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Facebook is cooked

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Re: Facebook is cooked

#631

Post by dguest »

testing22321 wrote: post #351
dash2 wrote: post #93

This is the tech version of "nobody I know voted for Nixon": FB's position in the US & Europe is very misleading from a global perspective. In the Philippines, say, Facebook is the internet. Every business runs on it. People use it instead of news. Everybody uses Messenger to chat. You get free minutes with your phone that are specifically for FB/IG/Messenger.

Yup. I spent time in 35 countries in Africa. FB is the internet.

Does FB data count against your data quota in these countries? I've been quite a few places where it's impossible to buy a sim card that doesn't give you free facebook and WhatsApp.

You can't use the real internet without asking your friends to pay for it.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#632

Post by donatj »

My Facebook is bad, but I still see a bunch of posts by friends. Instagram on the other hand went from a stream of artsy photos my friends posted of their vacations to a literal river of AI generated garbage.

Until about a year ago I really liked Instagram because it had been the last bastion of content by friends.

Now my feed goes

    - maybe one post from friends if I am lucky
    - 1-2 posts from content creators or local stores I like but don't follow 
    - endless stream of rage bait / slop / thirst traps
I just don't feel compelled to even open instagram anymore.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#633

Post by alecco »

jedberg wrote: post #204

> So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm? No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago. Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed.…

I just tried this: browse YouTube with incognito and watching 3 engineering vids only (Veritasium, Real Engineering, and Practical Engineering).

The home page shorts are about 50% thirst traps. There is creepy stuff, click-bait, and American politics/news (for and against Trump).

The worst one is a short "this is why ram costs $900" by "discord memes" showing a young girl with revealing clothing. Almost 1 million views.

I closed my YouTube account years ago because it was just pissing me off.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#634

Post by gzread »

jballanc wrote: post #469
blibble wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worse, cigarettes never threatened democracy the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved treat the company as a traditional publisher because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230

The problem with this is that section 230 was specifically created to promote editorializing. Before section 230, online platforms were loath to engage in any moderation because they feared that a hint of moderation would jump them over into the realm of "publisher" where they could be held liable for the veracity of the content they published and, given the choice between no moderation at all or full editorial respo…

Section 230 being repealed doesn't mean that any moderation will be treated as publication. The ambient assumptions have changed a lot in the past 30 years. Now nobody would think that removing spam makes you liable as a publisher.

Algorithmic feeds are, prima facie, not moderation, not user-created content and do not fall under the purview of section 230.

We all know why they're really doing it, though.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#635

Post by michaelt »

Aurornis wrote: post #255
curious_af wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

International flight attendant. So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary. If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that) What you're referring to may also be part of their XCheck p…

> So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary. I can confirm the same experience as the parent commenter for my family who still use Facebook even though most of them don't travel internationally. > If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political…

> I don't think this is Facebook playing 4D chess trying to hide content from politicians by detecting who is traveling internationally.

I agree the triggering criteria isn't international travel - but giving VIP treatment to VIPs isn't "4D chess" it's just business as usual.

You get elected to congress? The moment the list of winners comes out, someone from Comcast finds the accounts and marks them as VIPs. Someone at Uber does the same. Someone at Amazon does the same, and so on.

Typically this will limit who in Customer Services can view the addresses on your account and reset your password. But it can also mean you get free upgrades, put you at the front of the queue, assign your orders to highly-rated workers, etc - or for social media, a curated experience making the site look classy and enriching.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#636

Post by gzread »

cleandreams wrote: post #403
ryandrake wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar revulsion watching older folks in my family scroll and scroll through obvious AI slop and AI ragebait. They can't even really tell it's AI, and they just sit there gobbling it all up, even though it's 100% nonsense. I mean, on one hand, who am I to tell people what media to like and consume, but on the other hand, I kind of fear for their grip on reality.

This is not Facebook but I have a young friend who gets her news on Epstein from tiktok. She is convinced they were eating babies. I do worry (a little) that she will go over the conspiracy theories deep end. I told her tiktok news was bad "mental hygiene" but she didn't get it.

There is real, but weak, evidence the Epstein gang were eating babies. A lot of past conspiracy theories are suddenly seeming more plausible in light of the Epstein files.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#637

Post by varispeed »

gs17 wrote: post #225
varispeed wrote: post #81

Instagram is serving me literal porn when I browse shorts (for instance women showing their private parts). It's amazing that they are unable or maybe don't want to block it. Facebook basically has sexual content spam as in the OP article all the way. It's to the point I'd never open either app when in public.

> It's amazing that they are unable or maybe don't want to block it. I'm not convinced they care about moderation outside of legal necessity.

This is illegal in the UK, as they have to do age check for adult content. Also showing person porn without consent constitutes some form of sexual assault.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#638

Post by mrweasel »

bityard wrote: post #286
jedberg wrote: post #204

> So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm? No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago. Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed.…

Can confirm. For as long as I've been on facebook (way over a decade now), I've only used it to share pics of my kids/pets to family/friends. I unfollow people who post political and other garbage content. And yet, my feed is nothing but ads and Reels of young women bouncing on trampolines in bikinis.

One thought I've had is that it has to do with your level of engangement. If like me you doesn't really use social media for more than a few minutes a day (in my case I count Snapchat and YouTube Shorts, because that's what I have), then you start seeing some a lot of boobs.

It seems like the algorithm panics, because you don't engange with anything much, or because your interests shifts to often and it can't deal with it. So it falls back to boobs.

There's also a sad trend of assuming that because you're into lifting, your also misogynistic. The more you engange with fitness content, even if it's training programs or how to correctly do certain exercises, platforms like YouTube will start flinging misogynistic content at you and it's incredibly hard to remove.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#639

Post by firtoz »

arczyx wrote: post #568
cleandreams wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not Facebook but I have a young friend who gets her news on Epstein from tiktok. She is convinced they were eating babies. I do worry (a little) that she will go over the conspiracy theories deep end. I told her tiktok news was bad "mental hygiene" but she didn't get it.

> She is convinced they were eating babies There are indeed allegations of that, so it's not impossible. You can read it yourself here: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA001476... > On the yacht he witnessed babies being dismembered, their intestines removed, and individuals eating the feces from these intestines

Looking at the rest of the file, I'd rate the credibility of this as 2/10.

But of course I can also see how this could have been taken as fact and spread like wildfire. I wish good luck to the investigators, wow.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#640

Post by mort96 »

blibble wrote: post #454
javascriptfan69 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely think we will look back at the algorithmic content feed as being on par with leaded gasoline or cigarettes in terms of societal harm. Maybe worse since it is engineered to be as addictive as possible down to an individual level. Then again maybe I'm being too optimistic that it will be fixed before it destroys us.

I think it's worse, cigarettes never threatened democracy the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved treat the company as a traditional publisher because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230

Why change section 230? You can just make personalized algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement illegal instead, couldn't you? What advantage does it have to mess with 230, wouldn't the result be the same in practice?
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