To be totally clear, the UK has been a fucked up place for centuries, I don’t think Meta fundamentally changed the culture.

Having said that, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc are tools that enable political influence over the population at levels that were previously unimaginable. Look into Cambridge Analytica a bit or borrow Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie from your local library for details.

Starting as early as 2012 we have evidence that Facebook was pivotal in stoking racial tensions in Myanmar, leading to a genocide.

There’s evidence that Meta was a major factor in Brexit, which more specifically relates to my claim with respect to influence in the UK.

The US election in 2016 was clearly influenced by Meta platforms, including taking Russian money to stoke racial tensions in line with the Russian Manifesto, The Foundations of Geopolitics.

I’m currently reading through Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which is a memoir about how these systems were conceptualized and built at Facebook, and so far I’d recommend it.

Obviously Meta isn’t the only problem, Tiktok is clearly a problem of similar size and scope, and other social apps have their own challenges (X being owned by the richest man alive and actively influencing the algorithm, for example), but in many ways Meta is the OG, and blazed the trail for others.

Meta happened. UK, US, all over the world there is a correlation between the adoption of Meta’s products and the corrosion of basic human rights.

You should try asking people about the last EULA they read the next time you’re at a party. You’re gonna be blown away.

But how could the trolls enrage well meaning people into moving to a less privacy respecting browser if the post wasn’t designed for performative outrage?

A buddy of mine works for a fortune 500 company that started giving out MacBooks as the standard hardware this year. Apparently you need to jump through a bunch of hoops if you want to run Windows. I was shocked to hear it but Microsoft deserves to be humbled.

Bro I think you might need a T break.

You didn’t need to say cannabis was good, you suggested that it was better that we think of the plant smoked as cannabis than tobacco as to warn people about the societal ills of tobacco use.

I’m not going to do a lit review of all of the studies about cannabis risk for you, I just picked an article that cited the one you provided with a different conclusion. The point is that there is no academic consensus on this and we don’t need to revise LOTR because of your feelings about tobacco.

You’re not wrong, smoking things is bad for your health. I’m not saying that the risk is exactly equal, but if you could lay out an easily understood framework for how to assess the impact of smoking a single cigarette vs a single joint, I would be impressed.

All I’m saying is that Tolkien wrote the books with tobacco in mind, which was way more popular during his time, and we don’t need to pretend that they were smoking cannabis instead as some sort of some great societal PSA against the dangers of tobacco.

If we want to get really nitpicky, you don’t even inhale pipe tobacco smoke, whereas you’d never do the same with cannabis or you’d miss out on the effects. Obviously there’s a risk factor for mouth, nose, and throat cancer, but most western societies agree that adults should be informed of risks and allowed to make their own mistakes. Same goes for alcohol, mountaineering, and owning weapons.

Look, I can find academic papers that support my claim and cite them too, but the fact is that there isn’t nearly enough data on cannabis consumption to reach a scientific consensus. We know that putting toxins in your lungs is bad for your health overall, but I don’t agree that we can, in the same sentence, say “cannabis good, tobacco bad”. They’re both bad for you, and adults should be allowed to make their own decisions about when and how to use them.

Here, I’m not paying for full access to this paper, but it cites the paper you linked to and this one has itself been cited more often.

Marijuana use and risk of lung cancer: a 40-year cohort study

Russell C Callaghan, Peter Allebeck, Anna Sidorchuk

Cancer Causes & Control 24 (10), 1811-1820, 2013

Purpose

Cannabis (marijuana) smoke and tobacco smoke contain many of the same potent carcinogens, but a critical—yet unresolved—medical and public-health issue is whether cannabis smoking might facilitate the development of lung cancer. The current study aimed to assess the risk of lung cancer among young marijuana users.

Conclusion

Our primary finding provides initial longitudinal evidence that cannabis use might elevate the risk of lung cancer. In light of the widespread use of marijuana, especially among adolescents and young adults, our study provides important data for informing the risk–benefit calculus of marijuana smoking in medical, public-health, and drug-policy settings.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=946268550444709876&as_sdt=5%2C30&sciodt=0%2C30&hl=en#d=gs_qabs&t=1762525435931&u=%23p%3D9kkM3NKxiJUJ

This make it sound like you’re under the impression that tobacco is big cancer and cannabis is completely harmless?

Do you think it’s the nicotine that does the cancer and THC actually cures you? Because while I hate to be the one to bear that bad news for you, it’s the byproducts of combustion that cause the cancer, regardless of whether it’s cannabis or tobacco.

Basically, stop gatekeeping and let people, halflings, elves, dwarves, and ainur enjoy tobacco if they want. We’re all here for a limited amount of time, let me enjoy some pipe tobacco or a cigar without turning it into a moral panic requiring the redaction of one of the best stories of all time.

Also yes 10/10 for LOTR while stoned.

We’ll have to fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore

You might be a daft fucking idiot but at this point as long as you get out and vote for someone who isn’t a fascist, I could be convinced to share enough drinks that we forget our differences.

The racists and bigots (Heritage foundation and plenty of others) have been working on this shit literally since Reconstruction and we’ve been able to rebuff their insane ideas for over a hundred years. Then, after 4 years of insanity under Trump, culminating in a global pandemic, Jan 6, and election denialism, we get Joe Biden.

What steps do you think would be appropriate to take as the most powerful leader in the country in 2021 to help the country heal and avert future calamities like these? From the top of my head I can spout off a long list but accountability for Trump and those who enabled him are at the top of the list.

Why didn’t Joe take decisive action to fix our broken political system? Why did he allow Merrick Garland to slow roll the “investigations” for 4+ years and ultimately do nothing? How could he and Kamala run on a campaign of, “save the country from the fascists” and yet do nothing to save the country themselves? The Supreme Court ruled, during Joe’s term, that the President has absolute immunity for any actions taken as president. How could Joe’s administration get this kind of power while facing down a planned fascist takeover and DO NOTHING?

You’re coming at me like I’m “blind and stupid” while suggesting that Joe was the second coming of Christ in America, and I’m here to tell you that he simply did not perform his constitutional role to do everything in his power to maintain the Union. I like the guy, but he fucked up.

Project Nazi 2016-2025? Bruh, who controlled the government 2020-2024? Clearest troll yet. Unreal.

Stop rejecting the facts simply because they are unpleasant.

I am righteous in my displeasure with Sleepy Joe and the larger Democratic establishment that enabled MAGA to thrive. Are you so blinded by your hatred for MAGA that you’re unable to objectively evaluate the results from the election?

Look, I would have voted for 4 more years of Joe in a heartbeat, I voted for Kamala; but a majority of Americans voted for our current path. I do not think this is the best path for our country, but I also won’t pretend this happened in a vacuum. The Democrats steadfastly refuse to consider their own failings, and that includes lining up behind Joe Biden when his administration was polling in the gutter.

Fascism isn’t looking great but Americans clearly aren’t willing to vote for democracy on its own merits when the democratic leaders don’t have a policy that resonates with voters.

Tl;dr it’s not because I’m fascist that I call Joe sleepy, it’s because I demand better from our leadership. If that gets under your skin then you’re part of the problem.

Lmao I’m a MAGA? You’re a clown. 🤡

So we agree, rich douchebags took over our democracy while Sleepy Joe sat back and did NOTHING to stop it. Jan 6th? Trump sees no consequences. Numerous other indictments for Trump? No need to rush. Musk buying votes in PA? Seems fine.

All the while Joe sits around insisting he’s strapped in and ready for another term. He got elected on the premise that he would be a 1 term president then decided he was comfy, in spite of incredibly clear polling numbers showing that his policy was remarkably unpopular. Then Kamala picked up the mantle and when she asked what she would do differently? No notes.

Policy-wise Joe was better than most but politically he gave away the country to the fascists.

Sleepy Joe is a big part of the reason we’re in this mess to begin with. I say fuck him, he had his chance to earn a better nickname.

5x the property tax rate for all vacant housing?

Yeah I totally agree that the whole ordeal is unnecessarily complex and confusing. The number of websites that have started mandating 2FA despite having complex, unique passwords that have never been shared annoys me regularly. It’s frustrating that because other people can’t figure out how to use a password manager, we can’t have nice things.

My guess is that there is a certain number of account actions you’re allowed to take (changing password, email, etc) before they force you into a cool down period where you can’t delete your account for like a week. Maybe not, but this is one approach I’ve seen before.

As for the video call, I totally see your train of thought. This is gonna sound dumb, but consider that nobody at LI knows you, so a video call is of limited value, especially in this world of ai models that can apply filters to video in real time. I’m not saying this is their rationale, but it could be part of it.

I’m gonna nerd out here for a second but hopefully you’ll humor me. Authentication is tricky, especially if you want more than one factor for 2FA/MFA. The factors are often explained as something you know (password), something you have (perhaps a yubikey, in this case a state issued ID), or something you are (biometrics). The biggest issue as I understand it is that people reuse the same password over and over, so if your LI password were compromised then it isn’t too big of a leap to assume that your email was also compromised, meaning that any form of authentication relying on email cannot be trusted.

If LI has a policy that any account deletion actions attempted within a month of changing the primary email require the account to have at least 2 factors, that would trigger the request for your ID, because they’re assuming that a threat actor is controlling all of the relevant accounts and they are no longer useful for authentication. State issued ID is one of the best ways to authenticate because when your state provides the ID, they are providing a level of guarantee that the information is both true and being provided without modifications (authentic).

Having said all of that, could you not photoshop a state ID and provide that? Some in the comments have suggested that as an option. If I were designing the program then this third party, Persona, would have relationships with issuers of state ids and could do some level of validation that the ID being uploaded is authentic.

I realize none of this solves your problem, but sometimes I feel better about “stupid” policies if I can work backwards and understand how they came to be in the first place and what they’re meant to accomplish. My advice is to wait a week or 3 and try to delete again, but obviously that is still no guarantee. Good luck!

Would you prefer that anyone be able to request that any non-verified account be deleted?

I’d bet their security system saw you log in from a new IP, maybe even over VPN(?), then change the email and add 2fa, which are exactly the steps a malicious actor takes when securing an account acquired using credential stuffing. They presumably expect that your account has been compromised and are treating you as untrusted until you provide some form of validation that you are who you say you are.

I suspect that if you were to seek legal action against them they would claim that you refused to take basic actions to positively prove your identity and throw out some statistics, ie (making this up) 98% of users are able to verify using their system without any issues.

If you do seek to bring them to court under article 77, would you not then be putting into the public record a permanent association between your real identity and the account you seek to delete? Is that better than simply sending them a picture of your ID? With this in mind, is it worth the cost of legal representation to resolve the issue? I’m not sure where you’re from and you don’t need to answer me but I would encourage you to consider those questions when determining your path forward.