The Bane That Is Social Media

[Bact PhD]

How fickle is the wingnut public! It took just over a month for them to look at Parler askance:
www.vice.com/en/article/wx8gj5/even-qanon-is-abandoning-parler-the-far-rights-answer-to-twitter

...the app’s popularity has plummeted as downloads and daily active user numbers have fallen off dramatically — and now even some of the most influential figures in the QAnon community are criticizing it.
...The platform bills itself as “a non-biased, free speech social media focused on protecting user’s rights,” but in reality, it has become an echo chamber of right-wing ideologies and extremist views. Many conservatives have grown tired of Parler because there’s no one with an opposing point of view to argue with.

And that disillusionment is backed up by hard data.

Awwww. Pity.

[LFC]

And that disillusionment is backed up by hard data.

Awwww. Pity.

Thoughts and prayers.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 12, 2020 2:38:59 GMT Bact PhD said:

How fickle is the wingnut public! It took just over a month for them to look at Parler askance:
www.vice.com/en/article/wx8gj5/even-qanon-is-abandoning-parler-the-far-rights-answer-to-twitter

...the app’s popularity has plummeted as downloads and daily active user numbers have fallen off dramatically — and now even some of the most influential figures in the QAnon community are criticizing it.
...The platform bills itself as “a non-biased, free speech social media focused on protecting user’s rights,” but in reality, it has become an echo chamber of right-wing ideologies and extremist views. Many conservatives have grown tired of Parler because there’s no one with an opposing point of view to argue with.

And that disillusionment is backed up by hard data.

Awwww. Pity.

I'm a little surprised by this.  You'd think an intricate conspiracy theory which is partly based on looking for clues from Q could sustain itself.  Perhaps Q is gone, lost interest, and/or has found some other job stirring up trouble somewhere else.  No more clues, no more followers.    

[Bact PhD]

Q-Anon seems to be in some disarray following the occurrence of what was deemed the unthinkable—by which I mean the inauguration of Biden & Harris yesterday.

www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-55746304

Followers of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory are split over how to react after Joe Biden's inauguration confounded their predictions that Donald Trump would remain president in order to punish his enemies in the "deep state".

Many reacted with shock and despair as Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th US president.

"I just want to throw up," said one in a popular chat on the Telegram messaging app. "I'm so sick of all the disinformation and false hope."
For weeks, QAnon followers had been promoting 20 January as a day of reckoning, when prominent Democrats and other elite "Satanic paedophiles" would be arrested and executed on the orders of President Trump.

But, as Mr Biden took his oath and no arrests were made, some in the QAnon community had an uncomfortable meeting with reality.

[Deleted]

I don't do social media and proud to admit it as I read about all the stupidity and shenanigans that go on. I wish I could feel superior about low-info conspiracy minded Americans but there are enough Trump/conspiracy/QAnon supporters among my fellow Canadians that I can only despair at the future of this country, your country and the entire bloody world. I spit on Zuckerberg's name every time I hear it.

[LFC]

Facebook announced that it deleted 1.3 BILLION fake accounts at the end of 2020. One author makes the case that this is evidence of widespread fraud that Facebook has profited from and that advertisers who paid good money only to have their ads pushed by fake accounts (jacking up their "success" rate) should sue for fraud.

This Monday, Facebook announced that it had deleted 1.3 billion fake accounts between October and December. While the effort is being touted by the social media platform as part of its effort to fight disinformation, the president and CEO of Media Matters for America (MMFA) said it actually shows the opposite and raises a "big question about consumer fraud that needs to be asked."

According to Angelo Carusone of the watchdog group Media Matters, while judging Facebook's effort, one must look at "all the advertisers on the platform (political orgs, civic groups, corporations)."

"Facebook took money from advertisers, then FB showed those ads to fake accounts they let proliferate on the platform unchecked," Carusone wrote in a Twitter thread. "It's fraud."

"Every FB advertiser should demand a refund for any money FB charged them to serve ads to these fake accounts," Carusone continued. "Only way Facebook will start addressing this on an ongoing basis and not once every few years is if it costs them money. A refund bare minimum."

Carusone contends that the action shows that Facebook wasn't effective at addressing the problem of disinformation -- it's proof of how ineffective and negligent they have been.

"1.3 billion accounts were able to proliferate...before they acted? They waited until October? Not earlier. C'mon."

[Bact PhD]

Mar 23, 2021 14:39:34 GMT LFC said:

Facebook announced that it deleted 1.3 BILLION fake accounts at the end of 2020. One author makes the case that this is evidence of widespread fraud that Facebook has profited from and that advertisers who paid good money only to have their ads pushed by fake accounts (jacking up their "success" rate) should sue for fraud.

I wonder how many of those phoney-baloney accounts were from troll farms of various origins and how many were a la Wells Fargo—fake ones set up in-house for the purpose of padding numbers?

[LFC]

Every day the right-wing just gets more absurd.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s new “free speech” social-media site apparently will ban patrons from using naughty language or saying the lord’s name in vain.

Oh, also, without any hint of irony, the site—which the pillow mogul created after he was booted from various platforms for peddling outright lies about the 2020 election—will prohibit users from pushing “out-and-out” or “complete” lies.

Earlier this week, Lindell appeared on right-wing radio host Eric Metaxas’ program to promote Frank Speech, which is scheduled to go live next week. (Lindell had to change the original name of his social network, Vocl, after lawyers for the publicly traded company Vocal intervened.)

While Lindell has long asserted that his platform will be a haven for free speech and a place for users to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen by a supercomputer, he told Metaxas that there will be strict limits on what people can say or share.

“People asked me, ‘You’re going to let everything go? Porn? Swearing? Everything?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely not,'” Lindell declared. “We have a thing we found in the Constitution and our founding fathers that defines what free speech is.”

He added: “And Eric, get this, this Judeo-Christian platform we’re going to have here, they go by biblical principles—you know, you get to the Supreme Court, you have the Ten Commandments there—so, in other words, you’re not going to have porn up there!”

Besides barring pornography, Lindell also pointed out that his apparently Christian social-media site will prevent users from using certain curse words or engaging in blasphemy.

“You’re not going to be able to swear,” he proudly said. “There will be four words for sure you can’t say: You can’t say the C-word, the N-word, the F-word, and you can’t use God’s name in vain. What a concept, right?”

Metaxas, for his part, reacted positively, saying that he liked that the site sounded “really puritanical.”

Lindell, insisting that he would not “suppress true free speech,” went on to say that Frank Speech would adhere to the Ten Commandments—specifically, that users of the site cannot bear false witness.

[goldenvalley]

"Free" speech means whatever the owner of the social media site allows. You are free to say anything he agrees with even if it's partly lies so long as you say them for reasons he agrees with.

Really doesn't all of society define free speech this way? It's just that what is acceptable is in a state of flux and that makes people anxious.

[LFC]

Another day, another potential massive data breach at Facebook.

Still smarting from last month's dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a massive scale, links Facebook accounts with their associated email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public.

A video circulating on Tuesday showed a researcher demonstrating a tool named Facebook Email Search v1.0, which he said could link Facebook accounts to as many as 5 million email addresses per day. The researcher—who said he went public after Facebook said it didn't think the weakness he found was "important" enough to be fixed—fed the tool a list of 65,000 email addresses and watched what happened next.

"As you can see from the output log here, I'm getting a significant amount of results from them," the researcher said as the video showed the tool crunching the address list. "I've spent maybe $10 to buy 200-odd Facebook accounts. And within three minutes, I have managed to do this for 6,000 accounts."

[LFC]

Here's a pretty in-depth opinion piece on Section 230 which protects platforms from being held responsible for everything published on them.

Even though it’s only 26 words long, Section 230 doesn’t say what many think it does.

So we’ve decided to take up a few kilobytes of the Internet to explain what, exactly, people are getting wrong about the primary law that defends the Internet.

Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) is one of the most important laws protecting free speech online. While its wording is fairly clear—it states that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" —it is still widely misunderstood. Put simply, the law means that although you are legally responsible for what you say online, if you host or republish other peoples' speech, only those people are legally responsible for what they say.

But there are many, many misconceptions–as well as misinformation from Congress and elsewhere–about Section 230, from who it affects and what it protects to what results a repeal would have. To help explain what’s actually at stake when we talk about Section 230, we’ve put together responses to several common misunderstandings of the law.

Let’s start with a breakdown of the law, and the protections it creates for you.

[LFC]

Trump's promised social media platform is here! It's ... underwhelming.

After months of promising his own social media network for banned posters, former President Donald Trump on Tuesday launched a new section of his website — essentially a standard-issue blog.

The “platform” is styled like of Twitter but hosted as a running blog of Twitter-length commentary from Trump. People can sign up for post alerts on the platform through their email and phone numbers and are allegedly able to like them, although that function doesn’t appear to work as of publication. Users are also allowed to share Trump’s posts on Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter sharing option doesn’t currently work, but Facebook’s does allow people to share Trump’s posts.

“Generally, sharing content from the website reference is permitted as long as the material does not otherwise the Twitter Rules,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge on Tuesday. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even though the platform formally launched on Tuesday, there are posts dating back to March 24th. Trump’s latest post is a video advertising his new platform, calling it “a place to speak freely and safely, straight from the desk of Donald J. Trump.” According to Fox News, Trump will “eventually” be able to communicate with his supporters directly, although it’s not clear how that will happen. Trump’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment

"Just wait. You'll be sooooo happy!"

[goldenvalley]

May 5, 2021 21:14:24 GMT LFC said:

Trump's promised social media platform is here! It's ... underwhelming.

After months of promising his own social media network for banned posters, former President Donald Trump on Tuesday launched a new section of his website — essentially a standard-issue blog.

The “platform” is styled like of Twitter but hosted as a running blog of Twitter-length commentary from Trump. People can sign up for post alerts on the platform through their email and phone numbers and are allegedly able to like them, although that function doesn’t appear to work as of publication. Users are also allowed to share Trump’s posts on Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter sharing option doesn’t currently work, but Facebook’s does allow people to share Trump’s posts.

“Generally, sharing content from the website reference is permitted as long as the material does not otherwise the Twitter Rules,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Verge on Tuesday. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Even though the platform formally launched on Tuesday, there are posts dating back to March 24th. Trump’s latest post is a video advertising his new platform, calling it “a place to speak freely and safely, straight from the desk of Donald J. Trump.” According to Fox News, Trump will “eventually” be able to communicate with his supporters directly, although it’s not clear how that will happen. Trump’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment

"Just wait. You'll be sooooo happy!"

The whole point is for his loyal followers to share his posts to the regular social media.  And they will.

[LFC]

Trump's "social media platform" is flopping ... bigly. I haven't seen a mention of it or anything he might have put up on it anyplace  in the MSM. Maybe Faux News, Newsmax, and OAN are monitoring it.

Former President Donald Trump has had difficulty getting attention by writing statements longer than 280 characters.

Data analysis conducted by NBC News shows that Trump's new blog, which he launched as a way to push his message to supporters in the wake of his ban from top social media platforms, has failed to generate the kind of buzz his infamous tweets used to create.

"The ex-president's blog has drawn a considerably smaller audience than his once-powerful social media accounts, according to engagement data compiled with BuzzSumo, a social media analytics company," writes NBC News. "The Desk of Donald J. Trump is limited — users can't comment or engage with the actual posts beyond sharing them to other platforms, an action few people do, according to the data."

Trump's writing style was well suited to Twitter, where he used pithy insults and demeaning nicknames to level political opponents during his first run for the presidency in 2016.

Trump's blog, however, has typically focused on relitigating the election he decisively lost more than half a year ago, as well as occasionally taking shots at "junky" Kentucky Derby horses that failed drug tests.

"The Trump blog's low engagement numbers seem to suggest that the practice of deplatforming, or cutting off a user from their followers and thereby severing networks of common followers, is broadly effective and can be used to reduce hate speech and glorification of violence from mainstream platforms," notes NBC News.

[LFC]

Trump's anemic, sputtering blog performance didn't stop "boot licker" Marco Rubio from bragging like a teenage girl that he got a mention from Dear Leader.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) drew swift backlash on Monday after he sent out a fundraising email boasting that former President Donald Trump mentioned him on his new blog.

As reported by ABC News' Rick Klein, Rubio's fundraising email to supporters touted the fact that Trump talked about him on his recently launched blog.

"I was lucky enough to be one of his first posts!" the email gushed.

Many Twitter users were quick to mock the fact that a two-term United States senator is giddy about simply being mentioned by a former one-term, twice-impeached president whom Rubio himself once personally described as a "con man."

Rubio's critics used several choice adjectives to describe him, including "pitiful," "sniveling," "pathetic," and "spineless."

[goldenvalley]

I suspect there's a small but loyal cadre of Trump supporters sharing stuff from the blog on Facebook and Twitter. It isn't quite as direct but it ends up where others and the algorithms can spread it.

[LFC]

The MAGAts are whining again because people don't want to put up with their shit. Nearly all of their efforts to make MAGA based social media have fallen flat. The result is that they keep trying to pollute competently run services with larger audiences. Once again they join, violate the terms of agreement, get booted, and whine like bratty, spoiled children.

Select members of the far right, including white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes and anti-Muslim activist Laura Loomer, have been kicked off Clubhouse, a new conversation application that has gained popularity during the coronavirus pandemic, where users can engage with each other in real time about a myriad of topics in different virtual "rooms."

On Saturday, Loomer signed up for the platform and quickly joined a room entitled: "App Store Hate Speech Double Standard: Parler vs. Clubhouse," moderated by right-wing communications flack Kris Ruby.

That particular room quickly descended into chaos, with Loomer going on an anti-Muslim tirade, which apparently violates the platform's policies. "As a Jewish woman, who was physically ejected from a moving Uber by a radical Muslim driver, on Rosh Hashanah, I value my safety, I'm pro-life, and you know I don't think I should have to be roadkill because Uber doesn't do background checks on their drivers," the onetime Florida congressional candidate said.

In November of 2017, Loomer was booted from both Uber and Lyft over posting anti-Muslim slurs aimed at drivers for both ride-sharing services. "Someone needs to create a non-Islamic form of Uber or Lyft because I never want to support another Islamic immigrant driver," Loomer tweeted at the time.

In the early hours of Sunday morning, Loomer was permanently suspended from Clubhouse over violating the platform's "violence policy." Responding to the apparent ban, Loomer wrote on Telegram: "I followed all of the rules and simply had a conversation about censorship. Less than 12 hours later, it's 7 am EST, and I'm banned from Clubhouse for what they are calling a violation of their 'violence policy.' Incredible."

"Clubhouse banned me based on accusations that I was violent even though I was only on the app for 5 hours ... Clubhouse needs to be investigated and shut down for aiding and abetting Islamic terrorists," Loomer added.

Loomer didn't return a Salon request for comment on the matter.

She isn't the first far-right figure to be booted from Clubhouse; in early March, white nationalist Nicholas Fuentes joined the app only to be permanently suspended within a few hours.

[goldenvalley]

A non-Islamic Uber or Lyft company? She wants a safe space? What a snowflake. I'm sure many a hired car driver has been tempted to throw loud mouthed, obnoxious passengers out of the car.

[pnwguy]

May 14, 2021 18:49:44 GMT goldenvalley said:

A non-Islamic Uber or Lyft company? She wants a safe space? What a snowflake. I'm sure many a hired car driver has been tempted to throw loud mouthed, obnoxious passengers out of the car.

They need one of these

[LFC]

Money transfer app Venmo defaults your transactions to being visible to the people in your network of friends. That's insane just on its own but you can also see people's network without even being a friend. Buzzfeed even tracked down Joe Biden's network of Venmo friends.

BuzzFeed News found President Joe Biden’s Venmo account after less than 10 minutes of looking for it, revealing a network of his private social connections, a national security issue for the United States, and a major privacy concern for everyone who uses the popular peer-to-peer payments app.

On Friday, following a passing mention in the New York Times that the president had sent his grandchildren money on Venmo, BuzzFeed News searched for the president’s account using only a combination of the app’s built-in search tool and public friends feature. In the process, BuzzFeed News found nearly a dozen Biden family members and mapped out a social web that encompasses not only the first family, but a wide network of people around them, including the president's children, grandchildren, senior White House officials, and all of their contacts on Venmo.

The president’s transactions are not public, and BuzzFeed News is not identifying the usernames for the accounts mentioned in this story due to national security concerns.

After BuzzFeed News reached out to the White House for this story, all the friends on the president’s Venmo account were removed. A White House spokesperson did not have an immediate comment.

After this story was published, a Venmo spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “The safety and privacy of all Venmo users and their information is always a top priority, and we take this responsibility very seriously. Customers always have the ability to make their transactions private and determine their own privacy settings in the app. We’re consistently evolving and strengthening the privacy measures for all Venmo users to continue to provide a safe, secure place to send and spend money.”

By late Friday night, the Venmo accounts tied to the president and first lady Jill Biden were no longer online.

[goldenvalley]

I remember the first time I looked at Venmo and being appalled that it included this network of friends idea as if it were What's App instead of a way to exchange money. I've never used it, but I know my kids do.

[LFC]

May 17, 2021 18:39:45 GMT goldenvalley said:

I remember the first time I looked at Venmo and being appalled that it included this network of friends idea as if it were What's App instead of a way to exchange money. I've never used it, but I know my kids do.

I use it but my network is very, very small. It's basically limited to people who come on charter fishing trips I organize. I don't use it on a more "informative" level.

[Bact PhD]

Dear Daughter pretty much has to use Venmo to get paid for her babysitting. Urg.

This piece popped up at an opportune time.

[LFC]

May 17, 2021 23:58:15 GMT Bact PhD said:

Dear Daughter pretty much has to use Venmo to get paid for her babysitting. Urg.

This piece popped up at an opportune time.

I don't have a problem with it for highly limited use. Of course that's not what they want. To get me to use it in a generalized way they have a long way to go.

I recently saw a piece on the local news about Cash App. They're facing skyrocketing complaints from people who can't get their money out of it! They get locked out of their accounts and then can't get through to customer service (likely offshored). I steer clear of that one. Even with my limited use I could risking $4,000-$5,000 for a trip and that's not a bill I want to float from my own personal finances.

[indy]

I largely confine myself to Apple and Paypal products, including their cash sending services. I don't think they are all that great or anything, just the best of what is available.