Natalie Portman'll be an octogenarian and the Slashdot AI will still be talking about stuffing hot grits down her bloomers.

You'll no doubt be downvoted to oblivion by activists close to and with a lot of help gaming the system, but I wanted to thank you sincerely for taking the time to write and post this really excellent, fact-filled, salient post.

Those rugged individualist farmers

Sorry, I'm too busy basking in your tolerance, lack of prejudice, and open mindedness.

Right-wing voters actively want to hurt others

Please, and I mean this very sincerely: go outside and touch grass. Right wing voters are exactly like you. They think they're doing the right thing. They aren't always, just like you aren't always, but just like you they mean well and are not generally speaking mustache twirling villains wearing denim overalls and straw hats.

To summarize: the Alt-Right Arrow HDMI LA knows where it is at all times, because it knows where it isn't.

It's also still working on improved power delivery(!?)

Then all psychology at a level above individual nerve signals, all history, a great deal of anthropology and paleontology, etc., are uninteresting to you.

Because I don't see value in speculative, emotional debate as to the motives of politicians, preferring to focus on policy effects over unfalsifiable spin?

"Russia collusion" was a massive hoax, founded on a faked intelligence dossier bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign.

Oh but Republicans and "Libertarians" (aka Republicans who don't want to admit they vote for Republicans) ONLY care (don't pretend otherwise) about perceived slights against the right wing.

Sir, this is undoubtedly projection.

Yep. Small costs on the order of a cent would cause little inconvenience to normal users, but would make spam at scale completely infeasible.

"By "stomach ... diversity" do you mean tolerate exploitation of social media as a propaganda tool?

No, I don't. They all tolerate that. Slashdot is awash in it, and you're here!

Mastodon seems like a reasonable alternative to Twitter for those folks who cannot stomach any diversity in their social media feeds. I'm not entirely sure why elements of the tech community are so bent on serving that niche, though.

Microtransactions

Free? Who said anything about free? As in beer, as in speech?

You think they colluded with the BIDEN then in 2020 they also colluded with the TRUMP.

Yes, that might well be true. It should be investigated, but at a (somewhat) lower priority as it is not still on-going, or as a part of a more general, bi-partisan truth and reconciliation process that accurately accounts for the timeline, nature, and volume of censorship pressure coming from the government towards social media companies.

it's the GOP trying to copy what the Democrats have been doing with Jan 6th and Trump

You're ascribing motive. I'm talking about the action itself - the government is indeed investigating the government pertaining to collusion with big tech to suppress private political speech. WHY the government is doing that is a more subjective question, and one that's uninteresting to me because the answers are ultimately unfalsifiable.

Lol, honestly that's a fair approach. I kind of disagree about the political side - Slashdot has always been political, but the civil libertarian politics here have taken a real 180 that wigs me out of late. But I respect the approach.