Joshua Casey 😷 @JoshuaACasey@social.cleverlibre.org

This paper went viral and was presented repeatedly as evidence (by influencers) that COVID vaccines were killing people. Then it was placed under review. Fact-checkers *and the AUTHORS* disputed how it was framed on Twitter.

Just because something is published doesn’t mean labeling interpretive framings of it as “misleading” is “censorship”. Here was one clarification trying to explain what it did and did not say:

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-study-emergency-idUSL2N2X21LM

A study of compound swears used in Reddit comments from 2006 to 2020 has found that the most popular combination is ‘dumbass’ (3.6 million comments). The 444 combinations used only once include ‘sleazenozzle’ and ‘bastardbucket’.

A Christmas Eve story: had my 2nd day snowboarding with the family today, and then headed home from Tahoe, exhausted (probably not the best idea to exhaust myself boarding immediately after Covid recovery, but... too late). On the long drive home we stopped at iHOP for dinner. iHOP is not good food, but after a day on the mountain, it sure feels like good food. When we got there, there were a few other families, but as we were getting ready to leave we were the only ones left...

Once again, Elon doing crooked shit on Twitter. The new views counter is completely fake and bumps it up by random numbers. It’s the Facebook video views lawsuit all over again.

https://twitter.com/straydognz/status/1606193571505115136?s=46&t=ZATJLQNHIeKgkjouyQ9MWw

#Instagram #censorship #meta #sexworkerrights #discrimination

@emilygorcenski I’d love for the people saying that quote tweets keep this place free of harassment to talk a walk through the replies on some of my posts 😵‍💫

Mastodon should add quote tweets. They chose not to on purpose, it was a mistake

QTs are essential to have a discourse, a back and forth discussion. To let people add context, expertise, recommendations, jokes. To make Mastodon a town square, not isolated feeds

To prevent dog-piling and harassment I'd give users the option whether they can be QTed and the ability turn it off for individual posts. We don't need dunks but we do need quotations

A user on the cybercrime forum Breached is selling what they claim is info scraped via Twitter APIs from 400 million Twitter profiles, including email, name, account name, follower count and in many cases phone number.

The seller told me they scraped the data using the same set of weaknesses in Birdsite APIs that allowed the scraping (and publishing) early this year of profile data on 5.4M Twitter users.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/54-million-twitter-users-stolen-data-leaked-online-more-shared-privately/

They said they scraped the data via an exploit that was patched earlier this year, in the login api, and specifically the part of it that checks for duplicate accounts.

That, according to the seller, leaked the Twitter user ID, which was then converted via another Twitter API into a username. They also said that same iterative process worked for user telephone numbers.

The vulnerability that was reportedly used to scrape the previously dumped 5.4M twitter user data set was reported to Hacker One on Jan. 1, 2022.

https://hackerone.com/reports/1439026

The seller released 1,000 new records as a teaser, and is trying to get Twitter to buy the data for an undisclosed amount.

They also pasted a number of "celebrity" accounts directly into the sales thread. Curiously, this record set does not have the phone number associated w/ my Twitter account. But it was in the 5.4M scrape that got released on the same forum last month. However, I removed the burner phone number from my profile around the time the seller said they scraped this data (beginning of 2022).

The data in both the teaser and the 1,000 user file includes follower counts for each user, and a spot check on about a half dozen of them show follower numbers consistent with what Archive.org and Sociable says about follower accounts at the beginning of Jan 2022/end of December.

They are selling it through the escrow service set up by the administrators of the forum, which is what you'd expect to see in a real offering for this volume of data.

Journalists will never stick around this app long term sadly unless it adds quote posting. We desperately need it to communicate effectively, build on each others ideas, and add crucial context to posts. These are things replies simply do not accomplish. Also quote posting or reblogging does not = harassment! Tumblr, for instance, has had the feature since the beginning. We need it here now too 🙏🏻