Category: Facebook and Social Media

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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CDC director highlights the success of a state that ignored CDC advice

by philg

From #Science itself:

If we accept the CDC’s premise that humans are in charge of viruses, the map demonstrates that Science-deniers Ron DeSantis (Yale/Harvard grad) and Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo (Harvard MD/PhD in Science Denial) are doing a great job in Florida! The people who did the opposite of what the CDC suggested are “doing the best” (if we accept the public health premise that COVID-19 infection/death rates are the appropriate measure of a society’s success).

How could the CDC’s social media nerds not have waited for these data to change before highlighting this map to hundreds of thousands of Americans?

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How’s Twitter doing, one year after Muskification?

by philg

It has been a year since Elon Musk took over Twitter. Is that a long enough period to determine which side of the fine line between stupid and clever the acquisition fell on?

After half a year, Elon had cut the number of employees by 80 percent (CNN).

Here’s my 15 minutes of fame on Twitter:

The tweet in context, replying to a tweet from state-sponsored National Public Radio:

Correction: An earlier tweet incorrectly stated there is limited scientific evidence of physical advantage. Existing research shows that higher levels of testosterone do impact athletic performance. But there’s limited research involving elite trans athletes in competition.

The glorious like itself:

Note that Twitter’s software didn’t highlight this to me. Elon Musk was lumped in with “and N others” in the notifications. I probably wouldn’t have noticed my brief moment of Twitter fame if not for the separate notification of the ELON ALERTS tweet.

The financials sound bleak. Despite all of the payroll cuts, the company was losing money as of July 2023 (Reuters).

And, more importantly, how is our democracy doing after a year of being attacked with misinformation? Will the biggest beneficiaries of freedom of speech on Twitter turn out to be supporters of Hamas? In the pre-Musk days, Facebook and Twitter might have prevented the righteous from expressing their hatred of Israel, Jews in general, etc. On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t seem to be censoring anti-Israeli posts. Example:

It is not “misinformation” by Facebook standards to refer to what is happening as “Israel’s war on the people of Palestine” nor to assert that Israel bombed a hospital despite the fact that nobody at Facebook has seen a picture of a bomb crater.

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Who was able to listen to the Ron DeSantis-Elon Musk discussion?

by philg

After 3 years of operation, Clubhouse has a 5,000-user/room limit. Zoom offers video as well and limits to 1,000 users for their high-end subscriptions (another 49,000 can listen passively). Elon Musk tried to push the everyone-can-talk-to-everyone software frontier out to 500,000+ users and, at least for me, failed.

Who was able to listen to Ron D and Elon chatting? What did they say?

(I’m not going to cover the Ron DeSantis Presidential campaign too heavily here in this blog, despite the Florida angle, because I don’t think he is prepared to tell Americans what they want to hear (e.g., that they will become richer without working harder) and, therefore, cannot win a general election.)

The Zoom page:

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Why are we afraid of TikTok?

by philg

“China says it ‘firmly opposes’ a potential forced sale of TikTok” (CNN):

China said it would “firmly oppose” any forced sale of TikTok, in its first direct response to demands by the Biden administration that the app’s Chinese owners sell their share of the company or face a ban in its most important market.

The comments came as TikTok CEO Shou Chew testified in front of US lawmakers amid mounting scrutiny over the app’s ties to Beijing.

China’s commerce ministry said Thursday that a forced sale of TikTok would “seriously damage” global investors’ confidence in the United States.

Why is TikTok more of a security concern than apps from other countries, which might or might not be backed by China ultimately? TikTok is, at least, obviously prominent and can be monitored carefully. I would think the worst computer security problems are the unknown unknowns.

Separately, is the deeper problem with social media apps that they are addictive, especially for young people? Instead of forcing a TikTok sale, would it be smarter to require all of the social media apps to set a 30-minute daily limit per user? (of course, some addicts could get around this by creating multiple accounts, but those would seem to be edge cases)

I’m not a TikTok user, but I logged in with my Google credentials and gave the app my birthdate (Jurassic!). The algorithm is purportedly awesome, but I didn’t find any videos that I wanted to watch on the default home screen. A search for COVID doesn’t yield anything as brilliant as Adley’s April 20, 2020 explanation of Faucism. A search for “Robinson R44” does not yield better content than on YouTube:

I’m following one friend on TikTok, but he keeps his likes private (and maybe there is no way to share them just with me?) so I can’t use his favorite videos as a gateway into the service.

Readers:

  1. What’s great about TikTok?
  2. Should we force a sale due to TikTok’s Chinese connections?
  3. Should we use regulation to protect ourselves from ourselves via a 30-minute limit on each social media platform?
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