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.
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 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.
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.
And now it’s much worse.
I’m not convinced that much of it is real. Many accounts have to be fake. Surely people can’t be as stupid as they appear. I think it’s AI’s funded or designed to be so stupidly biased.
This kind of thinking is how we end up with extremist politicians like trump. YES PEOPLE ARE THIS STUPID. LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE ARE THIS STUPID. Stop trying to ignore reality.
Yes and no.
Yes people are this stupid. But also bot networks. But also alt accounts. And many of those stupid people let the algorithm to pick them their political views, which is manipulated by both the bot activity and the platform holders.
A bit of both I think.
As a Facebook group administrator I get to see a fair bit of definite fake stuff. Any time someone posts anything with the word stolen for example, a number of fake accounts will attempt to post with names of people who ‘can help get your things back’.
They recently got a bit more advanced and will sometimes use 'I’m new here" type posts or similar tricks to try to trick the admin into letting them into the group. It’s a public group, hence a juicy target. There’s several tricks an AI can use.
That said, we have a fair share of legit nutters, rednecks, NIMBYs, homophobes etc as well - I just suspect some of the EV and renewable energy hatred for example, on Facebook is manufactured.
Unfortunately people are that dumb if not dumber, but also yes there are tons of chatbots that are sowing anger and division usually in favor of conservatives. Weird how Elon was talking about how many bots are on Twitter and has completely stopped talking about it.
Delete. It.
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.
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
Your HOA?
Sounds like you add by subtraction twice by deleting Facebook.
deleted by creator
“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]
”Oh yeah, uh, they blocked my account. No idea why, just something they do sometimes.”
Meta is the enemy of all of mankind
Social Media in general is our most self-destructive invention yet
Working as intended then?
surprised pikachu face
Leave that website.
There is no fixing it.
Happy cake day 🍑
🤝
Tbf, having a central authority dictate the truth to you ain’t so great.
Neither is having classes of people who you aren’t allowed to offend.
Tbf, having a central authority dictate the truth to you ain’t so great.
I don’t think the phrase “third-party fact checkers” (plural) implies a central authority.
Neither is having classes of people who you aren’t allowed to offend.
Facebook can’t stop you from offending people. What they can do is make it slightly more difficult by disallowing slurs, etc.
I look forward to the day when the people wake up and drag the oppressors into the streets.
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook[1].
[1]Corporations are the only ‘persons’ it’s acceptable to explicitly deadname.
No shit.
This is why I’ve switched back to the old internet. Chat like irc/matrix for social interaction. RSS for information. And webrings for browsing the personal garden websites that used to constitute the internet before social media took over. It’s been great.
The good internet magazine has been writing about this and is my inspiration
As well as the internet history podcast.
That’s hilarious. 👍
That nerdy guy who wants to be an MMF fighter sure is angry, you can tell by his business.
Best thing I’ve done: delete Facebook/Meta. It was very difficult because you kept coming back… Think I “deleted” 20 times and still crawled back to login. Yeh…
So I came up with a plan to purposely delete and lock myself out of it.
This was like 5 yrs ago, I didnt have much uploaded photos so the process was easy. First, I changed the email on Facebook/Meta to a temporary one. Then I went further to use some random password create a new password.
Then I deleted the account with that temporary email and random password and closed the browser. Finally, I nuked my entire OS and reinstall a new one, just in case if the cache contains data about the email and password.
I found I wasn’t getting anything out of it so I just stopped using it, after three months I just deleted it. Facebook legit sucks, like it’s nothing but ads and garbage so it felt super easy to get rid of for me. I also figured if there’s pictures there they’re also already on my phone and if they’re not it’s not like I know which ones to miss them, like it if I don’t know it exists anymore I can’t actually miss not having it so I just straight up chucked the whole thing in the trash. I’ve had zero interest in going back. I think years ago it would have been harder but now? There’s literally nothing of value to bring me back