Once again, social media giants Facebook and TikTok have been caught red-handed.
More than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders have laid bare how the companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users’ attention.
An engineer at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, described how he had been told by senior management to allow more “borderline” harmful content – which includes misogyny and conspiracy theories – in user’s feeds to compete with TikTok.
“They sort of told us that it’s because the stock price is down,” the engineer said.
↫ Marianna Spring and Mike Radford at the BBC
Meta, TikTok, and Twitter are criminal enterprises, and their executives should be trembling in court instead of scheming on yachts. Their role in legitimising far-right extremism will eventually catch up to them, and once that happens, no yacht is going to keep them safe.
If Meta and TikTok were people, I would shoot them from afar! Disgusting corpos. Oh, and Zuck could also use something…
Really feels like the horse has already bolted on this one. They’re too big for fines to matter. What can Joe Public actually do apart from not using the services they provide?
And, in today’s news Technofascist gonna Technofascist.
I have to admit, I’m a bit stuck with knowing what to do. We can not use those tools, and I guess the others out there are pretty great, but most of the people we know, general friends and family members, are never going to move to fediverse stuff.
They kinda have most people by the short and curlies…
I don’t agree with the argument that we are stuck. People are just very truly incredibly addicted to comfort. And addicted to the platforms.
I once had a discussion with a friend and his friend and their whole argument went around “well, there’s no problem in scrolling Instagram 4 hours a day if makes me happy. If it would be bad for me, I’d not feel happy when I use it, right?” It was shocking. A 5-year old kid can argue more solidly than that. And trying to argue that “you are making an awful person even richer” also does not fly. The answer sounds like “I am too addicted to bother”, or “It wouldn’t make difference if I left”, or “It’s too late for us anyway”.
The week before Meta integrated data collection between WhatsApp and the rest of their “offerings”, I told my friends I was out. Firstly, to Telegram, then to Signal. I held the ground and my friends created accounts and talk to me there. The ones that don’t, send me SMS and then I call them back. E-mail still works and you get instantly notified. Worse case, people text me to call them back and I do.
My home country is pathologically addicted to WhatsApp. You get everything done there, including highly sensitive doctor’s papers. Instead of booking an appointment via WhatsApp, I call them. They usually get very annoyed and think I am from Mars when I say I have no WhatsApp, but I get my appointment anyway. We are just lazy. People have successfully booked doctor appointments via phone calls for 50+years. And sometimes WhatsApp is worse. What you could solve in 30 seconds becomes an hour of messages back and forth.
There’s no need to plaster your life over Instagram or the constantly instantly available via text or to be reachable for the flood of memes. Even sometimes now people send me memes and I am usually annoyed. It’s not even funny anymore. I’ve seen variations of the same jokes 500 times already.
Ugh.
/rant
The BBC article sounds like it’s about dangerous content like calls to violence or terrorism.
The author’s comment however makes it sound like he just wants more Soviet-style censorship of political opinions he disagrees with, like it was at its peak in the early 2020s.
If certain reports are to be believed, Meta has invested as much as $2bn in lobbying for the OS-level verification regulation across various countries.
As yourself why this is so important to them and why they would spend so much.
I think it is because they are trying to shift the blame and responsibility fro themselves on to someone else. “yeah we showed these disgusting images but they logged into the computer and the computer told us they were an adult… So all fair!”
You reminded me of an interview with an ex Big Water exec who claimed that’s what they did back in the day with plastic bottles: they made them recyclable to shift the blame on their consumers.
(Sorry for being so vague, I really don’t remember the details right now).
But I agree with you, and I worry this whole mandatory os-level age verification will end up doing more harm than good to children, as everyone (from advertisers to predators) will be able to see their age brackets and act accordingly.