Extremely tedious Twitter discourse

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The YouTuber Who “Vaped” The E-Girl Bath Water And Got Cockroaches In His PS4 Went To The Netflix Walkout

On Wednesday, Netflix employees staged a walkout in protest of the streamer’s handling of Dave Chapelle’s comedy special, in which he declared that he’s “Team TERF,” or “trans radical exclusionary feminist.”

The streaming platform has pretty much made every bad decision possible throughout this whole thing, first, by suspending trans employees who were vocal on Twitter about the special and, then, firing the leader of the company’s trans employee resource group after employees began organizing a walkout. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Variety, “Obviously, I screwed up that internal communication.” lol yeah I’d say.

Right-wing and anti-trans Twitter users mobilized against the walkout on Wednesday, doing what they always do. They attacked sympathetic media outlets, lampooned and harassed trans internet users supporting the protest, and spent the day quibbling tediously over the amount of employees who were actually participating in the walkout — whether it was hundreds or thousands of employees.

Counter-protesters showed up to the protest, as well. One of them was YouTuber Vito Gesualdi. The reports of what Gesualdi did at the protest are messy, but from videos on Twitter and YouTube, at the very least, he showed up with signs that read “We like Dave” and “Jokes are funny” and shouted at protesters.

The Associated Press covered Gesualdi’s presence at the protest, initially reporting that he shouted profanities and called the Netflix employees peaceful in comparison to the YouTuber. The Associated Press then issued a correction, writing that they change the caption "to remove reference to Gesualdi using profanities which he did not do at the moment the image was made. Also removes reference to protesters being peaceful because one protester destroyed his sign."

Gesualdi is claiming that he was assaulted and that users are using DCMA takedowns to silence him from sharing footage of it. Though, whoever is issuing DCMA takedowns isn’t just targeting Gesualdi, they’re also taking down footage of the confrontation from other Twitter accounts, as well. And many of the videos that have been pulled down from Twitter are still up on YouTube in a video that Gesualdi released on his own channel titled, “I Got ASSAULTED at the Netflix Protest!” So, you know, I have a few ideas who could be DCMA-ing the footage of Gesualdi at the protest.

Anyways, litigating what Gesualdi did or did not do to cause protesters to smash up his sign literally does not matter and is also exactly what right-wing influencers want because it’s a very good way of distracting people from the demands that Netflix employees have, which include:

• A disclaimer on the Chapelle special that warns viewers that it “contains transphobic language, misogyny, homophobia, and hate speech.”

• A fund specifically set up to support trans and nonbinary talent.

• And just simply acknowledging how much harm the company caused the trans community.

Gesualdi built a small following as a Magic: The Gathering player, but now mainly focuses on a mid-level YouTube channel with about 200,000 followers, where he makes videos about gaming culture. He’s also made an absolutely tremendous amount of content about “fixing” Star Wars.

He was also the YouTuber who claimed that he had purchased Belle Delphine’s “E-girl bathwater” and “vaped” it. He later admitted he didn’t (thank god). But I think the most important thing to know about Gesualdi is that in 2019, he was absolutely roasted for posting photos of a cockroach infestation in his Playstation. He’s since deleted the tweets, but I wrote about it in a super early issue of Garbage Day.

“Decided to try cleaning all the dead roaches out of my PS4,” Gesualdi wrote. “Sony, please design smaller vent holes next time.”

A user replied to Gesualdi at the time, writing, “Cockroaches shouldn't be in your home to begin with.” To which Gesualdi shot back: “Spoken like someone who never had cockroaches”

Twitter Almost Gets It

Twitter released a study this week titled, “Algorithmic Amplification of Politics on Twitter”. It’s a fascinating — and wildly frustrating — look at how Twitter, well, regularly favors all the stuff I wrote about above, actually.

“In six out of seven countries — all but Germany — Tweets posted by accounts from the political right receive more algorithmic amplification than the political left when studied as a group,” Rumman Chowdhury, Twitter’s director of software engineering, wrote in a blog post about the study. “Right-leaning news outlets, as defined by the independent organizations listed above, see greater algorithmic amplification on Twitter compared to left-leaning news outlets.”

Yes! That does sound like Twitter.

"We can see that it is happening. We are not entirely sure why it is happening. To be clear, some of it could be user-driven, people's actions on the platform, we are not sure what it is. It's just important that we share this information," Chowdhury told Protocol in a follow-up piece.

This is an incredibly common thing you’ll hear from reps at large social media platforms. They’ll say that their algorithms favor right-wing content and then throw their hands up and claim it might be just because users prefer it. Look, I’m not a machine learning expert, but I’m going to guess that it might have something to do with your algorithm which favors a negative engagement feedback loop.

New Right-Wing Free Speech Social Platform Dropped

Trump, who is still banned from the only free speech social platform that actually matters, is trying to make his own right now. It’s not going well! Someone was able to claim the @donaldjtrump user name on the site and then used it to post a photo of Piggy Poop Balls:

If you aren’t familiar with Piggy Poop Balls, it’s a picture of a pig shitting on its own balls. It’s a thing. You can read more about it here. Trump’s social network isn’t the first one of these dumb projects to fall apart right out of the gate. In July, Jason Miller, a former spokesperson for Trump, tried to launch a free speech social network called GETTR, which was then quickly inundated with hentai.

Also, Trump’s new social network, which is called Truth Social, appears to have a non-disparagement clause in its terms of service. And it also appears to just be a fork of the decentralized social network Mastodon and is still even using Mastodon’s default error page.

Rich People Are Still Struggling With Squid Game

If you don’t know who this is, MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, is a 23-year-old YouTuber whose whole schtick is giving people huge sums of money and filming their reactions. His net worth is an estimated $15 million. MrBeast, if you’re reading this, please, for the love of god, do NOT make a real-life Squid Game.

Or, actually, you know what, go for it. Nothing means anything anymore. Let’s all compete for large sums of money in a death game run by a YouTube millionaire. Whatever!

A Therapist Gets Chased Off TikTok

A TikTok user named @sidequesttherapy deleted their account this week after people became outraged that the user was identifying as a therapist and using the app to vaguely complain about their patients. As Twitter user @afroelven wrote, “talking to a therapist and then going home and seeing a vague TikTok they posted complaining about a client that sounds like me would be my Joker origin story.”

Users have been trying to dox @sidequesttherapy, but so far, I haven’t seen anything reliable about whether or not this person is actually a therapist. In their bio, they link to a card, which describes them as a private practice owner and licensed therapist in Florida, but there aren’t many other details out there.

Due to the username, however, an Austin-based clinic called Side Quest Therapy has put out a statement saying they have nothing to do with the TikToker. According to The Daily Dot, the Austin Side Quest’s website now reads, “I have NO staff and if I did, I would NEVER hire someone that sick, insensitive, ignorant, gross, and so completely disconnected from the real purpose of therapy.”

A Good Twitter Thread About Cows

This is exactly what it looks like. Click through. It’s a good ass thread.

Will You Stare Into The Orb For Internet Money?

Worldcoin is here. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a crypto project by former Y Combinator CEO Sam Altman. Altman wants to use Worldcoin to give everyone on Earth cryptocurrency in exchange for scanning their retinas. According to Worldcoin’s website, the idea is that everyone should have access to cryptocurrency, but Altman wants to make sure that only human beings are receiving it. So he created a device called the “orb,” which scans your eye and gives you Worldcoin in exchange.

If you click through on that tweet above there’s a good thread about how this all works in practice.

“The Orb captures an image of a person’s eyes, which is converted into a short numeric code, making it possible to check whether the person has signed up already. If not, they receive their free share of Worldcoin,” the Worldcoin website reads.

lol ok so here’s what I love about all of this. A very, very small amount of the human population uses cryptocurrency. The two main reasons for this, as I see it. One, it’s a highly volatile and speculative economy that runs on a 24-hour market and, two, using it is extremely difficult. For instance, in the US, crypto holdings are taxed like real estate. If you were try and buy a coffee with Ethereum, you’d have to submit that to the IRS, who would tax you on how much you made or lost off the transaction. Instead of putting any money or resources into fixing any of those issues, Altman decided it would be simpler and easier to… make an orb that scans your eyeballs?

A Good NFT Project At Last

My friend Samir has started a new NFT project called “Selfie A Day Project” and it’s extremely funny. He’s currently selling NFTs of his own face, which he’s making every day. I’m just impressed by how many different shirts he has! This has nothing to do with anything, but I think I’d make more Garbage Day videos if I didn’t feel so self-conscious about repeating outfits in them and I simply do not have that many shirts. So far, Samir has made two sales, which adds up to about $200. Not bad! And by my count, he owns at least seven shirts.

Oh, while we’re on the subject, a DAO now owns Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and Chainlink will be working with the Associated Press to connect the AP’s race calls, sports and economic data, and financials to smart contracts. What does that mean? Basically, verified AP data will be put on the blockchain, which will allow blockchain-based developers to use it. Look, I can try and make it simpler than that, but it’s Friday and I only have so much space in these emails before the bottom gets cut off by Gmail.

The Dinosaur Emojis Are Trans

On Twitter right now, TERFs are starting to use a dinosaur emoji next to their display name to signal that they’re “gender critical” — or anti-trans. Why a dinosaur? Well, as UC Berkeley professor Grace Lavery wrote on her Substack recently, “Gender critical activists (GCs) frequently call themselves ‘dinosaurs,’ as distinct from the new-fangled ‘unicorns’ of the wider LGBT movement.”

Well, in yet another blow for the TERF community, author Courtney Milan, who wrote the original proposal for the dinosaur emojis has responded. “These emoji dinosaurs 🦕🦖 are both trans, I know this because I wrote the proposal to the Unicode Technical Committee asking for them,” Milan tweeted this week.

Milan then shared a bunch of minutes from the Unicode committee outlining the exact timeline of how she first proposed for the inclusive of the emojis. You simply love to see it.

A Good Tweet

Some Stray Links

• Slate Got The Eve 6 Twitter Interview

• The Methods of Moral Panic Journalism

• Maybe we need a moral panic about Facebook

P.S. here’s an extremely good Tumblr post about the Teletubbies.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***