Stop Using Facebook (opens in new tab)

Source:

> Facebook has announced that it was teaming up with CheckYourFact.com, which is an offshoot of the anti-science media site, The Daily Caller

> The CheckYourFact website brags that: "Our mission is a non-partisan one. We're loyal to neither people nor parties — only the truth. And while the fact-checking industry continues to grow, there are still countless assertions that go unchecked. We exist to fill in the gaps."

Source's source:

> The Daily Caller, which has published misinformation about climate science for years, was co-founded by the science-denying Fox News host Tucker Carlson and is backed by major conservative donors, including Charles and David Koch, the billionaire fossil fuel barons who are the single biggest funders of climate science misinformation.

They use a source, which uses a source, which argues that CheckYourFact employees are climate change deniers because it's a spin-off of a site that was donated to by climate change deniers.

Looking at the evidence, one of the first links I saw on CheckYourFact's site was debunking a bad thing that Hillary supposedly said [1], which suggests it is not the same in agenda as The Daily Caller.

To the creator of this site: If you want this to have an impact, present the facts as-is, with no sensationalism or dramatization. Most of what you're writing very well may be true, and this seems like a noble cause, but if a reader can pick apart one questionable if not false statement, its legitimacy will be destroyed.

(If you're interested in a great piece on the importance of making claims conservatively and retaining legitimacy in reporting/writing, highly recommend checking out Spotlight, which chronicles the Boston Globe's exposure of the Catholic Church protecting pedophile priests).

[1] https://checkyourfact.com/2019/11/20/fact-check-hillary-clin...

If there was some kind of bot that would automatically crosspost events from Facebook to other social media platforms, then perhaps there would be a chance of winning me over.

I used to say that it was impossible for me to understand how people could become hooked on activities as ridiculous as gambling on slot machines, and yet I have to shamefully admit that I've probably now spent one or two full years of my life just cycling through different news sites, even when I knew I had probably read almost all of the interesting articles already.

The insidious thing about these things is that you do get something out of it, too. I've come to realize that it's not worth it ultimately. For me, the point where I started to understand that this really wasn't healthy was when I realized that the hours I spent on rapid-reward websites per day was pretty well (negatively) correlated with my mood. It can become an escapist activity, the go-to thing to do to avoid facing actual real-world issues.

I think rapid-reward websites are particularly dangerous to people who are intrinsically very curious and thus drawn to novel information. It's sad to think how much genuinely interesting thoughts of genuinely worthwhile thinkers you could absorb instead, if these sites didn't exhert such a pull. The pessimist in me is really worried about all the 12-year-old John von Neumann's right now being intellectually poisoned by ubiquitous, rapid-reward entertainment.

Anyway, I finally made the decision to change something and blocked almost all of the rapid-reward sites in my hosts file, via browser extension and Android apps... Defense in depth. ;) [1] Now, when I feel really compelled to check some news site, I go for a run. I can honestly say that this is one of the things that I have done in my life that has had the biggest positive impact on my well-being, relative to the effort needed.

[1] Yes, I've made an exception for HN and for one super boring newspaper website. I feel those are actually worth it.

There, I fixed it to make it more realistic, otherwise it’s about as useful as saying “Stop Using Oil”.

This would make a better case if it dropped the ones that are kind of weak.

> Because Facebook was covertly paying teens 13 years old and older to spy on them.

Didn't this involve people who explicitly download and app that told you it was going to gather this data for research in exchange for payment? I'm having a bit of a problem seeing what was covert about it.

> Because Facebook gave exclusive access to your private messages and friends to large tech companies, device vendors, retailers, entertainment sites, automakers and media organizations.

And with this one I'm having a bit of trouble understanding what "exclusive access" means here. It sounds like it was pretty much the opposite of exclusive. I'm not saying giving you data out non-exclusively is better than giving it out exclusively--just that this "exclusive access" claim makes little sense.

> Because Facebook facilitated Brexit by spreading misinformation, made a fortune and tried to sue to prevent people from finding out.

The essences of this seems to be that people pushing "leave" bought ads on Facebook, and that some of the people who bought the ads may have been shady.

> Because Facebook employees say “F*ck ethics, money is everything”.

One engineer said that on Blind. I'm pretty sure you can find one employee with that attitude at pretty much any employer that pays well and has over 100 employees.

On top of that it's difficult to convince these 'influencers' to move due to the reasons outlined on this web-page if they start to lose their followers, popularity and their money. They will crawl back to FB/IG again if this happens. Rather than target general users, they must target the influencers with millions of users.

Every major social network always had these 'influencers' using it first and their followers always jumping on it afterwards. If a privacy-respecting alternative can somehow help grow an 'influencers' reach or even make them more money without violating their privacy, they will stay and their millions of users will follow them.

It would be interesting to link to privacy policies and other relevant information as well!

Everybody has heard about all these things on the telly, on online newspapers, etc. The media launched a massive campaign against Facebook. It didn't work. People find value in Facebook and they don't care about your predicament. Let people enjoy things!

> One big issue is that there’s nothing decentralised that currently exists that can rival the quality & user experience of mainstream social networks, and decentralisation comes with its own problems (I personally think the problem with mainstream social media is its ad-based business model and not centralisation). Mastodon (which seems to be the biggest alternative being proposed) is still a joke, even the name and branding sounds awful IMO. And who in their right mind thought calling a post a “toot” (https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/toot) was a good idea. Besides the branding, decentralisation comes with its own issues like the lack of network-wide content moderation and agreement on what content is acceptable. There are solutions (more like hacks) around this where instance admins can choose not to federate with instances they don’t like the policies of, but it then causes problems for end-users where they can’t communicate with their peers on those banned instances despite all of them being on Mastodon. Good luck explaining to a non-technical person why they can’t talk to/see the posts of certain people despite them all being on Mastodon, and the solution is to spend time choosing an instance with policies you agree with and making sure your friends are on it or on a similar instance that’s not banned by yours, and then hoping the instances stay online without any kind of funding (there’s also no knowledge of whether they would scale to the size of mainstream social networks). The solution IMO is not Mastodon or any of these fringe social networks. The main problem is the lack of an ethical business model in mainstream social media. The solution would be to vote with your wallets and fund a better Facebook alternative - it could even show the current social networks that there’s profit to be made treating their users with respect and make the situation better for everyone else too.

Something's also broken the Internet Archive's ability to save the site right now, see:

https://web.archive.org/save/https://www.stopusingfacebook.c...