i remember reading (from wynn-williams as well, i think) an account that facebook would ignore major issues unless they affected growth. that's interesting from a(n anti-)colonialist lens.

it did get some traction in specific communities. my middle school was almost all on google+, because we were too young (by the US children's online privacy protection act) to create facebook accounts, but all had g-mail accounts (many of which we also weren't supposed to have, but creating a google account for e-mail under 13 was considered more acceptable than doing so with a facebook account).

the most chilling part in this article is the indications shared at the end, that the structural issues promoting hatred on meta are ongoing, and the listing of other up-and-coming examples.

the platform would need to change its structure, as to be less favorable to the spread of hate that caused the genocide.

also, one hopes that a social media platform would not be afforded the personal freedom and and human dignity that people who had been complicit are at times afforded. platforms and corporations are not people, they should not be afforded human rights. if a platform has to go, it has to go.

it was interesting to see the variety of topics that the same tweet brought up. a lot of people were angry, not all for the same reason or even opposite reasons.

(note: she passed in 2021)

study link: http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/lxjiang/papers/sac13stackoverflow.pdf

Wang, Lo, Jiang: An Empirical Study on Developer Interactions in StackOverflow

for one, the company can be responsible for scales of actions that wouldn't be as likely (or even possible) without their platform. kara swisher, in a chapter of hers about social media from "burn book", quotes a government official from sri lanka saying, of attacks there motivated by ethnic hate that spread on facebook, "the germs are ours, but facebook is the wind" (audiobook m4b; track 15 / 24:09).

careless people also mentions aspects of this, specifically in regard to the genocide in myanmar

Sarah Wynn-Williams talks relatively little of this in so many words in "Careless People" (about her time at facebook), but she does make clear that the lower-level employees were more concerned about content moderation, but that a lot of major moderation decisions came right from the top (Mark himself) -- so, in a way, the deciding body could be comprised of up to entirely white people.

"Friday" was surreal. i don't think any of the people making fun of it considered themselves (ourselves? i may have had a part) bullies, and yet we were contributing to the zeitgeist of harassment that this article describes in Black's life.

maybe if the content is already usually found online uncited? but this creates a paradox about who should be the first to make that true.

"Wegener had asked his backend engineers to delete all of her memories from before 2013" is such a Wham Line (as referred to by TV Tropes) -- in context it makes perfect sense, and yet the wording it uses reminds (or maybe even reveals) how much power the article's notional chisel is.

interesting! it reminds me of a plot point in 1984, where one of the procedurally-generated songs outlives all the others (and some written by hand) because its lyrics seem to resonate with people more.

there's something curious about the wording in this article. the wording the article uses to describe antico (who is notable for her uncommon abilities) feels similar to the wording other articles use to describe people who are disabled in uncommon ways. it seems her abnormality makes her the subject of similar academic and public fixation, regardless of its direction.

i could see how this could be controversial, especially if a tool uses opaque processes to tell what a user's needs are. even if a device can detect my disability correctly, i don't want to be forced to push around an "accomodation" that some engineer is testing and doesn't do much good. and if a tool can detect disability to provide accomodations, it can also do so for more nefarious reasons.

hey, i've contributed to this site! (not for this comic though, i went back and checked my old account.)

so Facebook is taking advantage of the fact that they are responsible to you for data you give them, not necessarily data about you

came across this first in a jewish studies class, wasn't expecting to see it here!

hadn't seen this one before - somehow, and perhaps as an inverse demonstration of this rule itself, te eloquence heremakes it all the more maddening

this entire slate of events (from the fake youtuber scandal, to the trump tweet sources, to the fake scientist) baffles me, because i was around for all of it, yet missed all of it at the time. truly we can live on different corners of the internet.

i am wondering how contextual vs. universal this is -- i feel like i know people who would die a little inside at any purposefully-planned surprise, even one with good intentions. though they might not share this discomfort.

MIDI was used here to talk about abstraction of sound as notes, but i wonder if there could be other non-bitmap formats to represent sound, like notating the shape of the waves via mathematical equations. what would this sound like?

reminds me of how i occasionally see that a file was "edited tomorrow" due to misconfigured time settings (though with interpretation of tine zones, i could imagine how this could be a feature!)

the comparison this serves of spreadsheets to other forms of programming is interesting to me, i hadn't thought of them as significantly different from a list of commands before

it's interesting here that part of the donkey's effectiveness comes not just from lack of awareness of political message, but also from (widely presumed) sentience. people widely see punishing it as unethical, but they also see such an action as possible. it's hard to see the dismemberment, incarceration, or torture of a computer program as cruel to it, so administrators take action against bots without these fears of public perception.