Anti-social media

And no amount of corporate jargon or performative masculinity can make that stain go away.

At a moment when Zuckerberg's focus is clearly on sucking up to the Trump administration, Instagram goes the extra mile to block hashtags like #democrat and #democrats from Instagram.

Officially it's a mistake, with some tool from the company giving the following statement:

We're aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.

Despite their claim to affect "across the political spectrum", the "problem" seems to affect both #democrat and #democrats, but neither the hashtags #republican nor #republicans.

Here's a video of said behaviour documented by a PeerTube user (@[email protected]):

https://peertube.doesstuff.social/w/f8c84bb5-3dec-45a1-b833-3b3f0736c4e8

Critics of zuckermuskian media claim those services are so terrible because they're for-profit entities, capitalist enterprises hitched to the logic of extraction and profit above all else. The problem with this claim is that it doesn't explain the changes to these services. After all, the reason so many of us got on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram is because they used to be a lot of fun. They were useful. They were even great at times.

They replicate bias, entrench inequalities, and distort institutional aims. They devalue much of what makes us human: our capacities to exercise discretion, act spontaneously, and reason in ways that can’t be quantified. And far from being objective or neutral, technical decisions made in system design embed the values, aims, and interests of mostly white, mostly male technologists working in mostly profit-driven enterprises. Simply put, these tools are dangerous; in O’Neil’s words, they are “weapons of math destruction.”

The first half of the article goes over the problems we know well but in the second half there are some proposed solutions.

The WEF surveyed hundreds of experts worldwide and found that false and misleading content is seriously harming the geopolitical environment in a number of ways.

It enables foreign entities to affect voter intentions, it can sow doubt among the public about what is happening in conflict zones, and it can be used to tarnish the image of products or services from another country.

It's the second year in a row that misinformation has been listed as the biggest global risk.

We Want Your Soul by Adam Freeland

Meta—the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp—has just hired Dustin Carmack, a former adviser to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s doomed presidential campaign and an ex–Project 2025 employee.

The evidence of the past decade and a half argues strongly that platform corporations are structurally incapable of good governance, primarily because most of their central aims (continuous growth, market dominance, profit via extraction) conflict with many basic human and societal needs.

Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.

Instagram has begun testing a feature in which Meta’s AI will automatically generate images of users in various situations and put them into that user’s feed. One Redditor posted over the weekend that they were scrolling through Instagram and were presented an AI-generated slideshow of themselves standing in front of “an endless maze of mirrors,” for example.

In an update to its hate speech policy on Tuesday, spotted first by The Independent, the apps' parent company Meta deleted numerous clauses banning specific derogatory statements about protected groups, while adding detailed exceptions for anti-trans speech.

Mr White’s appointment was announced on Monday and comes as Silicon Valley seeks to build closer links to Mr Trump

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news, said the donation was a departure from past practice by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

"Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created," Mark Zuckerberg says.