Giving Facebook a rest

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Crackpot
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Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Crackpot »

I have decided to give Facebook a rest for a while. While I have been managing the barrage of false and misleading and downright dangerous misinformation pretty well for a while I recently made the mistake a clicking on a “Crafty Panda” video. Video is not about creating something with epoxy and a lathe (and a shitload of plastic waste) is full of ideas many of which are Ill-informed at best and downright hazardous at worst.

The worst thing is the tendency to “hatewatch” these videos which my feed dutifully supplies an overabundance driving me to despair for humanity.

It’s depressing that after the years of mean spirited shit a fucking craft channel is the metric ton that broke the camels back.
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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TPFKA@W
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by TPFKA@W »

I only keep using it to stay updated on far flung family. I have unfollowed a number of those who post stupid right wing or left wing no sense.

ex-khobar Andy
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

I did have some Trumpist friends on FB - occasionally I would issue some mild rebuke or contrary evidence when they were on one of their more asinine rants, but they must have unfriended me because I don't see them any more. I didn't cross them off my list because (I'm thinking of two in particular) when I knew them they were reasonable guys whom I thought of as friends - maybe we had our differences but no more than was common five or ten years ago. I still want to know how these people think.

Burning Petard
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Burning Petard »

I have avoided any contact with Facebook. That policy has not been without its costs: Stonekettle has had almost no posts this calendar year. He seems to prefer Facebook. My online church congregation moved to Facebook and then within three months fissioned into angry trolls. My extended family has a place in Facebook. My daughter tells me it has good news about the family, but rarely. It is mostly stuff from Trump fabulists.

IMNSHO, social media is anti-social. Anybody here remember the Well or Co-Evolution?

snailgate

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Joe Guy
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Joe Guy »

I'm on Facebook only with my Plan B name, 'Joe Guy' but I rarely go there, as my many Facebook "Friends" may have noticed. At the time I registered, people needed to be registered to be able to read anything. I think that has changed. Either way, I've never liked the idea of putting my real name online.

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Gob
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Gob »

I use Facebook for amusement and keeping in touch with family and friends at home and abroad. It's a tool that can be used, but needs careful handling.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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Crackpot
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

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I decided to start reporting and Crafty Panda Videos that show dangerous things to Facebook
Okay... There's all kinds of things wrong with what you just said.

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BoSoxGal
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

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There was a disturbing segment on Morning Joe yesterday discussing the new WSJ reporting on internal studies at Facebook acknowledging that they (and their partner platform Instagram) are a serious factor in the rise in teen suicidality in recent years. It also discussed their own research showing that changes in 2018 meant to improve interactions between family/friends on Facebook haven’t worked as planned, that the platform acknowledges becoming a more hostile and angry place and that Zuckerberg nevertheless resisted any further changes because the user engagement is up and the cash is rolling in. Here’s a CNN piece on the same issue but not as in depth; I encourage those who are interested to seek out more on the story. https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/16/business ... index.html

Yesterday I was tossed in jail for 30 days for citing the CDC statistic that 78% of the hospitalized and dead from covid19 are/were overweight or obese. This was in a conversation with antivaxxers on the BDN Facebook page and apparently because one of them was overweight/obese Facebook decided to judge it as bullying - never mind that in the post I acknowledged my own overweight status and cited it as one of my reasons for being keen on getting the jab and utilizing other protective measures with diligence. I wasn’t mean, I didn’t name call - I was jailed for posting the same facts that are in dozens and dozens of news articles about covid19 online. It’s crazy. The algorithm that ‘catches’ community standards violations is wholly without common sense ability, and people get punished simply because someone is angry at them and reports their post and there is a word - in this case obese - that triggers the algorithm without any consideration of context. The individual I was interacting with is the same one who claimed the FDA approved thalidomide and then went totally quiet when I refuted him with a link to the FDA page that discusses the thalidomide story and how America was saved from that tragedy by a female reviewer at the FDA. I guess he owned me.

For a long time I’ve noticed that I see very little content from my actual friends and family. Facebook fills my feed with advertisements, page posts from pages I’ve liked (which is better than ads, but still) and a lot of news. The rules of engagement are that facts don’t actually matter all that much and you can get away with being nasty so long as nobody reports your posts - antivaxxer people have called me stupid and worse, and told me I’m going to die because I put the Pfizer poison in my body, but because I don’t report their posts to Facebook, nothing happens to them. God forbid you write factual science based posts with zero personal attack but which use a word - obese - that is a medical descriptive term relevant to discussion of covid19 and which apparently they’ve programmed their algorithm to trigger on as bullying. (Fat, fatty, lardass, etc. I would readily understand - but obese?)

Anyway, I put in my request to delete my Facebook account entirely. I’ve wasted too much of my life there already and it’s a more evil place than it is a source for good in the world. The last couple of years it has been a huge source of anxiety for me as reading posts there has revealed how hateful and willfully ignorant so many people are and that is profoundly depressing to me. I’ll miss the occasional updates from far flung friends that I saw, but somehow I used to live without all that, and I read a lot more books to boot.
Last edited by BoSoxGal on Fri Sep 17, 2021 6:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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Scooter
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Scooter »

Their algorithm for community standards violations pretty much sucks, I reported a poster who was repeatedly calling others "fag" and "faggot" along with other violently abusive language, and nothing happened. When I posted that Facebook had done nothing about the poster calling others "fag" and "faggot", I got a warning that I had violated community standards.
"If you don't have a seat at the table, you're on the menu."

-- Author unknown

Big RR
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Big RR »

I have avoided Facebook, but had a friend who had his account suspended without any explanation (other than some generic language) and they provided no additional information when he asked. He just decided to terminate his account. That doesn't seem to be rare when it comes to Facebook.

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BoSoxGal
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

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After I posted here I watched this morning’s episode of Morning Joe where they further discussed the WSJ reporting on the leaked Facebook internal documents. Turns out that Facebook has also done zero things about reports from their employees that in developing countries the platform is being used for large scale drug and human trafficking. The WSJ reporting sounds very good, but it is behind a paywall and so I have not read it only listened to the interviews with the reporters on MJ.

On my way to a meeting in Fall River this morning I listened to a Lincoln Project podcast that also focused in part on issues with Facebook and Zuckerberg’s failure to do anything truly substantive about manipulation of the platform by political entities and disinformation campaigns - both in regard to the electoral process and in regard to the vaccine rollout, which purportedly Zuckerberg wanted to get behind in a major way but metrics show the platform has actually been a massive source of the disinformation inhibiting vaccine uptake and leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary covid19 deaths and the orphaning of a great many children.

Apparently according to some of his peers, Zuckerberg lives in a fantasy bubble in which Facebook is mostly a source for good in the world that has bettered society by connecting people. Rather than focus any real energy on addressing any of the serious negative issues that their own internal research has highlighted, Zuckerberg is focused almost exclusively on working toward his dream for the next stage of Facebook, which is essentially a virtual reality like that depicted in Ready Player One where Facebook users could engage most of their waking hours.

I think the guy is nuts, and more and more I am convinced that quitting Facebook is a necessity not only because of the negativity it brings into my own life, but because it’s a dangerous company doing dangerous things to our democracy and having something like zero accountability to Congress or anybody else.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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Joe Guy
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Joe Guy »

Is anyone here on Twitter? I signed up but have not commented more than ten times. It seems to me like you would have to spend a lot of time there in order to get responses because everyone is talking about what is happening in the world right now - not a few hours ago. At least that’s what I’ve seen in my limited experience.

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BoSoxGal
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

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I signed up for Twitter several years ago but have only tweeted a couple of times, and a few more times I’ve retweeted others. I have spent very little time there, I never intentionally login, I get redirected there when I click a tweet embedded in an article.

I find Twitter a bit convoluted but more than that, it seems to me that it’s a place one could easily get lost for far too long checking feeds. I figured I was already wasting enough of my life at Facebook.

That said, apparently it’s where a lot of the cool cats hang.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan

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Joe Guy
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Joe Guy »

BoSoxGal wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 9:42 pm
.....That said, apparently it’s where a lot of the cool cats hang.
It seems more geared to celebrities and news-people but maybe that's because, like you, I only go there when I click on an embedded tweet so I don't really know the system. Maybe there are places in Twitterland where uncool people like me hang out and exchange tweets but that's not what I've seen and I don't have the time or the interest in it.

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MajGenl.Meade
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by MajGenl.Meade »

Facebook, Twitter, etc. for all the "good" that may be done, in the end I see these things as the weapon of mass distrustion.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57369349
It has been four years since online posts claiming to be from a self-styled government insider, known as Q, first appeared making extreme assertions about those at the very top of US power and society. It spawned a far-reaching conspiracy theory that has torn families and friendships apart.

It was January 2021 when Nicole Lauber's 14-year-old son took her to a hospital emergency room. Hours earlier, Nicole had been driving out of her small hometown in Kansas when she started having palpitations, and her arm and face went numb. "I thought I was having a heart attack."

Nicole had experienced a panic attack after 10 months of watching her mother disappear into her phone screen, and a world of conspiracy theories. Specifically, QAnon - an expansive movement that has inspired protests, split families and continues to find new followers online.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts

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Long Run
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Long Run »

Gob wrote:
Fri Sep 17, 2021 6:05 am
I use Facebook for amusement and keeping in touch with family and friends at home and abroad. It's a tool that can be used, but needs careful handling.
Exactly. 80% of my FB friends do not do politics on FB, me included (it is a terrible format for any kind of reasonable interchange). Just don't follow those who want to use it as a soap box, or post 100 times a day.

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Sue U
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

Post by Sue U »

I have to use FaceSpace for some orchestra stuff because that's how the groups communicate. Otherwise, I don't do it with any real frequency, but what I see on my feed is pretty benign. It's a little surprising how many of my elementary school classmates still all keep in touch (both online and IRL) and have had lifelong friendships -- and frankly how nice they have all turned out to be. (One of them currently needs a liver transplant as a result of cancer and has raised quite a bit of money from these childhood friends.) I see almost no political ads or content; as far as I can tell, there are literally two people among my 258 FBFs who will very occasionally post some dumbass right-wing meme intended to be humorous, but I have never seen any QAnon, "Stop-the-Steal," anti-vax or other conspiracist-type posts. I spend more time looking at that stupid bird app, but admittedly the jokes there are often pretty good.
GAH!

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Long Run
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Re: Giving Facebook a rest

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