Interesting timing. I quite Facebook 3 days ago after 11 years. It's hard. I still haven't had a day where I haven't checked (although I'm absolutely done posting/liking/commenting). Anyways, I'm trying.
Social media is a tool in your hand. It is possible to use it to better ourselves, it is possible to get mired in the madness. I’ve had a bit of both, but have refocused on using it to listen and learn the perspective of the white and black community (I’m not a part of either). I’m learning the most actually from reading the posts of white people who are being honest with themselves and the outside about why it’s taken this long and why it has been difficult for white people to come around.
They will have to spew their hate on facebook and four-chan... Google bans two websites from its ad platform over protest articles The two sites, ZeroHedge and The Federalist, will no longer be able to generate revenue from any advertisements served by Google Ads. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-n...ts-ad-platform-over-protest-articles-n1231176
https://www.washingtonpost.com/cont...22-956a-e880c2024324/?itid=lk_inline_manual_3 Resignation letter from Facebook engineer Facebook software engineer Ashok Chandwaney posted this letter on the company’s internal message board. Full letter at the link above
I'm sorry I missed this thread when it first came out. I'm a fan of Golden Age Sci Fi, writers like Asimov and Clarke. and those writers predicted that once we had global communication things like racism, xenophobia and even nationalism would disappear. The truth is the opposite and the reason is while we have global communication and we can instantaneously communicate with the rest of World is that human nature itself hasn't caught up. As humans are minds much of our cultural institutions are still based on the tribal level and as such it's really difficult for us to think of people beyond the tribe more than abstractly. A tribe isn't just physical but also bound together by the common interests. For example the tribe of Clutchfans. Most Clutchfans are Houston but we have Clutchfans in Australia, HK, and Greece. What we've seen with social media is far from increasing human understand and allowing us to grow beyond our tribal views it allows us to seek out tribes whereever they are physically. For example with Clutchfans we can seek out other Rockets fans even though we are tens of thousands of miles from Houston. Like any other tribe a virtual tribe reinforces certain views such as just reading GARM nearly all of us feel that the Rockets get a raw deal from Refs and we hold it as almost a sacred belief that the Dream Rockets of the mid 90's would've beaten the Jordan Bulls in the NBA Finals. Most other tribes don't share that belief but that opposition strengthens our own identity as Clutchfans. Essentially we are an echo chamber reinforcing our views of Rockets history with Tinman as one of our holy men. That's for something relatively benign like sports but social media is doing the same for other views including politics. We can find others who share our views and mutually reinforce those views. The importance of geography matters less versus ideological familiarity. That's why I don't think it's an accident that we see people in Minnesota flying Confederate Flags and claiming that it is their heritage when Minnesota was the first state to volunteer to fight for the Union in the Civil War. The geography and specific history of Minnesota matters less than finding an ideological tribe and adopting the symbolism of that tribe.
Here is an example of a social media platform that encourages user to wait, don't retweet before reading the article (don't just retweet the headlines). Not everyone is happy with it. Twitter is currently testing it out and plan to roll it out afterward. https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/22...-retweet-read-article-prompt-censorship-claim House Judiciary Committee Republicans and committee member Rep. Doug Collins (R-GA) are spreading a misleading claim about a new Twitter feature that asks users to read articles before retweeting them. Earlier this year, Twitter started testing a prompt to discourage knee-jerk retweets. It appears on links across the entire service, but Republican lawmakers have cited individual warnings on right-leaning articles as the latest of many censorship accusations. Twitter announced last month that it would roll out the feature across its mobile apps, describing it as a way to “help promote informed discussion.” When you hit the retweet button on a link you haven’t visited, Twitter adds a label above the confirmation menu, warning that “headlines don’t tell the full story” and offering a chance to check the story out. This is optional; you can ignore it and simply confirm the retweet if you want, and it doesn’t add any extra taps. But some conservative Twitter users expressed fury at the warning. Former PJ Media editor David Steinberg claimed that Twitter “placed a headline warning label” on a Wall Street Journal article about Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik, saying the prompt “should disturb every American.” The label appears if you try to retweet many other WSJ articles on a variety of topics as well as stories from The Verge and other media outlets. The claim was amplified by Republican members of Congress. Collins claimed that Twitter was “censoring” all tweets from Sean Hannity, citing labels on links to Hannity.com. The Twitter account for Judiciary Committee Republicans made a similar claim about a Hannity article, insinuating that Twitter had specifically added the warning to a story about allegedly leaked emails from Hunter Biden. Twitter’s communications team tweeted a somewhat exasperated response. “We’re doing this to encourage everyone to read news articles before Tweeting them, regardless of the publication or the article,” a spokesperson wrote. “If you want to retweet or quote tweet it, literally just click once more.” It’s not necessarily surprising that Twitter’s new feature would raise hackles since it comes on the heels of two unpopular Twitter decisions. Twitter blocked a link to New York Post articles about Hunter Biden’s emails last week, citing a ban on “hacked content,” before apologizing and changing its policy. It also started temporarily asking users to quote tweets instead of retweeting them, another attempt to encourage more engagement. Today, a Senate committee approved subpoenas for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, calling them to testify about restricting the Post story’s reach. Twitter doesn’t seem to apply the warning to every link either, and that’s caused some confusion online. As the National Republican Senatorial Committee noted, you can retweet links to Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue without a warning. However, we also received no warning when retweeting a link to Republican equivalent WinRed. We’ve asked Twitter for more clarification on when the label appears. But whatever its answer, the feature is far more widespread than these lawmakers suggest.
