Your post contains zero examples of anyone telling anyone not to read newspapers. The Mélenchon example (according to your own words!) is him pointing out that voters already don’t read newspapers, not that they shouldn’t. The Musk examples are about one specific newspaper, and even there he isn’t telling us not to read it. (FWIW, I would never have known or cared about any of these examples before reading this post.)

So what exactly are you trying to tell us with this post?

I don’t know a lot about French politics and have no opinions about Mélenchon, but if he said something to the effect of “we are now in the great era of social media”, then I agree with him on that. It is, in my mind, enormous societal progress that lots of people now get their news from other ordinary people on websites/apps (“social media”) in addition, or even instead of, legacy media which sees it as its job to enforce an “Overton window”. It’s democratization of knowledge and information sharing, why should I think that is a bad thing?

It’s kind of ironic that you’re posting this to a social media site, TBH.

Yeah, well, you know, that question has been around for almost as long as the WWW: Which laws apply on the Internet, and how do you enforce them if they do?

Lots of politicians would like the answer to be: My country’s laws apply to all websites that can be accessed in my country. If they violate them, my country’s government should be able to fine them, order ISPs to block access to them, arrest people associated with them, maybe even more…

But if that’s the case, then cannot countries like the PRC, Thailand, Iran, North Korea, etc. also do those things? Can we claim they are doing something illegitimate when they do, when self-described liberal democratic republics do them too? Can the Internet even work at all if everyone constantly has to comply with all countries’ laws, most of which they don’t know about?

The business model of mainstream social media companies is that they are ultimately part of the advertising industry. They need some kind of legal presence everywhere that they have customers (advertisers). That legal presence can be fined like any other company, and that is how most laws are currently enforced against them. But those that don’t can do this https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko or even this https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyrants-4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-the-uk-over-extraterritorial-censorship/ and then what do governments do?

Meat with berries is not an absurd idea at all? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingonberry_jam

In fact, I ate some for lunch today. :D

https://xkcd.com/810/ was intended as a joke, but there is a kernel of truth to those thoughts…

On Microsoft’s own new hardware? Almost “not the onion” material…

huh, never knew that was a thing too on the fediverse, though I was familiar with the one on reddit

Not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc

We had a solution to this problem in the 2000s and early 2010s when we were on topic-specific forums where each (broad) topic was a separate website where you needed a separate account.

But that had its disadvantages too…

So people will be able to fork it and add ActivityPub integration? :D

I don’t see how it’s a generational thing.

People who grew up when smartphones were already a thing might never have needed to learn how the Internet and URLs actually work. To a lot of everyday users nowadays, the Internet is just a series of smartphone or tablet apps you switch between. I used to think that the spread of the Internet into more segments of society would create a society of computer nerds, ha ha ha ha ha nope.

The problem is that there is an almost infinite way to design these kinds of URLs, so maintaining a database of what should be stripped out isn’t trivial.

They do pretty much the same thing. If there are nuances, I do not know about them.

Governments of the world, get the hell out of the Internet, kthxbai.

That’s not a great acronym in a language where many different numerals start with the letter T. Could be a two letter acronym, ten letter acronym, twelve letter acronym, thirteen letter acronym, thirty letter acronym, thousand letter acronym, …

What do they currently know about the Internet? Are they currently using a microblogging or discussion platform? Difficult to answer this without knowing that.

Who is the “ruling class” in this context? Governments, billionaires, someone entirely different? Because I think you’ll find it might not be the same people doing each of these things…

Doesn’t Android require a Google account anyway?

I looked it up today and it seems that at a lot of airports in Europe (where this happened), the limit is 6 cm. My pocket knife is slightly below that.

in 2024

Reminds me of the time I forgot to remove a pocket knife from my keys before going through airport security…

Staff member holds it up, I notice it and am like “oh no, that’s not allowed, right? oh well, then throw it away, I forgot about it…” - staff proceeds to measure the blade length and tell me “no, it’s ok, that’s allowed” and hands it back to me. I still have that pocket knife now, but don’t intend to try that again.