Jason 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸

mutant freedom now. youth worker. social work student (he/they)

[Audit Office (ANAO) @ANAO_Australia]

Contribution open for the management of Centrelink automated decision-making performance audit https://t.co/rnvnQmqYEr

[IT Guy @T3chFalcon]

Someone searched for a Munich publishing company on Google. the AI Overview came back with:

"Yes, [company] is known for dubious business practices."

then added a summary. red flags. tips for users to avoid the scam.

confident and structured but was completely made up.

the sources the AI cited said none of that the AI mixed the company up with genuinely shady firms and invented connections that existed nowhere on the internet.

the publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist. Google didn't respond adequately.

so they went to court.

the court's ruling:
AI Overviews are not search results. they are Google's own words. Google rewrote the web "in its own words and according to its own structure." therefore Google is the author. therefore Google is liable.

Google's defense: users know AI makes mistakes and should double-check.

the court's response: that's not how publishing law works.

Google's statement after the ruling: "AI Overviews are designed to reflect information that already exists on the web."

the information that destroyed two companies' reputations did not exist on the web.

the AI wrote it.

Google published it.

a court just decided those are the same thing.

every AI search engine. every chatbot. every platform that takes information and synthesizes it into a confident answer is now looking at this ruling.

When your AI gets it wrong, who pays?

[Greg Baldwin @GregBaldwinIroh]

Hard truth…

I can speak freely because I’m 65 years old and my pocketful of fucks is seriously depleted.

Working as a paralegal at various studios in LA for thirty years…I had the opportunity to observe studio executives closely.

They’re generally a slippery and clueless bunch who shouldn’t be allowed near anything remotely creative…but the new regime at Paramount is straight up evil.

I assure you.

These soulless bastards have nothing but contempt for a show about grace and redemption and the struggle against fascism.

ATLA is a mystery to them.

They. Do. Not. Value. The. Franchise.

[Joe Merrick @JoeMerrick]

This is absolutely atrocious and a deathknell for many websites

Serebii should be ok as a large portion of our traffic is direct due to our reputation, but this is horrendous for all individual sites everywhere.

These things scrape our sites then kill us. I see no logic to it.

[Jason 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸 @jasxnyz]

@maximumwelfare @abcnews @ABCmediawatch I agree, I was only thinking about insurance just then. Poorly worded

[Mukhtar @I_amMukhtar]

They are now publishing an antisemitic caricature of the only Jewish party leader while accusing him of antisemitism.

[Jason 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸 @jasxnyz]

@RickyBenjamin8 @sja900 No gatekeeping

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

Evil websites like Libgen, Z-library, and Sci-Hub had pirated millions of academic books and papers.

They've been shut down, and rightly so.

We shouldn't use them anyway. We should make billion-dollar academic publishers richer.

Anyway, here's how to access these libraries:

🚨DO NOT DO THIS!

[Internet Archive @internetarchive]

The web is disappearing 🕳️

According to a Pew Research Center report, 26% of pages from 2013-2023 are no longer accessible.

But that’s not the whole story.

In a new study published in Internet Archive's book, VANISHING CULTURE, data scientists working with the Wayback Machine have found:
16% have been restored through the Wayback Machine.
56% are preserved before they disappear.

Preservation is the remedy for cultural loss.

📚 Read VANISHING CULTURE free from the Internet Archive

📖 Download & read: https://t.co/BrawXOwMBr
🛒 Purchase in print: https://t.co/EB58IliqDm

#VanishingCulture #DigitalMemory #InternetArchive #BookTwitter

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.

Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.

Here's what happened:

Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."

And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.

Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.

The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."

Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.

Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.

Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.

Same playbook with Hanes:

Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."

Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.

But it gets even worse...

Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.

Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.

They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.

The mechanism is simple but terrifying:

If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.

Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."

Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.

Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.

So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.

You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.

"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."

3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.

This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.

And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.

"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.

[Robert Silverman @BobSaietta]

Using facial recognition tech, the Knicks surveilled a trans woman, tracking her every move out of fear she'd show up on MSG's tv broadcast

And they can do it to any "enemy" of Jim Dolan, who's built his own deep state. From @NoahShachtman
& me @WIRED https://t.co/K1cni5P9QC

[attractive wastrel @UrbaneUrban]

it’s even worse than it sounds. this went on for two years, and ultimately they banned her from MSG for the crime of being trans in public (and potentially on broadcast television).

[Jason 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸 @jasxnyz]

@Tion888 @abhussy He ejaculated. ‘came’ isn’t a verb used to describe urination.

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

🚨 BREAKING: The FBI has successfully extracted deleted Signal messages from a suspect's iPhone via notification storage, the place where all your notifications are stored for up to one month.

Notification storage stores data from all messaging apps, it's a big flaw in iOS. But there's a way to turn it off...

[John Scott-Railton @jsrailton]

BREAKING: You checked the weather this morning.

And you just told a surveillance company where you sleep.

Meet #Webloc, used by ICE, cops & foreign govs to track 500m+ phones.

No warrant required.

Our latest @citizenlab investigation + how to protect yourself 🧵/1

[Hugo Guerra @HugoCGuerra]

I finally discovered why they are doing this! The new Kindle devices have ads in them, which you have to pay extra to remove them. I’m assuming they couldn’t put ads on the old Kindles. Sooner or later the ads will play every other page! We live in corporate hell now!

[Dr. Ghada Sasa, PhD 🇵🇸 @drghadasasa]

I just read the new Haaretz article about how Israeli planted pines are suddenly dying en masse and it is absolutely worth dissecting. Here are a summary & my observations as a Palestinian scholar who writes on green colonialism. 1/

[Jason 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸 @jasxnyz]

now that we’re in between elections, it’s time for the @Greens to go One Member One Vote for our federal leader

[katexbt.hl @katexbt]

Wow, LinkedIn just got caught in a huge scandal.

Here's what's going on:

> Every time you open LinkedIn in a Chrome-based browser, LinkedIn’s JavaScript executes a silent scan of your installed browser extensions.
> The scan probes for thousands of specific extensions by ID, collects the results, encrypts them, and transmits them to LinkedIn’s servers.

It gets worse:

> The scan doesn’t just look for LinkedIn-related tools.

> It identifies whether you use an Islamic content filter (PordaAI — “Blur Haram objects, real-time AI for Islamic values”)

> whether you’ve installed an anti-Zionist political tagger (Anti-Zionist Tag), or a tool designed for neurodivergent users

Huge L after L