That’s… Out of date at best.

The minutes from the BBC’s March (April? Around then) 2025 meeting specifically include the progress made on their overarching aim to ‘win the trust’ of Reform voters, using programming, editing choices, etc. As in, explicitly.

The BBC have never recorded, or evidenced, am intention to appeal to a specific section of voters before. No other political party has ever been singled out as the BBC’s ideological goalposts, not even when a party had been in power for over a decade, or when a party wins a massive majority of votes.

Reform UK are the first, and only party that is officially courted by the BBC. And no, there has been no mention before or after of any effort to balance viewpoint or maintain the trust of any other voters or (hilariously, I know) maybe go for some sort of neutrality.

I’m not linking to the minutes, because it’s only available as a pdf, because nobody should change their minds on the basis of a random link on social media, and because plenty of people have made a concerted effort to ‘spread the word’ apparently believing that if people actually see in black and white ‘we the BBC are aligned with Reform UK and have been for a while now’, posted by the BBC on a BBC platform, maybe they’d stop saying ‘the BBC is the truth incarnate and anybody who criticises it is a troll, foreign, or a leftist’.

I won’t post the link, because I don’t think people do that. I haven’t seen any evidence of it. Either most British ppl on social media support Reform and think BBC fealty is perfectly natural, or most are pathological liars, trolls, bad actors, or just don’t really care about much of anything.

I console myself with the assumption that most normal Brits are not on social media, that the right wing tend to be over represented online, and that I don’t spend much time in the left wing arena because, well, it’s not a fun place to be.

Anybody else? Google the minutes. It’s 3 pages long, you can read the whole thing in a minute or so. Then you can Google historical precendent, I suppose, or some sort of keyword search for previous equivalents, but you won’t find any.

And then, or if you can’t quite be bothered to do that: doing tell people that the BBC is fantastic and you’ll ‘protect it at all costs’ until you have done that minimal amount of research and agree with the policies. You can probably extrapolate that to any company, really.

Otherwise, people can only assume that you’re one of those voters.

Literally everybody can see exactly what was written, when, and from which IP address. Not only is that history maintained indefinitely on Wikipedia, it’s also downloaded by thousands of people around the world.

Everybody who has ever added a missing punctuation mark to a page is recorded in history, the specific date and time and page and action, accessible even if the world wide web goes down and Wikipedia ceases to exist.

I’m not sure if your ‘anonymous graffiti’ analogy is quite right, though I’m also struggling to imagine many places in my country where someone could graffiti on a wall and not be tracked down very quickly if necessary.

Oh god, I didn’t even look to see what changes they’d made to other articles.

Actually that should make things easier, there are processes for reporting repeated vandalism, and they’re much more efficient than ‘this person wrote one article badly’. I’ll have a look.

I get your point, but the 'real crux of the matter ’ is very much - what is the fediverse. That’s what an encyclopedia is for. It defines things.

Wikipedia is not the place to highlight or discuss the moral or legal standards that every entity must meet. That would be ridiculous.

Chicken soup is subject to at least 10,000 individual regulatory restrictions (no poisons, name must reflect content, pay this tax to enter this country, staff must be paid and free and blah blah, no more than x foreign substances, must not go rancid within this time frame, can’t be packaged in a paper envelope). Some, like the workers’ rights and fair pricing and amount of weird chemicals, are actually pretty important human rights issues that have very real, immediate effects of the health and wellbeing of various population groups.

Should they all be on the Wikipedia article for chicken soup? All of them? If so, I have news about the laws, restrictions, relations, challenges, emerging research, etc, into vegetable soup. And also tomato soup. And, in fact, every processed food. And if that looks a bit ridiculous, consider the ethical considerations of the tea industry. It’s horrific (source: I’m English). It’s been horrific for hundreds of years now and has literally ended nations, killed millions of people, and doesn’t look like it’s in the final stretch of being solved.

It is, therefore, probably too much to include on a page about a new cruelty-free brand of iced tea that’s just taking off. People would go to that page to read about that brand of iced tea, not tea in general, and certainly not the troubled history and socio-political scandals of the tea trade in general, unless they had a beef with the iced tea brand.

Which, I suspect, is what happened on the fediverse page. And I didn’t put the flags on the page, or remove the content, but I’m glad someone did.

Back in the day, we used to marvel at the mental fortitude of paramedics and war medics, who constantly see and deal with the most extreme accidents and horrors of humanity so that we, the public, don’t ever have to.

That burden does seem to have expanded rather. I legit think it might be less traumatic to triage and transport a selection of burns victims, traffic fatalities etc for a living than to moderate busy social media platforms.

At least in an ambulance you generally get fair warning what sort of unspeakable horror you need to attend next, and you can help them.

I suppose in the medical emergency industry you also don’t have to inform the disfiguring disease / patch of black ice on the road / tainted drinking water that ‘yep, sorry, you can’t operate here. Yes I know you’re just trying to get by but we do have a No Festering Gonorrhoea sign that you ignored before infecting this lady’.

TLDR: at some point community moderators (not the over zealous type) might need to be recognised as an emergency service

Someone put that on in the last 12 hours, and since then, some anonymous person just deleted the entire section lol.

I legit feel really grateful, I’d been going down a bit of a ‘either every source of information is corrupt and there’s no hope, or I’m losing my mind’ rabbit hole. I haven’t quite pulled the plug on Reddit yet, which may be contributing to that.

I prefer the whole ‘major additions and changes should be introduced in the talk section of a page so it can be discussed by the committee of reasonable good faith adults with lots of spare time and patience’ approach to Wikipedia editing, but in retrospect that may be a wee bit idealistic in current times. So the ‘one person complains and documents, another person flags, and another just deletes the entire thing’ is a process that may be a good compromise between The Way Things Should Be and how to edit Wikipedia with consensus and without being harassed by neo Nazis.

They did! The change log shows the main section of ‘I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here’s 600 words on how terrible the concept is’, and also reassured me that I wasn’t just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.

I’m bizarrely excited about it too. You can’t thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I’ll throw a vague ‘thank you!’ out into the world and try to pay it forward.

My next battle: figuring out why I can’t edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn’t think of ‘just edit it anonymously’.

I feel like the corporate American need for exponential growth and for endless feeds of mindless scrollable content is, maybe, not what people are crying out for on the fediverse.

There are so, so many other platforms offering both. They got shit, because exponential growth and endless scrolling feeds only ever lead that way.

I’m happy with one little corner of the internet that doesn’t always need to pump up its numbers month on month, year on year, and where I can scroll for a bit then get bored and go back to the real world.

In fact, I seem to recall an awful lot of people saying that’s the only way to engage with the www and stay sane. Or at least, have a fighting chance.

Maybe today’s major social media platforms will find new ways to hold the gaze of the masses, or maybe they will continue to decline in relevance, lingering like derelict shopping centers or a dying online game, haunted by bots and the echo of once‑human chatter.

Occasionally we may wander back, out of habit or nostalgia, or to converse once more as a crowd, among the ruins. But as social media collapses on itself, the future points to a quieter, more fractured, more human web, something that no longer promises to be everything, everywhere, for everyone. This is a good thing.

Man, something about this article really hit me. The internet used to be a playground, and we’ve all noticed it becoming noisier and nastier of late. But this article points out that it’s a legit warzone now, a flesh market, a prison.

We keep coming back like caged monkeys hugging their wire mothers harder and harder the lonelier they feel. Fuck this noise. It’s barely habitable for adults, it’s absolutely no place for the younger generations to grow up. Idk how we let it get so bad, or what to do, but the entire thing needs cleaning up.

I’m thinking more ‘anti competition law’ and ‘holding social media companies responsible for harms,’ as suggested in the article, but in my head I’m imagining some glorious expulsion of Elon Musk, advertisers, and data collectors from the world wide web, like driving the devils from the garden of Eden (which, btw, seems like a trick the Christian God missed).

The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households.

Or about 10 small countries. Not even being that hyperbolic: American households are fabulously, insanely wasteful of energy.

The rest of the world (barring places like Saudi Arabia, which are rarely used as moral or socio-cultural examples the world should learn from) has done the whole ‘What’s the point in trying to better the world when America and China do more damage than the rest of the world combined?’ debate decades ago, and we ended up deciding that we can’t control the worst offenders, and can only do what we can.

Literally any moral value or standard is subject to ‘but but but what’s the point if you can’t eradicate the problem entirely?’, that’s why it’s such a weak fallacy. Minimising absolutely pointless destruction of non-renewable resources won’t successfully save the environment tomorrow, but we can do it anyway, and if will help. We can’t eradicate theft, but we can do our best to pay for things before taking them. We know that being polite in public isn’t the 1 thing holding our society back from utopian perfection, but we do it anyway, because it helps.

We can all pinky promise not to murder or violently assault anyone, and pay no attention to the weirdo protesting that ‘What’s the point in not assaulting people when actually, cars and illness and unhealthy lifestyles do more harm’, because that person is presumably just looking for an excuse to hit someone.

And yeah, long story short: using ‘American households’ as an example of how insignificant AI’s energy usage is is kinda like saying smoking is safe because it’s actually less harmful than spending 6 hours a day on a busy road in Delhi. If you don’t spend 6 hours a day near busy roads in Delhi, you won’t exactly think ‘oh that’s ok then’. And if you do, your lungs need all the help they can get and you’ve got all the more reason to be wary of smoking (I say this as a smoker btw).

Huge areas of Africa and the middle east are becoming uninhabited because of climate change. Those people all need food and water, and the western world does not have the resources or inclination to house and feed them all. It is almost unanimously described as the worst crisis humanity has ever faced, and the practical solution - stop wasting fossil fuels and non-renewable resources when there’s a viable alternative - is so insanely easy.

Billions of lives could be saved, if everyone on the planet agreed to be mindful of energy waste. Not ‘stop using energy’ or ‘everybody become vegan and live in houses made of recycled banana peel’, just quit wasting.

But there are entire countries who don’t seem to get the whole ‘acting together for the betterment of humanity’ thing, so that incredibly simple solution won’t work. And all we can do in the meantime is to lead by example, make ‘responsible consumption’ a lifestyle rather than an option, and hope against hope that enough Americans and Chinese people decide to reduce their dependence on 1000 daily images of shrimp Jesus or an endless output of bullshit papers written by AI to pretend that’s what science means, in time to maybe save some of the planet before wildfire season lasts 12 months a year.

Also: it’s not even like you’re gaining anything from constantly using AI or LLMs. Just fleeting dopamine hits while your brain cells wither. Of all the habits one could try to reduce, or be mindful of, to literally save lives and countries, anybody who honestly thinks generative AI is more important is very addicted.

Also also: it’s just so shit.

The only time I remember feeling genuine panic at a software update was years ago when my laptop suddenly decided it urgently had to restart. It took longer than I’d expected to boot up again and it kept showing the message ‘All your files are exactly where you left them’.

I have no idea how or why but that really felt like a threat 🤣 of course when it finally turned on I was scouring all my folders trying to remember what I had where to see what they’d accidentally deleted. I felt stupid for being so suspicious then went online and ‘all your files are exactly where you left them’ was already turning into a meme. It made people angry as hell.

And thinking about it, if someone is unlocking their front door and you interrupt them to say ‘excuse me, sorry, just wanted to say: all the stuff in your bedroom is exactly how you left it,’ they probably would not feel reassured.

It is not a reassuring thing to hear. Anyway, fuck meta.

Who on earth signed off on this name?

Is is targeting the (presumably few) people who want to leave WhatsApp and/ or Facebook messages but who have good feelings about platforms called ‘X’? There are 25 other letters of the alphabet.

A Napoleon complex, as I understand it, is when a high achiever feels insecure due to a reasonably insignificant, but noticeable, flaw, and gets so bitter and defensive about it that it draws attention from their achievements to the flaw and their bitterness.

Eg, man rises to the top of his country, conquers others, spreads and empire that, for all its flaws, revolutionised global concepts and uptake of democracy, human rights etc. English critics mainly focus whether he’s a few inches shorter than average.

Whereas Elon: did not do any of that, and the ‘minor flaws’ are his remarkable personal anti-magnetism.

It’s absolutely unbelievable that the richest man in the world still can’t get any friends, let alone partners, who can stick around longer than a year or so. He was brought up with the finest education money could buy and every opportunity, and has not managed to invent, discover, or excel at anything other than buying things.

Not only has he not conquered a multitude of countries or spread anything other than anger and personal dissatisfaction, he couldn’t even rise to the top of his own country.

And, not being funny, his own country was not the stiffest competition in the field of ‘really respectable, well liked, competent people’. White South Africans do not dominate the league tables of Cool Chill Folk Who Fairly Earned Their Worldwide Respect, and all he had to do was keep buying companies and collecting money and not being such a raging wanker as to be a threat to multiple countries’ national security. That is such an achingly low bar, and I truly do not believe anyone except Musk could have failed to clear it.

TLDR: Napoleon ruled his country and many others, leaving a new global standard for law, human rights, freedom, and democracy (which is even more impressive considering he was a kinda imperialist knob).

Musk’s talents are being astronomically rich, and against all odds, setting a new global standard for ‘that white South African pro-apartheid guy who turned out to be unusually racist and anti-meritocracy’. How bad do you have to be before billions of people would recognise you from that description? The man was born on a golden throne and has managed to make a name as the most distasteful turd in the open sewer miles away.

I think the ‘we’ is referring to fascists, not British citizens.

And alarmingly, that’s not even a joke. There’s a clear cult of personality thing being whipped up, and I legit don’t see what he’s got in common with the baying mob other than racism, fascism, and a taste for violence.

Why would so many people be convinced to bus up and down the country spewing hate at migrant hotels, raising flags everywhere like we’ve fallen to USA levels of idiocy, at the behest of a man who doesn’t share their: country, nationality, culture, religion, class, upbringing, life path / experience, financial or social position or priorities, or literally anything other than… well, I can’t think of anything other than fascism, unhappiness, and probably the petulant anger of someone who can’t figure out why nobody likes or respects them.

And I don’t think many of them are consciously aware of the unhappiness or thwarted desire to be a valuable member of society, so fascism it is.

Just so you know, this comment is visible on the internet for anyone to see, and has been for 2 years.

When they actually introduce all these fantastic new features, we will know who to blame for the idea.

I get your point but I don’t think Russia recreating the first acts of WWII on a NATO country can be dismissed as a ‘distraction’ from many real world events short of actual official world war 3, or Putin being arrested or something.

There is also a strong argument that illegally invading a country is always quite a significant event, certainly to the people in that country.

Yeah, but most of us have this funny idea that war is a bad thing and we don’t want to do it again.

I’m pretty sure there are enough ‘pro-war, show those bad guys who’s boss! We ain’t no pussies’ people to form a formidably large army, though, which seems like a win-win for everyone.

Those who want war can go ahead. Everyone else can continue what we’ve put so much effort into for the last 100 years or so. And all the ‘big fan of war as long as it’s happening to somebody else’ people can choose to be very quiet, or shipped off to the front lines.

I suspect the internet would suddenly take a very pacifist turn.