Mastodon

It's Almost Like it's All Pandering to an Audience

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

First up is a report from the Software Freedom Conservatory on Trump's new TRUTH Social app's licensing:

Today, we saw the Trump Media and Technology Group ignoring those important rules — which were designed for the social good. Once caught in the act, Trump's Group scrambled and took the site down.

Of course they're improperly using open source software.

Then there's this from their terms of service:

When you dig into the platform’s terms of service, however, things get a little more complicated. Users must agree not to “annoy” any of the employees and not to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the site”. So don’t be rude about Trump, basically. Users must also agree to refrain from “excessive use of capital letters”.

So free speech, but they've also already blocked people from selecting specific usernames, are branding themselves as a conservative social media site (will DeSantis call this site illegal?), their literal name is ALL CAPS, the guy this is trying to make happy uses ALL CAPS more than anyone else I know, and you can't use the service to badmouth the service or the people making it. But okay, free speech.

Which brings us to the cherry on top:

Twitter is publicly sharing research findings today that show that the platform's algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians and content from right-leaning news outlets more than people and content from the political left.

While conservative politicians love to feed their base with red meat about how biased every social network is against them, time and time again, we see studies looking into reach of content on these mega-platforms actually favors conservative content.

I have no problem with TRUTH Social existing because we do need more competition in the social media space. I'm just so tired of "free speech" to a lot of people meaning, "only things I agree with, and I should have no consequences for what I say." If people are upset with Twitter, then they'll leave for a better option.