Social Media & Big Tech news and discussions

[wjfox]

Pretty big scandal emerging here.

[Powers]

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Meta Says It Will End Fact Checking
by Huo Jingnan, Shannon Bond, and Bobby Allyn
Updated January 7, 2025

Introduction:

(NPR) Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the social media company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, would stop working with third-party fact-checking organizations.

Repeating talking points long used by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies, in a video Zuckerberg said the company's content moderation approach resulted too often in "censorship".

"After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth," Zuckerberg said. "But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S."

Meta set up one of the most extensive partnerships with fact checkers after the 2016 presidential election, in which Russia spread false claims on Facebook and other online platforms. The company created what has become a standard for how tech platforms limit the spread of falsehoods and misleading information.

But the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic accelerated a backlash among conservatives who cast content moderation as a form of censorship. Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, but eventually allowed him to return ahead of his second run for office. In recent years, fact checkers, researchers of false narratives, and social media content moderation programs have become targets of Republican-led Congressional probes and legal challenges.

Read more here: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/nx-s1-5 ... erg-trump

[firestar464]

‘Shark Tank’ star Kevin O’Leary wants to buy TikTok—and says he needs Trump’s help

https://www.fastcompany.com/91257166/sh ... rumps-help

[weatheriscool]

Mark Zuckerberg says ending fact-checks will curb censorship. Fact-checkers say he's wrong.

Source: CBS News

Updated on: January 8, 2025 / 3:59 PM EST

Meta's fact-checking partners are rebutting Mark Zuckerberg's suggestion on Tuesday that their work is tantamount to censorship.

In announcing the social media giant's decision to end fact-checking in the U.S. on Facebook, Instagram and other Meta platforms, Zuckerberg said the move would "dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms." In a Facebook post explaining the company's shift to a community-driven moderation approach, Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan also said that "Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in 'Facebook jail'."

But those running the nonpartisan entities behind Meta's third-party fact-checking efforts said they had nothing to do with whether a post was removed from a platform, noting that the company was the final arbiter of what content it published.

"Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers never censored anything," Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit devoted to media literacy, said in a statement. Poynter's PolitiFact is among the entities that had teamed with Meta on fact-checking.

Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meta-mark- ... ensorship/

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

Meta terminates its DEI programs days before Trump inauguration

Meta, fresh off announcement to end factchecking, follows McDonald’s and Walmart in rolling back diversity initiatives

10 Jan 2025 21.06 GMT

Following a week in which Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta was getting rid of factchecking, as of Friday the company is also terminating its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, effective immediately.

An internal memo from Meta acknowledged that “the legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing”, while pointing to recent supreme court decisions and the “charged” view some have of DEI as a concept. Axios and Business Insider first reported the memo. While Meta confirmed to the Guardian the company is ending its DEI practices, the company did not respond to a request for a comment about how the decision aligns with its overarching goals.

In the memo, Janelle Gale, vice-president of human resources, wrote that the company would be ending several programs that targeted minority groups, including the Diverse Slate Approach, which she said “is currently being challenged” and representation goals, both of which have been used to promote diverse hiring practices.

Silicon Valley’s lack of race and gender diversity has long been acknowledged. According to the company’s most recent diversity report, under previous efforts, Meta doubled the number of Black and Hispanic employees in the US two years ahead of its goal, increasing from 3.8% and 5.2% to 4.9% and 6.7%, respectively. Per the new announcement, Meta will no longer enact specific diverse hiring practices.

The company is ending its equity and inclusion training programs and totally disbanding a team that was focused on DEI.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... ei-program

[firestar464]

Calling women ‘household objects’ now permitted on Facebook after Meta updated its guidelines

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/tech/met ... index.html

bruh

[wjfox]

Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg

13 Jan 2025 20:21

Mastodon announced Monday that it's shifting its structure over the next six months to become wholly owned by a European nonprofit organization—"affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual."

This takes control of the social network away from its previous "ultimate decision-maker," Eugen Rochko. As founder, Rochko initially took the reins to ensure the decentralized platform would never be for sale and "would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual." His grand vision remains to leave Mastodon users in control of the social network, making their own decisions about what content is allowed or what appears in their timelines.

The news comes after leaders of other social networks, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, have sparked backlash over sudden changes to popular apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). For years, Musk has drawn criticism for changing Twitter's hate speech policies through his X rebranding. And more recently, Zuckerberg this month defended Meta's decision to relax hate speech policies (permitting women to be called "property" and gay people to be called "mentally ill") by calling bans on such speech "out of touch with mainstream discourse."

Mastodon is hoping to provide an alternative social network for users who are potentially frustrated with their lack of control over their timelines and content on other networks.

But to achieve the "envisioned independence" for all users, Mastodon's structure needed to "evolve," the blog said, "as the community grew" to about 1.5 million monthly active users in 2023. Remaining headquartered in Europe primarily, Mastodon's day-to-day operations will be managed by the new European not-for-profit entity, "establishing a new legal home for Mastodon."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... naire-ceo/

[caltrek]

Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban
January 17, 2025

Introduction:

(Axios) The Supreme Court on Friday upheld a law that could ban TikTok in the U.S.

The big picture: The court unanimously rejected TikTok's claims that the law violates the First Amendment.

• The wildly popular app was on course to disappear for U.S. users as soon as Sunday, but President-elect Trump has said he would delay enforcement of that ban. TikTok's long-term future is still unclear.

Driving the news: The bipartisan law President Biden signed in April requires ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, to either sell TikTok or shutter it inside the U.S. on Jan. 19.

• The justices said that because the primary responsibility falls on a foreign company, and because all of the speech that's currently on TikTok could still be there under new ownership, the First Amendment does not apply.

Read more here: https://www.axios.com/2025/01/17/supre ... mp-biden

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[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Global Survey Shows That There is
Majority Support for Moderation on Social Media Platforms
February 10, 2025

Introduction:

(Eurekalert)
• A new large-scale, global survey has revealed that most people want harmful social media content such as physical threats and defamation to be restricted.
• This also applies in the USA where several social media platforms have recently modified their policies in favor of unrestricted free speech.
• However, the majority of users believe that intolerance and hate have become unavoidable on social media.
• This study, conducted by the University of Oxford and the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has been published today (11 Feb).

The global debate on whether and how social media content should be regulated has flared up again in recent months. Citing freedom of expression, the platform operators X and Meta have relaxed regulations intended to restrict discriminatory statements. Meanwhile, Australia has banned social media access for children under 16.

However, the discussions and research on these issues focus mainly on the attitudes of companies, policy makers and the media. So far little attention has been paid to the opinions of social media users. To address this gap, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford and TUM surveyed around 13,500 people in six European countries and in the USA, Brazil, South Africa, and Australia in the autumn of 2024. In this representative study the respondents answered an extensive questionnaire on the conflicting objectives of freedom of expression and safeguarding against digital abuse and misinformation.

Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1073136

[firestar464]

"but but muh freeze peach!!!"
"You see, just because you can doesn't mean you should"

[weatheriscool]

[firestar464]

Content removal attempts from Google this decade

https://surfshark.com/research/study/go ... l-attempts

[caltrek]

Bluesky is Similarly Structured to Other Social Media, but With Some Unusual Features
February 26, 2025

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) A comprehensive analysis of social media platform Bluesky provides insights into its structure, polarization and political leanings, in a new study published in open-access journal PLOS One on February 26, 2025, by Dorian Quelle and Alexandre Bovet, from the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Conclusion:

Bluesky appears to be relatively left-leaning: of links shared by Bluesky users, over 60% led to left-leaning websites. Centrist sources made up about 20% of links shared, and only about 8% of links led to right-leaning websites.

Despite this political alignment, the researchers found that Bluesky users particularly diverged on the topic of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Using a machine learning algorithm to categorize relevant posts as pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, the researchers found that prior to the October 7 attacks on Israel and the subsequent retaliation, most posts about Israel-Palestine relations were neutral. Afterwards, there was a sharp split between users, with a greater number of posts skewing more pro-Palestine over time.

Given its similarities to larger social media sites, Bluesky offers a unique opportunity to study how these networks grow from their beginnings and change over time. The polarization around the Israel-Palestine conflict also demonstrates that divisions can occur even in networks that are otherwise politically aligned, and future research could probe these splits.

The authors add: “Our study shows the potential of open social media platforms for investigating the impact of their design and algorithms on collective human behavior.”

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1074220

From the PLOS One article:

In 2019, Bluesky originated as the “Bluesky initiative” and was announced by the then CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. As a separate entity, the takeover of Twitter (now X) by Elon Musk did not affect Bluesky’s operation… In early February of 2024, Bluesky opened the website to users without an invite.
…
While Bluesky is modeled after Twitter, (i)t sets out to solve the “thorniest problems of social media” such as misinformation, harassment, and hate speech by implementing decentralization and leveraging a marketplace approach to these problems. Notably, Bluesky allows anybody to create custom moderation and algorithmic curation services, and users are free to subscribe to the ones they prefer. Decentralization means that the protocol or platform draws upon “multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system”.
…
Bluesky sets out to give users more agency over their own user experience. In practice, users have more choices in moderation and can design and subscribe to diverse content recommendation algorithms. Bluesky enables users to generate feeds letting them “choose their algorithms” in an effort to aid users discover content from other users they do not know and to gain exposure to specific content posted. Bluesky’s innovative feed feature has been used to create over 39 thousand feeds by a subset of highly active users. Feeds showcases a wide array of algorithmic choices, ranging from simple regex-based filters to professionally curated content streams. Popular feeds include “Discover” which promises to show “Trending content from your personal network”, “Mutuals” showing posts from followers of the user, but also topic-specific collections such as “Science” and “Art”. Notwithstanding the breadth of creative feeds, the feature’s overall adoption appears limited relative to Bluesky’s total user base. Engagement with feeds follows a familiar pattern in social media: a heavy-tailed distribution where a small number of feeds and highly active users dominate the landscape. This aspect of the platform provides an opportunity to investigate how users engage with and potentially influence content curation mechanisms, a topic of growing importance in the study of social media dynamics.

Read more here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/arti ... n=plos006

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[wjfox]