TIL teen girls still used Facebook.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Happy I got AdNauseam after uBlock Origin. Deleted my facebook a year ago, shit is an AI slopfest built upon the greed and manipulation of every part of the chain. Defcon 31 has a good talk that brings this up. "Disenshittify or die" by Cory Doctrow, cann recommend to watch.
I support the use of AdNauseam. Not sure if there are any more extreme alternatives, I now choose to be actively hostile towards advertising/tracking rather than just passively blocking it.
Teenagers should not be on social media. I rest my case.
Not just teenagers. Facebook and quite a few others should outright be banned. Not only they are scientifically proven to be a mental health catastrophe and a political threat to democracy, it's also pretty clear now that both these things are part of their design, not bugs or unintended emerging properties.
Ok, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Arguing like this is kinda pointless.
I don't think it will be possible to get them off social media (or the internet in general), so you need to find ways to make it work.
E.g. minors can not be advertised to, no algorithmic content, no doom-scrolling, and heightened data protection. I think teenager should get access to as much as possible to reduce the "risk" of them trying to go around it. "Their" version of social media might even be the superior one in the end.
If the world wasn't on fire at the moment, people could calmly discuss possible solutions and propose laws in every country to actually protect their children from e.g. the stuff mentioned in the linked article. Sadly, this isn't going to happen ...
The thing is that social media have an oversized influence that makes a calm discussion of possible solutions very hard to have. When the US recognized the implications of letting a foreign power exert so much control over their people, they tried banning TikTok, or breaking it up so their US operation would be under US control.
Facebook should also be split and its EU operation purchased by a European company, that could then spend more time implementing the other changes you mention (doom-scrolling, data protection) and less time lobbying to get all these pesky EU regulations removed.
And yes, it does feel heartbreaking to count the US as a threat to national security, but China has never threatened to annex Greenland with military force, so what would have been paranoia and extreme anti-americanism last year is now the sensible, level-headed thing to do.
No one should
That's some cartoon villain level shit jfc
This type of advertising isn’t new. There is that famous (although the claims from the father have been questioned) New York Times article written by Charles Duhigg in 2012. A father of a teenage girl in Minnesota got upset for receiving coupons from Target for infant care related products. As the story goes, he later learned his daughter was in fact pregnant. It turns out Target was using some predictive algorithm to identify would-be mothers and straight up sending them coupons for infant care products. It seems ever since this article was published that they stopped doing this in such a direct manner. Again, there have people who questioned the validity of the claims for this specific story, but Target did confirm they were doing this.
My doctor's office (allegedly) handed my info to a plastic surgery clinic so they could send me a "happy 40th birthday, now fix your sagging bullshit!"-email the literal day I turned 40.
Needless to say that put a damper on things.
People have been doing evil shit for money since the invention of money. These days it's just automated.
I think I read somewhere that that was apocryphal, but it strikes me as 100% plausible. It doesn't even have to be a matter of "write a system that detects pregnant women via their purchase history and send them coupons for maternity stuff" I think Amazon's Frequently Bought Together feature could get it done. The same algorithm that suggests a tacklebox and some lures when you have a fishing pole in your shopping cart might recommend diapers and formula to those who buy maternity pants.
Be aware that the companies would have paid Facebook handsomely to identify users in this way. The world we live in has a sickness with greed for money at its heart.
Saint Luigi deliver us from villains like Facebook
As if there would be no social networking without Zuckerberg.
Like any sin, the change starts with us. If we want a healthy social network, we can build a healthy social network.
Tom from Myspace never treated us like this.
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At some point we need to start criminalizing shit like this and actually holding people accountable.
It’s so much bigger than this. It starts young. iPad kids. Strict gender roles. Sexualization of children. Learning from parents who have been conditioned by capitalism, sexism and more. We got little girls that want skincare products and teens talking about plastic surgery. It’s bad.
Agreed though. Punish people for ruining society. I think I read a while ago that France had required social media posts to flag when images have been altered. We need more laws like this too.
As little kids we got like no genderbased education from our parents. When we moved our grandmother got a lot more control and dumped blue boyish stuff on my brother and forbid the girly things. Has never worn a dress since and now is still not willing to wear one
(it could be that us older sisters influenced that he wants to wear dresses too)
Bummer. Happens to almost all men in the US. Maybe less now, but this new red pill generation is wild.
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💯 Big tech companies think they’re above the law.
Thus far, they’d basically be right. Any fines are simply chocked up to “cost of doing business” expenses and since no one wants to either make solid laws against this stuff OR hold them accountable for current ones, they’ll just keep at it.
If a law has a fine, it was created to deter poor people.
That depends on if it is a dayfine or not.
A fine of €500 for speeding will only really affect poor people, 30 dayfines which value is dictated by the wealth of the individual is a better system.
they ARE above the law, at least it would seem so.
History has shown that they are.
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Zuckerberg’s $300 million mega yacht may be tracked here: https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9857511
My thoughts exactly.
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Who the fuck comes up with this stuff?
This is the sort of thing machine learning algorithms are pretty good at at.
Coupled with however many millions of interactions a day, you would have no problem correlating changes to your algorithm against increases in revenue.
But. It’s often not that impressive. Humans are equally good at noticing patterns.
All it takes is for one person at FB to see their wife or daughter delete a post, ask them “why did you delete that post” and take away from the response of “It made me look fat” to go “there’s a new targeted ad that’ll get me a bonus”.
In a similar vein, 80% of your banks anti-fraud systems isn’t deep learning models that detect fraudulent behaviour. Instead it’s “if the user is based in Russia, add 80 points, and if the account is at a branch in 10km of Heinersdorf Berlin, add another 50…. We’re pretty sure a Russian scammer goes on holiday every 6 months and opens a bunch of accounts there, we just don’t know which ones”.
People who traded morals for money.
The most generous assumption is that they use statistics to determine correlations like this (e.g., deleted selfies resulted in a high CTR for beauty ads so they made that a part of their algo). The least generous interpretation is exactly what you're thinking: an asshole came up with it because it's logical and effective.
Either way, ethics needs to be a bigger part of the programmers education. And we, as a society, need to make algorithms more transparent (at least social media algorithms). Reddit's trending algorithm used to be open source during the good ole days.
Can you make the algorithm open source that determined it was ok for you to murder Tuvix tho
JANEWAY DID WHAT SHE HAD TO DO
if (ugly) {
kill_child(child_name);
} else {
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
}
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Wonder how much of a bonus the sick fuck who pitched that got for the idea?
Probably nothing. Most likely, a paid consultant to give ideas. And if it was a worker, they were just doing their job and at most got a "great job, keep up the good work," praise email.
And tiktok is supposed to be our enemy?
Por que no los dos?
TikTok absolutely does the same kind of thing and worse. Engagement is all that matters. Doesn't matter what kind, what about, or how that engagement is generated.
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