Why are you downplaying them as “a tech company selling ads” when the most relevant characteristic of theirs is facilitating genocide in Myanmar, then obstructing the investigation, and fuelling ethnic violence in more places like Ethiopia?

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

https://time.com/5880118/myanmar-rohingya-genocide-facebook-...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...

I'm not sure exactly what the extent of the "facilitation" was in the first link, so what I'm about to say might be a little vague, but the second doesn't appear to be about them covering up their role in said "facilitation", but rather their refusal to provide so much user data to The Gambia looking to prosecute Myanmar officials for war crimes.

The way you've phrased that makes it sound as though Facebook were trying to hide the actions they took to facilitate things, which I think is a miscommunication.

I think the Myanmar experience has a lot to do with why Facebook tries to disappear politics talk on Threads. I mean, negative talk about your neighbors is how political violence starts.

People on the Fediverse get high and mighty about the Myanmar incident but in a Fediverse world the Myanmar government would have run the big instance in their language and would have defederated anyone who tried to stop them, alternately outsiders could have defederated but then they wouldn't have any influence.

Fediverse folks could have refused to run a server to support genocide but there is no way they could stop their software from supporting genocide. A centralized system like Facebook does have more control and more responsibility but when they took that responsibility later on Myanmar kicked them out

https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-censorship-virtual-privat...

Why ? The discussion is about fixing brand reputation, and he quotes probably one of the most disgustingly successful rebrands in history. If even IG Farben managed to successfully rebrand, surely a company that just went "a little too far" with private data, can too. Looks quite on topic to me.

It’s a level of hyperbole that could only be taken seriously by an autistic person or someone in tech. That’s why.

Not only my point stands, I still remember a world almost without narcissists, people traveling for fun, not to take a photo to brag, times where people listened to doctors not some people recommending horse dewormer, UK not suffering due to Brexit consequences ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8425058/ ), people actually bonding in person,...

Or in words of Umberto Eco ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco ):

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”

You are underestimating the horror that Facebook did to human society. I am accusing them of crime against humanity. And all that, just for selling ads - where you will be able to see the comparison with IG Farben, do whatever it takes, to earn money.

I accept the argument, that if they wouldn't, someone else would, but nevertheless THEY did it or we would be talking about someone else.

Even if you don’t like it, idiots do have as much right to speak as any Nobel Prize winner. Not only that, the more they speak, the better, as the chances of stopping being an idiot increase. All Nobel Prizes were at some point also idiots, if they’re still not idiots today about some topics.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley for a racist idiot, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling for an alt health idiot, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Josephson for a psionics idiot

https://bigthink.com/the-past/nobel-disease-great-scientists...

This reeks of nostalgia. The past wasn't as great as you remember it, and the present isn't as terrible as you think it is.

Nope, I am quite rational here and if I wouldn't witness change in society, I wouldn't believe it. I am seriously worried for humanity, as what I am seeing today is: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808 (and this was shot in pre-facebook era)

Fun fact, they didn't have large budget for shooting so they were searching for footwear that would look futuristic. They found some unknown company producing cheap "shoes" so horrible that the director wasn't worried for it to succeed as "no one would wear that". The company was Crocks.

https://media.snopes.com/2023/09/idiocracy.png

Anyway, this whole thread is actually proving my point. It wouldn't happen before Facebook.

Go back to any random year in human history and ask the older people whether they think the world was better when they were young. They will all say "yes" (evidence for this exists in countless survived writings, as well as other social phenomena like people becoming more conservative as they age). It's one of the most natural things in the world.

That alone should be a very strong signal that maybe your nostalgia is not based on a rational unbiased observation of the changes in society.

edit: and to be clear, obviously there have been times in history where things really did get worse for a period. But if you're proposing that that's happening now, you have a massive burden of proof to overcome, and you should be absolutely really totally sure that you're not being influenced by rose-tinted glasses. Which I'm not even sure is possible.

I understood immediately where you are pointing. And I wish you would be right.

Correlation does not imply causation.

So what? You believe the world has gotten worse every year since the beginning of time? Or is it that all those older people throughout history have been wrong, but somehow it's you that's finally gotten it right?

Whatever. I don't have time to fight every logical fallacy you produce. I think I have explained it well, there is no need for me to bother with everyone who doesn't understand it.

Your Kaczynskian wall of text sure told em.

Fair that perhaps they (the director specifically) thought that (they look like something nobody would want to wear) about Crocs. Heck, I thought that back then, many did. So perhaps that's why Snopes is saying it's true.

But Crocs had actually become somewhat popular already before Idiocracy.

The more realistic full picture explanation being that they chose something that they or someone on their staff, like many "look at those idiots" types (myself at the time included), already knew and considered a stupid trend is much more likely. It doesn't at all negate that they in fact thought nobody with taste would wear those shoes, but I don't think that choice was entirely made in isolation not aware of the trend.

The effect of watching the movie and seeing Crocs worn was yet another of those pieces of evidence that the stupid people of today connect to that fictional future world, like all the other stuff on the movie dialed all the way to the top (energy drinks, corporate sponsorships, etc.)

The mere fact that someone knew of Crocs, thought of them, and chose them because of their ugliness, means they were popular/successful enough to pop up on someone's radar, despite them ostensibly not being something that would be worn by anyone. Perhaps they didn't know how much more popular Crocs would become but they for sure must have picked them as an artifact of things already going in a weird direction (Why can you get this? Who would want this? Someone must, these will be the stupid people of tomorrow.)

But also, actually, so what?

Look at some of the fashion of past decades older movies. Some of it is cool but a lot of it is super ridiculous.

And if you look at Crocs, are they really objectively stupid? Treating them as a high fashion item probably is. But they are versatile and robust, good for many types of use cases were people used to wear other types of cheap plastic sandals. People wearing leather shoes surely thought sneaker were stupid until they became so mainstream that they were evaluated more objectively.

Citing idiocracy and Crocs seems like a very weak argument to your case and even Idiocracy's point (fashion choices don't indicate the world is getting stupid). Mind you I'm not disagreeing that things have gotten worse in many ways and social media is definitely not helping. OTOH, Facebook actually was somewhat reasonable for a long time, and useful to connect with people. Only once the Twitterification of it started did it get so bad. But somehow Twitter never gets the bad reputation.

No. Crocks became popular after Idiocracy. Check the year they were shooting as it took them a few years to release it. Chat with Mike Judge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBu_RpKqCg8

Yep

At most, it just laid bare to see what were the normal social interactions and thoughts of millions of people and made possible far more viral spread of ideas. On the last one, I don't even think it's social media's fault, it's probably the whole internet at large, it's just these sorts of interactions happen most there.

I have been active on internet forums since the mid-late 90s. Facebook and Instagram and their other social media didn't create any of those bad human traits, they were rampant to begin with.

What these normie-networks did do was make a UX for public posting so easy that scores of low-education users were able to be influenced and re-share low-infromation-quality stuff in huge magnitudes. FB is guilty of making a super accessible user experience, and then in not being aggressive early enough in having high standards for its userbase. But it didn't invent society's ills.

I found myself stepping back from social media and deleted a lot of my accounts in 2016 -- the election and the Cambridge Analytica thing was a big reason. LinkedIn could have been the worst because I had spent so much time promoting myself and prospecting, I met a lot of good folks but I also met so many bullshitters who helped make me into a bullshitter.

The influx of normies circa 2000 did not seem so bad to me but Facebook and Twitter were another thing.

I was thinking a lot about it, but at the times of IRC and forums (and modems ;) ) this was not an issue on society scale. Facebook actually revolutionized it and made it available to anyone including showing the more contraverse opinions to other people as it was more likely for them to click. They were/are literally pumping up all the bad in society, to earn more money.

My point is that the less savoury aspects of human interaction were still happening, just not in the open. The popularity of the internet as a medium of human interaction just made it visible, recordable, searchable and pressed the gas pedal. I wouldn't particularlyblame FB for inventing this.

So your argument is that making computers and the internet easier to use for normal people is cause for societal destruction? I can’t be convinced, but that does seem like more of an indictment on people than it does tech.

Not my argument. You are fighting Umberto Eco (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco ) here.

Let me repeat him as you probably didnt catch it (I dont understand how, but this is one of the things, I dont understand, so I wont argue about it):

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”

I can just confirm that what he has seen and described is correct. And the more that you are standing your ground, the more you are proving, he was correct.

His entire argument amounts to Eternal September[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The tech company that got Donald Trump elected, and helped make all of our grandparents into lunatics?

That Facebook?

Wasn't that Twitter? You know, the site he actually used?

2017 called they want their meme back.

You remember that Facebook customer who got sued for breaking privacy agreements and profiling FB users? That’s the most public one.

Also the Russians sitting around posting on social media meme is still actively in use. I’ve seen it at least a handful of times this month