I like the testing and hopefully they will share more detailed research findings in the next 6months. Especially on content moderation knowing they have decades of experience on this.
So I looked them up with my Mastodon account to try to follow but quickly discovered that not all searches for ‘BBC’ lead to accounts related to the BBC…l.
Outsourcing administration instead of doing it in house would be much cheaper for news orgs in the long run I'd think. Volunteer admins is one thing. Staff admins is another.
It’s like running your own email server in the early 2000s. For large businesses it totally makes sense.
Hobbiests can do it to if they are interested.
Most people will land at a “shared” service and let someone else handle the admin tasks. I’m afraid that eventually there might only be “outlook.com, gmail.com, and yahoo.com” so to speak, because it’s just the easy way to go for most people and economies of scale make it more feasible for the operators who find ways to get paid.
But people self host email today, and there are many more email orgs around including private work email and specialised services such as Proton mail focusing on privacy and security. It’s a good analogy.
An open standard like Mastodon will allow big players but also niche and small players, who can focus on specific communities or offering specific spins.
Totally agree. The smtp protocol server to server interoperability made email all work smoothly across many federated hosts and I think ActivityPub is more or less designed with a similar strategy, except for defederations. I guess the equivalent would be blocking spam at your smtp gateway, lol.
Do people actually self host mail? I remember watching some conference that said it is basically a full time job nowadays to get your mails actually delivered if you're not one of the big providers. Much easier to pay one of them and just use a custom domain instead, and I can easily see this being a thing for the fediverse one day too (assuming it ever gets big enough)
I selfhost my own email and you are absolutely correct it is musch easier to receive than to send. I use a 3rd party to send all my outgoing mail on my behalf.
Humm, they do charge for some options like the "business account" but have blocked even allowing you to use an email reader that is not theirs. I know, I've been trying use all the things that used to be free...
If you go to another domain (or even one of your own), you can still talk to all the people who use GMail.
Maybe GMail should choose to defederate, so GMail accounts would no longer be able to receive from or send emails to non-GMail accounts. Then maybe they could trap people and charge more.
For some equivalent posts we’ve seen significantly larger engagement numbers for Mastodon compared to X/Twitter, particularly given the relative sizes of different platforms.
we have had to do very little moderation of replies associated with our content.
So you get significantly larger engagement numbers and spend less time moderating. What’s left to ponder, amigo?
I do fear that as federation grows, then so too will potentially the same threats that happen on centralised social media. The fediverse is going to have a lot of vulnerable servers who won’t moderate or detect trolls & bots and over time the issue could become extremely onerous.
If a server were an obvious conduit for disinfo then other servers could defederate from it. But if it was different accounts on different servers mixed in with authentic users then it’s almost impossible to remove. What tools does mastodon / lemmy even provide to spot inauthentic behaviour? And because we’re talking different servers run in different ways there is no clear picture from above that can be formed in the same way that a centralized social media platform might have - identifying suspicious clusters of nodes or traffic.
As for federation’s future we’ll wait and see. Both bluesky and threads are talking of providing federation protocols - threads using activitypub and bluesky it’s own API. As for Mastodon & Lemmy I see a lot of positive interest in these things. The fact we’re commenting on Lemmy instead of Reddit says a lot.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan says deepfake audio of him supposedly making inflammatory remarks before Armistice Day almost caused “serious disorder”.
The clip used AI - artificial intelligence - to create a replica of Mr Khan’s voice saying words scripted by the faker, disparaging Remembrance weekend with an expletive and calling for pro-Palestinian marches, planned for the same day last November, to take precedence.
The AI fake emerged during an already-tense political row, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the pro-Palestinian marches in a different part of central London were “disrespectful” on Armistice Day.
Through a screengrab, I traced the recording back to TikTok and what appears to be the originator of the clip: an account called HJB News with the ironic tagline “Keeping it real”.
Mr Khan said organisations such as the Electoral Commission, which are responsible for keeping the UK’s elections “free and fair”, also needed more powers to deal with faked information.
TikTok said it had spoken to both the mayor’s office and the Metropolitan Police in November 2023 about the platform’s approach to this content and flagged how similar issues could be raised directly in future.
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All large news orgs and NGOs need to do the same - federate their server which becomes the source of truth, and then mirror the content over other social media which is not federated. This may or may not include Twitter. I imagine that over time having news and reporting across social media will diminish any advantage Twitter possesses and then news orgs / NGOs might decide if they want their content on a platform like Twitter that cannot be bothered with things like stamping out bots, trolls, inauthentic actors, or supporting a free and fair press.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France, has been found guilty of illegally funding his 2012 re-election campaign.
He was handed a one-year sentence of which six months were suspended, meaning they might be served by wearing an electronic tag instead of going to jail.
If the sentence is confirmed, he is most likely to be forced to wear an electronic bracelet, carry out community service, or pay a fine.
Several other people implicated in the Bygmalion case, like Sarkozy’s deputy campaign manager Jérôme Lavrilleux, were also handed suspended sentences.
He adopted tough anti-immigration policies and sought to reform France’s economy during a presidency overshadowed by the global financial crisis.
Next year, Sarkozy will be tried over allegations he took illegal funds for his 2007 presidential campaign from the late Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.
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