Facebook and Social Media – Page 5 – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Earth Day: Pinterest will help heal our planet?

April 22, 2022April 6, 2022 by philg

Happy Earth Day, especially to those who live in single-family houses and drive SUVs!

This would be a great day to post a photo of your pavement-melting Ford Bronco to Pinterest, which will happily collect ad revenue from photographs of lavish consumption that burns the Earth’s resources. What can’t you post? “Pinterest announces ban on all climate misinformation” (Guardian, 4/6/2022):

Pinterest is to block all climate misinformation, as the image-focused social network seeks to limit the spread of false and misleading claims.
Under the new policy the site is committing to take down content that distorts or denies the facts of the climate crisis, whether posted as adverts or normal “organic” content.
Pinterest is defining misinformation broadly: the company will take down content that denies the existence or effects of climate change or its human causes, as well as content that “misrepresents scientific data” in order to erode trust in climate science and harmful, false or misleading content about natural disasters and extreme weather events.

Would it be possible to thrive on Pinterest posting photos of a soft-on-the-Earth lifestyle? Would there be a lot of users and ad revenue if a person posted pictures of his/her/zir/their one-bedroom apartment, 5-year-old bicycle, and donation of all surplus income to a tree-planting enterprise? The first result that I stumbled on after searching for “home” on Pinterest is 6,200 square feet:

A lot of what drives people to consume more is envy and shame-avoidance, right? If Pinterest wants to help the Earth, wouldn’t the correct course of action be shutting down Pinterest so that people would be more likely to be happy with what they already have?

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People banned from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube can buy back their Freedom of Speech for $1,595

April 5, 2022March 23, 2022 by philg

Folks who’ve been unpersoned by Twitter, Facebook, and/or YouTube/Google might feel that their practical freedom of speech is gone. The good is is that it can be bought back from the U.S. Mint for $1,595 via the First Amendment to the United States Constitution 2022 Platinum Proof Coin – Freedom of Speech:

If you want the FBI’s January 6 task force to come to your house, add a Donald Trump medal to your shopping cart:

If you want to celebrate a Nobel laureate who has been complicit in what the U.S. now says is “genocide”, the Daw Aung San Suu Kyi Bronze Medal:

Continuing the theme of celebrating the achievements of strong women, here’s one for the Apollo 11 astronauts:

To celebrate weekend warriors who like to put on uniforms, give themselves officer rank and uniforms, and buzz around in mighty Cessna 172s, one for the Civil Air Patrol:

To remember that Big Government is not always competent, one regarding the USS Indianapolis (Navy failed to notice that the ship hadn’t arrived and failed to take any action, not even a search plane launch, in response to a distress call received from the vessel before she sank):

The Mint celebrates John Muir, who advocated eliminating low-skill immigration to the U.S. in order to preserve the environment:

(See “The Extremist Campaign to Blame Immigrants for U.S. Environmental Problems” (Center for American Progress): “John Muir, known as the father of national parks, expressed racism toward Black and Native Americans and promoted ideas of restricting immigration by nonwhites.”)

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Should I add a Like button to this blog?

March 31, 2022April 1, 2022 by philg

Everyone loves Facebook and Twitter (except those who’ve been banned for heresy!) and the Like button is credited as making those apps addictive (who doesn’t want to be liked?). Is it time to add a Like button for posts and comments on this blog? I’m pretty sure that there are WordPress plugins that will do it (a list of 10 from 2020).

One concern that I have is making sure that a rainbow reaction emoji is available, taking inspiration from Facebook:

(On Facebook, the rainbow reaction is available only during Pride Month, but I would want to offer it to readers all year.)

A comment as the only method of feedback doesn’t seem adequate in this day and age. A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system was clicked on by nearly 6,000 people in the past five months (plus viewed by an additional few thousand who saw it when new as part of the home page), so presumably folks liked it, but only 7 people reacted to it with a comment.

Why Facebook is so addictive: the Like button

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Why does Twitter make thoughtcriminals delete their own thoughtcrimes?

March 21, 2022March 22, 2022 by philg

“Twitter suspends Babylon Bee for naming Rachel Levine ‘Man of the Year’” (New York Post):

Twitter locked the account of a right-leaning parody site, The Babylon Bee, after it awarded Rachel Levine, the transgender Biden administration official, the title of “man of the year.”
The Babylon Bee story was a reaction to USA Today’s naming of Levine, who is US assistant secretary for health for the US Department of Health and Human Services, as one of its “women of the year” last week.
Twitter says it will restore the account, which has more than 1.3 million followers, if the Bee deletes the tweet, but CEO Seth Dillon says he has no intention of doing so.

Apparently, Mr. Dillon was not unpersoned and could still tweet:

My question concerns the requirement that the Babylon Bee heretics delete their own tweet. Why didn’t Twitter’s orthodoxy enforcers delete it once they noticed the thoughtcrime?

A Facebook friend’s take on the original story:

it’s a meta-joke. The joke isn’t that he’s a man, the joke is that saying so is such a transgression of the orthodoxy that everyone immediately reacts, “omg, I can’t believe they said that” and bans them from social media

Is it an important part of the healing process for a thoughtcriminal to delete his/her/zir/their own tweet?

“Facebook and Twitter restrict controversial New York Post story on Joe Biden” (Guardian, October 14, 2020): Twitter said it was limiting the article’s spread due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which contained material supposedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. … Facebook, meanwhile, placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there were questions about its validity. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said a Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone.

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Shut down Facebook for public health reasons?

October 26, 2021October 11, 2021 by philg

Facebook has been in the news lately due to testimony at the Senate by Frances Haugen (imagine how much better off the company would be if they’d never hired him/her/zir/them!). From “Here are 4 key points from the Facebook whistleblower’s testimony on Capitol Hill” (NPR):

Haugen has leaked one Facebook study that found that 13.5% of U.K. teen girls in one survey say their suicidal thoughts became more frequent after starting on Instagram.
Another leaked study found 17% of teen girls say their eating disorders got worse after using Instagram.
About 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse, Facebook’s researchers found, which was first reported by the Journal.

From Harvard’s McLean Hospital, “The Social Dilemma: Social Media and Your Mental Health”:

The platforms are designed to be addictive and are associated with anxiety, depression, and even physical ailments.
A 2018 British study tied social media use to decreased, disrupted, and delayed sleep, which is associated with depression, memory loss, and poor academic performance. Social media use can affect users’ physical health even more directly. Researchers know the connection between the mind and the gut can turn anxiety and depression into nausea, headaches, muscle tension, and tremors.

We’ve been willing to suspend or eliminate what had been considered fundamental and/or Constitutionally guaranteed rights in hopes of reducing the death rate tagged to COVID-19. Children couldn’t go to school for a year in American cities; adults couldn’t gather despite a First Amendment purportedly preventing the government from restricting their right to assemble. The potential loss of life-years from social-media-induced teen suicide is larger than whatever we might have saved via coronashutdowns (even if we assume that lockdowns and masks had some effect, COVID-19 was killing people at a median age of 82).

Why not declare that social media represents a public health emergency (Harvard re: racism as a public health crisis) and make Facebook, Instagram, et al. illegal in the U.S.? (order that ISPs block access to their IP addresses, accept a bit of leakage from Americans getting in via VPNs from the Free States of Russia, Scandinavia, etc., maybe require some FATCA-style rules so that companies are required to screen out American citizens regardless of VPN use)

Recent envy-provoking posts from Facebook friends… let’s call this one “I went to the Rolling Stones with friends while you were bored at home.”

Numerous “My kids are smiling, healthy, and happy, while yours are bratty, congested, and sulking” (variation: “My kid got into the elite college from which your kid was recently rejected”) and “I am on vacation somewhere beautiful while you are stuck at work wearing a mask 8 hours/day.”