On Monday, Taylor Lorenz posted a telling story about how Meta has been suppressing access to LGBTQ content across its platforms, labeling it as “sensitive content” or “sexually explicit.” Posts wi…
I don’t know how to stress this any more clearly: A privately owned social media site isn’t actually a public space. It’s literally the definition of a private space. It’s more akin to a mall than a library. That’s the whole issue, how does it help to be on a site where all the admins have to do is shut down your speech and ban you anyway? Where everything you do, every move you make is tracked and monetized and studied to be used against you? It’s by definition a surveillance state where you have no rights.
You realize they make money from ads and if the majority of people stop using their services they stop making enough money to function as a business? They may already have your data but you don’t need to be giving them more.
The bigger issue is that corporations have commodified public spaces. You can take back public spaces by choosing to not use their services and convincing others not to. Facebook is already dying which is why they rolled out bullshit AI profiles and the public response to that went really badly. But they live and die by engagement so if they already are needing to turn to faking engagement to keep people on and money rolling in, then isn’t a boycott literally the way to cut them off at the knees and stop them being a public space?
Forgive me if I didn’t make clear that everyone needs to do it, not just LGBTQ+, my point is there are very few reasons to keep using these services for any person with a conscience.
Like you’ve mentioned, real public spaces have been killed so by quitting FB and other corpo social media you effectively self-ostracise as there are little alternatives. Yeah, you’re playing their game but when you’re losing you need humility rather than some moral high ground. If you want to affect the change you need to talk to people.
There is no talking. There is no convincing them to change. Let them rot where they sit. Let them die off in their old folks homes, hating the kids and the queer. It’s not our job to sit on Facebook and leading them in a round of kumbaya. Since you can’t protest a private social media network effectively on that network, you just walk the fuck away.
But don’t delete your account, before you simply never login again, upload as much high def white static video as you can.
Screw Facebook and their advertisers. They don’t need our eyes while we tried to tell some racist bigots that they’re racist bigots.
You’re not going to win by waiting for old people to die off. We reproduce in lower numbers than before and tendency to go disillusioned as you grow older remains a constant. Currently that disillusionment is being harvested by far right but that’s entirely on how the left lost credibility in the west after allying itself with liberal elites.
We won’t get ourselves out of this ditch unless we stop participating in culture wars manufactured for us by those elites. Normal people don’t care about queers but society is so polarised that they assume default stance from their political tribe. When you say they should die off you only strengthen their belief. It was never about this but more serious underlying issues that we’re not addressing because it’s a proxy war that’s supposed to distract us from a bigger war by the rich against the regular people.
I’m not saying we need to abandon traditional gender and minority emancipation goal but we need to be mindful of priorities. Meta employees are more outraged about new hate speech policies but they didn’t care when Meta enabled genocide in Myanmar. See how skewed it got? People don’t like hypocrisy.
Normal people do not give a shit about LGBTQ, and I mean that in the best possible way. Unless it’s shoved right in their face, in which case they will most likely be put out by it. Pretty much the same concept as with other (often important) things that rampant activism turns into something abhorrent.
It’s so weird to me that people still use Facebook. Nobody under 40 uses Facebook. The women use insta sure but literally what are you going on Facebook for. It’s only boomer hate groups on there now
Agreed but we invented other forms of communication for a reason. [edit] All I’m saying is - don’t roll over and let them win by default. You don’t have to use corpo social media in good faith. Break rules and fight back.
…and they will immediately delete all your posts and ban you. It’s an authoritarian surveillance state, remember? It’s way easier to “disappear” your voice and opinion from their website than it is to remove you from reality. They have literally all the control in that space, the technology is built against you from the ground up. There’s nothing sneaky you can do that they don’t already immediately see and can shut down. They automated bots roving looking for shit like that to take down.
How is that helping again? To be immediately silenced and others never see a word you had to say? How is that helping?
In the real world they still have to black bag you and throw you into an unmarked van to disappear you, something other people will see. Facebook makes it so that the unmarked van and black bag are never seen by others.
It’s like fighting with a moderator. It ain’t a democracy and whatever choice they make is “law,” even if we are users disagree and think what they did silly. Too bad, thems the breaks. They have all the power in that situation and we don’t. Zuckerberg literally employs mountains of people just to shut up voices like yours before they get a foothold. In my view, it’s more than a waste of time, it’s literally handing an enemy resources (data) while cosplaying being helpful.
Doing dumb shit like altering your language to use words like “unalive” to get around arbitrary filters is fuck stupid too and hurts language for the sake of people like Zuckerberg. You’re not changing language to fight them, no your changing language for them instead of dumping their fucking services and using ones that don’t do stupid shit like ban the word “suicide.” Language evolves naturally, but this evolution is in direct response to censorship and it’s a bad deal.
I didn’t say you wouldn’t be at a massive disadvantage but they didn’t have functional moderation before and they’re not going to pay for it now. What’s being suggested as an alternative is flat out giving up.
What’s being suggested as an alternative is flat out giving up.
No it’s not, it’s simply not spending our time on a private companies property. Literally the Civil Rights era was bolstered by massive success of boycotts. It wasn’t giving up, it was hitting them in the pocketbook and it worked.
But you can make any excuses for yourself that you need to keep sucking down that corporate slop.
I don’t know how to reiterate that you can still talk to people in other places like Facebook, the fact that you treat it like it’s the only way to communicate with people says a lot about you and how you view the internet. It’s naive, imho.
What if people like you had convinced Martin Luther King Jr. that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was “giving up” because they “weren’t using the buses.”
On 5 December, 90 percent of Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off the buses. That afternoon, the city’s ministers and leaders met to discuss the possibility of extending the boycott into a long-term campaign. During this meeting the MIA was formed, and King was elected president. Parks recalled: “The advantage of having Dr. King as president was that he was so new to Montgomery and to civil rights work that he hadn’t been there long enough to make any strong friends or enemies”
Finally, and most importantly, you talk about breaking rules, but you haven’t even given one example of how you can do that effectively to help people. I might believe you if you were coming correct with examples, but you aren’t so I can only assume this is some foolhardy desire to do good but you have no fucking clue how. The how is the hard part, buddy, and it doesn’t come from giving in to corporate slop and giving them the money they need to keep fucking you over.
Okay. I’ll leave those patient support groups because you told me to cut contact with people using corpo media. You might not be interested in boring reasons people do what they do but that’s why common people don’t believe in honesty when you tell them you have their best interest at heart. This suggests that you only care about what’s good for people superficially and people can smell that a mile away, hence current popularity of liberal left.
Unlike yourself, I cultivated relationships with those kind of people outside Facebook, got their phone numbers, and am able to be part of a support network for them without needing to use Facebook.
That’s the moral high ground speaking. I was like that too but at some point it was too hard to not notice that it wasn’t very effective. I’m pretty sure grannies on my local FB arthritis support group have bigger problems than navigating ethics of social media and politics.
I don’t know how to stress this any more clearly: A privately owned social media site isn’t actually a public space. It’s literally the definition of a private space. It’s more akin to a mall than a library. That’s the whole issue, how does it help to be on a site where all the admins have to do is shut down your speech and ban you anyway? Where everything you do, every move you make is tracked and monetized and studied to be used against you? It’s by definition a surveillance state where you have no rights.
You realize they make money from ads and if the majority of people stop using their services they stop making enough money to function as a business? They may already have your data but you don’t need to be giving them more.
The bigger issue is that corporations have commodified public spaces. You can take back public spaces by choosing to not use their services and convincing others not to. Facebook is already dying which is why they rolled out bullshit AI profiles and the public response to that went really badly. But they live and die by engagement so if they already are needing to turn to faking engagement to keep people on and money rolling in, then isn’t a boycott literally the way to cut them off at the knees and stop them being a public space?
Forgive me if I didn’t make clear that everyone needs to do it, not just LGBTQ+, my point is there are very few reasons to keep using these services for any person with a conscience.
Like you’ve mentioned, real public spaces have been killed so by quitting FB and other corpo social media you effectively self-ostracise as there are little alternatives. Yeah, you’re playing their game but when you’re losing you need humility rather than some moral high ground. If you want to affect the change you need to talk to people.
There is no talking. There is no convincing them to change. Let them rot where they sit. Let them die off in their old folks homes, hating the kids and the queer. It’s not our job to sit on Facebook and leading them in a round of kumbaya. Since you can’t protest a private social media network effectively on that network, you just walk the fuck away.
But don’t delete your account, before you simply never login again, upload as much high def white static video as you can.
Screw Facebook and their advertisers. They don’t need our eyes while we tried to tell some racist bigots that they’re racist bigots.
You’re not going to win by waiting for old people to die off. We reproduce in lower numbers than before and tendency to go disillusioned as you grow older remains a constant. Currently that disillusionment is being harvested by far right but that’s entirely on how the left lost credibility in the west after allying itself with liberal elites.
We won’t get ourselves out of this ditch unless we stop participating in culture wars manufactured for us by those elites. Normal people don’t care about queers but society is so polarised that they assume default stance from their political tribe. When you say they should die off you only strengthen their belief. It was never about this but more serious underlying issues that we’re not addressing because it’s a proxy war that’s supposed to distract us from a bigger war by the rich against the regular people.
I’m not saying we need to abandon traditional gender and minority emancipation goal but we need to be mindful of priorities. Meta employees are more outraged about new hate speech policies but they didn’t care when Meta enabled genocide in Myanmar. See how skewed it got? People don’t like hypocrisy.
You are grossly wrong.
We don’t get disillusioned at the same rate we used to. The leading edge of Gen X’s in their '50s and they give a fuck about everybody.
Normal people do give a shit about LGBTQ, only these weird conservative assholes don’t.
Fuck Facebook, everybody out of the boat. Leave it like Twitter.
Normal people do not give a shit about LGBTQ, and I mean that in the best possible way. Unless it’s shoved right in their face, in which case they will most likely be put out by it. Pretty much the same concept as with other (often important) things that rampant activism turns into something abhorrent.
deleted by creator
It’s so weird to me that people still use Facebook. Nobody under 40 uses Facebook. The women use insta sure but literally what are you going on Facebook for. It’s only boomer hate groups on there now
Real life exists dude. Facebook isn’t the only place to talk to people.
Agreed but we invented other forms of communication for a reason. [edit] All I’m saying is - don’t roll over and let them win by default. You don’t have to use corpo social media in good faith. Break rules and fight back.
…and they will immediately delete all your posts and ban you. It’s an authoritarian surveillance state, remember? It’s way easier to “disappear” your voice and opinion from their website than it is to remove you from reality. They have literally all the control in that space, the technology is built against you from the ground up. There’s nothing sneaky you can do that they don’t already immediately see and can shut down. They automated bots roving looking for shit like that to take down.
How is that helping again? To be immediately silenced and others never see a word you had to say? How is that helping?
In the real world they still have to black bag you and throw you into an unmarked van to disappear you, something other people will see. Facebook makes it so that the unmarked van and black bag are never seen by others.
It’s like fighting with a moderator. It ain’t a democracy and whatever choice they make is “law,” even if we are users disagree and think what they did silly. Too bad, thems the breaks. They have all the power in that situation and we don’t. Zuckerberg literally employs mountains of people just to shut up voices like yours before they get a foothold. In my view, it’s more than a waste of time, it’s literally handing an enemy resources (data) while cosplaying being helpful.
Doing dumb shit like altering your language to use words like “unalive” to get around arbitrary filters is fuck stupid too and hurts language for the sake of people like Zuckerberg. You’re not changing language to fight them, no your changing language for them instead of dumping their fucking services and using ones that don’t do stupid shit like ban the word “suicide.” Language evolves naturally, but this evolution is in direct response to censorship and it’s a bad deal.
I didn’t say you wouldn’t be at a massive disadvantage but they didn’t have functional moderation before and they’re not going to pay for it now. What’s being suggested as an alternative is flat out giving up.
No it’s not, it’s simply not spending our time on a private companies property. Literally the Civil Rights era was bolstered by massive success of boycotts. It wasn’t giving up, it was hitting them in the pocketbook and it worked.
But you can make any excuses for yourself that you need to keep sucking down that corporate slop.
I don’t know how to reiterate that you can still talk to people in other places like Facebook, the fact that you treat it like it’s the only way to communicate with people says a lot about you and how you view the internet. It’s naive, imho.
What if people like you had convinced Martin Luther King Jr. that the Montgomery Bus Boycott was “giving up” because they “weren’t using the buses.”
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/montgomery-bus-boycott
Finally, and most importantly, you talk about breaking rules, but you haven’t even given one example of how you can do that effectively to help people. I might believe you if you were coming correct with examples, but you aren’t so I can only assume this is some foolhardy desire to do good but you have no fucking clue how. The how is the hard part, buddy, and it doesn’t come from giving in to corporate slop and giving them the money they need to keep fucking you over.
Okay. I’ll leave those patient support groups because you told me to cut contact with people using corpo media. You might not be interested in boring reasons people do what they do but that’s why common people don’t believe in honesty when you tell them you have their best interest at heart. This suggests that you only care about what’s good for people superficially and people can smell that a mile away, hence current popularity of liberal left.
Unlike yourself, I cultivated relationships with those kind of people outside Facebook, got their phone numbers, and am able to be part of a support network for them without needing to use Facebook.
but keep making excuses for yourself.
Okay, let’s be clear about this: staying on Facebook isn’t “humility.” It’s selfishly selling out to simp for the fucking enemy.
That’s the moral high ground speaking. I was like that too but at some point it was too hard to not notice that it wasn’t very effective. I’m pretty sure grannies on my local FB arthritis support group have bigger problems than navigating ethics of social media and politics.