A community index of servers added a new rule recently, that requires every participant to defederate from Threads. Some admins are unhappy.
  • GONADS125@feddit.de
    0·
    7 months ago

    For the Meta apologists, I have a reality check for you:

    Threads was immediately subject to mass amounts of radicalizing, extremist content, and there have also been instances of users having personal information doxxed on Threads due to Meta’s information-harvesting practices. [1]

    Threads was marketed to be open to ‘free speech’ (read: hate speech and misinformation) and encouraged the Far-Right movement to join, who have spread extremism, hate, and harassment on Threads already. [2] Threads has been a hotbed of Israel-Palestine misinformation/propaganda. [3] They also fired fact-checkers just prior to Threads’ launch. [1]

    As already established, Meta also assisted in genocide! [4]

    Meta/FB/Instagram also have a strong history of facilitating the spread of misinformation and extremism, which contributed to the January 6th insurrection attempt. [5], [6]

    This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information.[7] Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads…

    FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. [8] Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

    I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

    • Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];

    • Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

    • Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

    • Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

    • Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

    • Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design. [9]

  • FlumPHP@programming.dev
    0·
    7 months ago

    “I don’t think it’s nice to federate with a company that has been cited in multiple independent reports of massacres/genocides,”

    And I don’t think it’s nice to take the choice away from users. I can block threads all on my own – I don’t need a nanny who doesn’t even cite their sources.

      • Corgana@startrek.website
        0·
        7 months ago

        Can you explain how defederating prevents Meta from extending open standards (ActivityPub) with proprietary capabilities, and using the differences to strongly disadvantage Threads competitors?

        • millie@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          7 months ago

          The reason embracing works is because it creates connections between people using the system and allows them to piggyback off of other services.

          At the moment, the wider fediverse may not have a ton of people, but the quality of content blows mainstream social media out of the water. By making it available through Threads, new users are going to be encouraged to follow their normal pattern of gravitating toward the big thing while still having access to this content. If we post on servers federated with Threads, every piece of content we add is a boon for Meta for absolutely free. The fact that they have deep pockets means they already have independent federation beat on the server end in terms of stability and long-term reliability. It makes a lot of sense for the average user to just grab a Threads account and not worry too much about which other instances have the odd hiccup or potentially stop existing.

          On the other hand, if people exposed to the fediverse keep hearing about all this stuff that isn’t on Threads, there’s a better chance that they’ll get into the decentralized account model that’s natural to federation. The logical conclusion quickly becomes making accounts in places that are federated with the places you want to read and post, and if Threads isn’t connected to all those places it means it doesn’t serve to unify fediverse accounts under a corporate banner.

          Threads has a resource advantage, but we have a content advantage. If we let Threads in, the content advantage dissolves, because not only do they gain access to fediverse content, they pollute it.

          Thankfully the reality is that the choice will always lie with server owners, not via consensus. As long as the owners of servers with higher-quality content and better moderation don’t open the floodgates to Threads, that pocket of high quality content that a Threads account can’t have will always exist.

          Personally, I suspect the above will be self-perpetuating, as connecting with a larger social media entity will degrade the quality of content. The best bits will always largely be inaccessible to the big sites.

          • Corgana@startrek.website
            0·
            7 months ago

            How would blocking yourself from the ability to follow Threads accounts stop them from… anything? It’s not two-way if one of the two parties doesn’t want it to be, and Meta can’t be trusted.

            • millie@beehaw.orgEnglish
              1·
              7 months ago

              It’s two-way. It prevents interactivity between the instances, meaning that Mastodon doesn’t get flooded with Threads users and Threads doesn’t get access to Mastodon content.

              Preventing both of those things is a win for the fediverse, because it preserves its identity and purpose rather than just being 10% of a network controlled mostly by Meta.

              Allowing both of these things to happen is a win for Meta, because their users overwhelm the fediverse and they get free content until it no longer exists.

              We don’t lose anything by staying away from Meta, unless you like really love Facebook and want that to be what the fediverse is reduced to. Unchecked growth isn’t a win, it’s cancer.