I will probably be harassed for this but I feel like I need to act.
The recent debate and decision by world to federate with threads seems to have sparked massive pro meta propaganda. Some accounts post completely one sided articles nearly every day, using carefully crafted language to shape meta as the „facilitator“ of the fediverse and some beligerent benevolent god. You dont have to scroll far in this community to find the posts I‘m talking about.
Please consider reporting these posts for the propaganda they are and asking your admins to defederate from threads.net.
To show you why meta is not welcome in the fediverse, here is a quote from the fedipact which is the reason I have defederated threads in my own instance.
THEIR LONG TRACK RECORD OF PURE EVIL
i’m just gonna paste some links here because there’s no point in paraphrasing what others have already said more eloquently
(if you’re wondering why i’m using archive.org it’s to break the fucking paywalls on these articles because fuck that, information wants to be free)
that time they helped facilitate a genocide
that time they helped try to rig an election
that time they did creepy behavioral experimentation on their users
so, yeah. there’s legiterally shitloads of precedent here. not to mention all the privacy concerns. which brings us to the need many feel to protect ourselves from this insidious megacorp…
Against one thing meta-shills often try to ascribe: we dont have a problem with the people on there but it is literally everything else.
Admins and Mods who read this, please consider signing the fedipact on https://fedipact.online
Thank you very much for reading and have a nice day.
Edit: wording, crossed out
I literally show my wife articles of Meta/Tik Tok data breaches and other shit, and she just shrugs and keeps using it. I have a friend who works in fucking CYBER SECURITY and he still has social media apps on his phone. It’s unreal.
But… you’re on social media right now.
Much like Reddit, user data here is worth little outside of LLM utility. Moreover, most of your data is freely available to anyone with a bit of patience and the ability to spin up an instance. Everything is open here, but what’s open isn’t meticulously indexed information about your hopes and dreams… I hope.
Yeah, no, that’s my exact point. It’s not like data in the “fediverse” is particularly secure, beyond the fact that you can opt out of some parts of it in some applications. And it’s not like it’s not social media doing social media things.
I see a lot of this performative outrage or pride on being on the “open” version of social media, but social media is social media. A lot of its problems are design problems that are replicated in the federated versions, and a lot of the privacy concerns remain on paper or haven’t surfaced just because this version of it is so small by comparison.
I don’t think a lot of people who have made this crusade a key part of their online persona fully understand what the underlying issues are and how they work. “How can cybersecurity experts have a TikTok account” kinda reads like the “we need to ban plastic straws” of Internet dysfunction.
You’re absolutely correct. But let’s just be practical here. Lemmy isn’t the same thing as Facebook or Tik Tok. It’s a completely different beast. I’m also being careful to not post sensitive information about myself, whereas on Facebook it’s literally your name and identity and photos and private conversations.
Ah, I didn’t realize that my Lemmy account is tied to my actual name, address, phone number, and all of my irl friends. I also didn’t realize that my Lemmy account has thousands of photos of me for deep fakes, and that the government can at any time request all of that for next to no reason. Thanks for enlightening me!
You’re welcome.
I mean, my accounts in Twitter or Reddit were never tied to those things, either, and I sure see a lot of Mastodon users under their own names.
What I do know and some people don’t fully realize is that public posts here are search engine indexable, as are Masto posts based on their privacy settings, so data being scraped is not conditional on anybody else federating. Although the data that requires federation to access can obviously be accessed just by spinning up an insstance privately at any point.
Don’t get me wrong, the treatment of data and the monetization and social engineering tools in commercial social media aren’t the same as here, but a lot of people assign a level of privacy and secrecy to their fediverse activity that just isn’t there, and the same goes for moderation tools.
Hilariously once they started rolling out Threads opt-ins you could see some Threads users complain that opting in could mean that others can see their posts without their control, or that they don’t have direct moderation access to federated copies of their content. And you know what? They’re not wrong.
Each platform has its own gaps. I prefer the set of gaps in the Fediverse, and I’ll certainly take Bluesky over Threads or Twitter these days. But social media is social media, and there are fundamental issues at the core of the concept and with every implementation of it, including this one.
No he isn’t? Social media is centred on posting about yourself and following people to see what they post. This is a link aggregation site with a comments section. By the definition of “place you can go and post comments on a topic”, then Usenet is social media. Every website with a comment section is social media
The letters section of your newspaper is social media. No, the whole point and problem of social media is that people make it about themselves.
So by your standards Mastodon counts but Lemmy doesn’t? Is Mastodon part of the problem in that read of the situation?
Yes. Microblogging in general. It started bad with “had toast this morning” and “look at my lunch” and somehow we got influencers out of it.
That’s debatable, but fair enough. Still, you’ll agree with me that’s not what a lot of people around here are thinking, and probably not what the OP was thinking either. Specifically if the issue is, as he suggests, privacy and security Reddit (and so Lemmy) are no different than Twitter (and so Mastodon).
Ultimately it’s the same confusion between data exposure, tracking and designed dynamics.
I get where you’re coming from but is he managing his risk or not?
Does he understand the risk? If yes, good. No? Bad.
Is he ignoring the risk? If yes, bad. No? Good.
Is he weighing the risks against the benefits he receives of using these apps and taking appropriate steps to mitigate those risks? If yes, then good. No? Bad.
Cyber security isn’t “lock everything down at all costs”. Otherwise I would insist you throw your phone in an incinerator along with all your computers, live in a bunker reinforced against nuclear attack with a small army to guard you, never leave it, never talk to anyone… Etc.
It is enabling one to achieve their goals with a tolerable amount of risk. That level of tolerable risk is different for everyone.
This is correct. Security is managing risk to a tolerable level. Not eliminating it entirely. Unless you want to live by yourself cut off from the world. People who have black and white views on security are weird.
Well maybe they aren’t experienced info security professionals :)
I’m going to be honest, I’m kind of of this mindset.
I haven’t yet had a decent argument made to me regarding why I should personally care if TikTok or whatever has like… my age gender and what types of books I read and what apps I have on my phone.
The concern is what other pieces of information are they collecting, and when and who do they share that information with. Does it also collect data on what places you visit, or what kind of potentially controversial information you look up. People are concerned about things like visits to a hospital making its way to their employer and insurance against their will, or a trans person being outed by the ads they are served in front of their family, or maybe that the police will knock down their door because their GPS falsely placed them at the scene of a crime. Or what if they live in an actual fascist regime, and that government comes knocking because they searched for something verboten. Even aside from all that, all this data is inherently your’s, and yet all these companies collecting it are just taking it from you without your explicit knowledge or consent and without you seeing even a dime or what a quick search tells me is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Are things like that happening though? With the insurance?
I mean if the police want to come to my door and shoot me in the head or find a reason to brand me as a felon any day they can basically already do that. That goes for about anyone. It doesn’t really seem to matter if any data brokering company also happens to tag me as maybe being gay or having a 90% chance of supporting Palestine over Israel or similar
I dunno. I just feel like a lot of the argument are contingent on envisioning some imminent future wherein every Western country turns into a completely fascist police state with like concentration camps - but also they can only get their information on local demographics based off of data sold by social media companies? And foreign ones at that? And even in this situation you’re not really doing anything about it but just trying to lie low and hope no one discovers you’re an atheist or whatever until you die of old age?
It kind of reminds me of Pascals Wager. You know that one? Where it goes “ooo you have to believe in god because what if you don’t and the Christian god is real… you go to hell!?”. Like. Yeah, sure. I guess that could happen. But most people will shrug their shoulders at it, not really convinced. It requires a lot of assumptions
If that company that has tagged you as gay sells the data that most often includes location, maybe even your face, to an anti-gay hate group that could end quite badly. It’s the same impluse that drove the red scare and the citizen made lists of " suspected communists" and they were blacklisted from their communities, harrassed or evenharmed or killed.
What exactly do you think the anti gay hate groups are going to do?
Have you literally slept through the bomb threats being called in to children’s hospitals and schools over LGBTQ issues?
And you think that will happen to gay people because they use tiktok
Ah, so you have moved from “nothing will happen” to “nothing will happen because of TikTok specifically.”
Like, good for you if you don’t have to worry about being added to a list of undesirables that the Jan 6 segment of the population would be interested in doing violence to because of your sexuality or gender? Some state governments are literally trying to obtain information on medical care provided to trans patients in completely different states, and people have been charged under anti-abortion laws based on their search history. If you don’t understand why queer people are more worried than normal about their safety and privacy go read the fucking news. So maybe sit on it and spin instead of telling people the queers are in hysterics over nothing. What are you even doing on Lemmy if you think digital privacy is bullshit?
Um, Charlottesville?
Regular lynchings from the 1800s?
I don’t really understand the question.
You think that gay people will be lynched because they have Facebook downloaded on their phone.
If that helps you not to think about anything being said, sure.
Out of curiosity, what do you think a hate group does with information on their particular bogeyman?
To answer your question about the insurance thing, yes. Yes, that is a thing that is happening today. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html
Because they use that information to draw a psychological profile of people, and they use that to subtly push their agenda with content they show.
Allegedly, anyway.
For a more concrete example, though not quite like this, look at Tencent-funded western movies. They’ve all got a Chinese side character who’s always shown in a positive light.
Who is “they” in this context?
Also, how does your “concrete example” pertain to this discussion? That doesn’t have anything to do with data from social media or phones. It’s just a giant media company pushing having having some Chinese people in some movies.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NNv2RHR62Rs&pp=ygULY3JjdXMgbXVzaWM%3D
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://m.piped.video/watch?v=NNv2RHR62Rs&pp=ygULY3JjdXMgbXVzaWM%3D
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yep. Almost like the mind-altering power of television should have been taken seriously instead of laughed off and supercharged into an always-on ubiquitous device we mostly equate with our actual personhood.
We could actually address it now. No time like the present, eh.