Meta rolled back protections. Now hate is surging - What we're seeing: More hate, more fear, less freedom.
Meta rolled back protections. Now hate is surging - What we're seeing: More hate, more fear, less freedom.
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.
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.
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
Social Media needs to die
Said that on Social Media
Corporate-run social media needs to die.
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
Meta is the enemy of all of mankind
Social Media in general is our most self-destructive invention yet
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
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!
FB at least did a mediocre job at curbing hate speech. Then the progressive backlash against genAI broke the techbros so much they went full fash, since 2023.
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.
Leave that website.
There is no fixing it.
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?
I do wonder, are seeing more hate, more fear and less freedom because there is more hate, more fear and less freedom, or are we seeing these things because they are now no longer deleted, and there is the same amount of it?
Either way there is no fix for facebook and other facebook owned platforms. Get rid of this shit.
Honestly, probably both. The fact that stuff isn't being deleted anymore and that they make carve-outs in the rules for hate against specific minorities would embolden people to post more hateful content.
That nerdy guy who wants to be an MMF fighter sure is angry, you can tell by his business.
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?
Facebook: makes a system where the only way to get engagement is to hatepost.
People on facebook: hateposts
People: "How could this happen?"
No shit.
The CEO is a genocidal zio. USA is a hate group. What else do people expect?
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.
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.
surprised pikachu face
I look forward to the day when the people wake up and drag the oppressors into the streets.
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.
Working as intended then?