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.
Remember when, at the dawn of the decade, conservative media would whine about “BIG TECH CENSORSHIP!”?
Those were the days. /s
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook[1].
[1]Corporations are the only ‘persons’ it’s acceptable to explicitly deadname.
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
Do we really like people, though?
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
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
Corporate-run social media needs to die.
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.
No shit.
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.
That nerdy guy who wants to be an MMF fighter sure is angry, you can tell by his business.
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
”Oh yeah, uh, they blocked my account. No idea why, just something they do sometimes.”
Your HOA?
Sounds like you add by subtraction twice by deleting Facebook.
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]
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.
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.
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?
