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Category: Social media

Technology is designed to make its users to believe in human obsolescence

Technology is designed to make its users to believe in human obsolescence

Jaron Lanier writes: [W]hat we need to talk about is the dominant business model. This model spews out horrible incentives to make people meaner and crazier. Incentives run the world more than laws, regulations, critiques or the ideas of researchers. The current incentives are to “engage” people as much as possible, which means triggering the “lizard brain” and fight-or-flight responses. People have always been a little paranoid, xenophobic, racist, neurotically vain, irritable, selfish and afraid. And yet putting people under…

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How to fix social media

How to fix social media

Nicholas Carr writes: There are several ways to decipher intent in social media communications. Some are straightforward. Certain platforms, like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Clubhouse, operate largely as broadcasting channels, while others, like Messenger, Zoom, and Facetime, are used mainly for personal conversation. Many platforms, Snapchat being a prominent example, offer users different modes of communication, some geared to personal speech, others to public speech. On platforms where personal and public speech are intertwined, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram,…

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Facebook understands the metaverse all too well

Facebook understands the metaverse all too well

Ian Bogost writes: In science fiction, the end of the world is a tidy affair. Climate collapse or an alien invasion drives humanity to flee on cosmic arks, or live inside a simulation. Real-life apocalypse is more ambiguous. It happens slowly, and there’s no way of knowing when the Earth is really doomed. To depart our world, under these conditions, is the same as giving up on it. And yet, some of your wealthiest fellow earthlings would like to do…

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Facebook’s rebrand ‘does not affect how we use or share data,’ says Zuckerberg

Facebook’s rebrand ‘does not affect how we use or share data,’ says Zuckerberg

The Verge reports: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday at his company’s Connect event that its new name will be Meta. “We are a company that builds technology to connect,” Zuckerberg said. “Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology. And together, we can unlock a massively bigger creator economy.” “To reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” he added. He said the name Facebook doesn’t fully encompass everything the company does now,…

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Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons

Facebook tells employees to preserve all communications for legal reasons

The New York Times reports: Facebook has told employees to “preserve internal documents and communications since 2016” that pertain to its businesses because governments and legislative bodies have started inquiries into its operations, according to a company email sent on Tuesday night. The move, known as a “legal hold,” follows intense media, legal and regulatory scrutiny over the social network’s harms. Lawmakers and the public are up in arms after Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee turned whistle-blower, provided thousands…

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Facebook has treated most of the planet with all the care of an invading imperial force

Facebook has treated most of the planet with all the care of an invading imperial force

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes: Facebook, like the internet itself, is supposed to be a global phenomenon. It’s designed, its leaders say, to unite the world, transcend difference, and collapse distance. Its global reach and influence is undeniable. Nothing in human history has connected more than 3 billion human beings. Nothing has had such a profound set of effects in such a short period of time as Facebook has had everywhere—except, more or less, the People’s Republic of China—over the past decade….

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More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it

More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it

Nieman Lab reports: As if there wasn’t enough Facebook news to digest already, another deep dive from The Washington Post this morning revealed that Facebook engineers changed the company’s algorithm to prioritize and elevate posts that elicited emoji reactions — many of which were rolled out in 2017. More specifically, the ranking algorithm treated reactions such as “angry,” “love,” “sad,” and “wow” as five times more valuable than traditional “likes” on the social media platform. The problem with this plan…

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The Facebook Papers: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

The Facebook Papers: ‘History will not judge us kindly’

Adrienne LaFrance writes: Before I tell you what happened at exactly 2:28 p.m. on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the White House—and how it elicited a very specific reaction, some 2,400 miles away, in Menlo Park, California—you need to remember the mayhem of that day, the exuberance of the mob as it gave itself over to violence, and how several things seemed to happen all at once. At 2:10 p.m., a live microphone captured a Senate aide’s panicked warning that…

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Facebook wrestles with the features it used to define social networking

Facebook wrestles with the features it used to define social networking

The New York Times reports: In 2019, Facebook researchers began a new study of one of the social network’s foundational features: the Like button. They examined what people would do if Facebook removed the distinct thumbs-up icon and other emoji reactions from posts on its photo-sharing app Instagram, according to company documents. The buttons had sometimes caused Instagram’s youngest users “stress and anxiety,” the researchers found, especially if posts didn’t get enough Likes from friends. But the researchers discovered that…

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Facebook failed the world

Facebook failed the world

The Atlantic reports: In the fall of 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few weeks, the company took down 129,191 pieces of content, disabled more than 1,000 accounts, tightened its policies, and added new ways to detect this kind…

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Facebook services are used to spread religious hatred in India, internal documents show

Facebook services are used to spread religious hatred in India, internal documents show

The Wall Street Journal reports: Mark Zuckerberg praised India in December as a special and important country for Facebook Inc., saying that millions of people there use its platforms every day to stay in touch with family and friends. Internally, researchers were painting a different picture: Facebook’s products in India were awash with inflammatory content that one report linked to deadly religious riots. Inflammatory content on Facebook spiked 300% above previous levels at times during the months following December 2019,…

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‘Carol’s Journey’: What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users

‘Carol’s Journey’: What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users

NBC News reports: In summer 2019, a new Facebook user named Carol Smith signed up for the platform, describing herself as a politically conservative mother from Wilmington, North Carolina. Smith’s account indicated an interest in politics, parenting and Christianity and followed a few of her favorite brands, including Fox News and then-President Donald Trump. Though Smith had never expressed interest in conspiracy theories, in just two days Facebook was recommending she join groups dedicated to QAnon, a sprawling and baseless…

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New whistleblower claims Facebook allowed hate, illegal activity to go unchecked

New whistleblower claims Facebook allowed hate, illegal activity to go unchecked

The Washington Post reports: A new whistleblower affidavit submitted by a former Facebook employee Friday alleges that the company prizes growth and profits over combating hate speech, misinformation and other threats to the public, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Washington Post. The whistleblower’s allegations, which were declared under penalty of perjury and shared with The Post on the condition of anonymity, echoed many of those made by Frances Haugen, another former Facebook employee whose scathing…

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Trump’s Truth Social media platform plans to go public via SPAC

Trump’s Truth Social media platform plans to go public via SPAC

The Wall Street Journal reports: Former President Donald Trump unveiled a new digital-media venture Wednesday and said it would go public by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company. Also called a blank-check firm, a SPAC is a shell company that lists on a stock exchange with the sole intent of merging with a private firm to take it public. The private company then gets the SPAC’s place in the stock market. SPAC mergers have exploded in popularity in the past…

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How many users does Facebook have? The company struggles to figure it out

How many users does Facebook have? The company struggles to figure it out

The Wall Street Journal reports: Facebook is struggling to detect and deal with users’ creating multiple accounts on its flagship platform, according to internal documents that raise new questions about how the social-media giant measures its audience. An internal Facebook presentation this spring called the phenomenon of single users with multiple accounts “very prevalent” among new accounts. The finding came after an examination of roughly 5,000 recent sign-ups on the service indicated that at least 32% and as many as…

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QAnon is becoming even more antisemitic

QAnon is becoming even more antisemitic

Vice News reports: The organizer of a major QAnon conference in Las Vegas later this week, where at least four sitting GOP lawmakers speak on stage, shared a neo-Nazi film with his 70,000 followers on Sunday evening. John Sabal, who’s known online as QAnon John, is preparing for Thursday’s “For God and Country: Patriot Double Down” conference, but on Sunday night he took time out of his busy schedule to share a post about people who had praised “Europa –…

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