#meta’s algorithms do what they do

[1mnobodywhoareyou]

Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!

The band had just finished playing Edge of Great to close out their concert. They’d decided to keep Luke’s impromptu duet moment for live performances and had also now played it enough times that it’s not quite as charged for them as it once was. Julie and Luke are still staring at one another when the band is met with an unexpected response.

“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!” the crowd starts chanting.

Reggie hugs his bass, settling back with a self-satisfied smirk as if he can’t wait to see this go down. Alex looks with amusement and a smidge of concern between the audience and the couple and back again. Julie and Luke haven’t formally announced their relationship but they haven’t been working all that hard to hide or deny it either.

Julie raises an eyebrow at Luke and he grins at her with a mischievous glint in his eyes and startles everybody by suddenly standing. He makes his way over to the corner of the drum riser just behind Julie and Reggie barely has time to move his bass out of the way before Luke dips him deeply and plants what appears to be a very sloppy, overzealous kiss on him. The audience gasps in seeming unison and is otherwise silent. Alex can’t help the guffaw that leaves his throat, harshly breaking the silence that had settled over the room and Julie breaks down giggling as Luke returns Reggie upright before bounding off the stage with a wave. Reggie stands stunned for a moment and Julie grabs him to pull him offstage with her.

Where Luke has been met with a very “trying to be stern while also choking down laughter” manager of theirs, Flynn.

“Do you have any idea how much work it’s going to be to clean this up, Luke?” they asked him while he grins.

“Yeah, but it was funny.”

“Hilarious,” she deadpans with a roll of their eyes and a slight upturn to their lips. 

The crowd had apparently recovered and were now calling for their expected encore. Flynn rolls her eyes, still not understanding why this is a thing that continues to happen at concerts but Luke is nothing if not a musician of his time and he insists on maintaining the tradition. He all but shoves Julie back onto the stage, reeling her back quickly to peck her on the lips before sending her out again as if nothing out of the ordinary had even happened.

[anaquariusfox]

I spent the evening looking into this AI shit and made a wee informative post of the information I found and thought all artists would be interested and maybe help yall?

edit: forgot to mention Glaze and Nightshade to alter/disrupt AI from taking your work into their machines. You can use these and post and it will apparently mess up the AI and it wont take your content into it's machine!

edit: ArtStation is not AI free! So make sure to read that when signing up if you do! (this post is also on twt)

[Image descriptions: A series of infographics titled: “Opt Out AI: [Social Media] and what I found.” The title image shows a drawing of a person holding up a stack of papers where the first says, ‘Terms of Service’ and the rest have logos for various social media sites and are falling onto the floor. Long transcriptions follow.

Instagram/Meta (I have to assume Facebook).

Hard for all users to locate the “opt out” options. The option has been known to move locations.

You have to click the opt out link to submit a request to opt out of the AI scraping. *You have to submit screenshots of your work/face/content you posted to the app, is curretnly being used in AI. If you do not have this, they will deny you.

Users are saying after being rejected, are being “meta blocked”

People’s requests are being accepted but they still have doubts that their content won’t be taken anyways.

Twitter/X

As of August 2023, Twitter’s ToS update:

“Twitter has the right to use any content that users post on its platform to train its AI models, and that users grant Twitter a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to do so.”

There isn’t much to say. They’re doing the same thing Instagram is doing (to my understanding) and we can’t even opt out.

Tumblr

They also take your data and content and sell it to AI models.

But you’re in luck!

It is very simply to opt out (Wow. Thank Gods)

Opt out on Desktop: click on your blog > blog settings > scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle

Out out of Mobile: click your blog > scroll then click visibility > toggle opt out option

TikTok

I took time skim their ToS and under “How We Use Your Information” and towards the end of the long list: “To train and improve our technology, such as our machine learning models and algorithms.”

Regarding data collected; they will only not sell your data when “where restricted by applicable law”. That is not many countries. You can refuse/disable some cookies by going into settings > ads > turn off targeted ads.

I couldn’t find much in AI besides “our machine learning models” which I think is the same thing.

What to do?

In this age of the internet, it’s scary! But you have options and can pick which are best for you!

Accepting these platforms collection of not only your artwork, but your face! And not only your faces but the faces of those in your photos. Your friends and family. Some of those family members are children! Some of those faces are minors! I shudder to think what darker purposes those faces could be used for.

Opt out where you can! Be mindful and know the content you are posting is at risk of being loaded to AI if unable to opt out.

Fully delete (not archive) your content/accounts with these platforms. I know it takes up to 90 days for instagram to “delete” your information. And even keep it for “legal” purposes like legal prevention.

Use lesser known social media platforms! Some examples are; Signal, Mastodon, Diaspora, et. As well as art platforms: Artfol, Cara, ArtStation, etc.

The last drawing shows the same person as the title saying, ‘I am, by no means, a ToS autistic! So feel free to share any relatable information to these topics via reply or qrt!

I just wanted to share the information I found while searching for my own answers cause I’m sure people have the same questions as me.’ \End description] (thank you @a-captions-blog!)

[vyva-melinkolya]

we all agree that the push towards short form, vertical video (tiktok/reels/shorts) is ruining fucking everything right? Tiktok has been useful for the dissemination of political information (e.g Gaza) i’ll give it that, but that feels moreso a result of meta and twitters algorithms being just a little *more*’evil and censor happy. And i want to make it very clear that my hatred for tiktok has nothing to do with the fact that it was a product of a Chinese company, because i see a lot of critiques relying on some sort of sinophobic conspiracy. On the contrary, it’s what tiktok has become in the vacuum of western popular culture and marketing that makes me fearful.

I know that every generation faces a new, polarizing technology and inevitably, there are those among said generation who will critique it. That is the nature of things. However, there is also something to be said about how, with the acceleration of technology (running parallel to the acceleration of capitalism, acceleration towards collapse etc), each coming generation faces an increasingly more malevolent “advancement”. TLDR, i’m going to talk my shit.

I’m going to speak on the aspect that is most relavent to me, as a musician. I am petrified by what short form video is doing to music and to musicians. I think that tiktok provides the illusion of making music and being a musician more “accessible” while actually pouring gasoline on the fire that the pop music machine had already started. Standards for what popular culture “expects” from music are being doubled and tripled. Let’s talk about song length. Success and marketability favoring shorter songs is not something new, it has been the trend for decades. But with short form video, it goes even further. You’re not just hearing the same song over and over on the radio, you’re hearing the same 15-30 seconds of the same song over and over again. This in-turn, starts to influence the way people write music, persuading people to make songs that *could* have that 15 second appeal. There is an art to pop music, there is an art to writing a catchy hook—this is something else. We weren’t meant to hear or understand music like that. There are so many songs from reels that i found annoying, until i heard them in their full context. It’s insidious. It makes everything feel like a fucking commercial, even if nothing is being advertised.

I’m going to pull directly from someone else’s experiences, someone who’s music seems to be everywhere on short form videos. The ambient musician My Head Is Empty has a hundred million streams on the song “i was only temporary”. Despite that exposure, they experience “never ending copywrite issues” and have “received death threats” by people who refuse to credit them when using their song. Pulling a quote here, from a comment on their own post

“vyva_melinkolya unfortunately it just gets worse. i saw a bot content page that steals pod cast footage and spams dozens of videos with my song stolen, comment on a "motivation" spam content , who actually made a post telling people the name of my song, and the previous page i mentioned, the pod cast spam commented on that video saying "Bro stop don't give out the sauce. this audio helps me pull numbers brooo" - so people are actively INTENTIONALLY stealing it and telling people to not credit me. like. u can't make this stuff up”

Beyond this, My Head Is Empty feels frustrated that despite all this exposure, the rest of their work (nine albums) as a musician remains under appreciated, and i think that frustration is 100% valid. People cannot fully appreciate music, or even understand it as a work of art created by another human, when it’s taken so far out of its context. Again, the soul being sucked out of art by “the machine” isn’t anything new but, this is a whole other level. Being a musician is more expensive than ever, streaming earns you fractions of a cent etc, it all feeds into itself.

When a song or a musician i love deeply finds its way on to tiktok (let’s use Duster’s “Stars Will Fall”, one of my favorite songs ever as an example)I am not upset that i cant “gatekeep” it anymore. I’m not upset by the idea of something I love and hold dearly finding a larger audience. I AM upset in the manner in which it is being disseminated. I’m upset with art I hold dear to me being chopped up and used as “trending audio”. When I saw Duster in concert recently, lStars Will Fall” was the song I was most looking forward to hearing. It was the last song they played, and it was the song seemly everyone chose to talk loudly over. The audience was mostly people my age and younger. This complaint might come off as petty or pretentious or cliche, i frankly do not give a shit.

Let’s talk about how musicians are expected to promote music on tiktok/reels. This is a matter of opinion, at the risk of sounding very pretentious: the “POV we are x band from x” “My label says i need x followers before x” “posting this video until c musician notices me”. I understand that some of it is in jest but, what the fuck? When did this become the norm? I do not blame anyone for promoting their music like this, but we should want more for ourselves. I’ve always said being a musician is deeply embarassing, inherently. If being a musician is inherently embarassing then what is this? I dont have a solution for this, and the music industry has always been ugly and bloodthirsty and seldom fruitful— but i feel like the very small amount of dignity we had as artists is now lost and I cant fucking stand it. Artists seem to promote the same single with dozens of reels over the course of months, hoping that something sticks. I dont want to sound like i’m shaming or, again, sound like i can provide a solution. I’m just very fucking sorry that it seems like this is “the way”. And personally, i’m scared that if i dont “get with the program”, im going to fail.

Again, all of this speaks to larger trends in entertainment industry and even larger trends in capitalism. But i’m just airing specifics right now because frankly? I cant take it anymore.

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

Tumblr is so intuitive to me that I'm fascinated by people who use algorithms. I was explaining to a Grindr date why I only use Tumblr and I explained that you can opt out of the algorithm and he was like "then what do you look at?" And that question was so crazy to me. What do you mean what do I look at? I look at the people I follow in reverse chronological order. I'm pretty sure that was the default before meta properties and Twitter got algorithms.

[xxxpu55yslay3rxxx]

This post is so sexy, OP you did it, you broke tumblr misinformation long posts to their barest essences. This shit should be enshrined as a featured post. In fact, this should be one of the first things you see when you make a Tumblr account; the username could be blurred out if you want anonymity.

As for what can I add:

Sometimes you get an interloper who claims they're an expert on the topic. They mostly start their posts with "hey, xyz expert here!" and then start mixing things that are correct with baseless assumptions. Or they just sound smart and there repeating vague bull; that's what you highlighted OP. That's why you should be wary and try to read the info yourself, even if the one communicating it to you is actually an expert.

This is also why I roll my eyes when I see the "no net information" screenshot. Cause even though I agree with the sentiment, I'm cynical to not reblog those posts in the first. Also I tend to have a certain lethargy when it comes to reblogging posts.

So: lazy Chad's we stay winning 🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️!

I enjoy long informative threads on social media but I also think they should be taken with a grain of salt. Because as soon as you see one on a topic YOU'RE an expert in, the anatomy tends to break down like this:

Post from an OP who is clearly a professional or at least a well-informed hobbyist. Information is correct.

Elaboration from OP because they got excited about the original post doing number and wanted to add more

Interloper who THINKS they're contributing to the conversation but they're mostly just parroting talking points they loosely remember from like a youtube video or a different post. They're maybe not WRONG but you wouldn't be comfortable calling it a reputable addition given all the details that are glossed over

Person going "wow that's fascinating :0" and asking a follow up question

Different person giving an answer to that question but it rubs you the wrong way because it ignores a ton of "it depends" nuance

Person making a joke which like. You get what they were trying to do. But the joke is categorically different from the matter at hand.

Someone posting an XKCD that does not actually apply.

[bobacupcake]

anyways heres my twitter exodus social media rankings as someone whos income is tied directly to my following so i am stuck in this hell loop until i get paid enough to hire a socialmedia manager for our game studio

tumblr - i mean come on guys. ive been here for 11 years. i met th love of my life and became her friend via tumblr ask memes here. whats more to say. theres obviously things i would change but out of all of them this one is the one i feel most comfortable using. you guys always have my back 7/10

twitter - awful. awful. awful. i hate you. you took everything from me. we used to have cotweets. i was going to collab with my friends and post them as a cotweet. you bastard. 0/10

cohost - favorite out of all the new sites. in terms of functionality i dont have too much reason to use it because its ux is super similar to tumblr but the community and vibes are great. its run by actually cool people. you can put css in posts. i have seen so many cool posts. 10/10

bluesky - honestly not too bad from the usability angle. big thing keeping it down is its another VC funded thing so it will eventually become awful but for now its decent. its basically twitter but before it got bought out by musk and also you can pick the algorithm your feed runs on kind of like tumblr (so like you can make your default a completely linear timeline of only the people you follow. or a completely linear timeline of only your mutuals). if any of them become the proper "twitter successor" i want to believe it will be this one . not that i Hope its this one but i feel like if it isnt this one its going to be threads and i dont want it to be threads. 5/10

hive - it was mobile only and i needed to update my phone to use it so i never did. i dont know if people still use this one i dont think they do ?/10

mastodon - idk why i cant get into mastodon i have tried so many times i am just not feeling it. 4/10 for me but 8/10 objectively

threads - bad. bad. meta product. privacy violations so bad its banned in the eu. algorithm driven feed with 50 million celebrities i dont know and dont care about. mobile only. pleae dont let this be the one. please i dont want to use threads. i dont want to have to use threads. please. please. please you guys

[cerastes]

OKAY, Reclamation Algorithm 2.

The first RA was a more arcade experience with meta progression: You had runs lasting only a few days, and you'd have to defend against a final boss horde in a much smaller overall map. Likewise, your resource acquisition was also much more explosive, such as getting a couple of Clash of Clans and other such resource-rich maps almost every run. You could only carry a few items other than what you had built on your base between runs, meaning that blowing up everything and saving a couple of things between runs was the way to go.

I think RA2 is easier overall than RA1 simply because it's a continuous, full-on mode that doesn't have an arcade, short-run based format. It goes on for as long as you play. Resource acquisition is slower because of its longer form nature, but it also does not at all pressure you with Linebreaker day 14 for example. Plus, the Energy System this time is much easier to manage, since you need Two Pops or Three Pops of Energy Drink to field an entire squad of 6 and under or 7 and above, respectively, whereas RA1 needed you to feed individual units from a Fountain of Energy Drink. That's not to say everything is easier; the Priestess and the Troubadour are much more challenging than anything RA1 threw at you -- Linebreaker, Ruinbringer, and Al-Rafiq --, and while the new horde bosses are fun, they are on about the same difficulty as those three, who are more or less tests of RA mechanics and if you are using them or not more than anything.

Make no mistake, this is ENDGAME endgame, especially in regards to Priestess and Troubadour, since you have to beat them in one Day -- two attempts at the map in which your progress is saved between attempts, BUT in which you can only use each unit once, so if you want to use 12 units per attempt, that'd be 24 units you think are up to par -- and they bring mean gimmicks that can be curbed somewhat by the season in which you fight them, but not entirely, and are still quite formidable even with the counter season. They were some of my favorite parts of the mode, personally, because not only is it a big, harsh challenge, it also reinforces the World Of Adventure nature of Terra: Even though they are unaligned with any of the big factions, you still have REALLY strong individuals roaming the land.

I think the main difficulty for a lot of people will come from choice overload: Arknights is already a game with a lot of player expression and a focus on gameplay, both aspects not at all the norm with gacha games and thus not what a lot of gacha gamers are used to, and while main content is kept very accessible to all skill levels, they do provide truly endgame challenges that can be quite demanding in terms of skill, for players that do dabble in the depth of player expression and team building that Arknights offers, such as High Multiplier (Waves/Natures) Integrated Strategies and 26+ Risk Contingency Contract.

This preamble is to say, Reclamation Algorithm has even more player expression and thus potential options for you to use. You have so, so many more tools other than just your Operators that a lot of people just don’t know what to do with them, hence why I think so many people find it so much harder than it truly is. Food for a myriad of different stat boosts and perks, structures to mold maps and enemy routing at your will, the ability to create your own ranged tiles or throw 5-block fridges at your enemies, purposefully overpowered tools like stun mines and supply stations at your beck and call, you can do so much in RA, and for some people, maybe it’s too much. Like an open world game does for some people, the sheer vastness of your options in RA2 might just blind and overwhelm some, especially since the average gacha player is very casual (and that’s not in the slightest an insult), and the average AK player watches clear guides without really understanding why the strat in the guide worked. Thus, in a mode in which player expression is king, the player that barely interacts with the baseline mechanics of the game, let alone those exclusive to RA, is not even part of the kingdom. For me personally, RA1 clicked the moment I realized just how nightmarishly strong the player is if they use food and structures, and after that, it was a non-stop streak of wins (unbroken in RA2 since RA1, too).

My advice to anyone trying to seriously get into RA2 is to just experiment as much as you can with anything that even remotely calls to you: Is there a unit you like a lot, like say, Bibeak? Well what if you give her insane attack, bulk and infinite SP to spam her skills? Food that buffs ATK, 2 shield generators and 2 supply stations on Bibeak makes this a reality. You wish Yato Kirin had no DP cost whatsoever? There’s food that makes her DP cost 0 no matter how many times you deploy her. You wonder what it’d be like for Eunectes to have 3 Block? Food does that. You think a particular map would be much more manageable if you could just have a Corrupting Heart-buffed 5-Block Mudrock in a particular chokepoint with no ranged tiles? You make your own ranged tile and then give Food to Mudrock to get her to 5 Block, or maybe 3 Block is enough, and you’d rather she has 75% extra Def and 35 more Res instead to make her truly unkillable, well, food does that too.

You just need to dabble into the possibilities a bit before it becomes crystal clear just how insane you can get.

[whokilledjared]

the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself. (& takes on social media)

Hi.

I'm lonely.

The moment I got "two weeks off school" in sophomore year, life went to 4x speed & I can't turn it off no matter how hard I try.

Maybe COVID-19 adolescence did numbers on me. Somewhere between the iPhone 5c and ChatGPT, 14-hour screen times have live-streamed to me a steady, homogenous death of culture.

Nothing is cool anymore. Nothing is sacred. Every movement is a trend, and every cult classic a sequel.

The value we place on things being beautiful, on being "cool," and our gatekept appreciation of how hard these things were to find: it's been co-opted, or perhaps stolen. It's been stolen by the new merchant class. "Disruptors" and "innovators" turning our lives into a burgeoning black mirror prequel. Soon, we'll graduate too, and we'll wring every morsel of value in each others' lives dry for cash.

Plain and simple, I think we're being manipulated.

Your dates are an algorithm. Your music is a social signal. And Zuck knows when you sleep.*

God. What the fuck are we doing???

“Individuation is becoming the thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.” — Carl Jung

Recently, I deleted Instagram. My first impulse was to post a story or something, announcing my departure. But then, I thought that would be lame.

I got rid of my account, too. Kinda. Over 1 year, over 800 followers removed, and what remains of me is a little grey icon, and "JM_0000000010" where my name and face used to be.

yay.

There were many people I wish I could have been friends with, but I wonder, too, why I find myself so drawn to the validation of others. Does social media affect me worse, or do we all just choose to ignore it, languishing in private?

At any rate, this last year has almost felt like re-learning how to be a human being.

Personally, I think one of the biggest markers for maturity is when you become willing to disappoint the people you know in favor of what feels right to you, when you start to unravel the stories you’ve told yourself (or been told) about who you are and what you should be. In short, the sluttiest thing a man can do is be himself.

And sometimes, I think about every college student that has ever lived. My grandmother, my dad, and so on. Just consider for a moment all kids who graduated before 2010:

What was it like for the ones in 1940? To walk around, before a campus had computers? In 2006: To meet someone pretty, but forget their number? In 1999: To cram into dorms, and watch Seinfeld live on-air?

Would I, like my dad in 1988, have braved cold night, brisk wind, & landline phone-call just to knock and see if my friends were too busy to hang?

What stories could I tell if there was even the slightest chance of getting lost on the way home from a party?

Humans are social creatures. We crave our friends like water. To me, the clearest difference between Dasani and Instagram is that one of them comes in a bottle.

Yet despite these distractions and comforts we have in 2024, somehow, we still have engineering students. People who carve out time in their day to sit down, look at paper, and solve differential equations. But then, that's not so hard, is it? It just takes time. Precious, fucking, time.

At Meta, leagues and leagues of these engineers power behavioral scientists, who are competing for the highest salary. Their benchmarks? Your FOMO. Guilt. Anxiety. Obsession. The worse you feel, the more you engage with their content. The more you engage with their content, well, you're starting to get the point.

Try something for me: Open up Instagram, but don't tap anything. What happens? How many little animations? How many tiny nudges prompting you to get lost? Our home-pages are billion-dollar diving boards, hoisting us over engineered catacombs of subconscious quicksand.

My homepage is my FOMO, my envy, and my crushes. The pain and struggle of trying to be someone who I am not. My little existential crises, bundled-up, packaged, and shipped with a like button.

To abandon your social networks entirely, however, requires a safety net of close friends. After all, your friends are online, and you'd be miserable without them.

This is the problem with our monkey brains. Millennia of sociological natural-selection have made us quite great at feeling terrible. We're damn good at making tribal status games to play with, too.

Seeking refuge in quirked up septum piercings and boygenius listeners, my time in counter-cultural, alternative "scenes" between St. Louis and Tampa has shown me that even the weirdest of folks and the most removed can accidentally find themselves reduced to nothing more than high-school popularity contests. Even if I love them. Even if they're amazing people. We're human.

We can't "quit social media" as much as we can't "quit bottled water" Sure, we can, but it's inconvenient. And even without a bottle, we're still drinking water.

So I lost touch with my friends. I got no new updates on their lives. I forced myself into the inconvenience of not having a phone to reach for in fleeting moments of boredom. Suddenly, I was out of the loop. Suddenly, I was bored. And suddenly, nobody missed me. My only friends were the ones I had the time to text. Everyone else ... does not exist.

Weekends have become more valuable than ever. Without the empty social calories of seeing my friends' pictures, I find myself planning hangouts as often as my schedule allows. I have more lunches, more study sessions, and more is done in the company of less.

And I have the time to breathe.

And in this calm, I think I found my answer: it's my misplaced ambition. These fears of anxiety and people I thought I would miss, they seem represent something I want to see more of within myself. Something I want to develop, lean into more deeply, as an individual. And I think that's quite normal; to look out into the world and feel attracted to things we want to see more of. This is, I think, how everyone develops their own definition of beauty — and of coolness. It's largely the intersection of what we find most interesting, and what we want to see more of in the world. Because beauty and coolness, by definition, are rare and hard to find. If they were everywhere, nothing be beautiful, nor would anything be cool.

When we all turn into wrinkles and cataracts, bad backs and heart attacks, for a brief, glorious moment, our lives are going to flash before our eyes. In this moment, you'll see your story. The ultimate progression of you.

How much of that will be skibidi toilet and reaction clips? How much of that will be arguing on the internet? Can you tell me, just how much of your life will you have skipped over to pacify your intentionally-lowered attention span?

That girl whose number you couldn't find Those passing questions over coffee that you couldn't search on Google The boredom of a subway ride

Those are not inconveniences, they're what the older generations refer to as "life."

* (oh, but if you can't sleep, consider this aside: Google knows the angle you walk at, how fast you're walking, and they've got crowdsourced pictures of everywhere around you at all times of the day. fun bedtime thoughts <3)

[suikasweetheart]

Hind's Hall

Woah! Yeah, the people, they won't leave What is threatenin’ about divesting and wanting peace? The problem isn't the protests, it’s what they're protesting It goes against what our country is funding (Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free (Hey) Block the barricade until Palestine is free When I was seven, I learned a lesson from Cube and Eazy-E What was it again? Oh yeah, f**k the police (Woo)

Actors in badges protecting property And a system that was designed by white supremacy (Brrt) But the people are in the streets You can pay off Meta, you can't pay off me Politicians who serve by any means AIPAC, CUFI, and all the companies You see, we sell fear around the land of the free But this generation here is about to cut the strings You can ban TikTok, take us out the algorithm But it's too late, we've seen the truth, we bear witness Seen the rubble, the buildings, the mothers and the children And all the men that you murdered and then we see how you spin it Who gets the right to defend and who gets the right of resistance Has always been about dollars and the color of your pigment, but White supremacy is finally on blast Screaming "Free Palestine" ’til they’re home at last (Woo)

We see the lies in them, claiming it’s antisemitic to be anti-Zionist I've seen Jewish brothers and sisters out there and riding in Solidarity and screaming "Free Palestine" with them Organizin’, unlearning and finally cutting ties with A state that's gotta rely on an apartheid system to uphold an occupying violent History been repeating for the last seventy-five The Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied (Woo) If students in tents posted on the lawn Occupying the quad is really against the law And a reason to call in the police and their squad Where does genocide land in your definition, huh? (Hey; hey) Destroying every college in Gaza and every mosque Pushing everyone into Rafah and dropping bombs The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all And f**k no, I'm not voting for you in the fall (Woo) Undecided, you can't twist the truth, the people out here united Never be defeated when freedom's on the horizon Yet the music industry's quiet, complicit in their platform of silence (Hey, woo)

What happened to the artist? What do you got to say? If I was on a label, you could drop me today I'd be fine with it 'cause the heart fed my page I want a ceasefire, f**k a response from Drake (Woo) What you willing to risk? What you willing to give? What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids? If the West was pretending that you didn't exist You'd want the world to stand up and the students finally did, let's get it (Woo)

[probablyasocialecologist]

When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you to try and think of them less as social networks, and more as a form of anthropological experiment. Every single thing you see on either platform is built or selected to make you spend more time on the app and see more things that Meta wants you to see, be they ads, sponsored content, or suggested groups that you can interact with, thus increasing the amount of your “time spent” on the app, and increasing the amount of “meaningful interactions” you have with content. I also want you to realize that anything bad that you see on the platform is a symptom of Mark Zuckerberg’s unwillingness to rate-limit or sufficiently moderate the platform. Logically-speaking, one would think that Meta would want you to have a high-quality Facebook experience, pruning content that might be incendiary, spammy, scammy or unhelpful, or at the very least, comes primarily from those within your own network, but when your only concern is growth, content moderation is more of an emergency measure.  And to be clear, this is part of Meta’s cultural DNA. In an interview with journalist Jeff Horwitz in his book Broken Code, Facebook’s former VP of Ads and Partnerships Brian Bolland said that “building things is way more fun than making things secure and safe…[and] until there’s a regulatory or press fire, you don’t deal with it.”  Horwitz also cites that Meta engineers’ greatest frustration was that the company “perpetually [needed] something to fail — often fucking spectacularly — to drive interest in fixing it.” Horwitz’s book describes Meta’s approach to moderation as “having a light touch,” considering it “a moral virtue” and that the company “wasn’t failing to supervise what users did — it was neutral.” As I’ve briefly explained, the logic here is that the more stuff there is on Facebook or Instagram, the more likely you are to run into something you’ll interact with, even if said interaction is genuinely bad. Horwitz notes that in April 2016, Meta analyzed Facebook’s most successful political groups, finding that a third of them “routinely featured content that was racist and conspiracy-minded,” with their growth heavily-driven by Facebook’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features, algorithmic tools that Facebook used to recommend content. The researcher in question added that “sixty-four percent of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.” When the researcher took their concerns to Facebook’s “Protect and Care” team, they were told that there was nothing the team could do as “the accounts creating the content were real people, and Facebook intentionally had no rules mandating truth, balance or good faith.” Meta, at its core, is a rot economy empire, entirely engineered to grow metrics and revenue at the expense of anything else. In practice, this means allowing almost any activity that might “grow” the platform, even if it means groups that balloon by tens or hundreds of thousands of people a day, or allowing people to friend 50 or more people in a single day. It means allowing almost any content other than that which it’s legally required to police like mutilation and child pornography, even if the content it allows in makes the platform significantly worse.  As a result, Meta is kind of like an absentee parent, occasionally looking up from their phone and muttering “don’t do that” when something obviously awful happens, and even then they’re extremely hesitant to intervene. 

[mariacallous]

In March 2007, Google’s then senior executive in charge of acquisitions, David Drummond, emailed the company’s board of directors a case for buying DoubleClick. It was an obscure software developer that helped websites sell ads. But it had about 60 percent market share and could accelerate Google’s growth while keeping rivals at bay. A “Microsoft-owned DoubleClick represents a major competitive threat,” court papers show Drummond writing.

Three weeks later, on Friday the 13th, Google announced the acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. The US Department of Justice and 17 states including California and Colorado now allege that the day marked the beginning of Google’s unchecked dominance in online ads—and all the trouble that comes with it.

The government contends that controlling DoubleClick enabled Google to corner websites into doing business with its other services. That has resulted in Google allegedly monopolizing three big links of a vital digital advertising supply chain, which funnels over $12 billion in annual revenue to websites and apps in the US alone.

It’s a big amount. But a government expert estimates in court filings that if Google were not allegedly destroying its competition illegally, those publishers would be receiving up to an additional hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Starved of that potential funding, “publishers are pushed to put more ads on their websites, to put more content behind costly paywalls, or to cease business altogether,” the government alleges. It all adds up to a subpar experience on the web for consumers, Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser says.

“Google is able to extract hiked-up costs, and those are passed on to consumers,” he alleges. “The overall outcome we want is for consumers to have more access to content supported by advertising revenue and for people who are seeking advertising not to have to pay inflated costs.”

Google disputes the accusations.

Starting today, both sides’ arguments will be put to the test in what’s expected to be a weekslong trial before US district judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia. The government wants her to find that Google has violated federal antitrust law and then issue orders that restore competition. In a best-case scenario, according to several Google critics and experts in online ads who spoke with WIRED, internet users could find themselves more pleasantly informed and entertained.

It could take years for the ad market to shake out, says Adam Heimlich, a longtime digital ad executive who’s extensively researched Google. But over time, fresh competition could lower supply chain fees and increase innovation. That would drive “better monetization of websites and better quality of websites,” says Heimlich, who now runs AI software developer Chalice Custom Algorithms.

Tim Vanderhook, CEO of ad-buying software developer Viant Technology, which both competes and partners with Google, believes that consumers would encounter a greater variety of ads, fewer creepy ads, and pages less cluttered with ads. “A substantially improved browsing experience,” he says.

Of course, all depends on the outcome of the case. Over the past year, Google lost its two other antitrust trials—concerning illegal search and mobile app store monopolies. Though the verdicts are under appeal, they’ve made the company’s critics optimistic about the ad tech trial.

Google argues that it faces fierce competition from Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. It further contends that customers benefited from each of the acquisitions, contracts, and features that the government is challenging. “Google has designed a set of products that work efficiently with each other and attract a valuable customer base,” the company’s attorneys wrote in a 359-page rebuttal.

For years, Google publicly has maintained that its ad tech projects wouldn’t harm clients or competition. “We will be able to help publishers and advertisers generate more revenue, which will fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content on the internet,” Drummond testified in 2007 to US senators concerned about the DoubleClick deal’s impact on competition and privacy. US antitrust regulators at the time cleared the purchase. But at least one of them, in hindsight, has said he should have blocked it.

Deep Control

The Justice Department alleges that acquiring DoubleClick gave Google “a pool of captive publishers that now had fewer alternatives and faced substantial switching costs associated with changing to another publisher ad server.” The global market share of Google’s tool for publishers is now 91 percent, according to court papers. The company holds similar control over ad exchanges that broker deals (around 70 percent) and tools used by advertisers (85 percent), the court filings say.

Google’s dominance, the government argues, has “impaired the ability of publishers and advertisers to choose the ad tech tools they would prefer to use and diminished the number and quality of viable options available to them.”

The government alleges that Google staff spoke internally about how they have been earning an unfair portion of what advertisers spend on advertising, to the tune of over a third of every $1 spent in some cases.

Some of Google’s competitors want the tech giant to be broken up into multiple independent companies, so each of its advertising services competes on its own merits without the benefit of one pumping up another. The rivals also support rules that would bar Google from preferencing its own services. “What all in the industry are looking for is fair competition,” Viant’s Vanderhook says.

If Google ad tech alternatives win more business, not everyone is so sure that the users will notice a difference. “We’re talking about moving from the NYSE to Nasdaq,” Ari Paparo, a former DoubleClick and Google executive who now runs the media company Marketecture, tells WIRED. The technology behind the scenes may shift, but the experience for investors—or in this case, internet surfers—doesn’t.

Some advertising experts predict that if Google is broken up, users’ experiences would get even worse. Andrey Meshkov, chief technology officer of ad-block developer AdGuard, expects increasingly invasive tracking as competition intensifies. Products also may cost more because companies need to not only hire additional help to run ads but also buy more ads to achieve the same goals. “So the ad clutter is going to get worse,” Beth Egan, an ad executive turned Syracuse University associate professor, told reporters in a recent call arranged by a Google-funded advocacy group.

But Dina Srinivasan, a former ad executive who as an antitrust scholar wrote a Stanford Technology Law Review paper on Google’s dominance, says advertisers would end up paying lower fees, and the savings would be passed on to their customers. That future would mark an end to the spell Google allegedly cast with its DoubleClick deal. And it could happen even if Google wins in Virginia. A trial in a similar lawsuit filed by Texas, 15 other states, and Puerto Rico is scheduled for March.

[princeoftrashy]

Tiktok shadowbanned me for this and all my reposts, haha. I don’t make a lot of political pieces, but when NO mainstream news are even trying to report the truth about a genocide, it’s my duty as a artist to use whatever platform I have to redirect people’s attention. I’ve already managed to educate a few people via my YouTube post, so I’m doing something right.

And I don’t really care if companies like Tiktok or Meta are going to kill my reach for it. I’m not about to shut up because some algorithm tells me too. And guess what? I’m submitting my recent paintings to a local gallery show. You want my art to not be seen, come burn it.

[Paintings]

[kalethemonster]

my american trans siblings, you will be under a fascist government once january rolls around. that fact is fucking terrifying. even for me as an aussie. (though your politics heavily affect us also bc all social media algorithms treat anyone posting in english as american)

take your time to mourn your freedom. you're losing sooo fucking much and it breaks my heart. the next two months you have left should be used for networking with irl trans people and preparing yourself mentally. let yourself morn but for fucks sake stay alive.

every day you exist is an act of resistance against those who wish you never existed in the first place.

so, how can you keep yourself existing?

irl? go back to 80's queer social policy. dont ask, dont tell. but definately use ways of signing to other queer people that you are one. with irl community, do your best to keep eachother afloat and help where you can. if you grow food, share it out. if you have a vacant room, add someone who needs a place to your household (ground rules and house rules important obvi). if you gotta go back in the closet do so, if you're already transitioning medically do your best to stock up on hrt during the next two months. your irl community is the best resource you have, so networking to find them while you an still do so freely in the next two months is critical.

social media is a tad more complicated so i'll break it down by site/company.

twitter: archive any important past posts you have made via screenshots and then just fucking nuke your account, delete all posts you have made individually to make sure and the delete the acc. elongated muskrat is the annoying orange's biggest financial supporter. he will turn over any and all info he government may request about trans and queer users. if you ever needed any more reasons to dump twitter thab the ones you have already had, take this one.

meta: in terms of facebook, if you still need it for family, archive posts abt being trans via screenshots, and delete said posts. if they were posted by supportive familiy members then get them to delete what they have posted of your identity for safety reasons, then only use for family you can only reach through it. for instagram and threads private any accounts you have that has your personal information attached other than ones for personal businesses. if you need public account access for reaching out,, make an account with only your first name listed, fill it with aesthetic shit or meme posts so it isn't easily linked to you as a person.

as far as i know with bluesky, more or less post as usual but stilll protect your personal information. first name and pronouns only. do not include location markers.

redit, hold all personal info verry close to your heat, give nothing away, have like 50 burners, you dont need karma.

youtube, if you only use it for viewing, use as normal. if you upload, do your best to not show ANY recognisable outdoor landmarks, keep personal info tight, and donot get into anything political. if you can take a hiatus that would be even better.

tumblr: post as normal minus locational and government info.

common thread here is do not reveal any personal shit at all and do your best to conceal what is already posted. back to 90s rules for most sites. unfortunately tech-literate bigots finding your info is a possibility and so you want to withhold as much as you can to avoid being located and identified.

general ruled (both irl and online):

you are dealing with fascists. anything out of line they will actively try to snuff out. if anyone st all tries to get you to talk about ANYTHING REMOTE POLITICAL in any form of public space, SHUT THE FUCK UP. completely shut it down with "i dont talk about politics" or "i dont like politics". yes it's the pussy's answer to get out of shit, but being a pussy in the presence of violent fascists keeps you alive. if they try to talk about palastine, shut the fuck up. if they try to talk about trans people, shut the fuck up. if they try to talk about abortion, shut the fuck up. if they try to talk about disability/meantal health. from new years onwards, you will treat any person in the US who tried to talk about any of that shit in public that isn't doing it for the sake of protest as a narc. you will only properly discuss it behind closed doors with trusted family, comunity and allies.

as of new years day, it is the job of all allies in the us to basically be human shields for not only queer communities, but disabled, migrant, and any form of non-white communities too. if you are cis, white, able bodied, and have been an american citizen from birth, and happen to be a decent person, you are the ones who gotta protect those who cant protect themselves or cant leave the country. yes even if you're queer. if you are a white cis queer person, you can hide your sexuality for 4 years. most trans and intersex people cannot hide their gender or traits.

to recap: for the next two months, mourn your freedom, connect with your local queer comunity. do not share any personal info anywhere online unless you have a buisness, and then keep said info to the bare minimum. if people try to talk to you in public, shut the fuck up. allies and white cis lgb must protect those who cant run or hide.

the next four years are gonna be hell. but just know that of it seems no one has your back, this trans man all the way in australia has your back. love from me, my cousin, and my wonderfully supportive mother. stay sane, aqy safe, stay together.

[x-lucifera]

I don't remember who

wrote that little piece of meta-ish text. But I saw a couple of days ago a claim that Rouge is better than Rose and/or Clara, because when he saw Doctor's other faces he was in awe, while both girls were kinda scared.

If anybody knows the post I'm referring to, please link it, because I can't find it, and I'm not gonna look further into timerouge tags, cuz... You know the algorithm.

Anyway. I strongly disagree.

Rouge just saw that the guy he just met (who is kinda hot), can change his appearance. That's it. But he is a guy from the far future, who travelled his bit and seen his share of things. He is also currently hunting some shapeshifters. So no biggie. It was a kind of appropriate response. Cuz c'mon that is cool. But he doesn't know that death is what causes the change. He doesn't know the change is painful, confusing, and scary. He doesn't have to see it happening.

Meanwhile both, Rose and Clara, had to deal with the change actually happening with none or almost no prior knowledge about the process. Meaning of course that Rose had NO IDEA what was happening, and Clara knew that Doctor could regenerate, but never exactly what that meant. Both girls are from the 21st century, with little knowledge of the universe.

Rose did not know what happened. Her beloved Doctor was in pain and then he disappeared and someone else just showed up. He was also saying his goodbyes, and that is never a good sign. Her friend was gone. She was rightly afraid that someone did something to him. Maybe he was kidnapped? Maybe he was dead? She had no idea but was still trying to protect him. And then struggled to see the Doctor in that new guy because of the shock and the change going wrong. But after whatever was going wrong passed she accepted him instantly.

Clara knew about the process of regeneration, and that he will look different. Just the theory, but she knew. She was not, however, prepared for it to actually happen, the Doctor after the change is gonna act weird and it takes time for him to get over this regeneration haze. Her beloved friend was hurting and she had no way of helping him through it. So she was scared for him, and confused because to her knowledge it should renew him, but he looked older (as per human standards).

What I am saying here is simple - there is no comparison between those two. These are completely different situations. In the first one, you find out the stranger had 15 faces. That is cool In other your beloved is dying, hurting, changing and there is nothing you can actually do to help or stop it from happening. That is scary, difficult, painful and confusing.

All of those characters had appropriate reactions to the given situation.

[justheretoposttrash]

day 5 of meandering about endeavor (and briefly hawks)--(taking a more meta-look at the fandom with this one):

i find it fascinating and honestly sorta cool that the fandom is so divided on endeavor in a way that lines up well with how people are divided on his character within the text itself.

the responses are certainly not black-and-white or binary, but it's easiest for me to give the examples of hawks and natsuo as sorta opposite ends of the spectrum. many endeavor fans are similar to hawks--enjoying his cooler moments while also greatly appreciating how much he puts himself through in his efforts to change for the better (as an aside, i do find it hilarious how many endeavor fans enjoy seeing that man beat the shit out of and actively suffering. kinky lol). endeavor haters, on the other hand, generally want nothing to do with his character (while some even say that they want him to die, when it comes to fictional people in a story, that's basically the equivalent of "keep this guy far away from me"). the need for unequivocal and complete separation from his character is similar to what natsuo wants and sticks with in the story (although he does have his moments of sensitivity regarding his father, in spite of this).

i think that the reasoning behind irl fans and the characters also often align. for hawks, it's incredibly inspiring and gratifying to see that someone is willing to put in the work to change, even if doing so will be difficult and often unrewarding. the worse the actions are, the more painful the upward climb becomes, but also the more crazy it is that the person in question is willing to make that climb in the first place. i've noticed a lot of endhawks fans in particular really finding a lot of personal healing through exploring these ideas, whether they want to change for the better themselves, or they wish those in their life who'd hurt them would be willing to grow as people the way endeavor's character does. sure, there are some people who gloss over the terrible things that he's done, but many seem to enjoy actively engaging with what he's done and working through what it means for them.

for natsuo, it's not just about it being "too little, too late", though that's definitely a big part--but also that he as a person cannot have a relationship with his father while keeping himself safe and healthy. a lot of real-life relationships end up this way, especially between parent and child once the child reaches adulthood, and it's a very healthy boundary to set. for irl people engaging with fiction that triggers similar emotions, this looks more like ignoring, not engaging with, or wishing for the removal of the character activating them---and if that "boundary"-esque wall can't be drawn, if they repeatedly are unable to avoid the character's presence, this often wells up as anger and turns into venting, which is only natural if you're being bombarded with a stimulus that you feel unable to control. (sure, blocking and filtering tags is available, but algorithms can be incredibly confounding/unavoidable, not everyone remembers to tag their stuff perfectly every time, and in this case, the maligned character plays an incredibly crucial and central role in the canon material itself--so if you want to consume, y'know, mha, you have to grapple with a text that at best isn't always for you, or at worst occasionally betrays you.)

i don't mean to overstate my case--a lotta ppl like stuff or hate stuff without questioning it--but i think in the case of this one particular character, a lot of nuance tends to emerge, and there's a lot of potential there for analysis/learning. I also think that some conflict and friction becomes inevitable between disagreeing fans regarding endeavor's character. naturally, your average person getting crushed in the gears of day-to-day life is going to feel hurt when they're accused of not engaging with the thing that brings them much-needed comfort in the "correct" way, especially if they have indeed been putting a lot of work into thoughtfully engaging with it behind-the-scenes. it's also difficult to give people you disagree with the benefit of the doubt, bc honestly there are plenty of wild takes or arguments made in bad faith out there--and very few ppl want to wade through a bunch of cortisol-spiking statements just to find one that is reasonable enough but that still might be disagreeable to them.

it's likewise interesting to see the reactions of people either calling hawks a murderer and hating on his character, or claiming he did nothing wrong and that twice shouldn't have fought/deserved to die (and while i can understand wanting to defend silly bbygirl birdman, man oh man would hawks not be happy with the latter take if he were a Real Boy). i don't believe either group comprises the majority of mha fans by a longshot, but there's still enough that i've noticed these little trends in one pocket of the internet or amother. i got nothin prescriptive here, i just find it all interesting to talk about.

lastly, i wanna say that, while telling stories from the POV of an abuser and trying to give them sympathy at the same time is so often a gross and very Bad Move, crazily enough i think mha is one of the best executions of this that i've seen. aside from the nuanced way endeavor gets treated by other characters (some supportive, some rightfully angry, some rightfully hateful), what stands out to me is that, by having us see through his pov, the story actually shows what anyone could realistically expect as a best-case-scenario of an abuser starting to atone. we don't have to question if he's sorry, don't have to question if he understands what he did as wrong, don't have to question that he's doing actionable things to make progress, etc., because we spend so much time with his thoughts. and it's not perfectly linear and it does come way too late, but it is kind of wild to see this kind of best-case evolution unfold bit by bit. of course, the flipside to this is that real life doesn't work this way and you can never have absolute certainty that an abuser genuinely understands/won't go on to abuse again. still, being able to see a direct model for what accountability and working towards atonement looks like is refreshing, when by comparison so many other character arcs in other stories 1) end in redemption through death, 2) have the character barely do any internal work/stay an absolute asshole, or 3) resolve a past "sin" that actually wasn't that bad to begin with. when all three tropes are avoided, when someone did something unforgivable but is veritably changing for the better but is still alive, what the heck happens next? what the hell do you do? what does anyone do? some options are explored in mha in a pretty neat way--natsuo never wants to see enji, and enji agrees. touya wants to see enji every day (at least implicitly so) and enji makes that his vow. so many flawed parents irl are unable to respect their childrens' wishes when it comes to letting them completely go so they can live their lives, or when it comes to staying ever-present and showing them genuine care, and yet enji becomes a parent capable of doing both opposite-seeming things at once, finally willing to do and become what his children ask of him. the todoroki saga is certainly not perfect---i for one have *thoughts* about how the very end of rei's arc has been handled---but i think it's unique for how it benefits from providing so much of endeavor's pov, whereas other stories from an abuser's pov might have slapped on shitty apologia or only provided an "explanation" for why that character is so nasty without going too much further than that. while this choice may force some fans to have a level of closeness with a character whose presence begets feelings of hurt and hopelessness, it also makes sense why this choice has captivated other fans and provided, oddly enough, a sense of inspiration and hope.

[fairuzfan]

By the way, you may have heard this, but shaun king's ig account got suspended.

This is probably your dream come true, but this still means palestinian posts disappearing from social media by the whims of meta. Also this happened after when mohamed al-kurd's twitter got banned. And after motaz said his ig got shadowbanned to hell and high waters... Is meta now progressing on the purge? What do we do?

I mean it's not my dream come true haha but I do hope people stop listening to him at least as an authority since he's a grifter who steals money.

The issue is for twitter, it's a separate company and the algorithm works differently than FB and IG. For Instagram, I know that saving/bookmarking posts will help, and sending posts that you think are important to people. I actually have always found the main feed on instagram annoying and just go to people's individual accounts to see if they updated so I would recommend doing that consistently.

For example, you could go to Bisan's account, then Anat International, then Motaz, then whoever else you want to check in on and like+share their posts.

For FB, I honestly don't know how to counter it that much. I remember in 2021, during Sheikh Jarrah and the May war on Gaza, I tried to post something with just the word "Palestine" and it straight up deleted the post right away. So like, intentional deletion based on a word. I haven't been on FB much since then so I don't know what it's like right now but it sounds like not much has changed.

I heard of 7amleh, which documents censorship of Palestinian speech online. You might wanna check them out, thought they're fairly new so I'm not sure what it is they do exactly.