In spring, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg invited more than a dozen professors and academics to a series of dinners at his home to discuss how Facebook could better keep its platforms safe from election disinformation, violent content, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech. Alongside these secret meetings, Facebook was regularly making pronouncements that it was spending hundreds of millions of dollars and hiring thousands of human content moderators to make its platforms safer. After Facebook was widely blamed for the rise of “fake news” that supposedly helped Trump win the 2016 election, Facebook repeatedly brought in reporters to examine its election “war room” and explained what it was doing to police its platform, which famously included a new “Oversight Board,” a sort of Supreme Court for hard Facebook decisions.
Several years later, Facebook has been overrun by AI-generated spam and outright scams. Many of the “people” engaging with this content are bots who themselves spam the platform. Porn and nonconsensual imagery is easy to find on Facebook and Instagram. We have reported endlessly on the proliferation of paid advertisements for drugs, stolen credit cards, hacked accounts, and ads for electricians and roofers who appear to be soliciting potential customers with sex work. Its own verified influencers have their bodies regularly stolen by “AI influencers” in the service of promoting OnlyFans pages also full of stolen content.
Meta now at best inconsistently responds to our questions about these problems, and has declined repeated requests for on-the-record interviews for this and other investigations. Several of the professors who used to consult directly or indirectly with the company say they have not engaged with Meta in years. Some of the people I spoke to said that they are unsure whether their previous contacts still work at the company or, if they do, what they are doing there. Others have switched their academic focus after years of feeling ignored or harassed by right-wing activists who have accused them of being people who just want to censor the internet.
Has Facebook Stopped Trying?
Did it ever start?
I got rid of FB in 2009, and it was full of crackpots even then. I think that was also around the time the timeline went from chronological to algorithm-based (or maybe a little after that?) . “Somehow”, the crackpots always rose to the top.
These days, I only see FB content second-hand when it’s shared elsewhere (or a friend/family sends me something). It’s always way worse than what I remember it being when I got rid of my account.
Exactly. All these articles on how tech companies are “turning scammy.” No, they were always scammy, it’s just become unavoidably obvious now.
I remember around the same time you dropped FB saying to people that their metrics on targeted ads were undoubtedly inflated. They’ve literally always been feeding the world nothing but bullshit.
EDIT: It’s weird how hard it was to find this image. In a lot of places it shows up as “image not found.” Looks like Zuck has been trying to erase it from the internet.
Keep in mind that it might not be related at all to zuck silencing things. Imgur, the main image hosting platform in the past decade or so, purged image uploads from non-users a couple of years ago.
That said this could be doctored in many ways, not sure it’s a smoking gun.
I’m literally talking about news articles, though, who are hosting their own images.
I think that was also around the time the timeline went from chronological to algorithm-based
This has always been the first stage of enshittification. Twitter back in 2007 was pretty nice. I made a lot of local friends because they’d post cat pictures and food pictures and we’d have meetups. Really great folks that I found because their posts showed up in a chronological feed alongside other ones I follow.
Then when they switched to an algorithmic feed all those posts by people with low follower counts got drowned out by ones with activity. My friends were still there, I just didn’t see them because The Algorithm decided I didn’t want to. I stopped using Twitter not long after that.
Facebook came along at the right time in Internet history to grab all the Boomer crackpots and monied groups.
Facebook started in 2004 as a platform only available to college students (who would have mainly been born after 1982). After it was opened up to the general public in 2006, its userbase remained pretty young for a number of years.
The majority of crackpots on Facebook today are not boomers. They probably grew up in the 1990s or after.
Facebook never tried in the first place. They just put up a facade that they’ve let fall down.
They found out how it could be stopped so they could bypass those measures. Come on, people! It’s like you’ve never personally dealt with selfish manipulative assholes.
Secret thief: How could we work together to catch the thief?
Police: We’ll install a camera at the front door.
Thief: Great idea!
Thief robs the place going through a window
Facebook has always been first and foremost an advertising platform, and they went where the money is. Some of that’s the automated algorithms, some of that is deliberate corporate informationeering.
I offer some thoughts on the decline and fall of the internet here, and I think it’s germane to this discussion: https://michaelhjenkins.substack.com/p/visions-of-a-post-apocalyptic-internet?r=26iex9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Man, journalists out here lately just murdering Betteridge .
Good, though. It doesn’t need to be a given.
I’m no facebook fanboy by any measure. I miss Forums, but everyone moved to FB groups. (at least 90% of the people/content). I am on FB, I manage my FB feed. I unfollow/unfriend “crackheads” as someone else called them. I only follow people that mainly post their own content, not forward shit, or post news etc.
I was mainly there to share public “stuff” with my remote family (both parents were 300-600 miles from us) and we had a young child (both parents first grandchild).
I now mainly use FB for groups of my interest, because that’s where the people are. I also sell stuff on FB market place, because craigslist is a ghost town.
Between managing my feed/friends, using ‘social fixer’ browser extension and Pihole I rarely see ads on there. Certainly not on my PC. The the App can sneak in some, but I hide/report any ad I see.
It works for me. I don’t live on there by any means but go there for interest groups.
