Without net neutrality, ISPs could theoretically do things like block Nazi sites like stormfront.
But this is merely one potential outcome of allowing a corporation to dictate what content we are allowed to view. Like any censorship, it can give the appearance of being good, if only "the bad guys"are being censored.
And if better hope the corporations running the ISPs are benevolent.
(Narrator: they weren’t)
Pretty much this…
He says he tries to use Facebook as little as possible, and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.” He later adds, though, that he believes the company “overwhelmingly does good in the world.”
Hmm. I don’t think we can close the pandora’s box of online at this point. The question is, what’s the fix? This guy clearly has no idea.
The fact that FavStarBot still exists is proof we’re all fucked.
Facebook, where literally everything is fine.
If only the Mossand went a little medieval on Zuckerberg’s ass.
Apparently we live in a world where when you see a facebook post calling for murder, the appropriate reaction is to get on twitter and threaten murder.
How did you read that as a threat of murder?
Get your act together. 1st warning.
Or else what? Please tell me what Mossad is threatening to do here.
So, I do not really use Facebook. I have an account for competitions and such but not connected to much besides one or two pages. As I was visiting a page from someone who is only on Facebook I had a look around to see what the current state is.
Seriously? THESE are the top choices for Science and Tech groups an account that follows FFG, one 80s Synthwave page and Facebook fake checker site gets shown? This is worse then I thought.
School and education… yea. May be better? Still underwhelmed. Seriously, if this is some kind of quality indicator or how they steer content this shit ruins everything.
Based on what I’ve seen of Mossad in this context, I kind of assumed that they were threatening cyber attacks on facebook.
I mean, ok? Facebook kinda deserves it, imo. Not for this incident in specific, bot for being shitty in general. See @ImaTarget’s post.
This is a sad but important Tweet stream:
Threadbare seems to embed it all backwards, so you’ll have to click through. :(
That’s sad. Of course back in the day, people would disappear from the world and you never found out why. You never had their real name, and they would just disappear from games, from community boards… from e-mail. You just hope they were okay.
I had one person contact me last month after 4 years, 4 years of vanishing. They were okay, had trouble in college, just… isolated themselves. If I were local, I would not have given up so easily but online… only so much you can do.
I am sorry they learned that way though and now feel guilty about not reaching out.
That is a sad one. I tend to compress those tweetstreams because they are terrible, so I’ll do that for everyone now:
For those of you who work in social media, I need to share the story of my friend who died, and I didn’t know because algorithms.
A friend I’ve known mostly online for 15+ years died this weekend. Our friendship started on an old gaming forum, but continued on Facebook. He was part of a group of friends, and we’ve all stayed connected via Facebook. He didn’t post much, but he liked and commented a lot. I met him once years ago, and just two months ago he told me he’d love to host me and my family down in Portland when we got down there.
I found out from a mutual friend on FB that he’d died, and had been hospitalized. I was shocked. I NEVER saw this in my feed. Ever. So I flipped to his feed, and sure enough, there’d been a post in November about him being in the hospital. I was never shown this post. Now, I’m a meticulous FB feed peruser. I always set it to Most Recent and browse until I see the stuff I saw last time. I keep up. Other friends have confirmed that they too never saw his hospital post.
So now we’re all horrified. We never knew to reach out. And worse, we never commented, because we never saw it. Did he die wondering if we cared? He didn’t know, and we didn’t know. All because FB’s algorithm presumably decided that he didn’t post much, so he didn’t warrant enough attention in our feeds. So now today not only have I lost a friend, a bunch of us are horrified that we never knew, and we don’t know if he KNEW we didn’t know.
In the age of online relationships that social media companies claim to facilitate in a positive way, this feels like unacceptable.
Uh, no offense to this person or her friend, but…
If someone you know dies, and you didn’t know he or she was sick or hospitalized or that he or she even died, then you are not actually friends with that person.
Real friends don’t rely on Facebook’s news feed to find out what’s going on with each other. And if you do, then the relationship you have with that person isn’t really friendship. Facebook calls it that, but you’re really just acquaintances.
Not at all true for today.
And therein lies the rub. People are treating social media like a communication medium—as if it were another type of mail or chat or telephone service in which messages are sent and reliably received—in part because they are encouraged to do so by the design of social media applications. But these systems are not that. They are algorithmically curated and make no promises that every message that may have been intended for you will be delivered to you. That’s a failure of the social media application, not of the social relationship itself.
My brother died unexpectedly a few years ago, and every year on his birthday his Facebook feed is full of all of his friends posting sad messages about how much they miss him. Except for one guy, who just posts “Happy Birthday!” with the exclamation point. I seriously don’t know how to bring it up with him.
I have a few friends on Facebook who passed unexpectedly young. After a while, you lose track of who’s posting rememberances (e.g., we miss you) and who’s posting unaware of their death. And sometimes you can’t tell which kind a specific message is. It is pretty weird.
