Deleting Facebook is a first step. If all BLM supporters, not just black people but all people against fascism and racism, deleted their account, that would be a heck of a message after which chairs would fly at Facebook HQ. Advertisers there sell by the numbers, not by political affiliation; take away a big chunk of users, and the platform either collapses or implements true neutrality.
As for the alternatives, Diaspora and Mastodon might deserve a look.
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Facebook is run by Republican and neoliberal sociopaths, looking favorably, so to speak, on GOP propaganda is to be expected. Even more so by a business model based on keeping people on the site as much as possible, even if that involves exposing them to society-weakening bullshit.
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@orenwolf Can something be done?
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Kind of. The thing is, Face***k users are much more important than Face***k rejectors to advertisers because they are stupid, and therefore a good ROI on advertising dollars. The goal in modern advertising is to quickly rid yourself of critical thinkers, people with expectations, and anyone who pays attention generally. This is why all advertising is designed to insult your intelligence. Once you’ve chased away anyone who has noticed that you are insulting them, you can go about the more lucrative business of selling shit to pigs.
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Need a BBS MAGABLOCKER!
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Excellent. I hadn’t thought of this. Edited to fo**ow suit.
I’ve said it before: if you think the media is ignoring Faceb**k, have you ever heard a -peep- about this phenomenon on LinkedIn? Consider how many people are out of work, creating new accounts and looking for something to blame. If I had any $$ I’d bet that if I went back to the thread in which Melinda Gates mentioned Covid and was called a murderer in the comments, those comments have not been removed.
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Google targets based on users - we disabled ads that direct users to obvious pages like Trump’s campaign site, but we can’t do more than that really. Individual users should be able to adjust who google thinks they are in Google’s ad settings
https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated
If you’re blocking tracking though, good luck - Google doesn’t know who you are so you’re going to get garbage.
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At the end of the day it looks like a greater than even chance that Trump will be reelected. It is still important to get people out to vote. I have attempted talking sense to members of the cult of Trump. That was generally a futile effort.
The protesters at least in Portland aren’t helping their cause. I drove through downtown and as an older white guy who actually sympathizes with them, I was greeted with middle fingers and expletives.
Also a valid point. Reminds me of when site owners implement countermeasures against adblockers, which is useless since those users would be immune to advertising anyway, so they probably should rather profile those users in order to narrow calculations of potential buyers.
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At this point there are chances that many of his followers already infiltrated the movement to discredit it by doing nasty things in front of the cameras while carrying anti-Trump signs.
I would expect the unthinkable from those bastards, even committing false flag murders.
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I noted recently on another site that a big banner Trump ad from Google allowed me to “see why I was targeted”, but the options to remove it, or even report it, were absent.
It’s like the Google Assistant feed (or whatever it’s called these days). First day I chose “Not interested in: Donald Trump”. Next day, Donald Trump is top of my feed. I go to the settings on the story and get the option: “Not interested in: News”. Google: You will suck down your Trump and you will like it, serf.
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We’re involved in local political goings on and I have been trying to keep some tabs on what the other side is talking about and hoo-boy, a parallel universe may not even be accurate. More a perpendicular universe headed away at a high rate of speed.
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Blog view and ad blockers set to kill, aye Captain!
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Put a PiHole on your network, point your router at it for DNS resolution, and the ads never even get loaded.
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I’ve got one but I need to set up a separate router behind a DMZ because AT&T Fiber configurations don’t permit manual DNS configuration. Oh, and AT&T throttles the DMZ on my current fiber modem, so if I want something like throughput I have to beg them for a different device. Long story short, I haven’t even taken the router out of the box.
In the meantime I have manually set up pihole as my DNS on my laptop, but my six million ad blockers are still necessary to block other ads successfully. (Maybe not the boingboing ones specifically, though.) Anyway, I often have to hop off of pihole to do things like check analytics on our website or complete surveys, so I am on the VPN a lot of the time, which means the pihole doesn’t pihole for me.
I’ve been wondering about this for a long time. We have all this technology that ties us together and we never harness it’s actual power.
Take Comcast for example: EVERYBODY in America fucking hates Comcast. It’s not a big evil company that still has a bunch of supporters like Walmart. It’s a big, evil company that nobody likes.
Imagine if even fifty percent of those people started calling Comcast to cancel their subscriptions. You’d start seeing changes immediately.
Same thing with something like Facebook. You wouldn’t even have to cancel. If a significant portion of their users just didn’t log on for a few days they would absolutely shit their pants.
How do you harness something like that?
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Typically, the top interactions on Facebook are from conservatives or conservative outlets. Back in July, Kevin Roose posted the top 10 most shared posts were from:
- Fox News
- Fox News
- Occupy Democrats
- Fox News
- Ben Shapiro
- Ben Shapiro
- Ben Shapiro
- An0maly
- Blue Lives Matter
- Dan Bongino
See the pattern? It’s all from a conservative slant. Because of the conservative slant, leftist outlets like the NYT et al. will do everything they can to discredit those who create this content. They will even throw shade at Facebook itself because Facebook allows conservative content to be shared. That’s why leftist activists pretending to be journalists, like Roose, proclaim Facebook to be a parallel universe. Roose qualifies this view by paragraphs such as this:
“The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has gotten 56 million total interactions on his Facebook page in the last 30 days. That’s more than the main pages of ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR combined . Data from a different firm, NewsWhip, showed that Mr. Shapiro’s news outlet, The Daily Wire, was the No. 1 publisher on Facebook in July.)”
When a single person like Ben Shapiro is getting more interactions than ABC News, NBC News, the NYT, The Washington Post and NPR combined, it should indicate there’s a problem with legacy news media. Instead, the legacy news media will stay their course and continue attempting to discredit people like Shapiro, and again, and hint that Facebook is in bed with Trump’s army. This is a wink and a nod to Facebook that they should be shutting down conservative speech even more than they’re already doing.
In Roose’s universe, Breitbart and Fox News are far right when the truth is they’re fairly center right. In his universe, groups like Patriot Prayer are far right white supremacists. They’re not, but it’s what every single legacy news outlet will call them without presenting any evidence. The more they claim they aren’t far right white supremacists, the more the left uses this to say they are. It’s the perfect Kafka Trap.
I’m self-aware enough to understand what I’ve said will go over like a lead balloon. I’ve been reading Boing Boing for a very long time but almost never have the urge to post comments. I had recently seen Roose’s Facebook top 10 list and then found this post. I always find it interesting to read how conservatives are perceived by those on the left.
Fucking hell.
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To all posts above, If you got fists and guns and you have thoughts and words then use them. A revolution will not happen in a comment section unless you take action, thoughts and ideas first before fists and guns.
I guess 40 comments down no one will hear my sentiment… and if you do read below the line then make your voice heard
Peace
As much as we can
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