“Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”
26 minutes ago [-]
dylan604 33 minutes ago [-]
Meta has already been okay with drug use by allowing people to place ads and other posts clearly promoting drug use/sales. IIRC, 404 Media did an article on this
What's the latest social media platform position on being labeled a publisher? Aren't they against that?
scarab92 40 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
HarHarVeryFunny 5 minutes ago [-]
It's disingenuous to try to present all offensive subject matter as "differences of opinion" and objections as politically motivated.
Some subject matter, such as terrorist beheadings, animal abuse, sucker-punching strangers, etc, is just plain illegal and should not be publicized and glorified.
YOU may not agree, but society and the legal system has.
lokar 37 minutes ago [-]
At least you don’t have to use the default feed. You can make your own.
scarab92 30 minutes ago [-]
The default feed is orders of magnitude more visible than the cherry-picked low-follower-count users that formed the basis of this article.
There’s a tremendous double standard here. The offensive right wing content is something you’d have to explicitly search for, whereas the offensive left wing content is front and center.
forestrywat 18 minutes ago [-]
Imagine thinking the right has learned to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive.
ndsipa_pomu 23 minutes ago [-]
Most of the calls for censorship of right wing voices has specifically been about them inciting violence and riots (e.g. against asylum seekers).
NikolaNovak 32 minutes ago [-]
Out of curiosity, which part of the world are you in?
While agreeing that every side and compass orientation has conspiracy theories and ragebait, here in North America the right / Conservatives are foaming-at-the-mouth livid at the (real, Perceived, or mixed) wokeness / communism / liberallness of "mainstream media".
In this neck of the woods, the sentence "right has learned to tolerate different opinions they find offensive" isn't even hilariously wrong, it's tragically, despairngly, painfully bizarre :-(.
wpietri 30 minutes ago [-]
Ah, so you agree that a "white nationalist with Neo-Nazi links" is accepted as a right-wing voice these days? That's how it has looked to me since Charlottesville, but it's always nice to get it confirmed by people with different perspectives.
mc32 3 hours ago [-]
The egregious part is the amplification part. Profit derives from that. Transmission and protection are neutral and they are necessary for all information especially if there is a history of freedom of expression; though of course some governments and others like regulating permissible expression.
wpietri 55 minutes ago [-]
Transmission and protection are not neutral. They're a choice. Facebook has freedom of association and is allowed not to host content they believe harmful. Something they already do extensively. [1]
Facebook is doing that in India as well. They are becoming Government Lap dog and do as its comfortable to their profits. Government of India able to suppress many dissent in recent years because of social media suppression. BTW Current government control News Channels by other means, we have term for Indian news channel as Godi Media. "Godi" in hindi literally means lap.
Zuck was gagging for the Trump 2nd term so he could go all in on this shit. Slow clap for the Meta employees that enable it.
asdvsadnvs 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pyrale 1 hours ago [-]
> Even if its an engineer that's making 6 figures that you are liekly alluding to, do you expect everyone to agree with your moral code and quit their job?
No, but you shouldn't expect to see them addressed with respect either, just like Enron traders, Purdue salesmen or tobacco scientists don't get a lot of it.
nancyminusone 1 hours ago [-]
Somebody implemented this. If you did, you did, and I don't think you should be allowed to claim you didn't.
wpietri 52 minutes ago [-]
Everyone has the moral obligation to not enable or profit from harm. Do we all live up perfectly to that all the time? No. There's no meaningful moral rule where people can do that. If there were, it wouldn't be worth having as a moral rule.
Is Zuckerberg responsible for the harm he's causing? Yes. Are the workers enabling that responsible? Yes. Are the people who profit from indirectly supporting that responsible? Yes. Responsibility is not zero sum.
beezlewax 1 hours ago [-]
> do you expect everyone to agree with your moral code and quit their job
Yes. This would be ideal.
wpietri 49 minutes ago [-]
And second best would be these people owning their moral vacuity.
I can sort of respect a response like, "Yeah, I like Zuckerberg's money and I don't give a shit about the harm I'm enabling. I'll keep cashing my checks and being an asshole." It's the people who expect us to pretend they're not asshole that get to me. They want the upside of bad behavior without the downside. Sorry bub, FAFO.
JohnFen 1 hours ago [-]
If you work for a company, you are enabling that company's practices. If those practices are bad and you are aware of them, then continuing to work there means your hands are dirty too.
People have, of course, every right to make such a decision based on their own ethical sensibilities. I have every right to judge them based on mine.
forestrywat 11 minutes ago [-]
These big companies have orgs within them that do, e.g., charitable work. Or work on standards or open source. Or accessibility or inclusion or other work to genuinely improve lives. How does your judgement apply to folks who attach their altruistic efforts to the funding and reach of a big company?
I would understand if you said, "Nope, still equally responsible" or if you said, "Relatively less worried about these folks".
Genuinely interested in hearing thoughts about these orgs at big companies.
JohnFen 7 minutes ago [-]
Doing good deeds does not absolve anyone of their bad deeds.
> How does your judgement apply to folks who attach their altruistic efforts to the funding and reach of a big company?
If it's getting the company to fund your altruistic efforts and isn't benefiting that company, then it's not contributing to the bad deeds. Otherwise, it is.
Either way, if you're working for the company, then you're still enabling them. Whether or not you participate in internal do-gooding efforts doesn't change that.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> What if you are a cook or a plumber or a janitor at Meta who has no idea
One, do better. Two, the vitriol is obviously aimed at Meta’s white-collar employees. (Anecdotally, it’s getting harder for them to date.)
edgyquant 54 minutes ago [-]
“Anecdotally” this is not the case, it’s getting harder for everyone to date meta employees are not doing worse than anyone else and with their income likely the opposite
malfist 52 minutes ago [-]
> There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!
Terrible take. Trying to moral gymnastics your way out of taking responsibility for who you work for. If you're working at meta it's unlikely to be your only good option. Yes, the janitors get a pass.
lokar 33 minutes ago [-]
I doubt the janitors actually work for Meta
freejazz 37 minutes ago [-]
Shame on anyone that works for Meta!
darig 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
carlosjobim 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jnovek 2 hours ago [-]
Literally the second paragraph in the article:
“An ABC NEWS Verify investigation into several controversial Australian pages on Facebook has found that some are benefiting directly from social media monetisation programs run by Meta.”
They are paying him for his content. Funding him, if you will.
Virtually every company pays people to do stuff and then profits off of the stuff those people do.
carlosjobim 1 hours ago [-]
No, you have an incorrect understanding of what the word means. Funding is when you commission somebody to do something. Ie, you give them money before they do it.
ABC or HN has also changed the title of the post now to "paying", which is the correct word in this case, not "funding".
JohnFen 36 minutes ago [-]
That's not the definition of "funding". "Funding" is setting money aside for a specific purpose. When that money is spent doesn't enter into it.
barbecue_sauce 1 hours ago [-]
Gangster rap has largely faded out of mainstream media.
acdha 2 hours ago [-]
There’s a big difference between fiction when the viewer knows it’s make believe and when it’s presented as factual. Nobody is committing genocide because they saw a violent movie whereas Facebook shares responsibility for at least one recognized genocide and a number of smaller scale events where the company amplified hateful content and was very slow to take it down. A key distinction here is choice: I don’t accidentally start watching a slasher movie or listening to gangster rap, but Facebook / TikTok / X will ensure that I see unrequested content if it’s something their algorithms reward for “engagement” (i.e. it sells ads), it won’t be labeled, and they won’t let you reliably control it because they’d lose money if Facebook had a “only show my actual friends’ posts” default.
> There’s a big difference between fiction when the viewer knows it’s make believe and when it’s presented as factual.
The difference is far more nuanced and borders on inconsequential when it comes to mass media influence on society.
Just because something is presented as fiction or for entertainment doesn’t mean it doesn’t impact your psyche or your perception of the world and others.
You certainly accidentally start listening to gangster rap when it's played on TV, on the radio, or on the auto playlists from streaming services. Or you wouldn't turn on your radio by accident, but then you wouldn't open Facebook by accident either.
Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide, I don't think anybody would deny that anymore. So if we treat it as harmless entertainment, then we should apply the same standard to content published on social media. Publishing genocidal content would be beyond that, nobody would disagree. Still, what music do you think that African child soldiers listen to when they go on a raid to burn a village and kill everybody they find?
As for violent movies or torture horror movies which are so celebrated in mainstream culture, their impact on viewers minds and souls are probably worse than a lot of what people here don't like on Facebook.
wpietri 36 minutes ago [-]
> Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide
What's your evidence for this? You seem to be making the claim that without gangster rap there's a bunch of violent crime that wouldn't have happened. But it seems more plausible to me that the bulk of that crime is due to the drug trade and other social and economic factors, and that gangster rap is just the musical expression of what's already going on.
And I'd expect the same to be true of, say, country music. Are you also going to claim that people who listened to a lot of Johnny Cash were more inclined to shoot people, possibly in Reno, just to watch them die? Did many Merle Haggard fans turn to crime because of him?
Personally, I listened to plenty of Ice T, NWA, and Snoop. Sometimes I still do. I have yet to become a stick-up kid or pack a 9 mil. Should I be worried? If there's some sort of threshold dosage, I might go over it at any time.
2 hours ago [-]
ImPostingOnHN 2 hours ago [-]
> Meta doesn't fund the stuff people put there
Actually, the article makes it pretty clear that they fund some of the really bad stuff.
windexh8er 1 hours ago [-]
This type of comment is why K-12 education in the US really needs to start focusing on skills related to disinformation. The example given here is obviously an art vs disinformation/misinformation/psyops. They aren't the same and conflating them doesn't do anyone any good.
Also, Meta does fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs. You'd think that money being paid would also mean a higher level of scrutiny. I'm really curious how these conversations play out internal to Meta. Does everyone just pretend this isn't an issue? Seems like there's a lot of great book material that will be dropped in the coming decades as these efforts wear on and break people.
carlosjobim 2 minutes ago [-]
In real life right now and for many years, we have gangster rappers (or drill or trap, whatever you'd like to call it) who are funded by record companies, broadcasted everywhere, and praised by the mainstream. Including being broadcasted and celebrated by public service stations.
In their records they rap about murdering people and raping women, and also threatening to murder specific individuals or bragging about having done such. Among other things.
They are also active on social media, where they also threaten people with violence and death, or brag about such feats.
And finally they also murder people in real life, or get murdered likewise by their peers.
Now for the same person, expressing themselves the same way but on different platforms. For their record company funded content we say "that's art and free speech", and for their social media posts we say "what have you done, Zuckerberg!?".
> Also, Meta does fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs.
You are right. I misunderstood the program to be general payments to all creators of size á la Spotify, but it's an invite-only program.
edgyquant 52 minutes ago [-]
Are you implying gangster rap wasnt cultivated and pushed to the masses by the large media companies? The only difference between then and now is the technology available and the name of the companies.
xutopia 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wpietri 1 hours ago [-]
He really doesn't. Look at the consequences to him for wasting tens of billions on his "metaverse" fantasy, for example. Let me know if you find anything.
But even if he did, that doesn't require that he ignore negative externalities. Facebook has a Net Promoter Score similar to what health insurance companies and monopoly utilities do. Zuckerberg himself is disliked by 2/3rds of humanity. That's not good for long-term shareholder value.
Something else that's bad for long-term stock values? Profiting from slowly destroying the health of the societies in which all your customers live.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> Zuckerberg has a fiduciary responsibility to optimize shareholder value
“Shareholder value” is ambiguous for good reason. It defers to the Board’s judgement. Fiduciary responsibility doesn’t excuse this sort of incentivizing of crime.
46 minutes ago [-]
53 minutes ago [-]
JohnFen 1 hours ago [-]
That's a serious oversimplification. A CEO doesn't have any duty to maximize profit at all costs. "Shareholder value" includes quite a lot of things that aren't directly about that at all. Often, the way to optimize shareholder value is to pass on certain practices that may be technically profitable.
56 minutes ago [-]
criddell 1 hours ago [-]
> Zuckerberg has a fiduciary responsibility to optimize shareholder value
Is that true?
And if it is true, he controls 60% of the voting power because he owns class B shares that get 10 votes each. Do you think he will sue himself if he fails to wring every last dollar out of Meta?
singleshot_ 42 minutes ago [-]
Generally speaking, there are two fiduciary duties of the officer: do not usurp corporate opportunities and do not act without information.
Your second question is not relevant because you do not have to be the majority shareholder to initiate such an action.
stephen_g 45 minutes ago [-]
No, the OP is repeating a common misconception. Corporate law sets out a number of fiduciary duties, including to act in the best interest of the shareholders but “maximising shareholder value” is not one of them.
The idea that companies should “maximise shareholder value” is a key ideal of some political/economic ideologies (especially what people describe as ‘neoliberalism’) but it’s not law.
singleshot_ 41 minutes ago [-]
I think it's just something that Jack Welch at GE said so many times while making so much money that people started to believe it / wanted it to be true. I'd be happy to hear other stories about why this nonsense arose.
consp 1 hours ago [-]
Fiduciary duty only means acting in the interest of those providing you with money. If they demand sanity that can become the guiding goal instead of money. Never going to happen in the money first, I want more society we live in but there is no reason it can't. See some activist shareholders demanding change to boards to ensure certain outcomes not related to money.
nehal3m 1 hours ago [-]
I quote myself 2 years ago, forgive me if I’m stating the obvious:
I'm going to set up two axioms to arrive at an extrapolated conclusion.
One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).
Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.
Extrapolated conclusion:
These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
ajkjk 1 hours ago [-]
and a moral responsibility to do otherwise. Or, well---whether or not you agree that it is the case in some cosmic sense, it is still how we get to judge him.
Ironically he seems to be very sensitive to this judgment. You would think he would also take action on the basis of it, but so far, seemingly not?
invalidusernam3 1 hours ago [-]
Why didn't he step down for his metaverse then?
jtbayly 1 hours ago [-]
This is such a tired trope to blame capitalism for every company’s misdeeds.
wpietri 1 hours ago [-]
Right? If the press and commentariat is to be believed, these companies are run by genius titans who can do anything, anything at all. Except something good for the societies they and their shareholders live in and profit from. That would be a violation of the gospel of St Ayn, and therefore unthinkable.
datsci_est_2015 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mattlondon 3 hours ago [-]
I think this is a bit misleading.
It sounds to me like the creators are creating and uploading the content, and then that is getting monetised on the platform?
The title makes it sound like meta is commissioning the content? I don't think that is the case here? Or is it?
Directly commissioning someone to create it is pretty wild.
NoLinkToMe 3 hours ago [-]
This is correct, it's monetisation, not commissioning.
Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.
It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.
However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.
Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.
Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?
I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
artur_makly 3 hours ago [-]
Thank you for this poignant allegory - its so spot on - it will really open some people's minds here who are overthinking and rationalizing their current Big Corp employments.
econ 2 hours ago [-]
They put you in several opposing camps. They identify the most insane content and show only that to everyone in the opposing camp.
No one cares if you clean up after your dog makes a nr 2. The anti dog poop people want to hear you don't give a fk and let Herman poop wherever he likes.
Similarly the dog owners don't want to hear you understand. They want you to talk about little poopers getting stuck in your barbed wire with razorblades.
mikeocool 3 hours ago [-]
> appear to be profiting from is "an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts."
The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.
jklinger410 2 hours ago [-]
The invitation is automated
mikeocool 56 minutes ago [-]
Oh, that’s good, because if you automate something then you’re automatically absolved from all responsibility for its actions.
And you certainly shouldn’t bother monitoring what it’s doing.
Starman_Jones 2 hours ago [-]
Did Meta set up the selection criteria for the automated selection system?
lazide 2 hours ago [-]
It’s the new smoking. It’s currently at the stage they profess ignorance while being lambasted with all the videos of them clearly knowing what was going on and lying to congress about it.
I give it a couple years before the PSA about ‘your brain on social media’ or whatever.
nkrisc 2 hours ago [-]
They are creating an environment where they incentivize it and profit from it. Whether or not that’s meaningfully different from directly commissioning it themselves seems like a minor quibble to me. It’s no different than a mob boss suggesting a rival should take a long walk off a short pier.
jeremyjh 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, it says in the article that they are being paid through Meta’s content monetization program. The title is a bit of bait but it’s simply true that rage sells eyeballs so Meta does create an incentive for people to create awful content of many different types.
iamnothere 3 hours ago [-]
It sounds like the Twitter/X creator system that was recently curtailed when it didn’t have the expected results. I’m sure the same will happen to Meta’s system, if you pay for raw engagement then you tend to get trash.
Ironically, the article is itself ragebait! But that’s the media as a whole (including Meta).
jklinger410 2 hours ago [-]
They wrote that title specifically to mislead people.
Tangurena2 2 hours ago [-]
Twitter/X has actually paying some of those creators. They're changing that program in September.
No, Meta intentionally set up the incentive structure to reward rage bait content. You should expect they knew what they were going to get from doing that.
You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and not know exactly how this will go.
aragilar 3 hours ago [-]
I think it depends on whether what Meta states about the "Content Monetization" program being invite only is true? If it is, that's effectively commissioning, if it's not, well Meta is lying and then the question is why lie?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3 hours ago [-]
First, pay people for the "engagement" their content generates, then aggressively promote the most "engaging" content. At the same time, such content is known to have certain characteristics. This is the Facebook (et al.) commissioning model.
rubyfan 3 hours ago [-]
Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me. They are bad for your soul, bad for the nation, bad for the world.
Bluestein 3 hours ago [-]
If I may offer: Because they have become fiendishly adept at exploiting an addictive behaviour/weakness in our brains WHILE masquerading as some sort of social utility (AND perhaps vestigially retaining some semblance of that) - which, incidentally, is what (some) originally might have been, before encrappification.-
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
I suspect the OP understands this. Since few of those on HN (I am assuming) no longer have a FB presence, the question is why hasn't everyone arrived at this same conclusion and walked away from that addiction?
Meta should really have gone the way of MySpace a long, long time ago.
jolmg 8 minutes ago [-]
People may believe they need facebook to maintain their relationships.
Bluestein 2 hours ago [-]
And/or MySpace should have gone the way of F'book :)
Though I hear it might make a comeback.-
PS. To your point, I am guessing: For one thing it takes the ability to thus conclude, to begin with. THAT, in turn takes intellect and time AND evidence such as has been accruing. AND third, probably, because addictions are by definition hard to quit. ALSO: I think few times in the history of addictive behaviours has the enabling agent had such a low low low entry threshold, such presumptive innocuousness, and such assumed and granted "utility". It began by hijacking human communication, "socialization". It is devious.-
jasonjayr 2 hours ago [-]
Breaking any type of addiction is hard. For some people it requires intentional and deliberate help from others.
mrguyorama 60 minutes ago [-]
People educated in math and probability are actually still prone to gambling addiction and things.
It doesn't matter what your high level brain knows, there is a structure and organization of your brain that only changes on geologic timescales, and that structure has serious, easily attackable flaws.
Bluestein 49 minutes ago [-]
I like your use of "attackable" (and of flaws, obviously).-
PS. F'book commoditized social interaction to their ends while abusing these attackable surfaces. Kalshi and that ilk have now done away with the whole pretense of communication itself and are abusing the same addiction mechanisms to commoditize OPINION to their ends. Opinions: Everybody has one.-
PS. At some point somebody is going to commoditize mere bodily movement wrapped into such an addictive mechanism and we will get people with "weird" performative "palsies" walking about.-
pydry 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly. Same reason we eat junk food that also isnt good for us.
exhumet 3 hours ago [-]
i recently downloaded it again after nearly a decade to use marketplace to buy a bike for my wife. Got the bike and deleted the app. but my god opening it up was hell. the interface on mobile is just....stressful. super cluttered, shit all over the place with notifications and things to see. first post i saw on there was someone i used to be friends with but havent thought about in years just blatently reposting ACTUAL racist shit... bought a bike in one day and deleted the app once again. horrible experience aside from the nice old dude who sold me the bike lol
rubyfan 2 hours ago [-]
I had a similar experience logging in to FB to delete my account which was inactive for almost a decade. It’s legit was like the movie Idiocracy. Casino vibes, over stimulation, people saying stupid thing, trying to sift through lots of garbage to find the thing you’re looking for.
exhumet 2 hours ago [-]
thats exactly what i was telling my wife, a casino is way more accurate than what i said. i was like it felt like signing on to Temu with all of the shit all over the place
acdha 1 hours ago [-]
I remember going to Las Vegas once after I turned 21, realizing that it totally wasn’t my thing, and especially being scared by the expressions on the zombie seniors sitting in front of the slot machines shoveling quarters in.
I see that basically every day now with people watching TikTok or Instagram while walking, on the bus, or even driving, barely able to tear their attention away. It’s like a casino except that it’s available 24 hours a day with no limits.
exhumet 47 minutes ago [-]
yeah its nuts. ive hard restricted any form of social media to 15 minutes a day combined for the remaining ones i have. its been extremely healthy tbh. ive felt much better in the almost two years ive been doing it!
and i get it! the zombified rapid button pressing over and over. when i went to japan we were stoked to go check out a pachinko hall and we walked in and it was overstimulation city lol. walking in through the front door directly out through the back door haha.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
My experience with Instagram too. Signed up to talk to one person who only uses Instagram, and it's just garbage all around.
I think it's a frog boiling situation. Early users got gradually accustomed to the gradually increasing garbage, but anyone who enters the ecosystem now is immediately turned off.
AstralSerenity 1 hours ago [-]
I use Instagram on Android because it's heavily modified and stripped to its bare essentials just for responding to friends. Prior to this I used the web app. If those two disappeared I would be done.
inigyou 1 hours ago [-]
Instagram on Android was caught bypassing OS security requirements by opening a port on localhost, which webpages with Facebook tracking scripts would connect to to get your identity.
exhumet 2 hours ago [-]
at the very least, insta is a semi cleaner and its the content itself thats abrasive... for now... thats the only other thing i use purely to keep up with family and i do photography so its somewhere to share some pics with family and friends.once you spend an entire night flagging everything you dont wanna see it becomes pretty clean. and then i put a 15 min timer on top of it. so it barely gets used but its semi well-tailored lol
newsclues 2 hours ago [-]
I refuse to use facebook on mobile. Website only, and it’s terrible but that’s where the local community is if you need to find a lost dog or deal on a bike.
exhumet 2 hours ago [-]
yup and thats exactly what i discovered. id rather not use it and also not lose any additional respect for people i used to like or have good memories with lol
unglaublich 3 hours ago [-]
It's an addiction. These platforms have been engineers to be addictive, and now people are hooked.
rohan_ 39 minutes ago [-]
It's not like traditional media is any better. At least with social media platforms the means of producing media and building a following has been democratized.
wookmaster 3 hours ago [-]
Hard agree, I keep hoping for the day society awakens as a whole to realize what they're doing to us.
gosub100 44 minutes ago [-]
I don't use FB or insta , but here are some reasons why people use it:
- Keep in touch with family
- Comfort from having their ideas reinforced
- Organize small events
- Share pictures easily
- not feel lonely
- stay current on world events
All of those have other routes to accomplish the same thing, but I guess they have the "Dropbox effect" of simplifying it so even techno challenged can use it.
beej71 10 minutes ago [-]
Meta is easier for that stuff, I won't deny. Nevertheless, we've managed to get our families into Signal groups that largely accomplish the same things at the scale we need. And the benefits of not needing to wade through slop make up for the losses. It's so peaceful! Hopefully more people give it a try.
carlosjobim 2 hours ago [-]
I'll help you understand: Important information is many times only found on these platforms. Many local businesses and events only have their info on Facebook or Instagram. Many local community groups are only on Facebook, and you'll find information there that has a real impact on your life (like bus broke down).
The other part is messaging. In parts of Europe nobody uses WhatsApp or SMS to communicate, everybody is on Facebook messenger.
And there's still the old school social media posts: cousin had a baby, friend got married. And also content made for the general public which is not malicious.
neutronicus 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Instagram is by far the most reliable communications channel from my kid's school, believe it or not. Like, there are mailing lists and portals you can log into, but the IT aspect of actually getting access for even one parent, let alone both, is such a fucking slog for everyone involved (and who knows what bullshit the school has to deal with from their side) that we get info through our WhatsApp group chat from the parents who have Instagram.
el_jay 2 hours ago [-]
Once I overcame the addiction tech, engineered over billions of brilliant-person-hours, atop research into human behavioural prediction and conditioning that’d make the KGB blush?
It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.
Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
Get their Signal or WhatsApp numbers.
neutronicus 2 hours ago [-]
If you want to "make it" as an artist / restaurateur / musician / million other things you kind of have to.
Hell, the most reliable communication channel for getting information from my kid's school is Instagram.
jmyeet 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if you're talking about Meta platforms or social media in general. It's been years since I've used any Meta platform but I'm a daily user of Tiktok.
On Tiktok I don't think the platform is paying people to rage bait, at least not directly. But wannabe influencers will still try and rage bait their way into a viral video and hopefully a following. To me it's entirely transparent and I just move on but people fall for it. Lots of people. Gender wars is easy pickings. A good example was the $3 cheese surcharge on a burger. I knew immediately that was fake and it was later confirmed [1].
But why am I on Tiktok? Because there's actually some good stuff on there and just some plain entertaining stuff. But what really seals it is the comments. Therea re a ton of videos where the comments are the best part. There are some funny people out there. And Tiktok more than any other platform I've experienced seems to surface such comments.
But I could best describe Facebook as your racist uncle posting conspiracy theories and that's pretty much it.
> Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me.
Because it provides a form entertainment, low hanging entertainment. All designed to grip you in your weakest fronts.
Map out what triggers a person visually. Feed it in to a LLM model and on the evil scale, you can start exploiting those who get angry based on whatever content.
Anger is one of the easiest trigger points in form of media. Broadcast a opposite view of an individual or a group. Downvotes and Upvotes are the primitive form of this and if you lack the emotional intelligence (thick skin) to handle the flack, you end up turning on emotions.
Tabs are superior to spaces and Python is basically JavaScript with indentation.
smrtinsert 3 hours ago [-]
Because they influence a lot of opinions which influences decisions which ends up influencing all our lives. Back around 2016 bots were loose on ut internet, with everyone freely gobbling up misinformation. Now there is an unofficial army of people determined to keep facts up at the forefront as well as other malicious social media negative trends at bay.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
As well as several official armies determined to keep disinformation at the forefront while keeping facts at bay.
throwyonion 3 hours ago [-]
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Gigachad 3 hours ago [-]
So is meth, but it’s as popular as ever.
florkbork 5 hours ago [-]
I will call out the ABC here for taking a lot of the boots on the ground work that Tom Tanuki - independent journo (https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki) has done with these far right slopaganda mills, slicing off the prior recognition and pretending it's a big new problem they just found.
While a bit of this is new... Is it that new? Is this report that detailed? Hmmmmm
embedding-shape 2 hours ago [-]
Well, they claim they've done their own independent investigations, maybe started because of that bloggers/vloggers work, but still could be independent. What exactly is pointing towards it not being independent? It seems to be a detailed enough account of why the people break Facebook's own guidelines, yet receive money from Facebook.
fosron 5 hours ago [-]
Facebook is still big in my country, Lithuania, and both rage-bait and other type of fringe content is rampant, and even worse after fact-checking was removed. It is wild, and with some outside actors (specific country that shall not be named) it is a big problem with political and social effects being felt IRL.
soco 4 hours ago [-]
And is Lithuania doing anything about it? In Romania Facebook and TikTok do whatever they please, and whatever they are paid to do, with complete impunity as the authorities actively do nothing at all.
fosron 2 hours ago [-]
Our police has a page called "Virtual Police Patrol" which allows reporting of these cases. Some of the worst trolls have been prosecuted and sentenced. But we're not doing much regarding Facebook itself, just cleaning up with the results of it.
Barbing 1 hours ago [-]
Recent Guardian article:
“Inside a meme factory: meet one of thousands of Indonesians trading political outrage clicks for Facebook cash“
Just to add onto this; Instagram purposely floats controversial comments to the top of a comment section for "engagement" purposes. I've seen this many times.
bilekas 5 hours ago [-]
This isn't anything new, it was abundantly clear after Facebook removed their fact checking team during covid that the priority was engagement over everything else, and rage bait is exactly that.
iamnothere 3 hours ago [-]
COVID-era “fact checking” went way beyond its remit and started to become a political tool. This had negative consequences for the average person’s trust in institutions of all kinds, because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech, even if it’s clearly inaccurate (as it so often is). It’s a good thing that it was removed.
The problem with Meta is the monetization and engagement model, not the lack of fact checking.
bilekas 2 hours ago [-]
> because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech
I'm not sure that I buy that when people's health are at stake. When things are objectively false, and spreading that information will actively harm people, you have a responsibility and duty of care to point out falsities. But that's just me.
iamnothere 13 minutes ago [-]
It isn’t just you, but it also isn’t everybody. Dissent is always present, and the 1st amendment ensures that people have the right to speak their mind. Having the government lean on private platforms to pressure them into censorship, especially in a coordinated fashion, violates that right. Even if the government attempts to launder that pressure through a maze of domestic and foreign NGOs.
eigencoder 51 minutes ago [-]
COVID was accidentally released from a lab.
That statement was censored as "objectively false", but our best information says it's probably true, and it was probably true then, too. Censorship is a dangerous walk. I totally agree with you that harmful misinformation is a problem, and that we have a duty of care. The problem is "who fact-checks the fact checkers?", and what happens when political leaders can request certain topics "fact checked".
b40d-48b2-979e 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry your COVID misinformation was removed and your president actually lost the 2020 election.
iamnothere 12 minutes ago [-]
Lol. “My president”. As if.
This attitude you have is why we’re in a race to the bottom politically. I hope you live to see the fruits of your efforts, fully.
trymas 4 hours ago [-]
I just want to add, that they (FB and other big social media) probably understood what propaganda power they wield after 2016 facebook and cambridge analytica scandal.
Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.
Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.
superxpro12 3 hours ago [-]
Facebook figured out a long time ago that "ragebait" and profit are transitively connected via "engagement". They recognized that anger, hate, fear, and all negative emotions can ALSO bring in a LOT of clicks.
koe123 3 hours ago [-]
Every single time historically we have unregulated media you get a shitshow. I think you can blame our societies nonchalant lassez faire attitude to the propaganda profiteering by American big tech for lots of the issues we face today. Honestly: do cocaine laced recommender algorithms really benefit us? I really hope the EU fully bans this stuff.
Tangurena2 2 hours ago [-]
That used to be called "yellow journalism" in America (and "tabloid journalism" in the UK) which led to the Spanish American war in 1898.
Care to elaborate? You don’t think the creator of “You should self harm: the TV show” would’ve been regulated and held accountable for the detrimental consequences back in the day? Not saying it was perfect back then, but today I do think internet media companies are out of control.
Uh, the Hays Code is actually a premier example of "Industry Self regulation", as well as it's replacement, the equally absurd and incestuous MPAA ratings system.
It's the exact "Industries have an incentive to self regulate" talking point that conservatives have long used to say industries should be less regulated
And you are pointing to it as an example that we shouldn't use the government to regulate media.
Meanwhile, I think the FCC does a pretty good job, where their regulatory bar is "You cannot blast boobs or these swears over the public wireless spectrum, everything else is fair game", including an entire TV channel called "Fox News" which has had to argue in court on at least one occasion that nobody would assume any program on "Fox News" was news, rather than entertainment.
brrk 2 hours ago [-]
Right, cos we know that it's regulated - Elon rules X/Twitter, Mark rules Facebook, and shareholder value rules the others. In fact it's even more regulated now because Donald rules over them.
fsuts 3 hours ago [-]
But regulated media is also a shit show!
JKCalhoun 2 hours ago [-]
You just need accountable media.
Torture or murder on a live Facebook stream? You hold Facebook accountable.
beepbooptheory 3 hours ago [-]
Like what?
iamnothere 3 hours ago [-]
Pravda is the most famous example
UK “D-notices” are another great example
And the Sedition Act, as well as the Comstock Act
doo_daa 2 hours ago [-]
Aren't the UK's D-notices advisory. I thought they could be (and often are) ignored by media outlets. I don't think they warrant a mention alongside Pravda.
iamnothere 16 minutes ago [-]
True, I suppose UK “super injunctions” would be more apt, although the D-notice system has been used multiple times to successfully prevent information from reaching the public.
bwb 5 hours ago [-]
FB is built on rage bait, what else do they have beside cute videos?
code_duck 5 hours ago [-]
Horrible sympathy and religion bait like "I bet nobody will upvote this poor sick child with one leg, won't you? 1 amen = 1 prayer!"
wookmaster 3 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately things like craigslist died off and moved to Facebook marketplace somehow. I have to ask my wife to post things for me.
haunter 4 hours ago [-]
Marketplace. It’s pretty good that’s my main usage of Facebook nowadays
Joeboy 4 hours ago [-]
If you use the friends or "all" feeds, you just get stuff about what your friends are up to and things from pages you've subscribed to. Or I do anyway. Also good for discovering events locally.
Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.
bwb 4 hours ago [-]
I removed all friends years ago. After I read about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I quit, but I still need an account for a few groups I moderate.
I think it has done more damage to this country than tobacco.
3 hours ago [-]
basisword 4 hours ago [-]
Connecting with your friends and family. Unfortunately they abandoned this long ago because they weren't satisfied with making a mountain of money.
vintermann 4 hours ago [-]
I use FB for genealogy, because there are a lot of local groups where people post historical pictures, and older people in general are more active on Facebook.
I've seen some local groups taken over by ragebait slop, though. Ironically, not even right wing rage bait slop. As far as I can tell, it finally boiled over for the admin of the page, who was a fairly liberal guy in an extremely rural place, when a local museum found out he was anti-Trump and stopped collaborating with him on local history (maybe for fear of other's reactions). Since then he's strictly reposted rage material from other places/people on Facebook, much of it clearly low effort/AI generated.
I can't judge him, he lives there after all, and from this side of the ocean my political sympathies are definitively closer to him than to his enemies. Still :/
tomaytotomato 55 minutes ago [-]
I would drop Facebook in a heartbeat but Facebook Marketplace is a strong pull for getting bargains in my local area.
I have alternatives like eBay and Gumtree but they have their own shortcomings.
Examples from Facebook:
- Antique lumber planks 50p a plank
- 4 sticks of DDR4 16GB SODIMMs, £60
- Garden tools, £10
This stuff would be slower and more expensive on eBay, and Gumtree is more of a waiting game as its userbase has definitely shrunk.
eagerpace 52 minutes ago [-]
I have a dedicated profile for marketplace. I managed to keep it separate from my real meta account for a long time but they eventually tricked me into linking it. We need a Wikipedia model online marketplace. Craigslist was close, but didn’t keep up.
ravivooda 1 hours ago [-]
Every other day, my feed seems to be filled with pro-Republican posts, followed by pro-Democratic posts the next. It’s fascinating how the model decided this was the kind of content worth generating.
01100011 1 hours ago [-]
To some degree I think social media algorithms already altered our behavior enough that extreme and controversial content generation would continue even if we disabled the algorithms. They've reinforced the memes enough now that they are self-sustaining.
mrguyorama 1 hours ago [-]
"The Model" didn't decide anything. Facebook and these other attention economy companies have been A/B testing for two decades now, and there have been multiple "Metas" they have found. They have all converged eventually on ragebait being an extremely effective engagement driver.
They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial"
It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.
wookmaster 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not surprised, I quit because I kept getting pushed this content for a long while and suspected as much. Same is happening on nextdoor for sure, whenever I login there's some pushed post that creates a bunch of engagement of someone stating something very political and controversial. It almost feels funny how bluesky and other platforms lack this sorta rage bait being prioritized. Facebook and friends sold us out hard and made society suffer. Stop using their services.
giwook 3 minutes ago [-]
I hate that I've become jaded enough to say this, but what else is new?
cdrnsf 2 hours ago [-]
Meta and its products are a cancer.
throwfaraway135 1 hours ago [-]
There is no solution based on censorship that doesn't undermine democracy. If you want Facebook to censor people/content/ideas that you don't like it is going also to censor vital information needed for a democracy to work.
The best solution for now seams to be what twitter is doing with community notes.
zigman1 1 hours ago [-]
You don't have to censor, but you don't have to pay either
throwfaraway135 1 hours ago [-]
Not paying is a form of censorship.
thih9 4 hours ago [-]
The companies clearly won’t listen to reason, not as long as this strategy works.
Voting seems to work, either with actual votes, or wallet, or attention.
FB and IG reels both.
Twitter gets a lot of rightfully owed criticism about it's fair share but its always weird to me seeing people slam twitter then go right on to IG or some other meta owned app as if its significantly different.
BoxOfRain 4 hours ago [-]
I'm so glad I got myself off Instagram and Reddit, the longer I go without them the more I realise what massive cognitohazards both of them are if you spend too much time on them. Different mechanisms but both were much more of a net drain on me than I realised before leaving them.
basisword 4 hours ago [-]
I use both IG and Twitter. IG reels for me are largely funny videos, stuff I follow, and stuff I'm interested in. On Twitter I only follow tech stuff and yet about 20% of the stuff in my 'recommended' feed is racist, violent, and stuff I have zero interest in. Even if you hit the 'non interested' button they continue to shove it down your throat.
lukan 5 hours ago [-]
Is it ethical wrong in this case, to wish those persons to get beaten up one day, by one of the people where they fueled their hate (who do take it out on other people for real)? So they reap what they sow?
graemep 4 hours ago [-]
Understandable but wrong.
wizzwizz4 4 hours ago [-]
Wishing for something doesn't make it happen. So we should consider the effect that this wishing has on you: does wishing for vengeance make you a worse, or better, person? I'd try to avoid it, myself.
If you're in a position where you're actually making the decision between letting these harmful practices continue, or putting a stop to them, that's different. But in this society, such people are more likely to be journalists and justices than vigilantes, so violence is still inappropriate. I think the scenario you described, of those incited to violence turning on the inciters with violence, is rather unlikely in reality, and it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
hugodan 3 hours ago [-]
Click on it, read the image title, that's all you need to know and the correct title here.
ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago [-]
I stopped logging into Faecebook, years ago, because it marked most of my posts as spam (I tended to post "look at my latest" stuff, there, so I understand why; but it rendered the platform worthless, for me).
However, I'll lay odds that if I had posted that Hitler was just a misunderstood genius, my posts would have gone viral throughout the system.
christkv 3 hours ago [-]
I have a very mixed friend group from hard left and hard right and they all get their own little bubble of rage bait that amplifies their own beliefs. Since i have them in my feed I get this crap from both side in my feed thanks to the algorithms. So i barely touch the site anymore
classified 1 hours ago [-]
Probably training the rage-bait edition of their AI so they can generate future "content" themselves.
Growtika 5 hours ago [-]
Especially before elections, it feels like they rewards people for being toxic
seydor 5 hours ago [-]
Can't they just do it with AI ?
raincole 3 hours ago [-]
Newspapers and also pay people to produce rage-bait content.
falsemyrmidon 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know anyone who uses Facebook anymore
iamnothere 3 hours ago [-]
This is a tired rehash of the same panic we had after 2016. In short: “Oh no, if we allow unrestricted communications, people may turn this into political advantage!” No shit. That’s the point of free speech.
As always, the only solution is twofold: (1) end the targeted advertising business model (for everyone, not just Meta) and (2) acknowledge and address the underlying social and economic problems affecting average people. But of course the establishment has no interest in pursuing either one of these. And so popular anger will continue to build.
I’m sure that shutting down the few release valves for that anger is a great solution.
phatfish 2 hours ago [-]
It's not a release valve, it's a honeypot so the 99% keep blaming each other. Shut it down and something might actually happen in the real world.
iamnothere 5 minutes ago [-]
You seem overly confident that your ideology is the one that will win in the subsequent chaotic struggle. History gives us a 50% chance of a horrible dictatorship, and a pretty good chance of millions of deaths.
diogenescynic 48 minutes ago [-]
We've become a provocateur type of society... Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast, Jake/Logan Paul... it's all the same thing at the end of the day. They harvest attention and in return funnel their audience towards ads, merch, OnlyFans, etc.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4 hours ago [-]
This is a really funny way to describe Facebook's (and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and...) entire business model. It's long been known that they aggressively promote ahem "engaging" content. How do they incentivize people to make it? Ad revenue!
archerx 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe they should pay their programmers to fix the audio bug in their iOS app. I can't listen to my podcasts and use the facebook app at the same time because it wants to mute the podcast to play nothing, even with the phone on silent and autoplay disabled the facebook app just randomly mutes my podcasts for no reason making me not want to use the app.
mkbkn 2 hours ago [-]
Entire public Meta suite of products are cancer to the society.
cedws 5 hours ago [-]
Social media platforms have been paying out for attention seeking behaviour for a long time now. It’s why every YouTube video now has the same lame shocked face, red arrows, and clickbait title. It’s why assholes film themselves intentionally pissing people off for TikTok. It’s a whole category called nuisance tubing.
I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.
These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.
shevy-java 5 hours ago [-]
Indeed. What I noticed is that the quality of the videos went down on youtube in the last 3 years. Now, the quality was never as great as it used to be anyway, but Google changed various things that made youtube worse. They are slowly killing off youtube without realising it.
Levitating 4 hours ago [-]
A lot of channels got bought by private equity. YouTube is saturated with similar content so creators have to resort to clickbait to keep up. AI has allowed creators to increase their efficiency writing scripts.
I don't know what you believe Google changed about YouTube, but I believe it has just made itself worse.
brrk 2 hours ago [-]
It's difficult for me to understand what people are getting out of the youtube experience, as I'm pretty straight up intolerant of most of the traits of this kind of content - all I hear recently from the neighbours kid's tablets and phones is loads of stuff with too-fast too-intense mono-tone TTS.
Such a shame that people take up against AI, rather than the people selecting and serving them slop.
leonidasrup 4 hours ago [-]
CCP is keeping tight control over social media platforms first and foremost to prevent spreading information which could topple CCP.
"Last month 60 popular celebrity gossip sites were closed overnight for corrupting "core socialist values," and a new regulation released in May requires all online news portals to be managed by Communist Party-sanctioned editorial staff."
It also has a lot of other side effects. One of them seems to be a more stable, prosperous society. I don't like that a totalitarian dictatorship is more stable and prosperous than us, maybe we should fix that?
nixon_why69 4 hours ago [-]
No, they actually do have a paternalistic drive to keep things healthy and pro-social above and beyond some Bond villain stuff.
I mean, yes, you also can't get away with organizing an opposition, but they really do care about social cohesion and good family values above and beyond that.
(Also, one should always note that the BBC is state owned when they write articles full of invective like this).
leonidasrup 34 minutes ago [-]
The priorities of CCP are suppressing opposition first and social cohesion and good family values second. If you don't like state owned BBC, you can read for example non-state owned Guardian about the state of Chinese media landscape.
Your first paragraph and second contradict each other somewhat. Celebrity gossip sites are not likely to threaten the party. On the contrary they may well work as "opium for the people", or circus with the bread, to keep dissent down.
The party doesn't actually need "core socialist values" to stay in charge. They could easily have adopted a Putin (or Napoleon, or Caesar) attitude of "I don't give a damn about the framework legitimizing my rule, as long as you acknowledge me as the boss".
vrganj 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe keeping the CCP in power and society not degenerating are correlated?
They did oversee an unprecedented rise in living standards and global influence after all...
Maybe those core socialist values were what enabled it?
phendrenad2 4 hours ago [-]
People want to feel like they're doing something in the "culture war". Rage-bait gives them an outlet. Facebook might be saving us from total civil war here.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3 hours ago [-]
Rage-bait invented the "culture war" you're talking about.
efilife 5 hours ago [-]
Clickbait. Title makes it sound like they pay them directly to promote the platform, but they get paid through facebook content monetisation program
chinathrow 5 hours ago [-]
Not Clickbait.
If you provide both:
a) a service to earn money from content
b) an algo promoting those videos
then yes, IMHO they pay them directly for the content produced.
pizza234 4 hours ago [-]
There is a distinction between:
- Meta is commissioning or sponsoring rage-bait
- Controversial creators are earning money through Facebook's content monetization program
The title is ambiguous (at first, I thought it was the first case), and that's where the clickbait lies.
No doubt that also the second case is a serious problem, but that's orthogonal to the ambiguity of the title.
hhjinks 4 hours ago [-]
The distinction disappears when Facebook incentivizes the creation of the rage-bait content by prioritizing it in their algorithm. They can, at any moment, de-rank rage-bait, but they don't. That clearly signals "make rage-bait for our platform and we'll pay you."
Contrast it with something like Elsagate. Google actioned the offending creators and attempted to deprioritize the kind of content that caused the controversy. Facebook would do the same if they didn't condone rage-bait.
modo_mario 2 hours ago [-]
>They can, at any moment, de-rank rage-bait, but they don't. That clearly signals "make rage-bait for our platform and we'll pay you."
They don't because they don't select for it. They disporotionally push engagement but as far as I know don't have some indians or AI working tirelessly analysing countless videos to categorise them and rank them according to how ragebaity or controversial they are. Those things just rise to the top out of their effort to drive engagement and screentime.
Any alternative that does the same will end up with similar result.
hhjinks 2 hours ago [-]
I find it hard to believe that Facebook's feed is "dumb" and only promotes what's engaging the most users. They serve you content that they think you will find engaging, and there has to be some automatic categorization as a result.
And regardless, even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
aragilar 3 hours ago [-]
"an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts." implies this is only available to a subset of people?
myaccountonhn 5 hours ago [-]
So they do directly pay them?
bakugo 4 hours ago [-]
Ironically, this article is rage-bait.
aBskH123 3 hours ago [-]
It is not only rage bait. They like the new corporate fascism and that its followers believe that the right wing will fix the economy.
Maybe they have some romantic ideals about the 1930s, where Schacht fixed the economy for Hitler with a form of quantitative easing. But that scheme became unsustainable around 1938.
The difference is that back then the powerful needed people. The current Silicon Valley "elites" want to get rid of everyone, make them dumb and replace them with AI.
The sooner the right wing audience realizes this, the better.
cindyllm 3 hours ago [-]
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patchtopic 4 hours ago [-]
they are paying Nazis to make Nazi content.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
You can't say that here.
somelamer567 1 hours ago [-]
Meta have long profited from knowingly aiding and abetting the enemies of the West by undermining our societies from within.
Meta are the greatest force against freedom in the world today, apart from Putin's post-fascist power vertical and the Chinese Communist Party.
What I think of Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately cannot be printed, because unlike Meta platforms, HN has standards.
truckyday 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
magic_hamster 4 hours ago [-]
First of all, Facebook is not even the worst offender. That'd have to go to X and TikTok. Rage bait, propaganda, and straight up bad actors with money pushing their agenda. If you got angry because of a TikTok video, you are being exploited.
Some of these actors also put a lot of money into campuses in the west, so when you're done watching some terrible propaganda, you can join a local club and find your way to more people getting angry at misinformation. This is how we get stuff like "globalize intifada" and students "occupying" buildings.
I wish this was just hyperbole, but really, go check for yourself what kind of money state actors put into schools and universities in the west, and why.
leonidasrup 4 hours ago [-]
This is how we also get stuff like Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
When will people learn that rage bait content thrives thanks to people who are so delicate and emotional that they get unhealthily enraged at such content?
Stop raging on the internet and the rage bait content will disappear overnight.
Stop buying oil, chasing newest phones, luxuries, and the climate will get better overnight.
It’s all on the consumers, contrary to Redditor belief that the big corporations are at fault, it’s simply the matter of demand and thus supply. Not the other way around.
Take accountability. I know nowadays it is very unpopular to take accountability but this is the first step to make world better place. You can only change your own habits.
pjc50 4 hours ago [-]
> You can only change your own habits
Rather like smoking, I can only change my own habits (have never smoked) but that won't prevent me from being harmed by other people's habits.
Even if I don't use Facebook, I can be harmed by Facebook voters.
iamnothere 3 hours ago [-]
Any solution that requires individuals to “just” do something that’s contrary to their nature is not a solution.
No society has ever solved a serious problem by “just” doing something on an individual scale en masse.
Think about what you’re suggesting. Individual action that acts like coordinated action. It’s impossible at scale. It’s a total contradiction.
(This is not even touching on the fact that the vast majority of oil use and pollution comes from military, energy, and industrial uses, not individual consumers.)
This does not imply that every problem can or even should be solved, but you’re not going to solve it this way.
BoxOfRain 4 hours ago [-]
Out of interest, would you have made this argument with respect to Big Tobacco back in the day? In my view surveillance-based behavioural recommendation engines belong very much in the same category.
juleiie 4 hours ago [-]
I would say that initiative to combat big tobacco didn’t emerge out of some bored statesman.
It was what people voted for and endorsed, one way or another. Grassroots activists and various bottom top endeavours.
If you expect somebody else to solve your problems then nothing will ever happen.
3 hours ago [-]
Levitating 4 hours ago [-]
Meta could help the situation, for instance by providing fact-checking tools and banning rage-bait creators.
Instead they have removed those tools and are paying these creators. So it's not just consumers to blame here.
juleiie 4 hours ago [-]
Well, you use their platform and thus line their pockets. Why? Because it’s convenient, it’s lazy and “free” and you sold your soul and data for far too cheap.
If the population cannot behave in their best interest then the whole western civ gets Darwin Award and I am fine with that honestly.
And it is actually happening in real time in almost all categories from fertility rate to losing psychological warfare.
Levitating 4 hours ago [-]
But we don't all use Facebook, Facebook found its niche of tech-illiterate people to abuse.
The population is a wide demographic and it would be nice if companies didn't try to exploit parts of it.
juleiie 4 hours ago [-]
You can say a lot of words on any given topic on a niche technology board but what does that change?
What can you do to change this situation? If there is a want then there are opportunities to make a difference.
Look, I don’t expect everyone to go into politics or become some kind of chief activist but I would love for people to be more aware of their collective strength and power.
To dispel the too pervasive illusion of powerlessness and false narrative (I wonder where that came from btw) about lack of agency.
Today’s divisions (I wonder where that came from) make it harder to group up with people when everyone is so split and radical and polarised (I wonder where that came from)
juleiie 4 hours ago [-]
Look, I may make a lot of quite fervent comments on this site a lot of the times but it is just because I see 24/7 how we are getting tricked into less and less personal freedoms.
It’s not a fun thing to observe
kalaksi 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not holding my breath for masses to become informed, rational, responsible and balanced overall.
And why would the responsibility lie solely on consumers to act perfectly
shevy-java 5 hours ago [-]
Now people understand why Suckerberg is called Suckerberg.
Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).
elmer2 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
3 hours ago [-]
datakan 3 hours ago [-]
Because the article itself is ragebait
Razengan 3 hours ago [-]
Why do the richest and most powerful humans, who have seen all of the world and its wonders, and can go anywhere anytime, and get all the luxuries our civilization has to offer, and never have to struggle for anything in their lives..
want to make it worse?
carefulfungi 3 hours ago [-]
Because, often, that's how they became the richest, most powerful humans. If your goal is to have money and power, and you have more today than yesterday, the world for you didn't get worse.
Razengan 3 hours ago [-]
After a point what difference does it make?
When you literally have a billion dollars what difference does 1 million more make?
baggachipz 2 hours ago [-]
Just your common dick-measuring contest at a different echelon. When all people are NPCs to be exploited, getting the highest score is the goal.
"Mega-billionaire can't relate to his millionaire friends" - Wizards with Guns
bdangubic 3 hours ago [-]
If we were normal society company like Meta would be shut down and its CEO would be in Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity
lesostep 3 hours ago [-]
If we were normal society companies like Meta would be shut down before their CEO could commit crimes against humanities
bdangubic 2 hours ago [-]
when facebook started out and was actual social network, for a short period of time it was arguably a net-positive for the society though…
pbiggar 3 hours ago [-]
Similarly, Meta is paying violent illegal israeli settlers, who commit attrocities against Palestinians in the West Bank in order to steal their land. Same mechanism.
Which part was wrong? That meta is not paying settlers? Or that the whole point of setter policy is to take the land and the method is to enable settlers to mistreat original population as much as possible?
eclips0 23 minutes ago [-]
You are a settler too, don't forget.
binary132 3 hours ago [-]
My ragebait good. Your ragebait bad.
throww2q79ww 3 hours ago [-]
Social network is a cancer. I don't even talk to people who use these networks.
fergie 5 hours ago [-]
The irony here is that ABC is the platfrom doing the rage-baiting.
ThunderSizzle 5 hours ago [-]
How is this any different than traditional media? Cable news creates fake problems and controversy constantly, and pay their news anchors well to do so.
In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.
Social media is just following the same strategy.
matherial 4 hours ago [-]
What are you trying to say? That Facebook should be excused because others also behave badly?
Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.
LunaSea 4 hours ago [-]
Social media has been protected by the Safe Harbour rules because they had millions of users creating content which was difficult to monitor and moderate.
If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.
afavour 4 hours ago [-]
One big difference is regulation and algorithms. All viewers/readers see the same content in traditional media, and they’re all subject to scrutiny by government regulators (however effective or not they may be).
Social media networks display different things to different people so it’s borderline impossible to know exactly what they’re even showing. That makes regulation extremely difficult.
More broadly, this perspective depresses me. I’m old enough to remember the promise of the internet when we first all got it: that it would democratise information and we’d be able to break free of the issues with traditional media. Fast forward to today and we’re asking “why shouldn’t the tech giants monetise hate speech?”. How far we’ve fallen.
trymas 4 hours ago [-]
With social media you can spend small amounts of money , create media and target people half across the globe from you.
ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.
lonelyasacloud 4 hours ago [-]
> How is this any different than traditional media?
Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.
brookst 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, and Ebola and influenza share traits too. I’m not sure that makes them interchangeable though.
basisword 4 hours ago [-]
>> How is this any different than traditional media?
Facebook is global. Traditional media is much more heavily regulated in some countries and while it may not be perfect, it's not comparable to the shit show that is social media.
Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.
Logically we might expect Meta to get into selling narcotics next.
"It is not Meta's role to police drug use"
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
“Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”
What's the latest social media platform position on being labeled a publisher? Aren't they against that?
Some subject matter, such as terrorist beheadings, animal abuse, sucker-punching strangers, etc, is just plain illegal and should not be publicized and glorified.
YOU may not agree, but society and the legal system has.
There’s a tremendous double standard here. The offensive right wing content is something you’d have to explicitly search for, whereas the offensive left wing content is front and center.
While agreeing that every side and compass orientation has conspiracy theories and ragebait, here in North America the right / Conservatives are foaming-at-the-mouth livid at the (real, Perceived, or mixed) wokeness / communism / liberallness of "mainstream media".
In this neck of the woods, the sentence "right has learned to tolerate different opinions they find offensive" isn't even hilariously wrong, it's tragically, despairngly, painfully bizarre :-(.
[1] https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/
- Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
- UN: Facebook had a ‘role’ in Rohingya genocide - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/13/un-facebook-had-a-r...
- Rohingya refugees sue Facebook over genocide - https://www.dw.com/en/rohingya-refugees-file-lawsuit-against...
- https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2024/12/20/fa...
- https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240921-big-techs-complic...
- https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-o...
No, but you shouldn't expect to see them addressed with respect either, just like Enron traders, Purdue salesmen or tobacco scientists don't get a lot of it.
Is Zuckerberg responsible for the harm he's causing? Yes. Are the workers enabling that responsible? Yes. Are the people who profit from indirectly supporting that responsible? Yes. Responsibility is not zero sum.
Yes. This would be ideal.
I can sort of respect a response like, "Yeah, I like Zuckerberg's money and I don't give a shit about the harm I'm enabling. I'll keep cashing my checks and being an asshole." It's the people who expect us to pretend they're not asshole that get to me. They want the upside of bad behavior without the downside. Sorry bub, FAFO.
People have, of course, every right to make such a decision based on their own ethical sensibilities. I have every right to judge them based on mine.
I would understand if you said, "Nope, still equally responsible" or if you said, "Relatively less worried about these folks".
Genuinely interested in hearing thoughts about these orgs at big companies.
> How does your judgement apply to folks who attach their altruistic efforts to the funding and reach of a big company?
If it's getting the company to fund your altruistic efforts and isn't benefiting that company, then it's not contributing to the bad deeds. Otherwise, it is.
Either way, if you're working for the company, then you're still enabling them. Whether or not you participate in internal do-gooding efforts doesn't change that.
One, do better. Two, the vitriol is obviously aimed at Meta’s white-collar employees. (Anecdotally, it’s getting harder for them to date.)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mario_Savio
“An ABC NEWS Verify investigation into several controversial Australian pages on Facebook has found that some are benefiting directly from social media monetisation programs run by Meta.”
They are paying him for his content. Funding him, if you will.
Virtually every company pays people to do stuff and then profits off of the stuff those people do.
ABC or HN has also changed the title of the post now to "paying", which is the correct word in this case, not "funding".
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
The difference is far more nuanced and borders on inconsequential when it comes to mass media influence on society.
Just because something is presented as fiction or for entertainment doesn’t mean it doesn’t impact your psyche or your perception of the world and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...
Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide, I don't think anybody would deny that anymore. So if we treat it as harmless entertainment, then we should apply the same standard to content published on social media. Publishing genocidal content would be beyond that, nobody would disagree. Still, what music do you think that African child soldiers listen to when they go on a raid to burn a village and kill everybody they find?
As for violent movies or torture horror movies which are so celebrated in mainstream culture, their impact on viewers minds and souls are probably worse than a lot of what people here don't like on Facebook.
What's your evidence for this? You seem to be making the claim that without gangster rap there's a bunch of violent crime that wouldn't have happened. But it seems more plausible to me that the bulk of that crime is due to the drug trade and other social and economic factors, and that gangster rap is just the musical expression of what's already going on.
And I'd expect the same to be true of, say, country music. Are you also going to claim that people who listened to a lot of Johnny Cash were more inclined to shoot people, possibly in Reno, just to watch them die? Did many Merle Haggard fans turn to crime because of him?
Personally, I listened to plenty of Ice T, NWA, and Snoop. Sometimes I still do. I have yet to become a stick-up kid or pack a 9 mil. Should I be worried? If there's some sort of threshold dosage, I might go over it at any time.
Actually, the article makes it pretty clear that they fund some of the really bad stuff.
Also, Meta does fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs. You'd think that money being paid would also mean a higher level of scrutiny. I'm really curious how these conversations play out internal to Meta. Does everyone just pretend this isn't an issue? Seems like there's a lot of great book material that will be dropped in the coming decades as these efforts wear on and break people.
In their records they rap about murdering people and raping women, and also threatening to murder specific individuals or bragging about having done such. Among other things.
They are also active on social media, where they also threaten people with violence and death, or brag about such feats.
And finally they also murder people in real life, or get murdered likewise by their peers.
Now for the same person, expressing themselves the same way but on different platforms. For their record company funded content we say "that's art and free speech", and for their social media posts we say "what have you done, Zuckerberg!?".
> Also, Meta does fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs.
You are right. I misunderstood the program to be general payments to all creators of size á la Spotify, but it's an invite-only program.
But even if he did, that doesn't require that he ignore negative externalities. Facebook has a Net Promoter Score similar to what health insurance companies and monopoly utilities do. Zuckerberg himself is disliked by 2/3rds of humanity. That's not good for long-term shareholder value.
Something else that's bad for long-term stock values? Profiting from slowly destroying the health of the societies in which all your customers live.
“Shareholder value” is ambiguous for good reason. It defers to the Board’s judgement. Fiduciary responsibility doesn’t excuse this sort of incentivizing of crime.
Is that true?
And if it is true, he controls 60% of the voting power because he owns class B shares that get 10 votes each. Do you think he will sue himself if he fails to wring every last dollar out of Meta?
Your second question is not relevant because you do not have to be the majority shareholder to initiate such an action.
The idea that companies should “maximise shareholder value” is a key ideal of some political/economic ideologies (especially what people describe as ‘neoliberalism’) but it’s not law.
I'm going to set up two axioms to arrive at an extrapolated conclusion.
One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias).
Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.
Extrapolated conclusion: These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
Ironically he seems to be very sensitive to this judgment. You would think he would also take action on the basis of it, but so far, seemingly not?
It sounds to me like the creators are creating and uploading the content, and then that is getting monetised on the platform?
The title makes it sound like meta is commissioning the content? I don't think that is the case here? Or is it?
Directly commissioning someone to create it is pretty wild.
Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.
It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.
However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.
Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.
Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?
I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
No one cares if you clean up after your dog makes a nr 2. The anti dog poop people want to hear you don't give a fk and let Herman poop wherever he likes.
Similarly the dog owners don't want to hear you understand. They want you to talk about little poopers getting stuck in your barbed wire with razorblades.
The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.
And you certainly shouldn’t bother monitoring what it’s doing.
I give it a couple years before the PSA about ‘your brain on social media’ or whatever.
Ironically, the article is itself ragebait! But that’s the media as a whole (including Meta).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/13/twi...
You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and not know exactly how this will go.
Meta should really have gone the way of MySpace a long, long time ago.
Though I hear it might make a comeback.-
PS. To your point, I am guessing: For one thing it takes the ability to thus conclude, to begin with. THAT, in turn takes intellect and time AND evidence such as has been accruing. AND third, probably, because addictions are by definition hard to quit. ALSO: I think few times in the history of addictive behaviours has the enabling agent had such a low low low entry threshold, such presumptive innocuousness, and such assumed and granted "utility". It began by hijacking human communication, "socialization". It is devious.-
It doesn't matter what your high level brain knows, there is a structure and organization of your brain that only changes on geologic timescales, and that structure has serious, easily attackable flaws.
PS. F'book commoditized social interaction to their ends while abusing these attackable surfaces. Kalshi and that ilk have now done away with the whole pretense of communication itself and are abusing the same addiction mechanisms to commoditize OPINION to their ends. Opinions: Everybody has one.-
PS. At some point somebody is going to commoditize mere bodily movement wrapped into such an addictive mechanism and we will get people with "weird" performative "palsies" walking about.-
I see that basically every day now with people watching TikTok or Instagram while walking, on the bus, or even driving, barely able to tear their attention away. It’s like a casino except that it’s available 24 hours a day with no limits.
and i get it! the zombified rapid button pressing over and over. when i went to japan we were stoked to go check out a pachinko hall and we walked in and it was overstimulation city lol. walking in through the front door directly out through the back door haha.
I think it's a frog boiling situation. Early users got gradually accustomed to the gradually increasing garbage, but anyone who enters the ecosystem now is immediately turned off.
- Keep in touch with family
- Comfort from having their ideas reinforced
- Organize small events
- Share pictures easily
- not feel lonely
- stay current on world events
All of those have other routes to accomplish the same thing, but I guess they have the "Dropbox effect" of simplifying it so even techno challenged can use it.
The other part is messaging. In parts of Europe nobody uses WhatsApp or SMS to communicate, everybody is on Facebook messenger.
And there's still the old school social media posts: cousin had a baby, friend got married. And also content made for the general public which is not malicious.
It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.
Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.
Hell, the most reliable communication channel for getting information from my kid's school is Instagram.
On Tiktok I don't think the platform is paying people to rage bait, at least not directly. But wannabe influencers will still try and rage bait their way into a viral video and hopefully a following. To me it's entirely transparent and I just move on but people fall for it. Lots of people. Gender wars is easy pickings. A good example was the $3 cheese surcharge on a burger. I knew immediately that was fake and it was later confirmed [1].
But why am I on Tiktok? Because there's actually some good stuff on there and just some plain entertaining stuff. But what really seals it is the comments. Therea re a ton of videos where the comments are the best part. There are some funny people out there. And Tiktok more than any other platform I've experienced seems to surface such comments.
But I could best describe Facebook as your racist uncle posting conspiracy theories and that's pretty much it.
[1]: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/tiktok-3-dollar-burger-chee...
Because it provides a form entertainment, low hanging entertainment. All designed to grip you in your weakest fronts.
Map out what triggers a person visually. Feed it in to a LLM model and on the evil scale, you can start exploiting those who get angry based on whatever content.
Anger is one of the easiest trigger points in form of media. Broadcast a opposite view of an individual or a group. Downvotes and Upvotes are the primitive form of this and if you lack the emotional intelligence (thick skin) to handle the flack, you end up turning on emotions.
The problem with Meta is the monetization and engagement model, not the lack of fact checking.
I'm not sure that I buy that when people's health are at stake. When things are objectively false, and spreading that information will actively harm people, you have a responsibility and duty of care to point out falsities. But that's just me.
That statement was censored as "objectively false", but our best information says it's probably true, and it was probably true then, too. Censorship is a dangerous walk. I totally agree with you that harmful misinformation is a problem, and that we have a duty of care. The problem is "who fact-checks the fact checkers?", and what happens when political leaders can request certain topics "fact checked".
This attitude you have is why we’re in a race to the bottom politically. I hope you live to see the fruits of your efforts, fully.
Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.
Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War
It's the exact "Industries have an incentive to self regulate" talking point that conservatives have long used to say industries should be less regulated
And you are pointing to it as an example that we shouldn't use the government to regulate media.
Meanwhile, I think the FCC does a pretty good job, where their regulatory bar is "You cannot blast boobs or these swears over the public wireless spectrum, everything else is fair game", including an entire TV channel called "Fox News" which has had to argue in court on at least one occasion that nobody would assume any program on "Fox News" was news, rather than entertainment.
Torture or murder on a live Facebook stream? You hold Facebook accountable.
UK “D-notices” are another great example
And the Sedition Act, as well as the Comstock Act
Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.
I think it has done more damage to this country than tobacco.
I've seen some local groups taken over by ragebait slop, though. Ironically, not even right wing rage bait slop. As far as I can tell, it finally boiled over for the admin of the page, who was a fairly liberal guy in an extremely rural place, when a local museum found out he was anti-Trump and stopped collaborating with him on local history (maybe for fear of other's reactions). Since then he's strictly reposted rage material from other places/people on Facebook, much of it clearly low effort/AI generated.
I can't judge him, he lives there after all, and from this side of the ocean my political sympathies are definitively closer to him than to his enemies. Still :/
I have alternatives like eBay and Gumtree but they have their own shortcomings.
Examples from Facebook:
- Antique lumber planks 50p a plank
- 4 sticks of DDR4 16GB SODIMMs, £60
- Garden tools, £10
This stuff would be slower and more expensive on eBay, and Gumtree is more of a waiting game as its userbase has definitely shrunk.
They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial"
It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.
The best solution for now seams to be what twitter is doing with community notes.
Voting seems to work, either with actual votes, or wallet, or attention.
If you're in a position where you're actually making the decision between letting these harmful practices continue, or putting a stop to them, that's different. But in this society, such people are more likely to be journalists and justices than vigilantes, so violence is still inappropriate. I think the scenario you described, of those incited to violence turning on the inciters with violence, is rather unlikely in reality, and it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
However, I'll lay odds that if I had posted that Hitler was just a misunderstood genius, my posts would have gone viral throughout the system.
As always, the only solution is twofold: (1) end the targeted advertising business model (for everyone, not just Meta) and (2) acknowledge and address the underlying social and economic problems affecting average people. But of course the establishment has no interest in pursuing either one of these. And so popular anger will continue to build.
I’m sure that shutting down the few release valves for that anger is a great solution.
I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.
These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.
I don't know what you believe Google changed about YouTube, but I believe it has just made itself worse.
Such a shame that people take up against AI, rather than the people selecting and serving them slop.
"Last month 60 popular celebrity gossip sites were closed overnight for corrupting "core socialist values," and a new regulation released in May requires all online news portals to be managed by Communist Party-sanctioned editorial staff."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40896235
I mean, yes, you also can't get away with organizing an opposition, but they really do care about social cohesion and good family values above and beyond that.
(Also, one should always note that the BBC is state owned when they write articles full of invective like this).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/dec/15/jimmy-lai...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/hong-kong-auth...
The party doesn't actually need "core socialist values" to stay in charge. They could easily have adopted a Putin (or Napoleon, or Caesar) attitude of "I don't give a damn about the framework legitimizing my rule, as long as you acknowledge me as the boss".
They did oversee an unprecedented rise in living standards and global influence after all...
Maybe those core socialist values were what enabled it?
If you provide both:
a) a service to earn money from content
b) an algo promoting those videos
then yes, IMHO they pay them directly for the content produced.
- Meta is commissioning or sponsoring rage-bait
- Controversial creators are earning money through Facebook's content monetization program
The title is ambiguous (at first, I thought it was the first case), and that's where the clickbait lies.
No doubt that also the second case is a serious problem, but that's orthogonal to the ambiguity of the title.
Contrast it with something like Elsagate. Google actioned the offending creators and attempted to deprioritize the kind of content that caused the controversy. Facebook would do the same if they didn't condone rage-bait.
They don't because they don't select for it. They disporotionally push engagement but as far as I know don't have some indians or AI working tirelessly analysing countless videos to categorise them and rank them according to how ragebaity or controversial they are. Those things just rise to the top out of their effort to drive engagement and screentime.
Any alternative that does the same will end up with similar result.
And regardless, even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
Maybe they have some romantic ideals about the 1930s, where Schacht fixed the economy for Hitler with a form of quantitative easing. But that scheme became unsustainable around 1938.
The difference is that back then the powerful needed people. The current Silicon Valley "elites" want to get rid of everyone, make them dumb and replace them with AI.
The sooner the right wing audience realizes this, the better.
Meta are the greatest force against freedom in the world today, apart from Putin's post-fascist power vertical and the Chinese Communist Party.
What I think of Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately cannot be printed, because unlike Meta platforms, HN has standards.
Some of these actors also put a lot of money into campuses in the west, so when you're done watching some terrible propaganda, you can join a local club and find your way to more people getting angry at misinformation. This is how we get stuff like "globalize intifada" and students "occupying" buildings.
I wish this was just hyperbole, but really, go check for yourself what kind of money state actors put into schools and universities in the west, and why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_pet-eating_hoax
Stop raging on the internet and the rage bait content will disappear overnight.
Stop buying oil, chasing newest phones, luxuries, and the climate will get better overnight.
It’s all on the consumers, contrary to Redditor belief that the big corporations are at fault, it’s simply the matter of demand and thus supply. Not the other way around.
Take accountability. I know nowadays it is very unpopular to take accountability but this is the first step to make world better place. You can only change your own habits.
Rather like smoking, I can only change my own habits (have never smoked) but that won't prevent me from being harmed by other people's habits.
Even if I don't use Facebook, I can be harmed by Facebook voters.
No society has ever solved a serious problem by “just” doing something on an individual scale en masse.
Think about what you’re suggesting. Individual action that acts like coordinated action. It’s impossible at scale. It’s a total contradiction.
(This is not even touching on the fact that the vast majority of oil use and pollution comes from military, energy, and industrial uses, not individual consumers.)
This does not imply that every problem can or even should be solved, but you’re not going to solve it this way.
It was what people voted for and endorsed, one way or another. Grassroots activists and various bottom top endeavours.
If you expect somebody else to solve your problems then nothing will ever happen.
Instead they have removed those tools and are paying these creators. So it's not just consumers to blame here.
If the population cannot behave in their best interest then the whole western civ gets Darwin Award and I am fine with that honestly.
And it is actually happening in real time in almost all categories from fertility rate to losing psychological warfare.
The population is a wide demographic and it would be nice if companies didn't try to exploit parts of it.
What can you do to change this situation? If there is a want then there are opportunities to make a difference.
Look, I don’t expect everyone to go into politics or become some kind of chief activist but I would love for people to be more aware of their collective strength and power.
To dispel the too pervasive illusion of powerlessness and false narrative (I wonder where that came from btw) about lack of agency.
Today’s divisions (I wonder where that came from) make it harder to group up with people when everyone is so split and radical and polarised (I wonder where that came from)
It’s not a fun thing to observe
And why would the responsibility lie solely on consumers to act perfectly
Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).
want to make it worse?
When you literally have a billion dollars what difference does 1 million more make?
"Mega-billionaire can't relate to his millionaire friends" - Wizards with Guns
https://www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/posts/meta-does...
In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.
Social media is just following the same strategy.
Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.
If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.
Social media networks display different things to different people so it’s borderline impossible to know exactly what they’re even showing. That makes regulation extremely difficult.
More broadly, this perspective depresses me. I’m old enough to remember the promise of the internet when we first all got it: that it would democratise information and we’d be able to break free of the issues with traditional media. Fast forward to today and we’re asking “why shouldn’t the tech giants monetise hate speech?”. How far we’ve fallen.
ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.
Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.
Facebook is global. Traditional media is much more heavily regulated in some countries and while it may not be perfect, it's not comparable to the shit show that is social media.