Even better.
The fact that she isn’t doing that makes me happy.
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Another inane post from that FB friend I talked about recently. Reporting on his meal at Wendy’s:
I decided to go back to my old stomping grounds and try their new & improved fench fries. I’m not impressed; they taste a lot like BK’s fries. I came in for the ‘son of baconator’ which was also a disappointment. I got a free one because the first order was wrong. I’m leaving with a frosty!
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Journalists should really stop saying “the Metaverse” but rather “a metaverse”.
They should say “shitty second life rip off”
My wife has somehow gotten on Facebook’s bad list and she’s gotten two time outs. The first one was that she replied to a video of a snake slithering into someone’s house with “oh no, no way. I’d have to burn the house down” and now after she replied to one of her gfs posting something about staying in bed and watching TV with “I’d kick you out of the bed so I could watch”.
It’s funny that for the latest one she’s stormed up to my office and exclaimed “Facebook banned me for advocating violence… again”
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I got banned from a reddit forum for violence when I said “someone needs to knock some sense into them”.
You obviously needed to say “someone needs to lightly insert some sense into them via warm washcloth”
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“Your account has been suspended.”
“You cannot post or comment for 3 days”
“You can’t go live for 63 days”
Over the past month, Karimi has sent numerous appeals to Facebook, but has gotten no reply. And so last week, Karimi pushed his way through a champagne-sipping crowd of journalists and media representatives at a reception that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, threw at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy.
The festival is one of the industry’s key annual events and a rare opportunity for journalists like Karimi to speak to big tech company representatives directly.
Karimi found a Meta staff member and, shouting over the crowd, tried to explain to him how all independent voices on Afghanistan are being affected by Facebook’s poorly thought-out policy that seems to indiscriminately label all mentions of the Taliban as hate speech and then summarily remove them. He explained that Facebook is an essential platform for people stuck in the Taliban-imposed information vacuum and that blocking those voices benefits first and foremost the Taliban itself. The Meta representative listened and asked Karimi to follow up. Karimi did – twice – but never heard back.
“We went from reaching 2 million people to reaching 200,000,” Salome Ugulava, Formula’s chief digital editor told me. The drop followed a warning they received from Facebook after its algorithm flagged a quote from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as hate speech. The post, which she showed me, was merely a translation into Georgian of a post by Zelensky himself.
Apparently they’ve reacted to the Rwandan genocide by just suppressing everyone. Meanwhile the bad actors are of course weaponizing the reporting process.
“We were already under constant attacks from Georgian government troll farms, but since the invasion Russian-backed organizations began reporting us too. Azov incident was one of many,” Nika Gvaramia, the channel’s Director General told me.
I hate stuff like this. People who applied for federal student aid had their data automatically shipped off to Facebook.
There’s always some quote like this where we’re just supposed to trust them. No.
The data sent to Facebook “was automatically anonymized and neither FSA nor Facebook used any of it for any purpose,” Cordray said in the emailed statement. “ The pixel functionality in question was deactivated soon after the campaign ended as part of FSA’s typical campaign maintenance.”
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I gave Instagram photos of my baby. Instagram returned fear.
Non-paywall: https://archive.ph/RvVZN
When my son was born last year, friends from all over wanted to share in my joy. So I decided to post a photo of him every day on Instagram.
Within weeks, Instagram began showing images of babies with severe and uncommon health conditions, preying on my new-parent vulnerability to the suffering of children. My baby album was becoming a nightmare machine.
This was not a bug, I have learned. This is how the software driving Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and lots of other apps has been designed to work. Their algorithms optimize for eliciting a reaction from us, ignoring the fact that often the shortest path to a click is fear, anger or sadness.
I made my son a private Instagram account, and posted nothing but photos and videos of him smiling and snuggling. I followed the accounts of a handful of other babies from friends also longing to connect when covid-19 kept us apart.
But there was a darker dynamic at work, too. On the app’s home screen and other tabs, Instagram mixes photos from my baby friends with suggested posts from strangers. At first, these algorithmically generated recommendations were neutral, such as recipes. After a few weeks, something caught my attention: Instagram was consistently recommending posts of babies with cleft palates, a birth defect.
Soon after came suggested posts of children with severe blisters on their lips. Then came children attached to tubes in hospital beds. In my main feed and the app’s Explore and Reels tabs, Instagram was building a crescendo of shock: There were babies missing limbs, babies with bulging veins, babies with too-small heads, babies with too-big heads, even hirsute babies. Lots of the images were shared not by parents, but by spammers posting nonsense captions and unrelated images.
On Instagram’s Shopping tab, things were also getting dark: T-shirts with crude dad jokes gave way to anti-vaccination propaganda, then even sexually explicit toys.
When I open Instagram today, more than 1 in 10 of the images I see just aren’t appropriate for my baby photo album.
So how does it decide what to show you? The algorithms used by Instagram and Facebook look for “signals.” Some are obvious: Liking a post, following an account, or leaving a comment on a post are all signals.
In my case, I didn’t do any of that with Instagram’s suggested posts. But Haugen explained you don’t have to “like” a darn thing for Instagram to pick up signals, because it’s monitoring every single thing you do in the app.
“The reality of being a new dad is that you are more vulnerable to the suffering of children,” Haugen says. “And I am sure when you run into one of the shocking photos, you’re not intending to spend time on that photo, but you pause. And the algorithm takes note of that longer duration.”
It’s called “dwell time.” Otway, the Meta spokeswoman, confirmed even the speed of your scroll is a signal that feeds Instagram’s algorithm. So are a few other things Haugen said I likely did out of shock when I first saw these posts, such as tapping into an image to take a closer look. In a blog post last year, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said the app is on the hunt for thousands of signals.
I was pretty sure they were doing this. But it’s good to see it confirmed.
The whole showing more of stuff you slow down to look at is ridiculous. It’s like your car noticing you slow down to look at car wrecks, so it drives you to as many car wrecks as it can find. And then in the AI singularity all the smart cars get together and create more wrecks to keep the humans engaged.
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Then why does my phone keep showing me sexy guy butts? EXPLAIN THAT!
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I just got a check from Meta for $400, so obviously I love FB and this thread should be deleted. Don’t bother clicking to get some yourself, it’s Illinois only and the deadline was long ago.
If you elect to hate FB anyway, keep in mind that they are now $400 poorer.
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The past couple days I have been getting a ton of “suggested for you” content that is straight up right wing propaganda. Stuff from pages like “maganomics”, to a bunch of anti-trans bullshit, and a ton of anti-democrat nonsense. Nothing I do online should suggest I am interested in that content. This shit is being forced fed to millions of idiots who aren’t capable of deciphering its validity. Social media is poison to society. Ugh.
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Former roommate of mine announced on Facebook that he’s taken a job with Facebook doing AI research, and specifically asked for feedback (about pytorch scaling), I gave him some very mild pushback on working for Facebook on the stuff that they’re specifically using to make the world worse, immediately got a “be nice and less passive aggressive” post from one of his polycule girlfriends and a “yet you participate in society, curious” post from some dipshit wearing a my chemical romance jacket and a top hat in his profile pic.
My friend’s response was “well basically only these guys and google will pay me to do this so what can you do”
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nothx
