Interrupting the Chud-O-Sphere

A Format Update, Dear Reader

Why are you getting a Stuff Keeps Happening on a Friday? What is this madness?

Hey y'all. I am changing up some stuff about Stuff Keeps Happening. I'm going to be experimenting with stuff over time, but part of the changes I'm trying out includes more frequent, but shorter editions of Stuff Keeps Happening. For now, expect at least a Monday post with more throughout the week, with one primary story and a handful of interesting links and tidbits in the "More Stuff" section.

I'll be continuing to tweak stuff and find a good rhythm. If you'd like to hear more of my thoughts on these changes, check out this video on YouTube.

With that said, let's go to the main story.

The Chud-O-Sphere

The US Justice Department has just kinda upturned the right-wing chud-o-sphere with two major moves: an affidavit detailing Russia's efforts to influence social media conversations in the US, as well as the outing of Tenet Media—a right-wing media organization—as being secretly funded by Russia to the tune of millions of dollars.

YouTube has now taken down Tenet Media's channels, and several high profile right-wing influencers who are deeply associated with Tenet are on their back foot, including the likes of Tim Pool and Dave Rubin.

If you don't know who those guys are, I'd like to trade brains with you.

Notably, the influencers themselves were not listed as perpetrators of the crimes, but instead were—at best—useful idiots. At worst, they knew exactly what was going on but the money was too good. I'm talking like, $100,000 at a time good.

Exhibit 10A from the affidavit covers the other side of things: a plan to seed hundreds of social media accounts which claim to be from every state in the US. They even had a plan to spread the accounts out so that there'd be four from each state: two active accounts, two in waiting in case the active accounts got banned.

The pdf has one redaction of note, which occurs several times. The document is a translated Russian brief which refers multiple times to a redacted group referred to as "U.S. Political Party A," citing that "U.S. Political Party A" is "currently advancing a relatively pro-Russian agenda [which] could be exploited…"

To summarize: yes, there are swarms of fake accounts using either trained professionals or AI products to churn out destabilizing sentiment in online discourse while also funding right wing chuds to continue curating extremist followings.

More Stuff

A measles outbreak in Oregon is happening among children, likely due to abysmal vaccination rates.

Despite originally refusing to comply, Elon Musk's Starlink internet service is now blocking Twitter in Brazil per court order.

OpenAI has stated that they wouldn't be able to create their services if they had to abide by copyright law when training their AIs. Maybe that's a sign, y'all.

Microsoft has "clarified" that you can't disable their AI-powered Recall system which literally screenshots your computer periodically. They had accidentally released an update which listed the feature under the list of optional features, when they actually didn't intend to make it a toggle.

Finally for today: No Man's Sky finally a real video game: they added fishing.