iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

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.

jesus christ

So sorry to hear, pplains

The other day an elderly relative of mine got tagged in a video post with the caption:

https://i.imgur.com/5DM6PxG.png

"Look who died in an accident I think you know him I'm so sorry"

Total bottom of the barrel clickbait and it kinda bothered me because this relative is not exactly young nor in the best health so I was arsed enough to report it.

2 days later I get a response from FB:

"Today at 8:41 AM

Your report

To keep our review process as fair as possible, we use the same set of Community Standards to review all reports.
We've taken a look and found that this content doesn't go against our Community Standards.
We understand that this might be upsetting so we recommend exploring the options available to control what you see.
You can also request a review if you disagree with the decision to not take this down."

aka "Looks good to me 👍👍 Sorry you're offended, tough shit lmao!"

Relatedly, my IG feed rarely has content from people I follow, just promoted content and viral algo trash.

Real "circling around the drain" vibes from Meta's product suite.

Hey Steve, nice to see you here.
I bounced from Facebook end of last year and I'm much less angry as a result.
Instagram is annoying af agreed, but i've convinced the feed to just send me cat pictures and paintings of dragons so it's not dancing women or people selling clothes.

Doesn’t look like this was posted here

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/19/tech/facebook-cambridge-analytica-settlement-application/index.html

Oh snap thanks. Just subbed mine.

These weird clickbait sites wouldn't go that full distance were it not for Facebook providing them the coverage.

Without FB, they'd have to settle for the page footers of news sites, where the "People With Drivers Licenses From [Your State] Eligible For Cash Settlement" links live.

But they get clicks on FB, which get clicks for FB. Why slaughter that cow if it annoys only a small group of people?

What if... *huge bongrip* the tagged person died in the metaverse and that's what the link was rightfully showing?

-meta product team

Relatedly, my IG feed rarely has content from people I follow

there's a filter for that.. tap on the Instagram logo and select 'following'

Shame you have to do that every single time though.

Just watched two couples that I'm close friends with, who previously had no beef and were very close themselves, end their friendship very publicly in an argument in a FB thread. One where one couple was pretty deliberately misunderstanding the other, even when the other was trying to point this out politely to them.

Kinda blows my mind. The only friendships I've ever insta-ended on social media were people who I didn't know well who turned out to be racist/sexist/transphobic. I could see if someone was being abusive or if there was long-standing friction that bubbled over. Or abusive

This was just one couple's insistence on hearing something the other didn't say or imply

- the extra "abusive", lol

Facebook is very accessible when you have some kind of problem. Contact them, and they will work to bring your friends back together.

I am most definitely not getting involved. I have enough to deal w in my own house lol.

Just find it interesting how many times I see this happen but it does kinda suggest the friendship wasn't as healthy as they thought it was when it does happen

The argument was over Guardians of the Galaxy

I can't even comprehend what you're saying here, please set more.

I was just kidding--see my own troubles with Facebook earlier in the thread. Your account could be taken over by blood-sucking Nazis from Jupiter, and you're not getting any help from them.

ok I have to know what about GotG did it

Couple A made a comment about how they thought the public criticism about Gunn's depiction of violence against Rocket's friends was overblown, because it was just fake CGI shit, and people were being too sensitive*. Wife in Couple B lightly pushed back to say that she enjoyed the movie, but that those scenes upset her and that she probably couldn't see it again.

Couple A apparently heard "if you liked this movie you're literally Heinrich Himmler" and reacted needlessly aggressively for the next few hours until they both blocked each other.

*which was weirdly out of character for them, as they are usually progressive and empathetic, so I'm guessing there's more at play here

lol clemenza. that was a helluva dry post.

Defriend anyone with strong opinions about GOTG IMO. not in real life but on social media.

I have FB Purity to block the words "guardians" and "galaxy" but forgot to get the acronym

Lol thank you for elaborating (I no longer look at Facebook nor have I seen the movie so I appreciate the glimpse into the Metaverse).

then again, I guess this type of thing plays out in the flesh too.

still remember freshman year of college, scurrying away angrily from the common area as two groups of six people got into a shouting match about the other's supposed misunderstanding of the Star Wars timeline (this was right after Phantom Menace came out!)

The disputes are fiercest when the stakes are small

Twas ever thus

the only relationships i ended via facebook were all very early in the trump era. i made one of those "if you have ever even thought about supporting trump for a millisecond i fucking hate you and you're terrible" posts, and some family and a handful of high school acquaintances made it very clear that they were proud of being terrible

A great way to sort out who you do and do not need in yr life imo

I realize it's fashionable to hate on Facebook but for me it has been a pleasure. I get exactly the right amount of contact with people I only like a little bit.

The people I really love? I have multiple ways to reach those people and I am happy with how much we interact, and If I need a break from them I can just not interact with them; it's fine.

For some reason I have exactly no contact with Trumpy / Republican / conservative people. Like, at all. I literally do not see them or their stupid shit.

I don't think it's because I'm better at curating my feed than other people, nor is it because I live in a rarified coastal cultural bubble (hi I am from fucking Missouri).

For whatever constellation of reasons, the site has somehow done a good job of showing me what I want to see and not showing me what I don't. Sorry for those who it doesn't work for.

I witnessed a friendship collapse over FB recently because one person was posting about travel and referred to his long sightseeing walks as "death marches," and then someone else posted that she has family in Ukraine and is very worried about them so can we not make jokes about death marches, and Person A blew up and wrote a bunch of angry posts to Facebook at large about how he's a member of several minority groups and how could someone have the audacity to accuse him of insensitivity.

(xpost) All my Facebook issues are with the company itself, and all the weirdness they've forced on me; like you, my friends (real-life friends and FB-only friends) cause me little grief.