The Antisocial Network

[KingRoyal]

It's not that complex. Once you've found your way into the "Politics" category for Facebook, the system will shove a conservative page into your feed saying stuff like "We must ban Critical Race Theory to ensure schools are safe for our children" and the intent is to get people posting "ur dumb" or "God has ordained me to kill poor people" as a reply then let fights break out in the comments. It's an incredible amount of engagement

[mharr]

You don't need to find your way into a specific 'politics' wing of the site, it makes sure some variation on that scene is playing out anywhere it can get traction.

And if they really double down on the Oculus Metaverse thing we're going to start seeing the gargoyles from David Brin's novel Earth, AR headset enclosed boomers scanning faces on the street for Skynet's analysis of their political identity so they can start Facebook fights with strangers in person and record it all for the culture war. Things could get cyberpunk as shit out there.

[Mongrel]

Of course this means that cancel culture has been monetized.

Just assume everything's been monetized.

It's harder and harder for me not to be constantly visualizing the Ferengi bit where when you enter any building, even a friend's home, you pay for the hospitality privilege of setting foot inside.

[Brantly B.]

Thing is I've gotten so cynical that I actually believe these leaks themselves are selective, to obscure the real reason why these sites keep pushing conservative dogwhistles, catering to the right, and pushing the public discourse comfortably that direction regardless of the social consequences.

It has nothing to do with believing or disbelieving in a conservative agenda.

It's just because conservatives don't use ad blockers.

[KingRoyal]

I also think it's because non-conservatives are more likely to post on conservative meme pages more than conservatives are to post on liberal/leftist memepages

[Thad]

Thing is I've gotten so cynical that I actually believe these leaks themselves are selective

Well, this one certainly was, in that it wasn't a leak, it was a published study.

Meanwhile: Facebook to stop using facial recognition, delete data on over 1 billion people

The change, while significant, doesn't mean that Facebook is forswearing the technology entirely. "Looking ahead, we still see facial recognition technology as a powerful tool, for example, for people needing to verify their identity, or to prevent fraud and impersonation," said Jérôme Pesenti, Facebook/Meta's vice president of artificial intelligence. "We believe facial recognition can help for products like these with privacy, transparency and control in place, so you decide if and how your face is used. We will continue working on these technologies and engaging outside experts."

[Caithness]

In a strange way, the plague has offered up a desperately needed one-time safety blow-off. Everybody gets a reprieve for a while, some wealth gets spread around. How much of that generates meaningful mid-term or long-term change, well, we'll see.

[Mongrel]

That is true, but we're currently seeing labour gaining ground, for however long that lasts or how far it goes. I guess letting a million people die in the US alone will do that.

As those articles are from January, I wonder what the numbers are right now (Muskie's on his way to becoming a trillionaire, so they might be worse!).

[Thad]

That is true, but we're currently seeing labour gaining ground, for however long that lasts or how far it goes.

There are a few different things going on.

One is that we're seeing appointments on the FTC and elsewhere that suggest Democrats are finally reconsidering the last 40 years of Chicago School economic policy.

Another is the generational change I keep talking about -- Millennials know this "work hard and you'll be rewarded" American Dream fairytale is a crock of shit, and don't recoil in terror whenever anyone says "socialism".

And the pandemic has also shifted the risk-reward calculation for people working shit jobs. A whole lot of low-wage workers have been right at the edge of deciding "this isn't worth it, I'd be better off not having a job at all" for decades, and risking their lives while assholes sneer at them (or worse) for taking basic commonsense safety precautions has put a lot of them over that edge. Self-proclaimed free-market capitalists have not yet figured out that the way to get more staff is to offer better pay and benefits, and are currently exploring options like child labor instead.

Now, how long those trends are going to last? Hard to say for certain, but Millennials' power as an economic and voting bloc is going to continue to increase for the next 20 years and stay pretty high for another 30 or so after that. I think that, for that reason, it's going to be hard for Democrats to move back to the right on economic policy. (Republicans will continue to be terrible.)

As for the current so-called "labor shortage" that's actually just a bunch of businesses refusing to pay fair wages, I don't know what happens with that. I think low-wage workers are fed up, and there's a large segment of the population that's intent on being assholes and spreading COVID, and that doesn't look likely to change in the near future.

[Mongrel]

That is true, but we're currently seeing labour gaining ground, for however long that lasts or how far it goes.

There are a few different things going on.

One is that we're seeing appointments on the FTC and elsewhere that suggest Democrats are finally reconsidering the last 40 years of Chicago School economic policy.

Another is the generational change I keep talking about -- Millennials know this "work hard and you'll be rewarded" American Dream fairytale is a crock of shit, and don't recoil in terror whenever anyone says "socialism".

And the pandemic has also shifted the risk-reward calculation for people working shit jobs. A whole lot of low-wage workers have been right at the edge of deciding "this isn't worth it, I'd be better off not having a job at all" for decades, and risking their lives while assholes sneer at them (or worse) for taking basic commonsense safety precautions has put a lot of them over that edge. Self-proclaimed free-market capitalists have not yet figured out that the way to get more staff is to offer better pay and benefits, and are currently exploring options like child labor instead.

Now, how long those trends are going to last? Hard to say for certain, but Millennials' power as an economic and voting bloc is going to continue to increase for the next 20 years and stay pretty high for another 30 or so after that. I think that, for that reason, it's going to be hard for Democrats to move back to the right on economic policy. (Republicans will continue to be terrible.)

As for the current so-called "labor shortage" that's actually just a bunch of businesses refusing to pay fair wages, I don't know what happens with that. I think low-wage workers are fed up, and there's a large segment of the population that's intent on being assholes and spreading COVID, and that doesn't look likely to change in the near future.

Yeah, I'm aware of the different factors going in to the current situation, we just haven't seen how it's all going to play out yet.

Obviously my posts above imply that I'm figuring labour has to be getting *something*. While companies are resisting tooth and nail, with whatever government help they can buy in the bargain, many places ARE belatedly raising the minimum wage again, and workers ARE getting concessions and raises in many cases. The question again is just how lasting or strong these changes and concessions will be, but as you said, demographics are in their favour.

Up here in Ontario, the provincial Tories are trying to pivot to attract the labour vote by legitimately implementing some clearly pro-labour legislation, including a clear right to "shut off" remote work or extended hours and a minimum wage raise (which they had actually killed off when elected 3 years ago, so, not the slam dunk it sounds like). The devil's in the details of course, but it's at least clear that they understand that passing anti-labour legislation right now is damn near krptonite.

[Mongrel]

Meanwhile: Facebook to stop using facial recognition, delete data on over 1 billion people

The change, while significant, doesn't mean that Facebook is forswearing the technology entirely. "Looking ahead, we still see facial recognition technology as a powerful tool, for example, for people needing to verify their identity, or to prevent fraud and impersonation," said Jérôme Pesenti, Facebook/Meta's vice president of artificial intelligence. "We believe facial recognition can help for products like these with privacy, transparency and control in place, so you decide if and how your face is used. We will continue working on these technologies and engaging outside experts."

Well, that was quick.

[Friday]

Academi was an American private military company founded on December 26, 1996[2] by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince[3][4] as Blackwater, renamed as Xe Services in 2009 and known as Academi since 2011 after the company was acquired by a group of private investors.[5] The company received widespread notoriety in 2007, when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad, for which four guards were convicted in the U.S., but later pardoned on December 22, 2020 by President Donald Trump.[6][7]

[pacobird]

the reason why I can't take people on twitter seriously is there was a very popular meme on there about how you could give a person from the 18th century a cool ranch dorito and it would blow their mind, and i know the person who posted that never listened to Mozart because if they had they'd know the 18th century person would have been just fine

[Thad]

Jack Dorsey resigns as CEO of Twitter

Parag Agrawal, who had been chief technical officer, named as new CEO.

My first question is what this means for Bluesky.

Agrawal has been at Twitter since October 2011 and was promoted to CTO in 2017. He has worked on the company’s artificial intelligence efforts, and he also led Bluesky, the decentralized social networking project that Twitter launched in 2019. At the time, Dorsey said he intended for Twitter to eventually become a client of an open source Bluesky protocol. Currently, the project remains in the research phase.

Putting the lead of Bluesky into the CEO seat suggests Bluesky probably isn't dead, though it doesn't necessarily mean it'll ever actually come to anything, either.

[Thad]

Twitter introduces new policy against videos taken without people's consent, it's immediately abused to take down videos of right-wingers planning to attack the news media.

Who could have possibly foreseen this.

[KingRoyal]

That policy is not just stricter than other media sites, it's stricter than federal and state law about public photography

[mharr]

Almost like it took us literal centuries to evolve these laws because managing people is hard.

[Thad]

That policy is not just stricter than other media sites, it's stricter than federal and state law about public photography

That it's stricter than the law isn't really notable in itself; TOS in general are. That's kind of the point of a site TOS, to establish restrictions for using a site that are separate from the ones mandated by law.

A site rule being stricter than the law isn't inherently a bad thing; there's lots of stuff that's legal that I don't want to see. But of course it's not inherently a good thing, either.

The Chad Loder thread I linked above has grown; they're collecting examples of the new rule being abused.

On the plus side, Twitter seems to be responding; they've started suspending accounts for false reporting. That's a positive corrective step, but it shouldn't have taken this long. Any kind of new moderation policy needs to come with a plan for how to handle trolls abusing it to silence their critics, because that will definitely happen.

[KingRoyal]

Should probably rephrase. It's less that it's more strict than the law on photography, but that the restriction won't actually have an impact on harassment and doxxing but will definitely let Twitter suppress videos of police doing things. Well, not so much "let" as give them cover for when they do

[Mongrel]

BBC: Facebook tells LA police to stop using fake accounts to spy on users