https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/sci-tech/2023/08/21/group-calls-for-facebook-instagram-boycott-on-aug-23-and-24
TORONTO – An advocacy group is calling on Canadians to boycott Facebook and Instagram later this week. The Friends of Canadian Broadcasting group is asking people to stop posting content on Meta...
lol a temporary boycott with an explicitly defined timeframe of two days. Yeah that'll show them.
It's the protest/boycott circle jerk. "Congrats everyone, we showed Meta with that two day boycott. They will definitely stop being a shitty company. Let's celebrate by going back on Facebook and Instagram."
Protests & boycotts only work when they are sustained for long periods of time. The requires people to stay committed to an idea or goal even when it inconveniences them.
It did work well for reddit imvho as it's understood that reddit definitely lost revenue and users as a result - but that might also not apply to FB so well in this case; as the reddit one was global rather than specific to a single country, and reddit was already unprofitable to begin with - whereas this is boycotting what's likely an already unprofitable line for a very profitable company.
Same. Quit FB a few years ago. Never bothered with Instagram, or Twitter or really anything with my real identity.
However I used FB for nearly 15 years. I got a new job so I wanted to clean as much public facing data as I could, including all the "intrest" FB had decided I had. I'm not sure if its the same now but Facebook used to just keep a list of stuff you where "interested" in based on your browsing history (even outside of FB). Often it was inaccurate. I think ads or somthing whould hijack the algorithm to add whatever they wanted, youd have to clear it out every once and awhile.
After doing this my feed started showing me hate groups, alt right nonsense and images of child abuse material. I realized this meant, that in cases where Facebook had no listed intrest for somebody, this is the ads that it whould use, this was the core of what Facebook was. I nuked the account and never looked back. Honestly, great decision and I've never once regretted it.
Wow that's horrible! I quit and pointed all the facebook domains I could find to 0.0.0.0 when it came out they were experimenting on users in the first place. Pushing that sort of content to empty or cleared out profiles is insane.
After doing this my feed started showing me hate groups, alt right nonsense and images of child abuse material.
Sounds about white. Social media is inherently reactionary because it keeps people angry and engaged with the platform.
How, exactly, does entertainment lead to anger?
Is it a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy? One goes in thinking they'll have a good time, and when it proves to not be, instead of trying something else, they feel that the time will be wasted if they don't eventually find it in the way they originally planned?
People get angry because entertainment all the time. Trans character? Time to rage! A two second LGBT+ scene? Rage! A female playing Dr. Who? Ragin! Have Black and Asian characters in Lord of the Rings? Fuck, raging!
Comic book movies have their share of raging fans. The new Snow White remake, has people already angry.
So no actual rage, just more funny contributions to the entertainment machine which happen to portray a raging character?
Makes sense. I was starting to wonder there for a minute why someone would waste their free time being upset. But, I do recognize the fun in posting stupid shit that makes no sense.
This is like everyone trying to organize those gas station strikes a decade ago. Everyone remember those?
This might be a super unpopular take, and I recognize that, but the fact the government has become so reliant on social media is fucking ridiculous. I'm sorry, but I shouldn't have to rely on twitter or Facebook to get information from the government. It's fucking pathetic. Not like they aren't pathetic either, they are, but the government shouldn't be relying on private companies, run by maniacs, as their main method of communications. End rant.
You ever notice during the pandemic there was no email, real mail, phone call or text message sent to you directly from the government about lockdown measures?
There were Amber alerts sent out notifying the people of lockdowns. For example,
But, yes, it is foolish that we have to rely on Bell/Rogers/Telus/Apple/Google to get the word out. Canada Post is the entity which is supposed to be responsible for disseminating such information.
Thanks for this, i don't remember getting these notifications but it is possible I forgot/missed them. As you mentioned it still only reaches canadians with an active cell phone plan and who have cell service and should be used alongaide other systems.
I agree. The government shouldn't rely on private companies like ROBeLUS to send alert messages to people.
We shouldn't but here we are.
What else can we do?
By the way, news companies are also run by maniacs.
I'm impressed that the Reddit boycott left Reddit to be less popular than Instagram and Facebook. Maybe there is hope for this yet.
I gave those shits up a year ago cold turkey, plus reading the news headlines multiple times a day. Never looked back.
I find this outrage so funny. "Hey you give me $500 for this used Timmies cup?" "No" "How dare you!"
Why would Meta / Google want to pay 250+ million dollars a year to link to news sites? Do you think they're generating billions of dollars in revenue from those links?
they show ads next to summaries of articles which, hey, blame the people for only reading the summary instead of clicking through to the source
but they do profit and I would like to see journalism Not become yet another Meta™ product
But the news org provides that summary with the page to Facebook... it's part of the Open Graph Protocol which... is for facebook. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Platform#Open_Graph_protocol
Lets look at the source of a CBC News story.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-variant-ba-2-86-1.6943005
property="og:description" content="A highly mutated variant of the virus behind COVID-19 has popped up in multiple countries, but scientists aren't yet sure whether it will fuel a fall wave of infections or simply fizzle out."/>
So if the news companies are upset that Facebook is showing a summary... maybe stop providing a summary to facebook explicitly in your code?
Whoa, whoa. We spent good money on developers to add OpenGraph support to our news platform in order for us to have full control over what is shown on Facebook. Now you want us to just throw that away? Do you know how much software developer time costs? There must be a better solution. What if, and hear me out... Facebook paid us to use that work we did?
Give 'em a break, they're just following the capitalist's mantra: Find something that's currently free and charge people for it like it's supposed to be that way.
What you mean is, why are they ALREADY paying Australia for the same thing and suddenly don't want to pay Canada?
The answer will enlighten you.
Because they signed that law before Meta and Google promised shareholders they'd be more efficient with their spending and laid off tens of thousands of employees?
Because they actually came to an agreement instead of the Australian government saying "you'll pay what we tell you to"?
Wow, so enlightened.
Seriously, why the hell are people blaming Meta/Google and not their government for trying to push the shittiest deal on them for a product I doubt makes them much money at all?
"You pay our news sites an amount at the end of the year, and if you disagree on the amount we'll be the arbitrator." Only an idiot would make that deal.
They should be banned as a form of illegal drug due to the harm they cause (same with a few other platforms like tik tok).
While I think that social have a lot of benificial uses, the way most of them are implemented are anti-human in nature, and are the cause of a lot of mental health issues for those under 30, and especially for teens. Just look at suicide rates for teens over the last decade or two (especially among girls) and it's hard not to see facebook as a force of ill and should not be allowed to be used in Canada, especially by the young.
Actually, the largest study of our time by a very reputable institution recently showed the opposite.
A bit silly to look at the bleakness and wealth inequality that's increased dramatically over the past two decades and blame social media on increased suicide rates.
I'm very suspicious of this study. Not the least because it focuses solely on well-being. That's just one facet of the social media picture even if it gets corroborated by other researchers.
If you're going to tell Oxford psychology professors they're doing studies wrong you're going to have to be a lot more specific than that lol.
Why? It seems this publisher thought it was a good idea to blur its article text in an effort to boycott itself.
As a side tangent, I can see why Facebook stopped allowing links to news articles. It is annoying and pointless to click on a link and then find there is nothing there; an increasingly common practice amongst news sites. We should consider disallowing news links here too.