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Possibly the best cartoon figuratively illustrating opposition to the Musk-Trump régime.
By Portuguese artist Zez Vaz.
One thing everybody can do is to quit and delete broligarch social media. People who rant about Musk and Trump but still use Twitter/X and Facebook (and other Meta platforms) are being hypocritical. You empower the MAGA overlords just by being there.
Shes right!
Meta says its platforms will instead rely on "community notes" from its users, an approach pioneered by X.
Don't expect to find facts any more on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Zuck-owned social media.
Multibillionaire Mark Zuckerberg apparently wants to add even more loot to his enormous fortune. So he has increasingly been kissing up to Donald Trump.
Trump dwells in a universe where any content which contradicts him or disagrees with him is disparaged as "fake news". In such a space, fact checking is considered a hindrance to Trump's firehose of bullshit.
So getting rid of fact checking is a green light for conspiracy theorists, hate speech, and (of course) unsubstantiated Trump bullshit.
Meta is abandoning the use of independent fact checkers on Facebook and Instagram, replacing them with X-style "community notes" where commenting on the accuracy of posts is left to users. In a video posted alongside a blog post by the company on Tuesday, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said third-party moderators were "too politically biased" and it was "time to get back to our roots around free expression". The move comes as Zuckerberg and other tech executives seek to improve relations with US President-elect Donald Trump before he takes office later this month. Trump and his Republican allies have criticised Meta for its fact-checking policy, calling it censorship of right-wing voices. Speaking after the changes were announced, Trump told a news conference he was impressed by Zuckerberg's decision and that Meta had "come a long way". Asked whether Zuckerberg was "directly responding" to threats Trump had made to him in the past, the incoming US president responded: "Probably".
It's time to get off of META (Facebook, etc.) as it is to get off Twitter/X.
Your presence there just makes broligarchs richer and feeds the Trump messaging machine.
Don't whine that you somehow need Facebook to keep in touch with friends. People had lasting friendships for hundreds of years before Zuck started Facebook to rate girls at Harvard. And people in pre-Facebook times had fewer worries about privacy.
And please don't spew the insipid line: "I don't click the ads there." Clicking ads is not the point. You are giving broligarch social media credibility just by being there. Without people like you, Facebook and Twitter/X are just clones of Truth Social.
Quitting META and Twitter/X in not just good politics and good for your privacy, it's excellent for your mental health.
Should You Leave Social Media?
Democratic senator concerned after company is accused of ‘shadow-banning’ non-profits offering medication abortion
Mark Zuckerberg isn't just kissing Trump's ass, he's asking The Donald which shade of lipstick he should use when doing so.
Apparently Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc.) is throttling information on abortion.
Senator Ruben Gallego has accused social media giant Meta of “presumptively bowing” to the Trump administration by making abortion-related content more difficult to find. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, was accused of “shadow-banning” several non-profits who provide medication abortion to women in the US. “I am deeply concerned at the chilling effect that suppressing content related to abortion has towards women,” Gallego wrote in a letter sent to the company on Friday. “Women around the country rely on medicated abortion as safe and effective way to address deeply personal health decisions.” A dozen states across the south-east and midwest ban abortion. Four states ban the procedure past six weeks of gestation, before most women know they are pregnant. Non-profits, such as Aid Access, have responded by providing medication abortion to women in all 50 states using “shield laws” – protections passed by states friendly to reproductive rights that prevent healthcare providers from legal consequences in abortion-ban states. In Gallego’s letter, the senator describes how Aid Access had posts removed from Facebook and blurred on Instagram. The organization was also locked out of Facebook and briefly suspended from Instagram.
By using Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta platforms, you are supporting an affiliate of the MAGA propaganda machine. Zuck has gotten increasingly brazen in his support for Trump. It goes beyond the usual token kowtowing. He is an enthusiastic member of the MAGA Broligarchy.
Though there's a two letter difference between MAGA and META, the similarities are actually much closer than that.
What makes a “good” app, anyway?
There are plenty of excellent political reasons to abandon Twitter/X and Meta. But once you do quit, you'll also feel healthier.
In this excerpt, Kate Lindsay compares Twitter/X and Meta to less toxic choices.
This past week, I went through, cleaned out, and updated my Goodreads for the first time in almost 10 years. I did the same with Ravelry, which is essentially a Goodreads for knitting. I also finally downloaded Letterboxd (pretend I never wrote this), and updated it with some of my most recent watches (Wallace And Gromit: A Vengeance Most Fowl? Five stars). These apps fall in line with what should be the point of apps in the first place: to help with real life. You can’t engage with them in a vacuum. To use Goodreads, you have to be reading. To use Ravelry, you have to be knitting. To use Letterboxd, you have to be watching (ideally going to see) movies. Even a visit to Pinterest, one of the pioneers of the infinite scroll, more often than not ends with me pinning something I’d like to do IRL—a sewing pattern I’d like to try, or a new way to organize my office. These apps are companions, not black holes.
Twitter/X and Meta are black holes whose gravitational pull never let go of your attention.
Platforms are dominated by a minority of vocal users. Those people make you think that their dominance represents majority views. It's basically how extremists (regardless of ideology) hijack the conversation at Twitter/X and Meta with the help of algorithms which promote them.
Now, a majority of the content on most platforms comes from a minority of “power users.” You can chicken-or-egg this debate, but I think it went like this: These platforms got more popular, more centralized, and had to start using more bespoke algorithms to manage all the content. Users, though, started gaming these algorithms, and the people who could crack them got all the views. Everyone else’s content was deprioritized, so they became disincentivized to keep trying. Now, most of us just lurk.
Monopolization is generally bad. People who once had their own sites were lured by convenience into joining Facebook. But once in Facebook, they became manipulated byproducts of a multibillion dollar corporation designed to make Mark Zuckerberg even more fabulously wealthy. They had the feel of engagement but with few of its benefits.
Specialized and well-run platforms which don't turn you into a cyber zombie are fine. But those do not include Twitter/X and the Meta platforms which exploit you and ultimately control you.
What Mark Zuckerberg Really Means When He Talks About the Metaverse
In the parallel world of augmented reality, Facebook’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses contain cameras for taking photos/videos and a microphone for taking calls. The addition of more sensors and cameras increases the amount of egocentric data that Facebook can collect.
The metaverse, it turns out, is less cryptographic origami and more high-tech medical exam. The metaverse inextricably links the user’s individual, corporeal body and the ideas and actions that person takes. It’s about ever more granularly tracking and defining the individual consumer, down to our subconscious and involuntary reactions. The shocking thing about this is how easily the wow-factor of VR helmets and tricked out Ray-Bans have distracted us from the core, inevitable problem. The more deeply these devices are connected to Facebook’s ecosystem of apps and identity, the more the same old Facebook problems will come straight back to the fore: systematic mass surveillance, development of biased and opaque algorithms, and a general disdain for transparency or accountability.
Zuck’s Metaverse is just another data collection scheme – albeit on steroids. Sadly, many internet users who are easily dazzled by shiny objects will fall for it.
Mark Zuckerberg is a megalomaniacal James Bond villain. And he’s relying on masses of gullible users to volunteer for world domination under his cyber-totalitarianism.
We’re quickly running out of time to deal with tech oligarchies.
For those who care about social justice and free expression, getting caught up in the metaverse hype cycle would be a big mistake. But ignoring it would be, too. The problem is that Facebook is a trillion-dollar company that can afford to pay the attorneys and lobbyists and data scientists and product developers at the same time. Facebook’s “embodied internet” is not only a gross expansion of its ambition to total surveillance, it is an attempt to outpace the regulatory debate. As the whistleblower hearings and regulatory fracas continue, we can expect that Facebook will continue to delay, deny, and deflect.” But that’s in Washington. In Silicon Valley, D is for data.
As is the case with climate change, we need to act quickly. Of course the first thing everybody can do is to permanently leave Facebook.
The Facebook-clingers claim, “but that’s how I keep up with friends”. Look, Fb in its earliest form was created in 2004. For thousands of years before that, people managed to communicate with friends. d’oh!
It's a remarkable failure of the imagination (as well as a bit of laziness) that people claim they will lose touch with friends by exiting a massive data collection vacuum cleaner.
Deleting Facebook will not only improve your mental health but could even be profitable. After a New Zealand publisher deleted Facebook, her readership soared.
This News Publisher Quit Facebook. Readership Went Up
[T]he brutal fact is the whole way platforms have been built is both a priori exploitative of citizens, and simultaneously easy to exploit by bad actors. It's a system built on surveillance and sucking people’s data to manipulate them; where citizens have no control over, or even understanding about, the algorithms that dictate what we see and subsequently feel and ultimately do online.
Author Peter Pomerantsev, on the manipulative surveillance capitalism model which certain internet platforms are based on. Quoted at The Guardian.
Zuck is now granting you the privilege of paying him to have your personal data sucked up by Fb and Instagram.
Mark Zuckerberg announces a paid subscription model for Instagram called 'Meta Verified'
