Bend Over, Facebook is Back

[Sock Puppet]

There was also some unexpected opposition to the ban: Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower, tweeted that Facebook had “officially silence[d] the President of the United States. For better or worse, this will be remembered as a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech.”

So Facebook is an official US government entity? I think you forgot to leak that one.

I tend to support Snowden's actions on the main, but this is just fucking stupid. Mister Tangerine Man is probably the least silenced person (term used loosely) on Earth, and the F***book ban isn't going to change that.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Screenshot_20210107-120231.png

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I'll lump this profile of courage that is Twitter in here too. I mean it's just slapdash Facebook.

Twitter has banned pro-Trump cartoonist Ben Garrison pic.twitter.com/kIwNDnllkg

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) January 8, 2021

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Language

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

After they tweeted out stuff on behalf of President Trump, his official campaign account has also been suspended.

Twitter has a rule they have enforced for a while where you can't evade a ban by using other accounts you control. pic.twitter.com/HipAzuVfOI

— Yashar Ali �� (@yashar) January 9, 2021

[JoeP]

So. Who uses WhatsApp (a Facebook subsidiary hence thrad)? Who's signed the new terms that say they will share all your data with Facebook (effective 8th Feb; warnings started popping up a few days ago)? Who's going to quit WhatsApp because of this? Who's entirely meh?

I'm also on Telegram but I hardly use it (it was quite busy with Ingress stuff back in the day). I'm also considering Signal but my ancient Sumerian phone can't install it right now. Anyone use either of these actively?

Telegram is getting quite a boost atm. I rashly let it see my contacts when I first installed it, and now I'm getting a few messages a day along the lines of "Koekie van der Merwe has joined Telegram!" and I have no memory of who this person is. Most are South Africans, so I will assume they are people exploring alternatives to WhatsApp, rather than category 2 ...

Which is Parler users looking for somewhere else.
Ne pas parler: alt-social media crumbles 2021-01-13 | Espresso

Users flooded to Telegram, a messaging app favoured by far-right extremists who welcomed these “refugees” with open arms.

(I'm not sure that's a fair and balanced characterisation of Telegram? Any platform that offers actual privacy and encryption is going to be useful for fascists and other terrorists as well.)

Anyway now Telegram tells me

Telegram surpassed 500 million active users.

In the past 72 hours alone, more than 25 million new users from around the world joined Telegram.

...

I assume if these alternatives are any good, Facebook or Alphabet or Apple or Microsoft or Amazon will buy them out. And/or various governments around the world will already have back doors.

[lisarea]

Matlock and I use Signal, but just for regular texting.

It would be very weird if your phone were older than either of ours.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Discord for my e-friends. Regular text and iMessage otherwise. Sometimes Plurk.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Matlock and I use Signal, but just for regular texting.

It would be very weird if your phone were older than either of ours.

It's just the space it complains about. I need to delete a bunch of other apps. Or offline maps (since I can't actually go anywhere at the moment) if I still have any.

How do you rate the OKness of use vs irritatingness of Signal?

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by Kamilah Hauptmann

Discord for my e-friends. Regular text and iMessage otherwise. Sometimes Plurk.

I'm convinced you've made up some of those.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by JoeP

I'm convinced you've made up some of those.

Will, ironically, most of the discord is in the other channels.

[slimshady2357]

A couple of the whatsapp groups I use are moving to Signal now. I find Signal fine so far. I think they posted on twitter that they are way behind with verification links as so many people are switching. I know some of our groups still can't get a verification link so we're mid switching still.

Verification codes are currently delayed across several providers because so many new people are trying to join Signal right now (we can barely register our excitement). We are working with carriers to resolve this as quickly as possible. Hang in there.

— Signal (@signalapp) January 7, 2021

As soon as I can get everyone over it's fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you to whatsapp.

Uh-oh. WhatsApp's canary just died; they removed the statement that they never have access to your private keys. If you were using it because of its privacy, it's time to find something else. https://t.co/vmnSn9JqMK

— 🏳️*🌈🐺 Shadow D. Wolf (@SDWolf) January 8, 2021

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by JoeP

How do you rate the OKness of use vs irritatingness of Signal?

It works well for regular texting. I can't think of any particular annoyances.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Smol thrad

there’s no one way to be radicalized and even that is complicated. but what we saw analyzing years long post histories is how Facebook coaxed a certain type of person to become more extreme in order to reap the engagement. here’s one election denial group admin: pic.twitter.com/e2oDpMZvLE

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) January 14, 2021

[JoeP]

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

dMfqABc.jpg

[erimir]

Originally Posted by JoeP

Donald Trump suspended from Facebook indefinitely, says Mark Zuckerberg | US news | The Guardian

Good move, Suckerberg. And nice that you waited until after the coup attempt failed, just in case.

The Trumpers are calling him Mark Suckerturd now.

:nameburn:

Originally Posted by Sock Puppet

I tend to support Snowden's actions on the main, but this is just fucking stupid.

Honestly, the more I've learned about Snowden's takes on politics, the more skeptical I've become of him.

Before Obama, he wasn't some left-wing anti-surveillance person, he was more like a libertarian-ish right-winger. He thought 2016 was an election between "Trump and Goldman Sachs" (oops, turns out Trump put a bunch of Goldman alums in his administration). Now this. And he's out here today concerned that Trump isn't going to pardon Assange and saying if he doesn't it's because Trump has caved to the security agencies and acting like those agencies dislike Trump because he has some principles they disagree with (presumably that Trump is a non-interventionist who is opposed to war, setting aside the part where he ALSO wants the military not to try to reduce civilian casualties, escalating existing conflicts and pardoning literal murderous war criminals, and you know, the whole thing where he risked war by assassinating an Iranian general), rather than because of all the reasons he's a disaster on foreign policy and national security.

Snowden seems to mostly have garbage opinions about politics back to before he was famous. So, like I said, it makes me skeptical of his motivations for what he did in the first place and how he ended up in Russia and what sort of deals he's had to make for his protection there.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Bend over, Twitter is back:

Twitter just told me that “union buster” is a slur. pic.twitter.com/qlrqjrs39S

— commie tuberville (@marx_attacks_) February 24, 2021

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Jack Dorsey is trying to sell his first tweet as an NFT - The Verge

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

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[JoeP]

It's Facebook, Bitche.

Life's a Bitche: Facebook says sorry for shutting down town's page | France | The Guardian

Ville de Bitche in north-east France had fallen foul of social network’s algorithm

The mayor, Benoît Kieffer, said in a post: “The name of our town seems to suffer from a bad interpretation … the most astonishing thing is that Facebook took so long to correct this. The president/director general of Facebook France has just contacted me personally to tell me the Ville de Bitche page is published again and to apologise for the inconvenience caused.”

[viscousmemories]

I finally deleted my Facebook account as I've been wanting to for years. The last time I seriously considered it I made a fb post to that effect, and an ex-girlfriend asked me not to go through with it because she liked having a window into my life despite us not having interacted in many years. Oddly enough the straw that broke my back was getting banned from Instagram with no explanation beyond a claim that I had violated their rules. I'm certain I didn't because I hardly ever use Instagram, but I jumped through their hoops to get reinstated anyway (including taking and sending Facebook a selfie while holding a piece of paper with my username and the date on it).

When I got no response after a week I was so pissed off that I finally quit Facebook. A couple weeks later I got a generic email that my Instagram had been reactivated with no explanation or apology. When I logged in I noticed my avatar was a random middle-aged woman and there was a current login from Croatia, so I booted the login and changed my avatar and password. I'll probably continue to use Instagram (albeit as infrequently as ever) but I'm sticking with no more Facebook. Apologies to those of you who were my friends!

[JoeP]

My takeaway from this is that the group on Facebook is no use for reporting when FF is down.

Not that it ever was.

[Stormlight]

Originally Posted by Stormlight

This is heartbreaking. Thoughts and prayers!

iOS 14 privacy settings will tank ad targeting business, Facebook warns

This is terrible, devastating!

Facebook advertisers are panicking after iOS cuts off key tracking data | Ars Technica

The changes could have a significant effect on Facebook’s bottom line. Eric Seufert, an analyst who writes Mobile Dev Memo, forecasts that if only 20 percent of users consent to tracking, Facebook’s revenue could drop 7 percent in the first full quarter that the opt-in prompt is active (the forthcoming third quarter). The company warned back in February that the iOS changes would curtail its ability to track users across the Internet.
“It’s been pretty devastating for, I would say, the majority of advertisers,” Seufert told Bloomberg. “The big question is: Are we seeing just short-term volatility where we can expect a move back to the mean, or is this a new normal?”

Thoughts and prayers.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Facebook apology as AI labels black men 'primates'

Flickr and Google Photos already did this in 2015. Come on, guys.