Danny Ockilson - he/him @danny@justweb.dev

Hi, we are BBC News Labs #introduction

We’re charged with driving innovation for BBC News. Our team of technologists and journalists explore how new tools and formats affect how news is found and reported.

You can find out more at https://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/ and we’ll be posting here about our work

This account is part of an experiment from BBC R&D in establishing a BBC presence in the Fediverse.

There is no "overpopulation".
There is an "underdistribution".

That is a feature of Capitalism.
Creating unbearable conditions of inequality is the mechanism through which the Capitalism-ideologues brag of enticing or forcing people to labor for the further enrichment of the unproductive already rich into unusable opulence.
We have very many times the resources we need, just not where it is needed, because of Capitalism's inherently low efficiency.

Pls boost so I can show my wife how a toot can go round the world

(we are boarding a long haul flight and will be on the other side of the world when I turn my phone back on, so even with 0 boosts I think this will be a sound demonstration)

Promotion driven development and the idea of level appropriate work are the bane of big companies.

Once you get to a critical mass of senior people at a company, you start incentivizing complexity and redundancy because for those people to get promoted they need to show company-wide or organizational impact.

Why do you think Google has so many chat apps instead of everyone just working to make one or two of them great?

Noticing a lot of instance admins lately who are feeling pretty down.

Please remember that the vast majority of admins and moderators in this space do not do this work as a day job, nor as paid work. They have other projects and deadlines and bills and family and actual living plants. Please have the good grace to be patient with them 💜

*By which I mean do not abuse, harass, dox, threaten etc. Jeez.

I know people have elucidated greatly on why Zucc is bad, but I want to hone onto one specific event.

In 2010, Facebook entered then then-newly-opened country of Myanmar under their “Free Basics” programme. Zucc would underwrite the data costs of the mobile networks. In exchange? Well, Facebook would be ‘free’ for everyone to use in the country.

This had the (un)intended effect that everyone in Myanmar associated Facebook with the Internet.

Facebook, at this point, did not have a Burmese-speaking moderation team. They would not for a while. This is important to note. The Facebook algorithm started amplifying anti-Muslim content. Because that’s what people wanted to see in Myanmar. The military-backed civilian government even spread this content on Facebook. Because of this, such content spread far and wide.

It spread so fast that it catalysed a racial and ethnic genocide in Myanmar of this Muslim minority group. It took Zucc three years into the conflict to appoint a Burmese-speaking moderation team; by which point it was too late.

Facebook willingly, knowingly, and with only their bottom line at the forefront, accelerated one of the most devastating genocides in the world.

We should not give the “benefit of a doubt” to a war criminal.

@molly0xfff

"you are costing people their livelihood due to mistakes that you made."

We should have appreciated Angelfire and Geocities while they were still around.

No system that allows people to starve and die on the streets is worth bragging about, regardless of what you call it.