iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

what a shithole. Interesting to see how the weightings work/ change. would love to run an experiment slowly turning all the popular content more and more lefty.

eh

Instagram owner Meta said it would let its users in some countries call for violence against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian soldiers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-60709208

I guess it handed Russia a rationale to block Facebook and Instagram. They probably would've found one anyway.

buy nothing now has an app so you don't have to sign up to facebook to post/reply.

what's the difference between buy nothing and freecycle?

Buy Nothing is a bit more idealistic and community-minded and generally restricted to a smaller area, I think.

Was locked out of my account ("Facebook Protect"-related) for 36 hours, a friend finally figured out a solution (gave him my password and he logged in, and then, for reasons I don't understand, I was able to also).

Not to sound naive, but one question coming out of this: besides "billions of dollars," how is a public company that (if locked out from your account) pretty much can not be contacted--by phone, by e-mail--allowed to operate? Even Microsoft and Amazon, I'm pretty sure I was able to contact them in the past over a couple of issues. Here, I was caught in this Joseph Heller-level endless loop: 1) locked out; 2) required to change settings to get back in; 3) can't change settings because I'm locked out.

WHOA DOCTOR, facebook got BURNED on this one!!!

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It’s been four years since users alleging harm caused by the Cambridge Analytica scandal sued Facebook (now Meta) for selling tons of easily identifying personal information to third parties, allegedly doing so even when users thought they had denied consent. In 2018, plaintiffs alleged in a consolidated complaint that Facebook acted in “astonishingly reckless” ways and did “almost nothing” to protect users from the potential harms of this “intentionally” obscured massive data market. The company, they said, put 87 million users at “a substantial and imminent risk of identity theft, fraud, stalking, scams, unwanted texts, emails, and even hacking.” And users’ only option to avoid these risks was to set everything on Facebook to private—so even friends wouldn’t see their activity.

Because of Facebook’s allegedly deceptive practices, plaintiffs said that “Facebook users suffered concrete injury in ways that transcend a normal data breach injury.” Plaintiffs had gotten so far in court defending these claims that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was scheduled to take the stand for six hours this September, along with lengthy depositions scheduled for former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and current Meta Chief Growth Officer Javier Olivan. However, it looks like none of those depositions will be happening now.

On Friday, a joint motion was filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California. It confirmed that the plaintiffs and Facebook had reached a settlement agreement that seems to have finally ended the class action lawsuit that Meta had previously said it hoped would be over by March 2023.

It's not clear yet how much the settlement will cost Facebook—which has already paid billions in fines to the FTC—but there may be more information on Facebook sanctions in the next few days. Although the joint motion requested 60 days to draft a written settlement agreement, US district judge Vince Chhabria only granted the motion in part. Chhabria said he still expects all parties to “appear at the hearing on Friday, September 2 to discuss sanctions.”

Meta and Facebook’s legal team told Ars that it has no comment. The plaintiffs’ legal team did not immediately respond.

OUCH!!!!!!

https://social.entrepreneur.com/s/sajak-walks-off-set?as=6dap23851079301260596&utm_source=fb&utm_medium=z020409&utm_content=23851079248380596&utm_campaign=6dap23851079301260596&bdk=0

i included the facebook bonus URL numbers because it's the facebook thread.

if you have 5 minutes, you should read through that link. i feel very strange now

https://i.imgur.com/9e62auv.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/RFJnJtJ.jpg
sajak appears to be in physical pain whenever he has to give away 100K

i was not aware of this https://www.garbageday.email/i/75786121/bolsonaro-finally-debates. they really do have the stench of death on them as a company.

The debate in Brazil this week was notable for a few reasons, but the biggest one for me was that Bolsonaro skipped the one in 2018, instead going live on his Facebook as the other candidates debated each other. It’s hard to imagine Facebook Live (or any Meta product) being able to counter-program a national primetime broadcast in 2022, but four years ago, Bolsonaro was able to fully tap into an out-of-control social media groundswell, thanks to pretty much unlimited reached on Facebook and WhatsApp. When he won, his supporters literally chanted “Facebook” and “WhatsApp” at the presidential palace gates. And in an interesting story that I haven’t seen really talked about in the English media yet is that it’s not just Bolsonaro that is suffering from Meta’s waning cultural influence in Brazil and Instagram’s pivot to TikTok, but also all of the far-right influencers that ran alongside him in 2018. And so it should come as no surprise that Bolsonaro has recently begun focusing on Telegram.

I would rather his focus on drowning in his bathtub

Here's the unsolvable FB problem - having your spot blown up all the time. I.E. being tagged places you don't wanna be tagged.

Oh sure, you can stop it from showing up on your OWN Timeline with just a mere setting adjustment, which I added ages ago.

But that is useless if you have lots of friends are mutual friends with each other. If someone else tags me and I never approve adding it to MY timeline, my name still shows up in the friend's post. Which means people who are friends with the person who tagged me can see I'm there, it just delinks the link to my profile.

I can remove the tag, but until I notice it, my whereabouts are out there temporarily. So I wind up having to talk to people in advance to ask them not to tag me. Posting pics is worse cos it doesn't matter if I'm tagged if people recognize me, but I can solve that by not taking them with anyone?

Why do I care so much? Idk. For one I don't like people knowing where I'm at unless I choose to share that info, but mostly, a new age of FOMO butthurt that the social media age brought on.

Namely, I've had situations where random friends demand to know WHY WASN'T I INVITED when they see I was somewhere without them (one reason I don't check in places often), or I'll be invited to something but have a conflict, then that other person tags me and mutual friend yells OH SO THIS IS WHAT YOU BLEW ME OFF FOR?

I mean yeah that's childish behavior and it's not my responsibility to prevent people's feelings from being hurt, so if it comes to that, I'll just ditch any high drama friend if they do it more than once, but I also don't always want to advertise what I'm doing as that takes that control away from me.

(like it's diff if you're actually lying about your whereabouts and get tagged where you really are, cos that's actually kinda funny)

This is a solvable problem because within 5 years almost no one who isn't in a senior care facility will be using Facebook. All the tagging will be "game room" or "dining room."

kind of can’t believe people use Facebook, seems like such a relic

i got back in to be a little bit more in touch with family and today a cousin posted a flat earth video, for real. i haven't watched much flat earther stuff, so maybe this is a standard opening argument, but in the video, the guy was like "look at this image of the ocean from space and tell me what's wrong with it....you can't see any land there, why?", and then it cuts to his two friends/video participants, and they're like "because it's an ocean and there's no land there?", and the main guy interrupts with "watch the video. watch this. watch this." as he says that, the image of "the ocean" from space gets rotated 180 degrees, upside down, and also zooms out a bit, and you can see trees. "that's where we're filming from, the backyard. you see how easy it was to fool you? and we have almost no budget here. NASA has $65M a day to make it photorealistic."

My dad is a repeat believer in the 'facebook is limiting the number of people that can see you post to 25' hoax, and periodically asks me if its true and to explain it.

In the past I would have tried to explain its a hoax, but (admitdly belatedly) I realized he wants the hoax to be true, and wants me to confirm its true.

I confirm the hoax is true. zen ensues

I swear I see only the same five people. Maybe because they're the only ones using Facebook anymore.

I thought I'd deleted my account actual years ago now but someone told me yesterday that they'd contacted me on Messenger and I was still active. I just tried to log in to delete the fucker permanently and was told that I needed to contact three separate friends to verify me, then I could log in. Wtf.

Anyone ever had major, major problems with this miserable outfit?

In the past five months, I've had one comment and three posts removed.

1) a comment in a town tennis group about the weather: "The weather tomorrow looks very iffy. If anyone wants to play later today, let me know."

2) a post in my town's Facebook group--a group where I moderate--about a free screening of Lost in America I was having at a local community centre.

3) the same post as above, but in the Facebook group for a neighboring town (with permission from their moderators).

4) a post in a FB baseball group about all the father-son combinations Nolan Ryan has struck out.

The removals always come with the same idiotic blurb about community standards. I've tried desperately to get an explanation from someone, via both the help and support form and e-mail, but never get a response. Earlier today, I got an e-mail telling me to change my password because someone "may have accessed my account," which I counted as progress; I did, and I thought everything was fine, and now tonight I had a post removed.

I feel stupid for caring so much, but--sadly--FB is an important means of me keeping in touch with many people, and I use it for other things where I want to get word out. I'm convinced I'm going to have my account suspended without cause or explanation.

Also: does anyone know someone who works for Facebook who might actually be able to help? I'm serious. I have to believe that there are breathing, talking people somewhere who keep things running.

you can try Allyzay’s ilxmail!

I will...is that the display name, Allyzay? I don't remember anyone with that name posting.

Site been around a long time

I'll try. Checked, and has only posted twice since 2007 (in 2020). But it's worth a shot.

4) a post in a FB baseball group about all the father-son combinations Nolan Ryan has struck out.

How many have there been?

ilxor etaeoe works for Facebook Meta, I’ve harassed him recently to fix some bullshit that happened when my long-dormant account was inexplicably reactivated. Basically the only way to get customer support from Facebook is to complain to someone you know who works there. Ilx mail me and I’ll give you his phone number.

Or just go pester him in various threads until he does something about it

Oh we can just do that now? Cool.

clemenza i thought you knew her! sorry. i doubt she’d appreciate an email from somebody she doesn’t know complaining about facebook tbh.

Sorry, I already sent one out...I'll board-mail you now, silby, thanks.

Ryan struck out eight father/son combinations! TRIVIA 2020

Oh we can just do that now? Cool.

― can you still hit dinngers (gyac), Sunday, January 22, 2023 9:46 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago)

Imo if you work for Facebook you have to expect your life to get a little worse as a result

etaeoe and eeetai (used to post a lot in U.S. politics) are not the same person, are they? I had lunch with eeetai in Toronto once, ages ago.

kind of an interesting study about the motivations for clicking the "share" button, particularly bogus misinformation articles. a big chunk of people were just addicted to sharing stuff

The researchers created a mock Facebook entry for an article with a title and a graphic and showed it to users, asking them to decide whether they'd share it; the articles were evenly divided between accurate and misinformation. Overall, accurate stories were shared at a much higher rate (32 percent versus just 5 percent of false headlines). But a subset of subjects who shared the most stories—those with the strongest Facebook habit—shared fake and real stories at roughly equal rates. As a result, just 15 percent of the participants were responsible for nearly 40 percent of the fake stories that were shared.

To the researchers, this suggested that sharing misinformation isn't necessarily indicative of bias; instead, it's a problem of a subset of users who just habitually click share (with habit being defined as involving "limited reflection, inattention"). So the team designed an experiment to force people to do some reflection, asking participants to rate a headline's accuracy before they decided whether to share it (a group made these decisions in reverse order to act as a control). This worked partially. Habitual Facebook sharers reduced their sharing of false headlines but still ended up sharing a quarter of the total, and less frequent sharers were far less likely to share something false.

The researchers then repeated the experiment but used headlines that were either consistent with or opposed to the participants' self-described political affiliation (all headlines were accurate). A similar thing happened, with the non-habitual participants sharing politically palatable headlines at a rate seven times higher than contrary ones. By contrast, those with a Facebook habit were far less discerning, showing only three times the bias toward politically compatible headlines. So again, even with prompting, the habitual users were far less discriminating

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/for-facebook-addicts-clicking-is-more-important-than-facts-or-ideology/

Which would possibly explain my own problems: Russians are indiscriminately sharing my Nolan Ryan post in hopes of disrupting the 2024 election.

One thing I've seen a lot of since almost the inception of FB is friends getting ahead of family on death announcements and confusing everyone.

People shared news of my friend Di's death last year before the family had ok'd it.

Tonight, an old friend was reported as deceased and all of us began sharing condolences until we found out she had not died yet, just taken off the ventilator. Her daughter was really not happy about that.

I guess pre-social media there was the possibility of emailed rumors or phone calls but that required more effort and had no delete button.

fuck, i'm really sorry to hear about what happened tonight. both being taken off a ventilator, and the mess that you described. it's just the last thing, the worst form of bullshit, that grieving people need to deal with, especially while still processing what's happened.

It's ok. I'm more upset for her daughter. Nobody wants added weight at a time like that.

Like what a weird thing to want to post "first" about

N, based on this and other posts you have made in the past, it sound you really could get off facebook and it might be a net gain for you. Just email or text everyone you keep up with and let them know you're not going to be using that service and to contact you in another way.

Yr not wrong

I read ILX more than FB by this point

Sorry to hear about this N. (fwiw, I left Facebook under parallel circumstances in the wake of a friend's suicide. I left a "I'm not here, I'm there" message, peaced out, and am all the happier for it)

the site is getting super wonky, I don;t see notifications for comments or reacts sometimes

yeah that happens to me all the time, like i'll look and this post has two new comments and no indicator that they had arrived.

I find the sent/delivered/read icons that accompany messages--the lag time--very confusing as of late. I'll send a message to a friend who's online, and all I get is "sent." I can see where they might not read it right away, but how can it not be "delivered"?

loving this https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html

The teenaged son of a good friend of mine committed suicide last week.

My friend is feeling the tormented anguish that all of us never want to imagine. He and his ex-wife are also being very open about their grief, including the fact that the boy died taking his own life. In return, they're getting all sorts of signs of support from family, long-lost friends and perhaps even more important at this very moment, friends and parents of friends of the boy whom my friend has never met. Hearing about wonderful facets of his son's life that he wasn't even aware of.

Sounds like this is just the sort of thing where Facebook can do some good, right?

My friend and his family live in a satellite city of a Very Large American City. I googled the son's name and the city to see if an obituary had been published.

The first results were these AI-looking stories from pseudo-newspapers. "_____________ ____________ COMMITS SUICIDE". In the article, accompanied by a blurry enlarged photo of the kid, some of my friend's posts were laid out to look like he was being quoted for the story.

There's even a YouTube video showing up, that's 30 seconds long. I haven't clicked on it, but I assume it's the same type of deal.

My friend's got a public profile. You could look all this up yourself if you knew his name. So while it may be technically wrong to call this an invasion of privacy, it still feels like an invasion of something.