Neilly Tan

The new few weeks, months, years, will likely not be pretty. Get this guide to surveillance self-defense to your communities. It has printable PDFs as well as tailored reccomendations for certain activities, types of people, etc.

ssd.eff.org

Meta news and as we know Twitter and Big tech etc kinda makes you think about ethical tech job listings don't it. Is being on the trust and safety team of a company acting against the protection of vulnerable communities a trust and safety job. Trust, why? Safety in whom?

Some skeptics are decrying vibes based moderation, and yes, some loud voices right now will be the first to go "no, no, not like that" when such a standard is applied to one of *their* friends.

But. Singal stands out, even so, as a pretty clear-cut case of platform manipulation.

Story time.

Y'all know this, but once upon a time, I ran privacy at GitHub. I also advised the Trust & Safety team.

During that time, the Pizzagate psychos used GitHub as a repository to store photos that they used to harass the owners of a DC pizza restaurant.

So we had a lot of talks about...

Community mods have been leaving left & right since Singal got here. Before that, they've been overworked from the twitter influx. Bluesky needs to stop relying on free labor, stand by their community guidelines, and take action before expecting someone else to do their job for them.

Seeing all the talk about Singal's influence + BlueSky's nonaction is a very good reminder about how BS's admins did their damndest to try & sweep antiblackness under the rug in the early days AND went out of their way to make themselves unavailable

The tactic against trans ppl is 100% the same.

It’s genuinely shocking if you’re remotely familiar with the basic facts of trans care and youth medicine.

It is *profoundly* difficult to access gender-affirming care as a minor and the Times has printed more than a dozen articles implying that it is too easy.

The rage transcends As our institutions fail us, the specter of a more violent politics rises

As people cheered the murder of a healthcare executive online, Bloomberg ran a story about the epidemic of vandalism against Waymo cars.

These may not be 'coherent' political acts, but as our institutions fail us, rage transcends politics.

My latest:

www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-rage-t...

In the wake of the 2024 election in the U.S., many people are concerned about their digital privacy. EFF has decades of experience in providing digital privacy and security resources. Here are the top ten resources that we think are most useful right now 🧵 (1/13)

It’s really disheartening to see trans users having to step back from Bluesky because of the influx of transphobic harassment. Trans posters built the culture of this platform and it would behoove cis allies to advocate for their safety as Bluesky expands and they get targeted

Been talking about this with some other concerned friends, and it's maddening how the response on here has been, "oh but these bots are better than the bluechecks on the other site!!" like, sure, ok, but this is also a problem that is getting out of hand *here*

Screenshot from iPhone re voice to text voicemail, and submitting voice messages to training data

I’m really shocked by the new feature on Apple iPhone that transcribes voicemail… then asks your permission to submit someone else’s voice and message to their training data. This is not how GDPR/privacy works? There’s huge potential here for data breach 🤯

The last book from the late, great, David Golumbia.

Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research' A Hugging Face employee made a huge dataset of Bluesky posts, and it’s already very popular.

New from 404 Media: Bluesky may have said it won't use user data to train generative AI, but someone else just published a dataset of million Bluesky posts for "machine learning research". Already very popular dataset, your data may be scraped www.404media.co/someone-made...

re:pitfalls of federated platforms, i love how bots have begun to creep up on here

i remember seeing a tweet some months ago about how all of the bots on there are just like cobwebs that you learn to ignore lol

even if you move platforms, the dust will always follow. hello, spiders, my old friends

this completely, federated platforms fall into a techno-libertarian paradigm and privacy paradox by design.

not to be a hater (but also maybe a little) - bsky is much preferable to twt for, well, a lot of reasons but it still has a lot of pitfalls for all its promises

would love to join!

I could not sit silent while an elected official who spreads hate & lies that are getting trans people killed pretends to care about the future of the Internet. So I spoke up during Rep Nancy Mace's speech at the Project Liberty Summit & I would do it again www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-11...

Ableism teaches us to abandon each other.

Racism will disable you.
Transphobia will disable you.
Long COVID will disable you.
Genocide will disable you.
Climate change will disable you.

Do not obey when told to abandon the vulnerable.

Resistance & communities must be rooted in disability justice.

My latest anthology is Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire

You can find out more about my book plus a free plain language version and discussion guide on my website
disabilityvisibilityproject.com/book/disabil...

People have been so busy “letting themselves off the hook” for the last five years that millions are dead and even more disabled.

People have to start thinking about community as a whole - and stop assuming they will be the exception.

Death and disability can and does happen to everyone.