Thread on censorship

1) Twitter told us last night that the reason hundreds of thousands of people was removed

from the platform is because they have to confirm their phone number or email

Then those numbers would be represented in our follower count

More from Twitter

Merry Christmas! How’s your Christmas going? Here is a collection of random tweets from Indian Twitter that will do India proud. Thread 👇1/n

The run up to Christmas started with Chavhanke running his Christmas special series on conversions. 2/n

A few days before Christmas, a ‘dharmic’ influencer started a campaign about whether Hindus should celebrate Christmas. 3/n

Right-wing blog OpIndia meanwhile thought it was an opportune time to dig out a 10+ year old video of Zakir Naik on Christmas greetings. 4/n

No Christmas is complete without Indology enlightening his followers. In fact he does it every year on Christmas. 5/n

Cosmic Penguin
@Cosmic_Penguin

So regarding to my "bombshell"...it's perhaps a bit less dramatic than many presumed, yet it still troubles me a lot, to the point that I wondered whether I should stop posting on certain things

I'm going to make a bomb shell statement here around the turn of the year, something so risky that I face prospects of the Twitter account being attacked or even banned.

It's about my very uneasy Twitter experience over the past 2-6 months, the worst I could ever remember.
— Cosmic Penguin (@Cosmic_Penguin) December 31, 2020

You see, I realized in the last few months that, by translating information and news related to one of the fastest growing spaceflight powers of the world...I inadvertently became a spreader of PRC propaganda.

And with me exactly 180 degrees away from them, I feel scared.

It actually started a few years ago - it's not hard to meet Chinese Twitter users interested in spaceflight, either those living overseas or find a way to climb over the wall. Not surprisingly, many of these S/F enthusiasts are interested in their own military too.

This steadily grew with my followers' count until the flagship Chinese spaceflight missions of 2020 (Chang'e 5 especially but also many others) brought in dozens of them liking/re-tweeting my info tweets sometimes, and similar no. of such followers every month.

I do casually check these new followers/users sometimes. To my horror, far too many of them routinely insults, attacks, mocks others who they see as "anti-China" or spread potential mis-information, even blatant attacks, that started off w/ their state media/spokesperson.

$Dickie Bush \U0001f6a2$

Dickie Bush 🚢
@dickiebush

The most valuable Twitter feature you aren't using:

Advanced search.

Knowing how to use it will help you find the hidden gems of the Twitter archives and 10x your Twitter experience.

Here's the step-by-step guide:

Most Twitter users know nothing about advanced search.

And the few that do think you have to access it this way: by clicking the three dots in the search bar, then clicking advanced search, then using these fields.

This is painfully inefficient.

Luckily, there is a better way.

You can leverage the power of advanced search right in the search bar using text.

And there are six different things you can create filters for:

• Date
• Keywords
• Number of likes
• Number of replies
• Number of retweets

Let's dive into how to use each.

Before we do that, you might be thinking, what does this do for me?

Twitter is a real-time platform.

But the Twitter archives are full of gems.

Especially from some of the most prominent people on Twitter, you can learn a lot by combing through popular things they've said.

The foundation of advanced search is the "from" query.

Every query will start like this:

from:handlename

An *important* note: do not include the @ before the user's handle.

.
@marcie_hatter

I’m not a scientist, so obviously do correct me if I’m wrong. (Heck, this is twitter, I don’t need to ask that do I?)

BUT a virus doesn’t mutate in *nothing*, does it, it doesn’t mutate when it’s on the handle of the supermarket door or even in the air you’ve just breathed out.

It mutates *in a host*. And the most sure fire way for a virus to find a wide variety of hosts in which to mutate is to do precious little to control the spread of the virus. To have policies which amount to “take it on the chin”. To have an ‘acceptable’ death level.

To allow the virus to run absolutely rampant through one section of the population (children) because stopping it doing so would mean making a politically unpopular decision (closing the schools).

Seen some people (scientists, I mean, not your uncle Jim) saying this virus is now more transmissible in children and like... what did they THINK would happen if you allow the virus unfettered access to kids?

It adapts! It adapts to its fucking hosts! It becomes better at infecting them! Like, the whole fucking point for a virus is to be able to make copies of itself. It’s actually not that arsed about killing or harming you.

$Adam O'Kane \U0001f4ad$

Adam O'Kane 💭
@adamokane

📱 Over the past 2-3 years, I screenshotted a ton of random tweets about social/product that made me think

Here they are, in chronological order, w highlights from @nikitabier, @BrianNorgard, @rsg, @Mazzeo, @prestonattebery, + many more

(sry for weird twtr cropping + threading)

literally have a folder of dozens of my fav screenshotted tweets on consumer social product stuff...and @nikitabier is well represented
— Adam O'Kane \U0001f4ad (@adamokane) February 13, 2021

h/t @Mazzeo

Ironies of Luck https://t.co/5BPWGbAxFi

"Luck is the flip side of risk. They are mirrored cousins, driven by the same thing: You are one person in a 7 billion player game, and the accidental impact of other people\u2019s actions can be more consequential than your own."
— Morgan Housel (@morganhousel) March 14, 2018

I’ve always felt that the luckiest people I know had a talent for recognizing circumstances, not of their own making, that were conducive to a favorable outcome and their ability to quickly take advantage of them.

In other words, dumb luck was just that, it required no awareness on the person’s part, whereas “smart” luck involved awareness followed by action before the circumstances changed.

So, was I “lucky” to be born when I was—nothing I had any control over—and that I came of age just as huge databases and computers were advancing to the point where I could use those tools to write “What Works on Wall Street?” Absolutely.

Was I lucky to start my stock market investments near the peak of interest rates which allowed me to spend the majority of my adult life in a falling rate environment? Yup.

$Anu Satheesh \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f3$