The internet’s not in a great place right now. Twitter is morphing into a weird right wing propaganda site. People are doing hurricane conspiracies. The presidential election in less than a month is driving us collectively insane. And don’t even start with the fact that last week saw the anniversary of the October 7th Hamas attack, which prompted everyone on the internet to be very chill and cool and normal.
It’s grim out there. So this week, let’s duck all the heavy stuff we always cover and focus on what’s really important - wacky online discourse.
Indigenous Spirits, Hurricanes, and You
A question as old as society itself - Is it anti-Native American bigotry to say that evil spirits are fake?
This all starts with the account oodhamboi, a prolific poster with 10K followers on Twitter and 360K followers on TikTok. Mr. Hamboi posted that Hurricane Milton happened because people in Tampa1 dug up Native American burial grounds on TikTok and Twitter. Several people helpfully pointed out this was nonsense, which oodhamboi called out as anti-Indigenous bigotry.
This spawned a great debate - is it bigoted against Native Americans to say that belief in ‘sky fathers’ and vengeful spirits and Native creation stories is dumb? It went about like you’d expect it to. The vast majority of people said this is all ridiculous, but a dedicated minority of insane posters held the line to say that yes, you need to literally believe in Native religion or else you were anti-indigenous.
As most good discourses do, this eventually spiraled out into even dumber splinter conversations. First we got “Photos of the northern lights require trigger warnings”
And afterwards, we got the idea that Native Americans are literally not humans like the rest of us, but somehow from a woke angle:
There’s a certain kind of political sentiment that takes an idea (for instance, that native people deserve a voice and respect) and turns that up to 1000 in contexts where it makes no sense. The idea that you can respect indigenous people without having to say their religious rites are literally true simple does not occur - you’re either with them or against them. That’s how you land in a spot where it’s bigoted to not believe in Native American creation myths, but also bigoted to believe in them as that would be cultural appropriation. You must exist in a superposition of belief and nonbelief. Delightful, honestly. A great distraction from the foul stench of the rest of social media this week.
Roblox’s Very Bad Week
Roblox, as I’ve mentioned here before, is one of the most influential things on the web that most people over 30 have no idea exists. Roblox is one of the largest video games on the planet, with some estimates at 200M monthly users and others at 380M monthly users. It’s predominantly aimed at younger kids, and functions more like a platform than a traditional video game. You can create your own areas, mini-games and levels of Roblox. It’s actually very much a ‘metaverse’, just without the trappings of VR. You can roleplay in Roblox, build palaces and cities, build video games within the Roblox video game - the possibilities are very, very wide. Users can even make real money building things in this ecosystem. Roblox allows you to sell custom items you’ve created or access to certain areas/levels, and shares the proceeds with creators. In 2023 they shared more than $700 million with Roblox creators.
But last week, prominent short-selling firm Hindenburg released a report accusing Roblox of inflating their user metrics and also allowing open trading of CSAM on the platform. Hindenburg is what you’d get if the Wall Street Bets subreddit gained sentience and some actual intelligence - they do investigations of prominent companies, write bombshell reports exposing things about those companies, and then short the stocks of those companies so that they profit when the reports are released and the company’s stock tumbles. They’ve got a pretty good track record of uncovering scams and unethical practices - they sunk the dubious EV company Nikola and uncovered scams run by one of the largest business empires in India.
Is Hindenburg right? Roblox says the report is spurious and fake news and yada yada yada. I have no opinion on the ‘inflating user metrics’ fight other than to note Hindenburg is normally good at this stuff. But on the kiddy diddling stuff, it’s not exactly a secret that Roblox is filled with predators. Bloomberg did a big expose about this months ago, where the main takeaway was that Roblox’s efforts at moderation are wildly insufficient given the number of kids on the platform. Combining kids and live chat and unmoderated spaces on the internet is always going to lead to child predators, so I’m not shocked that Hindenburg was able to find open, undisguised markets for that kind of CSAM material on Roblox.
Influencers in a Hurricane
You’ve heard me repeat it ad nauseum: Posting Is The Most Powerful Force In The Universe. It’s the founding theory of this blog. From that piece:
The first time I watched the Lord of the Rings films it struck me that while everyone knows the One Ring will warp your mind, characters still fall into the trap. The ring has a will of its own. It’s a malevolent force in the LOTR universe, and it whispers to you. “Think how much you could accomplish with my power”, it says. “Just pick me up and use me, you are the one destined to rule”.
These characters know what the ring is. They are fully aware of the trap, but they’re still snared by it.
Posting on the internet is the One Ring. It whispers to you how interesting and cool you are. It murmurs that you’re always correct and your views are important. It tells you that everyone will recognize how right you are this as soon as you hit the send button. Think how many people will agree with your ideas! Think how many people will laugh along with your jokes! The allure of posting whispers to us all, and we’re sucked in by the promises of fame, clout, adoration and more.
If you spend any time at all on the social internet, you can’t help but see people ruining their lives in various ways, just for the sake of posting.
Anyways, here’s a story from Forbes about how a bevy of influencers chose to not evacuate from the path of Hurricane Milton for the sake of creating awesome hurricane content. Influencer/scammer Carolina Calloway tweeted “I’m not evacuating for the hurricane. I live in Sarasota, on the beach, in evacuation zone A. For more great advice, buy my second book! It’s called Elizabeth Wurtzel and Caroline Calloway’s Guide to Life. It’s about to come out if I survive!”. Sentient dog turd Adin Ross jokingly offered to pay people to livestream the storm, then backed out after some small-time streamers were actually insane enough to do it.
Most of these folks were in the Tampa area or nearby, and ended up ok because the storm took a turn and the worst of it missed Tampa. But man… I gotta say, even as someone who talks about this constantly, I am still amazed at what people are willing to do for the sake of content and posting.
Do you think Elon lives in fear of what he created?
Links
Casey Newton has a good breakdown of what’s going on in the Google antitrust case. The government won the case that Google abuses its monopoly position in certain ways, and we’re now in the ‘remedy’ portion of the legal process where the judge decides what Google’s punishment will be. You may have seen comments about ‘breaking up Google’ - but while the Department of Justice might hope for that, it seems unlikely to happen.
In other Google news, Chrome is moving ahead with an update that may kill the internet’s best adblocker, uBlock Origin.
Underage teens are stripping on TikTok Live for digital currency, which does not seem like a helpful news headline for a platform desperately trying to avoid a total ban in the US. Also not a great headline when you’re being sued by more than a dozen states who allege your platform is harming kids…
A touching story about the connections a disabled man created before he died through online gaming.
WordPress drama keeps rolling.
Threads is very sorry. They’re sorry, they’re trying to fix it.
Freddie deBoer on TikTok Disability Kayfabe
The editors desperately trying to protect Wikipedia from AI gunk.
Posts
It kind of ruins the narrative to point out the storm actually turned at the last minute and mostly missed Tampa. Maybe the spirits were still active!
I definitely don't only come here for the random links at the end, but I hope that they never ever ever stop.
I'm confused by the hurricane streaming section. Surely the death rate for not evacuating is extremely low in absolute terms? I don't see how this is different from e.g. base jumping, which has a death about every 2000 jumps.