Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions

[Time_Traveller]

Twitter/X Will Use Your Posts For AI Training And There's No Opting Out
17 October 2024

[...] As per the company's updated Terms of Service, users who post, submit, or display content on Twitter now automatically grant the platform a "worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose."

This license includes the right for Twitter to analyze the text and other information you provide and leverage it to enhance its services, including "for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type."

Moreover, Twitter reserves the right to make your content "available to other companies, organizations or individuals, including, for example, for improving the Services and the syndication, broadcast, distribution, repost, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services," presumably suggesting that not only can Twitter itself use your artwork to train its AI models, but it can also share it with other developers who'd be willing to help the platform "improve the Services".

https://80.lv/articles/twitter-x-will-u ... pting-out/

Sounds like selling your posts to companies without you agreeing to it.

[firestar464]

This honestly doesn't change much from what OAI and other companies are already doing

[firestar464]

How Republicans pushed social media companies to stop fighting election misinformation

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics ... r-AA1sDcE6

Here's one notable part of the article that stood out to me:

In October 2023, a few months after Jordan sent subpoenas to Meta, Google and other tech platforms, the longtime venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen published what he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”

The essay’s many short, declarative sentences gave off a punchy, defiant vibe. It set out to argue that society had lost its way and that the tech industry would lead the world into a bright new future, if only naysayers and regulations would step aside.

“We believe that there is no material problem — whether created by nature or by technology — that cannot be solved with more technology,” Andreessen wrote.

Blocking that progress are a range of “enemies,” he added, ticking them off on a list: Fears of existential risk (a likely reference to runaway artificial intelligence). Sustainability. Social responsibility. Trust and safety. Tech ethics. Risk management. Credentialed experts. Central planning.

It's honestly quite disturbing to see so many internet futurists espouse ideas like this. The right-wing belief that society would prosper if only the powerful and/or the rich were less restrained has hardly ever ended well. And yes, a lot of these tech dudes have an interest in booting out Dems from the White House. Andreessen in particular had invested in JD Vance's venture capital fund and even endorsed the Trump-Vance ticket.

[Tadasuke]

All the poor creators on X...

Before October 17th, you could opt out of having your posts used for generative training. The new amended terms and conditions have made it impossible to do so. X owns everything you post on X and can do everything and anything with it!



I see creators deleting everything and moving out from X...

Nothing is sure in life. Many people are actively trying to make life worse for others. As if life wasn't hard enough...

[wjfox]

[raklian]

[weatheriscool]

In a First, AMD Overtakes Intel In Data Center Sales
Epyc and Instinct rule the roost—for now.
By Josh Gulick November 6, 2024
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/i ... nter-sales

When it comes to the data center space, Intel has always been king. But it appears that AMD is pulling ahead as we close in on the end of the year. Both chipmakers have seen sales in the data center market increasing steadily for all of 2024, after noticeable drops at the end of 2023. But AMD’s resurgence has been more pronounced, resulting in its first-ever top spot in the data center segment with $3.5 billion. That’s a year-over-year increase of 122%.

AMD attributes its data center sales growth to its Epyc processor sales, naturally, but it also points to the AMD Instinct GPU as a growth driver. As we noted last month, AMD’s new Instinct MI325X GPU accelerator is a beast.

[wjfox]

Dump Twitter

If you stick with Elon Musk, you’re complicit.

November 8, 2024

The oligarchs won. When the markets closed November 6—the day Donald Trump was declared winner of the presidential election—the combined wealth of the world’s 10 richest people, nine of whom live in the United States, had surged by a combined $63.5 billion. It was, Bloomberg reported, the top 10’s biggest one-day gain in net worth since Bloomberg started tracking this multibillionaire cohort in 2012.

Never mind that 23 Nobel Prize–winning economists signed a letter last month affirming that Trump’s economic policies will be a catastrophe for the economy—something you don’t have to be a Nobel laureate to understand. Let go of any illusions you still harbor that the prosperity of the world’s richest people depends on a thriving economy. If anything, the oligarchs stand to do better when the economy (and the country) go to hell.

The single richest billionaire, and the most toxic, is Elon Musk. When Musk woke up on the morning of November 6, he was worth $263.8 billion. When he went to bed that night he was worth $290.3 billion. This one-day gain in his net worth exceeded 10 percent. Musk spent $130 million to reelect Trump and got back $26.5 billion; this may be the most profitable single investment of his storied career. And the financial returns are only beginning. Even if Musk never assumes his promised role as efficiency czar—the acronym for the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, was once a word to describe Venetian monarchs—Musk is well positioned to prosper under Trump. He can, reports Lora Kolodny on CNBC, “look forward to regulators and intelligence agencies winding down some or all of the 19 known ongoing federal investigations and lawsuits against Tesla, SpaceX and X, formerly known as Twitter.”

Ah yes, Twitter—or X. Whatever you call it, the social media site was Musk’s primary tool to elect Trump. In Bloomberg’s Tech Daily newsletter for November 7, Kurt Wagner writes that Musk “turned his feed into a Trump-inspired billboard for his more than 200 million followers,” that it “became a major source of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories,” that Musk “re-shared posts from the former president’s supporters, not all of them accurate,” and that Musk turned X into “a much more powerful version of Truth Social.”

Even if you don’t follow Musk on Twitter, you can’t escape his politics there. After the presidential debate, which of course Kamala Harris won handily, Wagner logged onto X and found himself inundated with “Trump won” posts from various accounts that he didn’t follow, including those of Donald Trump Jr., and Libs of TikTok, which despite the name is very much on the far right. These posts were fed to Wagner by X’s algorithm, which was rigged to deliver pro-Trump messaging. Writing in Slate, Farhad Manjoo calls X a “white-supremacist hellsite.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/188156/ ... ve-twitter

[weatheriscool]

[Time_Traveller]

I doubt many people would agree on his terms in Europe.

[firestar464]

It would be then necessary for NATO to boot the US, given Trump's collusion with Russia and other shenanigans

[wjfox]

Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after the US election

Tue 12 Nov 2024 02.44 GMT

Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 700,000 new users in the week since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.

The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach 14.5 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.

Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offered an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and policing harmful behaviour.

“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.

“The more liberal kind of Twitter community has really now escaped from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... trump-musk

[Time_Traveller]

Bluesky adds 700,000 new members as users flee X after the US election

Tue 12 Nov 2024 02.44 GMT

Social media platform Bluesky has picked up more than 700,000 new users in the week since the US election, as users seek to escape misinformation and offensive posts on X.

The influx, largely from North America and the UK, has helped Bluesky reach 14.5 million users worldwide, up from 9 million in September, the company said.

Social media researcher Axel Bruns said the platform offered an alternative to X, formerly Twitter, including a more effective system for blocking or suspending problematic accounts and policing harmful behaviour.

“It’s become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else,” he said.

“The more liberal kind of Twitter community has really now escaped from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... trump-musk

Perhaps, a replacement for FT instead of Conspiracy Social Network.

[firestar464]

Tbh though it's still based in the US. That's still a security concern

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts

Wed 13 Nov 2024 11.22 GMT

The Guardian has announced it will no longer post content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from its official accounts.

In an announcement to readers, the news organisation said it considered the benefits of being on the platform formerly called Twitter were now outweighed by the negatives, citing the “often disturbing content” found on it.

“We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X,” the Guardian said.

The Guardian has more than 80 accounts on X with approximately 27 million followers.

The Guardian said content on the platform about which it had longstanding concerns included far-right conspiracy theories and racism. It added that the site’s coverage of the US presidential election had crystallised its decision.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/ ... -elon-musk

[Time_Traveller]

Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts

Wed 13 Nov 2024 11.22 GMT

The Guardian has announced it will no longer post content on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, from its official accounts.

In an announcement to readers, the news organisation said it considered the benefits of being on the platform formerly called Twitter were now outweighed by the negatives, citing the “often disturbing content” found on it.

“We wanted to let readers know that we will no longer post on any official Guardian editorial accounts on the social media site X,” the Guardian said.

The Guardian has more than 80 accounts on X with approximately 27 million followers.

The Guardian said content on the platform about which it had longstanding concerns included far-right conspiracy theories and racism. It added that the site’s coverage of the US presidential election had crystallised its decision.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/ ... -elon-musk

How many will follow after The Guardian?

[wjfox]

How many will follow after The Guardian?

Lots, I suspect. I think the US election has finally shown just how awful and toxic the platform is, and it's going to be untenable for most reputable organisations to maintain a presence there. I will probably post my final couple of tweets in the next week or two, basically wrapping up, and then directing people to Bluesky etc.

[Time_Traveller]

How many will follow after The Guardian?

Lots, I suspect. I think the US election has finally shown just how awful and toxic the platform is, and it's going to be untenable for most reputable organisations to maintain a presence there. I will probably post my final couple of tweets in the next week or two, by wrapping up, and then directing people to Bluesky etc.

Good luck with the official move to Bluesky and others. To be honest, I'm missing the fun since leaving all of them but perhaps, one day I will head back to Mastodon and Bluesky and class those as my main ones, but follow you and more scientific channels etc instead of Politics maybe that's why I had enough of it in 2022. Watch this space...

[wjfox]

Bluesky says 1 million people signed up for the platform in last 24 hours

7:37 PM PST · November 14, 2024

Bluesky said Thursday evening that over 1 million people signed up for the platform in the last 24 hours, making it one of the busiest days for the company. This also meant the social network crossed the mark of 16 million users overall.

The platform’s announcement comes hours after Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that Threads had seen more than 15 million sign-ups in November. He added that the Meta-owned platform has had 1 million sign-ups a day for the last three months.

[...]

At the time of writing, the signup surge on Bluesky in the last 24 hours also placed the app at the top of the free apps chart on the App Store in the U.S., followed by ChatGPT and Threads.

Bluesky is still much smaller overall than Threads, which has over 275 million active users, and X. However, the platform’s CEO Jay Graber posted earlier this week that Bluesky has a higher engagement than X.

“We also have a higher percentage of posters than most social sites, which follow a 90-9-1 pattern of lurkers-commenters-posters. We haven’t dipped below ~30% posters,” she said in a separate post.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/14/blues ... -24-hours/


-----


Stephen King leaves X, describing atmosphere as ‘too toxic’

Fri 15 Nov 2024 10.05 GMT

Stephen King has announced he is quitting X after describing the platform as “too toxic”.

In a post on X on Thursday, the author of The Shining and Shawshank Redemption wrote: “I’m leaving Twitter. Tried to stay, but the atmosphere has just become too toxic.” Referring to the rival platform launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, he added: “Follow me on Threads, if you like.”

This week, the Guardian said it would stop posting on X, citing concerns over toxic content on the platform. The German football club St Pauli, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis, the US TV journalist Don Lemon and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia have also announced they will no longer post on the site.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/ ... -too-toxic