I will probably be harassed for this but I feel like I need to act.
The recent debate and decision by world to federate with threads seems to have sparked massive pro meta propaganda. Some accounts post completely one sided articles nearly every day, using carefully crafted language to shape meta as the „facilitator“ of the fediverse and some beligerent benevolent god. You dont have to scroll far in this community to find the posts I‘m talking about.
Please consider reporting these posts for the propaganda they are and asking your admins to defederate from threads.net.
To show you why meta is not welcome in the fediverse, here is a quote from the fedipact which is the reason I have defederated threads in my own instance.
THEIR LONG TRACK RECORD OF PURE EVIL
i’m just gonna paste some links here because there’s no point in paraphrasing what others have already said more eloquently
(if you’re wondering why i’m using archive.org it’s to break the fucking paywalls on these articles because fuck that, information wants to be free)
that time they helped facilitate a genocide
that time they helped try to rig an election
that time they did creepy behavioral experimentation on their users
so, yeah. there’s legiterally shitloads of precedent here. not to mention all the privacy concerns. which brings us to the need many feel to protect ourselves from this insidious megacorp…
Against one thing meta-shills often try to ascribe: we dont have a problem with the people on there but it is literally everything else.
Admins and Mods who read this, please consider signing the fedipact on https://fedipact.online
Thank you very much for reading and have a nice day.
Edit: wording, crossed out
Years ago, back before it was totally shitty, someone on reddit posted a gigantic, comprehensive, well-sourced list of all the horrible shit Zuck / Meta have done over the years.
It’s unfortunate that long lists of damning facts can’t seem to move the needle very much. People don’t seem to care unless directly impacted.
I hate seeing Meta dig its tentacles in. Thanks for posting this.
They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.
Mark Zuckerberg
I literally show my wife articles of Meta/Tik Tok data breaches and other shit, and she just shrugs and keeps using it. I have a friend who works in fucking CYBER SECURITY and he still has social media apps on his phone. It’s unreal.
But… you’re on social media right now.
Much like Reddit, user data here is worth little outside of LLM utility. Moreover, most of your data is freely available to anyone with a bit of patience and the ability to spin up an instance. Everything is open here, but what’s open isn’t meticulously indexed information about your hopes and dreams… I hope.
Yeah, no, that’s my exact point. It’s not like data in the “fediverse” is particularly secure, beyond the fact that you can opt out of some parts of it in some applications. And it’s not like it’s not social media doing social media things.
I see a lot of this performative outrage or pride on being on the “open” version of social media, but social media is social media. A lot of its problems are design problems that are replicated in the federated versions, and a lot of the privacy concerns remain on paper or haven’t surfaced just because this version of it is so small by comparison.
I don’t think a lot of people who have made this crusade a key part of their online persona fully understand what the underlying issues are and how they work. “How can cybersecurity experts have a TikTok account” kinda reads like the “we need to ban plastic straws” of Internet dysfunction.
You’re absolutely correct. But let’s just be practical here. Lemmy isn’t the same thing as Facebook or Tik Tok. It’s a completely different beast. I’m also being careful to not post sensitive information about myself, whereas on Facebook it’s literally your name and identity and photos and private conversations.
No he isn’t? Social media is centred on posting about yourself and following people to see what they post. This is a link aggregation site with a comments section. By the definition of “place you can go and post comments on a topic”, then Usenet is social media. Every website with a comment section is social media
The letters section of your newspaper is social media. No, the whole point and problem of social media is that people make it about themselves.
So by your standards Mastodon counts but Lemmy doesn’t? Is Mastodon part of the problem in that read of the situation?
Yes. Microblogging in general. It started bad with “had toast this morning” and “look at my lunch” and somehow we got influencers out of it.
Ah, I didn’t realize that my Lemmy account is tied to my actual name, address, phone number, and all of my irl friends. I also didn’t realize that my Lemmy account has thousands of photos of me for deep fakes, and that the government can at any time request all of that for next to no reason. Thanks for enlightening me!
You’re welcome.
I mean, my accounts in Twitter or Reddit were never tied to those things, either, and I sure see a lot of Mastodon users under their own names.
What I do know and some people don’t fully realize is that public posts here are search engine indexable, as are Masto posts based on their privacy settings, so data being scraped is not conditional on anybody else federating. Although the data that requires federation to access can obviously be accessed just by spinning up an insstance privately at any point.
Don’t get me wrong, the treatment of data and the monetization and social engineering tools in commercial social media aren’t the same as here, but a lot of people assign a level of privacy and secrecy to their fediverse activity that just isn’t there, and the same goes for moderation tools.
Hilariously once they started rolling out Threads opt-ins you could see some Threads users complain that opting in could mean that others can see their posts without their control, or that they don’t have direct moderation access to federated copies of their content. And you know what? They’re not wrong.
Each platform has its own gaps. I prefer the set of gaps in the Fediverse, and I’ll certainly take Bluesky over Threads or Twitter these days. But social media is social media, and there are fundamental issues at the core of the concept and with every implementation of it, including this one.
I get where you’re coming from but is he managing his risk or not?
Does he understand the risk? If yes, good. No? Bad.
Is he ignoring the risk? If yes, bad. No? Good.
Is he weighing the risks against the benefits he receives of using these apps and taking appropriate steps to mitigate those risks? If yes, then good. No? Bad.
Cyber security isn’t “lock everything down at all costs”. Otherwise I would insist you throw your phone in an incinerator along with all your computers, live in a bunker reinforced against nuclear attack with a small army to guard you, never leave it, never talk to anyone… Etc.
It is enabling one to achieve their goals with a tolerable amount of risk. That level of tolerable risk is different for everyone.
I’m going to be honest, I’m kind of of this mindset.
I haven’t yet had a decent argument made to me regarding why I should personally care if TikTok or whatever has like… my age gender and what types of books I read and what apps I have on my phone.
The concern is what other pieces of information are they collecting, and when and who do they share that information with. Does it also collect data on what places you visit, or what kind of potentially controversial information you look up. People are concerned about things like visits to a hospital making its way to their employer and insurance against their will, or a trans person being outed by the ads they are served in front of their family, or maybe that the police will knock down their door because their GPS falsely placed them at the scene of a crime. Or what if they live in an actual fascist regime, and that government comes knocking because they searched for something verboten. Even aside from all that, all this data is inherently your’s, and yet all these companies collecting it are just taking it from you without your explicit knowledge or consent and without you seeing even a dime or what a quick search tells me is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Are things like that happening though? With the insurance?
I mean if the police want to come to my door and shoot me in the head or find a reason to brand me as a felon any day they can basically already do that. That goes for about anyone. It doesn’t really seem to matter if any data brokering company also happens to tag me as maybe being gay or having a 90% chance of supporting Palestine over Israel or similar
I dunno. I just feel like a lot of the argument are contingent on envisioning some imminent future wherein every Western country turns into a completely fascist police state with like concentration camps - but also they can only get their information on local demographics based off of data sold by social media companies? And foreign ones at that? And even in this situation you’re not really doing anything about it but just trying to lie low and hope no one discovers you’re an atheist or whatever until you die of old age?
It kind of reminds me of Pascals Wager. You know that one? Where it goes “ooo you have to believe in god because what if you don’t and the Christian god is real… you go to hell!?”. Like. Yeah, sure. I guess that could happen. But most people will shrug their shoulders at it, not really convinced. It requires a lot of assumptions
To answer your question about the insurance thing, yes. Yes, that is a thing that is happening today. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
If that company that has tagged you as gay sells the data that most often includes location, maybe even your face, to an anti-gay hate group that could end quite badly. It’s the same impluse that drove the red scare and the citizen made lists of " suspected communists" and they were blacklisted from their communities, harrassed or evenharmed or killed.
What exactly do you think the anti gay hate groups are going to do?
Have you literally slept through the bomb threats being called in to children’s hospitals and schools over LGBTQ issues?
Um, Charlottesville?
Regular lynchings from the 1800s?
I don’t really understand the question.
Because they use that information to draw a psychological profile of people, and they use that to subtly push their agenda with content they show.
Allegedly, anyway.
For a more concrete example, though not quite like this, look at Tencent-funded western movies. They’ve all got a Chinese side character who’s always shown in a positive light.
Who is “they” in this context?
Also, how does your “concrete example” pertain to this discussion? That doesn’t have anything to do with data from social media or phones. It’s just a giant media company pushing having having some Chinese people in some movies.
Wasn’t that @[email protected]?
He was here around the API debacle, don’t know if that’s his actual account or whether he’s still active here
Is this list still available somewhere?
Sometimes people have different opinions on tech stuff so I’m hesitant to block people for opinions I disagree with…
But I also saw some posts that you’re talking about OP. You linked one up thread that had come to mind. That user’s post history is super suspect. With people pointing out their shill-like qualities 6 months ago in response to Meta propaganda links.
Exactly. The wording in these article is very sus as well imo. I would actually suggest everyone report them so we can get actual „opinions“ in here and not manipulative double speak.
Little course in marketing speak
It is what we use in sales and marketing (I did this for 20 yrs before i went back in IT). This language is hard to pinpoint if you dont know what to look for. Something is off about it if you take time while reading. Like a soliciter coming to your door but as text.
Its basically actively being biased and just ignoring every counter argument while shaping words to suggest more than they actually say. Its one of the reasons I went back to IT since its soulcrushing if you dont have a real ethical product. And even then it sucks that you have to do it since worse competitors will otherwise win. Thats also why I despise ads. Imo, they should not be allowed to appeal to emotion. If your product does not win on facts, it should not win at all.
I think it is part of a long term strategy.
They saw all the negative feedback that was given when the first announcement came and there were a lot of users saying its not so bad or that we should give them a chance then.
Eventually everything became quiet and things moved on now there is a steady rise of pro Meta comments again and this time it will lead to a less violent reaction because it has already happened once before.
Rinse and repeat until they become the norm.
Thats why I report these posts as the propaganda they are and always try to counter them in the comments. Just doing my part as much as I can. I’m already on my own instance so I cant just be banned for it if someone gets bought by meta (its not the only reason but one of them).
I assume my not noticing any meta shills is due to them being downvoted to hell. If so, excellent work everyone on keeping their propaganda in check!
Provide proof! I call BS. I see why more anti-Meta posts and pushing it on people. Anywhere here can search and you’ll find it. It dominates any conversations about Meta
Nope. I‘m entitled to my opinion without providing proof. But good luck with that attitude.
I’m absolutely for defeterating threads. But if you make a claim and treat it as fact and are trying to convince people of an idea the burden of proof is on you. Otherwise your argument sounds extremely disingenuous and entitled
Listen, I have asked a question and I provided a post of a person who recently picked up pro meta posts in different stages of disguise in the comments.
I‘m just not letting anyone talk to me this way. No need for you to send me to school, I know how this works. But I decide if I want to cooperate with someone. this person was rude and I brushed them off.
If you disagree and dont see an increase of pro meta (or as it now is „ambiguous“) posts, please say so and ask for clarification in a constructive manner and I will happily oblige.
Have a good one.
Can you give examples of what you’re referring to as propaganda? I haven’t seen anything but people bitching about Threads.
https://lemmy.giftedmc.com/post/329846 this for example
The Fediverse will soon have power on the social web to shape its future, but only through and in the interaction with Meta. This is the reality the Fediverse has to start arranging itself with.
First sentence literally.
Meta and the Fediverse are heavily intertwined: both are dependent on one another for their success.
Uncompromising idealists of a non-corporate social web, potentially origin of radicalisation and toxicity.
And so on and so forth. The language is shaping the story in one direction as if nobody has a chance to change something about it.
That’s all fair.
But it’s also heavily down voted and refuted.
Some people are gonna be shills and some are gonna be naive. But I’m not going to be a part of any platform Meta is trying to subvert.
I think this is generally a valid point of view. However, what I don’t like is to frame it as a easy-to-make-point, something that is basically obvious. Because it isn’t, mainly, because of network effects.
Not opening up to Meta means prevent the Fediverse from becoming a global thing. Not opening up to Meta means not to shape the future of the social web.
If you have this opinion, you implicitly say that you want the Fediverse to stay small. However, I think we can all agree that it would be good if the Fediverse became big. And the only possibility to achieve that is through the growth through Meta, which doesn’t mean working together with it, but profiting from it and cutting in its growth (which admittedly, will not be easy as well and, as you pointed out, also comes with its own moral drawbacks, which have to be thought of, too).
Meta is not cool. But it won’t help to hide away in a shelter until the whole thing has blown over. Because it won’t. All that will happen is that the part that opened up to Meta will grow rapidly and the other part will stay small and become less relevant. In this sense, now is the best time to drive change in the social web, until it is again dominated by Meta. Now we still have the choice to join and work against Meta in the social web.
Just because you federate doesn’t necessarily mean that you work together with it. But if you hide away, you leave the whole field of action up to Meta without even trying. Apart from the fact that it’s barely explainable to anyone outside the Fediverse. They will and already do blame us of double-standards: why create an open protocoll if the ecosystem wants to stay small anyways?
I strongly disagree meta’s involvement is necessary for the fediverse to grow and become big. Snowballing is a very real thing and as long as growth continues to happen, that will encourage more growth.
The threat of meta is a huge jump in growth, and communities that then centralize around those users. Once popular communities are established on meta servers, they have control. If they choose to split or defederate those communities on the non-meta side of the fence would be back to square one building from scratch. That is the problem and if we don’t see it for what it is we will be left with nothing.
You don’t defeat meta by calling out shills.
You can’t stop data collection by keeping the fediverse “pure blooded”.
That involves a digital bill of rights. Positive rights legislation.
That won’t come until we introduce competition into our voting system by making third parties viable by switching away from First past the post voting.
We can change how we vote at a state level (for now), so we don’t need to pass something federally. We don’t need to beg for representation, we can just reach our and take it. Alaska and Maine have already done away with first past the post voting, so why not yours?
If you are not convinced this is the way, Republicans are moving to ban alternative voting systems in states they control. Do you really want to use the voting system republicans prefer?
What’s the excuse blue states?
decision by world to federate with threads
…anyone know if I can block threads so I won’t have to abandon the instance or be subjected to Meta poison?
Instance blocking is, I believe, the reason stated that our instance hasn’t signed the pact that OP linked.
That aligns with my values, honesty, because it lets me make the choice for myself.
I find the pact-shaming to be kinda gross. But Meta as a company is truly disgusting, so I at least understand it.
You can block any posts coming from threads.net by going to settings and doing instance blocking but long term it probably is better to just move to a different instance that better aligns with your values.
What is “the people” in context of this post? Like… Meta employees?
No, the users. I get a lot of people claiming we’re just hating the people and cutting them off. Typical facebook logic. Learned helplessness if you will.
So… Facebook users? Dude like… are you alright? A massive percentage of the population uses Facebook in some capacity. It borders on being genuinely insane to ascribe any kind of singular identity to them.
I dont know what you‘re talking about but I dont like your tone.
You asked what „people“ meant. I thought you meant my next to last sentence where I said we dont hate the people on meta‘s social networks but everything else like the mechanics, the policy and the company behind it.
Does it make more sense now?
I think you’ve been thinking about this kind of thing for far too long
Probably 3 days on and off, since the recent wave of pro meta propaganda has started to spike again.
