Twitter admits two-factor login phone numbers were used for advertising

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/08/twitter-admits-two-factor-logi.html

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Of course if you set a TOTP 2-factor instead of your phone they’ll ask for the damn code every time you visit the site. It’s quite excessive for a social media account.

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If it was used to market boner pills, and ambulance chasing lawyers, directly to the President, I may be okay with this.

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Remind me again why anyone uses twitter?

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I don’t know. Do we really want him to find Twitter more useful than he already does?

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Almost anything that keeps him busy and away from his day job is worthwhile. The longer he spends on Twitter, the less damage he is hopefully doing.

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“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
― Frank Zappa

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Suprise!

Another company run by assholes, with a product that not only abuses its users, but forces everyone who doesnt use their shitty product to listen to other people using their shitty product, because every ass with a Twitter handle now makes more news with the stupid the blurt out than actual actions in the real world seem to anymore.

If there is one invention of the past decade I wish I could go back in time and erase, it’s the invention of Twitter.

(Back another decade, Facebook)

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Can’t like this hard enough

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So, you’re saying that you are incompetent, as well as being unutterable arseholes?

Also, the number of impacted users should either be (ideally) “zero”, or “everyone”. Any other response just raises even more questions about your competence.

And, of course, when I say “competence”, I naturally mean “honesty”.

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I actually get a lot of value out of it by following scientists, doctors, and patient advocates. I find out about interesting new research that wouldn’t otherwise cross my feeds, participate in discussions around emergent topics, and enjoy seeing heavyweights in various fields argue about new papers and policy.

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Subscribe to their newsletters instead.

Fuck Twitter

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These people don’t write newsletters, most blogs are dead, and they’re not going to change platform because it’s icky. I understand that you miss the early-00s Internet and that it is much easier to consider the lowest-common-denominator use cases for platforms, but perhaps these reflexes are blinding you to use cases with actual merit or to envisioning a better platform that improves Twitter’s best aspects and throws everything else out.

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Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I get it. But, I think if Twitter ceased to exist everything you’ve described there would be done on some other platform.

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Find another way.

People did so before and they will after.

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Does other people finding value in social media differently than you do somehow threaten the purity of your opinion here?

If you have a useful suggestion for that kind of community, I’m all ears, but if all you wanna do is be seen venting your spleen and polishing your opinion, please find someone else.

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People like you who don’t care that your personal info is being used to make other people rich whilst using their disingenuous platforms piss me off.

So be it. It’s your loss not mine.

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Hopefully. And then I cringe at all the rogue-foreign-policy-via-twitter incidents…

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Then get pissed at the people getting rich. You’re wasting your time ranting here.

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Ah, but we can’t uninvent stuff. Even if we shun it, this only means it continues with a more polar and unrepresentative audience. If we try and repress it, the means of repression will be worse than the original problem.

The internet is a social construction that we do not individually fund. The socialist solution would be too centrally fund for some rival service. It would support the social sharing of data but does not attempt to make a profit by harvesting information. It would still have the problems of whether and how much to moderate, and how to curate archives, but at least it should not be malign as Facebook or Twitter.

For our US readers: if ‘central funding’ is too Joseph Stalin for you, imagine some rich benefactor creating it for the general good.