I cannot wait until this whole FB trends ends. I want RSS feeds or blogs. Businesses should have their own basic websites that serve their needs.
Those comments you mentioned are a bit of a problem. Whenever admin complains about them I always say, "You're using Facebook. What do you expect? Only retired people, idiots, and bots are on there."
They never seem to understand what I'm talking about because, unfortunately, most of the folks in wildfire admin are 50+ years old
A fair number - not all - I am convinced are foreign trolls, or bots. There's something which just feels a bit different from a normal partisan, and the kinds of folks who invade every regional (town, county, etc.) group and post nonstop partisan dreck. Their profiles are off in some way, and the hours they are posting are all over the map.
FB does have the "big tent" thing going on, where they wanted to become the tool for every possible organizing principle. So you do get some of the legitimately most wacky people on the internet as well.
But what I keep seeing is stuff like this:
An account which seems like it was a normal account for like 10 years. Maybe it leans a bit in the direction of the content it is currently posting. But, it was mostly dormant for a few years. Then, it started posting a high volume of partisan content. It otherwise seems to be a real person, just it one day started posting hardcore partisan materials all over the regional groups (usually multiple). It's fishy.
Another one: An account which superficially seems to be a real account, except that it's got a generic enough name you can't pin down which person with that name it might be. Nothing about their profile identifies them as anyone in particular. They may have a lot of friends, but they don't appear to be people who know them IRL - just randos. Their profile feed is a mix of normal stuff and partisan stuff. What they post to groups is 100% hardcore partisan stuff. Their profile is very light on photos of themself, and always kind of low quality. There's never a photo of a place you can pin down to a real location. These don't tend to be accounts that have been around more than a year or three. Again, it's fishy.
Like I mentioned, in both cases, you'll see the accounts posting at odd hours for where they supposedly live.
They could be real people, or sophisticated trolling operations. TBH, the reason I lean more towards the latter is because Facebook is so goddamned lax about any kind of enforcement. Do I think someone could set up a bunch of fake profiles and operate them for years, all from the same Chinese or Russian IP address with locations all in the US, and Facebook would never ban them despite the accounts getting flagged? Yes, that is extremely easy to believe. If it drives engagement (and troll accounts do!), it's likely to be allowed to continue.
I'd be the happiest man on the internet for a split second if someone who works for Meta tromps on in here with a burner account and tells me I'm being an idiot, that they're fighting hard against troll armies and bots, that it's just a super hard problem because the troll/bot networks are so sophisticated. Hasn't happened yet.
If I watch some local-to-me news stories about libraries, the algorithm decides that I like news about libraries, and begins to suggest library-related videos from all over the USA. It does not care that I only cared about libraries in Phoenix and San Diego.
Likewise, there is this one English teacher who is absolutely gorgeous and I only watch her videos to see her talk. But of course, YouTube got the idea that I like English instructional videos from anyone, anywhere, and the algorithm slowly fills my feed with videos from instructors who are not the lady I like. It's crazy, I tell ya.
I'm not on FB anymore. But when I was, I got interested in Irish topics, and it was often family research-related, and so I'd be studying some esoteric topic in a very small town in a specific county of Ireland, and of course, the recommendation engine would blossom with completely irrelevant Pages and Groups from every corner of the Republic, for no reason except to bait me into engagement.
And that's all it is, engagement bait. They on the other side of the algorithm, they know for sure that you don't actually care about those topics or locations. But they are simply trying to dangle stuff in front of you like a largemouth bass, and eventually something will enrage you or you'll need to correct someone's spelling, or make an angry face emoji on a post, and then they have your engagement, and that's all they really wanted from you.
Not to inform you, or entertain you, but to engage your shit until you absolutely lose your temper. That's what they want on social media.
Yes, it would be nice if FB fades into obscurity. But what would be nicer is if people had some basic decency and responsibility (everyone, me included) before posting clickbaity, flammable, junk stuff. I have no clue how to achieve this, but the internet used to be a fun place (for learning, niche topics/ideas etc) - those days are gone, and it sucks
It's as bad as Facebook - and even sadder in that you know the folks are truly local, and still just as awful.
Are our only options truly old-school, disconnected approaches versus wading through trolls in a hyper-connected world?
Surely there's something else, and maybe it has nothing to do with tech as we know it.
If there are PIOs/PAOs here who are looking for a new place to share alerts (for free), I'd love to chat. Our audience is growing quickly, and we can be a replacement for Facebook/Twitter/any other site making it more difficult for constituents to read alerts.
jared (at) forth (dot) news
My friend groups are all moving to Partiful to plan events for example because so many of us are getting off Facebook
Not the same as town level engagement obviously, but a sign the audience is moving
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45795104
I would say that the missing link in the discussion is that the valuable data they are mining is social networks and the fidelity of their data there is of a much higher fidelity than what FB or IG provides since these are in-person events, typically.
This is an entire arm of marketing research: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01482...
Also all those data promises go out the window as soon as they are acquired. Then it's Privacy Policy updates with retroactive addendums. Would be very surprised if that wasn't the ultimate goal.
I hope to see turnkey organization oriented PDSes that let an admin management multiple accounts, and also host web pages with the same content that's distributed on network. Then gov posts has a web home and can be subscribed to in AT Proto apps.
It was extraordinarily telling when Nazi musk showed country flags to IP on shitter. The amount of astroturfing happening to local discussions is terrible. And who is doing this? Countries where 1$ is a day's or 2 days propaganda wages.
And my community is one of those "only facebook" government messaging areas. And what do they get? 1/2 are real locals, the other half who knows. But what I do know, is that they smell like AI created profiles, and primed for propaganda.
Not that NextDoor is any less toxic or useful, but your hyperlocal government agencies may be signed up there, as well. NextDoor has a dedicated "Public Agencies" tab/feed where you can ignore all the hoi polloi, if you so wish.
Many "real accounts" on NextDoor actually disclose their home neighborhood, although I have no idea if/how they filter out the liars and impostors and bots.