cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1874605
A 17-year-old from Nebraska and her mother are facing criminal charges including performing an illegal abortion and concealing a dead body after police obtained the pair’s private chat history from Facebook, court documents published by Motherboard show.
my understanding was that while google is the main culprit, facebook and google both played a big part in killing it. but since we’re discussing meta/facebook here, and they’re not blameless, i focused on that.
but yeah, fuck google too.
they’re not blameless
I think we should try to do better here and provide actual reasoning to our statements instead of unbridled rage, regardless of the topic, because this isn’t valuable content. I work in an adjacent industry and I believe that a lot of what people have said lately about this topic is overly sensationalized and I don’t mind discussing it, but “fuck Meta/Google because they’re evil” is subjective as hell and gets us nowhere except back to Reddit culture.
This discussion pyramid was a good post from the other day:
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b48a0a91-c7a3-4cc5-a117-6deceedde205.png
Your comments are “ad hominem” at best.
Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol. And that’s what all of this boils down to, trust. Do we trust Meta with not exploiting all of our data, and turning it against us at the earliest opportunity? Do we trust Meta that they want to contribute to the fediverse, and not just hurt it because it’s a competitor?
By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem. But at the end of the day, it’s just practical. Meta has a long and not so proud history of being extremely anti-consumer, and shoving that track record under the rug, trying to absolve them of responsibility and consequences for their actions, under the thought-terminating cliche of an ad hominem is neither productive nor practical.
Yes, people are mad at Meta, and yes, the distrust means their actions are scrutinized more than they otherwise would be, but that doesn’t mean that their actions aren’t actually massively anti-consumer, and that they aren’t a massive liability. In this particular case, you can make the argument that they had a legal obligation to hand over the data, had they not tried to build a walled garden with no privacy they wouldn’t have had the data to hand over to begin with.
(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the  syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)
I think the simpler answer is more likely to be correct. The Fediverse isn’t big enough to really bother Meta, but ActivityPub is a convenient way to seem cool, so they’ll partially support it as long as it doesn’t cost them all that much. Once the marketing gimmick has run it’s course, they’ll drop it.
I think the same was true for XMPP. I don’t think they planned to kill XMPP and I don’t think they plan to kill ActivityPub. But they did kill XMPP, and they’ll probably kill ActivityPub by accident as well when they support it just well enough to pull people over.
So I’m not worried about some Meta conspiracy to kill ActivityPub, I’m worried about getting steamrolled on accident for a similar reason that people don’t want to share locations of where they took pictures: they don’t want the big mass of people coming to destroy something unique.
So my recommendation is to push for making everything E2E encrypted by default, and have every message cryptographically signed by the contributor. If there’s something ad companies hate it’s privacy, and that’s what we should be pursuing. I’m not sure how that works for Lemmy, but surely there’s a way for instances to manage who can decrypt messages.
Saying distrust is an ad hominem is one of the takes ever, lol.
It is literally ad hominem, that is the definition. We aren’t discussing whether we can trust Meta or not, we’re discussing a specific topic.
By the same logic, blocking or banning a person instead of vetting every post and comment of theirs would also be an ad hominem.
It definitely is, but again, we aren’t discussing a person or an entity, we’re discussing a topic related to that person or entity. This isn’t a discussion on whether Meta should be defederated or not, frankly that’s simple, just join an instance that defederates with Meta or don’t, or build your own! There’s a ton of freedom here.
And I’m not saying ad hominem arguments can’t be used, but when an argument is entirely made up of ad hominem points while discussing a specific topic it isn’t a good argument.
Also, side note, as for trust I definitely don’t think we can trust corporate entities, but I also don’t think we can entirely trust the Fediverse as it exists already. We know there’s been an influx of bot accounts, moderation tools aren’t great yet, and every platform attracts bad actors.
(also, unrelated: you can embed images using the
syntax, and you can even add alt text in the brackets to help users with screen readers)
Thanks for the tip! Haven’t been able to get that working well here, I think I was missing the exclamation mark.
in a thread where we’re discussing how meta helped religiofascists violate someone’s human rights “meta is evil” is a summary, not an ad hominem
Fine, their comments are nonsense that aren’t based in reality and the Fediverse and it’s communities will suffer the fate of every other echo chamber shithole social media if it’s moderators don’t take action and make a conscious decision to tackle misinformation, regardless of whether or not it fits their personal bias. Better?