If I were a pessimist, I might say no one is calling for a boycott because of the enormity of the task, and how little people really care about politics when it truly matters. Personally I don't use Facebook too much, but I know a lot of people use it a hell of a lot. Cutting it out of their lives would be harder than avoiding a certain fast food chain, so they don't even try.
I'm not sure that's fair, though. I have the sense the article makes Facebook look worse than the facts warrant. Not that Facebook is good, but is there any serious argument that Facebook is more firmly aligned with conservative politicians than the average oil company, Wal-Mart, or Fox? And yet, there's no boycott against any of those.
The argument would be that FB has more capacity to alter the outcome of the 2020 election than any of those other industries, and so the prospect that Zuckerburg has a preference for ratfuckers is terrifying in a way that the Waltons having a preference for then is not.
I essentially agree with OP link but it's a really shitty piece of writing.
OP: I think FB is passively, not actively, right-wing. It's so terrified of getting regulated that it defaults to (typically American) free-speech absolutism, and so disinformation flows, to the cost of the reality-based community.
AFAICT in places like India, where it's getting regulated or plain blacked out anyway, it's being a more flexible and more useful. IIRC they recently reduced the reach of disinformation (/hate speech, forget) in S Asia by ~85% just by limiting WhatsApp messages to 5 forwards at a time.
They are also now taking down "co-ordinated inauthentic behavior" networks al the time. Weekly if not daily, all over the world, including Europe. Don't recall US off hand.
4: "Co-ordinated inauthentic behavior" -- so, like when a bunch of teenagers all pretend to like some band just because someone told them it was cool?
Like if a bunch of American soccer moms pretend to be Korean teenagers pretending to like some band because someone told them it was cool.
It's not really a boycott*, but I don't shop at Walmart.
* It's mostly just pure snobbery.
I don't really watch Fox either, at least not since The Simpson's started to suck.
And I am now boycotting Israel until somebody once again gives me money not to.
9: I never did shop at Walmart, but now it turns out they are the only place that has lactose-free half & half.
Israel has lactose-free half & half, but not the kind with floating bits of beef sausage.
11: I boycotted Israel for 25 years, but I went back this year. Sorry that I'm undercutting all your boycotts, Moby!
I have a relative who's no fan of Israel, but who also owns a Sodastream. I never have the audacity to point out the problem, because I'm just trying to eat my dinner over here.
I feel for your friend. I covet a Sodastream but have been unable to buy one due to the politics. I keep hoping that a good alternative will become popular and I can get that, but it hasn't happened.
17: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/pepsico-sodastream-israel_n_5b7c00d7e4b018b93e97aba2
Maybe people should be boycotting all Pepsi products?
It's O.K. if you drink it with milk.
Between 14 and 19, this thread is full of appealing beverage options.
I think both are only found in Wisconsin.
As someone who never got involved with social media at all, those who are on facebook and twitter look more and more to me like abject junkies who will never disconnect under any circumstances.
People should stick to the healthier addictions, like heroin or meth.
We'd be happy to send you some free samples.
FB is really useful. Could there be a fb that wasn't in thrall to fascism? On this timeline we can't even get NYT headline writers that aren't in thrall to fascism.
I can see Mexico from where I'm parked. Maybe in a different decade, it'll be possible to jointly fund sewage treatment for Tijuana so they don't have to close the beaches in San Diego for three days whenever it rains.
God, that article. The Democrats are going to fuck up the election and we're going to get four more years of this orange buffoon and a bunch of excuse making nonsense blaming FB, Russians, etc.
I suppose we can't blame the third-party voters or the racists or the sexists or the voter suppression or the Republicans or any of the other systematic issues that handicap decent Americans in the political process.
That's okay with me. Personally, I want it to be the liberals' fault for a change.
those who are on facebook and twitter look more and more to me like abject junkies who will never disconnect under any circumstances.
As someone who uses Facebook all the time, I can confirm your impression of this. I'm really dependent on it.
I think we should just buy off West Virginia again. It probably won't cost that much since I hardly ever see stuff from there on Facebook.
Super hard to figure out how a company run by a friend of professional Gawker-hater and amateur vampire Peter Thiel, who doesn't think women should have been given the right to vote, is right-wing, especially given that Thiel sits on the board of directors.
When I was running for local office it was huge to be able to advertise on Facebook. I hated spending campaign money there instead of in the local community, but it seemed like a really cost-effective way to get my name and face in front of a highly-targeted group of voters.
Of course, Facebook made it a huge pain in the ass. Their advertiser interface is so bad. I'm amazed, considering that its the conduit for all the money that they make, that the interface is allowed to be so bad.
Like, there were numerous instances where I was honestly unable to tell if they were fucking with me on purpose or if was just that their software was so bad.
I'm almost sure its the result of their crappy software but, the thing that bothers me is that if someone at Facebook was trying to fuck with my campaign, they totally could sabotage my campaign and hide behind the crappiness of their software.
FB web UI has always been surprisingly shit. Are they any better on mobile?
The messenger thing works very nicely. The actual app is fine to read. Never really post, so I don't know about that.
MeWe's mobile app is harder to follow a thread of comments on than Facebook's.
Unfogged is the easiest and uses much less bandwidth.
38: You have to say it in front of mirror if you really want to summon Mentally.
Unfogged is the easiest and uses much less bandwidth.
This is so very true. The web lost a lot when the social media model took over from the blog model.
For example, if I am looking for something I remember on Unfogged from a couple years back, I can generally find it in TFA. If I am looking for something I saw on Facebook long ago, shit is so hard to find that its as good as gone.
Looking stuff up on Unfogged is amazing. All you have to do is utter it in a comment, and a link magically materializes within a few comments. Often with context and multiple citations.
Some girl at Harvard submitted a bug report about the internet being written in ink.
"What did you talk about with Trump at your secret dinner?"
Is anything ever secure? Is anything ever secret? Guess what? The answer is a clear maybe. Or maybe not. I am going to say quiet words in your face just like I did with him and Congress. You can't expect me to tell you a secret that I didn't share with him but I am confident that we are sharing the same infrastructure.
I don't boycott facebook. I look at it maybe once a fortnight, mostly because the interface is so very shitty compared to almost everything else, and because I can't as easily control the feed as I can with twitter.
I believe, though, that social media are a threat to society which could reasonably be compared to the impact of alcohol on societies which are not used to it. This doesn't mean they will destroy everything. It is only -- as with alcohol -- vulnerable societies which are destroyed; perhaps most often those in which the males feel redundant (native populations, Fox news consumers ...).
What's needed are strong social inhibitions about how much to do and when -- and these take generations to grow.
Of course, one difference between alcohol and social media is that drinking alone is meant to be a problem, whereas with sm it's the other way round ...
44: A friend of mine is in recovery from alcohol. She found herself struggling to control her use of Facebook because of an intense fear of missing out. She had to give it up completely. She said that the first day she quit was almost as bad as the first day she quit Facebook. She was looking at herself in the mirror and desperate to get on Facebook.
44.2: Interesting.
To what extent have native (or other, hello Russia) societies anywhere developed effective inhibitions against alcohol? Obviously it's hard to disentangle the alcoholism from everything else, but my impression is that most never have.
perhaps most often those in which the males feel redundant...Fox news consumers
I would push back on since as we know most Republican voters are comfortably employed. The legions of the retired though might be interesting in the felt uselessness connection.
Further I doubt the gendered connection. AFAIK SM use is actually higher among women than men. If men appear more frequently among the worse trolls, they also appear more frequently among the worse criminals IRL; neither group is representative of the gender as a whole. That said, men are overrepresented among Trump voters. I just think one needs to be cautious how one slices and lumps populations.
Why does nobody look on the good side of alcohol.
I just thought I'd share that my own strategy for dealing with Facebook (which I've maybe mentioned here before? not sure) has been very successful for me: I blocked the News Feed with a Chrome extension, and have blocked it entirely, including the mobile site, on my phone using parental controls. I can still purposefully check in on people's individual pages, I still see group and event notifications -- I just don't get the big, loud amalgamated feed. Now I post once or twice a month (and am here more when I feel like procrastinating). It feels to me like a good compromise between shutting it off entirely and interacting with it in an uncontrolled fashion: it had been a net detriment to my life since 2016, I think. It's also not as principled as a boycott, but I still feed the beast a lot less and if everyone did just this much to limit consumption on the site it would be much less of a behemoth.
My strategy is to like pictures of my nieces and nephews, hide everyone who post Trump stuff, and, only when necessary, leave a smart-ass remark on another post.
47. Who says nobody does? I'm a member of a FB group dedicated to this.
W.C. Fields HFA Advocacy Group
My Facebook feed is too dull to get addicted to. Twitter, I find considerably more interesting.
46: The Laestadian movement in Lapland -- charismatic, revivalist Christianity -- did a lot to cut down on the use of alcohol in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although the temperance movement is now almost entirely forgotten, and US prohibition remembered only as an embarrassing disaster, it did have a considerable effect in some places and was a very powerful political force for a long time.
[Some laestadians did go entertainingly nuts in Finland in the 20s and 30s)
I was thinking of the legions of retired, yes. AS a generalisation, my generalisation doesn't work ...
Prohibition-era darknet FB will suck so much more than regular FB.
yes, but differently.
[ Great piece on assassination markets in the current Harper's, by the way]
I didn't realize anybody but Soldier of Fortune took those kinds of ads.
That maybe should have been in the other thread because some people are violent in all contexts and some people only in an anonymous context like the internet or Minnesota.
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...and China Silk Road Group Limited, formed The Belt and Road Initiative Blockchain Alliance (also called "BRIBA")|>
55: That is indeed a great piece. I've got a little list ...
they recently reduced the reach of disinformation (/hate speech, forget) in S Asia by ~85% just by limiting WhatsApp messages to 5 forwards at a time
That's really interesting. This was apparently quite a while ago, but I had missed it completely: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/21/whatsapp-limits-message-forwarding-fight-fake-news
Russia's intervention in the US cost/costs them almost nothing. It's hard to interpret the effectiveness of repeated electronic shouting as anything other than real social weakness. 44/46 seem right-- resentful retirees who correctly recognize that rapid change has made them useless are a problem.
17: buy an old one from when they were still british ?
I had no idea the Soda Stream was as old as the Mandate.
Is it worse that they aren't even actually useless? They're angry and resentful as entertainment.
The British have been that way for a long time.
But there's always a straight man taking the piss. Who's the Fry to Trump's Laurie?
The link in 55 is indeed a good read.
Facebook to set up 'war room' in Taiwan ahead of elections
The side that doesn't have concentration camps.