Tag: Facebook

Business Survival in a society ruled by Avarice and Meta’s Moral Choices

Much of today’s society is run by the ideology of Avarice. That is things are primarily judged by do they make money. If they do not then they are considered worthless. A human is valuable only in so much as they have the ability to make, spend or control the spending of money. This is not the only ideology but at present in my opinion in the West it is the dominant one. This has been even more the case since the last American elections where as far as I can tell a group of people were elected for whom Avarice is their dominant virtue. The rest of it, which is nasty indeed, is just ways to make sure money comes to them and not to others.

Upto their election, after Elon Musk bought out Twitter and destroyed it, Facebook and Meta were seen as more responsible social media empires. Not good but better than an awful lot of others. They did have fact checking and did have sanctions against trolling and such bullying behaviours. These of course implied limits to free speech but early days in the internet had shown that for true free speech to exist a strong policing of respectful language was necessary. Some people inevitably fall foul of this. The present President of the USA is one of these. Please realise if strong moderation in the early days of Bulletin Boards had not become the norm, Facebook, Twitter(X), Instagram, TikTok and such would not have come about. The evolution of social media would have died with Bulletin Boards as the trolls drove everyone else off and nobody but people like that would touch them. All that would exist is email discussions and probably things like Whatsapp where only people you know are added. We would still have the bullying albeit on a smaller scaler but we would not have the social influencers.

When the Nazi party came to power in Germany, business has the choices of adapting to their policies or facing the sanctions for not doing so. The Nazi party regulation meant 20% of small businesses went under. If there is a bigger company you can see, how pressure can be brought to bear so it will self regulate.

Zuckerberg wants to keep Facebook in the American Market which is Facebook’s biggest revenue earner. Europe is big enough to be a worry but if he has to choose between North America and Europe, North America will win every time. Zuckerberg is smart, he would have seen at least six months in advance which way the election was going. Donal Trump also did not like the fact that Zuckerberg donated money in 2001 to “donated roughly $400 million to nonprofits in 2020 to help state and local governments conduct a presidential election during an unprecedented pandemic” and had threatened him over that. So he decided he needed to make a rapprochment with Donald Trump. You can read about that rapprochment in the Business Insider.

So Zuckerberg and therefore Meta chose to side with Trump, may be I am wrong about the financial reasons. Zuckerberg gives another narrative, but one that I find too convenient. It makes me feel nervous on Facebook, it will make lots of other people feel nervous on FACEBOOK. Maybe I am wrong about greed, the need to make money to stay afloat there.

Did AI Change Facebook?

I am not providing answers here I am raising a question.

I am going to be honest, there have/are times when I end up scrolling through Facebook. This particularly happens when I am down and finding it difficult to focus. I find the scrolling provides a relief. Part of what I hope with this break from Facebook is that I can find better ways of coping with those times such as making the habit of picking up a book or doing one or so of the zillion jobs I am procrastinating on. At the moment the top two are doing a puzzle on my phone (Mathdoku) and going for a short walk but I hope to widen the options and up my ability to cope with boredom. I still find myself wanting to reach for Facebook. I have it tied down pretty well on both my phone and computers so I have not done so yet.

Following an nasty bout of flu December I ended up more down than I have been for several years and thus the scrolling got worse. It is no good saying just pick up a book, I do not have the concentration to do that in that state and the two minutes of focus just suit my brain in that state. I am not doom scrolling, far more likely to watch Irish Dance, gymnasticss, travel blogs, social interest or renovation blogs than doom laden scenarios. Basically the stuff I would read about in lifestyle magazines in 1980s and 90s. Throw in some spirituality blogs and you basically get what I looked at. It sounds pretty harmless.

Except Facebook would start trying to take me onto new creators who I had not been on before. Sometimes I found someone I enjoyed but some were mildly weird but rarely very weird and I just moved on. Then things began to change. Firstly the videos became shorter. I would no longer get a full episode but only the highlights of a video or the first part and no ability to follow on. I also began to feel that these were being posted by other channels than the original videos.

Then in January this year I got tonnes and tonnes of really weird videos. Videos that used videos with unrelated audio. I did not like this. I felt as if I was being manipulated. The videos’ audio was a male narrated voice that sounded artificial to me. It did not have the cadences of a natural speaker and it was the same voice on every single video regardless of the content. Initially there was some matching of the audio to the actual content of the video but eventually it felt as if they were two separate things.

I responded to this by doing a very tight policy on what I watched and what I liked and cutting my time watching. It pulled things back but I had to be hyper-vigilant or they started coming back into watching.

The only thing I could think of for producing this sort of video was that they were trying to produce an AI version of a successful video. It had gone around the internet looking for what were viral videos, looked for what was the transcript of audio for the videos that went viral and then found what was a popular narrators voice. Then combined the three in what was decidedly spooky.

I could control it on Facebook but it took constant vigilance and with struggling to focus it was only a matter of time before that vigilance lapsed.