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The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

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Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

#61
post #42
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the same case. Donald Trump's account was banned due to his role in inciting an insurrection but you could still find republican content posted by other users with hashtags. I'd expect the same treatement if a democratic leader tried to incite a violent mob to assault the capitol.

When the Capitol riot happened, Trump was tweeting to demand the protesters act peacefully and within the law. If Trump was truly an insurrectionist, then that’s a very strange way to incite insurrection.

[dead]

Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

#63
post #42
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the same case. Donald Trump's account was banned due to his role in inciting an insurrection but you could still find republican content posted by other users with hashtags. I'd expect the same treatement if a democratic leader tried to incite a violent mob to assault the capitol.

When the Capitol riot happened, Trump was tweeting to demand the protesters act peacefully and within the law. If Trump was truly an insurrectionist, then that’s a very strange way to incite insurrection.

You should re-read his tweets from January 6th[0]. He didn’t tweet about peace until hours after things started, (he was gleefully watching it unfold on TV[1], remember), and when he did, it was a half hearted one line sentence to go home.

And three of his tweets were deleted by Twitter, including this gem from late in the day:

“Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

This doesn’t read like someone who was remorseful about the actions that happened that day on his watch.

0: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/tweets-january-6-2...

1: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-capitol-probes-season-fi...

Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

#64
post #42
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No the same case. Donald Trump's account was banned due to his role in inciting an insurrection but you could still find republican content posted by other users with hashtags. I'd expect the same treatement if a democratic leader tried to incite a violent mob to assault the capitol.

When the Capitol riot happened, Trump was tweeting to demand the protesters act peacefully and within the law. If Trump was truly an insurrectionist, then that’s a very strange way to incite insurrection.

[deleted]

Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

#65
post #48
post #16

Did anyone successfully move away from instagram? I have an account and sharing photos to a community there (people who I know irl and random strangers) brings me joy. I also have a pixelfed account but I know no people there and I was unsuccessful in switching. I’d love to hear what others used or did that worked for them.

It’s really easy. You replace Instagrams and all other social media with NOTHING. Delete all doomscrolling apps. They are not a necessity. You will live your life just fine without them. Just don’t use anything at all. If there are people you wish to keep in touch with, contact them using a direct method. If you have work you wish to publish, use a normal old website with an RSS feed.

This. I have been social media free for many years now and want to encourage others to do the same. Engagement algorithms, selling influence to the highest bidder, and misinformation alone ~should~ be enough to sway most, but it's also just a big waste of time.

What I do instead: send pictures to friends/family via various messaging platforms, get news via RSS (self-hosted Miniflux), run pinchflat to download youtube videos from a very select group of channels (no comments section, no suggested videos, sponsorblock to remove the annoying bits), and use a lot of the extra time I was wasting to read, workout, and engage in my various hobbies.

Some other helpful things I do with my Android phone: set to grayscale, uninstalled any time wasters (youtube, news, games), use an app called BuzzKill to limit distracting notifications (some notifications disable during work hours, some apps have a cooldown so they can only notify once every 15 minutes for example), setup notifications every 5 minutes when using an app that could be used for time wasting (browser mainly). These time wasting alerts (done via Tasker) are a nice reminder of time wasting as the amount of time can easily go unnoticed.

PS I also don't feel like I have a boring life. I have many IRL friends, hobbies, and a close-nit family. All these steps have aided in finding fulfillment with what I have.

Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

#66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did it on Twitter. It has no grid but has communities and lots of photographers. Now though a bit of an exodus and more spam

Thanks for writing, sounds interesting. And yes, Twitter does not look stable at the moment. A blog, ideally a self hosted one, sounds perfect; but I don't know how to approach community interactions there. To clarify, I'd like to post personal photos and interact with viewers; I don't want to make money in any way. I'm curious how this works in 2025, I'd love to hear more if anyone has anything to share.

I’d suggest a WordPress blog with ActivityPub installed, so your posts live on the fediverse too. This allows two way interactions and makes it easy for people to follow you from whichever way they find easiest (ie on Mastodon, or an RSS reader, or even email if you have that set up). The blog post at the top of this link is actually my blog. It’s been fun to see the comments today that were written on Mastodon, but appeared in the comments of my post. That’s what the two way interaction that ActivityPub provides and I’m always happy to see it in action. I made a video about this a few months back if you’d like to learn more https://youtu.be/t4pmWufYRr0?si=pfQQwb6pxUxIM6pq

Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

#67

Why has this been flagged and removed from the front-page?

Sad to see it getting flagged here, especially given the context of my post. I do appreciate that it got shared here and all the comments so far. I put a lot of work into this and I really appreciate that people are sharing it around.

Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

#68
post #63
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the Capitol riot happened, Trump was tweeting to demand the protesters act peacefully and within the law. If Trump was truly an insurrectionist, then that’s a very strange way to incite insurrection.

You should re-read his tweets from January 6th[0]. He didn’t tweet about peace until hours after things started, (he was gleefully watching it unfold on TV[1], remember), and when he did, it was a half hearted one line sentence to go home. And three of his tweets were deleted by Twitter, including this gem from late in the day: “Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Countr…

To add to your (excellent) points, he only started tweeting about peace once it was obvious the plan (interrupting the certification to use "alternate slates") had failed. Of course he would share a "call for peace" at that point. Everyone with half a mind would. It didn't cost him anything (beyond his ego), and it has allowed his followers to do exactly what GP is doing - leaving out all the incriminating information.

Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy

#69

I’ve seen a bit of how these sorts of things work and I’m going to give Meta the benefit of the doubt for the initial block, I’d like to think their leadership isn’t that brazen, and the fact this was fixed suggests an error. One bad piece of content (possibly related to critique of the incoming regime) tripped up an automated filter and took down a keyword at an unfortunate time. What’s inexcusable is that it took s…

It's entirely believable that this showed up because of a bug, but it also seems likely that the bug was in setting it to full blocking vs some kind of deprioritization.
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