Damnit, I spoke too soon. The explore bar is back to normal with the stupid tic tok type videos on the top right.
After the whole Trump debacle, facebook tightened it’s rules on insults. So, if anyone insults you, you can get them warned or banned now. Some bitch went back to a post I made in December, 2020 and called me “crazy”. Hit the report button. Her post got deleted. Since it was 2020, I hope I didn’t make any reportable posts for her to revenge report. It might have been before the new rules or before I knew about the new rules. Now I’m careful.
TFW you see your friend count go down by one, and you’re fairly certain you know who it was cause they pissed you off repeatedly and about 2 months ago you finally let all the anger about it out, and you’re right, but why wait 2 months to unfriend a person?
for perspective, he unfriended my alt almost immediately, but waited on my real name until yesterday. so “just got around to it” wasn’t the reason for waiting.
I don’t have any friends on facebook, so I don’t see any posts or comments. Once in a while I’ll jump on marketplace to see if anyone’s selling rototillers or the like. Here’s what they came up with as people who could be my friends. I don’t think any of these folks are even on the same continent as me, like they can’t even judge based on location and name or something?
I didn’t post the last group of two, because one actually looked somewhat local. I had a look at their profile, never heard of them, they’re not even in the same province. The only connection, someone I went to high school with is listed as their friend. How they make that connection amongst all these others is beyond me. And they didn’t suggest my high school peer, they suggested a facebook friend of theres.
NOT ENOUGH DATA TO COMPUTE!.
I think a couple of those people tried to friend me, too.
Small world.
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Mohammed Asim has a real George Constanza vibe, I think you should add that guy.
If you’re looking for friends, I got an email this weekend from a Russian woman asking me to, and I quote, “bang me until you exhaust.” I can forward that to you, just lmk.
I distinctly remember posting that “Marine looks nice” to exactly that picture.
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I haven’t gotten any invites from ex-military silver foxes lately (with stethoscopes casually draped over their shoulders)
alas, poor fake profiles of yore.
Ex-military silver fox widowers with stethoscopes casually draped over their shoulders.
They’re always single / widowers.
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I never got their angle. Ya, I also get these friend requests from fake profiles like that (silverfox widowers), but why? What do they want from my profile? I figure it is some sort of scam, but not sure what it is.
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It’s not like I’ve got anything secret up on facebook. I’m not that stupid.
I think they’re trying to see if they can get any information out of you to try and guess your passwords / security questions to log into your accounts.
Maybe some are getting a twisted thrill out of cat-fishing middle aged women, but I assume most are after our banking info.
At some point we’ll get careless and mention the make of our first car, they’ll figure out who our mother’s profile is (from there often not hard to figure out her maiden name), our childhood best friend, favorite roommate, maybe we’ll post a photo of the house we grew up in and they can figure out the house number, etc. All the security questions.
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Of course. I couldn’t figure it out either and I never accepted them bc I thought it was creepy. Somehow it feels less creepy to think of them as ordinary spam bots.
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Cal Newport recently had a quick comment related to Social Media about how maybe the problem should be treated like teen smoking. There’s a limited amount we can do by slapping manufacturers, or in this case, social media websites on the wrist. We need to raise kids with the knowledge that you can use social media, but it’s really really bad for you.
I didn’t think it would get this bad. ICUs are packed and 1500 people a day are dying from a disease we have a vaccine for but 15% of men and a quarter of Republicans are a hard “no”.
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hmmm, i thought there were more sophisticated methods of stealing identities than that.
There are, but not every would-be crook is sophisticated.
And it’s a volume business. If they send out 50,000 friend requests and 99% aren’t dumb enough to accept and then 99% of the ones who ARE dumb enough to accept post insufficient details on their profile to correctly guess their security questions… they’ve found 5 victims.
If they can take each one for a couple thousand dollars… that’s $10 grand. Wouldn’t be enough to entice a lot of people, but if you’re barely making ends meet in Somalia that could go a long way.
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Related to the OP:
My problem with the current media narrative is that it treats Facebook as a uniquely bad actor. If Facebook were singularly awful, then things would get substantially better if they would just shape up. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think this narrative is an “OJ searching for the real killers” situation, in that it’s a misdirection drawing attention away from the actual source of harm.
Haugen’s testimony added to the already-large body of evidence showing that inflammatory content does well on social media. At this point, the market signal could not possibly be more clear: People want content that’s provocative and in-group affirming. And they also want sex — when it comes to hard abs and big, jiggling butts, America says “keep ‘em comin’!” Which highlights the non-revelatory nature of these revelations; if you didn’t already know that people want news that confirms their biases and images that engorge their privates, then may I humbly suggest that you haven’t been keeping up with the media trends of the past 200,000 years.
People are mad at Facebook for essentially giving in to market pressures. And, again, I understand the anger; Facebook’s actions have a real “something’s gonna fuck people up so it might as well be us” vibe. But the crime here is basically giving people what they want. Which makes me think that it’s probably not possible to build a social media landscape that functions in a substantially different way.
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EU likely to go first. They are much further along on tech reg than the US. Talk of a “do no harm” element in the works. Also legal authority to examine the algorithms used at FB if they suspect failure to self regulate.
This rings true to me. It seems that all the problems with Facebook happen with pretty much every social media. There’s the YouTube rabbit hole. Weird Twitter groupies.
And all of them can be used in positive ways, too. I keep up with friends and avoid politics on Facebook. My husband gets decent quality news on Twitter. My son follows knitting experts and similar “domain educational” stuff on YouTube.
I don’t know if there’s a solution, but if there is, it’s not “blow up Facebook”.