Social Control Media and 'Linux' Foundation Accelerate the Death of the Web
EARLIER this week we wrote about what Facebook had done to its Social Control Media and how the Facebook-connected EFF responded to that [1, 2].
A British copycat of the EFF (which habitually conflates issues like privacy and free speech with mass immigration, even illegal smuggling) has just published a blog post about that ("Musk and Zuck: Engineering Free Speech").
As Ryan has just put it: "They make these "AI Chat Bots" now for Facebook and Twitter. Their only goal is to pretend to be people to "drive engagement". It's basically fraud."
They also wish to have no liability/accountability/responsibility over whatever junk those bots spew out.
They just say "FREE SPEECH!"
Social Control Media is basically a dying business. Ask Microsoft how LinkedIn is doing...
Nobody is spared. It's safe to assume that YouTube still loses lots of money, as does TikTok (the Chinese government can subsidise those losses; it stands to gain from the censorship, propaganda, and other harms).
Is it just Social Control Media?
Is it bigger and broader a trend?
What is the Web as a whole becoming if not a giant cesspool of chaff and LLM slop, regurgitated by "bullshit generators" (as RMS calls them)?
If that's not bad enough, someone has just told us that Linux Foundation is ending the last vestiges of Firefox. It does seem so, plus the obligatory openwashing of Chrom*. Those "alternatives" merely help Chrome, which is proprietary, become synonymous with "the Web". Several years ago the Linux Foundation took a Mozilla project under its armpit (Servo) and did almost nothing with it for several years.
The future of the Web does not look good. HTTP/S is fast becoming little but as a transport layer for this proprietary thing (with DRM) called "Chrome" - a platform for 'webapps' (JavaScript, WASM, and more). It's the "new Flash". █