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Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

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Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#41

Post by mrweasel »

2024throwaway wrote: post #21

I have kept my Facebook account for the primary purpose of making sure relatives don't share pictures of our kids' faces, and check it very rarely. Recently though, the change has been incredible. People I know in real life, including my own parents, have been "Liking" very obviously AI generated posts. A HUGE amount of the "Recommended" posts I see are obvious AI images. It's gotten really, really bad, in just the p…

But do anyone actually post anything anymore. My account got closed in 2016/17 when I refused to accept their new terms of service. Up until that point I had pretty aggressively filtered my feed down to only things posted directly by people I knew. I think I checked in maybe once every two weeks and spend 2 - 5 minutes catching up. No one posted anything, it was all likes and shared posts.

My wife wanted to show me an article, posted via Facebook the other evening and I asked if I could scroll around a bit, out of curiosity. There was nothing but ads, post by companies, which I also count as ads and a few article about knitting. Facebook is no more personal that usenet was in the olden days, but it is at the same time an engine that just keeps pushing paid and "organic" ads for stuff for you to buy... Stuff you do not need.

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#42

Post by robertlagrant »

coolhand2120 wrote: post #18

When people say "fake news" it means different things to different people. "Hunter Biden's laptop is a Russian plant" was considered the truth and anything to the contrary "fake news". It wasn't just a mistake, it was a hard lie. Having any single entity determine what is "fake" and what is "real" is incredibly dangerous. We can't even agree if 72F degrees is the correct room temperature - let alone complex things li…

Yes, I think this is a proxy for "how much do you watch your usual news source". The Covington stuff wouldn't have made people think twice about regular news had the video of what happened leaked out on YouTube.

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#43

Post by idontwantthis »

ramoz wrote: post #39

My facebook experience is dramatically different than others I guess. The only fake stuff I see are sports memes and AI images fooling boomers. Otherwise my timeline is its mostly ads, friends sharing pictures and updates from their personal life, or posts from the groups I've joined. Twitter and TikTok are where the narratives flow.

You get whatever keeps you there and it seems pretty impossible to change what you see once your feed has become saturated with a single subject.

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#44

Post by binarymax »

robertlagrant wrote: post #25
2024throwaway wrote: post #21

I have kept my Facebook account for the primary purpose of making sure relatives don't share pictures of our kids' faces, and check it very rarely. Recently though, the change has been incredible. People I know in real life, including my own parents, have been "Liking" very obviously AI generated posts. A HUGE amount of the "Recommended" posts I see are obvious AI images. It's gotten really, really bad, in just the p…

> A HUGE amount of the "Recommended" posts I see are obvious AI images. As in AI artwork, or AI-generated images that purport to be real?

Look at this absolute nightmare to see what’s going on with AI and Facebook.

https://twitter.com/AnAngryOpossum/status/178973278033248283...

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#45

Post by orangecat »

bgun wrote: post #15
p_j_w wrote: post #7

Facebook is easily more harmful than TikTok and should get the same treatment.

The "treatment" TikTok is receiving is a requirement that its US presence should be sold to a US company. Facebook is already a US company, so I'm not sure what you mean. TikTok is not actually getting banned, unless it fails to achieve that sale, which is highly unlikely.

It looks like the CCP will not allow TikTok to be sold (https://twitter.com/michaelsobolik/status/178790253892830433...), which just further establishes that it's primarily an intelligence and propaganda operation controlled by a hostile government.

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#47

Post by forgetfreeman »

robertlagrant wrote: post #25
2024throwaway wrote: post #21

I have kept my Facebook account for the primary purpose of making sure relatives don't share pictures of our kids' faces, and check it very rarely. Recently though, the change has been incredible. People I know in real life, including my own parents, have been "Liking" very obviously AI generated posts. A HUGE amount of the "Recommended" posts I see are obvious AI images. It's gotten really, really bad, in just the p…

> A HUGE amount of the "Recommended" posts I see are obvious AI images. As in AI artwork, or AI-generated images that purport to be real?

Looks like I just found my daily hill to die on. If AI is involved the term "artwork" isn't really applicable.

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#50

Post by spinningslate »

adamwong246 wrote: post #38
spinningslate wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given that 1) It's not in Meta's interest Somewhat glib answer is it needs to be in their interest. Section 230 means the social media platforms are insulated from liability for the content they publish and promote. It was conceived in a world where those platforms were perceived as (relatively) neutral infrastructure for publishing and sharing content. But it's a long time since they were neutral. The algorithms u…

I, too, am not a lawyer but I believe that FB _ought_ to be "insulated from liability for the content they publish and promote" because I don't want them to be arbiters of truth. Humans need to decide for themselves whats true and off-loading this responsibility to Meta through contrivance of law is a Black Mirror episode come to life.

that's fair to an extent, and shows why it's difficult. Do we want the platforms to be the sole arbiter of truth? No, definitely not. Equally, editorial control where the sole driver is profit - with no accountability for societal consequence - can't be correct either.
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