Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

mental wellbeing, personal satisfaction, the development of quality relationships, reduces anxiety, reduces depression and improves ones belief in oneself and humanity.

It’s tough though; for all the bullshit that comes at you through these social networks, there is a lot of genuine personal connection too.

Having shunned most social networking for double digit years I do feel “cleaner” for not having to wade through all the crap, probably comparatively less anxious about the world in general, but also undoubtedly more isolated too.

No easy answer…

Every outlet has noticed the popularity that comes with telling people what they want to hear. It’s legal to give “opinion” that has no backing evidence, as opposed to journalism, where people reasonably expect some due diligence.

That’s why Hannity, for instance, is quick to point out that he is not a journalist, but in fact an opinion show host. That distinction is meant to limit his liability.

Political speech is protected, you don’t have to be tethered to reality in order to participate.

But there’s limits, for example slander and defamation.

Recently though, the change has been incredible. People I know in real life, including my own parents, have been "Liking" very obviously AI generated posts. A HUGE amount of the "Recommended" posts I see are obvious AI images. It's gotten really, really bad, in just the past few months.

To me social media is no different than Saturday morning cartoons (American phenomenon from the 80s/90s) that fill children’s minds with advertisements of sugar cereal and action figure toys, except social media is 24/7 and just stupid enough to become a drug habit.

Having worked in AdTech and Pulisher Analytics for about a decade, I know that orgs are measuring fake news viewability and content type + quality, so it'd just be nice to see a company making that digestible for people.

The other thing that could feasibly happen would be a bit of a mass exodus away from these things. There seems to be glimmers of that, but again, it is still a niche thing.

There doesn't seem to be a straw that breaks the camel's back, with this whole social media / internet freedom thing. Monopolies concentrate, rights dwindle, stability flounders, war flares up, climate crisis accelerates worsens, and just glimmers of resistance.

Do people still get any sort of news from Facebook? I only see very harmless content. People posting pics about their lives, some hiking groups... very few comments overall. I thought all the toxicity has moved to X formerly Twitter.

> the work of more than 30 academics from U.S. universities and Meta researchers

At least, one can appreciate that Meta is trying to understand the potential negative effects of their system and act on it. Social networks are here to stay in one form or another, it makes sense to understand how to regulate them rather than just hoping they wouldn't exist.

I'm a little burnt out entirely on social media; the closest thing to a social media that I still use is HN, and I do argue on here a bit but not nearly as much.

You can technically use messenger.com but need to request desktop site, login each time and then zoom out to make it useable.

For instagram they don’t allow to control pic visibility from web so I’ve stopped posting entirely.

Added friction basically destroyed usefulness. My next step would be using incognito mode for each session to eliminate tracking and removing password from password manager.

My wife has a client whom needed her to manage a campaign on Facebook so she attempted to make an account. It instantly got banned as spam. Like, instantly, before even being able to login.

I then tried to make one on her behalf to the same result. Me being me, I thought “I’ll use a different email”. Nope. Phone number, nope. Different phone number, nope. Different phone number while I’m in India, nope. Get my mum to make one, nope. Pay a local to make one, nope.

We just gave up in the end and her client settled for being advised over a screen share in a call.

I’ve not had an account for well over a decade nor has my wife so this was all really strange considering she only wanted the account in order to make them money by the way of managing ad campaigns for her clients.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ashley-biden-diary-claims/

The only fake stuff I see are sports memes and AI images fooling boomers. Otherwise my timeline is its mostly ads, friends sharing pictures and updates from their personal life, or posts from the groups I've joined.

Twitter and TikTok are where the narratives flow.

This means that they were just less aware generally. It doesn't look like they suddenly stopped believing the misinformation they were already exposed to, they were just prevented from being exposed to more of it.

> I was really surprised to see this effect, which was large enough to be marginally detectable,”

"marginally detectable" doesn't really inspire confidence in their results.

> The result regarding Trump favorability is very interesting. It does not reach the level pre-specified by the scientists, but because the standard of evidence they had is very high.

Lots of things seem true when you lower the standard of evidence far enough

I wouldn't doubt that getting off facebook means people will see less misinformation, and it'll probably do wonders for their mental health in general, but I'd take this entire thing with a massive grain of salt.

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There has to be some meta-level concerns.

Politics is really strange. Are they playing poker or is this some obscure stuff going on?

Oh I could ramble on people playing the geo-positioning game in Africa too for instance but that existed before I was born and as stupid as I think it may be... They are still trying to do it for some reason. French specificity I guess nowadays because what the goal of the presence near Australia... I mean if some people reproach to Putin that he has views on part of the Ukrainian territory, assuredly, they can't be claiming to still have views on New Caledonia, or Chad, or elsewhere(they call these interests, whatever that means, probably minus the people) etc. Am I misunderstanding something?

Doesn't seem very democratic to me...

Just wondering if this is intellectual laziness and lack of EQ that make them take the wrong decisions each time or whether there is something else, perhaps at the brain level?

Even "real" news are weird. (I had deactivated fb back in 2012 or so, therefore can't be that :o)

(sorry if I hold people to a higher standard than they are able to. I have my reasons :)

Having any single entity determine what is "fake" and what is "real" is incredibly dangerous. We can't even agree if 72F degrees is the correct room temperature - let alone complex things like abortion or if fat is bad for you.

To have any authority say one side is correct fails to understand how the structures of scientific revolution work. Much more likely they do understand and are using "Science(TM)" to force ideological agendas.

Full disclosure: I have never used Facebook.