Moving on from Meta?

So Mark Zuckerberg’s going back to his roots, rating girls’ attractiveness… er, “free expression”, apparently. Who knew Facebook as ever meant to be a hub of free speech? Certainly not Facebook themselves, who have enough of a history of censorship that Wikipedia has a whole page devoted just to that…

Community notes instead of actual fact checkers. Just like Twitter. Almost feels like there was no point leaving.

As for removing restrictions on those not even remotely hot button issues, well…

In a notable shift, the company now says it allows “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like ‘weird.’”
In other words, Meta now appears to permit users to accuse transgender or gay people of being mentally ill because of their gender expression and sexual orientation.

Fantastic. The article also notes these other changes:

Removing language prohibiting content targeting people based on the basis of their “protected characteristics,” which include race, ethnicity, and gender identity, when they are combined with “claims that they have or spread the coronavirus.” Without this provision, it may now be within bounds to accuse, for example, Chinese people of bearing responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic.
A new addition appears to carve out room for people who want to post about how, for example, women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in the military or men shouldn’t be allowed to teach math because of their gender. Meta now permits content that argues for “gender-based limitations of military, law enforcement, and teaching jobs. We also allow the same content based on sexual orientation, when the content is based on religious beliefs.” […]
Meta’s Hateful Conduct policy previously opened by noting that hateful speech may “promote offline violence.” That sentence, which had been present in the policy since 2019, has been removed from the updated version released Tuesday. (In 2018, following reports from human rights groups, Meta admitted that its platform was used to incite violence against religious minorities in Myanmar.) The update does preserve language toward the bottom of the policy prohibiting content that could “incite imminent violence or intimidation.”

On the plus side, you still won’t be able to deny the Holocaust or accuse Jews of controlling the media and you can’t do blackface and you can’t be overtly racist… and does any of that matter when you see the stuff that Facebook lets slide? The overtly racist hate groups it keeps saying don’t violate their community standards? When Zuck talks about working with Mushroom Cock, I feel like he’s being at least a little disingenuous about what that means…

(via)

Anyway, people are wondering whether or not the time has come or is coming to get the hell away from Meta’s services, or at least from Threads and Fessebouc (I don’t know why but Instagram feels less corrupt for some reason, and I am probably wrong about that), if not social media altogether. I don’t know. Saw someone on Threads saying “hey, don’t forget Reddit’s still a thing”, which… yeah, that‘s an appetising thought, isn’t it? I don’t suppose Meta’s really going to go down or anything, I mean, Twitter’s still there and me leaving that made no real difference except I could feel smug about myself for not using one billionaire’s social media while using three of another billionaire’s.

And Bluesky, of course. No idea how long that’ll take to get enshittified, but I’ve no doubt it’ll happen eventually. Still seems like it might be the best option for that sort of Twitter-esque short form thing. But maybe proper blogs really are the way ahead? This is where most of my activity takes place these days, if I have anything to say it tends to be here… I have a feeling this sort of thing will yet see a resurgence as long as our social media providers insist on “working with” the Right…

Also, Zuckerberg was the Zodiac Killer, not Ted Cruz.