I don’t know about other folks, but speaking for myself I am getting absolutely firehosed with incessant disturbing news on a daily, sometimes hourly basis as my country faces becoming the world’s largest authoritarian sweatshop.

I literally don’t remember seeing this at all.

But if I did, it’s not surprising to me that I forgot about it. The orange chancre driving across his own freshly painted narcissist’s folly was probably the least harmful/obscene/amoral/anti-human thing that putrescent fuck did with my tax dollars that day.

There is an interesting problem with human moderators though. Once the entire population of Earth is posting on social media, are there enough humans to ever moderate it?

Yes, because the community itself can be the largest part of its own moderation. As Reddit has proven, they do not all have to be paid, and people who run their own groups would be happy to take more of that moderation work on just to ensure their own viability on the site. There can also be local moderation as well as top-down moderation: it does not all have to be sweat shop workers in the third world. Meta could do far more than they are now to limit sockpuppet and astroturfing accounts, and accounts that are not actually tied to a human being, all of which would have an oversized effect on cleaning up the filth, but they don’t.

Rather, time after time, year after year, people tell whoever is looking into [whatever the current scandal is now] that they reported this content and Meta came back with “Nope, we have looked into this and this content does not violate community standards.” What if Meta just took action on the community reports they already receive? Meta will rapidly and without recourse take down content that involves, for example, classic art that involves nudity, but double down on ignoring actual CSAM, as in this case.

Compare and contrast that with Meta’s vigorous policing of content that does NOT promote their agenda. Put those together and it paints a picture of a corporation that is very much involved with its ability to manufacture and sway public opinion, but has no interest otherwise in cutting off anything that makes it a dollar.

There are all kinds of helps and fixes to what has become an extreme moderation problem, every single one of which Meta has refused to engage despite having profits in the billions. Billions. You could hire an entire country of moderators with a fraction of that, but they don’t simply because they are not interested in any of that.

No one is on a Meta site to be served as a customer; they are there to have their data collected and analyzed for better efficacy of the propaganda and advertising Meta pushes their way and then sold on to other data aggregators or even the government, and to be used in any way that Meta likes without recourse to the user. And if a kid gets trafficked, or killed, or kills themself because of Meta, well that need not force any real change either. Meta’s gotten really good at making concerned noises about that kind of thing without ever changing their own part in how it happened, and continues to happen.

Or to put it another way, in today’s model, Meta sees itself as entirely separate from its userbase, and unable/unwilling to distribute any of its power among its users to make it better for everyone. But look at Lemmy, where there is little separation between instance admins and the general userbase: everyone can help moderate from the ground up. There is no money in moderation here at all, yet we have not descended into 4chan. How is it that Lemmy can do adequate online moderation (and Reddit before it) for free without a single dollar, much less without the billions of dollars available to Meta? Its because on Lemmy the community itself is the primary moderation tool, and while they talk otherwise, in reality Meta refuses that community paradigm almost entirely.

There’s another factor as well: it is far easier to moderate an online community that has always kept its standards high from the start than it is to come around and clean house when it all starts feeling a bit Voat and 4chan. Had Meta been adequately moderating all along, it would never have gotten this bad to start with.

TL;DR: Effective online moderation only looks like an impossible task when it suits a company to not even try.

That’s exactly what happened. She was in her early teens and he was in college when both their parents died, within like a year or two of each other. He became her guardian and then later, when he was in the military, he officially adopted her so that she would receive his military benefits.

They’ve both talked about it, especially for that five minutes in 2016 when he was making a run at the Republican nomination for president himself. Of all the nefarious shit Lindsey Graham has done, this is not it.

*South Carolina

Someone posted what they claim is an original on X but it’s a poolside pic, not a hospital pic.

Xcancel link.

Yeah, I agree with you. In the age of moving pictures when almost everyone has a video camera and mic in their pocket, why are we being forced to rely on a single posed photograph that can’t talk?

This is the best one I’ve seen yet. It has the correct players.

No idea, and you’re right: more questions are raised than answered, IMO. The photo was released along with a written statement via McConnell’s Senate web page.

Or, you know, McConnell himself could readily put all the whispers to rest.

It’s not like reporters have never interviewed someone in a hospital before, and if he really did talk with all those Republicans that swear he did in the last few days, twenty minutes at a time apparently, then he should have enough stamina to issue a few words to the public personally. If he can sit in a chair, he can sit in a wheelchair.

This is not live. It is a still, posed photograph issued by McConnell’s office along with a written press release, which would have been fine in say 1876, but technology has moved forward. Why the leap backward?

When a sitting Senator who is facing the possibility of a special election because everyone, including his own state’s governor, thinks his seat is probably vacant, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that he say a few words to his constituents, LIVE, in a publicly verifiable manner.

Inasmuch as this is only a single still, posed photo that was released along with a written statement via McConnell’s Senate web page I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.

Beyond the word of a handful of Republicans that say they have talked “with” him, McConnell still has not verifiably actually spoken to or with anyone since his hospitalization in mid-June.

Yes, and McConnell’s not the only one. Thomas Kean, a Republican representative for NJ, just came back after four months of total silence about where he was or why he was gone, for example.

We’re only hearing from McConnell now because if he had not done something to end the speculation about whether he was even alive, Gov. Beshear would have called a special election to fill his seat out from under him.

What REALLY grinds my gears, though, is that the ones doing it are Republicans, the ones repeatedly voting against those same protections for any one of us that might also have cause to be absent from work: they vote against universal healthcare, they vote against minimum paid leave, they vote against the entire social safety net at every chance they get.

The bastard smiling in that bed might as well be holding a piece of paper in his hand that says fuck you I got mine because that’s exactly what it’s a picture of.

I think that’s a very fair question, not least because of all the Republicans swearing they had twenty minute conversations with him by phone in the last few days.

If he can talk on the phone that long, then how is it that we only have one posed still photograph?

Oh god I think I just snagged a toenail on that edge.

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Good comment. To support your theory of injury to the brain, look carefully at the photo. (If you’re on desktop you can click on it to get a better view.) In my own layman’s opinion, his pupils do not seem to be well aligned, and there may be some ptosis that the direction of his gaze is minimizing.

They could be aligned and I’m just looking at it wrong, but a direct facing look would have gone a lot further to prove sentience, IMO.

I definitely respect your need for proof, especially in this situation: I think we could all do with more than a simple photograph when it comes to a lying liar who lies facing a governor who is itching to call a special election to replace him if he doesn’t issue some kind of proof of life right now.

However, the WaPo page itself is probably legit. The article directly links to a fairly hi-res image of that page on the WaPo site. Paragraph 5:

The statement included a smiling picture of McConnell with his wife, Elaine Chao, a tacit response to speculation online that he had died or was incapacitated. McConnell held a copy of Sunday’s Washington Post sports section in his hand.

Upvoted. I’m not sure I agree with you yet because of the perfect plaid in his shirt and the lack of obvious fault in the pixelization throughout, but I absolutely respect the receipts you brought.

Also, his wife is smiling. I’m not absolutely sure it’s because he’s alive, but okay.

I dunno. The timing is kinda sus, Lindsey leaving and Mitch coming back at the same time.

Hmmm.

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Your work is beautiful. I’d heard of Pixelfed of course but never actually seen it before, and it’s blowing me away. I’m looking at the explore page right now:

https://pixelfed.social/web/explore

I’m a fan of landscape and nature photography anyway, and I absolutely love this. I crave beauty in these times, and there is plenty of it there. Many thanks.