Anti-social media

They could ban 53 accounts to protect 24 million people, but choose not to.

Part political thriller, part corporate horror story, and part dark comedy. Wynn-Williams doesn’t just pull back the curtain, she yanks it down, revealing a company run by arrogant, reckless execs like Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and Kaplan, who treat the world as an afterthought while chasing growth at all costs. It’s infuriating, jaw-dropping, and sometimes downright surreal. And she tells it all with wit, clarity, and guts.

Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental protections for our digital communities from corporate control and surveillance capitalism.

It could identify when they were feeling worthless or helpless or like a failure, and [Meta] would take that information and share it with advertisers

Three young children huddle in front of a camera, cross-legged and cupping their hands. “Please support me. We are very poor,” says a boy, staring down the lens.

Yaaaass

Excellent article by @Noupside@saturation.social highlighting how Musk draws on experiences from Twitter in his ongoing destruction of the US state aparatus.

Most online debate is actively harmful to our thinking. Every hour spent arguing on Twitter is an hour we could have spent reading a book, writing an essay, or having a genuine discussion in a better environment.

When was the last time you participated in an election for an online group chat or sat on a jury for a dispute about a controversial post? Platforms nudge users to tolerate nearly all-powerful admins, moderators, and “benevolent dictators for life.” In Governable Spaces, Nathan Schneider argues that the internet has been plagued by a phenomenon he calls “implicit feudalism”: a bias, both cultural and technical, for building communities as fiefdoms. The consequences have spread far beyond online spaces themselves. Feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian politicians. But online spaces could be sites of a creative, radical, and democratic renaissance. Schneider shows how the internet can learn from governance legacies of the past to become a more democratic medium, responsive and inventive unlike anything that has come before.

I found this to be a great write-up on how social media enables fascism by providing a sense of false agency: Posting online we feel like we are doing something, and we end up wasting our time shouting in a void rather than actually resisting.

And no amount of corporate jargon or performative masculinity can make that stain go away.

At a moment when Zuckerberg's focus is clearly on sucking up to the Trump administration, Instagram goes the extra mile to block hashtags like #democrat and #democrats from Instagram.

Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services. After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.

They replicate bias, entrench inequalities, and distort institutional aims. They devalue much of what makes us human: our capacities to exercise discretion, act spontaneously, and reason in ways that can’t be quantified. And far from being objective or neutral, technical decisions made in system design embed the values, aims, and interests of mostly white, mostly male technologists working in mostly profit-driven enterprises. Simply put, these tools are dangerous; in O’Neil’s words, they are “weapons of math destruction.”

The WEF surveyed hundreds of experts worldwide and found that false and misleading content is seriously harming the geopolitical environment in a number of ways.

Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp—has just hired Dustin Carmack, a former adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s doomed presidential campaign and an ex–Project 2025 employee.

The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.

In an update to its hate speech policy on Tuesday, spotted first by The Independent, the apps' parent company Meta deleted numerous clauses banning specific derogatory statements about protected groups, while adding detailed exceptions for anti-trans speech.

Instagram has begun testing a feature in which Meta’s AI will automatically generate images of users in various situations and put them into that user’s feed. One Redditor posted over the weekend that they were scrolling through Instagram and were presented an AI-generated slideshow of themselves standing in front of “an endless maze of mirrors,” for example.

Mr White’s appointment was announced on Monday and comes as Silicon Valley seeks to build closer links to Mr Trump

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, said the donation was a departure from past practice by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

"Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created," Mark Zuckerberg says.