iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

we should bring back rival partisan newspapers

I guess this is the blind people and the elephant. You're seeing political / news / information / opinion / journalism on it, and being outraged. You feel the tusks and say "this animal is like a spear."

Maybe I'm lucky or have done a good job choosing and manipulating what to see, I dunno. I mostly just see kids, cats, aunts. And I mostly just share what my kids are up to, what my cats are doing, etc.

I do see political content but have bubbled it successfully so that it's just people I already know I agree with. On the rare occasion that I want to say something that reflects my politics I can restrict it such that it's among people I trust.

And before you say it, YES, I understand that this also means that right-wingers and nazis and Q fans can also bubble such that they see only the stuff that they agree with and that whips them up i to a partisan froth. But 1. They would be doing that anyway, regardless of the platform.

And 2. This is not even remotely new. Journalism started with rival partisan newspapers, and there is a rich tradition of partisan-aligned information sources. People choosing to bubble. See Hearst etc.

I studied journalism and worked as a journalist for many years; if anything "objectivity" is a recent invention and illusory to boot.

I do not have a Facebook account and did not mention objectivity

we should bring back rival partisan newspapers

Should we? methinks we have.

Washington Post - establishmentarian centrist accused of being liberal

Washington Times - right-wing with a dash of Moonie weird

Washington City Paper - once a liberal alt-weekly, compromised by consolidation

New York Times - establishmentarian centrist accused of being liberal

New York Post - right-wing with a dash of nationalist/populist weird

Wall Street Journal - come the fuck ON

St. Louis Post-Dispatch - previously center-left, now suborned by right-wing interests due to market consolidation

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - previously center-left, now suborned by right-wing interests due to market consolidation

Richmond Times-Dispatch - previously center-left, now suborned by right-wing interests due to market consolidation

USA Today - gah let's not even go there

those do not seem to be partisan rivals to each othe

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In Washington, Post and Times are absolutely partisan signifiers.

In New York, Post and Times are likely partisan signifiers.

(But opposite)

https://scontent-lhr8-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t45.1600-4/cp0/q75/spS444/p180x540/121924616_6249331957723_3812299589916061477_n.jpg?_nc_cat=1&ccb=2&_nc_sid=7e83b1&_nc_ohc=uVT5UdJHSboAX8noCu4&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr8-1.xx&oh=0663ab186cf414fae413e7281f3b496f&oe=5FDA1DCF

So this is the sort of shit that Facebook ads are throwing at me now.

if that's the new Wachowski sequel I want no part of it

How it started: How it's going: pic.twitter.com/tg02vKxQlM

— everything bad happening is zuckerberg's fault (@GraceSpelman) November 17, 2020

Wow the FTC is really going for it: calling for Facebook to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp https://t.co/aQqiQwIfNG pic.twitter.com/ySJNZRzrhP

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) December 9, 2020

hell yeah

(like button)

wow.

Wow, that's actually quite shocking!

FB stock down only 2%, I wonder if investors think the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts here.

um

Facebook told employees on Tuesday that it’s developing a tool to summarize news articles so users won’t have to read them.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-news-article-summary-tools-brain-reader

congratulations facebook, you invented headlines

lmao

On Facebook, protesters had openly discussed what they aimed to do in Washington on a Facebook page called Red-State Secession for weeks. The page had asked its roughly 8,000 followers to share addresses of perceived “enemies” in the nation’s capital, including the home addresses of federal judges, members of Congress and prominent progressive politicians.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/06/technology/violence-election-capitol-hill-social-media.html

One of my friends had her account hacked. The hacker then changed the profile pic to....a pic of someone else. Then wrote my friend (who created a new profile) demanding a payment of a large sum to get the profile back.

Then attempted to make a ton of purchases using Facebook Pay (which were blocked).

A bunch of us reported the profile.

Their trained goons stated this was not a case of fraud/impersonation and didn't violate community standards.

...

So apparently the reason the request was declined was because my friend needed to report her account as hacked, which is a separate flow that isn't advertised, that takes two or three clicks to find.

And my friend, who is computer illiterate, refuses to do it because she insists she can't because she doesn't have access to her account, she's locked out.

Beyond the fact that it wouldn't make any design sense to require you to log into an account to report that it's been hacked and that you can't get into it, friends can't report on her behalf, so her account is going to stay hacked because she's stubborn and computer illiterate, plus FB's security is awful.

(she doesn't have to be able to log in but like that Stuwall thread, no way we explain that to her works).

I've got half a dozen FB friends with two or more accounts because they didn't know how to recover a hacked or lost login. Sometimes I get notifications to send a birthday message to three versions of the same person.

There must be millions of similar accounts floating around.

I opened one up a FB account 10 years ago just to harvest votes for my entry in a NAS photography competition, never really used it since. Although when I went back on it one day to contact an old friend there was a 3 year old unread message from him asking if I fancied going for a drink.

the murky world of vote swapping/purchasing for online competitions was quite an eye-opener. Some cheating fuckers pay click factories for votes by the thousand.

and once I did a vote swap with someone where the link they sent me was a trojan, then my laptop slowed down considerably and they started describing the pic on my wallpaper to me in detail and what browsers I used to terrorise me. Things like that and realising most the people I know from work at the time generally just post bigoted memes about eastern European people and benefit scroungers, it made realise that it wasn't for me.

Like many of you, I hate Facebook. I never post anything there and I basically only keep my account to keep some sort of connection with people that live far outside my other circles.

For example, yesterday I noticed that I hadn't heard from an old (~20 yrs) IRL friend of mine for over 3 months. She was living across the world (8500 miles) from me where Facebook is a bigger deal and part of her social circle. So I click on her FB profile and notice on her most recent post that there had been a an unusally large amount of comments... 100+ where there normally would be ~10.

In the comments was the announcement of her death (sudden yet natural causes) and her funeral which had occurred in November, and dozens of tributes and memorials.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon & evening very confused and sad as my friend was in her early 40s and pretty healthy.

But the fact that the only way I would have found out about this in real time was if I had happened to be online around the time of these announcements and the FB algo made sure to ping me that something was up, for all of that to happen and me to luck into it by chance, it absolutely infuriates me.

Anyways my point besides Facebook being terrible, is to also check in on your friends who FB is your major connection with and find an alternate way to keep tabs on each other.

Sorry to hear about that.

This is not anything like that, but I'm spooked these days by what seems like diminished activity by almost everyone I know. Is anyone else experiencing this? Common sense tells me it's the pandemic--people are tired, worried, etc. The paranoid part of me worries about I'm not even sure what. It's not just that my own posts don't get much response--I'm used to that. It's that hardly anybody I know posts anymore. Used to be I'd go out for an hour or two and there'd be a message or two when I got back and five notifications of new posts. Hardly anybody posts anymore. Maybe it's something to do with my settings or algorithms or something else--I know Facebook has its own inscrutable system. But it's unnerving.

This thread is about Facebook, not ILX.

"This thread is about Facebook, not your whole life" would have worked just as well for me.

This ain't the Truth Bombs thread either!

(by that I mean, "same")

Personally, I’m posting more than ever. I’d guess lots of people are stepping back and recovering from a time when they felt the need to confront others perhaps more ever before

I pretty much only post "hey this music is great" or "hey i made this thing" posts, don't engage with anyone else's posts, don't care to.

most of my postings are Jack Handy-wannabe misdirections and i'm much happier than I was prior to my 30-day timeout.

Clemenza, I experience the same thing on Facebook. My personal reasons for posting less, and mostly inconsequential things is partly out of dread of who will interact with it. By that I mean various things - I post something innocuous so set the post to public or all friends (a list 500+ now), but then a closer friend or relative will obliviously drop my kids names or other private info in the comments. Or my mother in law will barrage me with questions or apologies. Or there’s the possibility of being publicly linked with someone who posted toxic shit elsewhere. Local acquaintances who just see me as middle aged suburban mom x, seem to distance themselves if I post anything outside that box. Other people that actually are outside of that box also distance themselves if I hedge and post too much bland stuff. Feels like ever diminishing returns to put oneself out there at all, and I’m sure I’m not unique to think so. That said, I’m still on the thing far too much browsing practical info group content and just doomscrolling. Pandemic hasn’t helped.

I pretty much only post "hey this music is great" or "hey i made this thing" posts, don't engage with anyone else's posts, don't care to.

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Friday, March 19, 2021 10:32 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh, you mean on Facebook

lol yes, i mean on facebook.

Kim, I also mostly stopped posting anything remotely...provocative, I'd say, because anytime I would post *anything* that wasn't related to music or some endeavor of my own, people would start shit in the comments. And always the same people! It seems like a lot of the people who are still using Facebook actively are some of the most angry, depressed people I know, and I just don't care to interact with them in such a way.

the biggest thread escalation I ever caused was saying "who cares if Ben Affleck is gonna play Batman".

I think my Facebook experience is different than a lot of people's. I've almost never gone through the arguments and pestering that seems common. In all honesty, I've had more confrontation here--not constant or anything, but more than on Facebook. In the 10+ years I've been on there, there was a couple of minor flare-ups with a cousin this past election, and one over one of those pick-your-favourite-album things; I picked a Byrds album that someone else didn't think was a real album. It was over and deleted within about three posts. That's literally it--I can count them on three fingers. The general political stuff on my wall is more or less in sync with me, and the only politics from teacher friends has to do with teaching, and of course we're in sync there.

The worst annoyance for me was always people who over-posted--like constantly, 10-15 times a day. Some I unfollowed, some I let it go. Now it's just dead. I'm missing what I don't even like.

Honestly I'm praying for the death of Facebook.

facebook finished the job ilx started

https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2014/12/24/inadvertent-algorithmic-cruelty/

facebook seems kind of quaint and old fashioned now.

You find a better forum for organizing a takeover of your state Capitol l.

something feeling really desperate about them throwing friend recommendations of utterly random people in the notifications. HEY HEY HI HI MAYBE YOU KNOW THIS PERSON??? YOU SHOULD BE FRIENDS :D :D :D THEY ARE ONE OF SEVEN HUNDRED PEOPLE WHO IS FRIENDS WITH SOMEONE YOU HAVEN'T INTERACTED WITH IN OVER A DECADE!!!!

Hasn't that been around for a while?

The thing that was bothering me two or three weeks ago--lack of anything on FB in the way of activity--has started to subside. To paraphrase George Costanza, it's not me (I was worried that it was), it's Facebook. It just seems to be fading in general among the people I interact with--maybe pandemic-related (it's a particularly bad time where I am), or maybe more permanent.

I only signed up for Facebook last year so I could see Satoko Fuji and Natsuke Tamara perform concerts. I don’t know how anyone can use this garbage site. The UI is actively repellent and confusing. I know their shtick is trying to drag you in for hours but everything about it makes me run away within minutes.

That feature really just inspires creepy doodz to friend request friends of friends so they can mack and claim "FB said we should say hi!"