On January 7, 2025, Meta announced sweeping changes to its content moderation policies, including the end of third-party fact-checking in the U.S., and rollbacks to its hate speech policy globally that remove protections for women, people of color, trans people, and more. In the absence of data from Meta, we decided to go straight to users to assess if and how harmful content is manifesting on Meta platforms in the wake of January rollbacks.
Meta is the enemy of all of mankind
Social Media in general is our most self-destructive invention yet
Delete. It.
My #$%^ HOA only socializes through FB groups. Been trying to drum up interest in a defederated Frendica or something, but can’t get any traction :( I’ve unliked all the stuff and unfollowed everything else, but I can’t GTFO of it any further without being unable to deal with my neighbors civilly
Abandon civility, throw tomahawk instead. Your reputation will precede you. Their fear of you will bring about civility. You got this.
“Honey, We got a letter from the HOA, they’ve revoked our pool privileges, you wouldn’t know anything about that you’d you?”
[insert Krumbobulous Michael here I go killing again meme]
Your HOA?
Sounds like you add by subtraction twice by deleting Facebook.
”Oh yeah, uh, they blocked my account. No idea why, just something they do sometimes.”
any of the popular social media is now heavily infested with propaganda bots or fake promoted slop.
niche forum and sparse space like lemmy are the only thing left to have any decent interactions. even lemmy.world was heavily brigaded during election.
To me, this is like saying, “4chan has turned into a cesspool!” Yeah: It was like that from the start. YOU were the ones that assumed it was ever safe!
You’re posting stuff on the public Internet to a website for adults where literally anyone can sign up and comment FFS.
If you want good moderation you need community moderation from people in that community. Not some giant/evil megacorp!
There’s all sorts of tools and platforms that do this properly, easily, and for free. If you don’t like Meta’s websites move off of them already!
People in the community with special power and anonymity. No. That doesn’t work either.
FB at least did a mediocre job at curbing hate speech. Then the progressive backlash against genAI broke the techbros so much they went full fash, since 2023.
Leave that website.
There is no fixing it.
Happy cake day 🍑
🤝
This headline is garbage. You could put just about any Fortune 500 company’s name in there and the headline would still be accurate.
the url too. meta was never safe, and was never intended to be safe. the only way to make it safe is to shut it down.
why should anyone want it to be safe?
I do wonder, are seeing more hate, more fear and less freedom because there is more hate, more fear and less freedom, or are we seeing these things because they are now no longer deleted, and there is the same amount of it?
Either way there is no fix for facebook and other facebook owned platforms. Get rid of this shit.
Honestly, probably both. The fact that stuff isn’t being deleted anymore and that they make carve-outs in the rules for hate against specific minorities would embolden people to post more hateful content.
The headline confuses me. Has Facebook ever done something else?
Historically ('10s era) they were very focused on being “family friendly” and censoring anything they considered violent, sexual, perverse, deliberately deceptive, or otherwise upsetting to your middle-aged middle-income housewife/grandma.
Post-COVID, Zuckerberg’s been increasingly blackpilled, with an eye towards shock-jock engagement bait over any kind of civil moderation, fact-checking of misinformation, or discouragement of fraud/scam posts. So a site plenty of users have historically complained about feeling cloistered and sterile in the Disney-fied sense is now a total madhouse of AI slop, bum-fights clips, drop-shipper spam, and bargain basement rumor-mongering.
We’ve gone from a space that’s Mormon-style conservative to Fight Club-coded conservative.
Ok, but there had been plenty of criticism before that, specifically how readily the algorithm funnels the user into alt-right echo chambers.
And now it’s much worse.
That was more YouTube than Facebook.
The accusations are leveled at all social media.
Different applications employ different strategies for sifting content.
Facebook (and Google) pivoting to pure engagement bait was a more recent development, closer to 2018+, and synced up with their AI obsessions.
Social Media needs to die
Said that on Social Media
Corporate-run social media needs to die.
Idk I’ve never considered forums where you talk to strangers to be social media. If I don’t know anyone it’s not “social” to me, it’s one step away from talking to myself to be on a site like Lemmy or Reddit
The internet was made for FTPs. That’s it. If you aren’t transferring files, you are using the internet wrong.
No newsgroups? No IRC?
No text. ASCII was a mistake. HTML is heresy.
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook[1].
[1]Corporations are the only ‘persons’ it’s acceptable to explicitly deadname.
Remember when, at the dawn of the decade, conservative media would whine about “BIG TECH CENSORSHIP!”?
Those were the days. /s
Facebook: makes a system where the only way to get engagement is to hatepost.
People on facebook: hateposts
People: “How could this happen?”
How about… stop using META?
I think most of us, here, have. It really is mostly old folks and idiots left now.
Someone mentioned here, their hoa uses fb as their digital square, and my park union does too. I just don’t get to get involved with the park union, Facebook unfortunately, has become ingrained in many community oriented organizations. I hate it. I refuse to go back there.
I don’t understand why people are ao eager to give their money and privacy to billionaires.
Instagram is also Meta. Do the young 'uns still use that?
The CEO is a genocidal zio. USA is a hate group. What else do people expect?
The ones who have hate in their hearts can now shows us all their true colors.
That’s a good thing in my eyes. Let them show us exactly who they are.
There’s no speech police in the real world, you don’t need it online either.
That is the most simplistic, uneducated opinion on the subject that is possible to make. You should be ashamed.
If that’s the case, it should be easy enough for you to come up with an actual argument against it.
There are speech police in the real world. Workplaces don’t allow you to use slurs or to harass your co-workers. That’s just one example. In fact, any social group that I can think of will punish you for saying something. Some are more lenient than others, but every one has a line that you cannot cross.
True which is why I think an upvote/downvote system is the best form of moderation. Of course there are things you cannot allow, but it’s mostly the illegal stuff. I’m for low moderation, not no moderation. Facebook et al were not doing low moderation, it was heavy handed and unnecessary.
There are speech police in the real world. Workplaces don’t allow you to use slurs or to harass your co-workers.
That “speech police” traces to the government in the form of labor laws & regulations in the remit of the EEOC, eg, Title 7 of Civil Rights Act, Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Americans with Disabilities Act. Employers didn’t conceive of such workplaces policies on their own to invite lawsuits & put targets on their backs.
These laws do not apply to social media as a communication platform. Offensive expression doesn’t deny equal access/opportunities to platform resources they are under any legal obligation to provide. Should we put much confidence in social media companies voluntarily assuming unnecessary obligations just because?
It never made sense.
Nah, and cool opinion.
As someone else wrote, why should anyone put much confidence in “some giant/evil megacorp”? They’re not a philanthropic organization & they’re not real authorities. We can expect them to act in their own interest.
If content is truly illegal or harmful, then the real authorities should handle it. Simply taking down that content doesn’t help real authorities or address credible threats. If it’s not illegal or harmful, then we can block or ignore.
People already curate their information offline. It seems reasonable to expect the same online.
