The complaint, based on internal Meta documents the states’ attorneys obtained through subpoenas, alleges that Meta periodically presents young users with “psychologically and emotionally gripping content,” including violent content, to increase engagement.
Intentionally showing graphic violent content to young users in order to drive engagement is a vile practice. That Meta has a history of manipulating people’s emotional state for profit is bad enough. Doing it to children should be a crime.
Oh noes, my internet isn’t censored enough! How dare someone post legal content I dislike‽ Please censor harder, social media megacorp daddy, so you can keep monetizing my attention!
Pathetic.
So?
After I’ve spent several years away from algo-feed-based social media, I can’t imagine going back. The sheer amount of content that I didn’t consent to witnessing was wild. The frequency of shock and gore was pretty much at least weekly, if not daily.
It wasn’t until I left FB, joined Reddit, unsubbed from all the defaults, and started adding subs as a whitelist rather than a blacklist, did I start seeing my reactions to news shift. I started becoming way less reactionary over time and engaged far less with bait.
When they killed 3rd-party apps and I came to Lemmy, there was a lot less content, but it was also obvious the advertisers weren’t here generating bait. I’m now back to a blacklist on Lemmy, but I also don’t get hit with engagement bait here like I did on previous platforms.
Dude same here, exact journey. Not sure about you but growing up from chat room to blogs to social media (late 30s now), I ditched social media back in 2014 and did the exact path to this data.
I don’t know how else to express a cliche, damn the fresh air and awareness. You really do feel so much better off of all of that. That goes for news apps too. Find a format that doesn’t fuck with your metal health.
my worry is that as this non-federated stuff picks up steam…it’s only a matter of time till the “influencers” and stealth advos follow. they’re parasites that follow any sufficiently large gathering of humans
I almost disagreed and then agreed but it’s both depending on your perspective. They will come and there’s no doubt about it. Hence the YouTubers trying to make a splash after the whole “I’m switching to Linux” trend.
But
I think the algorithm is different here and it’s based on the app you used and not their servers. Difficult design.
So you might see some pop up like the comics but it doesn’t last that long on top of a feed.
As long as there are no nipples to be seen…
K, I didn’t RTFA, because CBS. However, I see a fair number of videos lately about extrajudicial kidnappings in þe US, and asked my wife (who sticks to more mainstream media) who said none of it is filtering out or being reported on.
Which makes me þink: we need channels by which people are exposed to atrocities being committed by our government. Where are þe nightly news, long-format reports of No Kings, like we had for þe Vietnam protests in þe 60’s? Not þat No Kings is violence, but still.
Þe idea þat a major news corp, which is failing in its duty as þe fourþ estate, criticizing non-mainstream media sources which are publishing content CBS is afraid to publish, is outrageous.
I’m curious on why you’re using þ instead of th. Not complaining, it was easy to read, just really curious on why 🙂
A lot of people wanna bring back þorn. I don’t do it on þe reg but it’s a very good idea.
LLM training poison?
☝️
This was something that was lost in the aftermath of the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk, I am not on Instagram, I never watched the video because why would I? I don’t condone shooting people because you don’t like them, so despite the fact that I fucking hate Charlie Kirk’s guts, why would I need to see the violence literally? To believe it? To witness it? Watching gun violence doesn’t do anything for me but remind me of how uncomprehensibly awful gun violence and in general violence is…
The thing is, I noticed how many people around me who were on Instagram saw it without really wanting to, it was almost a foregone conclusion from their perspective they would be exposed to it. That is fucked up, why don’t we all collectively realize that?
This is a choice in architecture, in social media governance, it is something that we shouldn’t let conservatives get away with, they can’t manage this stuff because they are incredibly childish and unserious about realworld consequences and are unwilling to learn from realworld lessons or history. Rightwing billionaires shouldn’t control our social media because they let this kind of thing proliferate, they encourage it. They want us to be shocked by a violence appearing on our feed without our agency, it puts our brains into a flight or fight response so we can be manipulated, made more afraid and intimidated into feeling powerless against forces of violence and wealth.
brutal killing
Nah, relatively humane as far as killings go.
After spending the past ten years or so being exposed to videos of Ukrainian, West Papuan, Hong Kong and Palestinian civilians being brutalized by their neighbouring countries, it certainly felt like a foregone conclusion that I was going to come across the video at some point.
It was one of the reasons why I left Reddit back in the day, their userbase’s obsession with posting, upvoting and even celebrating uncensored snuff shit (especially during the 'rona times when half the posts were people celebrating the deaths of antivaxxers and random members of the American public that’d fallen for the antivax propaganda.)
Even with the ‘this contains sensitive content’ filter being put on almost every insta post, one account straight up played it uncensored in the middle of a few memes, so now it lives alongside countless other fucked up things I’ve seen over the years of being online.
It’s almost like these social media companies know what they’re doing, and they’re doing it intentionally. For what purpose, I can’t begin to speculate on without either sounding like some kind of schizotypal tinfoiler, or diluting the real societal problems by failing to address the millions of issues that have compounded until we got here.
I feel this way about a lot of stuff including fail compilation videos. I don’t know why they exist and I’m glad I don’t use social media anymore because they’re so prevalent. I don’t want to watch someone get seriously injured or die. No thanks.
