mental wellbeing, personal satisfaction, the development of quality relationships, reduces anxiety, reduces depression and improves ones belief in oneself and humanity.
I’ve deactivated Facebook for about 15 years. Hopefully my belief in fake news is correspondingly low.
It’s tough though; for all the bullshit that comes at you through these social networks, there is a lot of genuine personal connection too.
Having shunned most social networking for double digit years I do feel “cleaner” for not having to wade through all the crap, probably comparatively less anxious about the world in general, but also undoubtedly more isolated too.
Regarding, loneliness, did you consider going to the library. Sometimes there are book reading clubs and you may meet like-minded people. Meetup app also helps connecting with people with similar outdoor activities such as hiking.
>Meetup app also helps connecting with people with similar outdoor activities such as hiking.
Hah! It's funny that you mention that. Like OP, I've also kicked social media and heavy internet use to the curb. I also happen to love multi-day backpacking trips, but one of the things I love the most about them is the complete solitude I can have for days on end! Something about being completely disconnected like that is soul-soothing for me.
>>love multi-day backpacking trips
Nice! I also dream of going on such trips. Do you have any good websites that I can use. I am starting out and prefer trails that are flat.
AllTrails is a great site for someone starting out! Its map is handy for finding trails and trailheads near you, and you can filter for the type of hikes you're looking for. I tend to prefer higher destinations in alpine-y areas above treeline, and this is my usual method for finding hikes:
- Load up CalTopo (a phenomenal mapping website)
- Head to a wilderness area I know I want to visit
- Find trails that look like fun destinations, see if I can connect those trails to other trails (I prefer hiking in loops, rather than out-and-backs)
- Head to hiking forums to scour trip reports for information about the trails/route I'm looking at to make sure my idea works
I live in the PNW, so I'm frequently on the NWHikers and OregonHikers forums, both equally amazing resources for on and off-trail research. Definitely see if you can find a forum-based community for your region, they've been a consistently positive experience for me compared to, say, a FB hiking group for the region.
This is a very interesting point, especially when you look at human connectivity over the past 100 years relative to the connectivity seen over the whole of our existence. If anything, your experience is somewhat of a "return to the norm" in some kind of sense. I often wonder if we've swung the pendulum too far with regards to hyper-connectivity.
We need to go back to "the old ways", that is, people just need to pay to use the internet. Compute and storage has never been cheaper. Instead of a service subsidized with ads, we each host our own software and just pay AWS (or whoever) for the bits we flip.
I consider the "host your own software" approach akin to being a linux user, so I am already accustomed to being in a minority. People love frictionless UX which the FOSS lifestyle really can never provide. So perhaps we can settle for a solution that meets the needs of enthusiasts, even if the masses choose "junk".
I tend to agree, but maybe I'm talking about something slightly different. I was meaning that when I watch a YouTube video, if the creator has monetised it then they get a tiny amount of money, which enables them to do more videos. The Web in general doesn't have anything like that.
True. You should look into Project Xanadu, which was created with seventeen original rules, one of which is the following:
>Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document.
Every outlet has noticed the popularity that comes with telling people what they want to hear. It’s legal to give “opinion” that has no backing evidence, as opposed to journalism, where people reasonably expect some due diligence.
That’s why Hannity, for instance, is quick to point out that he is not a journalist, but in fact an opinion show host. That distinction is meant to limit his liability.
Political speech is protected, you don’t have to be tethered to reality in order to participate.
But there’s limits, for example slander and defamation.
X has Community Notes. This is a beautiful feature. They target both regular posts and, most importantly, ads. False advertisement is a problem for all social media platforms out there, except X. As a quick example, I regularly see ads about a certain type of game that in reality does not exist. These ads are running everywhere. However, on X, the community notes add a banner right next to the ad saying that this is a fake game, so don't bother buying it. From the financial perspective, such banners do harm the platform. But from the user's perspective, it's amazing.
Social media like Facebook might be worse to some degree, though, because media outlets don’t have hooks that are as strong and universal as those of social media — there are those with a disposition towards watching shows like Hannity, but the appeal is somewhat constrained, with those who hadn’t been watching unlikely to start watching without outside influence.
By comparison, people from all walks of like come to social media for a wide variety of reasons, meaning the top of the funnel is much larger. Social media also lends an air of legitimacy to posted headlines with the way it attaches familiar, trusted names to them (posters and commenters), which over time trains users to disregard legitimacy of sources. It can also nudge users away from intellectual engagement and toward emotional engagement, with how ragebait headlines tend to be the ones that get posted most often.
Of course, that’s not to downplay the dangers of “news entertainment” on traditional media, but I think social media is its own special brand of insidious.
Journalism is just as protected as political speech. Obviously - since opinion, propaganda and journalism has been intermingled since the very invention of the printing press or even since the first people learned to speak.
The closest you can get to reality is open source journalism, where the outlet also links to their full source documents and tapes, along with the digested news article. Then each and every member of their audience could fact check them. But no news outlet does this, instead they obscure and hide source documents, even though they generally are within the public domain. Even public broadcasters do this, although they shouldn't have any financial interest.
I actually think hiding behind “journalism” gives you more freedom to say what you want. In theory, you couldn’t blatantly make stuff up, because you risk getting sued. However, if the last decade has taught me anything, even then, the burden of proof is on the victim.
I think these high profile media folks volunteer that what they say is opinion, not out of freedom, but more so to frame their talking points in a more persuasive way. Humans will naturally put up their bullshit detectors if they think something is reported as fact, and expect to see evidence. Opinion on the other hand, means your guard is down and you will hear the same message, but consider it.
Historically, people trusted something reported as fact and were naturally skeptical of opinion. It seems that many people are realigning to an environment where the "facts" were presented to create a limited, specific perspective of the world (which is closer to opinion) and the majority of "opinion" producers were challenged to be, and in some cases became, more evidence-based (which is closer to fact). In effect, the system is self-correcting to reflect the natural state of the world: truth exists, and the task is on you to discover it.
I have kept my Facebook account for the primary purpose of making sure relatives don't share pictures of our kids' faces, and check it very rarely.
Recently though, the change has been incredible. People I know in real life, including my own parents, have been "Liking" very obviously AI generated posts. A HUGE amount of the "Recommended" posts I see are obvious AI images. It's gotten really, really bad, in just the past few months.
But do anyone actually post anything anymore. My account got closed in 2016/17 when I refused to accept their new terms of service. Up until that point I had pretty aggressively filtered my feed down to only things posted directly by people I knew. I think I checked in maybe once every two weeks and spend 2 - 5 minutes catching up. No one posted anything, it was all likes and shared posts.
My wife wanted to show me an article, posted via Facebook the other evening and I asked if I could scroll around a bit, out of curiosity. There was nothing but ads, post by companies, which I also count as ads and a few article about knitting. Facebook is no more personal that usenet was in the olden days, but it is at the same time an engine that just keeps pushing paid and "organic" ads for stuff for you to buy... Stuff you do not need.
There are posts by real humans - but you are correct Facebook does their best to make them hard to find and rare. I aggressively block everything but real posts, and it is still hard to find real posts.
Almost nobody is posting on Facebook anymore. Instagram has taken over that niche. Facebook is in free fall and has to fill in the feed with anything - anything! Meaning many more ads, AI slop and complete garbage from all over the world.
"relatives don't share pictures of our kids' faces" - serious question: why ? I have seen that from friends too, and I respect it - but I don't understand what bad outcome that prevents.
Because they are children who can’t and haven’t consented to have their likeness posted all over social media, to be used as training data on an ever growing corpus of privacy destroying tech.
Additionally, pedophiles and creeps do actually exist.
I love that I get this question all the time, when from where I sit, the question should be to all the other parents: "Why do you insist on posting your children and their entire lives on social media?"
As someone who's entire life from infancy to adulthood has been published and catalogued on Facebook by my parents, I think your children will certainly appreciate what you've done one day.
It's something you can't ever get back once its out there, and we all know Facebook is perfectly happy selling out user's pictures as training data for AI companies.
The "treatment" TikTok is receiving is a requirement that its US presence should be sold to a US company. Facebook is already a US company, so I'm not sure what you mean. TikTok is not actually getting banned, unless it fails to achieve that sale, which is highly unlikely.
Stop with the intentionally obtuse “well akshually” stuff. You know what I meant: lawmakers should put Facebook under the same scrutiny and find a legal loophole that allows them to stop the harm Facebook is causing.
> TikTok is not actually getting banned
Semantic bullshit. Similarly strong logical footing as “we’re democratic we just don’t allow non-communist political parties.”
Whether feed-driven social media is bad is orthogonal to whether China controlling TikTok is a national security threat. Personally I believe both are true, but the latter is much easier to deal with via legislation.
Semantic bullshit. Similarly strong logical footing as “we’re democratic we just don’t allow non-communist political parties.”
I feel like ticktok is more damaging for just how your brain is wired more than anything. People are walking into bathrooms and using the urinals one handed without putting the phone down the entire time. I can’t imagine spending every free second of your life engaging with short form media is going to help your ability to deeply think about things.
You don’t need TikTok to promote that kind of behavior. I know people who do that and have never touched TikTok in their lives. Meanwhile Facebook was used as a tool in a real life insurrection that got people killed.
That argument could similarly be made for the countless "trends" that have harmed TikTok users and those around them, or really any other social media platform.
Maybe it’s because I’m old, but it still completely blows my mind that people rely on social media for news.
To me social media is no different than Saturday morning cartoons (American phenomenon from the 80s/90s) that fill children’s minds with advertisements of sugar cereal and action figure toys, except social media is 24/7 and just stupid enough to become a drug habit.
I use Twitter to follow certain sports and sports teams. One of the best places for that news. I don't use Twitter for anything else though so I don't know what it's like.
I would love if there was a Nielsen-rating equivalent for fake news outlets.
Having worked in AdTech and Pulisher Analytics for about a decade, I know that orgs are measuring fake news viewability and content type + quality, so it'd just be nice to see a company making that digestible for people.
I was (probably overly) optimistic there for a few years thinking some new internet type project would come along that would restore some of the balance in the direction of the average person, but it doesn't seem to be happening. I mean, fingers crossed and all that, but it doesn't seem to be here.
The other thing that could feasibly happen would be a bit of a mass exodus away from these things. There seems to be glimmers of that, but again, it is still a niche thing.
There doesn't seem to be a straw that breaks the camel's back, with this whole social media / internet freedom thing. Monopolies concentrate, rights dwindle, stability flounders, war flares up, climate crisis accelerates worsens, and just glimmers of resistance.
> Before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, more than 35,000 Facebook and Instagram users agreed to participate in an experiment.
Do people still get any sort of news from Facebook? I only see very harmless content. People posting pics about their lives, some hiking groups... very few comments overall. I thought all the toxicity has moved to X formerly Twitter.
> the work of more than 30 academics from U.S. universities and Meta researchers
At least, one can appreciate that Meta is trying to understand the potential negative effects of their system and act on it. Social networks are here to stay in one form or another, it makes sense to understand how to regulate them rather than just hoping they wouldn't exist.
I removed the Facebook and Twitter/X apps from my phone, so I don't get notifications. I still log into the websites occasionally, but I never get prompted by my phone, which I think is the real hook.
Its not psosible to overstate how truly awful the notifications from these social media apps are.
I get flooded with notifications from Snapchat about worthless brainrot garbage every day.
It's upwards of thirty notifications each day for an app I have literally one single group chat convo on and everyone in this chat is also on other platforms (AKA Discord).
If only these people weren't so insistent on using this PoS chat app from a failing company desperatly trying to retain its userbase shoving AI and TikTok clone features into it.
I deleted my Facebook in 2015 simply because I kept getting in arguments with people, and spending a not-insignificant amount of time every day fighting with people I barely knew. I figured that that was probably not healthy so I deleted it. I missed it for about a day, and then I pretty actively didn't want to ever use it again.
I'm a little burnt out entirely on social media; the closest thing to a social media that I still use is HN, and I do argue on here a bit but not nearly as much.
The nice thing about HN is that if you know how to behave and if you care to listen, you're most likely just having a conversation, it's not even arguing.
It's nice to know that meaningful conversations can still happen somewhere on the internet nowadays.
That's the thing, I feel like the moderation of HN is really good. The admins do a pretty good job stopping things before they get too crazy, and as a result it's just a lot more interesting to talk to people.
I still argue with people here occasionally but I generally actually feel like the person arguing is actually willing to change their mind, not score points for some pithy remark on Twitter.
I’ve found myself deleting apps and forcing into web worked well to reduce use.
You can technically use messenger.com but need to request desktop site, login each time and then zoom out to make it useable.
For instagram they don’t allow to control pic visibility from web so I’ve stopped posting entirely.
Added friction basically destroyed usefulness. My next step would be using incognito mode for each session to eliminate tracking and removing password from password manager.
Random question: how does one even make a Facebook account nowadays?
My wife has a client whom needed her to manage a campaign on Facebook so she attempted to make an account. It instantly got banned as spam. Like, instantly, before even being able to login.
I then tried to make one on her behalf to the same result. Me being me, I thought “I’ll use a different email”. Nope. Phone number, nope. Different phone number, nope. Different phone number while I’m in India, nope. Get my mum to make one, nope. Pay a local to make one, nope.
We just gave up in the end and her client settled for being advised over a screen share in a call.
I’ve not had an account for well over a decade nor has my wife so this was all really strange considering she only wanted the account in order to make them money by the way of managing ad campaigns for her clients.
Nowadays, most social media platforms are filled with fake news, misleading news/videos/images. It is a constant struggle to filter out what is real information and what is fake information.
Well duh. I deleted mine 13 years ago, and while I'm not exactly a futurist, the second I saw people I know who are not idiots sharing blatant nonsense on there it was obvious.
It is still unclear to me how we expect these platforms to filter "misinformation" given that 1) It's not in Meta's interest 2) who gets to decide what is and is not fake news ie "who watches the watchman"? and 3) the human base desire to gorge on junk, of one form or another.
Somewhat glib answer is it needs to be in their interest. Section 230 means the social media platforms are insulated from liability for the content they publish and promote. It was conceived in a world where those platforms were perceived as (relatively) neutral infrastructure for publishing and sharing content. But it's a long time since they were neutral. The algorithms used to promote content are, in effect, editorial control. The net result is that these platforms get to choose what users see - without any of the accountability that mainstream media has with regards journalistic integrity and veracity of content. Which isn't to suggest mainstream media is a paragon of balance and truth; but at least there are laws that can be used to hold those organisations to account.
I'm no lawyer and doubt the answer is as simple as revoking section 230. But something needs to be done. Perhaps the EU's investigations into Meta [1, 2] will inform an answer.
> without any of the accountability that mainstream media has with regards journalistic integrity and veracity of content.
I wouldn't assume that mainstream media has any journalistic integrity or veracity of anything. Watch several mainstream news stations and listen to them use the exact same wording when making politically hot statements. It seems likely to me, that some centralized body is ensuring that.
I have never had a FB or any highly popular social media account. I have no reason to believe that they are any better than mainstream. At the moment, I am in a continuous state of disbelief to be honest. All facets of information-flow appear to be politically biased and saturated with half-truths, double-talk and straight-up lies.
In my personal opinion, I do not support censorship of social media as our constitutional right to freedom of speech is more important to me. I believe this right should be honored in 100% of cases else the constitutions has no value in this respect. i.e. if it does not apply in all cases, then it cannot be relied on to apply in any scenario, and its purpose is lost.
We live in a world now, where we are all going to have to make up our own minds on what the truth is. It was always that way, but society took it for granted that "the news" was the truth. This is why propaganda is so effective by the way. I would rather except this as the one and only truth, and proceed into the future with a healthy dose of skepticism applied to all facets of information-flow.
I, too, am not a lawyer but I believe that FB _ought_ to be "insulated from liability for the content they publish and promote" because I don't want them to be arbiters of truth. Humans need to decide for themselves whats true and off-loading this responsibility to Meta through contrivance of law is a Black Mirror episode come to life.
that's fair to an extent, and shows why it's difficult. Do we want the platforms to be the sole arbiter of truth? No, definitely not. Equally, editorial control where the sole driver is profit - with no accountability for societal consequence - can't be correct either.
Never having activated Facebook or any similar service make one immune to 'fake news' in that it becomes just one more concept being bandied about by propagandists. Some of it is clearly nonsensical, other instances are facts which happen to inconvenience those who apply the 'fake' label - Hunter Biden's laptop, Ashley Biden's diary [1], etc.
My facebook experience is dramatically different than others I guess.
The only fake stuff I see are sports memes and AI images fooling boomers. Otherwise my timeline is its mostly ads, friends sharing pictures and updates from their personal life, or posts from the groups I've joined.
> Those who went off Facebook responded worse to news tests, but they were also less likely to believe widespread misinformation
This means that they were just less aware generally. It doesn't look like they suddenly stopped believing the misinformation they were already exposed to, they were just prevented from being exposed to more of it.
> I was really surprised to see this effect, which was large enough to be marginally detectable,”
"marginally detectable" doesn't really inspire confidence in their results.
> The result regarding Trump favorability is very interesting. It does not reach the level pre-specified by the scientists, but because the standard of evidence they had is very high.
Lots of things seem true when you lower the standard of evidence far enough
I wouldn't doubt that getting off facebook means people will see less misinformation, and it'll probably do wonders for their mental health in general, but I'd take this entire thing with a massive grain of salt.
I think it’s the same with all social media. I find X currently the worst; you cannot even go into post about react or whatever tech things and avoid maga, Trump, racism and anti woke shouting. It is depressing really. At least on Facebook there are my friends who got a new cat…
Just follow who you want to follow, and stick to the Following tab instead of "For You". At least X has that option; the other major/centralized social media services don't have any such option as far as I can tell (Instagram's "snooze recommended posts" option is the closest thing).
All sides are lying, just about different issues. And the ones they aren't lying about, they're spinning.
Russia has been running a full-on information warfare campaign against the US (and probably other countries) for several years now. Meanwhile, Democrats and Republicans are running a full scaled civil war in the info arena. (No, it's not just normal election stuff. I've seen those; this is different.)
Everything is getting caught up in this. Vaccines. Federal Reserve interest rates. Energy policy. Pop culture. Everything. You can't have a sane discussion about anything without getting tangled up in the information war.
Fine but lately I have been worried that people are crazy or the news I get are fake because I can't understand that in 2024, some countries are still warring to the point that people speak loosely about their nuclear arsenal and nuclear options (French media).
While deaths could be averted so easily if this is merely a territory issue.
There has to be some meta-level concerns.
Politics is really strange. Are they playing poker or is this some obscure stuff going on?
Oh I could ramble on people playing the geo-positioning game in Africa too for instance but that existed before I was born and as stupid as I think it may be... They are still trying to do it for some reason. French specificity I guess nowadays because what the goal of the presence near Australia...
I mean if some people reproach to Putin that he has views on part of the Ukrainian territory, assuredly, they can't be claiming to still have views on New Caledonia, or Chad, or elsewhere(they call these interests, whatever that means, probably minus the people) etc.
Am I misunderstanding something?
Doesn't seem very democratic to me...
Just wondering if this is intellectual laziness and lack of EQ that make them take the wrong decisions each time or whether there is something else, perhaps at the brain level?
Even "real" news are weird.
(I had deactivated fb back in 2012 or so, therefore can't be that :o)
(sorry if I hold people to a higher standard than they are able to. I have my reasons :)
When people say "fake news" it means different things to different people. "Hunter Biden's laptop is a Russian plant" was considered the truth and anything to the contrary "fake news". It wasn't just a mistake, it was a hard lie.
Having any single entity determine what is "fake" and what is "real" is incredibly dangerous. We can't even agree if 72F degrees is the correct room temperature - let alone complex things like abortion or if fat is bad for you.
To have any authority say one side is correct fails to understand how the structures of scientific revolution work. Much more likely they do understand and are using "Science(TM)" to force ideological agendas.
I don't want to be overly cynical and say it was intentional, but the term was watered down to become meaningless, but when it first came into use, it had a pretty clear and unambiguous meaning that I don't think any reasonable person would argue with. The Washington Post published an expose early in 2016 about two men in Orange County who had the brilliant idea of exploiting pre-election hysteria by registering hundreds of domains with names like patriotdailynews.com, giving it all the veneer of a real news page, writer bylines and bios, but all of it was completely made up. It was just the two guys in their apartment living room brainstorming the most outrageous sounding headlines they could come up that they thought people might believe, then making up fake writers and fake sources. That is "fake news."
When it started being used to mean any published account of purported facts that is wrong because inference is imperfect, evidence can be misleading, and publishers have some inescapable level of bias, then yes, it became a useless term. But it is not useless to distinguish between largely good faith attempts by real organizations with investigators who are at least trying to discover, verify, and publish facts, but some of the time fail, and outright fraud committed by people making up the entire endeavor wholesale.
There is no reason at all we should believe authorities cannot accomplish the latter.
A democracy with the government in control of speech is not a democracy. If you control what people can see, you control what they think. That's why it's the very first most important amendment. Without the free distribution of information we're all useless idiots to the people in control of the distribution. We've already seen censorship be used to sway elections, do you think that's OK?
Yes, I think this is a proxy for "how much do you watch your usual news source". The Covington stuff wouldn't have made people think twice about regular news had the video of what happened leaked out on YouTube.
The real money quote from that article: "David Rawson, the US ambassador, said that its euphemisms were open to interpretation. The US, he said, believed in freedom of speech."
mental wellbeing, personal satisfaction, the development of quality relationships, reduces anxiety, reduces depression and improves ones belief in oneself and humanity.