Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts

Sunday, June 11, 2023

Today's Meme



Quick reminder:
If your position is that kids should be beaten because you were beaten and you turned out OK, then I've got news for ya, bubba - you did not turn out OK.


Friday, June 09, 2023

Today's Bad Meme


You finish big, you look up and address the crowd:

Are you not entertained!?!

Monday, March 06, 2023

Today's "Conservative" Thing


I honestly don't understand what "conservatives" find so terribly wrong about that kinda thing - unless it's all part of some weird self-hatred syndrome, which makes it a projection of their own inner demons (?)

Is that why it seems so important for them to impose limits on people? Are they saying they can't possibly control their own potentially vile behavior, so they need to build a societal mechanism that imposes limits - by proxy - on themselves?

In the immortal words of Stan Marsh:

Wednesday, October 06, 2021

This New Way Is Nothing New

I'll start with this: "I really don't know what we should do about any of this."

I know we have to do something. I know we have to get better, as individuals, at sorting through the information landslide that hits us every fucking day in order to reject the bullshit which comprises the majority of it, and take whatever tiny nuggets of truth we can find, compare notes and see if we can make a little progress here and there.

But we've been making it a Buyer Beware proposition. And we're seeing what a fucked up world we get when we just throw it all up in the air and let nature take its course.

BTW - have you seen "nature" lately?


Without something human - something like honor and conscience and a solid grasp of the greater good in the context of an ethical framework, nature is a horrifying thing. It's fucking brutal. We all become nothing more than predators and prey, without regard for anything but our own immediate gratification.

And so we devolve - we revert to the crap we had to put up with on the playground in elementary school, where the tough guys ruled and anybody who crossed them took a beating.

We have to learn all over again to get out of the mindset in which we allow ourselves to be manipulated at a visceral level, which is what tough guys like Trump and Putin and Mussolini and Franco and Idi Amin and a thousand others have done forever.


Then along come these recent revelations about how Facebook has been used for the kind of brainwashing and radicalization that everybody and his fuckin' uncle have always known was happening, but that The Lizard King (aka Mark Zuckerberg) swears he either knew nothing about or that he was steadfastly standing up for the free speech rights of his user community blah blah blah.

Frances Haugen on 60 Minutes:


"It feels like a betrayal of democracy"

When we refuse to get together to acknowledge a premise based in verifiable fact, then we've made it all but impossible to do the work necessary to give us any chance to arrive at a conclusion that's true, which in turn makes a functioning democracy all but impossible.

My contention at this point is that The Lizard King has decided he's immune from the negative consequences of his complicity if the republic is toppled. I think he believes he'll be one of the plutocrats who gets to run the show - cuz that's pretty much what he's doing now - so he's convinced he wins no matter what else happens to the rest of us.

That's where our Clear-Eyed Pragmatic Both-Sides-Balanced-On-The-Knife's-Edge Capitalism has brought us.

And here's the big fat juicy rationalization they're using:

"Every day our teams have to balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content. To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true."

Sunday, June 27, 2021

A Very Fine Line

This is actually a really tough row to hoe.

I have no love or sympathy or any regard in any sense for Facebook, except that they should be more or less free to do their thing as long it doesn't directly harm anyone, or facilitate harm to anyone.

And that, I think, is at the heart of this:

KIRO-TV7 (Seattle)

Texas court: Facebook can be held liable for sex trafficking predators

The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that Facebook is not a “lawless no-man’s land” and can be held liable for the conduct of people who use the platform to recruit and prey on children.

The justices ruled that trafficking victims can move ahead with lawsuits because Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code, which was passed in 2009, the Houston Chronicle reported.

The ruling stems from three civil actions from Houston involving teenage trafficking victims who met the predators through Facebook’s messaging functions, according to the Chronicle. The plaintiffs sued the California-based social media giant for negligence and product liability, arguing that Facebook failed to warn about or try to prevent sex trafficking from occurring on its platforms, the newspaper reported.

The lawsuits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims.

Facebook’s attorneys argued the company is shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not the same as a publisher conveying the same message.

A Facebook spokesperson said in a statement that the company is considering what steps to take next.

“Sex trafficking is abhorrent and not allowed on Facebook,” the spokesperson said. “We will continue our fight against the spread of this content and the predators who engage in it.”

The justices, in their majority opinion, wrote that “We do not understand Section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking.

“Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it,” the opinion said. “Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking.”

The lawsuits were brought by three Houston women who alleged they were recruited as teens via Facebook apps and were trafficked as a result of those connections, providing predators with “a point of first contact between sex traffickers and these children,” the Chronicle reported.

According to the Human Trafficking Institute, the majority of online recruitment in active sex trafficking cases in the U.S. in 2020 occurred on Facebook. The organization made the assertions in its 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report.

“The internet has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims, and they often recruit them on a number of very common social networking websites,” Human Trafficking Institute CEO Victor Boutros told CBS News earlier this month. “Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers to recruit victims in active sex trafficking cases.”

One plaintiff said she was 15 in 2012 when she communicated with the friend of a mutual friend on Facebook, the Chronicle reported. She alleged that after the man offered her a modeling job, he posted photos of her on Backpage, an online platform that was shut down in 2018 because it promoted human trafficking. The woman claimed she was “raped, beaten, and forced into further sex trafficking,” the newspaper reported.

The second plaintiff said she was 14 in 2017 when she was contacted on Instagram, another Facebook property. The woman alleged that the man lured her with “false promises of love and a better future,” and then used Instagram to advertise her as a prostitute and set up “dates,” according to the Chronicle. The woman claimed she was raped numerous times and alleged that when her mother reported what had happened to Facebook, the company “never responded.”

The third plaintiff said she was 14 in 2016 when a man she did not know sent her a friend request on Instagram, the Chronicle reported. They exchanged messages for two years, and in March 2018 the man allegedly asked her to leave home and meet her, the newspaper reported. The man allegedly photographed the teen in a motel room and posted the images on Backpage, according to court records.

Facebook’s attorneys argued that Congress used “very broad terms” to preserve free speech, guard against censorship via threat of litigation and avoid inconsistent liability standards.

“When Congress decided to amend Section 230 to combat the scourge of online sex trafficking, it did so with a scalpel, not a hammer -- carefully enumerating precisely the types of claims that would be exempt from Section 230,” Facebook’s attorneys argued in a September 2020 brief to the court. “The balance Congress struck is embodied in the language it used. Congress is free to alter that balance by amending that language. But this Court doesn’t sit as a super legislature to rewrite the statute under the guise of divining legislative ‘purpose.’

“But regardless of what plaintiffs contend Facebook should have done about that third-party content -- prevent it, block it, remove it, edit it, flag it, or warn about it -- the purported duty to take action that undergirds plaintiffs’ claims derives from (Facebook’s) role as a publisher, which is why these claims are prohibited by Section 230.”

My hang up is that I want Facebook kicked in the nuts really really really hard, but I don't want the Q-birds to take this as any kind of vindication that their stoopid fantasies have some tiny scintilla of rational justification.

Can't wait to hear more on that shit.

Saturday, August 29, 2020

The Intertoobz


Like everything else in the world, some people are intent on turning the whole thing into one enormous cesspool - which, unfortunately, means there's money to be made on helping the bad actors float their shit.

WaPo:

Zuckerberg acknowledges Facebook erred by not removing a post that urged armed action in Kenosha

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a video post Friday that the company erred by not taking down an event listing for a militia group that encouraged armed civilians to defend the streets of Kenosha, Wis., from civil unrest before the fatal shooting of two people this week.

Facebook removed the page for the “Kenosha Guard” and an event listing for “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property” after the shootings Tuesday night in which Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, allegedly killed two men and seriously wounded a third.

Looking somber in a blue T-shirt and speaking in a slow, halting manner, Zuckerberg said the page and event listing violated Facebook’s policies and should have been removed after the company received numerous complaints about their violent nature. He called the error “largely an operational mistake.”

“The contractors, the reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to, didn’t, basically, didn’t pick this up,” Zuckerberg said. “And on second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

Zuckerberg didn’t say if the contractors had been disciplined for not removing the page and event listing or if Facebook would undertake additional training or consider changes to policies as a result of the event. He did not make an apology to the victims of the violence or their families in the video post.

Zuckerberg said there was no evidence that Rittenhouse followed the Kenosha Guard page or that he had been invited to the event page calling for an armed response to protests in the city.


There's his main defense - basically, "We just didn't know." And yes, I get it, with more than a billion user accounts, how do you police it all?


That's one of the big problems now though. Marketplace Consolidation has given rise to the SuperMegaGiant Company, and the Radical Libertarian business model makes for an atmosphere that encourages corporations to be a little lazy in holding up their end of the social contract.

But here's the thing: Corporations are considered people (according to SCOTUS). They have to be held to account when they fail in their obligations to a civil society. 

If they can't or won't take real steps to put effective self-governing mechanisms in place for themselves, then they deserve the same fate as any other "person" under the law.

It's not unreasonable to expect Facebook to be investigated for possible indictment for Criminal Negligence, Reckless Endangerment and Accessory To Homicide.

At the very least, the families of Rittenhouse's victims are entitled to recompense for Wrongful Death and Malicious Wounding, etc.

"...with liberty and justice (ie: accountability) for all."

Saturday, November 23, 2019

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Progress

Maybe - we'll see if anybody picks it up and/or follows it up.


endgadget:

Early this month, Facebook announced it will change how political ads appear on the company's platforms. Anyone advertising about elections or issues would need their identity 'verified' before the messages go online, and the messages themselves would be labeled 'Political Ad' with disclosure of who paid for it. Ideally, this could make advertisements on Facebook much more transparent, though we'll start finding out as the platform began requiring US-based advertisers to get verified today. In the coming months, this will spread to ad buyers across the world.


Starting today, anyone based in the US running an electoral or issue ad will have to run through the authorization process to provide a government-issued ID and mailing address. Then Facebook confirms identity by mailing a letter with a unique access code that only the advertiser's Page admin account can use, like an old-school version of email verification. And then, of course, they'll have to disclose who paid for the ads before Facebook will put them up.

While the changes went into effect, Facebook posted a Q&A about what advertisers know about you. While the company maintains that they don't know as much about us as we feared, by default, advertisers are still targeting users based on their interests and browsing habits. At least after these changes, we know a bit more about them.


Thursday, April 12, 2018

Today's Tweet



Why I'll be closing out (or at least moth-balling) my Facebook account pretty soon:



Once Zuckerberg decided against a subscription fee, his investors (who had already poured billions into the venture) had to be assured of some kind of revenue stream, and then we were off to the races.

Friday, October 20, 2017

Today's Internet Thing


Overheard on FB

Adults:
Record numbers of our teenaged kids are suffering from depression of one kind or another - we must find out why.

Kids:
School is like really stressful, our parents fucked up the economy, put the earth on a path to become unfit for human habitation, and now we have to deal with actual Nazis.

Adults:
It's the iPhones, isn't it?

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

These Kids Today

A little Facebook nonsense:


The tendency is to do a little bragging about the shit you pulled as a kid, because (I guess) it satisfies a fantasy that you were (and still are, maybe?) some kinda badass or whatever.

The main point of interest for me is that most of the people doing most of the bragging are the ones who spend lots of time on Facebook complaining about how fucked up everything is - blaming bad parenting and single moms, etc, for a general permissiveness they believe is at the root of all the rotten things all these rotten kids are doing.

And yes, I'm pointing out something that's ridiculously obvious - I ain't no genius, y'know.

So why is this not just as obvious to everybody else, particularly to the people playing these silly games on Facebook?

It is a wonderment.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

How We Got Here

A shortish interview with Paul Horner, Facebook Fake News Impressario, by Caitlin Dewey at WaPo
WaPo: You’ve been writing fake news for a while now — you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?
Horner: Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.
 I was wrong when I said this is the Era Of Post-Trust.  Actually, I was wrong not to include the part that says this is the Era Of Poe's Law.


"...without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers as sincere expressions of the parodied views."

Mr Horner again:
My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.
You know this shit ain't normal - push back against it.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

The Truth About Post-Truth

MTV Politics


FACEBOOK’S FAKE-NEWS PROBLEM AND THE RISE OF THE POSTMODERN RIGHT
Is anyone surprised that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't feel responsible? One of the luxuries of power in Silicon Valley is the luxury to deny that your power exists. It wasn't you, it was the algorithm. Facebook may have swallowed traditional media (on purpose), massively destabilized journalism (by accident), and facilitated the spread of misinformation on a colossal scale in the run-up to an election that was won by Donald Trump (ha! whoops). But that wasn't Facebook's fault! It was the user base, or else it was the platform, or else it was the nature of sharing in our increasingly connected world. It was whatever impersonal phrase will absolve Zuckerberg's bland, drowsy appetite from blame for unsettling the things it consumes. In this way, the god-emperors of our smartphones form an instructive contrast with our president-elect: They are anti-charismatic. Unlike Trump, the agents of disruption would rather not be seen as disruptors. In the sharing economy, nothing gets distributed like guilt.
The argument that Facebook has no editorial responsibility for the content it shows its users is fatuous, because it rests on a definition of "editorial" that confuses an intention with a behavior. Editing isn't a motive. It is something you do, not something you mean. If I publish a list of five articles, the order in which I arrange them is an editorial choice, whether I think of it that way or not. Facebook's algorithm, which promotes some links over others and controls which links appear to which users, likewise reflects a series of editorial choices, and it is itself a bad choice, because it turns over the architecture of American information to a system that is infinitely scammable. I have my own issues with the New York Times, but when your all-powerful social network accidentally replaces newspapers with a cartel of Macedonian teens generating fake pro-Trump stories for money, then friend, you have made a mistake. It is time to consider pivoting toward a new vertical in the contrition space.
 

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Today's Facebook Looney


You're afraid of that world?

Isn't 'participation' kind of an important concept in a little thing we like to call 'democratic self-government'?

And not to get too Capt Obvious on y'all, but ain't nobody don't know about the Law Of Unintended Consequences - the first lesson (sometimes the only lesson) a spanking teaches a kid is that violence is an appropriate reaction when you're mad or disappointed or frustrated or whatever.

So, you're telling me you're afraid of what happens when we teach kids to participate in the world they live in, and you're afraid they won't react violently when people don't behave the way they want them to behave. Is that about it? Is that really it?

Dontcha hafta wonder why it seems like somebody may be setting you up for something?

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Today's Facebook Looney


Whenever this crap shows up, I always try to post a comment that includes the question - what do you intend to do about the kids of the people you catch in your little dragnet? 

I have yet to hear from any of them.

But here's a message (to the pinch-faced prigs who think drug-testing is anything more than a way to make somebody's well-connected brother-in-law rich), from the guys who thought the 4th amendment to the US Constitution was of some importance to a free society: 
Go fuck yourselves.

Update BTW - how come we never hear from the Ammosexuals on this one? Something like - "I'm gonna avail myself of my 2nd amendment rights in order to secure my 4th amendment rights."

Can you say "Cherry-Picking"? I knew you could.

Sunday, September 27, 2015

I Blame Paris Hilton




It's a critter for fuck's sake - one of God's critters if you prefer.  And not to get too PETA all over the place, but you don't get to make this implied tacit claim of "dominion" to provide cover for doing whatever the fuck you want.