I refuse to use Meta, and I block their various URLs in my home. Friends and family complain and give me grief about it. It’s astonishing how much of a creep Zuck is, and yet he’s got his hooks in deep, and some people are still addicted to his garbage.
Now we’re doing headlines like this with tech companies in addition to politicians? These fuckers act with impunity because they can.
For some reason, it appears the unbreakable barrier for humanity is switching the fucking social media site you go to.
What would it take for people to consider not looking at Instagram and Facebook? A feed full of snuff videos?
the unbreakable barrier for humanity is switching the fucking social media site you go to.
Facebook is quickly becoming a retirement community, exclusively for me-maws and pepes. It hasn’t been the tool for college kids to organize keggers in nearly a decade.
But when alternatives to Facebook crop up - your Instagrams and TikToks and Discords and WhatsApps and Grindrs - they don’t last long before being gobbled up by the bigger social media giants or shut down by hostile state regulators.
In the end, everything returns to Facebook, because the big companies can borrow money for free and staple on whatever small firm is seeing a lot of early growth. I give BlueSky another three years, tops, before one of the big social media giants acquires it.
I agree, but we should at least have them fork over the cash to buy a new dumpster to enshittify every few years. There’s Twitter that people still cling to despite it being a superfund site since at least when Leon bought it.
Make Facebook the next MySpace, make Reddit the next Digg. Make social media sites starve to death from lack of engagement again.
pepes
You’re thinking of 4chan
Instagram and TikTok are already big social media giants in their own right.
If TikTok gets gobbled up, it’ll be because of the legal proceedings going on in which lawmakers are trying to force TikTok to allow itself to be bought up by some US company. Which is another issue altogether, cause if I start a business, the legality of the US government forcing me to sell my business to someone else, or even to be forced to sell my business to a foreign government or company and not be allowed to possess it, is a whole can of worms.
But outside of WhatsApp being shut down due to security reasons, the majority of those wouldn’t qualify as social media sites that would be gobbled up by some other social media giant.
Instagram is, uh, Meta? It was gobbled up just as it was taking off.
Tiktok couldn’t be gobbled, and is being beat down by legislators until they sell to US tech firms.
I stand corrected then. You can ignore all my bloviating.
bloviating
I love this word. TIL it.
I wish, they got rid of all the snuff sites long ago
Its amazing how quickly these assholes have dropped any sort of facade they were keeping up towards their public image. At best they are doing whatever they think will get them the most money, more realistically they actually support this regressive bullshit. As a non-American I am so pissed at what a good portion of that country has voted for and those that stayed home instead of preventing this.
LOL welcome to corporate America. The only reason they paid lip service to causes like you mention is because it was temporarily a pathway to more profit. Now that Trump is in office (or nearly so, anyway) they have read the room and realized these beliefs are actually a liability now. So, surprise! They dropped em like a rock in the pursuit of more profits. Never never never trust a corporation to do the right thing. They sometimes accidentally do it in the pursuit of profits, but tying your hopes and dreams to a large corporation is a foolish plan. THEY DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU THEY CARE ABOUT THE MONEY IN YOUR WALLET.
The oligarchs have paid their tithe to king Trump and feel like they are immune to consequences. So far they have been correct.
Yeah, it is absolutely crazy how much the tide has shifted with trump’s reelection. These so-called “woke” companies (it was always performative, but they performed for the more just side) have all turned 180 and dropped to their knees to kiss the ring.
And this is because of the very real feeling that trump will abuse his power and unconstitutionally stay in office. The guardrails seem to have come down, and these fuckers are rushing to get on the fascist’s good side.
That should alarm everyone, so I’ll say it again: these companies are positioning themselves on the side of fascism because they don’t think we can stop them anymore. They are making business decisions that bolster fascists because there’s a fuckin dollar in it.
With the power of these fucking megacorps behind the fascist movement, it’s like sticking a rocket engine on its ass.
Something something 1930’s Germany.
The guardrails seem to have come down
They don’t seem to, they definitely have. Remember that Supreme Court ruling that said the president can break the law?
That’s not at all amazing. What’s amazing is that a large number of people thought it was a great idea to hand over the power to decide what’s true or not to private companies. When they rolled out this “content moderation” used mostly against Trump the political left was beside itself with joy. I remember the taunts of “haha it’s a private company, they can publish whatever they want.” So incredibly stupid and short sighted.
The “it’s a private company lolz” thing was itself a reaction to when Republicans were refusing to make gay wedding cakes, and the loss of the Fairness Doctrine long before that.
I think “thought it was a great idea to hand over the power […] to private companies” is a misrepresentation. Some moderation was better than no moderation, but obviously "the political left"would have preferred regulation rather than self regulation.
What’s the point you’re making? That nothing should have been done?
That this was worse than nothing. Time after time we fall for the old “we’ll self-regulate trust us” and all it did was delay actual action being taken while a Democrat was in charge, and now we’re stuck for at least 4 more years. It was already godawful 4 years ago, 4 years from now the state of public discourse may be beyond repair.
I see your point now and agree
I mean, I feel thats still true. And because it’s true, we need to get the f off of it, as a society.
Supposing your team had won, these people would go back to only paying lip service. Better, no doubt, but not a solution. How long did fascists and racists and misogynists lay dormant in US culture before seizing control now?
You need cleansing and systemic change. People need to internalize “no one is free until everyone is free.” Fascists and ethno-nationalists need to be afraid and culturally eliminated over generations.
Fascism is enabled by liberalism, and its capitalist ideology, and it’s promoted by capitalists when capital is threatened. Capitalism is the underlying force here, and capitalists are behaving in exactly the same way they’ve done at similar points in history and as described and predicted by leftists.
Yes Democrats losing the vote sucks and we’re all paying for it, globally, but their win would have been a delay at best. That doesn’t mean winning votes isn’t important, but it means that it can’t be your one and only political action once every 4 years. It’s time to get serious.
This puzzles me. Why do these Meta employees care for LGBTQ people? How can anyone work for Meta and have a conscience?
Dude I’ve never had a single job that wasn’t for an entity I didn’t find morally reprehensible. I don’t think most people will ever have a choice in this matter. You have to work to eat.
