On January 7, 2025, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including the end of third-party fact-checking in the U.S., and rollbacks to its hate speech policy globally that remove protections for women, people of color, trans people, and more. In the absence of data from Meta, we decided to go straight to users to assess if and how harmful content is manifesting on Meta platforms in the wake of January rollbacks.
Remember when, at the dawn of the decade, conservative media would whine about “BIG TECH CENSORSHIP!”?
Those were the days. /s
The headline confuses me. Has Facebook ever done something else?
Historically ('10s era) they were very focused on being “family friendly” and censoring anything they considered violent, sexual, perverse, deliberately deceptive, or otherwise upsetting to your middle-aged middle-income housewife/grandma.
Post-COVID, Zuckerberg’s been increasingly blackpilled, with an eye towards shock-jock engagement bait over any kind of civil moderation, fact-checking of misinformation, or discouragement of fraud/scam posts. So a site plenty of users have historically complained about feeling cloistered and sterile in the Disney-fied sense is now a total madhouse of AI slop, bum-fights clips, drop-shipper spam, and bargain basement rumor-mongering.
We’ve gone from a space that’s Mormon-style conservative to Fight Club-coded conservative.
Ok, but there had been plenty of criticism before that, specifically how readily the algorithm funnels the user into alt-right echo chambers.
That was more YouTube than Facebook.
The accusations are leveled at all social media.
Different applications employ different strategies for sifting content.
Facebook (and Google) pivoting to pure engagement bait was a more recent development, closer to 2018+, and synced up with their AI obsessions.
This headline is garbage. You could put just about any Fortune 500 company’s name in there and the headline would still be accurate.
the url too. meta was never safe, and was never intended to be safe. the only way to make it safe is to shut it down.
Delete. It.
any of the popular social media is now heavily infested with propaganda bots or fake promoted slop.
niche forum and sparse space like lemmy are the only thing left to have any decent interactions. even lemmy.world was heavily brigaded during election.
My #$%^ HOA only socializes through FB groups. Been trying to drum up interest in a defederated Frendica or something, but can’t get any traction :( I’ve unliked all the stuff and unfollowed everything else, but I can’t GTFO of it any further without being unable to deal with my neighbors civilly
Abandon civility, throw tomahawk instead. Your reputation will precede you. Their fear of you will bring about civility. You got this.
“Honey, We got a letter from the HOA, they’ve revoked our pool privileges, you wouldn’t know anything about that you’d you?”
[insert Krumbobulous Michael here I go killing again meme]
I do wonder, are seeing more hate, more fear and less freedom because there is more hate, more fear and less freedom, or are we seeing these things because they are now no longer deleted, and there is the same amount of it?
Either way there is no fix for facebook and other facebook owned platforms. Get rid of this shit.
Honestly, probably both. The fact that stuff isn’t being deleted anymore and that they make carve-outs in the rules for hate against specific minorities would embolden people to post more hateful content.
Leave that website.
There is no fixing it.
Happy cake day 🍑
🤝
The ones who have hate in their hearts can now shows us all their true colors.
That’s a good thing in my eyes. Let them show us exactly who they are.
Meta is the enemy of all of mankind
To me, this is like saying, “4chan has turned into a cesspool!” Yeah: It was like that from the start. YOU were the ones that assumed it was ever safe!
You’re posting stuff on the public Internet to a website for adults where literally anyone can sign up and comment FFS.
If you want good moderation you need community moderation from people in that community. Not some giant/evil megacorp!
There’s all sorts of tools and platforms that do this properly, easily, and for free. If you don’t like Meta’s websites move off of them already!
FB at least did a mediocre job at curbing hate speech. Then the progressive backlash against genAI broke the techbros so much they went full fash, since 2023.
People in the community with special power and anonymity. No. That doesn’t work either.
This is why I’ve switched back to the old internet. Chat like irc/matrix for social interaction. RSS for information. And webrings for browsing the personal garden websites that used to constitute the internet before social media took over. It’s been great.
The good internet magazine has been writing about this and is my inspiration
As well as the internet history podcast.
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook[1].
[1]Corporations are the only ‘persons’ it’s acceptable to explicitly deadname.
I’m not convinced that much of it is real. Many accounts have to be fake. Surely people can’t be as stupid as they appear. I think it’s AI’s funded or designed to be so stupidly biased.
This kind of thinking is how we end up with extremist politicians like trump. YES PEOPLE ARE THIS STUPID. LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE ARE THIS STUPID. Stop trying to ignore reality.
Yes and no.
Yes people are this stupid. But also bot networks. But also alt accounts. And many of those stupid people let the algorithm to pick them their political views, which is manipulated by both the bot activity and the platform holders.
Social Media needs to die
Said that on Social Media
Idk I’ve never considered forums where you talk to strangers to be social media. If I don’t know anyone it’s not “social” to me, it’s one step away from talking to myself to be on a site like Lemmy or Reddit
Corporate-run social media needs to die.
There’s no speech police in the real world, you don’t need it online either.
That is the most simplistic, uneducated opinion on the subject that is possible to make. You should be ashamed.
If that’s the case, it should be easy enough for you to come up with an actual argument against it.
There are speech police in the real world. Workplaces don’t allow you to use slurs or to harass your co-workers. That’s just one example. In fact, any social group that I can think of will punish you for saying something. Some are more lenient than others, but every one has a line that you cannot cross.
There are speech police in the real world. Workplaces don’t allow you to use slurs or to harass your co-workers.
That “speech police” traces to the government in the form of labor laws & regulations in the remit of the EEOC, eg, Title 7 of Civil Rights Act, Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Americans with Disabilities Act. Employers didn’t conceive of such workplaces policies on their own to invite lawsuits & put targets on their backs.
These laws do not apply to social media as a communication platform. Offensive expression doesn’t deny equal access/opportunities to platform resources they are under any legal obligation to provide. Should we put much confidence in social media companies voluntarily assuming unnecessary obligations just because?
It never made sense.
Tbf, having a central authority dictate the truth to you ain’t so great.
Neither is having classes of people who you aren’t allowed to offend.
Tbf, having a central authority dictate the truth to you ain’t so great.
I don’t think the phrase “third-party fact checkers” (plural) implies a central authority.
Neither is having classes of people who you aren’t allowed to offend.
Facebook can’t stop you from offending people. What they can do is make it slightly more difficult by disallowing slurs, etc.
