FluTrackers withdraws from Twitter - September 16, 2020 - Updated

[sharon sanders]

There are a lot of jokes circulating on twit now. Here is one about the replacement for the censor guru that was fired yesterday:

Craig Spencer MD MPH
@Craig_A_Spencer
16h

BREAKING : Twitter reportedly hiring Iver Mectin to tackle Covid-19 misinformation across the platform.

[sharon sanders]

Elon Musk

@elonmusk
·
6h

Spoiler alert
let the good times roll
38.6K
70.5K
629.7K

14h
the bird is freed
118.8K
329.3K

[sharon sanders]

Elon Musk Buys Twitter, Fires CEO and CFO

With takeover deal completed, Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, among others, are fired

By Lauren Thomas
Follow
and Alexa Corse
Updated Oct. 27, 2022 9:00 pm ET

Elon Musk completed his takeover of Twitter Inc. TWTR 0.66%increase; green up pointing triangle Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter, capping an unusual corporate takeover battle and setting up one of the world’s most influential social-media platforms for potentially sweeping change.

Mr. Musk fired Chief Executive Parag Agrawal and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal after the deal closed, the people said. Spokespeople for Twitter didn’t comment.

It wasn’t immediately clear who would step into those top positions. CNBC previously reported the firings.


more...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-completes-twitter-takeover-11666918031

[sharon sanders]

It appears we are getting a lot of support on twit. A sample:

All
Mentions
See new Tweets Notifications











Cliff
and 36 others followed you









Pam
and 11 others liked a Tweet you were mentioned in
People to follow on flu @florian_krammer @MackayIM @Fla_Medic @FluTrackers @marynmck @Laurie_Garrett @InfectiousDz @ChuBailiang @Lingling_Wei

[sharon sanders]

Eurosurveillance
liked your Tweet
Hi Everyone! We missed you. We will see how this goes.

A few things:

1)We are still the same. We do not shift to "mantra of the day."
2)Do not donate to us.
3)We do not promote or sell anything.
4)If you have any medical questions, consult your medical practitioner.

[sharon sanders]

It appears traffic to us from twitter is unimpeded. So for now I will continue to tweet the site. They are using us, so we will use them right back. Mike Coston says he found our H5N6 post about the new case yesterday on page one this morning. By the time I check we were down the line somewhere.....who knows where....not anywhere near page one. So apparently google search engine indexing runs in cycles?

Anyway....

We have received many favorable comments for returning:












Patricia Bruijning
and 9 others liked your Tweet

Thank you for all of the supportive comments!

The Team at FluTrackers


-----------------------------------------------------



Emrah Kırımlı.
@EMRAHKIRIMLI
·
2h
Replying to
@FluTrackers
Will we track this season?

--------------------------------------------


Carol Gold
@caroldgold
·
11h
Replying to
@FluTrackers
Welcome back. You are the reason I saw the approaching tsunami in January 2020.

----------------------------------------------




Mike Rinaldi
@ponzo54

13h
Replying to
@FluTrackers
Please stick around! I first found out about COVID from you - before anyone knew it was a virus, before anyone knew it was a coronavirus, and before it was called COVID. You were the first to report on both Ebola outbreaks and MERS-CoV as well!


---------------------------------------------


Pat
@Most765
Sep 22
Replying to
@FluTrackers
Just discovered you are back again. I’m so glad.

---------------------------------------------

And many more likes.....


Thank you everyone for supporting Independent Media with your likes!

[sharon sanders]

I spoke to Mike Coston about this and we are not changing our ways.

FluTrackers will remain the same. We will not capitulate to "flavor of the day" mantras. We are not a political or religious site.

We still do not take any government or corporate $. We are all volunteers from around the world.

We still are not asking for any donations in this pandemic.

Take care of you.

[sharon sanders]

[sharon sanders]

It appears that google has extremely prioritized acceptable media in their search engine results. It appears that government sources are first, then followed by acceptable main stream media, followed by lessor main stream media, then random main stream media. Anything "flublogia" is hard to find. For example using the search terms: H5N1 avian flu. Crof's H5N1 blog was on the first page of google search with these terms since about 15 years. Same with Avian Flu Diary. I specifically did not pick COVID-19 terms because that topic is saturated.

Page 1:








Michael Coston's blog Avian Flu Diary finally appears on page 14 of a google search with the following seven year old post despite the fact that he is a leader in the world on the latest H5N6 news for 2021:

PNAS: H5N1 Propagation Via Migratory Birds - Avian Flu Diary

https://afludiary.blogspot.com › 2014/12 › pnas-h5n1-...
Dec 24, 2014 — Covering Pandemic and Seasonal Flu, H5N1 `Bird Flu, Emerging Infectious Diseases, public health, community & Individual preparedness, ...


Vincent Racaniello's Virology Blog appears also on page 14 with an 8 year old post:


A single amino acid change switches avian influenza H5N1 ...

https://www.virology.ws › 2013/06/11 › a-single-amino...
Jun 11, 2013 — Influenza virus initiates infection by attaching to the cell surface, a process mediated by binding of the viral hemagglutinin protein (HA) to ...


No H5N1 blog by page 15. I give up. What is happening here? Has google search engine re-calibrated search result priorities so that only government mantra sites are found in the first few pages? If so, this is really counterproductive. As far as I can tell H5N1 blog and Virology blog are highly COVID-19 pro-vaccine. Has google has swept the internet with a broad brush to eliminate COVID-19 "misinformation"?

As for FluTrackers - we provide information. Our continuing recommendation is for people to consult their medical practitioner for all medical questions. We have a scientific library that is loaded with vaccine information including trials, prospective candidates, problems, efficacy, side effects, etc.

So if the google search engine is selecting whole classes of internet formats and pushing them to the back of the line - I would like to remind google executives that you too will be called to the post COVID-19 tribunals.

As a result of this observation, reluctantly, I am going to test our traffic from twitter this week to see what is going on there.

[sharon sanders]

Wow...desperate times....the best thing to do when you are in a hole is to stop digging....


Twitter is exploring a subscription option called 'super follows'

The potential feature, which is still in development and may not launch, would allow users to solicit tips or charge money for exclusive content.

more..

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-exploring-subscription-option-called-super-follows-rcna314

[Shiloh]

Social-Media Algorithms Rule How We See the World. Good Luck Trying to Stop Them.
What you see in your feeds isn’t up to you. What’s at stake is no longer just missing a birthday. It’s your sanity—and world peace.
By Joanna Stern
Jan. 17, 2021 7:00 am ET

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we lost control of what we see, read—and even think—to the biggest social-media companies.

I put it right around 2016. That was the year Twitter and Instagram joined Facebook and YouTube in the algorithmic future. Ruled by robots programmed to keep our attention as long as possible, they promoted stuff we’d most likely tap, share or heart—and buried everything else.

Bye-bye, feeds that showed everything and everyone we followed in an unending, chronologically ordered river. Hello, high-energy feeds that popped with must-clicks.

At around the same time, Facebook—whose News Feed has been driven by algorithms since 2009—hid the setting to switch back to “Most Recent.”

No big deal, you probably thought, if you thought about it at all. Except these opaque algorithms didn’t only maximize news of T. Swift’s latest album drops. They also maximized the reach of the incendiary—the attacks, the misinformation, the conspiracy theories. They pushed us further into our own hyperpolarized filter bubbles.

“There are bad people doing bad things on the internet—QAnon, white supremacists—it’s not that Facebook, YouTube and other social-media
sites allow it on their platform. It’s that they amplify it,” says Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The worst-case scenarios are no longer just hypothetical. People are shown things that appeal most to them, they click, they read, they watch, they fall into rabbit holes that reinforce their thoughts and ideas, they connect with like-minded people. They end up in their own personalized version of reality. They end up inside the U.S. Capitol.

Certainly social media isn’t alone to blame. And when the blame does fall on social media, the robots aren’t the only ones culpable. The silencing of President Trump’s Facebook and Twitter accounts revealed the opposite: The humans running these companies still have final say over what does—and doesn’t—appear. (And last I checked, we can still opt out of using social media at all.)

But at the heart of it all, this is still a gigantic technology problem: Computers are in charge of what we see and they’re operating without transparency...

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/social-...em-11610884800

[sharon sanders]

It's your Twitter anniversary! Celebrate with a special Tweet created just for you

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I have never seen this before (since 2009). Maybe they are trying to pump up the remaining accounts. lol

[Emily]

https://en.mercopress.com/2021/01/12/germany-and-france-blast-the-digital-oligarchy-for-shutting-out-trump-from-social-media-platforms

Germany and France blast the “digital oligarchy” for shutting out Trump from social media platforms
Tuesday, January 12th 2021 - 09:10 UTC

[sharon sanders]

We are down another 100 net followers for a total of a loss of about 400 in the last few days. We now have 25,300 followers which is pretty good for not tweeting since September! lol

[Emily]

I read that Parler's server provider is Amazon. Their investment in that area is apparently much bigger than their warehouse/shipping/media business.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-01/amazon-is-laying-the-groundwork-for-its-own-quantum-computer

https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08553

Simulation of Quantum Many-Body Systems on Amazon Cloud


As such they are an infrastructure provider. I'm not comfortable with political censorship at that level. So far they have provided no evidence of claims the website did anything wrong legally. I don't belong to the site so can't investigate myself.