Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

It’s been a while since this last happened, but we’ve got a double-winning comment this week, taking the first place spot on both the funny and insightful leaderboards. And it’s an anonymous comment too, responding to Elon Musk’s plans to add ID-based verification to Twitter:

I have complete confidence that the man notorious for not abiding by contractual agreements will absolutely abide by the stated privacy policy and keep my information secure.

In second place on the insightful side, we’ve got another anonymous comment, this time about the ongoing demands from Canadian media organizations that Meta and Google give them money:

How would the media moguls react to “Moguls have much much more in their bank accounts than working people, therefore it is only fair that they pay much more in taxes.”

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Iskandros offering another thought on Twitter ID verification:

Of course, part of the problem here is that it assumes all interesting identities are “real world” identities.

That’s not the case.

Major streamers, for example, may have an account solely for their online persona, and it may have no relation (including visually, as is the case with vTubers) to their real identity.
Similar concerns abound with things like drag performers, who may wish to have an account for their stage name… but it’s their stage appearance that would be considered important, which is usually not going to match any government-issued id.

Even absent any privacy concerns, many of these services often poorly understand or serve smaller countries or regions, or non-western ones. ID cards vary widely across the globe… and aren’t required documentation in all countries, perhaps most relevantly in the US.

Also, I’m wondering how the case of things like bot or pet accounts are going to be covered, where the account is being used for an entity that can’t get an ID in the first place…

Next, it’s Anathema Device with a comment about Musk’s other dumb plan this week — the removal of titles and snippets from shared links:

Fuck those blind people anyway

I can’t imagine the supergenius that is Melon has given a second’s consideration to how people with screen readers will use twitter if this is implemented. I doubt he’s given a thought to anyone with a disability of any kind before in his life.

That’s his disability.

Over on the funny side, we’ve already had our first place double-winner above, so we move on to second place, which is yet another anonymous comment, this time about Mike Lindell’s harebrained scheme to monitor election interference with drones:

What Mr. Lindell forgot to mention is that his new fangled drone technology relies upon the 5G enabled wifi network.

Will this drone also detect when a voter connects to the wifi via their 5G enabled vaccination?

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with freakanatcha and a reply to that comment:

Now, watch your head…

Not to mention, the vaccine turns one’s body into a giant magnet. Any spinning metal parts on the drone would surely decapitate the voter.

Poll watchers to determine if the decapitation occurred before or after the person completed voting.

And since that wasn’t their only joke an that post, we close things out with one more entry from freakanatcha:

Here’s an idea for Mr Pillow

Require all polling stations to use Comcast as their internet provider.

I promise you, not a single voting machine will be online.

That’s all for this week, folks!