[Edit 2: I think anyone commenting should identify how much they use Facebook in their comment lol]
On the list of people I describe in the subject, I place myself first. If you’re here to defend yourself by showing me your receipts, congratulations, you win, I just saved us who knows how much time. I’m typing this out in an attempt to describe phenomena, not persuade you of anything in particular, other than, this is a thing I see happening a lot; too much would be my take.
I’m just gonna grab [a] most egregious example, but I would like to talk about this, not as a horrific fail, but as an exemplar; at the moment I believe that most people categorize it as the former.
[edit: there really is no “most” egregious example, and I just thought of a much worse one, and unlike Facebook I am fully guilty of this one: I own and drive a car, a lot, and boy am I ignoring some real world consequences there.]
That example being, Facebook Acted As The Main Propaganda Outlet For A Genocide Of The Rohingya In Myanmar, and therefore, Anyone Who Uses Facebook Is Using A Tool That Has Bloodstains On It And Are Somehow Not Horrified.
To more easily conceptualize this, it’s much the same as me needing a shovel, and having a neighbour that I happen to know murdered someone with their shovel, but has not been arrested for it, and right when I need the shovel, they walk over with their bloodstained shovel and offer to let me use it for my non-murder task. And I just go “Wow how convenient that you happened to be here with that bright-red shovel just now, I think I’ll use this one one of yours with the little spatters of brain on it, instead of walking over to my shed and getting my own shovel out!”
We are talking about murder here, Facebook was used to foment mass murder and in a world that made sense, Zuckerberg would be handed over to the ICC years ago, along with Henry Kissinger and a number of others who instead hang out at the Nobel Peace Prize club where Barack makes a mean Mai Tai.
The problems that people use Facebook to constructively solve is connections to family and close friends, event and interest group organizing, the marketplace, and for the avid user it constitutes a daily journal.
These problems could each be solved using something else that is also just as gratis. It might be a small amount of effort more, but then you maybe don’t ever have to touch the remains of a human life that once existed and now does not, due to this particular device being used to end that life.
But it seems that it’s more convenient, easy, zero effort, to simply ignore the gore.
That’s what I see on the internet. I don’t think anyone has ever accepted a bloodstained shovel and set to digging a ditch with it who didn’t also feel that their life was next if they didn’t, but as long as there’s no visible bloodstains, as long as it’s just a few articles and podcasts from known radical leftists, eh, look at little Jimmy’s recital, isn’t he cute?
Individual choices are constrained. Admonishing people for living in this world that we live in is straight from the Big Carbon playbook.
true but there is more to it, remember consumption and carbon production is just something everyone needs to do to survive in this world.
expecting your friends and family to use a billionaire’s private network as one of the sole ways of communicating is not really the same thing as being stuck buying your food with too much plastic on it.
one of these you really do have control over its not a forced choice its just one people think is.
Social media’s whole thing is the social aspect - if a community and/or its users are entrenched somewhere, they’re not likely to move because a minority has issues with the platform. It’s not unreasonable to want people to move away from Facebook/etc., but it’s not really true to say that’s a choice everyone has, if friends, family, and the communities or activities someone wants to engage with are there; if the options are communicating with loved ones on an ‘unethical’ platform or not communicating with them at all, it’s unreasonable and unfair to expect everyone to choose the latter.
in the past we would drag companies who made such walls in our telecommunications systems to courts and force them to allow open comms, now we have people making excuses for allowing walls.
If you’re implying that the belief that companies should be held accountable for their actions and that communication platforms should be democratized is mutually exclusive from not villainizing people for wanting to communicate with their loved ones, I strongly disagree.
I’m not making excuses for the companies. I’m making excuses for the people at their mercy, who are just trying to survive with the hand they were dealt. People can’t be blamed for following the path of least resistance; the blame lies squarely with the path and those who made it, and fighting the people on that path who would gladly follow another is counterproductive.
i see a lot of this injection in these replies, id suggest re-reading my statements and try and disassociate yourself from the anger of previous convos, no one is calling the users out here beyond saying they dont understand beyond maybe some of OPs statements.
however I do still see a little blame on the users since anytime this topic comes up people come in attacking those discussing it and often being quite rude and frankly overly defensive (common when one suggests to another the wool is over your eyes).
its important to note that those actions that forced those companies to move was initiated by representatives of the people.
at some point everyone made a choice here, they arent necessarily bad people for those choices but ignorance for whatever reason is on the menu. Hard to deny when the networks themselves work so hard to distort views for people. Algos you dont own are not made by friends they are made by those looking to monetize.
this was why we had these cases to begin with, if the incentive of a company providing communications platforms becomes perverted and at a fundamental cross of facilitating those communications its understood to be erosive and dangerous.
in short, communications are a fundamental public utility and should be treated as such.
It seems like we’re having two different conversations; I reread your comments as you suggested and it seems as if you’re responding to someone else. You’re talking about things completely unrelated from what I’m saying, and then implying I’m being unreasonable for being angry over something I’m not even angry about.
communications are a fundamental public utility and should be treated as such.
I agree completely. This was never in question and it feels like you’re implying I think otherwise when you keep reinforcing this point.
expecting your friends and family to use a billionaire’s private network as one of the sole ways of communicating is not really the same thing as being stuck buying your food with too much plastic on it.
one of these you really do have control over its not a forced choice its just one people think is.
at some point everyone made a choice here, they arent necessarily bad people for those choices but ignorance for whatever reason is on the menu.
This is what I take issue with. As a personal example, my grandpa knows how to make phone calls and use facebook; he doesn’t use technology much more than that, and he’s not in a state to learn how to use anything else right now.
So I use Facebook to talk with him. Not because I support Facebook, I just want to talk to my grandpa. I find it offensive when you imply those who use closed and/or ‘unethical’ platforms inherently do it out of ignorance, and that there’s always a choice; my only other choice is to not talk to my dying grandfather, and I won’t feel guilty for not taking that.
To be clear, in terms of big picture I’m with you on everything else you said.
communications are a fundamental public utility and should be treated as such.
That sums up my thoughts nicely.
I don’t feel this discussion has been in good faith; your last comment has some gaslighting (whether intentional or not) that I don’t think has a place in respectful conversation, so I won’t be responding further.
so wait, its better to say these people are knowingly choosing to be on these platforms and requiring others to do so communicate with them as well? im not even sure what you are saying but it does seem we may be at cross purposes
we have come a long way since breaking up the bells, wow
is your instance seeing everything?
im not supporting OPs post, if you look at the thread this is a reply to someone trying to equate these choices people are making to the lack of choice people have in the carbon argument https://lemmy.intai.tech/comment/632241
which to me is a watering down of the carbon argument where people truly have no choice vs having put themselves in a mental box for whatever the reason.
And yet, here you are on Lemmy, rather than on Reddit. Why is that?
The thing about it, though, is that we are all already on a universal network; the internet. We all have email, give or take a few weirdos. We are perfectly capable of reaching our loved ones that way.
It is a question of convenience in this case, not necessity.
In my car example, I can argue - or rather, I used to be able to argue, because I work fully remote now - that I had no choice but to commute, and since I moved to the country with not even a bus service into the city, it was quite arguable on the basis of your comic.
But I left facebook and my friends and family did not change; they had less of me, perhaps, but I had just as much of them.
I believe you responded to the wrong comment, as I didn’t post that comic. Either way-
It isn’t always a matter of convenience over necessity. For a personal example, my grandfather knows how to use Facebook and basically no other communication technology; he isn’t really able to learn new things now, so my options are to use Facebook or to not talk to him. If you’re saying I’m acting unethically unless I do the latter I don’t think much more needs to be said; if not, well, that’s my point.
He can’t operate a telephone?
Time zones and limited schedules are the issue there. Smartphones for texting are difficult for him. But either way, that’s beside the point; what I’m trying to get at is that an inconvenience to you might be more than that to someone else. Learning a new platform might be easy for you, but it’s basically impossible for someone with dementia. Leaving a job that requires you to use unethical tools might be fine if you can get another one easily, but some people can’t. Not talking with friends on unethical social platforms might be fine if you have more social opportunities, but to someone with social issues, finding a group of people that you can be comfortable around isn’t trivial.
The comment I originally responded to was saying it’s unfair to compare oil/plastics industry with social media, because you have a choice with the latter but not the former; while that’s the case more often than not, it’s far from universal, and applying the same standards to someone for whom the opposite is true is unreasonable. You never know how much someone has to sacrifice to do things that might seem easy, and you never know how easy the things that seem hard might be.
I know, everyone in the world who is not on the Fediverse is an evil, lazy scumbag and the absolute best way to get them to switch is to sneer and scold. No matter what communities they have built, what access to information they need, how difficult it is to rebuild that elsewhere, they’re all just terrible people compared to you, polishing your halo in the corner.
This line of argument is bogus and self-defeating. Quit it.
im not suggesting judgement, you are injecting that from a perspective I don’t have.
this is what people do, suggesting its the same as the carbon problem is a bit disingenuous as its entirely mental rather than systemic.
i get there are similarities but they are not the same thing.
i have seen sites with millions fold and other sites grow in its place in extremely short time spans. The idea of the current immutability of the internets services is a fallacy and the tools to communicate are open to all, there are no blocks beyond what is truly easiest and most understood.
It is not surprise that there is an embedded profit in making sure people think its so immutable, wouldn’t want to bleed users from the garden after all.
In this particular story, most users are both unaware and are actually served a version of the internet that is designed to make them want to stay in the gardens.
Stoopid sheeple. They should listen to you, sneering at them.
Lot’s of anger at a straw-person there it seems. I’m suggesting they are unaware at a level that takes an understanding that there is an option and a desire to do so.
Whats interesting is that in the last year I see more angry people like you rather than clueless ones.
this tells me awareness is growing and thats good.
be as angry as you want. ive been pissed since these people starting trying to take away the internet we paid to build.
FFS. There is no point lecturing people from on high. Talk about it, sure. Information is good. But moralising will do nothing useful. Point your fingers at bad systems, not the people who are just trying to live their lives under mostly quite difficult circumstances. Improve the environment in which people are forced to make difficult trade-offs. Don’t bully them for facing difficult trade-offs and not being obsessed about exactly the same things you are. It will not do you, or anyone else, any good. The problems are structural, fight the structures.
Isn’t it difficult to initiate change to big companies without user pushback? What impetus do they have to change when their user base accepts what they are given? Sure, regulators and legislators should do something, but they aren’t going to do it on their own. People need to do their part, and mass exodus is something the media reports on. I’m not asking anyone to abandon these places entirely, especially if their communication with certain people relies on it, but anyone can move away from them to some extent. Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not with doing. Also, in no way am I saying that it is the users sole responsibility to bring down or hold these companies accountable, but it usually takes some grassroots to get something started.
im not sure where you are seeing this, unless you are speaking generally.
if this is directed at me, I would say its this tone I get from people that would inspire me to look down and potentially lecture.
as i am often told, its not what you are saying, its how you are saying it.
I have trouble believing that humans can’t get by without Facebook. Even in the absence of viable replacements, we got along fine for millenia… arguably, we got along with each other better.
I have trouble believing that humans can’t get by without meat, or cars, or carbon fuel, or mass-produced clothes, or supermarkets, or .
It does not matter what you believe, or what you prioritise. Other people have different beliefs and have made different choices. If you want them to think and choose differently, don’t start off by telling them that they’re scum while you polish your imaginary halo.
And for fucks sake don’t fill the Fediverse up with so much narcissistic, whiny crap that everyone who isn’t you fucks off somewhere else.
This is not hard.
You’re going to great lengths to not read certain parts of my OP lol
Read it yourself, but think it through this time.
And having seen your edit of the OP, I quit Facebook something like 15 years ago and only ever had fake name accounts.
I quit Twitter the day Musk took over. I quit Reddit the night before it went dark. I’ve been boycotting Google as much as is possible for well over a decade.
Have I polished my halo enough for you to stop sneering and start growing up?
FFS
That example being, Facebook Acted As The Main Propaganda Outlet For A Genocide Of The Rohingya In Myanmar, and therefore, Anyone Who Uses Facebook Is Using A Tool That Has Bloodstains On It And Are Somehow Not Horrified
I think you’re being naiive if you look around the world and see a bunch of tools without blood stains. Newspapers have caused immense harm, books have caused immense harm, road networks kill thousands and thousands of people every single year, our meat based diets kill millions of animals and we love watching big movie star beef cakes who got big eating those animals. Hell do you have a job, do you work and participate in capitalism? Congratulations you’re participating in a system of artificial scarcity that kills millions a year.
We all use blood stained tools on a literal daily basis, it is not a new or surprising phenomena it is a necessary part of how we survive our day to day lives.
And quite frankly Behind the Bastards is a podcast that knowingly Streisand effects people like Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro when they need to crank out low effort content for Clear Channel Communications, even “radical leftists” as you refer to them aren’t blood free.
The problems that people use Facebook to constructively solve is connections to family and close friends, event and interest group organizing, the marketplace, and for the avid user it constitutes a daily journal.
These problems could each be solved using something else that is also just as gratis. It might be a small amount of effort more, but then you maybe don’t ever have to touch the remains of a human life that once existed and now does not, due to this particular device being used to end that life.
Also, this is flat out wrong. No, you cannot solve each of those problems using something else (except for journaling). Each one of those problems relies on Facebook’s social network and the network effects of everyone using them for them to be valuable (in addition to Facebook’s real name policy that, like it or not, is quite difficult and expensive for most internet services to implement and provides an immense amount of value to something like Marketplace over Kijiji).
To be fair, what you’re asking is for normal people to step outside the media they normally consume and seek other (sometimes untrusted) media to come to these conclusions. Some would say, “If this really happened, why isn’t the media reporting on it?” I know why, you know why, but the regular person out there thinks it must be an extreme view if their preferred media outlets are not reporting on it.
There are a lot of problems in the world. Personally I can focus on a few at a time and I can make changes and try and help these problems. Not everyone has the luxury to make the required changes or put the mental effort into these issues. Even if they did there is still to many issues.
I care about freedom respecting software and reducing the amount of rubbish I create. That’s it, I know there are other problems in the world but I cannot do anything because I’ll be stretched to thin.
Most people don’t care about privacy and a lot of them actually think of ads and targeted ads as a positive thing( I believe this also to be true). The problem is hard because to target ads you need to build a profile on people.
In my opinion the government needs to step in and clearly define what data you can collect and how it must be stored. I would like to see the government say you can store age, gender, race, and location down to the suburb but you cannot store name, exact location, phone number, email and ip address along with the previous information.
I think you’ve got to consider that most people don’t care. People have a limited capacity of things they can care about. That limit generally extends to the well-being of themselves and their immediate family, and a few major external issues they really care about. You yourself call out the car issue, you acknowledge it’s bad, but you continue because it’s outside of your capacity to really care.
There’s also the fact that for many people FB is the only platform that’s used by elderly relatives. You’re not going to get 90 year old Grandma to switch platforms. So if it’s a choice between a poor platform and less contact with extended family, many are going to pick the poor platform. There isn’t another comparable platform, despite some trying.
im often astonished at what people will mentally lock themselves into to save a click.
ux is so important, its almost impossible to understate. it does not just provide a way to access an application, it shapes your neural patterns.
UX is absolutely critical to the success or failure of a platform, yet the people who keep pointing away from the popular place (because its UX is “good enough”) keep pointing to places where the UX is utter shit and wonder why there’s no mass flocking to them.
You’re quite right about the UX being a work in progress here - I am not actually able to tell which comment people are responding to.
The fact that my current inbox is all butthurt comments from you is pretty humorous though. :>
This is just standard (and good) criticism of capitalism. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” as they saying goes.
But there’s the question of whether the mass murder in Myanmar would have happened without Facebook. That’s impossible to know for sure, admittedly, but I still believe it’s possible to think about it meaningfully. Because my answer is mass murder would have probably happened without Facebook.
The core of my argument is that technology merely allows humans to act more effectively and amplifies what we already do. What humanity does is not fundamentally changed by technology in most cases. And Facebook is one of the cases where the previously existing social division was amplified, where bad faith actors could act more effectively. Yes, Facebook had an important role to play by trying to make the platform addictive via algorithms that emotional content could hijack and spread like wildfire. However, while that doesn’t absolve Facebook’s instrumentality to mass murder altogether, it contextualizes it enough for me to treat it as any tool.
In other words, a murder-shovel digs just as effectively as a non-murder-shovel, and I don’t really see an intrinsic problem with using the murder-shovel.
The analogy of the tool fails when it comes to Zuckerberg’s role in directing Facebook to act as it did. A shovel doesn’t have a CEO dedicated to digging as much as possible; Facebook does have a CEO dedicated to making the platform addictive, the mechanism by which social divisions were amplified. I think his responsibility is complex…but he absolutely shares some responsibility for the tragedy.
And so, that’s why I believe your post is a good, moralistic criticism of capitalism: it demonstrates how market relations obfuscate moral responsibility. Facebook mediates and helps satisfy our social needs while allowing us to ignore our role, however small it is, in perpetuating the means by which others can influence others to commit tragedies.
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In 1993 Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) started broadcasting hate speach in Rawanda. They used technology presumably manufactured and sold by multi-national corporations who had no mechanism to prevent abuse of the platform they created. Should we blame the manufacturers of radio broadcast equipment for the Rawandan genocide?
No, but that radio station should definitely be shut down and handed over to the ICC, just like Facebook and Zuck.
By your silly analogy, I would have a problem with all the physical equipment manufacturers that Facebook buys their servers, switches, etc from. It’s not about the equipment, actually, it’s about allowing the operator of that radio station to continue operating the radio station, and not just that, continuing to listen to a station operated by that broadcaster in a different market, because in your market it’s all car ads and vaccine denial instead.
Try again.
Facebook didn’t generate the objectionable content. They created a mechanism for people to communicate with one another, like radio did a century earlier. Asking Facebook to check to make sure people don’t missuse the platform is like asking radio manufacturers make sure equipment doesn’t fall into the hands of evidoers.
What would you have had Facebook do, specifically? What practical steps are you wanting them to have taken? Could those steps be reasonably taken for every country in the world?
To maintain the analogy - what if the radio equipment were somehow designed to provide stronger, more far-reaching frequencies if the DJs were broadcasting hate speech and military commands, but shorter, weaker frequencies when DJs discussed crimes against humanity? Facebook isn’t a truly open platform, it’s algorithms dictate what users see and what goes viral.
I see where you’re going, but I think it’s important to note that the Facebook algorithm wasn’t intentionally boosting hate, it just looks to maximize engagement. The unintended consequence is that hate gets boosted because it gets engagement both from the haters and the hated.
Agreed. I personally struggle with the word “intentionally,” however. Meta was aware of the negative side effects of their content algorithms far before the recent Myanmar violence and did nothing to remedy it. There were internal reports about teen suicide and eating disorders several years prior that they tried to hush up, and of course the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal which revealed the extent to which Facebook was supplying third parties with user info that was directly responsible for increased partisanship in the 2016 & 2020 election cycles, and probably (imo) they share some blame for recent hate crimes in the US accordingly. And now we know they definitively hold blame for increased violence in Myanmar. If they knew the effect their platform had and did nothing about it, that to me seems intentional. Just my 2¢
Facbook use : no account never used it.
This brings up the limits of accountability. The average person cant control what Facebook does and who the promote. But they all contribute to Facebook’s large size and financial success.
Edit as a follow up. Take the atomic bomb. Many people help make it, not just scientists like Oppenheimer, Steel workers that made the out casing for bomb played a part in making nukes. But no one ever holds them accountable, because we shouldn’t. At some point your actions are to remote to be accountable
you should never read about the textile industry
Lol I knows baby, I knows.
In the end we must all rise up or go under, all together is how it ends up either way. I do try to buy my clothes at the thrift, which is easy since I never had the choice to be fashionable; wrong body type, which also meant I have frequently been faced with the choice in life to either buy ugly and ethically compromised [edit: also expensive, really expensive] clothing, or just go naked with my body that everyone finds utterly disgusting, went the reigning social narrative of the era. The world is a real bastard.
That said, anyone who makes sure to like all their grandpa’s Facebook posts, I would ask you to ask yourself this:
Do you think your grandpa cherishes every single one of your Facebook likes as much as a single phone call?
Or do you think your grandpa is there because he was also told that he had to be there now, if he wanted to connect to his family?
You know, yet you don’t hand-loom your own clothing from local materials. Interesting. I guess it’s more convenient, easy, zero effort, to simply ignore the gore.
It is. I wouldn’t even begin to know how to loom some clothes
Manic phase
Oh dear, you have creeped my history and identified that I am neurodivergent, and therefore have identified the pretext to reject my thesis without bothering to really engage with its implications. Well played, you sure got that sucker.
I am afraid you are off base though, I have put bipolar in front of my various practitioners many times, and they tell me that while they do see things that resemble a cycle in the things I say to them, the problem seems to be that neither my manic phases nor my depressed phases (last one was about ten years ago and lasted twenty years or so) were sufficiently destructive to my functioning to be diagnosable.
That said, I am halfway through clearing a ~300m forest path on my property today, and intend to have a fence up a week from now, so who knows, maybe you and I are both correct and the doctors are wrong.
requested info : I don’t use Facebook. I’ve had an account I opened in 2018 due to peer pressure, and I closed it in 2018.
I’m not familiar with that story, so correct me if I’m wrong, but this looks like a classic case of shooting the messenger. Facebook is a communication tool. The fact that horrible people used it to do horrible things doesn’t sound like a problem with the tool, except of course if people from Facebook were aware of it while it was happening (I doubt so, for the simple reason that they would have nothing to gain from that, and much to lose ; but again, correct me if I’m wrong). Genocides have probably been organized using phone and paper mail systems, but nobody would say “stop using phones, it’s bloodstained”. At least, with Facebook, there’s a possibility of moderation that never existed with previous means of communication.
… but fuck Facebook anyway. :P
if people from Facebook were aware of it while it was happening
Narrator: They were, including Zuck.
I’m sorry, I’m not taking your word for it, that’s not how it works. :) Do you have reliable sources on that?
I linked to a podcast at the end of the post, and if you follow the link, one of the first things you see is a list of links to articles and such.
Consider yourself led to water, Mr. Ed.
It’s going to be a difficult life if you avoid every tool that a bad person has ever used. Purified drinking water has been used to hydrate villains who then do terrible things. So you shouldn’t drink purified drinking water. The printing press has been used by evil people to spread evil ideas so you shouldn’t read or write. Ascribing intent to a technology is a very slippery slope. I don’t think it’s a tenable way to live a life.
What you are talking about is not the same as what OP is talking about. Following the analogy, it’s not like you should stop using shovels (or knives, or water) because someone bad used them (hell, Hitler was a dog lover, and I’ll be damned if I stop loving dogs because of that asshole). Rather, it’s that you shouldn’t just use the shovel you know murdered someone because the person murdered didn’t matter to you. Stepping out of the analogy, it’s not about the tool used (though the case could be made for some things) but about the companies who made them and how they used them or knowingly allowed them to be used.
Oh look! A living, breathing wokescold, complete with the public hypocrisy! I don’t know why I’m bothering pointing at it because they’re common like dirt, but here we are.
