More Information About Last Week’s Takedowns
newsroom.fb.com
newsroom.fb.com
But still, I find this post more than a little creepy.
It's mostly, I think, because you could change a few names and this post would sound very much like a press release from state-owned Chinese media, about how they shut down the Falun Gong or some dissident group in the interest of national harmony.
Maybe it's the Orwellian language. "Inauthentic"? If Facebook banned everyone who's inauthentic on their site, they would be left with hardly any users at all.
Fortunately, decisions can be made by humans who understand social context. Not everything has to be reduced to a machine-learning classifier.
When a politician says "this is good for my constituents" when it's really good for their donors, should they be banned from facebook?
Any time a politican says something their sponsors asked them to say, they should add a little #ad to it.
A singular politician voicing his/her opinion/rhetoric is one thing, a concerted nation state attack is entirely different.
I think it's interesting people are not making this distinction here.
With the amount of users they have, they are bigger than many nation states (and they also cross borders), so maybe people perceive the difference a bit immaterial?
I used FB since 2007, always with my real name, had around 200 friends, 150+ RL friends (a lot of former classmates). 2016 FB asked to see a copy of my ID to prove I'm a real person. And yes, I made political posts, so I guess someone mass-reported me. I bet you, the accounts who reported me didn't have to show their ID.
So since then I'm Facebook-free. It's not that I'm not aware they probably have all the data that would be in my ID and more anyway, it was a matter of principle, I said enough, this line I will not cross. Who do they think they are?
It's always easy to dismiss such things until they are done to you. Though to be honest, I'm GLAD. I wish it had happened sooner. These people probably considered it a victory for them, but for me they simply made my life better, and more effective at the stuff they hate. But that wasn't their or Facebook's intent.
Are you using an RSS reader? If not, you should be. Don't use those useless YouTube subscriptions, but use the RSS channel feed. Tell people about RSS. "You remember Google reader, well there are some great alternatives like Feedly and Newsblur .. and you can export all your feeds if you ever want to switch and they never block anything or change the order in which you view things like Facebook/Twitter."
Are you on Mastodon or run an instance? You should and encourage other people to find an instance. If you know how, you can run your own for your friends and family.
The solution is for people in tech that know how to latch onto, run and encourage more distributed systems of getting our news, blogs and entertainment that don't filter things for us.
https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted
If there was a server-only (no web-based client), super lightweight version that talked the Mastodon protocol and didn't require much in terms of functionality, i might have tried it. It kinda sounds like Go was made for projects like this, so i hope someone eventually makes one :-P.
It also separates front- and back-end, so it might come close to your „server-only“ idea.
It's super easy to run compared to Plreoma (which took me forever to Dockerize, the dockerfiles are in the same project). Years ago this was the problem with Diaspora too, but Docker has made this problem a lot easier.
I even have a container that backs up my volumes and database to Backblaze. If you want easy, cheap hosting, there's Masto.host.
Edit: I run on a $10 Vultr instance with some additional block storage and currently support <10 users without issue.
Also i do not really want to run docker in there... aren't dockers VMs themselves? Isn't this running a VM in a VM? Doesn't that kill any sort of performance?
TBH as i wrote above what i'd prefer is some self-contained binary i drop somewhere in my VPS and have it work automatically. See Fossil SCM and Gogs as a couple of examples for what i'm looking for.
https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-wit...
I can’t tell if your question is based in simple curiosity or implies some form of skepticism that mistakes were made or that problems actually exist.
Interestingly, Facebook actually got dinged from real news outlets because its algorithm was ranking stories from theAntiMedia (and other conspiracy sites) higher than those of actual journalists during events like the Vegas shooting. So that might have played into it.
They are being taken down because they are (allegedly) faking who is behind those accounts (i.e. they are fraudsters with political instead of financial motives).
The only reason they are taken down is that they are funded by an adversary power, but the American media is controlled by adversaries of the American public too.
At what point does the carrier of the message become the legitimate editior or even worse censor of that information. Who decides what is a fact? The winner? The CEO?
As far as I'm aware there is only one disicipline that is considered to have proof of facts, the rest is either best guess that meets the evidence or simply opnion. Allowing the messenger to chose what is and is not a fact removes the massive benefit provided by the internet, the ability for everybody to have a voice.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
We have just celebrated the anaversery of the end of the First World War, lets not have this date be celebrated in the future as being the start of the loss of freedoms that millions died for.
Maximised and polarised to the maximum by the media. That is the real common component here. Most people would be apathetic to those issues, if it wasn't for the media bombarding them and pissing them off.
Just wanted to point out though that these issues were chosen precisely BECAUSE most people are NOT apathetic to them.
That's what makes them good wedge issues. For instance, whether the media would cover them or not, people would still want marijuana. (And another set of people would still want marijuana banned.) People care about the issue regardless of whether or not the media covers it.
That's why these are good issues to use if your intent is to destabilize a society. They are latent, un-"dealt with" issues. I'd imagine those are the sort of issues you'd look for when trying to increase discord in target nations.
Is this hypothetical supposed to be something positive? Because I actually agree apathy to these issues, and most others, would be the logical result of not having the media report on them. But climate change happens in the real world, and the phenomenon doesn't care about the press it gets. It would still happen without you being informed. But, quite obviously, not knowing about problems does not seem to be a promising strategy for democratic societies.
(replace climate change with any problem you hold dear and consider true, in case you're one of those people)
Martin Luther King Jr sowed discord and divided society in beneficial and positive ways. Take a look at the Poor People's Campaign. How could civil rights have taken place if they didn't change people's minds?
And that's where all the subjective judgements come in. A lot of us would say that the guys setting off the bombs were sowing the discord. But, whether we like having them here or not, there is a group of people in the US who would say that King provoked peaceful citizens into blowing up little sunday school girls. And these two thought groups in the US will likely never be reconciled.
Look up "wedge issue". It's the best strategy in a two-party system. Pick one issue, make it super important so people vote for you even if they disagree with a lot of your other positions.
The most interesting thing about that article to me was discovering FB uses WordPress to publish them.
It's government instructing Facebook to remove pages. This only provides a few examples, and someone else in this very thread said they took down legit pages of legitimate people they know and follow, presumably also at the FBI's request. Is this not government censorship?
Does the FBI get to start taking down legitimate left wing organizing as they've done in the past with cointelpro?
The FBI's involvement was merely to call FB's attention to the existence of the pages. From the article, it seems that FB takes down such pages regardless of who happens to call their attention to them.