John Oliver cited a 5000% rise in search queries related to leaving Meta and deleting accounts. Among the topics mentioned in the analysis, attention was drawn to early Facebook’s naivete with regard to moderation requirements, the constitutional framework, and a history of governmental interference.
Oliver debunks common right-wing “cry censorship” talking points, as well as the objective difficulty of moderation endeavors, and how direct threats by Trump may have influenced Zuckerberg’s turnaround.
Oliver went on to suggest Signal, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed as alternatives that “do not seem as desperate to fall in line with Trump”. For those reluctant to completely ditch Meta, Oliver revealed a new site with step-by-step instructions to “make yourself less valuable to them”.
The guide was a collaboration with the EFF, and includes settings’ tweaks for Facebook and Meta, whose 98% of revenue comes from micro-targeting ads, the host previously cited, to increase privacy, and recommends Firefox, Privacy Badger, as “other measures” to take in order “to block advertisers and other third parties from tracking you”.
The segment culminated in a mock advert, in which the new Meta’s approach to moderation is coined as “Fuck it”, and hints to racism, internet scams, and calls to genocide running rampant on Meta’s platforms.
The clip reminds the origins of Facebook as a site to “rank college girls by hotness”, and its implication in genocide in Myanmar, which was more thoroughly discussed in an Oliver’s previous special on Facebook in 2018.
That doesn’t fix anything due to federation. Dog piling discourages people from critical discussion or from asking questions from fear of having the angry mob turn on them too. It leads to shallow and one sided discussions, especially in posts with a lot of participation. The only productive discussions I’ve ever had either on Lemmy or on Reddit have been one-on-one comment threads in small subs/buried posts.
But Lemmy knows what it wants to be, and I’m not saying it should change. It just isn’t really for me.
I think a large part of that is magnified by being on Lemm.ee, rather than a specialized instancd, like Hexbear or slrpnk or dbzer0. The most productive conversations generally tend to be between people who mostly agree but have alternative viewpoints, otherwise it becomes a shouting match.