Chaos in Washington, DC, is forcing some to move to new platforms.

Summary

Federal workers are increasingly wary of mainstream communication platforms like Facebook Messenger, fearing surveillance under Trump and Musk’s influence.

Many have shifted to encrypted apps like Signal, avoiding even casual discussions on traditional platforms.

Concerns stem from tech companies’ past cooperation with authorities and potential misuse of data. Privacy advocates warn of legal loopholes that allow government access to user information.

Workers have also become more cautious in workplace conversations, reflecting broader distrust of both government leadership and major tech firms.

  • @SynonymousStoat
    3•7 days ago

    Maybe it’s because I couldn’t get through reading all of this, but my initial skimming leads me to believe this would be hard to fully protect against abuse. It also feels like that at least in the beginning there would be a lot of centralized power and that doesn’t feel great to me.

    There are also a lot of grammar mistakes that made it hard for me to read, I’m admittedly not a great writer, but it was causing me to stumble while reading and made me question if this paper had even been edited or proofread by anyone.

    All that said, it’s definitely an interesting thought experiment.

    • @Aolley
      1•6 days ago

      oh for sure, it’s not written by a writer, it says it was only given one cursory proofread and that it is filled with typos and bad grammer, way down at the end.

      but I like to think of it as the first jigsaw puzzle pieces towards the goal of stopping capitalism as it is, making humans a long term functioning society, and removing misinformation from the internet.

      • @SynonymousStoat
        2•6 days ago

        They should probably move that information to the top so it at least primes readers ahead of time. Either way, I still feel like this system they are defining has to have some sort of centralized verification agency/group and I don’t really know how you can do that and not potentially be open for abuse or corruption. Alternatively, I also don’t know how you can verifiy an individual is who they say they are and aren’t creating fake/bot accounts in a decentralized manner either, these are very hard problems to solve and I don’t know if this paper touches on any ideas as to how to solve them, but it would be interesting to hear from the author on those topics.

        Again, interesting read and thanks for sharing it, I think it’s important for people to be thinking about how to approach problems like this in a digital age sooner rather than later.