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Facebook is cooked

pilk.website

741–750 of 890 posts

Re: Facebook is cooked

#741

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

> never threatened democracy

The beautiful part is how non-partisan this is. It cooks all minds regardless of tribe.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#742
post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The solution must be a social one: we must culturally shun algorithmic social media, scold its proponents, and help the addicted. We aren't going to be able to turn off the AI content spigot or write laws that control media format and content and withstand (in the US) 1st amendment review. But we can change the cultural perception.

It's really simple in the US: stop granting exemptions for the harm the content causes. Social media _is_ publishing. Expecting people to 'eat their vegetables' when only fast food is on offer is realistic, and flies in the face of all we know about the environmental drivers of public health.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privacy cost of Facebook is too high. Even if you have "nothing to hide" today, sooner or later you will post something you wish you had not posted, or someone else will do it for you. Once data about you is out there, it is impossible to remove, and the only recourse is to wait for that information to become irrelevant or outdated (if ever). For example, some employers have been known to spy on their employees t…

> Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of 1/2 of the planet, their children, pets, friends and family, in addition to their real-time location obtained through the spyware companion app. If adults decide to give them all this information aren't they the ones that should be blamed?

Facebook automatically tags people in photos

Re: Facebook is cooked

#744
post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we complain that everyone is siloed and no one talks to each other and complian that their feed is full of ideas outside of the silo.

What next? The intellectual dark web? I think we can have a free market of ideas or whatever you’re fetishising without it meaning that I can’t sit on the couch and open an app to see some family photos without it being intermingled with some loser saying that trans people should be hanged on the street. And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at. Can I ple…

That sort of rage bait is literally targeted to rile up people sitting on the opposite side of the kind of people watching that other media site that rhymes with socks. It’s all fake bullshit algorithmically optimized to divide.

Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff but it isn’t. It’s all the same nonsense packaged for different echo chambers.

At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn’t us vs them, it’s just us.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes one to know one? Could you elaborate

Meta is $201B total revenue business, virtually all advertising. Instagram is estimated to generate half of ad revenue. WhatsApp and Messenger contribute relatively little to ad revenue. So facebook.com alone must be generating around $100B revenue annually. It's impossible that something generating this revenue is serving AI generated NSFW teens pics with botnets commenting on those pictures only. Real humans must b…

I took the OP post at face value and that they preach what they say. If OP said he’s disgusted by those things then wouldn’t the ads be doing a bad match against the target demographic? I would expect ads, the largest revenue machine as you mentioned, to work really well. So to accept your statement would mean OP is sort of lying, that that content is a good match for OP and they are just trying to avoid it and hide that.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#746
Very nice to see this post and realize like I'm not the only one seeing things like this. Two quick stories:

I have always been a late mover to social networks, started using Facebook after many years of everybody around me using it and the same happened with Instagram. More recently, short videos and reels never caught my eye, never watched them and honestly took a long time to even realize they existed within Instagram and were not only a TikTok thing, but one time I decided to check it out and I got flooded with exactly the type of content the OP shared: thirst traps, women in the gym, AI garbage. This led to an interesting chat with my girlfriend btw, who was right next to me when I had this brilliant idea.

Took no more than 5 interactions in a course of a week or so of "open reels -> scroll down 3 or 4 videos -> exit" for the algorithm to be 100% more in tune with pages I follow on Instagram and content that appears in my feed (sports, tech, travel)

Also, similar thing for YouTube: if you watch a video in an anonymous tab, the home page will start empty, with no recommendations. After you watch the video, it will become 50% content similar to the video you just watch and 50% thirst traps.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#748

> 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.…

> Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.

I don't know what I did, but this has not been true of my account. A few years ago I did notice a sharp increase of AI slop filled with comments thinking it was real, which I found hilarious, but it wasn't thirst traps. It was more like "this person has a hidden talent and they are sad because they aren't recognized. Show them some love." And the person is obviously fake. I saw the same fake AI people in multiple languages.

Anyway, after a while that stuff lessened a lot, and the feed is a bit more reasonable. Mainly I get stuff that was posted on TikTok a few months ago. Lately there are a lot of quotations from the Epstein files.

Re: Facebook is cooked

#750
In the beginning there was a simple idea. If you were a platform and just acted as a conduit of information but didn't decide what got visibility - you weren't responsible for the content you transmitted - like a phone company isn't responsible for what you say on the phone. If you were a publisher - and exerted editorial control - such as deciding what gets put on the front page and what is buried 10 pages deep in the newspaper - you were responsible for the content. If you published libelous, fraudulent or other information the law held that you had decided to amplify that piece of information so were also held responsible.

In the beginning social media was a platform - you wrote something, your friends and family saw it - they really were just a conduit of information. Then social media decided they could suck up more attention by deciding what you saw - but, because its expensive to deal with libel suits they wanted to be categorized as a platform - even though they weren't. They succeeded - the good platform / publisher principle failed.

Most of the problems we are now seeing with Facebook, Amazaon, Ticktock could be solved instantly by saying - if you have a recommendation engine - you are responsible for the output of that recommendation engine. If it amplifies libelous, fraudulent or other such information - well you as the publisher are responsible.

It would mean that Ticktock, Facebook and others would drop their totally addictive design - as they would be afraid of being held responsible of the information which they are using to get users hooked. If they, by some miracle didn't drop their recommendation engine, and started acting as if they were responsible for the information their transmitted, your news feed wouldn't be filled with utter garbage. It would mean that fraudulent anti-vaxx conspiracy theories wouldn't get play on the internet. It would mean that libelous statements wouldn't get play. The list goes on and on.

Its simple, consistent with pre-existing law, and effective.

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