Monkeytime retweeted
Zelenskyy: "When our strikes reached Yandex data centers, it suddenly became little easier to breathe on many social media platforms. Many people noticed it.
There was less hate, less division, fewer provocations because there were fewer bots. It's pretty clear where those bots were coming from.
If they disappeared when Yandex went offline, this proves once again that Europe is not the source of the problems."
The big problem is that Russia figured out how modern society consumes information a decade ago, but the West hasn't.
There are millions of bots commenting and posting Russian propaganda. There are paid influencers spreading it, with Russian bots supporting their content.
There is a gigantic machine operating to radicalize and influence Western societies, and there is not enough defense in place.
It doesn't just influence elections, it sows discord, engulfs societies in culture wars, radicalizes teenagers, and shapes political decisions when elected officials fail to read the room.
That needs to change. And fast.
Monkeytime retweeted
It's almost as if we're seeing in plain sight a case of political retribution against a Black, female, Muslim member of Congress who's been repeatedly targeted by Trump for speaking out against him.
Weeks before elections.
Based on papers her dad filled out when she was a kid.
Monkeytime retweeted
DHS raiding a member of congress's home to search for immigration paperwork filled out decades ago by her now-deceased father really checks all the fascist police state boxes.
Monkeytime retweeted
Nick Sortor's audio about James Talarico is ai generated you can recreate the tests yourself see below 👇👇👇
What I ran it through:
Two independent open-source AI-voice deepfake
detectors from Hugging Face:
1-MelodyMachine/Deepfake-audio-detection-V2
2-motheecreator/Deepfake-audio-detection
Both are wav2vec2-based audio classifiers.
Method:
Extracted the audio from each MP4 with ffmpeg
Resampled to 16kHz mono
Ran each clip Krassenstein and Nick Sortor recordings through both models
Krassenstein
xitter.cf/krassenstein/status/21…
Sortor
xitter.cf/nicksortor/status/2109…
(full clip + 5-second windows)
Results:
Monkeytime retweeted
Expedia is a textbook case of enshittification. It is also a feature of allowing whole sectors of the economy to be rigged by online platforms, reinforced by the 2007 SCOTUS opinion in Leegin.
It should be a top priority for the new Congress to reverse Leegin and make coercive platform price restraints illegal per se.
Andrews v. Expedia, Case No. 2:26-cv-03743 (W.D. Wash.) courtlistener.com/docket/749…
Monkeytime retweeted
Expedia prohibits hotels from offering better rates on their own websites or other distribution channels, like non-Expedia sites Booking dot com, Priceline, or Agoda.
Then it enforces its scheme by demoting hotels in search results if they violate the policy.
Monkeytime retweeted
Why are hotels so expensive? A new lawsuit alleges that travel website Expedia is rigging the entire market, exploiting its leverage over 80% of all online bookings to inflate hotel prices in every booking channel by 15-30%.
It's an economy-wide price fixing scheme, not unlike what Amazon does to retail. /
Monkeytime retweeted
A one-time 5% wealth tax would bring Silicon Valley’s billionaires’ wealth back to where it was just 31 days ago, on September 7.
When it was "just" 178% higher than on January 1, 2023.
They’d rather let 3 million people lose their health insurance than let that happen.
Monkeytime retweeted
Harborplace won’t be torn down this year after all baltimorefishbowl.com/storie…
Monkeytime retweeted
Blood boiling. Not a good look for OpenAI or Greg Brockman here:
"ah nice" in response to "a hack to get around nytimes paywall" in his efforts "to scrape" The Times website. After many points on his bragging about OpenAI's substitution for news. /4
Monkeytime retweeted
“Artificial intelligence analysis” without any sourcing or methodology or transparency that can’t be duplicated cannot support load bearing factual claims in journalism. The incentive to Just Make Shit Up is obvious
Bizarre that @ClaraJeffery reposted this nonsense; it was a 5-day operation to round up runaways from foster homes, kids taken by parents in a custody dispute, and other bad situations. Nothing like a massive trafficking ring with 163 duct-taped kids in underground cages.
Monkeytime retweeted
No one was there taking pictures for the cover of Time Magazine when my army engineering unit was digging mass graves outside Fallujah for all the men and boys the marines killed after refusing to let any males leave the city, then treating everyone who remained as a combatant.
Among the most unforgettable images of the Iraq War is the photo of 1st Sgt. Brad Kasal being helped from Fallujah’s “Hell House” by LCpl Chris Marquez and LCpl Dane Shaffer on November 13, 2004, during the Second Battle of Fallujah.
Blood soaked and still clutching his 9mm Beretta, Kasal became a lasting emblem of sacrifice and the bond between Marines. Inside the house, he had been shot by insurgents 7 times and hit with shrapnel from a grenade blast after he threw himself over a wounded Marine. Gravely wounded and bleeding heavily, he still refused to be pulled out until the rest of his men were accounted for.
Those actions earned 1st Sgt. Brad Kasal the Navy Cross. The picture, and what he did that day, stand as a clear expression of the Marine Corps ethos: courage under fire, loyalty to one another, and the refusal to leave a fellow warrior behind.
Monkeytime retweeted
90% of Democrats in today’s CBS/YouGov poll
want the Democratic party to focus on passing Medicare for All. Party leaders are in the 10%.
Monkeytime retweeted
Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty today; one of the things he said was:
“I emailed United Healthcare’s leadership, posing as an investor managing $58 billion. Unlike my other experiences with the company, I was contacted back within 1 hour.”
Damn.
Monkeytime retweeted
my feeling is that, as a journalist, you should have enough integrity and backbone that if a subject of your reporting kills themselves, you don't feel the need to frantically cover up everything you've written about them.
hey @benryanwriter, why did you delete all of your tweets and substack posts about him?
Monkeytime retweeted
This and the six week Claudine Gay media meltdown make it clear that there’s nothing our commentator class loves more than an ostensibly race-neutral excuse to take high status black people down a notch. This output is clearly bat shit and wholly disproportionate






























