F**king Mondays: I Hate "Threads", Reader Pushback, And The Big Cluster Bomb Blowup

It's that time of the week again!

Mark Zuckerberg surfing. Image via CNET.

After a short break, we’re back with the most popular column on The Banter: The F**king Mondays roundup!

Zuckerberg’s new social media network

There’s a new social media network in town, and I will have nothing to do with it. In the battle of the tech billionaire narcissists/sociopaths, Mark Zuckerberg has released what he believes will be a ‘Twitter killer’ — an Instagram like text app called ‘Threads’. This may be everything Twitter isn’t; safe, free from Alt Right crypto bros, properly moderated etc, etc. But I’m not going anywhere near it. Why? Because Facebook destroyed our old site, The Daily Banter, and I will never trust them again. I wrote this on Substack’s social media platform Notes as a warning to other publishers:

A warning to anyone jumping over to Threads: I spent a significant amount of money and time building a sizable Facebook page for my old site The Daily Banter. We had over 40,000 highly engaged followers, including some pretty well known media people who would regularly share our work (Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow to name a few). We also worked with other pages with hundreds of thousands of followers, and made a good chunk of change from Facebook mobile ads.

We spent years trying to combat disinformation, particularly on Facebook where much of the Russian content farms did their damage. Then Facebook reduced our reach by 90%, then slashed our ad revenue in half. This destroyed our business. I could pay my staff, but not myself. I lasted about a year doing that, and then had to fold. I got no explanation from Facebook. No point of contact, no way of resolving anything. Just some bullshit reply from Adam Mosseri, the then Facebook News Feed boss, on Twitter saying “you should have only seen a 25 percent decline”.

This is why I will never, ever trust Facebook/Meta or whatever social media spinoff Zuckerberg creates. It is a fundamentally dishonest, horrible company that harvests your data and sells it off for huge amounts of money. You own nothing on their sites. Not your data, not your followers, or even their contact info. They can, and will pull the rug from under you for no reason at all.

I get social media companies cracking down on hate speech, disinformation etc, but we did not engage in any of that. And still we got crucified.

What kind of content are we going to get on Threads? As Substack author Ann Helen writes, “what’s happening early on with Threads is that these influencers are experiencing their own kind of context collapse, where their vague, sometimes vapid messages are traveling toward a different type of audience.”

Case in point, J-Lo’s declarations about “true love”:

Elon Musk is a petulant man-child who has no business running a social media network. He has turned Twitter in a hellscape of sycophants, Russian trolls, and conspiracy theorists. He has also declared war on journalists and has hurt The Banter directly by throttling Substack links. But I’ll take that over J-Lo’s attempts to “connect” with me “in a new way”.

Also, Musk goes to war with people in the open so everyone knows where they stand. Facebook slowly choked us out over a number of months with no warning, and no way of appealing. We couldn’t purchase a subscription, get verified, or appeal their censorship.

Thankfully, I don’t have to decide. I’m posting primarily on Notes and on Post, and hope that both Musk and Zuckerberg’s platforms fail spectacularly. I will be monitoring Twitter for journalistic purposes, but count me out of Threads. I strongly feel that The Age of the Billionaire Social Media Toy has to end at some point, and I’m happy to help expedite the process.

Alien push back

A reader writes in response to my now unlocked piece on David Grusch’s extraordinary alien/UFO testimony to Congress:

Is there life “out there”? Certainly. The universe, even just our one galaxy, is immense, diverse, and filled with planets. And life, even just looking at the narrow sample we have on this one planet we’re on, is diverse, amazingly adaptable, and utterly unwilling to be restrained. Where there is a place and energy, there is life.

Has alien life ever visited Earth? If you mean microbes drifting down from passing comets or having hitched a ride on an meteorite, maybe.

If you mean intelligent built-a-ship-to-get-here life, almost certainly not. The distances involved and resources needed to cross them make the trip far, far, FAR, more difficult than people realize, even when they think they’ve taken those into account. One need also only look to the Drake equation to see the odds of there being an alien civilization in our part of the galaxy, let alone one capable of reaching us, are fantastically low. A depressing thought to any, like myself, who grew up on dreams of “the final frontier” and meeting what’s out there but, well, math.

As Ben notes, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. And while credible seeming people may be saying there is solid evidence, it would have to be examined in detail by several independent teams of scientists and all other possible explanations found to be lacking before we should get any hopes up.

And another:

I feel the same way, as a scientist. I've long acknowledged we are not alone, but like the author, I remain skeptical. Now, I accept the probability that we are being probed by intelligent life but have a hard time conceding to actual physical visits. Let's just say there are limitations to propulsion (and spacecraft size) and the sheer distances are a problem for any life form that is wedded to time itself. The only other possibility involves manipulating time, and I have every reason to think that is not possible on a universal level.

There’s a good conversation going on in the comments section with some fascinating insight from readers. Justin and I did a deep dive on the story in The Emergency Meeting Podcast yesterday where we covered some of these issues and listened to audio of Marco Rubio discussing it. You can listen here:

The Great Alien Debate

Biden sends cluster munitions to Ukraine

MAGA Republicans, pro Russia Twitter and the Alt Left are apparently outraged by the Biden administration’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine:

These weapons, as the Times editorial board describes, are terrifying: “Delivered by artillery, a 155-millimeter shell packed with 72 armor-piercing, soldier-killing bomblets can strike from 20 miles away and scatter them over a vast area.” As the Times op-ed continues: “As of today, 123 nations — including many of America’s allies — have agreed never to use, transfer, produce or stockpile cluster munitions.”

I would take the moral lectures from Alt political figures more seriously if they had condemned Russia for using cluster munitions during their illegal, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Clearly these are horrible weapons, but there is one salient point to remember here: Ukraine isn’t invading anyone. They are defending their nation and should have the right to use whatever weapons they choose to use, particularly ones the Russians are using against them. You wouldn’t give someone going into a gun fight a knife on the grounds that “guns were bad”. So yes, cluster munitions are undoubtedly bad, but this is war and Ukraine is being blown to pieces by a psychotic fascist. Ukraine says it needs to these weapons to win, so unless we want this war to drag on forever or allow the Russians to win, we should give them what they are asking for.

On the subject of Ukraine, I spoke to Askold Krushelnycky, a Times of London journalist over the weekend, who is embedded with Ukraine’s 10th Brigade in the eastern region of the country. He had some fascinating insight about the conflict, so have a listen when you get a chance:

Banter Special: Embedded With Ukrainian Soldiers, Askold Krushelnycky Reports On Putin's Bloody War

See you next week!

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