Fears of Big Tech Censorship Grow After Meta Suspends No Kings Instagram Account
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/86855
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132 replies
Of look! All those things we said would happen are happening. Quelle surprise.
Qui aurait pu le prévoir? Pikachu.exe
Walang sinuman ang makakapaghula nito. Isang ganap na sorpresa ito.
Obh obh, cò thog an tùr babel a rithist?
Më thonë se gjyshi im e ndërtoi, por prindërit e mi nuk janë njerëz shumë të besueshëm.
Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn.
हमरा हिसाब से ऊ इंतजार करत रह सकेला आ सपना देखत रह सकेला।
every time the Americans go ‘oh shit I think we’re obviously living in a fascist regime!’ they forget about it within a week, this is like the 8th time in the last 2 years that this headline has run.
Literally two days ago they were running the same headline in response to Starlink and Ukraine.
I think we remember it every day, but that doesn't mean we suddenly reach the critical mass necessary to change it. For those of us who recognize what's happening for what it is, it's at the forefront of our minds.
Don’t you DARE suggest they get off their cowardly asses or they’ll start throwing MAGA-level language at you real fast
It's always the same responses:
"Nothing can be done" (we tried nothing and are all out of ideas)
"What are you doing about it?" (Can't somebody else do it? We welcome foreign interference!)
And then endless excuses for why nothing will work so they won't even try.
I've even seen the people giving these responses mock others for moving away from the US.
"It's a very big country, you see."
The downvotes on this post are hilarious. Just a bunch of the most pants-pissing white liberal cowards who keep telling themselves they're not part of the problem.
Though I will ALSO mock Americans who would rather flee the country than stay and fight back.
Hey guys, I had an idea that maybe the richest people in the world are buying up all the media so that they can control and censor public discourse and anything they disagree with.
I know it's a bit out there, and I can't prove it, but it's just this crazy thought I had!
Post was removed by AI mod
Reason: Subversive thoughts
It’s almost like abandoning protocols for platforms was a mistake.
Just like coming down from the trees and leaving the ocean.
It’s pretty crazy inside ocean though.
Yeah leaving the ocean was the first big mistake. Or maybe it was going multicellular. Or maybe it was letting in that bacterium that turned into proto-mitrochondria. Seemed like a really good deal at the time, all this new energy available for neat new activities, in exchange for some “progress” and cooperation? What could go wrong!?
If we hadn’t left the ocean, some other species would’ve taken our place. And while you may feel differently, I really don’t think orcas would be any more responsible than us. This is to say that there’s no guarantee that any species would behave any better than we have, given the same level of intelligence and drive for resources.
It’s not a zero sum game. Let the orcas go to work. I’ll gladly be their pet or play in their zoo, it’s likely to be better than what we’ve set up.
Can’t help but notice you didn’t mention your eagerness to be the orca’s food, which given the their nature, is drastically more likely.
Nah, they have been widely and countless times shown to be disinterested in or even vehemently opposed to eating us for whatever reason, the only known attacks come from mistreatment or mistaken identity, whereas there are literally centuries of numerous stories of their willingness to partner with us to work for shared hunting spoils in the wild, and numerous stories of their protecting humans from other predators. They’ll be great owners to us.
I see you either didn’t read or patently disregarded where I said “given our level of intelligence and drive for resources.”There’s no reason to assume they’d be as benevolent as you assume, especially given how deadly they’ve proven to other animals, such as seals, just for sport.
Orcas are highly disciplined apex predators whose behaviors are calculated survival strategies. I get your understandable dislike of human species, but to pretend that those predators would be kinder and more benevolent than us at our level of intelligence and capacity for reason seems to be nothing more than hating a species that, by and large, is generally kinder than the assholes, who get the most attention.
Don't forget abandoning nomadic lifestyles in favor of agriculture and settled civilizations...
I don’t know living until a maximum of 50 doesn’t sound great.
You want to spend an extra 50 years in a drawn-out process of dying?
50 is not old. Plenty of people can enjoy life into thier 70s. 80+ is where bodily autonomy degrades.
Man, I was just keeping with the deadpan humor of the thread. I know 50 is still young. But leaving the ocean and coming down from the trees likely had similar effects on lengthening life expectancies, no? I don't think we're here for an anthropological debate though, are we?
I wish activist organizations would stop making Instagram their primary/sole updates platform and have more sane communication options that aren't crazy addictive and centralized (for which there are quite a few options). Encouraging more people onto Instagram is counterintuitive
That's where people are these days, unfortunately.
Guess some people don't like hearing the truth. Maybe if they post to peer tube instead they can get 5 views and maybe even a like.
We have to be able to meet people where they are, wherever they might be.
That's assuming that they stumble on it. If all of those members know where to go, they will probably use an alternative platform. After all we all heard of a better option to redit and here we are
But how many people actually left Reddit to go here versus how many are still there?
Lemmy underestimate the vile power of network effect.
some went back to lemmy after coming here. i think some LURK on reddit instead though, after they were forced out, or tried to create a new account. all the content is there.
That's a good point. It should really be a two-pronged approach. One is setting up and maintaining an alternative to the mainstream social media sites, while the other is out in the muck trying to inform people and let them know where to go.
It isn't that I object to people reluctantly using the big-tech social platforms, it's that they seemingly do so enthusiastically.
I'm not disputing. Enthusiasm is precisely why they are in Instagram.
You misspelled AI bot accounts. It is unfortunate though.
Fancy that!
There's a reason Elon bought Twitter, and it wasn't just so he could wave his dick through the world's biggest megaphone.
Bluesky will fall in line as well. You don't have platforms with hundreds of millions of users without big pockets, and if you've got big pockets it would seem the world is already working exactly the way you want it to.
bluesky is already falling in line, its getting there.
If only there were, I don’t know, a social media network of services that use the same protocol to talk to each other, and has no central authority? Something that, and this may be a stretch here, that is created and ran by the people?
Maybe someday. 🤷
Hmm. You might be onto something. Perhaps some kind of universal protocol that would allow for a federation of independent social media nodes, a fedi-verse, if you will.
I heard that this utopian "freddy-verse" does in fact exist. I wonder how it can be accessed, does anyone know?
It's complicated.
Yeah, how would we even know if we were using it right now?
I do think the fediverse is better than the corporate built alternatives but the more time I've spent here the less I believe that it is a great solution. People are the fundamental problem and people control every instance, moderate every community, and post every comment (excluding bots which are their own problem). The amount of infighting I've witnessed here over trivial bullshit is astounding. People are constantly calling for defederation over one offense or another. Much of it rivals Reddit in it's pettiness.
It's true that no single entity controls it all, and that is an improvement, but everything still gets fragmented so much that I don't think I believe it can reasonably grow beyond what it is now. Not without running into variations of the same problems as the others at least.
I think the simple truth of the matter is that humans can't help this kind of tribal behavior. We group ourselves together using all kinds of labels, some broad and some incredibly specific, but the end result is always the same. Those with the labels I gave myself which are most important to me are my friends and those without them are my enemy. Until that primal need to exclude others is gone, any communal space we create will devolve to the point that there are effectively multiple siloed echo chambers that rarely overlap.
That was more of a rant than I initially intended, but the point is that I don't think the fediverse would have solved this problem. If a federated version of Instagram was the dominant service for that kind of activity then the No Kings account there would have been censored by many groups for many reasons. Enough so that I don't know that the impact would be any different.
I think what you're saying is that fediverse is a better solution but it will not scale and I agree.
Pretty much, yeah. Marginally better at least, depending on what you want it to be.
I dont think the fediverse will be able to withstand a sophisticated threat in its current form.
Once the number of MAUs makes it worth manipulating, it will be impossible to manage.
There will be a few large well managed instances with no federation, and a disparate assortment of tiny instances with very limited federation.
Agreed. The only reason this is not overrun with spam and bots is because it is small.
A possible solution could be reputation, but that gets dangerously close to Reddit Karma.
Nah, bots can farm reputation better than humans can.
The problem is that federation assumes good intent of the admins of other instances. If someone builds a network of instances intended to manipulate votes et cetera, I can't see how the fediverse could resist that.
Instance A can't trust that votes from instance B are legit. As soon as there's no trust then federating even with an aparently trustworthy instance becomes too costly in terms of time and effort.
I think a some kind of Web of Trust would have to be implemented. Like with GPG decide which servers and users you trust.
I don't know how that could work.
At the server level we already have that - federating with a server includes that server in the web of trust.
At the user level, how would new users become trusted? That seems unachievable given how difficult it is to attract users just in general without something like that. I've been on the fediverse for years but I don't know any other users that would "trust" me.
There's an awareness problem, though; the people only on corporate social media need to be told about mbin/piefed/lemmy (and then explained how to sign up and use it because instances, etc.) and it's not really effective to use only things in the fediverse to do that.
And none of you saw this coming? Really? State owned media news and "entertainment" outlets refusing to disparage the king?
And STILL y'all use them - knowing full well that all your information is sold on the open market and all your secrets are no more?
And then bitch about it. Fucking hell - America and the rest of the world devolves into dumb shits.
If you don't want to be "cut off" by the people you're protesting against, DON'T USE THEIR MEDIA.
Convenience is a hell of a drug. As soon as you ask someone to uproot their social media presence to the fediverse their eyes begin to glaze over. They don't understand it and want to be part of a giant and almost all-encompassing community which is not where we're currently at right now.
It takes multiple instances of censorship, frustration, and offending the wrong bot to be forced out of their online shell and even then they might still go for the next corporate-owned social media because it's "easier" than understanding what federation means.
state sponsored mass surveillance using AI cameras.
People need to understand that Zuch was in on this since at least Cambridge analyitca, he's one of the pioneers of modern misinformation warfare. Of all the guys in tech, only musk is more on Trump's side than Zuch. Actively the enemy.
musk has twitter, and tesla which has a wider reach. zuck has russian disinformation backing to help with manipulating boomer and genx users.
You must be delusional if you think Musk has bigger reach than Zuckerberg. Facebook is used by everyone. Your grandparents are on it. It has 3 billion monthly active users. Twitter has 5 to 6 times less users than that sitting at 500-600 million. Meta also had Instagram which is also incredibly popular.
And WhatsApp which provides businesses in the third world a platform to communicate internally and with customers. Besides being the most popular massenger. Took me years to get a majority of my friends and family to use Signal or Threema instead.
So they're destroying the 'social' feature of their social media. Interesting choice.
It stopped being social media a long time ago. It’s been addiction media since a long time. I used to call it consumption media. But addiction media is more accurate.
Datamining tool that was getting federal money. 3rd party government funded social manipulation.
... which is why TikTok was in fact a weapons platform more than a social one
what the fuck are they expecting? The account against kings on the platform owned by wannbee kings? get your fucking shit together, open your eyes and FUCKING LEAVE!
And lets stop about that BS "but we won't be able to reach as many people if blah blah". There. You now reach NO-FUCKING-BODY
Given how many bots and scam accounts are already present on the mainstream socials, it's not like they were reaching anybody to start.
Bit late for those fears, but okay
They did the same thing to Lula right before the Brazilian election, so what's to stop them from doing it domestically?
Honestly, they did the same thing in 2016 just were more sly about it
Can't spell metastasis without META: They are a cancer, delete your accounts today and stop letting them spread their sickness into you, your friends, or your family.
If you are fighting someone why the fuck would you use the platform of those you are fighting against?
There are plenty of options that you can use which haven't been invaded by parasites.
To reach the greatest number of people. In the fediverse you'd reach a dozen nerds at maximum, but everyone and their dog is still in Facebook and other corporate social media platforms
I know BUT there was plenty of time to get them to move somewhere else and keep the momentum and now it will take time to build it back up.
The Arab Spring was the "Facebook Revolution".
One man's revolutionary is another man's terrorist.
That maybe so but then why use a platform which is controlled by those that would classify you as a terrorist and can't block your actions against them?
No kings is about the separation of powers and the exercise of the First Amendment.
It's worth having an Instagram account precisely because this might happen.
Tell me we're not an oligarchy.
I would, but I don’t like lying.
Meta and X need to be banned from the EU.
Add Google, Amazon, and Apple to that and we might have a chance to start improving life in Europe.
And Microsoft
Especially Microslop, yes, idk how they escaped my list.
Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube..... Federation is the only real solution...
Streisand Effect in effect.
Whenever they accuse the democrats of doing something, you can be certain it's what they want to do in the very near future.
These absolute dumb fucks shouldn't be using facebook or instagram to begin with.
The Alt-right and capitalism ladies & gentlemen! Hope it was worth it.
Terrible headline. Implies that censorship isn’t happening, but we are on a slippery slope.
It should “Awareness of big tech censorship grows after…”
I sure don't miss Meta's shitty products. I made the right move closing all of my accounts years ago.
Remember how all the cons that thought "the Twitter files" were such a big deal and were constantly mewling about things like "Section 230"?
And all because they were merely being mildly hemmed in on saying openly racist shit on a private platforms, spreading harmful conspiracy theories about a pandemic, and wanting a Russian psyop about a hard drive, oops, I mean, "laptop" spread far and wide on the same private platforms.
Wonder where all these free speech maximalists are now?
I submit that the conservatives have always been rather problematic in their mental state, but a few things definitely broke their brains: 1. A black man being elected twice, and generally well-regarded by most of America and the world. 2. Their Qanon bullshit stories did not result in Podesta, Clinton, Obama, etc., being arrested by donnie douchebag. 3. Covid. and finally, 4. Their J6 scheme failed
By the time they hit 2021, their brains were so utterly broken. Claiming that "Big Tech" post Cambridge Analytica was "liberal", LOL. Quite the fucking take. And what conservatives have been the least bit cancelled? I still hear from all of these assholes all the time, way too much.
I tried researching candidates for elections the other day and Gemini refused to do anything but point me to the candidate's official platforms. I wanted to know who they were and what they did with political power they had into he past and we're not allowed to know that, apparently.
Why did you trust a LLM to source and interpret that information for you in the first place?
Slow down there big rig. I did an exercise to see what AI would do and it refused to assist me in helping me make an informed democratic choice. It has no such issue assisting with other tasks. That is disturbing limitation to put on it imo.
Has anyone else noticed that Google's results are largely irrelevant to the search now?
I've found Gemini will answer the question or whatever I've typed in (almost always 100% incorrectly) , I'll scroll past it only for the search results to be almost entirely random links that don't include my search terms.
They've abandoned traditional search. Our only options to search the net may be an AI interface.
🤢
I've been on a bit of an anti smart tech crusade in my house recently, and it's looking like I'm fully going back to 1999 then. If I don't know something, and no one I can ask knows then I just don't get to know. I refuse to ask the ai to search the internet for me when the search bar used to work perfectly fine and it's giving me the wrong answers.
Time to invest in one of those world encyclopaedias I guess.
I'm happily using kagi for search. I have to pay for it, but that way I'm not (necessarily) the product.
How about we all unite to make a better search engine? Alone it's hard but together it's very possible
The fact that one of the most prominent anti-trump movements is run by such clueless people, gives me no optimism for amerikkka
"omg, the guy sitting right behind the king on coronation day banned our content for criticizing the king!" (surprised pikachu face)
Almost every prominent activist organization is like that too, like they'll constantly bring up how bad the current establishment is while exclusively using Instagram, Discord, and Slack for communication. The small anarchist organizations seem to be the only ones who know what they're doing tech-wise.
Tech literary is really lost in this generation. But I think we have to do better and teach them. It's not thaaat hard and as with everything there are layers how far you can go.
There's a whole matrix of choices for apps, platforms etc. focusing on different usecases.
“Fears”.
POSSE from 93 til infinity https://indieweb.org/POSSE
So… fear of a thing that has always been happening grows? I didn’t know it’s possible.
As understood it, It was a auto-ban. And was therefore quickly re-instated. So no ill will. this time.
META is still a cancer, people need to stop letting it metastasize and delete their accounts.
They've "accidentally" suppressed left-wing or billionaire-critical accounts far more often than right-wing ones. And each time it's just a technical whoopsie. I'm not sure they're beingb honest with their explanations.
Edit: And, one day later, another technical oopsie where WhatsApp "accidentally" gave politically loaded instructions to their AI: https://redact.dev/blog/whatsapp-help-pages-hidden-ai-instructions
This can't be happening! I'm shocked beyond words
It's a hard topic to sort out. On one hand these are private company's platforms so they can kinda do what they want with their property. On the other hand, it's undeniable that social media IS news media now. So acts like this are effectively suppressing the news. And our laws (or lack thereof) have allowed actual news media and social media news media to be monopolized by one political ideology, which is extremely dangerous.
The only real answer at the moment is to simply stop using those platforms. But I get it. They're using the most populated platforms to try to reach the most people. Unfortunately, all the most populated platforms are owned by fascists.
Oh no. How are people gonna know when the next "lets all walk with signs on a Saturday when its not really disrupting any flow of business and the "kings" are quietly sleeping" day?
The truth will always find a way to get out. Grassroots organizations and word of mouth can easily defeat censored communications technology owned by questionably moral "businessmen".
No doubt these ppl get to use AI without the public restrictions. Remember that. They get to carry a gun everywhere and you only get to at the shooting range.
I think No Kings will be OK
I'm shocked "No Kings" had anything suspended given what a milquetoast joke of a movement it is.
It's a sizeable movement motivating people to vote against fascism. If you have a problem with that then I guess I'm not surprised you're carrying water for Mark Zuckerberg in the comments.
At the ones I've seen, the action itself was just speeches and signs etc, but people were meeting new comrades and organizations, some people learning about PSL for the first time which actually calls for serious action. It's not intended to be a strike-back type of thing like what's happening in France or Albania, it's helping people who have never done any serious political work in their lives get their foot in it.
All the tough guy experts in the comments.
At least 4 people identify as tough guy experts.
Are you pro censorship? Pretty weird take buddy
What?
You sound a bit simple
You sound like an asshole.
They had it coming tbh.
None of us want to see Trump demonstrating what he does with horses in his free time.
Mr. Hands Redux: Tail of the Two-Fisted Terror.
There's a name I (fortunately) haven't heard in a good long while.
The orange one can absolutely try to recreate what Mr. Hands did, though. Happy horse, happy country.
Weirdest cult ever.