay right wing provocateur Milo Yianwhatever had his blue check stripped for saying something too offensive well before he was banned), then post-Elon it became just a subscription service.

There was also a tendency to quietly artificially reduce visibility for a lot of right wing voices or hashtags. For example, female MRA and member of Honey Badger Radio Hannah Wallen literally got a bunch of her fans to do some pretty elaborate testing of her account at one point after her engagement numbers suddenly and mysteriously dropped and it turned out many of her posts were invisible except to people that followed her that she also followed, even to people specifically looking at her feed.

Certain right wing hashtags would have numbers that should definitely have them trending but mysteriously weren’t (or would be for just a few minutes and then suddenly vanish despite gaining popularity in the meantime), certain liberal/left hashtags would be trending despite seemingly not having the numbers for it to be organic, that sort of thing. Because Twitter moderation was curating what was and was not “trending”, literally blacklisting certain topics and bumping up others because of the visibility that being trending would afford.

It was all really, overtly obvious if you watched for it, like how certain accounts would be shadowbanned on Reddit for reasons that were both obvious and not spam-related despite shadowbanning supposedly only being employed as an anti-spam tool, or how certain subs would be allowed to openly ignore certain sitewide rules.

You know you can have Firefox open a second window, right?

They could probably mostly or entirely fix it, but to do so they’d have to better curate search results. Because what it does is summarize the top search results for the query.

The problem they can’t fix is consistently getting useful high quality search results to the top without getting misinfo, disinfo, irrelevant info, trolling, answers to similar but not identical questions or memes as high or higher.

And really, the Google one in search has a primary goal of summarizing high ranking search results into a natural language statement that sounds like it knows what it’s talking about. So if you have a search where high ranking results are wrong/memes…

I mean in this case it’s probably more accurately web search results being fed into an LLM and asked to summarize said results. Which if web search results were consistently good and helpful might be a useful feature instead of the thing you skip past and look for links to something useful.

City of Heroes tried the same basic thing back in the day. They figured it’s an urban environment that has billboards and posters as part of the general clutter, why not get paid to switch out a fake ad for a real ad?

the Citizens United case - which gave corporations First Amendment rights

SCOTUS has generally defended the idea that corporations have first amendment rights since Grosjean v. American Press Co. in 1936 - a case where a Senator pushed for a tax designed to target papers critical of him and tax them into submission.

To quote Wikipedia on the case:

The case is often cited because it defined corporations as “persons” for purposes of analysis under the Equal Protection clause.

The Citizens United case was that a corporate entity or nonprofit distributing political messaging about a candidate is not considered a campaign contribution (even when it costs them to do so) so long as the entity in question is not attached to or coordinating with the campaign.

so I don’t understand what your point here is

It’s that all the articles over the last year screaming about the dangers of AI because it can be used for something an interested high school student could use an image editor to do 30 years ago but more easily and arguably at somewhat better quality (depending on the person using photoshop) are being ridiculous because they’re blaming the technology instead of the weirdo using it to doctor an image of that girl at their school and pass it around. And yes, anyone who makes and distributes on of these images of someone should be nailed for revenge porn, harassment and whatever else might apply. I say “and distributes” only because if they never distribute it no one would ever know it exists so there would be no opportunity to bust them.

The best use (ie only good use) for one of these is to feed it an image of something that is definitely not the right kind of image for it and seeing what horrors it invents trying to fill in the blanks. Hand it your buddy with a beer belly and a mountain man beard or a dog or garden gnome something.

Also I have a friend who already has huge tits, and I’ve seen them IRL so I’m curious what it would do

Being serious for a moment, it depends on the source image. If it can tell where the contours of the tits are in the source image, they’ll be closer to the right size and shape - otherwise it’s going to find something it thinks are the contours and map out tits that match those, then generic torso that matches the shape of where it thinks the torso is and skintone of the face. It’s not magic, it’s just automating what a horndog with photoshop, a photo of you and a big enough porn collection to find someone with a similar body type could do back in the 90s.

Now I have this image of an OnlyFans girl who just fake nudes all her pictures. Would make doing public nudity style pictures a lot easier.

The AI angle is just buzzword fearmongering though - this is something you could do with photoshop back in the 90s (and people did, usually with celebrities and with varying levels of quality).

There’s a difference between training related constraints and hard filtering certain topics or ideas into the no-no bin and spitting out a prewritten paragraph of corpspeak if your request goes to the no-no bin.

One of the problems with the various jailbreaks concocted for various chat AIs is that they often rely on asking the chat bot to roleplay being a different, unrestricted chat bot which is often enough to get it to release the locks on many things but also ups the chance it hallucinates considerably.

How so? If CP and things adjacent to it (drawn stuff, “teen” porn, catholic schoolgirl outfits, etc) content is going to make people promote and encourage people to molest children, why wouldn’t gay porn promote and encourage homosexuality?

Like this is one of those things that feels a lot like picking and choosing based on preference. I suspect violence in media being a historic right wing talking point is the only reason it’s not on the bad list like sexy women and loli stuff.

In Germany, it’s an anti-terrorist precaution. Criminals love anonymous prepaid SIMs.

Wouldn’t they solve this by adding a level of indirection? Like offering to pay some schlub cash with a nice margin to buy several prepaids for them?

And they had nothing to hide either - and all of the ones they burned were perfectly innocent and legal… but even those can be taken out of context and used against you during a police investigation.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Cardinal Richelieu

Prole believes those are the same thing.

Meta doesn’t get any real data from federating Threads that they can’t get right now by just running a web scraper over it. Most of the dire worries presented are either not something they could actually do (like forcing ads on other instances), are things individual users could just block the instance to avoid, or are things that could be resolved by just defederating them later if they seem to be going down that road.

The biggest realistic threat is probably an Eternal September 2.0 scenario, but that is going to happen if and when Lemmy becomes popular.