Anti-social media

Edit: This seems to have been caused by some sort of algorithm censoring certain trending hashtags, not bootlicking admins. More info here: https://floss.social/@admin/114041922033317834

In a reminder that you don't have to be a billionaire to be a bootlicker, and that one needs to remain critical also while on the Fediverse, floss.social is blocking anti-fascist hashtags.

[I have chosen to redact this toot - the user deleted their post in response to admins clarifying what happened, so out of respect I remove this copy as well. The gist was that users could not post toots containing #antifa or #noAfD]

https://floss.social/@OddDev/114040886

I realize this might be slightly outside of the topic of this community ("Dedicated to antisocial behavior of social media corporations"), but I think it's important enough to nevertheless be of relevance.

With apologies for my bootlicker comment. Though we need to remain critical on the Fediverse, the lesson here might also be that we also need to be charitable and not jump too quickly to conclusions—which I just made myself guilty of. :)

It's interesting how Instagram (allegedly) accidentally banned #democrat after the US election, and now a similar problem was identified on a major Mastodon instance before the German election.

Most online debate is actively harmful to our thinking. Every hour spent arguing on Twitter is an hour we could have spent reading a book, writing an essay, or having a genuine discussion in a better environment.

The Internet promised us a marketplace of ideas. Instead, we built a gladiatorial arena where ideas go to die—time to find better places to think.

When was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.

I found this to be a great write-up on how social media enables fascism by providing a sense of false agency: Posting online we feel like we are doing something, and we end up wasting our time shouting in a void rather than actually resisting.

Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.

And no amount of corporate jargon or performative masculinity can make that stain go away.

At a moment when Zuckerberg's focus is clearly on sucking up to the Trump administration, Instagram goes the extra mile to block hashtags like #democrat and #democrats from Instagram.

Officially it's a mistake, with some tool from the company giving the following statement:

We're aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.

Despite their claim to affect "across the political spectrum", the "problem" seems to affect both #democrat and #democrats, but neither the hashtags #republican nor #republicans.

Here's a video of said behaviour documented by a PeerTube user (@letydoesstuff@peertube.doesstuff.social):

https://peertube.doesstuff.social/w/f8c84bb5-3dec-45a1-b833-3b3f0736c4e8

Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services. After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.

They replicate bias, entrench inequalities, and distort institutional aims. They devalue much of what makes us human: our capacities to exercise discretion, act spontaneously, and reason in ways that can’t be quantified. And far from being objective or neutral, technical decisions made in system design embed the values, aims, and interests of mostly white, mostly male technologists working in mostly profit-driven enterprises. Simply put, these tools are dangerous; in O’Neil’s words, they are “weapons of math destruction.”

The first half of the article goes over the problems we know well but in the second half there are some proposed solutions.

The WEF surveyed hundreds of experts worldwide and found that false and misleading content is seriously harming the geopolitical environment in a number of ways.

It enables foreign entities to affect voter intentions, it can sow doubt among the public about what is happening in conflict zones, and it can be used to tarnish the image of products or services from another country.

It's the second year in a row that misinformation has been listed as the biggest global risk.

We Want Your Soul by Adam Freeland

Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp—has just hired Dustin Carmack, a former adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s doomed presidential campaign and an ex–Project 2025 employee.

The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.

Instagram has begun testing a feature in which Meta’s AI will automatically generate images of users in various situations and put them into that user’s feed. One Redditor posted over the weekend that they were scrolling through Instagram and were presented an AI-generated slideshow of themselves standing in front of “an endless maze of mirrors,” for example.

In an update to its hate speech policy on Tuesday, spotted first by The Independent, the apps' parent company Meta deleted numerous clauses banning specific derogatory statements about protected groups, while adding detailed exceptions for anti-trans speech.

Mr White’s appointment was announced on Monday and comes as Silicon Valley seeks to build closer links to Mr Trump

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, said the donation was a departure from past practice by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

"Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created," Mark Zuckerberg says.