The Bane That Is Social Media

[LFC]

Parler is back on mainstream app stores. They've tucked their tails and are following the rules.

Parler, the conservative-friendly “free speech” social media app, is back in the Apple App Store. But like anything involving social media and free speech, its return is complicated.

Beginning on Monday, Parler is available for download on iPhones and iPads. This comes around four months after Parler was banned or limited by Apple, Amazon, Google, and virtually every other major tech company for allowing some of its users to openly organize violence following the 2020 US election — namely at the January 6 US Capitol insurrection.

In order for Parler to comply with Apple’s guidelines, it had to walk back its “anything goes” approach to potentially harmful speech and create a more restrictive version of its app just for iOS devices. Parler says it will start using AI to detect hate speech and block those posts in this new “Parler Lite,” according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Parler will continue to operate a less restricted version of its app on other platforms, including Google’s Android.

Parler’s splintered return to the mainstream internet is just another example of the increasingly polarized nature of political discussion on social media. Platforms like Parler are capitalizing on the demand for a social media network where people can say anything they want, at a time when companies like Facebook and Twitter have introduced more rules to limit harmful content.

Since its launch in 2018, Parler has presented itself as a place where people can speak freely without “fear of being ‘deplatformed’ for their views.” But now, it’s agreeing to play by Apple’s rules in blocking hate speech and violent content. That’s easier said than done — especially given Parler’s relatively small size and the fact that many major tech companies no longer want to work with them.

[LFC]

Punting QAnon from popular platforms has helped. Social media companies are going to have to get their shit together for the good of the nation or face the MAGAts who will demand compliance to their rules.

New research has found that specific language about the QAnon conspiracy theory has all but disappeared from the major social media platforms, Axios reports.

After platforms like Facebook and Twitter started throttling down QAnon content, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab say that the conspiracy theory's online influence has greatly diminished.

Popular QAnon phrases including "the storm," "the great awakening," "save the children" and "WWG1WGA (Where we go one we go all)" became increasingly prevalent online in March 2020 and peaked in June 2020 as racial justice protests took place, and then spiked again before the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. According to Axios, other factors played a role in the conspiracy cult's diminished influence, such as posts from the shadowy figure "Q" going silent and Trump's election loss, which cause many QAnon believers to be frustrated.

"Of all factors... reductions correlated most strongly with social media actions taken by Facebook, Twitter, and Google to limit or remove QAnon content," the researchers wrote. "Actions taken by Twitter after the January 6 attack on the Capitol correlates strongly with a dampening of what remained of traditional QAnon chatter at the time."

Contributing to the conspiracy theory's waning influence was the fact that right-wing-focused Parler and Gab social networks did not inherit the volume of QAnon content that was pushed off mainstream social media platforms.

[LFC]

Facebook finally woke up a little. They are a major conduit for the fascist, anti-reality, anti-democratic garbage flooding our nation as part of an effort of the political minority to take control of the government. Zuck probably realized that he'd be on the short list that the fascists would come after. I can't believe he did it for any noble reason.

It may have taken a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, but Facebook has finally decided that it’s maybe not such a great idea to allow politicians to post whatever kind of incendiary garbage that they want. According to The New York Times, the company will announce Friday that it’s revoking the special rules for political figures that exempted them from having posts removed or moderated because they were deemed to be newsworthy. That policy was introduced in September 2019, but has reportedly been reconsidered after Facebook’s decision to throw Donald Trump off its site over his posts that helped encourage the Capitol rioters earlier this year. According to the Times, the rule change will mean that politicians’ posts will no longer be assumed to be newsworthy, and their posts will have to fall in line with guidelines that prohibit harassment and hateful speech. Facebook will still exempt some posts from moderation if they’re considered particularly newsworthy, but will disclose that decision each time it’s taken.

[LFC]

Trump's Facebook ban is good until 2023 at which point he will be reevaluated.

Facebook announced Friday that the ban it has imposed on President Trump from using the platform will last until at least two years from the Jan. 7 decision the company made to suspend his account.

Facebook banned Trump from the platform because of his posts that praised the violent, insurrectionist mob on the Capitol on Jan. 6. Last month, a board of outside experts Facebook tasked with reviewing that decision said Facebook was justified in suspending his account, but said that the platform needed to reconsider the move to ban him indefinitely. The board of experts also called on the company to develop more uniform standards for handling users of Trump’s stature who encourage violence.

Facebook announced Friday that it had developed those standards and concluded that, under them, Trump’s “actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols,” i.e., a two-year suspension.

At the end of that two-year period, Facebook will examine the external circumstances whether there is a “still a serious risk to public safety” in reactivating Trump’s account, setting up the potential that the two-year ban could be extended.

“When the suspension is eventually lifted, there will be a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions that will be triggered if Mr. Trump commits further violations in future, up to and including permanent removal of his pages and accounts,” Facebook said.

I guess being a president who incites an insurrection is only good for two years.

[pnwguy]

Jun 4, 2021 18:46:08 GMT LFC said:

Trump's Facebook ban is good until 2023 at which point he will be reevaluated.

I guess being a president who incites an insurrection is only good for two years.

Twenty to life would be preferred, with extra time added for bad behavior 

[LFC]

"Our country can't take this abuse anymore!" --Donald Trump whining about his Facebook suspension

This makes me smile a little.

[pnwguy]

Jun 4, 2021 19:18:49 GMT LFC said:

"Our country can't take this abuse anymore!" --Donald Trump whining about his Facebook suspension

Dumpster needs to contact his friend Kim Jong-un to have Zuckerberg assassinated.  After all, he and Kim are "in love".

[RichTBikkies]

Jun 4, 2021 18:46:08 GMT LFC said:

Trump's Facebook ban is good until 2023 at which point he will be reevaluated.

Zuckerberg is scared of the death threats he'd get if he ever did anything substantive that Trump didn't like. And he'd be right.

None of this changes the fact that the sugar mountain is an LHB: Loathsome Human Being.

[LFC]

The latest right-wingnut attempt at social media is a Twitter replacement called GETTR. It was hacked almost as soon it was launched. Trump isn't even on it. He seems to have lost a bit of his fighting spirit. Getting shellacked on the most public contest in the nation, maybe the world, seems to have had a real impact.

A social media platform launched by Jason Miller, former President Trump senior adviser, was hacked within hours of its release on Sunday.

“GETTR” is a Twitter-style app that advertises itself as “a non-bias social network for people all over the world.” Miller told Reuters that more than 500,000 people joined the platform.

The accounts of the platform’s most popular users, mostly former Trump aides, were briefly hacked on the morning of its launch on July 4. Some of the accounts that were hacked include those belonging to Miller, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

“The problem was detected and sealed in a matter of minutes, and all the intruder was able to accomplish was to change a few user names,” Miller said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

Miller told Reuters that the situation had been “rectified” when asked about security on the social media platform.

The launch of “GETTR” comes a month after Trump’s blog was shut down after a mere 29 days. The former president started his now-defunct blog after social media giants banned him from their platforms for violating anti-violence policies following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. The blog — where Trump sought refuge to post statements after social media giants banned him from their platforms for violating anti-violence policies — failed to amass a fraction of the tens of millions of followers he had on Facebook and Twitter, according to NBC News.

Trump, however, does not have a verified account on “GETTR.” In an interview with Fox News last week, Miller said he hopes the former president will become a user of the platform, but that Trump is exploring several options. Miller denied that the former president is funding “GETTR.”

[LFC]

It appears that the owner of GETTR downplayed the outcome of the hack.

Hackers were able to scrape the email addresses and other data of more than 90,000 GETTR users.

On Tuesday, a user of a notorious hacking forum posted a database that they claimed was a scrape of all users of GETTR, the new social media platform launched last week by Trump’s former spokesman Jason Miller, who pitched it as an alternative to "cancel culture." The data seen by Motherboard includes email addresses, usernames, status, and location.

One of the people whose email is in the database confirmed to Motherboard that they are indeed registered to GETTR. Motherboard also verified the database by attempting to create an account with three email addresses that appear in the database. When doing that, the site displayed the message: "The email is taken," suggesting it's already registered.

It's unclear if the database contains the usernames and email addresses of all users on the site.

Alon Gal, the co-founder and CTO of cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock, found the forum post with the database.

Gal argued that this incident should be considered a data breach.

"When threat actors are able to extract sensitive information due to neglectful API implementations, the consequence is equivalent to a data breach and should be handled accordingly by the firm and to be examined by regulators," he told Motherboard in an online chat.

[LFC]

In what I can best describe as a match made in hell Facebook is looking to team up with churches to help them fleece the flock more efficiently. Because, you know, currently it's expensive and time consuming to grift for God(tm). And just imagine the quality of personal data Facebook will be able to harvest!

Facebook is trying to commune with God, but definitely not in a Tower of Babel way or anything.

The social media giant is arguably the closest that humans have come to competing with the divine for access to the innermost thoughts of billions of people. Now it’s intensifying a years-long effort to deepen its official partnerships with religious organizations across the country and center itself in developing trends in faith, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

In one highlighted example, Sam Collier, the pastor of a new branch of the global evangelical megachurch Hillsong opening soon in Atlanta, told the Times that Facebook had proposed working with the church to develop apps related to everything from streaming services to financial giving. (Collier said he couldn’t share more specifics due to a confidentiality agreement.) Other churches have also been the beneficiary of Facebook’s efforts to expand its faith-focused feature set. The Times reported that the company gave the Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal church whose membership is primarily Black, early access to features such as a $9.99 monthly subscription service that allowed users to receive “exclusive content” from a bishop and another that allows real-time donations—a new source of revenue for the “prosperity gospel” set. The church turned down testing another feature that would, uh, inject ads into video streams.

Facebook is also working to encourage faith groups to socialize more on the platform and has plans to launch new products related to sharing audio and prayer, according to the Times. The company had confirmed earlier this year that it is testing a “prayer posts” feature that enables the administrators of Facebook Groups to allow users to request others pray with them, with those users, in turn, hitting a prayer button to confirm they have. Bobby Gruenewlad, the pastor of Oklahoma’s Life. Church and creator of bible app YouVersion, told the paper YouVersion had not only worked with Facebook on that feature, but a Bible-verse-a-day functionality in 2018. The Assemblies of God got early access to features that allow Facebook users to call into video streams, the paper wrote, while Dallas megachurch The Potter’s House gained access to “various features before they were rolled out.”

[Deleted]

Jul 26, 2021 18:38:46 GMT LFC said:

..... In what I can best describe as a match made in hell Facebook is looking to team up with churches to help them fleece the flock more efficiently......

Oh my gawd .... now I know the end is nigh

[Bact PhD]

There's a piece in the new Atlantic that presents an interesting way of viewing Facebook in particular (and to a certain extent, Big Tech in general). There's a lot of behavior that Facebook engages in that I'm not too sure we would put up with if it were another nation doing so (emphasis mine).

Some of Facebook’s most vocal critics push for antitrust regulation, the unwinding of its acquisitions, anything that might slow its snowballing power. But if you think about Facebook as a nation-state—an entity engaged in a cold war with the United States and other democracies—you’ll see that it requires a civil-defense strategy as much as regulation from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Hillary Clinton told me last year that she’d always caught a whiff of authoritarianism from Zuckerberg. “I feel like you’re negotiating with a foreign power sometimes,” she said. “He’s immensely powerful.” One of his early mantras at Facebook, according to Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang in their book, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, was “company over country.” When that company has all the power of a country itself, the line takes on a darker meaning.

[large snip]

Facebook sold itself to the masses by promising to be an outlet for free expression, for connection, and for community. In fact, it is a weapon against the open web, against self-actualization, and against democracy. All of this so Facebook could dangle your data in front of advertisers.

To one degree or another, this is something Facebook has in common with its subsidiary Instagram and its rivals Google, YouTube (which Google owns), and Amazon. All position their existence as somehow noble—their purpose is, variously, to help people share their life, to provide answers to the most difficult questions, and to deliver what you need when you need it. But of the behemoths, Facebook is most ostentatious in its moral abdications.

Facebook needs its users to keep on believing that its dominance is a given, to ignore what it is doing to humanity and use its services anyway. Anyone who seeks to protect individual freedom and democratic governance should be bothered by this acceptance of the status quo.

[pnwguy]

Our old friend Dredel drops another post on The Bulwark.

www.thebulwark.com/facebook-is-not-the-town-square/

[andydp]

In a related note about Facebook:

Is FB "off line" for you too ?

[pnwguy]

Oct 4, 2021 20:32:54 GMT andydp said:

In a related note about Facebook:

Is FB "off line" for you too ?

If only it were permanent...

[LFC]

Oct 4, 2021 20:32:54 GMT andydp said:

In a related note about Facebook:

Is FB "off line" for you too ?

They are completely down.

[goldenvalley]

Oct 4, 2021 21:20:16 GMT LFC said:

Oct 4, 2021 20:32:54 GMT andydp said:

In a related note about Facebook:

Is FB "off line" for you too ?

They are completely down.

Well isn't that just too bad.  

[goldenvalley]

I noted this interview with a Facebook whistleblower". She isn't saying anything we didn't already figure out for ourselves.  A business pursues profit without regard to truth or damage to our society...a song as old as time.

[AnBr]

Oct 4, 2021 20:23:49 GMT pnwguy said:

Our old friend Dredel drops another post on The Bulwark.

www.thebulwark.com/facebook-is-not-the-town-square/

This from his article:

In a real town square, people who insist that COVID vaccines are filled with mind control nanobots and that the Jews are enslaving children are relegated to the fringes.

On Facebook, they are brought together into powerful collectives, afforded megaphones, and algorithmically ushered into everyone’s sphere of influence to corrupt otherwise rational and healthy discourse.

While true, a lot of it is created and propagated by reich-wing media. The two reinforce and abet each other. They effectively are doing Goebbels' axiom that if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

It is especially disturbing when you consider my old sig from Carl Sagan:

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

[andydp]

Oct 4, 2021 21:20:16 GMT LFC said:

Oct 4, 2021 20:32:54 GMT andydp said:

In a related note about Facebook:

Is FB "off line" for you too ?

They are completely down.

I didn't see anything confirming the dead chicken entrails in the server farm.

[LFC]

Oct 5, 2021 10:32:51 GMT andydp said:

I didn't see anything confirming the dead chicken entrails in the server farm.

Ssssshhhhh. Don't let them know that you know anything about that. They ... will ... find ... you!

[andydp]

Oct 5, 2021 14:06:40 GMT LFC said:

Oct 5, 2021 10:32:51 GMT andydp said:

I didn't see anything confirming the dead chicken entrails in the server farm.

Ssssshhhhh. Don't let them know that you know anything about that. They ... will ... find ... you!

I'm guessing it wasn't "chickens"

[LFC]

Sounds like Zuck when full blown Big Tobacco.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a new statement defending his company late Tuesday in the wake of U.S. Senate testimony from whistleblower Frances Haugen. And while comparing Facebook in the 2020s to Big Tobacco in the 1990s isn’t new, it really is striking to see Zuck make the same arguments that companies like Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds were making in the last decade of the 20th century—arguments that don’t make much sense in hindsight.

Fundamentally, Haugen argues that Facebook has chosen profits over the well-being of its users, and she stole tens of thousands of secret internal documents to prove it. Haugen told a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday that the buck stops with Zuck and that he could make the product better for humanity and safer for kids if he really wanted to.

Zuck insists the whistleblower’s testimony is “illogical” and that the “good work” of Facebook has been “mischaracterized.” The billionaire says that the company delivers a quality experience, which is why “billions of people love our products.” Obviously, billions of people loved and continue to love smoking tobacco. But it doesn’t mean it’s good for them.

Big Tobacco companies conducted internal research and knew that cigarettes were harmful as early as the 1950s. But they continued to insist in public, well into the 1990s, that nicotine was safe and not addictive. The CEOs of the major tobacco companies even said as much in 1994 when testifying to Congress when Ron Wyden made them go down the line and say whether they thought nicotine was addictive. They all said nicotine was not addictive, a blatant lie.

“At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That’s just not true,” Zuckerberg says in his new statement.

How could Facebook care more about profits that the well-being of its users? If its users are miserable, they’ll theoretically stop using the product. Unless, of course, they’re addicted. The argument is identical to what tobacco companies were saying in the 1990s. And the solution to a dwindling customer base is the same for Facebook as it was for the Big Tobacco in the 20th century: You need to hook a younger and younger audience.

We aren’t going to copy Zuck’s entire statement simply because it’s too long and boring. You’re free to read the whole thing on Facebook if that’s your cup of tea. But we’ve pulled out a few of the most interesting nuggets below, not because they’re noteworthy in isolation, but because they echo Big Tobacco’s strategy from the past.

[LFC]

John Oliver covered misinformation in immigrant diaspora communities. If you think Facebook is bad it turns out the foreign language options being used by many people are even less patrolled for lies and propaganda. Here's the whole video but if you don't want to take the time to watch 13:14-14:33 to see what one satirist did and how it turned out. The world is now brimming with ways to communicate and people are proving over and over and over again that they aren't smart and savvy enough to handled it. Technology is blowing by the capabilities of way too many people who, unfortunately, are still capable of causing a LOT of trouble.