The act of mansplaining is alive and well on social media.
Since what feels like the dawn of time, overconfident men have condescendingly explained how things work, even when they're woefully wrong and unqualified.
Look no further than a baffling exchange on Bluesky after Meredith Whittaker, the president of encrypted chat platform Signal and chief advisor to the AI Now Institute, promised "no AI clutter, and no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does."
It was a striking commitment, given the overall trajectory of the tech industry; Whittaker was responding to news that Meta-owned WhatsApp was pilfering personal data from Instagram and Facebook to pollute the platform with ads.
But it didn't take long for the mansplaining to begin.
"Signal will [sic] some sort of [large language model] integration in it soon," self-professed "tech geek" Bill Mitchell replied, a suggestion that was immediately shut down by Whittaker herself.
Mitchell dug in his heels, proclaiming that it's only a matter of time, and asserting that "engineers have already began laying out the ground work" for integrating AI chatbot tech on Signal.
Many other users quickly came to Whittaker's defense.
"Are you suggesting that you, random dipshit on the Internet, have a better view into Signal’s product roadmap than the actual president of Signal?" asked one perplexed Bluesky user.
Suddenly, Mitchell became the victim, accusing the user of "name calling" and becoming "hostile."
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