Social Media is for the Birds #nobodycares

[Free]

 

[Free]

What the world would look like without YouTube

Or, an alternate history of the internet.

www.theverge.com

 

[Isabeau]

Survey on Americans’ trust of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

This is how much Americans trust Facebook, Google, Apple, and other big tech companies

72 percent said that Facebook has too much power.

www.theverge.com

 

[Free]

>> 72 percent said that Facebook has too much power

What percent said they either plan to, or have stopped, using Facebook?

 

[Free]

Proposed bill is for U.S.

Proposed bill would end “likes” for young teens’ online content

Senators want kids under 16 to be more protected from platforms teens use.

arstechnica.com

 

[Free]

I'm not sure if this is classic human stupidity, or a more modern form.

 

[Isabeau]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Three Panel Soul - Apps

 

[Brenda Archer]

Three Panel Soul - Apps

I see an opportunity!!!!

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I see an opportunity!!!!

*shitcans your post <3

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Solution

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Solution

www.smbc-comics.com

 

[Isabeau]

Thread by @clarissaward: Thoughts from CNN takedown of a Russian troll farm operating out of Ghana and Nigeria. 1) Alarming that a group of 24 kids working on Samsun…

Thread by @clarissaward: Thoughts from CNN takedown of a Russian troll farm operating out of Ghana and Nigeria. 1) Alarming that a group of 2ing on Samsung Galaxy’s (no laptops) at a big table were able to reach more than a quarter of a million people, m…

threadreaderapp.com

 

[Brenda Archer]

Thread by @clarissaward: Thoughts from CNN takedown of a Russian troll farm operating out of Ghana and Nigeria. 1) Alarming that a group of 24 kids working on Samsun…

Thread by @clarissaward: Thoughts from CNN takedown of a Russian troll farm operating out of Ghana and Nigeria. 1) Alarming that a group of 2ing on Samsung Galaxy’s (no laptops) at a big table were able to reach more than a quarter of a million people, m…

threadreaderapp.com

I wish more people understood these things. Social media is a hall of distorted mirrors at the best of times because it’s deliberately designed to exaggerate our own preferences and proclivities. If the goal is advertising, we’ve all passively gotten used to the microtargeting. But then come the hard to trace state actors, and who knows who else.

Digging around in this author’s timeline I also found:

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

TikTok internal communications forbid "ugly", "poor" users' posts from being promoted

Portions of these discriminatory guidelines have leaked in the past, revealing that TikTok intentionally prevented posts from LGBTQ users and users with disabilities from surfacing in this section. The Intercept has more detail from the leaked documents, showing that they ban people who have an “abnormal body shape” such as a “beer belly” or “ugly facial looks” such as “too many wrinkles.”

The guidelines also ban videos from people who appear to be poor. Cracked walls or old decorations are enough to have a video suppressed, according to the leaked guidelines.

While TikTok says the goal was to prevent bullying (and past leaks have referenced bullying as a policy rational), the notes accompanying these restrictions explain that TikTok viewed these traits as less likely to draw in new users. “If the character’s appearance or the shooting environment is not good, the video will be much less attractive, not worthing to be recommended to new users,” reads the guide, which The Intercept says was translated by TikTok from Chinese to English for use globally.

A TikTok spokesperson told The Verge that the guidelines obtained by The Intercept are regional and “were not for the US market.” The company has made many of these changes over the past year. In that time, it hired a US head of trust and safety and launched trust and safety offices in California, Dublin, and Singapore to oversee the development of moderation policies, the spokesperson said.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Facebook anti-spam bug spent all night deleting legitimate news articles about coronavirus

 

[Free]

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[bubblesort]

Last Friday, I woke up and was doing my morning ritual... went to the can and checked FB. FB wouldn't let me in, though. They wanted me to upload a photo of myself to verify that I'm not a bot. I'm looking at it like, fuck this. Even if I was inclined to submit my photo for that, why do they want a photo of me on the can? Also, I've got a massive quarantine fro, bed head, my eyes are still bloodshot, and I shaved my beard to make masks work better, so I doubt the algorithm would recognize me, anyway. I barely recognize me when I first wake up. I said fuck it, deleted the app, and FB messenger. Then I had coffee and realized how I'll have to change how I do some things if I'm going to leave FB. I need to at least message some people and tell them to find me on discord or something to stay in touch with them.

I went to the PC, and got the same thing. No pic, no access. Out of frustration, I uploaded a random meme from my pictures folder. Probably a bad idea, but whatever. I could use some time away from FB for a while anyway. They actually did accept that picture as a picture of me, but it took them 2 days to do it. So I guess skynet thinks I'm a meme about bagpipes now. That might be useful if they ever send an android back in time to assassinate me.

So I got back in on Monday, and I forgot about all this until yesterday, when I got a notification that one of my posts was flagged by the fact checkers. It's this article, where the headline is, "The sun has entered a lockdown period, which could cause freezing weather, famine." Yeah, the headline is absurd. Solar flare activity doesn't cause that kind of thing. That's why I posted it with the caption, "Governor Wolf has gone too far! LOL". It's a joke. You can't fact check a joke. Or if you do fact check a joke, the best you can hope for is to make it funnier and more memetic.

Go ahead, think about the chicken crossing the road joke. Now think about a heckler standing up and saying he's a chicken cognitive scientist, and actually, because of neurological structures, chickens have no sense of space, so the chicken can not decide to cross roads. They do it, but they don't perceive it as crossing the road (that's probably not true, but you get the idea).

That's not even getting into the low quality of their fact checking on this. The fact checking article they pinned to my post is just people talking about what they find convincing and what they don't. I don't care at all about normative statements like that. If you want to check facts, I want serious, positive statements, or it's not fact checking. It's spin doctoring. To be clear, I do agree with the conclusions in their 'fact checking' article. What I object to is the low quality of the article in question. It is not about checking facts. It's just some asshole playing pundit with algorithms.

Anyway... now I realize that all that trouble over photo verification was probably because I posted a joke about something that the FB ministry of truth disagrees with. It didn't even get out to that many people. I got like two likes on it. When I posted that joke here on SLU, nobody even hit the laugh button, which I just don't understand. Don't you guys realize how funny I am? (I'm kidding, I know it's a lame joke)

It just seems like social media platforms are becoming more and more insane as time goes on, especially when it comes to humor. Last time I got thrown in FB jail, it was because I was watching a friend live stream some music, and he said the next song is about a bad breakup, and that women scare him. I joked in the chat that girls are gross. They seriously flagged that as hate speech and booted me for a few days.

I know my jokes are lame, I'm not a serious comedian or anything, but at the same time, do we really want AI to be curating and censoring our humor like this?

I miss usenet.

 

[Free]

I joked in the chat that girls are gross.

And Usenet misses you.