I’ve just published a little project with my data extraction code for PublicSquare, the Trump-aligned company offering advertising and other services for right-wing American businesses.

If anyone wants the full data set for the purposes of helping people boycott these fucking fascists, let me know.

PublicSquare seems to have memory-holed its marketplace pages, but I just scraped 40k of them from the Wayback Machine and extracted JSON data for 37k businesses, including 34k distinct email addresses, 31k phone numbers, physical addresses, etc.

There’s an alternate universe where David Lynch’s DumbLand (2000) had the impact of Homestar Runner (2000-????) and vice versa and somehow I think it’s a better place.

When you live around a memorial it tends to become invisible to you after a while, but I see Stolpersteine every day and you don’t get used to them.

I think everybody should open the Gas Town post and slowly scroll all the way to the end for exactly the same reasons that I think everybody should spend 10 minutes watching unhinged We Are Charlie Kirk edits on TikTok

Hard to say whether scraping Truth Social is more fun than scraping X, because on the one hand the users tend to be garbage in more boring ways, but on the other hand holy fuck the people who run this site are incompetent.

I just realized that tweet screenshots are the cat pics of Bluesky

Remember how on Twitter there were lots of mysterious aggregator accounts that would get repurposed for spam or disinformation once they’d built up a following by posting other people’s content? Luckily we learned our lesson and that could never happen here.

ctrl-f “eddington” <closes tab>

Because even lefties and progressives love this trash, especially if Twitter is involved somehow. Because it’s easier / more fun to shit all over your information environment than to read trustworthy sources and share what you read responsibly. Because it makes Bluesky’s metrics look better. Because

Man as an anarchist I love getting paid by the FBI. When those checks start landing again in Jan 2029 it’s party time in Berlin 🏴🇺🇸💰💰💰🇺🇸🏴

Just updated @memory.lol (first time since August): 4.5 million new accounts, 5.3 million new screen name mappings.

(scott) Horton hears a /u

Ah so this is why he’s our problem now. He flew too close to the sun

It’s sad that Scott Horton isn’t a bit because this would be a super funny follow-up to last week’s Scott Horton episode

As an American living in Europe I keep expecting to run into this supposed anger, but so far it’s still just the usual “wow that guy’s fucking nuts, why won’t he die”

What a surprise, a Bluesky account with “9.5k following” and “No porn / No DMs” in the bio is posting misinformation for clout.

Hot take: this is fine. If I wanted to see essentially contentless viral rage bait with big numbers next to it I’d be on X or Threads.

In my experience Germans tend to be considerate and civic-minded, but put them on a bicycle (or worse, an e-bike) and they become monsters.

The Bluesky Experience: a non-American I’ve never interacted with before shows up in my mentions to tell me that I should spend more of my time skeeting at AOC, an elected official in a country neither of us lives in.

It sure would be nice if Article 40 of the DSA wasn’t treated as a joke by everyone involved.

Just deleted a post complaining about ragebait on here because it should have been a post complaining about Cory Doctorow and the Guardian.

I’m not going to say banning tweet screenshots would solve all of the problems that make this place a hellhole, but it would solve like 80% of the problems that make this place a hellhole.

Yeah. What I do NOT understand is why so many people, including people whom I respect, follow him. Putting aside, just aesthetics, there are so many wrong facts and missing sources. Once, I tried multiple times over a day to get him address/delete some very wrong facts. Not a peep. Why follow him?

Lol I reported Scott Horton for misleading information, and Bluesky’s response is to give him a verified badge

I’ve had a Substack scraper running for a couple of years now (starting when I read Katz’s Atlantic article in November 2023). Every once in a while I check in on it, and the Nazi situation over there is very much not getting better.

Watching a Телеканал СПАС segment about Americans in Russia and it’s wild to see the guy from NJ who claims to own the copyright to the Pine Tree Riots song recently featured on the DHS IG hanging out in Moscow with prominent neo-Nazi Charles Bausman.

Probably stating the obvious, but the reason people here love this shit so much is because it’s comforting to think that there’s just a small set of violent racist men floating around America.

lmao that’s so embarrassing. to have to comment on the record that no, no it’s not AI slop using your name. that’s you. you’re doing that.

Update: I contacted the email address for Robert Scott Horton listed on New York’s Attorney Online Services, and he confirmed that he runs this account. So it’s not impersonation, just misinformation and AI slop.

Obviously the problem of misinformation on the left is nothing like it is on the right, but it’s still very bad, it’s getting worse, and this platform is part of the reason why. We have to do better than this.

People like Scott Horton are the worst trash on this website. Post links and tweet screenshots with vapid commentary for clout, cash in ancient credentials (thanks, Harper’s and Columbia Law), ignore criticism when you post misinformation.

Reposted somebody else's post of this Telemundo article yesterday on Enrique Tarrio bragging about being a member of ICE, but it's way too thinly reported. It's from that dataset that hasn't been confirmed and has weird problems, and him dicking around on Twitter isn't confirmation, so I unreposted.

I’m going to stop posting about this now, but one last request: every time you see that viral Scott Horton skeet in your feed today, just immediately unfollow (or block) the person who put it there.

The world is terrible all around but seeing people here share that Telemundo article about Tarrio “acknowledging” that he’s an ICE agent now is the thing has me spiraling. “Our side” is so fucked.

I just noticed that @/gork (Musk’s other chatbot) hasn’t posted for over a week. Anyone know why? They turned it off but didn’t even bother to clean up its last tweets, which are mostly nonconsensual sexual images.

One of the things the ICE leak mess highlights is how good the @ddosecrets.com folks are at what they do. Handling comms around something like this is hard, and journalists and influencers are going to do everything they can to help you fuck it up.

This post suggesting Proud Boy leader Tarrio is an ICE agent is getting traction but please don't share it. If he is an ICE agent then he's not been showing up to work lately —just look at his X account This so-called leaked ICE list has not been verified, so please don't share until it is.

this needs to be taken down until this list is verified -- like is it possible that Tarrio is mixed up with ICE? possibly! but this list seems sus and leaving posts up like this will harm the credibility of actual future leaks

I saw a name I recognize on a wiki page I don’t understand the context of because there isn’t really any context besides some not very good reporting, so clearly it’s time to make a lot of assumptions based on a meme I saw on Facebook six months ago.

I read the news about the ICE leak just before falling asleep last night and woke up feeling like Christmas morning, but unfortunately a) it kind of seems like bullshit and b) the Bluesky Resistance is being extremely annoying about it.

I am writing fascism-oriented fiction, and I think a lot lately about how to depict fascist villains who are interesting to read about and contend against but are not cool or brilliant. I think I have a way, but it'll be a while before anyone sees it. Hopefully we won't all be dead by then.

Watching this for the first time and thinking about how annoying it would be if the first big epic film about the fall of America comes out in 2034 and Bovino is an ice cold badass villain with sick lines.

I agree that US institutions will never do shit about these fascists, but their partners and families and employers might, and I think that’s who “Greg” is actually afraid of (he’s just filtering that fear through the usual paranoid conspiracism).

Idk whether this is true (I’d like to hope), but you can tell these guys believe it because only the biggest losers and weirdos among them have switched to using their real names.

I have some sympathy for the weird beef guys on here just because the opposite kind of guy (posts “BREAKING” plus screenshots of tweets all day, zero beefs, 250k followers) is obviously so much worse.

Just saw an “independent journalist” with 897k followers on here posting a screenshot of a tweet from a scammy anonymous news aggregator quoting an interview that they could have just linked to. How the fuck did we end up consuming and spreading information this way?

Do the journalists who think Grok "apologized" also think that when you get married to an NPC in Skyrim, you're married in real life? Do they check "married" on government forms after completing that side quest?