Social media, where being fake about who you are for a hit on the like button, by people who probably don’t really like it. Adults acting like children and children learning to lie.
Stolen from Woosterman.
It’s a time suck for some, it causes mental illness in teenage girls and is a propaganda tool now.
It’s being weaponized against the users and they don’t know it.
While I think that it has crossed the Maginot line of some not being able to shut it off, it is being used as a weapon against us now. It probably has for a long time. It was a political football that was kicked around when they started banning people for not thinking the same way the Silicon Valley tech moguls think.
Before the meat of this story, let’s not forget that Tik Tok is also a Chinese spy tool.
Now, Chinese Companies Help CCP Manipulate Global Opinion on Social Media.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cyber-influence campaigns against Western democracies on social media have become more frequent, sophisticated, and effective in recent years, with more Chinese government agencies, such as Qi An Xin, becoming involved.
Named “Gaming Public Opinion,” the report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) included data collection spanning Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Sina Weibo, and ByteDance products.
It reveals previously unreported CCP cyber-influence operations, such as one called the “Spamouflage network,” in which inauthentic accounts are used to spread claims that the United States is irresponsibly conducting cyber-espionage operations against China and other countries.
“The CCP has used these cyber-enabled influence operations to seek to interfere in U.S. politics, Australian politics, and national security decisions, undermine the Quad and Japanese defence policies, and impose costs on Australian and North American rare-earth mining companies,” the report said.
The most notable Chinese party-state agencies involved include the People’s Liberation Army’s Strategic Support Force, which conducts cyber operations as part of the army’s political warfare; the Ministry of State Security, which conducts covert operations for state security; the Central Propaganda Department, which oversees China’s domestic and foreign propaganda efforts; the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), which enforces China’s internet laws; and the Cyberspace Administration of China, which regulates China’s internet ecosystem.
Chinese state media outlets and Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials are also running clandestine operations that seek to amplify their own overt propaganda and influence activities.
In addition, the authors found that private Chinese companies collaborate with CCP agencies in their operations.
In a recent coordinated CCP propaganda campaign named “Operation Honey Badger” (蜜獾行动) by Chinese government-linked entities, for instance, Chinese cybersecurity company Qi An Xin (奇安信) supporting the influence operation.
“We uncover new evidence to suggest that the MPS, with the support of cybersecurity company Qi An Xin, may be involved in this campaign,” they wrote.
“The company has the capacity to seed disinformation about advanced persistent threats to its clients in Southeast Asia and other countries… It’s deeply connected with Chinese intelligence, military, and security services and plays an important role in China’s cybersecurity and state security strategies.”
As of April 2023, the “Operation Honey Badger” campaign continues to attribute cyber-espionage operations to the U.S. government.
Clive Hamilton, the Australian academic who authored “Silent Invasion,” said he agrees with the arguments made in the ASPI report.
Hamilton said he believes the CCP’s goal of manipulating public opinion remains the same, but the way it actually does it is changing.
As countries such as Australia have strengthened legislation and law enforcement to counter foreign interference, it has become more difficult for Beijing to carry out on-the-ground missions in those countries. That’s why underground work through networks is all the more important, he told Radio Free Asia.
The authors suggest governments review foreign interference legislation and consider mandating that social media platforms disclose state-backed influence operations and other transparency reporting to increase the public’s threat awareness.
In addition, they appeal to partners and allies to share more intelligence with one another on such influence operations.
“Strong open-source intelligence skills and collection capabilities are a crucial part of investigating and attributing these operations, the low classification of which should making intelligence sharing easier,” they argued.
On the other hand, social media platforms are urged to remove access to those analytics for suspicious accounts breaching platform policies, making it difficult for identified malicious actors to measure the effectiveness of influence operations.
Yeah, I think it’s BS like most do, just like being woke. Blaming others so you think that it will make people equal.
Woke definitions
Trying to silence someone for their beliefs is a cross between 1984 and Communism.
I wonder if the rest of the world is getting tired of the MSM egging on the mentally deficient or deranged people. They gang up like the mean kids on the playground who got together to bring someone down to build themselves up.
Critical Race Theory = anti-white positioning, or negation of people of European descent.
Fanatically pro-Abortion = critical birth theory.
Multiculturalism = critical culture theory.
Global Warming = critical climate theory.
Transgenderism = critical sex theory
Feminism = anti-men theory
Facebook = showing the filtered and best rather than the real you, also a place to Sh*t on others.
LinkedIn = Faux bragging and fake compliments
and woke
Gettin’ kind of tough for others when stuff starts coming true and the facts come out proving what you knew was right all along. Who’s going to call them out for lying to us, or is it going to be swept under the rug by Google, Facebook, the media and the deep state?
I could have always taken off my tin foil hat, but you can never get un-jabbed.
Here are some other direct quotes from the paper, there are 21 total so I spared the reader:
Remember it’s safe and effective (just like if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor)
Here’s the two sentences from the paper that everyone should read:
1) A worldwide Bayesian causal Impact analysis suggests that COVID-19 gene therapy (mRNA vaccine) causes more COVID-19 cases per million and more non-Covid deaths per million than are associated with COVID-19 [43].
2) An abundance of studies has shown that the mRNA vaccines are neither safe nor effective, but outright dangerous.
Not Covid, but related and I don’t have to take off my conspiracy hat for this one either. The government is our enemy right now.
Here is one of the liars.
Leaked WhatsApp messages reveal how health secretary hoped to shock public into complying with ever-changing lockdown rule
The U.S. Government Created the Vaccine, Did It Also Create the Virus?
Another FBI Whistleblower Says He Was Forced To Inflate Domestic Terrorism Numbers
Update: after being posted for only a few hours, I seem to have attracted the attention of China with this. I’m sure there is no connection between the two, right.
I noticed my numbers went down when I post Covid anti-vaxx stuff. I don’t care as this is an outlet for me to express what I think is the truth. I’m not sponsored by ad’s (sorry if you get them, it’s not me). I fit the algorithm for my continual posts that have joined with many others to expose the hoax. It goes down every time I put something up against big brother.
Collectively, we the conspiracy theorist are damn near perfect for getting the actual Covid facts and timeline right.
I’ve ditched Google, PayPal, Fake book, Twitter and other means of silencing me, but I found this out, posted below.
The pattern is that we are getting close to exposing DARPA’s involvement with the Wuhan virus and vaccine. It appears that there is enough sketchy timing as to which was developed first. DARPA is a part of deep state.
This post should get my hands slapped some more, but here goes.
The government’s campaign to fight “misinformation” has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program.
DARPA said those tools were used “to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information,” beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago.
The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms.
DARPA set four specific goals for the program:
Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online has compiled a report detailing how this technology is being developed to manipulate the speech of Americans via the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations.
“One of the most disturbing aspects of the Convergence Accelerator Track F domestic censorship projects is how similar they are to military-grade social media network censorship and monitoring tools developed by the Pentagon for the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism contexts abroad,” reads the report.
“DARPA’s been funding an AI network using the science of social media mapping dating back to at least 2011-2012, during the Arab Spring abroad and during the Occupy Wall Street movement here at home,” Benz told Just The News. “They then bolstered it during the time of ISIS to identify homegrown ISIS threats in 2014-2015.”
The new version of this technology, he added, is openly targeting two groups: Those wary of potential adverse effects from the COVID-19 vaccine and those skeptical of recent U.S. election results.
“The terrifying thing is, as all of this played out, it was redirected inward during 2016 — domestic populism was treated as a foreign national security threat,” Benz said.
“What you’ve seen is a grafting on of these concepts of mis- and disinformation that were escalated to such high intensity levels in the news over the past several years being converted into a tangible, formal government program to fund and accelerate the science of censorship,” he said.
“You had this project at the National Science Foundation called the Convergence Accelerator,” Benz recounted, “which was created by the Trump administration to tackle grand challenges like quantum technology. When the Biden administration came to power, they basically took this infrastructure for multidisciplinary science work to converge on a common science problem and took the problem of what people say on social media as being on the level of, say, quantum technology.
“And so they created a new track called the track F program … and it’s for ‘trust and authenticity,’ but what that means is, and what it’s a code word for is, if trust in the government or trust in the media cannot be earned, it must be installed. And so they are funding artificial intelligence, censorship capacities, to censor people who distrust government or media.”
Benz went on to describe intricate flows of taxpayer cash funding the far-flung, public-private censorship regime. The funds flow from the federal government to universities and NGOs via grant awards to develop censorship technology. The universities or nonprofits then share those tools with news media fact-checkers, who in turn assist private sector tech platforms and tool developers that continue to refine the tools’ capabilities to censor online content.
“This is really an embodiment of the whole of society censorship framework that departments like DHS talked about as being their utopian vision for censorship only a few years ago,” Benz said. “We see it now truly in fruition.”
Members of the media, along with fact-checkers, also serve as arbiters of what is acceptable to post and what isn’t, by selectively flagging content for said social media sites and issuing complaints against specific narratives.
There is a push, said Benz during an appearance on “Just The News No Noise” this week, to fold the media into branches of the federal government in an effort to dissolve the Fourth Estate, in favor of an Orwellian and incestuous partnership to destroy the independence of the press.
The advent of COVID led to “normalizing censorship in the name of public health,” Benz recounted, “and then in the run to the 2020 election, all manner of political censorship was shoehorned in as being okay to be targetable using AI because of issues around mail-in ballots and early voting drop boxes and issues around January 6th.
“What’s happened now is the government says, ‘Okay, we’ve established this normative foothold in it being okay to [censor political speech], now we’re going to supercharge you guys with all sorts of DARPA military grade censorship, weaponry, so that you can now take what you’ve achieved in the censorship space and scale it to the level of a U.S. counterinsurgency operation.'”
One academic institution involved in this tangled web is the University of Wisconsin, which received a $5 million grant in 2022 “for researchers to further develop” its Course Correct program, “a precision tool providing journalists with guidance against misinformation,” according to a press release from the university’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.”
WiseDex, a private company receiving grants from the Convergence Accelerator Track F, openly acknowledges its mission — building AI tools to enable content moderators at social media sites to more easily regulate speech.
In a promotional video for the company, WiseDex explains how the federal government is subsidizing these efforts to provide Big Tech platforms with “fast, comprehensive and consistent” censorship solutions.
“WiseDex helps by translating abstract policy guidelines into specific claims that are actionable,” says a narrator, “for example, the misleading claim that the COVID-19 vaccine supresses a person’s immune response. Each claim includes keywords associated with the claim in multiple languages … The trust and safety team at a platform can use those keywords to automatically flag matching posts for human review. WiseDex harnesses the wisdom of crowds as well as AI techniques to select keywords for each claim and provide other information in the claim profile.”
WiseDex, in effect, compiles massive databases of banned keywords and empirical claims they then sell to platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Such banned-claims databases are then integrated “into censorship algorithms, so that ‘harmful misinformation stops reaching big audiences,'” according to Benz’s report.
Just the News reached out to the University of Wisconsin and WiseDex for comment, but neither had responded by press time.
The NSF is acting, in one sense, as a kind of cutout for the military, Benz explained, allowing the defense establishment to indirectly stifle domestic critics of Pentagon spending without leaving fingerprints. “Why are they targeting right-wing populists?” he asked. “Because they’re the only ones challenging budgets for [defense agencies].”
He added: “These agencies know they’re not supposed to be doing this. They’re not normally this sloppy. But they won’t ever say the words ‘remove content.'”
The NSF, with an annual budget of around $10 billion, requested an 18.7% increase in appropriations from Congress in its latest budgetary request.
In a statement to Just the News, DARPA said:
“That program ended in March 2017 and was successful in developing a new science of social media analysis to reduce adversaries’ ability to manipulate local populations outside the U.S.
“DARPA’s role is to establish and advance science, technology, research, and development. In doing so we employ multiple measures to safeguard against the collection of personally identifiable information, in addition to following stringent guidelines for research dealing with human subjects. Given the significance of the threat posed by adversarial activities on social media platforms, we are working to make many of the technologies in development open and available to researchers in this space.”
DARPA then followed up with an additional message saying: “As a point of clarification, our response relates only to your questions about the now-complete SMISC program. We are not aware of the NSF research you referenced. If you haven’t already, please contact NSF for any questions related to its research.”
Mike Pozmantier and Douglas Maughan, who serve at NSF as Convergence Accelerator program director and office head, respectively, did not respond to requests for comment.
That’s right, I’m keeping the past in the past.
When I was first on fake book (an early adopter), it was great until people came back that I didn’t want to ever see again. That’s pretty much the way it is for most of my life. When you are in the past, you stay there. It’s too much drama for me to catch up. I have trouble with seeing people I haven’t seen in a while and it’s awkward.
It’s not just people from school or social groups I’ve been affiliated with, it’s family also. It’s very awkward as I know that were we not related that I’d never talk to them. I don’t with most anyway and have lost contact with a lot of the others.
Why haven’t we talked? The answer is usually because I didn’t want to. I have a hard time lying about that. I can fake being excited to see someone, I just refuse to do it anymore. It’s personality turn off when I see it in others.
I didn’t want anything connecting me to memories I didn’t want. It was painful enough the first time around. Why do I want to relive part of my life that are best left as experiences to learn from? I’d already moved on in life having parted ways once. Those memories of my early life don’t make me want to try and pretend it didn’t happen for me. I was glad it was over, dead and buried. It’s easier for me to deal with.
They kept wanting to connect. I did, but muted everyone, but finally I put them back in the history box where they belong, for a good reason. I had to dump it and remain true to myself.
If we were really friends, we wouldn’t need social media. I’m still friends with those who were my real friends. The rest are people I don’t connect with because we mutually don’t want to. To be fair, I mostly don’t want to connect with them, but that is my nature as an introvert.
I have listed other reasons in different posts that point out how fake people are on social media and that it is a time suck.
My life is better not seeing others. Let’s keep it that way.
Here is the key sentence.
Even before the empty gala, internal staff had their doubts about such methods, according to a report by Devex citing anonymous interviews; staff described it as “Digital garbage,” and “depressing and embarrassing.”
The link to the article is below, but when you think your s**t doesn’t stink, you usually wind up sitting in it. Zuck is in a Mt. Everest pile right now.
I guess he didn’t live through Second Life, or is behind on his FPS games reality wise. That’s a lot closer to what kids want.
He’s got the money to waste, let him. It’s costing the employees with layoffs, delayed hiring and cuts in perks. Welcome to the real world.
Everyone in the world other than him can see it’s a loser. Even if they gave the $1000 headsets away for free, many get sick wearing them. A lot of people just aren’t ready for this outside of early adopters.
When I can do what they do in the Ironman movies in 3D, I’ll consider it then.
Here’s the story:
The EU commission has tried and failed to be “down with the kids.”
The commission’s foreign aid department threw a virtual “gala” on Tuesday night, having spent €387,000 (about $400,000) on developing their metaverse platform, in an attempt to attract the interest of young people. Only six showed up.
According to one of the only attendees, Devex correspondent Vince Chadwick, it was an immediate flop and he was the only one left after “several bemused chats” with the “roughly five other humans” who briefly joined.
Chadwick shared a short clip on [hotlink]Twitter[/hotlink] showing multi-coloured paperclip-shaped avatars dancing on a stage next to a tropical beach. “Is anybody out there?” read one message on the screen. “The concert is just the same DJ spinning the same music,” said another.
Struggling in its early days, the metaverse space is part of an expensive plan designed to promote the EU commission’s Global Gateway Initiative, which aims to spend $300 billion by 2027 building new infrastructure in developing countries, and the official trailer was dropped on their social media in mid-October.
The platform is supposed to be a new way to explore the Initiative “through a series of ‘hero’ stories in a virtual environment,” according to the commission.
Users can find information through stories played on video screens around the tropical island on which it is set, while encountering other unusual additions such as an open book art installation on a liquid floor, drones that carry screens flashing words such as “education” and “public health,” and the ability to walk on water.
A spokesperson said the project aims to “increase awareness of what the EU does on the world stage,” targeting young people in particular who spend their time on TikTok and [hotlink]Instagram[/hotlink], and who are “neutral about the EU” and “not typically exposed to such information.”
Nor do fishermen, especially me.
As I sit back and think about it, this is how Facebook and Instagram pictures happen also.
The answer to both is insignificant. No one cares about your status last week, much less ever.
Also, warming and cooling have been happening well before there were cars and people (and cows farting). It’s even starting to lose it’s ability to launder money, the real reason for climate action.
Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. posted its second revenue decline in a row, as the social-media giant wrestles with a vortex of challenging business conditions that have combined to shave more than half a trillion dollars from its market value so far this year.
The company reported quarterly revenue of $27.7 billion, down more than 4% from a year ago, after posting a 1% decrease last quarter. Meta’s share price fell more than 5% on Wednesday, amid a broad selloff of tech shares, and is now trading at a price last seen in 2017.
Meta shares dropped a further 20% in off-hours trading following the earnings report.
From the WSJ, more here
I think there are a lot of people like me that are tired of the crap, both from Fakebook and from people over posting.
They interfered with the elections and now disaster for Americans and the world.
I don’t believe in karma, but the saying is right, it’s a bitch.
My life is so much better without fake book. It really went into the toilet pretty fast.
These 2 organizations are on my list of people I’m trying to keep out of my life.
It used to be that most Americans were mainly brainwashed into buying specific products and services by watching television, reading the newspaper, noticing billboards, and seeing films. Propaganda was a front-loaded “machine” that was quite linear in its approach to influence buying motives of consumers. With the invention of the internet and social media, everything changed.
The consumption of news, products, services, lifestyles, pornography, and now most medical “choices” are made online, after “consuming” artificial intelligence. This is how technology has been created and disseminated to chronically DAMAGE humanity, and it’s happening like a tsunami engulfs a coastline, every day.
An artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm regulates the content chosen to be placed in front of user’s eyes specifically to influence their purchases of products, services, and information, based on what they talk about, type about, and search for using smart devices. Ever just talk to a friend about anything, then minutes later an ad pops up on your smart device, selling exactly what you just talked about? That’s AI. Smart devices are almost always RECORDING, whether or not you have the camera, microphone, or app “open” or “live.”
For example, Facebook’s AI software analyzes videos, stories, photos, and even memes, then gathers together ‘recommendations’ for you. Add in some key misinformation and suddenly you find yourself buying what Fakebook told you to buy, and believing what Fakebook calls news.
Google search engine uses AI to guide everyone AWAY from any information about natural health and AWAY from any information that exposes prescription medications and vaccines as the dangerous, experimental mediums they really are. Google blocks, bans, censors and bankrupts people, businesses and organizations that do not support the communist narrative that attempts to control all Americans’ lives and livelihoods.
A forthcoming study co-authored by a Tel Aviv University researcher appears to confirm widespread fears about the negative impact of Facebook, the world’s biggest social media platform, on its users’ mental health and self-image.
A detailed examination of data showed a correlation between a “statistically significant worsening in mental health symptoms, especially depression and anxiety” and the rapid introduction of the social media network.
Some of the benchmarks include a 20% rise in those who reported anxiety disorders; an increase of 25% to 27% in the proportion of students expected to experience moderate to severe depression; an additional 7% of students experienced “severe depression” since gaining access to the network.
The introduction of Facebook, the study found, led to increased utilization of mental healthcare services.
Who doesn’t know Facebook is at best a waste of time and at worst, life destroying. It certainly is political having funded part of the mail in fraud in the last election and Zuckerbucks 2.0 is underway.
One of the best things I ever did in Social Media, of which I have been an early adopter (and un-loader of the bad ones. I miss nothing from people who want to be seen or appreciated.
Now the Introvert inside of me is loving having cut connections with my past. Facebook presented me with a list of people I hoped never to see again. I got most of them out the way we did it before social media. Then this intrusion.
I couldn’t take the political dumbassery (a word I apparently made up) from people I thought had brains.
I also got to see who matured past high school and who didn’t. I didn’t need to see that either.
Be smart, get rid of it. I read recently that the average person wastes 1.5 hours a day on social media. Don’t be that person.
Man I hated them at work. I’d do anything to not go to any group anything. I was work at home as early as the 90’s and didn’t miss office anything.
I drove one time 3 hours for a appointment I knew wasn’t going to happen to miss a networking event. It was my only legitimate out. I knew I couldn’t last as long others and I knew I couldn’t go.
What is the worst thing as they turn into a facebook post. People spend the entire event trying to say stuff about themselves to get likes.
About half way in or less as time went on, I stopped talking and went over to sit down unless I had to do some participation.
Maybe going to diversity training, where they tell you how bad you are for how you were born is as taxing on your social battery. I dunno.
I regularly post about the tragedy that is social media, how government mishandled Covid, that Gates and Fauci are power grabbing beta males and the worst sin of all, saying Covid came from Wuhan.
I have enjoyed posting the dangers of the jab, because meatheads I know can’t believe that I’ve proved it’s poison.
It turned out that I was both ahead of the curve on a lot of things
I predicted it would take it’s toll on my traffic and it did. I still get hits from China watching me properly place blame on their policies and human rights, but the big G search engine didn’t like it at all.
I also got banned by Facebook searches which regularly borrowed my memes. I detailed how to delete fake book many times and why you should do it.
All of that has cut me to about 10% of my usual traffic.
Now, ask me if I care? Why I don’t is that I write this for me. I get my thoughts out there in writing. Being introverted, I’d rather communicate that way rather than orally.
Will I stop? Not a chance. I’m having too much fun lampooning the mistakes.
Heck, the election season is not really in full swing. I can’t wait.
I was reading a few years back and saw this gem. It was around Christmas time of year and I was fatiguing from the festivities.
For me, that is one of the worst times of the year. The fake happy from people who’s true nature I know is difficult to take. I see it anywhere I go
As I thought about it, I realized that it is so true. It’s really why I don’t go to many social events, especially Christmas parties.
I got tired of pretending to be social and/or having a good time, all they while wishing I could leave. Hell, I usually plan leaving before I go.
Most socials are like fakebook posts. Tell as much as you can about yourself to get likes.
Conversation should be about asking others about them and what is important that they would like to talk about. What I watch is people waiting for a response so that they can talk again. I don’t even try and a lot of time. I’ll just see how long people will talk about themselves and see if I can not say anything. They rarely notice. I won’t offer any information unless I think someone truly cares, but that’s only if I had to go and I’ve already got my exit plan in place.
Missing are some celebtards, some governors who let power get to their head, and one US president who cluelessly let power get to his head and mishandled and mis-managed Covid at almost every point. It could have been over in 2020, but no, so would the power and control. Also not pictured are the MSM, the propaganda arm of the current government as well as the woke social media, which ruins everything it touches, but was fully behind restricting people and locking us down.
Same thing for Alcohol. When I see a girl post herself holding a drink, like all guys learned when they are growing up, it’s a leg spreader.
If I guy is posting at drink, I think here, hold my beer because something stupid is happening soon.
Things aren’t going so well for the platform of hate and envy. In the last 3 stock trading days, Meta stock has dropped nearly $100 a share, falling from $323 last Wednesday to $224.91 on Monday. They announced that they are losing people on the platform for the first time (that we have been told).
Now this from Captain Obvious:
The late October announcement from Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook was being rebranded as Meta has been met with less than stellar reactions from the public. A survey from Morning Consult indicates that the public opinion of the rebrand, the metaverse concept and Zuckerberg, himself, were largely unfavorable.
While a slight majority (55%) of the US adults surveyed have some level of favorable opinion of Facebook, fewer have a favorable opinion of the company’s rebrand name, Meta. Only one-quarter had favorable opinions of the Meta name, compared to the 4 in 10 who had a somewhat/very unfavorable opinion of the name. Millennials are most likely to express an unfavorable opinion about Meta, while Gen Z are more generous in their opinion of the name change.
The public’s opinion of Mark Zuckerberg is also far from positive. More than half (54%) of all respondents report that their opinion of Zuckerberg is somewhat/very unfavorable. This sentiment is felt most by Baby Boomers, with 62% having an unfavorable opinion, compared to just 16% with a favorable opinion.
Along with announcing the rebrand to Meta, Zuckerberg introduced the company’s concept of the metaverse — “a set of interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world. Importantly, it’ll be characterized by social presence, the feeling that you’re right there with another person, no matter where in the world you happen to be.” It’s safe to say the concept has fallen flat in the eyes of US adults. About 7 in 10 (68%) say they are not interested in the project. This point of view is shared across all demographic groups but articulated most by women (73%) and Baby Boomers (84%).
Source for the above
Futurism.com has this to say (where the title of this post comes from)
Turns out at least one major marketing expert agrees with what the plebeian public already knows — Mark Zuckerberg may not be able to pull off this Metaverse thing.
On a new new episode of Vox’s Pivot podcast with Kara Swisher, renowned NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway laid the cards on the table. While he gave Zuckerberg credit for being a “visionary” who’s doing the right things to try and pivot a sinking ship — aka Meta-formerly-known-as-Facebook, which is now losing active users for the first time ever — but he’s not convinced that its Metaverse is headed in the right direction.
“If he pulls it off, it’ll be one of the most impressive feats in — not even corporate renewal — but vision around maintaining growth,” Galloway said during the podcast. “I don’t think they’re going to. I think this thing is already a giant flaming bag of shit.”
Part of Zuckerberg’s problem, according to Galloway, is that Meta’s Quest headset, previously known as Oculus, is still way too clunky to impress Meta’s target audience.
“The people in this universe are not impressed with the universe he envisions, and specifically the portal,” Galloway said on the podcast. “One of my predictions in November of 2021… was that the biggest failure in tech-product history might be the Oculus.”
There’s also the issue of spending. Zuckerberg sank $10 billion into the Reality Labs division, only to see company stock prices dip by more than 20 percent this week. Galloway says that with public opinion of Meta so low, there’s little hope the company can recoup its investment.
I for one don’t celebrate failure, but I don’t like those who have ruined the lives of a lot of people, selectively censored what is morally right and have bought an administration who has trashed the country in a year.
Fake book can kiss my ass.
Get woke, go broke.
The instructions below are from PC Magazine. Note: don’t deactivate, delete.
Why? Because Fake Book is sucking the life out of your data to sell you to others. They don’t care about you and it ruins most peoples lives by taking up time or sucking your emotional gas tank dry. People put their fake best out there and you compare your real self. It is there to make you feel bad
It was built on an algorithm of hate and prejudice against White Men. It literally gets you to hate to stay on. I call it social terrorism.
Here’s another reason. Fascist Book funded the stealing of the election. It’s coming out now how they paid mules to pick up boxes of fake ballots. It is on the backs of people they sold to advertisers, in other words you. I know the Trump haters will be for this, but ask yourself, are we really better off? I think not.
D’Souza narrates the film, explaining, “We tracked 2,000 mules making a number of poll drops. Leaving no fingerprints. Snapping pictures to receive a commission. A coordinated ring of unlawful vote harvesting in all the important swing states.”
He confirmed one “mule” made 53 trips to 20 drop containers for the election.
To fully delete your Facebook account forever, go to facebook.com/help/delete_account. Just be aware that, per the Facebook data use policy, “after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.”
Translation: if you wrote a comment on a friend’s status update or photo, it will remain even after you delete your own profile. Some of your posts and pictures may hang around for as long as 90 days after deletion, as well, though just on Facebook servers, not live on the site.
There is a deletion grace period of 30 days. That means there is a month before Facebook really gets rid of your account, just in case you change your mind. It’s just one more way Facebook cares.
Just like trying to impeach a president who wasn’t even in office when Covid was raging across the country, the assholes on parade in the house will prance around with the Media (MSM) instead of trying to solve important issues, say the supply chain or let the people arrested a year ago be given a fair treatment.
Oh, FakeBook Facistbook will ban anyone one who actually represents freedom of speech about it along with Twatter and the other hate groups.
We need to stop this nonsense and get about putting our country back on track. They haven’t accomplished anything other than helping themselves to money for a year now.
That’s a big claim, given the existence of Google and Microsoft, but the things that they’ve done pretty much prove it.
My blog won’t do a damn thing to change what they do, so I just choose to not to be on their site. My life is much better that way. Zuck is rich, I wish he would just go away, it never works that way though.
I have seen what social media does to others. It’s not pretty. It’s almost an addiction. It also turns people into haters and gossipers.
What people post is usually not who they are, rather what they want to project to others.
If I want to connect with someone, I don’t need fake book to do it. I would rather forget most of the people that it recommends to me anyway.
Recently, fascist book announced that they were copying Google (Alphabet) by rebranding to Meta.
I was taken aback as meta means death in Hebrew and I’m pretty sure Zuckerberg is Jewish. His actions and those at Facebook don’t indicate that he believes in God though, quite the opposite. It is appropriate as it’s death to your mental health to be on one of their platforms.
Censorship
There are many examples of fake book taking down posts that didn’t fit the narrative, especially during the election. Zuckerbucks donated about $400 million to swing the election the way it went. Who says you can’t buy an election? Joseph Kennedy did it in 1960 so this is nothing new.
They admit that their censorship is just someone’s opinion anyway.
The Metaverse
I’ve been around long enough to remember the farce that was Second Life. It’s where you played a sort of real life video game in a virtual world. The head of quantum computing at IBM had his department go to virtual meetings for about 2 months in that space. It was such a pain in the ass that the world gave up on it.
To me, it was like Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards, if you are old enough to remember that funny game.
So now, they want us to believe that we’ll wear an Oculus headset and pretend we are in the Matrix. That trope has a long way to go before it really catches on.
What I Think
There is a growing trend in the Comics to head to the Metaverse. The next Dr. Strange will go there. Avengers Endgame showed how you can do it through the Quantum Realm.
That’s not what it really is though. Something is up with Facebook that needs a re-direct. That is what you do in the PR World when things aren’t going your way and you don’t want to address the issue on the table. You go ahead and change the subject and talk about something else. The MSM and politicians do it daily.
The WSJ had a series on the issues at Facebook and they are in some turmoil that caused this change. They are selling it as a new platform, but I smell a rat.
Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. That is the central finding of a Wall Street Journal series, based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management.
It usually has something to do with money, so ad revenue must have been an investor issue, or the fact that Instagram was causing depression in teenage girls because of their self-image being destroyed by others.
It also could be that there are 2 groups of fake book users. The elite users who can break all the rules, and the rest of the rubes that don’t include celebtards, politicians or their favored group.
Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook allows its users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards apply to everyone. In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules. The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was intended as a quality-control measure for high-profile accounts. Today, it shields millions of VIPs from the company’s normal enforcement, the documents show. Many abuse the privilege, posting material including harassment and incitement to violence that would typically lead to sanctions.
Facebook Company has failed in its apparent attempt to disappear into the witness protection program for creepy technology by re-branding as “Meta”. Along with this new facelift for the holding company of Facebook and all of the corporation’s other tech holdings — notably WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus VR — founder Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company has plans for creating a whole “Metaverse,” a virtual alternative reality.
Banning people from the platform for not conforming to their standards. Like a lot of things, that will come back to bite you. Look who he banned and who is building an alternate social media platform now.
AR vs VR
I think there is something to be said for an Augmented Reality world first. That is helpful. I don’t think that a virtual reality world is what anything other than gamers are going to do for now.
If I see someone walking around with an Oculus headset on, I’m going to slap them an then point to someone else when they take it off just to mess with them.
This is something that is way down the road and as soon as the real AR is available, won’t be as attractive. If you want to live in a play world, you can do it via video games right now.
As usual, I distrust Facebook and their motives as should you. I dumped them as a platform. I had to go there a couple of weeks ago to find a workout schedule at my gym that wasn’t anywhere else. I saw the usual tripe there and was almost physically ill for a day. I promptly deleted the account so I wouldn’t have to see it anymore.
Of course it is. We already found out from the whistleblowers that Fake Book knew that hate drove most of the conversation. Here’s the other thing, people hate whoever is successful. Instead of trying to also be successful, they more than not try to take them down. It’s childish, but human nature.
Before you read further, I ask this question. If you discriminate because of skin color, it’s racism right? If you discriminate based on Sex, it’s Gender Discrimination, right?
From 90 miles from Tyranny, we find this:
We now know why Facebook decided to change its “race-blind” hate speech detection algorithm last year to allow more anti-white hatred.
The Washington Post reported last week that an “April 2020 document said roughly 90 percent of ‘hate speech’ subject to content takedowns were statements of contempt, inferiority and disgust directed at White people and men.”
They viewed this as a failure of the system because white people are supposed to be the targets of all hate.
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone defended the company’s decisions around its hate speech policies and how it conducted its relationship with the civil rights auditors.
“The Worst of the Worst project helped show us what kinds of hate speech our technology was and was not effectively detecting and understand what forms of it people believe to be the most insidious,” Stone said in a statement.
He said progress on racial issues included policies such as banning white nationalist groups, prohibiting content promoting racial stereotypes — such as people wearing blackface or claims that Jews control the media — and reducing the prevalence of hate speech to 0.03 percent of content on the platform.
[…] These findings about the most objectionable content held up even among self-identified White conservatives that the market research team traveled to visit in Southern states. Facebook researchers sought out the views of White conservatives in particular because they wanted to overcome potential objections from the company’s leadership, which was known to appease right-leaning viewpoints, two people said.
Yet racist posts against minorities weren’t what Facebook’s own hate speech detection algorithms were most commonly finding. The software, which the company introduced in 2015, was supposed to detect and automatically delete hate speech before users saw it. Publicly, the company said in 2019 that its algorithms proactively caught more than 80 percent of…
The Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security heard testimony Tuesday from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former employee of the tech giant. In a rare show of bipartisanship, a bloc of Republicans and Democrats joined together to demand action against the company.
Haugen, who used to work as a lead product manager for Facebook’s civic misinformation team, came before the Senate to discuss the company’s internal practices, with special emphasis placed on the ways that these practices disproportionately affect children.
Haugen explained, “I’m here today because I believe Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy.”
She added, “I believe in the potential of Facebook, we can have social media we enjoy, that connects us without tearing apart our democracy, putting our children in danger, and sowing ethnic violence around the world. We can do better.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) observed during his opening remarks that predatory targeting and marketing practices by Facebook have “put profits ahead of people.”
Yes, but so does Congress and Facebook will just pay them off under the table and they’ll get their hands slapped. They will pontificate and then let it slide like they do with anything.
I’m surprised that it even got this far with as illiterate as Congress is about technology. Zuckerberg toys with them when he has to testify while the suits in Washington grill them with questions prepared by their assistants, but don’t have a clue regarding what they are talking about.
This also is likely to be a sideshow while they push their infrastructure pork bill to create socialism through when we aren’t looking.
As you know if you look a few posts down, I loathe Facebook, but they act like they are above the law and certainly above congress, especially the group that is in there now. They are the biggest bunch of do nothings except cancel culture people and promote everything our country doesn’t stand for.
Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.
Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.Kentik’s view of the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage.
Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.
In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.
As Don Surber said, I made $7 billion more than Zuckerberg did yesterday.
Life is better without this site, especially for teenage girls it is reported. I hope others see that and help to eliminate insincere social media from their lives, but I doubt it. If they did, they’d stop trying to be like others (especially celebtards and sportstards) and be themselves
For me, it is an introvert thing. I eliminated it because I didn’t want to see what others had to say, or be connected to groups I have consciously left behind because of Mauerbaurtraurigheit.
But, I’m retired so everyday is Saturday for me. I don’t have deadlines or conference calls or personnel issues today. Man I don’t miss work.
I don’t miss Facebook that went down yesterday. I didn’t even know it until I read about it. I’m glad to have that ball and chain out of my life also.
I have a brother-in-Law who is retired not by choice, but defined his life by his job. He doesn’t know what to do. I feel sorry for him. Life is much greater than your job.
For now, I’ll pet my dog and enjoy what comes next.
To get a full understanding of how bad it is, the WSJ ran a series on the Facebook files recently. Link here but it might require a subscription. It points out the obvious, but also that it’s such a screwed up company now that it can’t get out of it’s own way.
It talked about how it ruins the lives of people, especially teen aged girls. Zuckerberg then said how it enhances peoples lives in a washing machine spin of doublespeak.
They block who they don’t like and let who they do like post anything, even against their own policies.
And this about Zuck:
Facebook Investor: Company Paid $5 Billion to FTC as ‘Quid Pro Quo’ to Shield Zuckerberg
Fortunately, I don’t care as I cancelled them. It along with Twitter are helping to ruin the country and people’s lives around the world. It has taken a political position on things. I don’t care which side it picks, but it should have been a neutral platform.
Instead, it is now a high school place where you are a part of the in crowd or not. Those with a triple digit IQ should move to a better and more productive place, like going outside and enjoying life.
It was too childish for me and I didn’t want to open it anymore to see the spew that comes from it.
I still talk to those who really are my friends. Most of them were never on Facebook.
For Introverts, not being on it also lets you escape from a lot of noise that sucks your personal energy and time.
I’ve written about Internet Road Rage and Stupid Things Smart People do. It’s also why I stay away from a lot of social media. My life is a lot happier that way. Also, I don’t have to worry about my body image that Zuckerberg lied about yesterday.
It doesn’t take many posts for you to see that I think Fake book and Twatter are the cesspools of the Internet. More hate is spilled there than Iran towards Israel and the USA.
I happily quit both. My life is better and while I didn’t waste a lot of time on them, it still was mostly useless.
I always hated those friend recommendations because I’m sure they were on the other side also. My rule was if you aren’t my friend then you aren’t worth being my fake book friend either. I happily forgot most of the people I grew up with and didn’t want to find them again, let alone reconnect.
It’s as bad as a phone call for an introvert without first warning that you are about to intrude on my life. There was an introvert on the team that invented texting to avoid that phone call.
When I saw this one, I realized that it was time to dump fake book. I also can’t stand that they are the arbiters of free speech and who is allowed on, so I made the decision for them. I don’t want to be in a place of hate or that has special rules for people who they don’t agree with personally, and went to other platforms that don’t suggest people I’d rather not see or hear from again in life.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some good things, but sooner or later it goes down the crapper when someone “offends” another. It is where you can find more bias and discrimination (against anyone and everyone) since segregation.
Twitter is probably the biggest cesspool. Since Facebook Fake Book started censoring, you can’t trust what is real or not. I also don’t care about my high school or college enough to see what they are doing. If either of us cared, we’d have stayed in contact.
The hate generated against the last President just told me the people in charge of these platforms are untrustworthy. They say one thing and do another.
Do what you want. Most are addicted to social media. The truly smart people don’t waste time trying to impress others as to how good their life is or worry about what others have.
My life is better without social media terrorists. I still get what I need to know without it being filtered by a loser in a cubicle with an axe to grind over who voted for whom. The elitist oligarch’s have told them what is allowed, then they prattle on condemning exactly what they are doing.
As usual, I’ll just do my own thing and let others suffer who wish to read that tripe.
From the WSJ:
China Is Now Sending Twitter Users to Prison for Posts Most Chinese Can’t See
Two of the most restrictive groups censorship wise are going at each other here to ban information that was made to be published, go figure. Note: It refers to the CCP government, not the Chinese people.
Both are paranoid and neither are really helping anyone get better. My advice, leave both.
Delusions of Adequacy 