#check please social media

[jinkamuraisqueen]

a few of you asked to see blushing jin so i'll share the king himself blushing<3 and a few others (but i was playing around with their expressions)

AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH LOOK AT HIM!! LOOK AT MY HUSBAND!!! HE'S SO SO CUTE SUFGUGSLUGLLHAS I LOVE HIM SO MUCHHHHH YOU DONT KNOW HOW MUCH I LOVE HIM

bonus because i was doing this for a few friends in discord and might as well send them here for alan, rui, and haru's lovers~

[poindesticker]

#NURSEYDEX:

nursey, you voted for me?

dex, of course i voted for you.

[infiniteglitterfall]

OMG, COULD EVERYONE PLEASE STOP IMMEDIATELY BELIEVING AND REPEATING DISINFORMATION?!

Sorry, I just. Was just on Twitter, and I snapped.

I literally haven't seen one true statement about Israel on social media in MONTHS.

It's gotten to the point that I'm seriously considering starting a sideblog fact-checking all of it.

PLEASE STOP BEING GARFIELD I AM BEGGING ALL OF YOU

BE NERMAL FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

I've written at least one really long post about fact-checking things before. I have another saved as a draft somewhere.

But all you really have to do at this point is GO LOOK AT AN ACTUAL NEWS SOURCE.

What do I mean by an Actual News Source?

An actual news source will tell you where it's getting its information.

Basically: Wikipedia rules apply at all times. Citation. Fucking. Needed.

Except with news articles, I don't mean a detailed footnote.

I mean, if they say, "Rosco Flubberish reported seeing a pig fly across Whatever Place. 'It was a flying pig,' he said," they're fine.

If they say, "Sources close to the President reported that the Department of Farmland Creatures launched a pig into the air this afternoon," they're fine.

If they say, "There have also been reports that pigs flew," they are purely making shit up.

Just check CNN or something. CNN checks their shit, and they're very quick on the draw.

NBC has been very reliable too, in my experience. So have ABC, Newsweek, the Jerusalem Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, the AP, PBS, the Washington Post, and Reuters.

You can break through most paywalls by putting archive.is or 12ft.io before the https:// of the URL. Or just go to either of those sites and paste the URL in the box.

Nobody is perfect. I've seen some articles from all of the above that were accurate, but left things out that I personally thought were important.

Journalists are humans, humans fuck up.

(Also, NONE OF THIS APPLIES TO OPINION PIECES ON ANY TOPIC. Opinion pieces are exactly that: opinions. They don't seem to be fact-checked anywhere, as far as I can tell. They range from super-accurate and informative to complete nonsense.)

(Surprisingly unreliable sources in my experience: Democracy Now, Jacobin, Workers World Party. The latter two act like news sites but are basically running nothing but opinion pieces; Democracy Now can do important deep dives, but I've also seen news coverage from it that was wildly misinformed in that same way.

On the flip side, Slate and the Atlantic are largely opinion -- the Atlantic more than Slate, maybe -- but they often have really well-researched analysis of political situations. Ditto Teen Vogue, and sometimes Vox.)

You don't have to read CNN or the NYT or whateverfor fun. You don't have to make it one of your news sources.

Just. Do a quick check on Google News before you assume anything is true, and then run it through a bullshit filter as described above.

You are being actively lied to, all the time. So am I. We all are.

And people will believe and repeat literally anything that sounds about right.

That's just human nature.

That is WHY none of us are immune to propaganda.

if you want my personal shortlist of Bad Sources, as in Sources That Consistently Publish Absolute Falsehoods:

Any and all state-owned or state-controlled media. For example:

Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari government, and so are a bunch of other news sites.

Mehr News, the Tehran Times, Al-Quds TV, and Al-Alam are owned by the dictatorship of Iran.

Oops. Looks like every form of broadcast Iranian news media is owned by the dictatorship of Iran, which has a monopoly.

Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, Palestinian News and Info Agency, and Al-Hayat Al-Jadida are owned by the government of Palestine (the Palestinian Authority)

Al-Aqsa TV and Felesteen are owned by Hamas.

TASS / Russia News Agency, Russia Today, and a fuckton of others are owned by the Russian government.

State Media Monitor seems to do a pretty great job of tracking and listing these things. Check out your own country there!

I specifically listed those ones because some of them (especially Al Jazeera, Mehr News, and TASS) are sites I've seen come up frequently on Tumblr, or in my attempts to fact-check what people are saying here and on Twitter. The rest are just more examples from the same governments.

Al Jazeera deserves special notice because it's become a very popular leftist news source. Believe me, I used to read it all the time too.

It can be reliable and accurate sometimes. But:

It consistently tweets things that are unsourced, never appear anywhere else, and that would be big news you'd expect it to follow up on if they were true. It seems to be following a strategy of "tweet every rumor you hear in case it's true, so you can get the scoop."

It also does this with its liveblogs of the war. And ALL its coverage of the war at this point is liveblogs. So things that are verifiably true will run right next to things that are complete hearsay, but are too long to just tweet.

This is especially dangerous because as far as I can tell, Al Jazeera doesn't delete anything that turns out to be false.

I've also seen regular news articles in Al Jazeera, on multiple topics, that veer from Absolutely True Statements to Wildly Exaggerated Numbers and Speculation. Stuff you wouldn't expect a source on, like statistics or descriptions. And there's no way to tell the difference unless you already know a topic really well, or are fact-checking them while you read.

One especially terrible example, from Gazan activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib:

Al Jazeera has never posted or published a correction.

Alkhatib has also blamed it for destabilizing the region, although he's exaggerating about it being Hamas's official propaganda outlet:

TL;DR: If you see a Tumblr post making any kind of factual news statement without a link, at this point you need to assume it is absolutely not true. And either scroll on past, or go check Google News.

If there IS a link, you need to click through to see what it's from and what it actually says.

(Honestly, you need to do that with Wikipedia too. I've repeatedly clicked through on citations that absolutely did not say what the article implied they did.)

And pro tip: on mobile, you can just smack a button to sort Google's news results by most recent, and it helps A LOT. There's gotta be a way to do the same on desktop, but if there is, it's not immediately visible, which sucks.

[cabesswtaer]

the scene in td3 where hennessy mentioned tiktok haunts me still.. maggie ily but why

[dawn-the-rithmatist]

Hello if you’re like me and saw the lil search button replaced by something called “tumblr live” and went momentarily feral with rage, here’s how you can avoid it a little longer:

Hit the gear button on your blog’s page

Under the “Account” page, go to “General Settings”

Go to “Dashboard Preferences”

Scroll to the bottom and flip the switch that says “Snooze Tumblr Live”.

This will only buy us 7 days without it, unfortunately, but I’m willing to bet that they’ll be keeping track of whether people do or don’t like it/use it/snooze it, so if you hate it! It’s worth doing :)

@staff I am begging you to make this feature optional. I am BEGGING you to make it optional.

Editing this because I can see where it’ll be a nice feature for some folks! I don’t think it’s a bad idea! But I would love to be able to opt out please!

[troythecatfish]

Unvale is a new inclusive platform for artists, writers, WorldBuilders, and character creators. Unvale is anti AI “art” and anti NFT with the goal of inspiring and motivating creators to continue in their journey and build their character and story portfolio. If you’re tired of social media platforms like instagram and Twitter that make it difficult for illustrators to share their work i highly recommend hopping over to unvale and creating a portfolio, here you can easily find other artists and they can find you. The most invaluable resource available to artists in the modern day is the ability to connect with a community and share ideas. It’s easy to get started, once you’ve created an account you can upload your original characters and set up profiles for each of them you can include multiple images for each character as well as a detailed list of traits to further characterize them for your audience, it’s actually a really great way to organize your own thoughts for later reference. There’s even a category for worlds, organize your characters by which fictional universes they belong to then share them so that other artists can find your work and get exited about your stories. Unvale is 100% free to use and it’s available right now. No promo code no 133% off just free if you’re an artist and you’re eager to share your work with the world, I highly recommend creating an Unvale account and start connecting with other artists just like you.

[batfamilybakingzine]

🦇 Hello Bat-Fam Baking Fans! 🦇

Our interest check has been up just over a day, and we have received nearly fifty responses from possible buyers, contributors, and moderators. We are blown away by this overwhelming support, and wanted to come on here and say thank you ❤️ Our head mod is working on the Caard with all of the information as I type this, and moderator applications will be open very soon… Just in case you missed the interest check, or would like to share it with someone else, it can be found below!!

[mymartiniblue]

can we PLEASE STOP commenting t*eils name under videos that have absolutely nothing to do with him, I literally went in the comments under a nct wish tiktok seeing “I wonder how they feel about t*eil 🥺” THEY MET HIM ONCE— and please stop making everything about him, anything related to nct nowadays has to have something to do with t*eil, AND ITS NEVER ABOUT HIM!?! and yes I am aware that this is a big topic amongst south korea/kpop community, but bringing up his name that has nothing to do with him is actually draining

[firmscaldinghandshake]

do not appreciate getting a stupid anxiety dream about missing an event completely, then going to the bar the next day to find out it's been canceled

[tuttle-did-it]

I'm a very big fan of when specialists debunk crap online because it's ineffective or dangerous.

[emmashouldbewriting]

mums in romance author groups: i'm scared of my 13yo reading these spicier books but we share a kindle account, pls help

me: my 13yo is reading kathy reichs and karin slaughter and asking for more so i sent her to my bookshelf for more questionable murderous content

but in all seriousness... if your kids have access to the internet, they're already consuming adult content. instead of hiding it, open dialogue with your teen so you can educate them on healthy boundaries and relationships. which most romance novels teach, by the way. unlike the serial killer novels mine favours.

[widevibratobitch]

my god. skinny people really just have like. No Idea huh just absolutely not a single clue lmao it's almost funny to watch fr but then id lie if i said i wouldn't fucking kill to be able to be that ignorant

[monstermoviedean]

hello fob friends if anyone has a good video of i am my own muse from last night could you please send me the link?

[thekidsare-not-alright]

hey! maybe don't say they should remove a song from the permanent setlist in the official fob discord server! maybe! that's kinda just rude! they're having fun! shut up!

[starscelly]

me joining twitter cancelled i just spent 30mins trying to find out whose sister ppl were saying otter commented heart eyes under and then when i found the post the sister turned out to be dating one of his lakeville high school teammates. who is also an nhler. and he was probably doing a generic ass "(heart eyes) love u guys!" type comment. bc it was literally a photo of them together. i cannot do shit like that regularly i will go insane.

[not-poignant]

Thinking about the post on media and film distribution I added to yesterday, what I forgot to add is simply that a lot of you now spend the hours that you would have once spent on cinema and television on Tiktok and Reels and (to a degree) YouTube. If you know you spend 1-3 hours on Tiktok each day, well, in the 90s, nothing like that existed. You only had books, cinema, television, radio. So people weren't hyping memes and random dances and Good Emu Person and Shitty Emu Person etc. and everything folks talked about - even on early internet - when it came to mass media, centred on those specific forms of mass media.

Cinema will never ever be the same again so long as people give 12+ hours of their week to Tiktok / Instagram and similar sites, instead of cinema and television. You can't cry out for a golden age that's gone when it's gone because the audiences moved on. The fact is, one of the most common media watching memes on places like Tumblr is a version of 'everyone is recommending shows or movies to me and I don't have the time / energy / inclination to watch them.'

I'm part of this, I spend a lot more time on Tiktok than I do watching television or cinema, and this obviously only applies to the folks who do spend huge chunks of time scrolling through short pieces on the internet. And there's also nothing wrong with that until you go 'omg why aren't we getting shows like we used to / why is fandom so different now / why aren't we having these experiences anymore.'

You took the time and investment away, and that's why. It's way easier to get rabidly hyped in a fandom if you don't have Tiktok, or YouTube, or Instagram**, because what's left over (film, television, etc.) is all you have. And that's a pretty huge and significant reason why a) the budgets for film and TV are smaller (overall, it's similarly extreme on the other end, re: Sandman and Marvel etc. But I'm including everything here) and b) fandoms aren't as huge or long-lasting as they used to be.

I'm still noodling on this, and obviously there are a lot of factors going on here (many of which I went into yesterday, it's so fucking opaque to say 'we don't have films like we used to' because like, we do, people just don't know where to find them anymore, what we don't have is indie films hitting the zeitgeist like they used to, which is a different issue and it's multifactorial, and some of it is that people are now screaming about Emmanuel the Emu instead of the latest indie movie that came out). But I do think where Tiktok is making billions off of people, those billions are not going to more 'classic' forms of mass media.

If you want it, you have to give it your time. It's that simple.

** (Obviously these things can also be used as tools for fandom, it's just so much of fandom has also now ported over to transformative works around real people (i.e. dueting / stitching / replying / remixing / meme-ing etc. are all a form of transformative work that take time and labour, they're just different to what we classically think of as transformative works) and/or Tiktok fandom moves really fast by the nature of the format).