Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/02/facebook-totally-blew-its-own.html
Facebook says the ban rollout took longer than planned.
5 Likes
But did they actually refer to it as a “stunt”? Because that would have been refreshingly honest of them.
18 Likes
Whoever writes the history of this company years from now should title it “Do the Wrong Thing”.
16 Likes
I didn’t get to use this on the other story, so I’ll use it here:
Applies so well…
14 Likes
The Louis Farrakhan who said that Jews played a key role in 9/11, who continues to preach antisemitic sermons, and who says that “wicked Jews are promoting homosexuality”?
42 Likes
When will Twitter ban Donald Trump?
18 Likes
That bungled launch window allowed Alex Jones, Milo , and the other banned jerks tell all of their Instagram and Facebook fans where to find them.
Eh… it’s not like if they disappeared out of the blue that fans coudn’t still find these people. I mean, comeon. They are gullible, but not that dumb they can’t bang out “Where is alex jones” with their meaty ham fists on their keyboards.
13 Likes
Possibly after he is no longer president.
6 Likes
I agree; the people who are motivated enough to download another app and sign up for a new service just to see these assholes probably would have found them again anyway. Most people are just casually engaged, so it’s good that their feeds wont have the likes of Jones popping-up anymore. Still it’s shocking how incompetent this corporation is.
13 Likes
Wouldn’t it be amazing if Facebook and Twitter suddenly resurrected all deleted posts and likes, then froze him out of his accounts, as a means of preserving the record?
8 Likes
That bungled launch window allowed Alex Jones, Milo , and the other banned jerks tell all of their Instagram and Facebook fans where to find them.
bungled launch? Nope, it was all planned in advance to roll that way, believe it.
11 Likes
And who also was highly likely to have had something to do with Malcolm X’s assassination, because X was starting to eclipse the not-so-honorable Elijah Muhammad.
22 Likes
The issue here is that by bungling things FB made it easier for these scumbags to contact their mouth-breathing “Friends”, play the martyr for them, and tell them where the next cesspool platform is (your move, Telegram).
Also, a lot of FB users aren’t very sophisticated about the alternatives out there (evidence: they’re still on FB in 2019), so a good portion of them might have had a hard time finding the new site or service and the motivation to sign up for it.
What’s clear is that, once again, Facebook screwed up to the benefit of dangerous creeps.
12 Likes
He’s not great, that’s for sure. He’s just an outlier in the group in that the traditional “far-right” hatemongers would never have anything to do with him because he’s a black guy (nominally) associated with Islam.
4 Likes
If anything, they’re attempting to be fair to Lou by making him the token black member of an exclusive violence-preaching bigoted arsehole club.
3 Likes
I fail to see how that’s a fail.
If a fan of one of these clowns logs on to Facebook and sees one’s missing, they’re not going to say “oh well, guess I’m done listening to them!”
They’re going to fire up Google, type the person’s name in, and find their new site.
2 Likes
I can’t help but wonder whether the “stickiness” and “exponentiation” of hate online are due to a McLuhan-ite form of participatory hate being a much hotter media than working through rational sources or distributed compassion. By users covering their ideological pudenda in pseudonyms and participating in burn-account froth where they blur the line with meme bots, it seems like it’s setting the stage for emergence of higher-order phenomena, like goblin horde waves of clicks cholerically percolating through the guts of ML-tweaked content algorithms to skew results towards accelerating radicalization. Then you get bifurcations, boundaries, and sub-spaces (or sinks) in the noosphere where recirculating memes undergo virulent mutagenesis in a harsh local environment. Which gets even weirder, because then the sorting mechanisms for which trash bubbles up to the top become local themselves and next that leads to asymmetrical exploits whenever content crashes across boundaries and sets off epistemological immune reaction1 elsewhere in the noosphere. So to keep writing badly and mixing metaphors, it gets back to the original McLuhan ideas: psychic warfare at the margins that degrades the reality written by prior centers all using plasmatic media to canalize the meta-ontologies that underpin the sets of confirmation biases present in the audience and determines which users will be susceptible to its present virulence factors. Gross.
1: What’s even grosser is that this phenomenon is literally manifest in the form of the current measles epidemic.
3 Likes
Gonna stop you right here.
Facebook, a site with a real name policy, had such a big white supremacist problem theyvhad to kick people off the platform. Who were using their legal names.
The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is a feel-nice story we tell ourselves.
But fascists and racists have always acted in the open. Real name policies didnt stop Yolo Minneapolis, and it didn’t stop Richard Spencer.
What does is kicking fuckwads out of society.
12 Likes
The content has already gained a form by the time it is in the mouths of people willing to identify themselves by their real name. Facebook is absolutely part of the problem and has been an eager plague host in the emergence of this pattern. What I was getting at was more the difference in content you see on places like /b/, Twitter brigades, Gab, and various hateful subreddits, where it is more formless and more directly virulent.
1 Like
Ahhh. The old let-the-assholes-who-don’t-deserve-a-place-on-wide-ranging-social/informational-platforms-time-to-give-their-asshole-followers-a-heads-up-on-their-alternative-platform courtesy; it’s the gentlemanly thing to do.
4 Likes
