True, but after that, Facebook went to easily-gamed algorithms right in time for the 2016 elections.
Yeah. They are just steaming hot mess of lies and greed.
Look at this point I have completely written off Facebook as useless and irredeemable no matter what.
I joined before it was open to anyone freely when it was still a college network I was on there for 14 years.
After 2016 I got so fed up with bulshit articles and racist trolls and shallow people who wanted to be my friend but never did anything with me I just dumped everything after I delete it at all and I have no desire to ever go back. I disconnected myself from a lot of useless people who honestly weren’t in my life though they seemed to like pretending they were.
I don’t think I’ve ever even going to comment on any Facebook story again, after every single lie Zuckerberg has told and every daily occurrence of privacy violation that asshole foists on everyone, he is utterly useless and worthless asshole to me and so is anything he creates. He gets no second chances I’m sick of hearing of him and his consistent worthless creation and ego.
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Got you beat, Stephen–I never did subscribe to shitFacebook, and I’ve never regretted it. I also don’t do Twitter; BoingBoing is as close as I come to (anti)social media. It makes me happy to not know what I’ve missed.
Imagine all the far right BS that would get prominence on FB while lefty stuff was blocked if FB wasn’t run by liberals like Peter Thiel mentee, Zuck, and greedy sociopaths like Sandberg.
Who would fill the vacuum if Fox News disappeared?
Someone like oh, er, the UK Daily Mail… (Didn’t have to think too hard on that one.)
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404
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I deleted my Facebook page when they deleted my posts from BoingBoing.
What is a social platform?
The point of Facebook is to allow people to share pieces of “information”. This can mean anything, really, from your kitten’s latest cute trick, to some anti-vaxxing nonsense you’ve copied from that guy who makes up nonsense storie to troll Republicans on Facebook.
How can Facebook even judge it as news, when it’s just people posting things to each other.
The problem is people.
Not that I have any love for Facebook.
FIXED! thanks
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I guess a start would be if it’s coming from Fox News’, Brietbart’s, CNN’s, etc, FB pages, it’s likely “news.”
Block that shit. All of it. FB has shown they can’t be a news source, or news aggregator, without become a straight-up tool for evil. They either lack the means or desire to fix the problem. They’ve had a year and a shit-ton of money. It’s still broken. Badly.
Blocking “news” from “news sources” may cut the torrent of fud down to a trickle, at least for a bit. Maybe long enough for us to catch our breath, balance, and bearings, and give someone time to come up with a better solution.
The problem isn’t the lone crank on Facebook. It’s the finely tuned misinformation machines that are just getting more and more pernicious until we end up in the shit we now find ourselves.
The kicker is, though, unless they do SOMETHING proactive to address the problem, which obviously isn’t to hand it off to algorithms that can be gamed, things will only get worse. This isn’t as bad as it can get.
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That’s a good framing. I mean, it really is about corporate invasion of a human space. It’s like having Fox News playing on TVs all over a public/private meeting space. It would take the same kind of stomach that valuable anti-trust legislation would take. A kind of dormant ruminant stomach that hopefully Americans, et. al. are once again awakening.
Honestly, I dream about a truly viable not-for-profit freemium and/or pay-what-you-can model of social media to compete with the corporate behemoths. These conversations get bogged down in, “Any alternative has to be completely free!” or “An alternative to FB has to be distributed and decentralized!” or “Well then it has to have a ‘mute user’ function!” perfect-enemy-of-anything-different and conversations get all fractured.
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