I hope this serves a cautionary tale to the left. If you think it's righteous to block or cancel someone who offends you on your moral or political ground, someday someone in power can do the same to you. That's why I'm all for free speech, even when some speech may offends someone. Well, I got downvoted every time when I say this, so it really shows what the left are.
The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
71–80 of 87 posts
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't agree with the Trump ban and a lot of other "content moderation" (which affected the left wing too). But in the case of Trump he was banned due to the incitement of violence/revolt in the Capitol Hill incident and the attempts to overturn election results.
Look at Clinton and Pelosi’s tweets when Trump won the first term. They also challenged the result and claimed it was a manipulated election. May 16th 2017 Nancy Pelosi tweeted to her massive following “ Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.” Does that mean she was removed from social media for “inciting revolt”? No, of course not. Trump’s twee…
Pelosi didn't question the election results or call for their overturning. It was about the claims about foreign influence, which was later used to build the narrative for impeachment.
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#73Did 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.
I stopped the day Instagram started training their models with user posted content. I only keep it because my wife is sending me interesting things and vice versa.
I'm planning to move my photography to Pixelfed, like you. I don't care about the interaction I get. It'll be just a webpage, a public gallery which I can show people when taking photos comes up.
Actually, I created the account already, but didn't have the time to post the photos actually. Since I have limited storage, I want to handle resizing + optimizing them before posting them to not exhaust my quota too quickly.
The breaking point was for me to not being depending on these apps for my happiness. Taking photos makes me happy, sharing is just putting it out there. People's acknowledgement doesn't change the fact that I have taken these, and printed and framed some of them.
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#74Did 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.
My goal is not avoiding doomscrolling though (I don’t do that on instagram in the first place).
Other than direct contact I like to also have more casual and indirect interactions. Instagram works well for me here, I’m curious if anyone is doing similar things with any other apps.
But sure, if you feel that instagram or social media is causing you more problems than benefits, absolutely do something different.
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#75> "The Day" So it was fine when they were censoring republicans, but only became "the day of infamy" when blocking the left... Zero acknowledgement or mention in the article about the history of censorship against the right. I thought they believed in equity?
When did they censor the republicans?
For the last several years, they censored the Hunter Biden laptop story (before an election, at that!), the claim that COVID was possibly a lab leak, and other "uncouth" topics that turned out to be reasonable after all. And the positions censored were far more likely to be associated with Republicans than they were for Democrats.
Republicans on FaceBook in particular joked about being in FaceBook jail heavily -- observing "shadow bans", outright bans, and other ways they couldn't communicate with their fans and friends.
Indeed, when Twitter was bought out and the censorship was removed, many of these people were amazed at how much interaction they got afterward -- it was night and day. And we now know from the "Twitter Files" that the Government was behind these efforts all along, so it's not just a "company has the right to moderate content" issue, it's a "government is violating the 1st Amendment" issue.
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter. They didn't seem to have a problem with this. It's interesting how the brainwashing works: they always find a reason for whatever they do. "Empathy", "sympathy", "compassion" for whatever evil they do. "We are protecting innocent people from the Dangerous Thoughts". When other groups do it to them, then they cry in the media in which they control. The solution is simple: we…
> Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter For misinformation and inciting violence. Not because of his politics.
If Democrats can incite violence and post information with impunity, yet Republicans get fact-checked out the wazoo (by Democrats, no less!) ... it's very hard for us to take the claim that this wasn't "because of his politics".
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#77I hope this serves a cautionary tale to the left. If you think it's righteous to block or cancel someone who offends you on your moral or political ground, someday someone in power can do the same to you. That's why I'm all for free speech, even when some speech may offends someone. Well, I got downvoted every time when I say this, so it really shows what the left are.
"it's different when we do it..."
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The two way activitypub integration looks very practical, I didn’t realize this is an option; I’ll read more, thanks!
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at Clinton and Pelosi’s tweets when Trump won the first term. They also challenged the result and claimed it was a manipulated election. May 16th 2017 Nancy Pelosi tweeted to her massive following “ Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.” Does that mean she was removed from social media for “inciting revolt”? No, of course not. Trump’s twee…
Consider that the differing results in each situation led to different actions taken. In only one case was there an insurrection supported (as evidenced by pardons) by the tweeter.
First off, it's now clear from the evidence that the "insurrection" was the FBI working hard to entrap all the people they could, after everything was done to limit security on the day of the protest.
Secondly, the riots in Washington DC on Trump's first inauguration are rather pretty, the way the fires of businesses glowed in the night.
I'm really tired of pretending that somehow the Republicans are the "uncivil" ones, while the Democrats are perfectly innocent, and wouldn't harm a fly.
Re: The Day Instagram Blocked Democracy
#80I’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…
This is a very unlikely scenario, given how many hashtags were blocked and how specific they were.
Then why did they "fix" it?
They were related hashtags. My guess is a few bad posts on those hashtags that polluted them in some way, such that automated systems decided to classify those hashtags as bad. I'd bet that such a system exists, that's just basic responsibility.