Facebook

Merkin Baller

Gern Blansten said:

Merkin Baller said:

what dreams said:

Merkin Baller said:

I go on Facebook a handful of times a year, & it’s the same shit over & over so I don’t bother with it much. I only keep the account open for the messenger which I use to stay in touch w/ family overseas. 

I did find it odd the one time that I clicked on my Facebook tv feed and there were several Charlie Kirk videos queued up. I don’t have much political stuff if any on my wall or in my likes... & I’ve never clicked on right wing videos or articles that would suggest I’m into that sort of content, so I was genuinely curious as to why those videos were being suggested for me. If anything it should have suggested concert videos as all I ever used to post about was music. 

They have access to your phone or computer, all of it. If you're on the AMT discussing something political, they know it.

They're even hooked into the microphone. I've had every app shut down while having a person-to-person conversation, and as soon as I got back online, the ads were relevant to the offline conversation I was having. 

I struggle with the privacy thing. I wonder what happens when this power ends up in the wrong hands. It seems relatively harmless as it is, but it's not guaranteed to stay that way. Remember the technology in 1984 is the TV that looks inside everyone's homes to track compliance. 

I have not seen Social Dilemma but the novel, The Circle by Dave Eggers, really made me think hard about the topic.

Yeah, but I don’t have the app on my phone at all, nor do I have it open in safari. 

Every 4-6 weeks I either login from my work pc, or get the app on my phone, but once I’m done I log out / delete the app. 

Even if I did, there’s nothing in my habits to suggest Facebook should think I’m interested in Charlie Kirk’s content. Maybe they were simply featuring the most popular videos of the day, idk, but it seemed odd. 

Yes it is odd.  There is a guy in my feed on Twitter that posts the top 10 facebook activities every once in awhile.

It's generally a combo of Dan Bongino, Kirk, Shapiro, Mark Levin.

Facebook is a right wing cesspool.

Seeing several Charlie Kirk videos suggested to me in my TV feed left me with the impression Facebook was promoting his content.

I really can't stress enough how little that guy is on my radar. 
I know who he is through twitter, but I've never discussed him on AMT, interacted with any of his tweets, watched any of his videos, or searched him out, and can pretty safely say I've never even had an in person conversation with anyone about him. Most people in my real life circle have no clue who he, or Ben Shaprio or Dan bongino are... there's nothing in my history or profile or activity to suggest I would be into that type of content. 

Maybe it was indeed done under the guise of 'ten most popular', but it still left me with the impression they're promoting that content. 

Maybe that's just me being a conspiracy theorist too, IDK. 

Gern Blansten

Merkin Baller said:

Gern Blansten said:

Merkin Baller said:

what dreams said:

Merkin Baller said:

I go on Facebook a handful of times a year, & it’s the same shit over & over so I don’t bother with it much. I only keep the account open for the messenger which I use to stay in touch w/ family overseas. 

I did find it odd the one time that I clicked on my Facebook tv feed and there were several Charlie Kirk videos queued up. I don’t have much political stuff if any on my wall or in my likes... & I’ve never clicked on right wing videos or articles that would suggest I’m into that sort of content, so I was genuinely curious as to why those videos were being suggested for me. If anything it should have suggested concert videos as all I ever used to post about was music. 

They have access to your phone or computer, all of it. If you're on the AMT discussing something political, they know it.

They're even hooked into the microphone. I've had every app shut down while having a person-to-person conversation, and as soon as I got back online, the ads were relevant to the offline conversation I was having. 

I struggle with the privacy thing. I wonder what happens when this power ends up in the wrong hands. It seems relatively harmless as it is, but it's not guaranteed to stay that way. Remember the technology in 1984 is the TV that looks inside everyone's homes to track compliance. 

I have not seen Social Dilemma but the novel, The Circle by Dave Eggers, really made me think hard about the topic.

Yeah, but I don’t have the app on my phone at all, nor do I have it open in safari. 

Every 4-6 weeks I either login from my work pc, or get the app on my phone, but once I’m done I log out / delete the app. 

Even if I did, there’s nothing in my habits to suggest Facebook should think I’m interested in Charlie Kirk’s content. Maybe they were simply featuring the most popular videos of the day, idk, but it seemed odd. 

Yes it is odd.  There is a guy in my feed on Twitter that posts the top 10 facebook activities every once in awhile.

It's generally a combo of Dan Bongino, Kirk, Shapiro, Mark Levin.

Facebook is a right wing cesspool.

Seeing several Charlie Kirk videos suggested to me in my TV feed left me with the impression Facebook was promoting his content.

I really can't stress enough how little that guy is on my radar. 
I know who he is through twitter, but I've never discussed him on AMT, interacted with any of his tweets, watched any of his videos, or searched him out, and can pretty safely say I've never even had an in person conversation with anyone about him. Most people in my real life circle have no clue who he, or Ben Shaprio or Dan bongino are... there's nothing in my history or profile or activity to suggest I would be into that type of content. 

Maybe it was indeed done under the guise of 'ten most popular', but it still left me with the impression they're promoting that content. 

Maybe that's just me being a conspiracy theorist too, IDK. 

Hard to say.  It wouldn't surprise me if FB was pushing it due to his shit being popular.  They will do anything they can to get people to engage and click

F Me In The Brain

I'm not on either Facebook/Twitter but do you know if the Top 10 is really the Top 10?
That is not facebook sharing that, is it?

F Me In The Brain

Also, I don't know who any of those people are.  Right wing nutters, it appears.

Gern Blansten

F Me In The Brain said:

Also, I don't know who any of those people are.  Right wing nutters, it appears.

Bongino is a former secret service agent.  Not much education.  Kirk is uneducated as hell.  Shapiro at least has education but he's still a smarmy asshole.  

They are popular because they spew veiled racism and toe the general facist line that is tRumpism.

F Me In The Brain

Lovely!

mace1229

Gern Blansten said:

https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10/status/1338503559415926787

My guess is that isn't as drastic as it appears to be. Sort of like the reason why Fox news is the leading cable news channel, there is no competition. If you're conservative and you want news, you have 1 main choice. If you're liberal and you want to watch a news, you have a dozen choices. So Fox brags about being #1.
I think that applies to Facebook too. Sure, Shapiro might get a lot of hits, but that's because his audience is concentrated. 
Also factor in the fact a lot of those sites are free while the competition is subscription based. That has got to draw an additional crowd. There's been plenty of times people link an article to NYT or some other paper than I can't read because I don't subscribe.
My guess is if you count how many hits are from total right and left sites, it would probably be close to equal. But you have the same number of hits spread across fewer sources for the right, giving them a near shut-out for the top 10. I don't see FB being a breading ground for right media. 

lastexitlondon

You only realise how rubbish face book is when you quit. 
6 years and counting . Nobody really needs it.

Gern Blansten

lastexitlondon said:

You only realise how rubbish face book is when you quit. 
6 years and counting . Nobody really needs it.

agreed....I used to like fb and hate twitter....now it's the reverse

It's shitty how people use fb to try and sell their pyramid schemes to "friends"....fucking beachbody, people selling coffee, "influencers" that sell all kinds of bullshit.  I'm still not sure how those people actually make money or maybe they just get discounts on the shit they hawk

Gern Blansten

Two examples from my fb feed....same guy.  Former buddy from high school.  He posts a few times a day about how tRump is still going to be president.  

I love the Bongino post.  Grenell is about the biggest idiot on the planet.

Gern Blansten

another example....he really thinks there is a chance

F Me In The Brain

No accounting for idiocy

lastexitlondon

Brainwashing

brianlux

Face book:

Meltdown99

Facebook escalates feud with Apple over iOS privacy changes

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-escalates-feud-with-apple-over-ios-privacy-changes/

eeriepadave

i'm on it, don't post as much as i used to, but there are a few friends who post like 20 times a day. Seriously? That's just annoying.

mickeyrat

Meltdown99 said:

Facebook escalates feud with Apple over iOS privacy changes

https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-escalates-feud-with-apple-over-ios-privacy-changes/

this is a clear illustration of what its about.

fuckerberg is an addict. his drug is your data and he gets it everywhere. a tell is tge facebook plug-in on a given website

HughFreakingDillon

eeriepadave said:

i'm on it, don't post as much as i used to, but there are a few friends who post like 20 times a day. Seriously? That's just annoying.

i used to think this way. then, i came to the realization that, if this is truly something they enjoy and makes them happy, what do i care? to me it's kind of the same as when someone "post count shames" someone here. if someone posts too much than i like to see, i just hide them. (shouldn't happen now, i only went back recently for music groups and have like 4 friends)

in the case of facebook, for some it's just a godsend of inclusivity. prior to social media, they had no outlet, felt they had no voice. it now gives them a feeling of connectivity to the outside world. 

F Me In The Brain

I would argue that connectivity is the worst thing about facebook/social media.
Assholes in their basements find other conspiracy nuts or racists, or pederasts, or whatever. 

Stay marginalized, whackos.

Too late to put the toothpaste back into the tube, of course.  

HughFreakingDillon

F Me In The Brain said:

I would argue that connectivity is the worst thing about facebook/social media.
Assholes in their basements find other conspiracy nuts or racists, or pederasts, or whatever. 

Stay marginalized, whackos.

Too late to put the toothpaste back into the tube, of course.  

of course there's always going to be the flip side to every coin, i was just saying it's really awesome for a lot of people, that's all. 

tempo_n_groove

FB has been in the news here of late. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/New-York-leads-multistate-lawsuit-asking-courts-15788840.php

It's trying to breakup the IG and Whatsapp accounts from FB.

dignin

Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

The architecture of the modern web poses grave threats to humanity. It’s not too late to save ourselves

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/facebook-doomsday-machine/617384/


Long but good read.

mickeyrat

https://news.yahoo.com/instagrams-redesign-shifts-toward-shopping-133454830.html  Recently, when I opened Instagram, I noticed that the usual spot for checking notifications is now a Shop tab. The Instagram blog post announcing the redesign ...

mickeyrat

this motherfucker wants shit both ways. anything to remain unregulated.

his fucking addiction to data,money and power has went a long way to setting a good part of the stage for where we find ourselves.

One hopes with fuckstick issuing his "proclamation" this board sees fit to make it permanent.

Facebook and Trump are at a turning point in their long, tortured relationship

Facebook’s Oversight Board is expected to announce a decision Wednesday on whether to reinstate the former president’s account

By

Elizabeth Dwoskin and 

Cat Zakrzewski

May 4, 2021 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

On Jan. 6, as an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, President Donald Trump posted on Facebook that his supporters should “remember this day forever.”

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long,” he said in a post.

In response, Facebook did something it had resisted for years: banned Trump’s account indefinitely for inciting violence. Twitter, YouTube and others followed suit.

The ban is that culmination of a long-running and tortured relationship between the politician and the social media company, one that will hit a new inflection point on Wednesday. That’s when a Facebook-funded panel of experts will announce whether Facebook must reinstate Trump’s account. The impending decision by the Oversight Board, a less than one-year-old body that describes itself as an “experiment” in the regulation of online speech, could be the most consequential decision ever regarding free speech on social media, according to experts. It could also alter the way that social media companies treat public figures going forward.

Trump’s social media megaphone during his presidency helped transform Facebook, as the company sought ways to survive a hostile political climate and accommodate the boundary-pushing president. Facebook made numerous concessions, including a “newsworthiness” carve-out that exempted political figures and other leaders from its hate speech rules and an explicit policy not to apply fact-checking to political leaders.

The newsworthiness exemption was initiated in response to Trump’s use of inflammatory language during his first presidential campaign, The Washington Post reported, and in the years that followed, it guided Facebook’s approach to political leaders and reshaped the world’s information battlefield.

Facebook's Oversight Board has decided the fate of Trump's account. Here's everything you need to know.

For years critics asked Facebook to ban Trump, citing his frequent promotion of misinformation and extreme rhetoric. But Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had long felt that the public needed to hear what politicians had to say, as long as troubling comments fell short of violence, according to his public statements. He also thought Facebook shouldn’t be in the role of making such consequential decisions and started to create plans for the board in 2018.

But the events at the Capitol in January were the last straw.

The Oversight Board is evaluating the determination — which Facebook says was made during extenuating circumstances — at the company’s request. Facebook says the rulings of the independent, 20-member body are binding. The company does have a hand in picking board members, which include a Nobel laureate and a former Danish prime minister, and paying them through a separate trust.

“This is just the start of an experiment, but it can’t be where it ends.” said Evelyn Douek, a lecturer on free speech issues at Harvard Law School. “In some sense, we are all playing Facebook’s game by taking the Board seriously as a legitimate institution. On the other hand, no one has a better alternative right now.”

More than a decade ago, Facebook began courting politicians and candidates to show them how to build an audience and reach voters on the service, according to public records and interviews with former employees and previous reporting.

Though the company had worked with Trump previously in its celebrity partnerships division, things shifted when he emerged in 2015 as a long-shot presidential candidate. In December of that year, he posted a viral video in which he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from the United States.

In a high-level meeting to discuss the post, senior executives, including Zuckerberg, said they thought it went against the company’s hate speech guidelines and several wanted to remove it, according to several people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

But after some debate, executives decided to create a blanket allowance that newsworthiness would be taken into account when making calls about whether certain posts violated Facebook’s hate speech rules.

Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him.

When the “newsworthiness exemption” policy was formally announced the following October, the company did not discuss Trump’s role in shaping it.

Facebook has disputed the policy was originally designed for Trump, instead saying it was developed in 2016 in response to the site mistakenly removing a historic Vietnam War photo that contained child nudity.

In the ensuing years, those debates about newsworthiness informed the company’s approach to content from political leaders around the world, former employees say.

Formally, Facebook says the carve-out was used just six times. In 2018, for example, the company restored a video by the top aide to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in which he blamed immigrants for pushing out “White Christians.”

But some internal critics said Facebook went too far, including by protecting conservative publishers who were Trump allies and waiving its typical three-strikes penalty system for misinformation for a pro-Trump super PAC and for the president’s eldest son, The Post reported last year.

Elizabeth Linder, a former Facebook executive whose job was to facilitate ties to political leaders and candidates in Europe and the Middle East until she resigned in 2016, said courting high-profile users and prioritizing helping those users gain a vast audience above others was problematic. It created a dynamic that meant it was sometimes difficult to hold them accountable.

“Social media companies should be on the side of people versus the side of individual political leaders,” she said, adding that the company’s approach to this was flawed.

Trump ban by social media companies came after years of accommodation for world leaders who pushed the line

In the run-up to 2020, Twitter started rolling back some of its own public-interest carve-outs, adding labels to political speech that broke its rules. Facebook went the opposite direction, announcing that it would not fact-check politicians in their ads.

As the 2020 election got underway and the United States was hit with a devastating pandemic, Trump began to flood the zone with more misinformation than before, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

He falsely claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was exaggerating the death toll from the coronavirus. He posted that the high U.S. caseload could be blamed on frequent testing and that “the Mortality Rate for the China Virus in the U.S. is just about the LOWEST IN THE WORLD!”

There is no evidence that the CDC exaggerated covid-19 deaths, according to Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fact-checkers have found Trump’s claims regarding the CDC and testing to be false. The United States had the sixth highest death rate from covid-19 in the world at the time of his comment.

Facebook left up 1,440 posts by Trump containing misinformation or extremist rhetoric last year, according to analysis by the left-leaning advocacy group Media Matters. The group has argued to the Oversight Board that Trump’s account should not be reinstated. The social network appended generic labels to approximately 500 of those posts, directing people to authoritative information. Just one was rated false.

Facebook said in response to the Media Matters report that not all forms of misinformation related to the election or covid-19 were banned by the company and that Facebook removed Trump’s posts in the handful of instances where executives found they violated the social network’s policies.

A quarter of Trump’s 6,081 Facebook posts last year featured misinformation or extreme rhetoric

In May 2020, amid protests in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd, Trump used a segregationist’s reference to suggest that the military might shoot demonstrators who broke the law.

Though civil rights advocates and thousands of employees said the post threatened violence, Zuckerberg’s team first made a phone call to the White House asking Trump to soften or take down the post, The Post reported last year. Trump later backtracked on some of the comments, and the chief executive left the post up, arguing to staff that it could have been in the public interest because it was meant as a warning.

After the election, Trump posted misinformation 363 times on Facebook from Jan. 1, 2020, to Jan. 6, 2021, the period examined by Media Matters, including false claims of victory and voter fraud, false claims about the voting infrastructure company Dominion Voting Systems and false claims that the election was stolen from him in which he used the phrase “Stop the Steal” — the rallying cry of the Capitol rioters.

None of these posts were removed. Facebook appeared to remove just seven posts by Trump in all of 2020, four of which were for copyright issues, according to a Washington Post review.

On Jan. 6, Trump posted a video in which he said his supporters were “patriots” and were “special.” He tweeted that they would not be “disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form.” He also tweeted that he would not be attending President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, breaking a tradition held by almost all presidents until then.

First Facebook and then Twitter suspended Trump’s account that week on the grounds that those comments were encouraging or inciting further violence and lawbreaking to delegitimize the election — or worse, to conduct an attack on the inauguration itself.

“The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook wall on Jan. 6. He noted that in the past, the company had allowed Trump to use the platform because “we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech.”

“But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government,” he wrote.

The next day, Facebook said the ban would continue indefinitely. Twitter followed Jan. 8 with a permanent ban.

Two weeks later, Facebook referred its determination to the board.

Silicon Valley experts are mixed on the potential outcome. Some think Trump’s account will not be reinstated because he went too far. Others expect Trump will be allowed back on, noting that Facebook and others said they were making an immediate decision based on extenuating circumstances that have now passed.

Most expect the decision to come with strongly worded recommendations that, if adopted, could reshape the way speech by public figures is moderated online — and how the line between speech and violence is drawn.

Restoring Trump’s account would send the message that “there is little a public official can do that would warrant their removal,” said Danielle Citron, a free speech expert at the University of Virginia School of Law. Trump went too far, and “it would be performative nonsense if they reinstated him.”

That could have serious consequences for world leaders’ use of the platform as a whole.

Katie Harbath, a former Facebook public policy executive who created the company’s original partnerships with politicians, and a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said if Trump is permanently banned, the company will be flooded almost immediately with questions about other world leaders.

“The decision is the beginning, and it’s a milestone in this conversation,” she said. “But it won’t give us all the answers.”

HughFreakingDillon

fuck zuckerberg and fuck trump. 

lastexitlondon

HughFreakingDillon said:

fuck zuckerberg and fuck trump. 

This 

Halifax2TheMax

HughFreakingDillon said:

fuck zuckerberg and fuck trump. 

At the same time? Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!

static111

They are so going to reinstate his account.

HughFreakingDillon

of course they will. they want all the Q's to come back to Facebook. 

static111

HughFreakingDillon said:

of course they will. they want all the Q's to come back to Facebook. 

We need to break up and regulate these social media sites or we are all going to die of misinformation.   Sadly there are much worse things than trump being on Facebook to worry about, even on Facebook, but nothing will be done about any of it.