I wanted to buy something second-hand. Unfortunately, Facebook Marketplace is the shit where I live. So I thought I could quickly register, contact the seller, and delete my account afterwards.
However, I refuse to participate in this insanity. Video selfie my ass, Facebook.
I get it. They want to combat bots and potentially even detect if a person is old enough to use the platform. However Facebook has eroded absolutely any trust that there’s no way I’d give them this. Not that I use Facebook anyway.
There’s no way they want to combat bots. You report bot content and they’re like “nah, this doesn’t go against our community guidelines” all the fucking time.
What do you expect from a company that removed independent fact-checkers, wanted to add AI profiles as users, amongst other things? I think they relish bots and the engagement they bring to the platform, completely blind-sided by how bad it looks for them long-term.
I don’t even think they care about image. That was early-game for them. Now they’ve scooped so much data on people that they could probably close Facebook and still manage to track people based on metadata and shadow profiles.
I’d kind of think it would be in their interest to, not because they give a shit about what their end users think, but what their customers (advertisers) think. I’d imagine that advertisers are paying x amount to reach real humans that can spend money, so if it turns out that businesses are paying to advertise to bots then I can’t see them being too happy about that. Not unless they’re upfront with businesses and they tell them that x% of their user base is bots and they’ll only charge them to advertise to real people.
I honestly don’t even think advertisers give a shit anymore. If people keep buying what they’re pushing, all they see is dollar signs. If anything, the whole “advertiser doesn’t like this” thing is just some sort of scapegoat.
Like, look at YouTube - you’re telling me that somehow the company pushing some products that nobody gives a fuck about is horribly offended because a guy in a video said “Shitfuck McPussyCock” three seconds in; but they have no issue with the hatred, misinformation spreading, and general stupidity of people like Tim Poole, Ben Shapiro, Crowder, and that other dipshit with the beard and glasses (whose name I have actually thankfully forgotten)?
The thing to understand about large organizations is that appearances matter a lot and the people working in them have to look busy. This is well known phenomenon among low level employees but it applies to managers and even executives too (who have to put on a show that they’re increasing shareholder value and that their company is special somehow).
So, why do advertisers care if someone says “fuck” but not about someone whose spewing pseudointellectual misogynistic bullshit? Because there’s someone whose job description is “brand value” and if they’re not upset about something then they don’t look busy. The amount of “fucks” per minute is a really simple metric that (now that speech recognition is as good as it is) is really easy to measure. In other words its an easy way to look busy.
Of course it doesn’t hurt that the guy’s boss is probably a conservative anyway, and so doesn’t mind the misogyny so much, but looking busy is the main reason.
Zuckerborg is literally promoting bot “friends”
its not even about it, probably more data to tie to you and sell to data brokers, facebook feed most of the time wont even prioritize to show your friends posts instead will show posts from pages that paid Facebook to advertise, its literally no longer what it used to be for a few years already and probably why they were all in for having a separate messenger app for Facebook so those who find more convenient not to quit will just keep using it to maintain contact with people through it while keeping their accounts