I still have a facebook account for family reasons but I never use it except for answering messages. When I did, there was an extension F.B. Purity that would take care of the ads as well as being a bit of a RES for facebook. You could edit settings to only show certain things in your feed, and other cool settings. But facebook in general is not something I want to be near these days.
Oh interesting. Thanks heaps, I will definitely be adding that!
If your friends are the ones with the hate speech and genocide
Thanks this made me giggle uncontrollably for a moment there!
No I just mean using fb kind of makes my skin crawl on a moral level, because of its long-term willingness to aid in genocidal killings for years on end and its role in fomenting hate more generally.
Ah yes I almost forgot about all the facebook stuff. Have you read Mindf*ck? The one about Cambridge Analytica not the romance novel that comes up when you search for it. While not directly implicating facebook, they are at least complicit in some pretty horrible stuff (and that was 10+ years ago). It’s one side of the story from a whistleblower but it’s a pretty crazy story.
I haven’t posted on facebook in a long time (I can’t remember posting anything after they got rid of “walls”), there’s an awful lot not to like about facebook, but there isn’t a replacement. There’s Friendica, sure, but that is not in any way ready to replace facebook, and I have pretty simple criteria (posts are private, handles video and photo uploads well. That’s pretty much my whole list).
I have not read that, sounds interesting! I remember reading an interview with one of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblowers who said they had been deliberately testing messaging on dissaffected young men and came up with “drain the swamp” etc long before Trump’s candidacy though.
Meta are directly implicated in the Myanmar genocide. The higher ups there were aware that it was being used to deliver specific genocide instructions for over two years and refused to shut that down, then later during the genocide prosecution they actively impeded the courts.
The book covers that pre-Trump stuff. From memory it was something like Obama got elected using a form of microtargeting and Republicans realised they were way behind on using big data. So the early parts were almost 8 years before Trump was elected. I think the company (not yet called Cambridge Analytica) was involved in dodgy stuff in developing countries ahead of that as well.
That does sound interesting. I’m really behind on reading about all that big picture stuff. There’s a book called Surveillance Capitalism I keep meaning to read to help me make sense of what is going on.
Lately I get the impression that “Republicans” and “Democrats” aren’t really the driving forces behind any of this - it’s oligarchs or something.
Problem is my brain rebels against non fiction lately and would much rather read a sci fi about evolved spiders exploring space!
I still have a facebook account for family reasons but I never use it except for answering messages. When I did, there was an extension F.B. Purity that would take care of the ads as well as being a bit of a RES for facebook. You could edit settings to only show certain things in your feed, and other cool settings. But facebook in general is not something I want to be near these days.
I have one for reasons (contacts) but I don’t like it either… I wonder if FB Purity still works?
It’s not just the GUI or the algorithms though. It’s also all the hate speech and genocide.
The last update was less than a month ago so I’d guess it works: https://www.fbpurity.com/
You can remove all the posts from your feed that aren’t from your friends. I remember getting a bit lost in all the settings though.
If your friends are the ones with the hate speech and genocide, then… I guess you can block keywords? Or just un-friend them.
Oh interesting. Thanks heaps, I will definitely be adding that!
Thanks this made me giggle uncontrollably for a moment there!
No I just mean using fb kind of makes my skin crawl on a moral level, because of its long-term willingness to aid in genocidal killings for years on end and its role in fomenting hate more generally.
Edit: Amnesty International report from a few years ago in case you’re wondering what I’m on about.
Ah yes I almost forgot about all the facebook stuff. Have you read Mindf*ck? The one about Cambridge Analytica not the romance novel that comes up when you search for it. While not directly implicating facebook, they are at least complicit in some pretty horrible stuff (and that was 10+ years ago). It’s one side of the story from a whistleblower but it’s a pretty crazy story.
I haven’t posted on facebook in a long time (I can’t remember posting anything after they got rid of “walls”), there’s an awful lot not to like about facebook, but there isn’t a replacement. There’s Friendica, sure, but that is not in any way ready to replace facebook, and I have pretty simple criteria (posts are private, handles video and photo uploads well. That’s pretty much my whole list).
I have not read that, sounds interesting! I remember reading an interview with one of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblowers who said they had been deliberately testing messaging on dissaffected young men and came up with “drain the swamp” etc long before Trump’s candidacy though.
Meta are directly implicated in the Myanmar genocide. The higher ups there were aware that it was being used to deliver specific genocide instructions for over two years and refused to shut that down, then later during the genocide prosecution they actively impeded the courts.
The book covers that pre-Trump stuff. From memory it was something like Obama got elected using a form of microtargeting and Republicans realised they were way behind on using big data. So the early parts were almost 8 years before Trump was elected. I think the company (not yet called Cambridge Analytica) was involved in dodgy stuff in developing countries ahead of that as well.
That does sound interesting. I’m really behind on reading about all that big picture stuff. There’s a book called Surveillance Capitalism I keep meaning to read to help me make sense of what is going on.
Lately I get the impression that “Republicans” and “Democrats” aren’t really the driving forces behind any of this - it’s oligarchs or something.
Problem is my brain rebels against non fiction lately and would much rather read a sci fi about evolved spiders exploring space!
Tell me more about these spiders exploring space? Presuming we aren’t talking Ender’s Game.