Category: Facebook and Social Media

A walk to the bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts

by philg

Happy Independent Bookstore Day to those who celebrate. A follow-up to Why does every “independent” bookstore have the same political point of view?…

I posted the following images on Facebook with no words other than “A walk to the bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts..” (neglected to include a third period for the ellipsis)

The results were far more dramatic than I had expected. Let’s look at only the comments on a single photo:

Don Hopkins, a software engineer old enough to have worked at Sun Microsystems, kicked off the thread:

(I don’t know anything about Lulu DeParis. I think that she lives in Maskachusetts, but this may not be her real name. And, in fact, I don’t know with any certainty that Lulu DeParis is a she, other than the inference from the name “LuLu”.)

The thread continued despite nobody having any idea why “LuLu” had reacted to the photo (maybe it was a mistake?).

The software expert says “obviously she wanted…”:

I unwisely offer an explanation of why pictures relating to Rainbow Flagism are interested (“Never complain, never explain”, said the pre-Islamic British, and how right they were!):

Don Hopkins then trots out a hero/heroine of transgenderism from the world of nerds. Seth Gordon, a Maskachusetts-based software engineer (his/her/zir/their profile says “Studied Women’s Studies Minor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)”), chimes in with the assumption that the residents of Maskachusetts are, indeed, as intelligent as they claim to be:

I point out that folks in MA set up COVID-tagged death rate as the measure of a group’s intelligence and, by that metric, the residents of MA are not intelligent. The reference to a transistor nerd, of any gender ID, gives me an opening to cite William Shockley:

Don Hopkins doesn’t seem to read the “Classically” part of my statement as referring to the dark past and also “a person” as applying to 100 percent of those who are gender-confused:

Don produces some pictures from the late 1970s when VLSI design rules were fat (3000 nm (“3 microns”) vs. 3 nm today) and electrical engineers were thin:

Mark Day, MIT PhD, pronouns on his LinkedIn profile, chimes in to note that I am “wildly prejudiced”. Don Hopkins pulls in David Levitt, last seen here in Did Albert Einstein ever say anything about empathy? and notes that I am “a hateful bully”:

What is the opposite of being a “hateful bully”? Going back to all of someone’s recent Facebook posts and asking “do you hate gay people as much as you hate trans people? Why or why not?”:

He posted the same question as a comment on this post, which is literally about the weather:

(My response: “I certainly hate whoever was responsible for the steady rain and high-30s temps that afflicted me during my April visit to Boston!”)

I’m sure that Don Hopkins’s opinions of me are substantially correct, but I do find it interesting that pictures, without comment, of the righteous lifestyle are so upsetting to the righteous. You’d think that they’d be proud of their Rainbow-/mask-enhanced streetscapes.

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Looks as though X made the transition from Trump to Biden without breaking links

by philg

I was concerned that links from this blog to X posts by President Biden and trailblazing VP Kamala Harris would be broken by the transition to dictatorship. Yet it seems that my fears were unfounded. In Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? I included a tweet from @POTUS and it now magically appears as content from @POTUS46Archive:

Fair to say that X is the only major Silicon Valley company that cares about preserving older pages/links?

#ThanksElon!

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Mark Zuckerberg’s foxhole conversion to free speech

by philg

American democracy ends in five minutes. We’ll be weeping not only for the end of Science-guided rule but also because of Climate Change since it was forecast to be the coldest Inauguration Day in 40 years.

Let’s try to push through our shared tears to think about Mark Zuckerberg and his foxhole conversion to free speech. From University of Colorado:

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company would fire its fact-checkers and instead rely on its users, with the help of AI, to police Facebook and Instagram for false or misleading posts. The company will also move its content moderation team from California to Texas, lift restrictions designed to protect immigrants and LGBTQ people from hate speech and “dial back” penalties for rule-breakers.

Nathan Schneider, assistant professor of media studies, sees it as a wake-up call to users that it may be time to take back some control over social media platforms.

Rightly, many people are terrified. The company has been quite explicit that it is committed to tolerating and normalizing the discourse of the far right, which includes denying the dignity of people in many communities, particularly queer folks. This move reflects the kind of naked power that this company has always been able to exert over speech, and its ability to determine what the bounds of acceptable speech in society are. As the political winds shift, the company appears to be embracing that shift across its networks. We should be asking ourselves whether we can continue to place so much trust in a company that can abruptly remove protections in this way.

There is a solution, fortunately, according to the giant brains of academia:

What’s hopeful to me is a growing movement of people embracing other kinds of social networks like Mastodon and Bluesky. … You could look at an example like Wikipedia – a widely trusted utility on the internet that is mission-driven and organized as a nonprofit.

Here are Zuck’s plans for today (AP):

Compare to 2020: “Facebook censors The Post to help Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign” (nobody could suggest that people had been bribing then-VP Joe Biden via Hunter Biden or amplify the misinformation that the Hunter Biden laptop was somehow genuine).

A literal-minded friend in a chat group explained the motivation for Zuck’s elimination of (Democrat) fact-checkers just as the White House was turning over to Republican rule:

He has principles

An immigrant from Eastern Europe in the same group:

when did he have principles, before biden or now?

(My main question about Facebook is how it can be so jammed with pig butchers compared to the purported unregulated hellscape of Twitter. Maybe the answer is that Facebook is explicitly about friendship and therefore it makes sense to try to befriend someone on Facebook?)

Related:

(the image, full size below, is interesting because it shows Kamala Harris as a key figure in the U.S. civil rights movement, which started in 1954 (Wikipedia) despite her parents having migrated to the U.S. in 1958 and 1961)

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Sunset of TikTok will be the dawn of a new era of American productivity?

by philg

I visited TikTok.com at 11 pm Eastern time last night:

I wasn’t a regular TikTok user, but I don’t remember any education- or work-related content there. If Americans aren’t viewing TikTok anymore will there be a huge boost in American productivity and GDP as a result of all the TikTok addicts doing something useful instead?

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Palestinian Fatwa, the Democrats’ move to Bluesky, and X’s algorithmic bubbles

by philg

Starting a few days after the recent Election Nakba, my righteous friends began announcing their departure from X (Twitter) to Bluesky, a Democrat-only safe space with similar technical features. X is now too toxic, but the toxicity wasn’t a problem so long as Democrats were securely in power.

A similar situation seems to have been going on among the Palestinians. “Gaza’s top Islamic scholar issues fatwa criticising 7 October attack” (BBC, November 8, 2024):

The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the devastating war in the Palestinian territory.

Professor Dr Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, is one of the region’s most respected religious authorities, so his legal opinion carries significant weight among Gaza’s two million population, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim.

Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls “violating Islamic principles governing jihad”.

His fatwa highlights that, according to Islamic law, a military raid should not trigger a response that exceeds the intended benefits of the action.

The October 7, 2023 attacks could have been a fine example of jihad, in other words, but only if military victory had been achieved. Only after 13 months of fighting could an Islamic determination of whether the attack was justified be made because a key element of justified/not-justified is the extent to which the jihadis are victorious.

From an MIT professor, November 16, 2024, on Facebook:

Searching for “leaving bluesky toxic” on X, I found the following screenshot, purportedly from Bluesky:

(The account seems to have been deleted. As noted in Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? I think that “Lillian” exhibits a logical thought process, unlike the Democrats who said that Trump was a “threat to democracy” and then expressed “get well soon” sentiments after he was shot. If the above is authentic, the only way to maintain an account on Bluesky is to buy into this illogical thought pattern (Trump’s continued existence is a dire threat and also Trump’s life must be preserved for as long as possible).)

My search uncovered some additional elevated intellectual discourse among the elites on Bluesky:

I can’t figure out why X is intolerable to the righteous. As far as I can tell, X’s algorithms create virtual echo chambers for liberals and conservatives. The X servers learn that conservative responses to liberal posts, e.g., from the New York Times or a Democrat politician, are unlikely to be welcomed by the people who enjoy the original post and, therefore, a conservative response gets just a handful of views. A response by the same user to a conservative post, however, might get thousands of views. Each X user, therefore, was already in an algorithmic bubble.

Separately, because people do sometimes disagree with what I post on Facebook and X, I have decided to leave both platforms. I have created a social media site that will be restricted to users who share my point of view. It’s called DoucheSky (TM).

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Fifth anniversary of Kamala Harris defending freedom of speech

by philg

Five years ago, today:

In case the above is memory-holed, an image version:

(Professor Saad corrected his typo (“FREE societies”) in a follow-up, so this also reminds me that it has been two years since Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Where’s the Edit button for replies?)

Some other comments from fall 2019:

  • You running for President of China?
  • Sorry you don’t like the constitution. Maybe you should run for leader of a different country.
  • Thank god this hysterical candidate who tramples on the constitution will never be President.
  • Democrats want to ban all speech they disagree with. Bunch of fascists. Good luck keeping the 1st amendment if Dems ever get full power.
  • So you are against the 1st amendment?
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How are Brazilians doing now that they’ve eliminated the biggest threat to their democracy?

by philg

Here’s Jair Bolsonaro, characterized by media elites as “far right”, “authoritarian”, and “a threat to democracy”, in 2023 (from “Exiled Bolsonaro lives it up in Florida as legal woes grow back home” (Guardian)):

The Brazilian masses responded to elite advice and voted to preserve their democracy (50.9:49.1), but the threat wasn’t completely extinguished. “The Big Lie Is Going Global. We Saw It in Brazil.” (New York Times, November 14, 2022), for example:

Donald Trump’s playbook of poisoning the polity with misinformation … is being exported and deployed beyond the United States and becoming a transnational threat to democracy.

Mr. Trump’s methods were energetically adopted in Brazil by his authoritarian, right-wing friend Jair Bolsonaro, who pushed misinformation during his presidency, seeded distrust in the electoral system for years and, eventually, tried to discredit the electoral process in Brazil after losing the presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last month.

It’s bad enough when a threat to democracy speaks and even worse when he/she/ze/they doesn’t speak:

For more than 44 hours after his electoral defeat, Mr. Bolsonaro maintained a dangerous silence

So long as the government does not control all media and social media, democracy is unsafe:

The attempts of Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters to create uncertainty about Brazil’s future could be the new global norm as would-be autocrats are embracing the Big Lie as a legitimate political strategy.

NYT, today, “How Brazil’s Experiment Fighting Fake News Led to a Ban on X”:

To combat disinformation, Brazil gave one judge broad power to police the internet.

That justice, Alexandre de Moraes, has since carried out an aggressive campaign to clean up his country’s internet, forcing social networks to pull down thousands of posts, often giving them a deadline of just hours to comply.

It has been one of the most comprehensive — and, in some ways, most effective — efforts to combat the scourge of internet falsehoods.

When his online crackdown helped stifle far-right efforts to overturn Brazil’s election, academics and commentators wondered whether the nation had found a possible solution to one of the most vexing problems of modern democracy.

Then, on Friday, Justice Moraes blocked the social network X across Brazil because its owner, Elon Musk, had ignored his court orders to remove accounts. As part of the blackout order, the judge said internet users who tried to circumvent his measure in order to keep using X could be fined nearly $9,000 a day, or more than what the average Brazilian makes a year.

Justice Moraes has continued to use the threat to democracy as a justification for his actions. In his order on Friday, he said Mr. Musk’s refusal to comply with orders to suspend accounts “represents an extremely serious risk to the municipal elections in October” in Brazil.

How else are Brazilians being protected from threats to their democracy? The current government has the opposition leader more or less under house arrest: “Brazil’s Bolsonaro must hand in his passport for coup investigation” (state-sponsored NPR, February 2024). Brazil is on the right side of history, according to the best minds of Harvard, Columbia, and Berkeley: “Brazil president withdraws his ambassador to Israel after criticizing the war in Gaza” (state-sponsored PBS, May 2024; “Lula has been a frequent critic of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, which he compared to the Holocaust earlier this year.”). [Note that the “Holocaust” is being exacerbated by a population explosion.]

Some additional warnings that Brazilian voters heeded:

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The California Righteous prevent me from sharing fireworks porn

by philg

We’re gearing up for one of the three days per year when it is legal to terrify canines in Florida (July 4, Dec 31, Jan 1; contrast to up north: “All fireworks are illegal in Massachusetts for private residents”).

I posted the two pictures below from the Walmart here in Jupiter, Florida on Facebook with the caption “Safe and Sane’ way to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Florida.”:

The post was removed three days later by Facebook:

Taking a picture inside a Walmart is interpreted as an attempt to buy/trade/sell:

I requested a review and there is no way to tell them “I was not buying or selling anything”. Nor to enter any free text, explanation, or defense. Here are the options:

It looks like Facebook has amped up their moderation in general. Here’s something from earlier the same day:

I certainly don’t remember posting anything nude/sexual, not even pictures of brave Virginia Democrat Susanna Gibson. Facebook is where I post Florida beach scenes, pictures of the kids and Mindy the Crippler, etc. There doesn’t seem to be any way to figure out either the date of the offending nude/sexual post or the content. It’s a totalitarian system in which the accused is supposed to know his crime (updated to “his/her/zir/their crime”).

Here’s the rule:

Other than showing Mindy the Crippler’s naked body, I can’t imagine what they’re talking about.

My recent Facebook posts that haven’t been removed…

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Why isn’t Facebook’s software smart enough to add “you already have a friend with the same name” to scam friend requests?

by philg

One popular fraud technique on Facebook:

  • copy some public elements from a profile, e.g., Mahmud Mohammed Ahmed’s
  • create a fake account with the same name and profile image
  • make friend requests of the people who are friends with the real Mahmud Mohammed Ahmed

Quite a few people seem to accept these fake friend requests, not checking to see if they are already friends with Mahmud Mohammed Ahmed. Why isn’t the Facebook software so say “This may be from a fake account; you’re already friends with someone named Mahmud Mohammed Ahmed” and display the profile pictures side by side?

Speaking of profile pictures, why isn’t the Facebook fraud software smart enough to check new accounts to see if anyone by the same name has exactly the same profile images? Maybe there are multiple Mahmud Mohammed Ahmeds out of 8 billion humans, but what are the odds that they look exactly the same and have chosen to dress and pose in the same way for a photo?

It looks as though approximately 10 percent of people will fall for the above scam. Here’s a request from a month ago:

Here’s the real person:

The scammer got 35 friends out of 299.

It’s the third night of Kwanzaa. What do we find on Facebook? A “Professor at … Professor” who purportedly lives in Maryland, but whose profile image seems to be Prof. Prof. Dr. Dr. Maulana Karenga, Ph.D., Ph.D.‘s.

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The profitable side of DEI

by philg

“Former Facebook employee pleads guilty to stealing $4 million” (CNN):

An Atlanta woman pleaded guilty to stealing more than $4 million from Facebook while she was an executive at the company.

Barbara Furlow-Smiles who worked as a lead strategist, global head of employee resource groups and diversity engagement at Facebook, Inc., now known as Meta, from about January 2017 to September 2021 according to U.S. Attorney Northern District of Georgia Ryan K. Buchanan’s Office.

“This defendant abused a position of trust as a global diversity executive for Facebook to defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission,” said Buchanan in a statement.

That last paragraph is my favorite. The U.S. government employee implies that the mission of DEI, despite its having been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, is sacred.

The other interesting aspect is that she stole $4 million via expense account fraud. Where can the rest of us get an expense account big enough that $1 million per year in fraud isn’t detected for more than 4 years?

Loosely related… a Maskachusetts Congresswoman says that the Supreme Court is “corrupt”:

Maybe this is why federal employees can ignore the Court’s ruling that the principal objectives and methods of DEI are unconstitutional?

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