On January 7, 2025, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including the end of third-party fact-checking in the U.S., and rollbacks to its hate speech policy globally that remove protections for women, people of color, trans people, and more. In the absence of data from Meta, we decided to go straight to users to assess if and how harmful content is manifesting on Meta platforms in the wake of January rollbacks.
Remember when, at the dawn of the decade, conservative media would whine about “BIG TECH CENSORSHIP!”?
Those were the days. /s
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook[1].
[1]Corporations are the only ‘persons’ it’s acceptable to explicitly deadname.
Do we really like people, though?
Best thing I’ve done: delete Facebook/Meta. It was very difficult because you kept coming back… Think I “deleted” 20 times and still crawled back to login. Yeh…
So I came up with a plan to purposely delete and lock myself out of it.
This was like 5 yrs ago, I didnt have much uploaded photos so the process was easy. First, I changed the email on Facebook/Meta to a temporary one. Then I went further to use some random password create a new password.
Then I deleted the account with that temporary email and random password and closed the browser. Finally, I nuked my entire OS and reinstall a new one, just in case if the cache contains data about the email and password.
The headline confuses me. Has Facebook ever done something else?
Historically ('10s era) they were very focused on being “family friendly” and censoring anything they considered violent, sexual, perverse, deliberately deceptive, or otherwise upsetting to your middle-aged middle-income housewife/grandma.
Post-COVID, Zuckerberg’s been increasingly blackpilled, with an eye towards shock-jock engagement bait over any kind of civil moderation, fact-checking of misinformation, or discouragement of fraud/scam posts. So a site plenty of users have historically complained about feeling cloistered and sterile in the Disney-fied sense is now a total madhouse of AI slop, bum-fights clips, drop-shipper spam, and bargain basement rumor-mongering.
We’ve gone from a space that’s Mormon-style conservative to Fight Club-coded conservative.
Ok, but there had been plenty of criticism before that, specifically how readily the algorithm funnels the user into alt-right echo chambers.
And now it’s much worse.
That was more YouTube than Facebook.
The accusations are leveled at all social media.
Different applications employ different strategies for sifting content.
Facebook (and Google) pivoting to pure engagement bait was a more recent development, closer to 2018+, and synced up with their AI obsessions.
Tbf, having a central authority dictate the truth to you ain’t so great.
Neither is having classes of people who you aren’t allowed to offend.
Tbf, having a central authority dictate the truth to you ain’t so great.
I don’t think the phrase “third-party fact checkers” (plural) implies a central authority.
Neither is having classes of people who you aren’t allowed to offend.
Facebook can’t stop you from offending people. What they can do is make it slightly more difficult by disallowing slurs, etc.
The ones who have hate in their hearts can now shows us all their true colors.
That’s a good thing in my eyes. Let them show us exactly who they are.
That nerdy guy who wants to be an MMF fighter sure is angry, you can tell by his business.
Social Media needs to die
Said that on Social Media
Idk I’ve never considered forums where you talk to strangers to be social media. If I don’t know anyone it’s not “social” to me, it’s one step away from talking to myself to be on a site like Lemmy or Reddit
Corporate-run social media needs to die.
The internet was made for FTPs. That’s it. If you aren’t transferring files, you are using the internet wrong.
No newsgroups? No IRC?
No text. ASCII was a mistake. HTML is heresy.
This headline is garbage. You could put just about any Fortune 500 company’s name in there and the headline would still be accurate.
the url too. meta was never safe, and was never intended to be safe. the only way to make it safe is to shut it down.
why should anyone want it to be safe?
I’m not convinced that much of it is real. Many accounts have to be fake. Surely people can’t be as stupid as they appear. I think it’s AI’s funded or designed to be so stupidly biased.
Unfortunately people are that dumb if not dumber, but also yes there are tons of chatbots that are sowing anger and division usually in favor of conservatives. Weird how Elon was talking about how many bots are on Twitter and has completely stopped talking about it.
This kind of thinking is how we end up with extremist politicians like trump. YES PEOPLE ARE THIS STUPID. LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE ARE THIS STUPID. Stop trying to ignore reality.
A bit of both I think.
As a Facebook group administrator I get to see a fair bit of definite fake stuff. Any time someone posts anything with the word stolen for example, a number of fake accounts will attempt to post with names of people who ‘can help get your things back’.
They recently got a bit more advanced and will sometimes use 'I’m new here" type posts or similar tricks to try to trick the admin into letting them into the group. It’s a public group, hence a juicy target. There’s several tricks an AI can use.
That said, we have a fair share of legit nutters, rednecks, NIMBYs, homophobes etc as well - I just suspect some of the EV and renewable energy hatred for example, on Facebook is manufactured.
Working as intended then?
This is why I’ve switched back to the old internet. Chat like irc/matrix for social interaction. RSS for information. And webrings for browsing the personal garden websites that used to constitute the internet before social media took over. It’s been great.
The good internet magazine has been writing about this and is my inspiration
As well as the internet history podcast.
Facebook: makes a system where the only way to get engagement is to hatepost.
People on facebook: hateposts
People: “How could this happen?”
surprised pikachu face
