Categories
Burningbird Social Media Technology Weblogging

Mastodon and Burningbird

The social media upheaval continues but things are starting to quiet down a bit. Oh you can’t tell this from the media, which is full of stories leading with “Elon Musk says…”, but that’s primarily because the media hasn’t figured out how to wean itself off Twitter, yet.

I quit Twitter the day that Musk reactivated the Project Veritas account. Even a lie would be ashamed to be associated with Project Veritas. Not so Twitter and Musk.

Out with Twitter

I didn’t delete my two Twitter accounts, because bots and trolls can snap up a previously existing username in 30 days once deleted. And I didn’t deactivate them because deactivated accounts are deleted in 30 days. What I did was post a last note where to find me on Mastodon, set both to private, and then walked away. I won’t even look at Twitter now, because doing so triggers ad impressions and that gives Musk money. I don’t plan on ever giving that guy money, and I’m severely curtailing the amount of attention I’ve giving him.

I’ll miss the folks that stubbornly stay on Twitter, but they’ve made their choice, I’ve made mine, and someday maybe they’ll wise up.

On to Mastodon

In the meantime, my move to Mastodon has had ups and downs, but has ended up on an up. My choice of kickoff point on mastodon.social was a good one (@burningbird) because the creator of Mastodon (Eugen Rochko), who is also the administrator of mastodon.social, is quite welcoming of new Twitter folks. No nonsense about content warnings.

Speaking of content warnings, I was told to use them, and told not to use them. My account on democracy.town was frozen and I believe it was because I did use content warnings when cross posting from Twitter. But I got into a disagreeable argument with another person about not using them when cross posting. A lose/lose.

Well, to hell with that server and any server administered by hypersensitive admins letting the power go to their heads. And to hell with other people’s CW demands.

Now, I use content warnings sparingly—primarily for larger posts or posts that contain what I deem to be sensitive material. If people don’t like it, they don’t have to follow me.

Mastodon and RSS

I did add some Mastodon stuff to my weblog. You’ll see a “post to Mastodon button” at the end of a story. And you’ll see my latest Mastodon entries in the footer. The latter comes from the RSS feed appended to each account in Mastodon (mine: https://mastodon.social/@burningbird.rss).

The really nice thing about Mastodon having an RSS feed is you can follow a person’s Mastodon entries in the same RSS reader you use for weblogs. Pretty soon, we’ll no longer be able to tell the difference between a weblog and a micro-blog.

Post to Mastodon

The post button is interesting (how-to). Unlike one centralized location for Twitter and Facebook, each person is on a specific Mastodon server, so you have to specify what server you’re on in the ‘toot this’ web page that opens. This is the nature of the federated beast. It’s no different than if you have a weblog or web page and you have to provide its unique URL when asked for it.

I also bookmarked the Toot dialog and use it when I post a link to Mastodon. I found using the dialog helps to trigger the link excerpt, while posting a link directly in Mastodon usually leaves the link as just a link.

The downside to using the Toot dialog is it logs me out of Mastodon, every time. This is a PITA when you’re using two-factor authentication.

Mastodon and Burningbird

My plan is to create my own Mastodon server, but I’m working through how I want to do so. I can spin up another Linode for it, or try putting in on this server. There are Mastodon hosting sites that are attractive, if for no other reason than you have to have SMTP access (for email), and it will be a cold day in hell before I try to run an SMTP service again. But I’m leaning towards spinning up another Linode and then using a 3rd party SMTP server such as Gmail.

The great thing about this federated universe is when I do create my own Mastodon instance, I can move all my follows/followers to it. I don’t believe I can move my posts to it, but really I don’t care about my older Mastodon posts. In fact, I’ve set my account up to delete them automatically after two weeks. Why burden mastodon.social with my old crap? I might be restoring my old weblog posts, but I don’t care about old Twitter/Facebook/Mastodon postings. These are just social media blurbs.

I do care about the people, so I don’t want to lose those connections.

When I do setup a Mastodon instance, I’ll spin you a tale of my trials and tribulations setting up a Ruby on Rails project. The one downside to Mastodon is it’s Ruby on Rails, an environment I have no experience with. I may also install something like PixelFed, which at least is good, honest PHP and Node.

 

 

Categories
Social Media Standards

Testing Tribel, counter.social, and Mastodon

Elon Musk’s Twitter antics are getting harder to ignore, so I’ve joined with others to look at social media competitors in hopes of finding that perfect Twitter alternative.

Hint: there aren’t any.

The Trouble with Tribel

The first app I checked out is Tribel, a social media app created by Omar Rivero, also known as the founder of Occupy Democrats.

Tweet by Omar Rivero talking about founding Tribel

I verbalized Tribel as “tribble” right at the start, which made me inclined to like the service. However, friendly associations aside, Tribel is trouble.

The first red flag for the service was when it asked for age and gender when signing up. There’s absolutely no reason for this type of information unless the people behind Tribel plan on doing some data gathering. If you don’t want the kiddies, then just put a disclaimer in at signup requiring that the person be over 18.

Hmmm.

Once reluctantly passed the intrusive sign on, the next roadblock is figuring how the system works.

Tribel doesn’t seem to have the word count limitations of Twitter, and as someone pointed out, you can edit your posts. But the system also forces you into behaviors that are annoying.

For one, you can’t just do a post and publish it to the world. You have to pick your audience, and then you have to select from a gawd-awful huge list of topics and sub-topics. If you choose to submit a personal post, then you can only share it with friends. If you do pick a topic, then it asks if you want to be a Contributor, when all you really want is to publish a damn post.

You could look beyond these design fails, but how people treat you on the service is something you can’t ignore. Woe unto you who criticizes Tribel, the software.

The screenshot below is an example of an exchange I went through when I expressed my unhappiness about some of the Tribel design decisions (specifically, having to choose from a gawd-awful list of topics). I don’t think in my entire life, I’ve been accused of being a traitor to the Democratic cause solely because of tech criticism.

screen capture from Tribel where I was told to get the hell out because of being critical of Tribel's tech

This screenshot demonstrates the biggest problem with Tribel: it is an echo chamber, similar to TruthSocial but falling over on the left. That the members are Democrats, or progressive, or liberal doesn’t matter: it’s an echo chamber; an echo chamber that exhibits zero tolerance for dissent.

I’m a Democrat and a progressive and a liberal…but I’m not a clone or a cult member.

Tribel promises to be a “kinder, smarter network.” It’s anything but.

counter.social and the 90s live again!

The second social media app I tried was counter.social. Unlike Tribel, it’s fairly simple to post…once you get past all the 5xx errors from a service that’s being hit with a lot of new signups at the moment (a problem all the apps are experiencing right now with the sudden interest).

Once you can access the site, your first thoughts might be, “The 90s called, and they want their web design back.”

It actually features a scrolling banner at the bottom. Wow, when was the last time you saw a scrolling banner? The rest of site is a jumbled mess of columns, all white text on dark background and featuring a lot of ‘stuff’ including that scrolling banner.

screenshot of counter.social featuring scrolling banner on bottom, left

Thankfully, counter.social does feature an ostrich mode in preferences that turns off much of the cruft, including the banner. You can access preferences by clicking the three dots next to your profile.

screenshot of counter.social with the cruft turned off

There is no option to change the coloring to dark on light. or make it less messy. The most you can do is actually make it more messy by adding more columns of stuff to the page.

Additional functionality including creating groups and lists and modifying the appearance is behind a subscription paywall. The amount you have to pay isn’t very much ($4.99 a month), but having to pay for what should be basic functionality isn’t necessarily conducive to increased participation.

I did find the folks on counter.social to be quite friendly. The service is still small enough to have a nicely intimate feel to it. Two things, though, don’t work for me.

The first is the design and layout, which is just too busy and overwhelming. It’s hard to see what’s going on. Even in Ostrich mode, it’s too busy. I suspect even if I could switch to a dark on light background, it would still be too busy.

added more columns to counter.social, and it is really messy now

The second concern—and the primary concern—is the fact that the service is controlled by one person.

The counter.social app, itself, is a fork of Mastodon (discussed next), by The Jester, a very well known hacktavist. In real life, The Jester is a man named  Jay Bauer.

snapshot of tweet by the jester noting that counter.social is a fork of Mastodon

The counter.social site promises a hate-free environment, and I have no reason to doubt this isn’t true. Moderation takes resources, though, and we have no idea how many resources counter.social has.

The funding for the site is a month-to-month operation. That’s one of the actual design elements: a progress bar tracking whether the month’s funding goal has been met. The site does tend to make its funding fairly quickly during the month, but the nature of the funding and  ownership make the service very precarious.

Frankly, I don’t want to trade one service that was purchased by a billionaire with another that could easily disappear or be sold.

I quit counter.social after my first impressions, but then decided to continue giving it a try (I’m @bbird). I might be able to learn to live with the 1990s design, but that single owner is likely to be a no-go for me. This leads me to the next social media app, which goes from one owner to no owner.

I’m on Mastodon. Somewhere.

Mastodon is a fascinating social media application, because unlike Twitter, or Facebook or counter.social, no one owns it. Or, I should say, everyone owns it.

My mastodon.social main feed page, using a dark text on light background

Mastodon is a federation of individual servers based on open source software and protocols managed by different groups or people located all over the world. When you sign up for Mastodon, you don’t sign up at a single entry point: you locate and find a server you’re interested in, and then sign up at it.

Once signed up, though, people can follow you regardless of what server they’re on and you can follow them back. So, I’m signed up at mastodon.social as @burningbird, but I can follow @someuser at phpc.social, and my posts show up for them, and their posts show up on my home page.

Each server may or may not have a waiting list, and each server sets its own moderation rules. In addition, each server may monitor or block other servers that they deem to be the source of spamming, hate, pornography, or misinformation. As an example, you can see a list of filtered, limited, and suspended servers for the Fosstodon Mastodon, to get an idea what type of servers do get moderated and blocked.

In addition, you can sign up at multiple servers if you wish. I’m @burningbird at mastodon.social, but I’m also @burningbird at phpc.social, and @burningbird at fosstodon.org. I can keep the separate accounts, or if I decide to stay with just one, I can migrate all my follows/followers to the Mastodon server of my choice. If I do migrate my account from one server to another, we’ll still be connected, and you won’t even know I’ve moved.

Best of all, I can install and setup my own Mastodon server at burningbird.net, and join into the federation—something I am seriously considering. The only downside to this approach is that I won’t have access to folks on a local server when I run my own. Which is why I may stay with an existing server, and why it’s important to sign on to a server that best matches your interest.

(If I do install Mastodon, it would be for personal use. I’ve done the running a server for multiple people in the past, and it was exhausting and very stressful.)

Of course, the freedom to sign up at multiple servers is also one of the problems with Mastodon: there’s no way to know who is authentic and who isn’t. I’ve signed up as @burningbird at three different servers. Someone else can sign up as @burningbird at other servers, and you won’t know who is who without some other way of authenticating the individual. In most cases, you’ll have to find the correct Mastodon user by following a link they’ll provide either at a web site, or other social media app.

(Note that Musk doesn’t consider authentication to be a big thing, since he’s turned the famous Twitter blue authentication checkmark into a marketing brand anyone can buy. I like what one person wrote on Twitter: the blue checkmark will become the equivalent of posting an Amazon Prime subscriber badge.)

From a usability perspective, Mastodon is about the closest experience I’ve found to Twitter, notwithstanding the expected growth issues related to a sudden surge of new users. You start out with light text on dark background, but you can change to the dark text on light background in Preferences. In addition, you can change to slow mode for your feed (new posts require a click rather than automatically scrolling), set image size, determine what happens when an image is hidden and so on.

mastodon preferences page

Unlike counter.social which tends to get into your face about contributing funds, the Mastodon servers typically include a request for donations in their About pages, and they’re not pushy about it. Having said this, if you do like Mastodon and you like your server and don’t want it to go away, consider contributing.

Mastodon isn’t owned by corporations, the Saudi government, or some rich guy. Because of the open source nature of the software, and the standardized open protocol of the federated access, trying to buy out Mastodon would be like trying to buy out the web or the entire internet. Not even a big bucks guy like Musk could do it.

What about Bluesky?

In the midst of all of this, Twitter’s original founder Jack Dorsey has popped up with Bluesky—seemingly his version of a federated social media app.

When I first heard about it, I signed up for the beta. If I get invited, I’ll probably check it out for grins and giggles. But will I stay with it? Unlikely.

To me, the biggest strike against Bluesky is the fact that Dorsey chose to go his own way on designing the federated protocol for Bluesky—the AT protocol—rather than work with the open source and open standards community. This type of arrogant indifference to open standards and its “I know what’s right, and I’m doing it my own way” attitude just stinks. I’ve seen it too much and have fought against it for years. I certainly don’t need to buy into it because one technocrat thinks he know better than anyone else.

Dave Troy touched on much of this in an in-depth piece that discusses Dorsey, his relationships with Musk, and their world views. What he wrote made me wary even before discovering the AT protocol. Read it, and form your own judgement.

Ultimately, it’s not the application or the technology: it’s the people

After testing the three tools, I’ve decided to stay with Mastodon. I’m still exploring the network, still considering what server I want to live on, but what I’ve seen pleases the open source “can’t be owned by rich assholes” part of me.

However, I’m not quite ready to give up Twitter, and it’s not because I’m enamored of the app. I actually find Mastodon to be better tech fit for me. No, leaving Twitter means leaving the best part of Twitter, the part that Elon Musk can’t and will never understand:

The people.

I have built relationships with folks out on Twitter. I have a good group of very smart people I follow and interact with. They’re in technology, Constitutional law, food safety, the environment, politics, news, and life. They can write amazing things in a very small space. They can convince, inform, instill wonder, spark outrage, inspire thoughtfulness, and make me laugh.

A platform’s technology is such an unimportant component of social media. Yes, you want to prevent security hacks, and you need to scale your app to fit the demand. Social media applications are complex and take real skill to manage. I’m not disparaging the abilities of the people who maintain a social media app.

But it’s the people that make the social media app, not the other way around.

Elon Musk doesn’t understand this. He never will. And it’s why I’m investing time in other platforms and encouraging others to do the same. Because someday I hope all the wonderful people I connect with on Twitter will be somewhere else, and I can kiss Twitter good-bye.

And in case you decide to pursue a Mastodon account, find me at @burningbird. Or you can always find me here, at Burningbird.

Categories
Social Media

Evil twin Twitter and the media

Musk took over Twitter, immediately fired most of the executive staff, and has seemingly lowered the restrictions on some of the more notorious Twitter offenders (of which sadly pathetic but proud killer Kyle Rittenhouse is one).

Musk’s own tweets would seem to support our worst fears of his impact on the site. This screenshot of a Hillary Clinton tweet and a Musk reply is a good example. Instead of joining with Clinton to condemn what was a heinous attack on Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Musk decided to jump onto the most-cringeworthy, fringeworthy conspiracies.

Musk implies there's 'more to story' on the Pelosi attack

What’s worse is the despicable and disgusting lie about Paul Pelosi is being allowed to flourish on Twitter. So much so that I’m wondering if Musk has told the people that handle moderation to cease their activities.

Good-bye Good Twitter

To celebrate Musk’s take over, the right burst forth in hate speech, including an astounding 500% increase in the use of the N word.

tweet about increase

Tom Fitton, that miserable excuse for a human being who wants to destroy the quality of life we still have, is claiming that Twitter is censoring a report on illegal ballot harvesting in Florida. The above-mentioned Rittenhouse is looking into it.

The reality is: there is no illegal ballot harvesting in Florida. The claims are a lie. A fact-checked lie. So Twitter is preventing an election lie, and that has the right so very unhappy. Which says a lot about the right.

But how long will the lies be caught and tossed? Already, the appalling and ugly-as-hell rightwing-generated myth surrounding the Paul Pelosi attack that Musk tweeted is dominating the service.

Meet Evil Twin Twitter

All the ugly activity—the Pelosi attack myth, the racism and bigotry—will end up driving sane people off the site. Many folks have quit already; moving on to singular writing or other social media sites. This leaves the toxic and the even more toxic to control what happens at the site.

Normally, folks who want to stay with Twitter would have a solution: just block everyone who is toxic. And in a way this would work. We could resurrect Good Twitter, and float it above its evil twin.

The problem, though, is the media. The media is used to examining Twitter trends to figure out what stories to cover, and for how long. If extremists on the right have excessive influence on these trends, and the media continues it’s lazy, click-bait behavior, Musk and Evil Twin Twitter could have a profound impact on what news is published.

Twitter and other social media sites have already had a wrongful impact on how news is covered—with major news organizations determined to normalize extremist rightwing activity in order to appear to be ‘balanced’ in its coverage based on loud howls of protest on social media.

I shudder to think how much worse this will all get with Musk in control.

Categories
Social Media

Twitter is about to be Musked

The Musk buyout of Twitter is all but done, and even before the blo…ink dried on the contracts, the scent of Musk permeates the social service.

According to the Verge:

Musk has a deadline to close the purchase of Twitter by October 28th. In a sign the deal is proceeding, Twitter froze its employees’ equity awards, Bloomberg reported. Anonymous sources tell The Post that the deal is moving forward in good faith.

Among bright boy’s planned changes? Mass layoffs of over 7500 of what he considers ‘low performing’ employees. This means we can kiss content moderation good-bye. Which means we’ll be inundated with spam, scams, misinformation, and most likely, Trump.

Twitter has always been my favorite social media site. It’s the best source not only for breaking news, but also the more obscure but in-depth news pieces that don’t always float to the top in our attention-grabbing spaces.

I’ve also enjoyed the brilliance of the writing. Anyone can write 10,000 words and eventually make a point—lord knows, I’ve tried—but it takes mad skills to do so in 140280 characters.

Then there’s the people. There are folks with a few followers, folks with millions, but regardless, they have something to say and we want to hear it. Twitter is good at this.

The old Twitter. Not the newly Musked Twitter.

No, the Musked Twitter will be monetized to a degree that will take our breath away (or smother us, whichever comes first). Every bad actor kicked off of the site will be welcomed back, starting with the worst of the worst, Trump. Forget trying to stop the spread of misinformation—if the lies mean profit, the more lies the merrier.

What’s scarier is the fact that the news media trolls Twitter looking for the stories it should cover. Twitter has already had a bad impact on news coverage—I hate to think how much worse it can get with Musk and his ego in charge. Probably All Trump, All the Time. Excuse me, make that All Musk, Trump part of the Time.

My days as one of the birds of Twitter are numbered.

 

 

 

Categories
Social Media

Outrage Porn

This week we’ve reeled from one outrage to another.

First, it was the letter DHS IG Cuffari sent to Congress, asserting that Secret Service people deleted texts after his department requested them. Followed by a claim that North Carolina is passing a bill making women who get abortions into murderers in the first degree. Then it was AG Garland sent out a memo that demonstrates he won’t charge Trump. This occurred in parallel with another outrage: Politico breathlessly claims that anti-abortion states will use geofence warrants to discover who is getting an abortion.

There were also assorted and sundry pronouncements, accompanied by exclamations and shouts of “How dare ____!” You fill in the blank.

Things aren’t great right now. We have an excessively dangerous political party controlling an increasingly dangerous court. We’ve already lost one right, bodily autonomy, and we fear we’re on the precipice of losing others.

At the same time, though, we’re going to miss the real dangers if we spend all our time up in arms about phantoms.

The items I just described are all good examples of these phantoms. They sound plausible, they imply danger, and the outrage us. But when you look more closely, the risks are minimal, the dangers not apparent. The outrage is more about driving attention than effecting change.

I call these phantoms outrage porn.

Secret Service deletes January 6 texts

Second Update

And, as expected, people are finally, finally beginning to question Cuffari, and his motives.

In addition, we’ve also heard that Secret Service Agents typically don’t even carry their smartphones in secure locations.

Update

It’s hard to get a clear story on what happened with these texts. Previously, the Secret Service said the texts were not deleted and were provided to the committee. But now they’re saying text messages were deleted because of the program they ran. At the same time, they’re saying texts had been given to the committee in the past.

So, am I wrong on this? Yes. The texts were deleted.

At the same time, I do no believe this action was based on some controversy,  covering up attempts to hide some agency-wide conspiracy to support Donald Trump. No, anyone who has ever made a major roll out of new systems in a large corporate setting will recognize what happened here.

The Secret Service deserves the flack it’s going to get. But no, the only controversy here is why Cuffari decided to send his letter last week, when he knew about the texts last year.

The Secret Service has had problems, not the least of which their behavior while on location. But there’s never been any indication of widespread support for treason in the ranks. A couple of agents wanting to get Pence into a car so they can move him to a place of safety is not an indication that the Secret Service is some form of shadow agency seeking to undermine our government.

So when Inspector General Cuffari sent a letter to Congress—totally out of the blue—making a claim that the Secret Service deleted texts about January 6th, and did so when his department asked for them, it called for us to examine the letter and its intents objectively. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen.

One well-known talking head after another breathlessly claiming the Secret Service is corrupt, deleted texts, calling for investigations and heads. Several even implied the Secret Service colluded with Trump.

Funny how people ignored some plain facts right in front of us. Facts, such as IG Cuffari being a Trump-appointed IG who has been heavily criticized for not doing his job; whose department is under investigation; who received a letter himself recently from Congress; who came to the job with some red state experience and a diploma from a diploma mill.

They also ignored the statement issued from the Secret Service, bluntly denying Cuffari’s claims; that if some texts were deleted it was because of a standard phone upgrade, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because the texts he mentioned were never deleted.

How do we know they were never deleted? Because when the House subpoenaed the texts, the Secret Service stated they would turn them over the very next business day after receiving the requests.

Why would Cuffari come out with this letter now? Oh, I don’t know, but I have a guess. Both Republicans and the media were on the hot seat because of the outrageous claims they were making about a little 10-year old rape victim getting an abortion in another state because of the SCOTUS actions.

Then there are all those calls for Biden to fire Cuffari.

But this is all just a guess.

North Carolina and First Degree Murder Charges

Update

This one now has an official Fact Check entry.

This one came to us not from the professional media, but one of the Twitter talking heads. A talking head who has since deleted the tweet, but I managed to capture a shot.

Tweet claiming women will be charged with murder for abortion

Even though he deleted the tweet, his work was done: the thing has legs. Just search on Twitter for “North Carolina abortion murder”.

You know what this is based on? Someone in the North Carolina legislature introduced a bill to add a state Constitutional amendment defining that people are people from conception and anyone that kills people is guilty of murder.

From this, Hultmark built up the claim that women be jailed until forced to give birth or sentenced to death if they aborted.

Folks, here’s the thing about state legislatures. They all have nutcases. Every single one has at least one fringe element who is typically ignored. Fringe elements file bills. Sometimes they file a lot of bills. And do you know what happens to these bills?

They die in committee. This particular bill didn’t die just once, it died twice.

Now personhood for fetuses is a real threat. We know states are introducing personhood for fetuses in their legislation. But not even this crazy GOP is crazy enough to put something like this into law. In fact, the GOP is twisting itself into a pretzel trying to say that aborting an ectopic pregnancy isn’t really abortion. Or that a 10 year-old terminating a pregnancy really isn’t getting an abortion.

The one thing the GOP does not want is even the remotest possibility of jailing pregnant women until they give birth, or executing a woman who gets an abortion. This is the bridge too far for the American populace, and the GOP knows it.

Bills are passing right now that are a danger right now. Our attention should be on them. Not a bill introduced February of 2021 that died in committee.

Maddow, Garland, and the Memo

This one is a bad one on Rachel Maddow. She discussed a memo that AG Garland released that seemingly re-affirms a memo AG Barr put that ‘talks about the importance of avoiding “partisan politics” in decisions regarding investigations and criminal charges and protecting the agency’s reputation for “fairness, neutrality, and non-partisanship.”‘

But, as others have noted since, this memo is boilerplate, standard, has been around for many administrations, and is no big thing.

I could go on, but the point has been made. Maddow and folks: do better.

I have a Geofence, you have a Geofence, we all have a Geofence

Last but not least is the Politico story released today that equates red states going after those getting abortions and states requesting geofence warrants. It then ties the two into making a claim that red states will use geofence warrants to target women getting abortions in other states.

This was Politico click bait. The publication is notorious for this.

First, a geofence warrant is based on a specific event. What police do is when there’s an event like a murder or bank robbery, it goes to a company like Google and asks for data for smartphones in the general vicinity of the event at a certain time.

As EFF notes, it’s a horrid invasion of privacy, and likely unconstitutional. A Virginia judge recently decided it was unconstitutional. But is it really that great a risk to women seeking an abortion?

Unlikely.

First, though geofence warrants are overly broad, they’re not completely without boundaries. These warrants are for cellphone data in the vicinity of a specific event within a specific period of time. They’re not endless trolling of all location data near abortion clinics that somehow will get tracked back to women in the state who may or may not be pregnant.

Even the reddest judge won’t stomach what will end up being a never ending netting of generalized location data for all time.

The example Politico used is anti-abortion people using ads to target people near an abortion clinic. This is nothing more than one company who used location data to display location-specific ads, who then got its ears pinned back by the Massachusetts state’s AG, and who promised to never, ever do that again.

There was no warrant related to this action. There couldn’t be, because there’s no event. Only the location.

That’s the key: there’s a difference between a generalized display of ads on your phones because of location and a police force vacuuming up all data for all smartphones in areas outside of their own jurisdiction in order to somehow capture that one woman that got away.

And how would these police be able to track woman A going to location B in order to do C? If you think they’re going to get search history data for anyone and everyone who searches for the word ‘abortion’, and then somehow magically trigger that into a warrant to wait to see if this same woman appears at any of the thousands of abortion clinics still operating in the country, think again.

Frankly, not even Alito or Thomas would stomach this one. OK, well, maybe they would, but I suspect Gorsuch, Roberts, and Kavanaugh wouldn’t want to come anywhere near it.

Fight Outrage Porn

I understand that people are wary and a bit paranoid, and frankly we should be considering the GOP is redefining evil daily, and SCOTUS is off its rocker.

But if we spend all of our time in a state of outrage over events that really aren’t outrageous, we’re going to burn out. Our senses will become numb. We’ll be drowned out in that chorus of “How Dare They!” and miss the real threats that come at us.

So when you hear a story that triggers outrage, just stop for a moment. Before you retweet, reply, share, or blast out to your followers, take the time to think about you just read or heard; to consider the source; to do a little googling of your own to see how very real the outrage is.

We all want to be the firstest with the mostest, but I would hope that it’s more important for us to raise the alarm when the alarm really does need to be raised.