But Facebook’s tendrils may be ready to set more fires.
Facebook’s past present and future are actually pretty disturbing.
NPR – Meta says it will end fact checking as Silicon Valley prepares for Trump Updated January 7, 2025 5:03 PM ET Heard on All Things Considered Zuckerberg said his views on content moderation have changed. Meta has made “too many mistakes” in how it applied its content policies, he said, and pointed to Trump’s election to a second term as “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.” “So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said. (emphasis added)
The roots of facebook is hacking Harvard House identification photos of fellow students and, without permission, putting them into an online rating game of hot vs not. This was the basis of Facebook.
The Harvard Crimson – Hot or Not? Website Briefly Judges Looks By Bari M. Schwartz, Contributing Writer November 4, 2003 “Were we let in for our looks? No. Will we be judged on them? Yes,” proclaimed the site, which Zuckerberg has now taken offline. Zuckerberg, a computer science concentratror, said he created the site — www.facemash.com — by hacking into House online facebooks and compiling ID photos onto his website, allowing viewers to vote for the “hotter” of two randomly chosen photos or rate the looks of students in a particular House against fellow-residents. A link to the site was forwarded on many House and student group e-mail lists over the weekend—including the Institute of Politics (IOP), Fuerza Latina and the Association of Black Harvard Women (ABHW)—prompting both praise and criticism across campus. But by Sunday night, outrage from individuals and student groups led Zuckerberg, who said he never expected such widespread publicity, to shut down the site for good. By that time, Zuckerberg said, there had been 450 visitors to the site who had voted on their peers’ photos at least 22,000 times. “I don’t see how it can go back online. Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable. The primary concern is hurting people’s feelings,” Zuckerberg said. “I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.” (emphasis added)
Too late – 21 years later, Mark Zuckerberg has managed to insult probably almost everyone around the globe. It’s about time to put a stop to this junky corporation’s net negative operations.
Facebook lifts restrictions on calling women ‘household objects,’ black people as ‘farm equipment’ By CNBCTV18.com January 8, 2025, 3:25:21 PM IST (Published) The new section of the policy states the company now allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird’”. Other changes include removing content targeting a person or group based on their “protected characteristic(s) with claims that they have or spread the novel coronavirus” or “are deliberately spreading the novel coronavirus.” According to reports, users may now get to associate the COVID-19 pandemic with Chinese people in the absence of this provision.
They want users to act as editorial staff and police the site. Another example of privatized profits and socialized loss.
The People Deliberately Killing Facebook Edward Zitron May 20, 2024 From the very early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has acted without remorse, tricking and scheming and screwing others over in pursuit of digital dominance and financial gain in a way that I find absolutely stomach churning. Yet Zuckerberg could not perpetuate these disgusting acts without the help of people like Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz, who saw to it that Meta shut down CrowdTangle, a public insights tool from Meta that allowed researchers to easily analyze what was happening on Facebook. Horwitz reports in Broken Code that Facebook — led by Alex Schultz — killed CrowdTangle because reporter Kevin Roose kept posting a list of Facebook’s most-engaged-with content, and that Facebook was dominated with right wing lunacy and misinformation like “Plandemic,” a COVID conspiracy film that Joel Kaplan, head of Meta’s public policy team, initially blocked the health team from removing until Roose reported that it was Facebook’s number one post. Just to be abundantly clear, the Head of Public Policy at Facebook deliberately allowed the spread of COVID conspiracies, and would have continued to do so if a reporter hadn’t used a Facebook tool to show how popular they were, which resulted in Facebook choosing to kill the tool that allowed the reporter to find out.
Rich people are to some extent performers I suppose. The society page and whatnot. I really don’t want to be in this audience.
The MAGAfication of Mark Zuckerberg The Meta CEO wants the left to leave him alone so he can shape our collective future Paris Marx Jan 15, 2025 Zuckerberg’s new fans wanted to see him as Musk’s foil — the better social media baron — despite history showing they were two sides of the same coin. The billionaires even played into the supposed rivalry by suggesting they were going to physically fight one another, as robotic Zuckerberg morphed into a mixed martial arts enthusiast.
This isn’t a game and it isn’t a joke either.
404 Media – Meta Is Laying the Narrative Groundwork for Trump’s Mass Deportations Joseph Cox · Jan 16, 2025 at 9:42 AM “We believe Meta is certainly opening up their platform to accept harmful rhetoric and mold public opinion into accepting the Trump administration’s plans to deport and separate families,” Citlaly Mora, director of communications at Just Futures Law, a legal and advocacy organization focused on issues around deportation and surveillance. “Meta knows well that hate speech can and does incite violence under certain conditions,” Danielle Citron, a professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Law who previously consulted with Facebook on trust and safety issues, said. “We saw how hate speech in Myanmar inspired genocide against the Rohingya people. We have seen hateful words inspire doxing, harassment, and violence against Haitian immigrants in Ohio this fall. Meta has spent years building trust and safety teams only to tear them down.”
I’ve been concerned for some time now.
We have been divided and conquered.
The Cognitive Crucible – #212 Libby Lange on Algorithmic Cognitive Warfare Information Professionals Association Dec 17, 2024 Libby Lange: “yeah and you know in one of the articles that goes through a cognitive operation kind of stage by stage the goal of moving people into groups is also that people will sort of self-police within the group and sort of self-police behavior thus kind of making each group controllable depending on sort of how you insert content that is targeting that group which is kind of a weird sort of wonky way to think about it but essentially creating these groups that are I guess you could say more manageable almost where if you have a really cohesive society where people are really working together then as sort of an outside adversary that’s not a very manageable population right but if you have people split off and you understand kind of the workings of that group or why that group comes together the way it does what their sort of central organizing issue is or their central organizing beliefs then they may be easier to kind of manage John Bicknell: “divide and conquer” Libby Lange: “exactly” (emphasis added)
Doom scrolling is bad enough, but I think a lot of us have been sleepwalking into danger on social media. And maybe it’s time to stop saying, “I can stop any time I want” and actually admit we have a problem and stop.