Following me on Twitter leads to a lack of scintillating insights. If anything you see plenty of retweets. I still miss the old social bookmarking service del.icio.us which is what I end up using Twitter like.
My timeline recently would show that I've been trying to keep up to speed with developments in the attack on the United States Capitol earlier this month. There have been plenty of consequences from that. Right now the various state National Guard elements have contributed enough troops to where there is a rainbow unit in the capital at heavy division strength. There are essentially five heavy brigades of troops to protect the capital. The Ohio National Guard is contributing a wee bit to the overall security situation.
A big push in the domestic media in the United States relative to the attack has focused on social media as an accelerant as well as radicalizing force. The Associated Press has now focused on podcasting as something else that needed to be cracked down on. USA TODAY notes a large cry on the part of both Trump supporters and far-right extremists claiming that censorship is taking place with so many online services pulling back like they have in the past nine days or so.
Technology does not necessarily provide answers to all our social problems. The wrong way to look at the social situation in the United States at the moment is to wonder if there might be a neat machine learning solution or other complicated solution that might be appljied to stop extremist militias from communicating with each other online. We're already seeing that now as we learn that Donald Trump had accounts on social networks that the average person would never have expected such as Twitch and Snapchat.
Isolating people without communications outlets creates pressure. Has nobody seen Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace? That line about communications disruptions is not a throwaway bit of bad scripting in the movie. People are not going to suddenly stop and change their minds about the world around them if you just take away all the social media users they predominantly follow and restrict their online interactions. That's not normal human behavior let alone what you would see in a horrible B-movie script.
Now is not the time to build the better cognitive mouse trap to bend people to your will. I understand the temptation exists right now for what are seemingly noble reasons. Doing the much harder work of talking to each other, not treating each other like mortal enemies, and acting like human beings acted not all that long ago is what is needed.
If you have idle hands still in need of technical work might I suggest picking up something from the snap requests category on the snapcraft forum and trying your hand at that instead?
from Planet Ubuntu https://ift.tt/3sxjkHc
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