John Oliver cited a 5000% rise in search queries related to leaving Meta and deleting accounts. Among the topics mentioned in the analysis, attention was drawn to early Facebook’s naivete with regard to moderation requirements, the constitutional framework, and a history of governmental interference.
Oliver debunks common right-wing “cry censorship” talking points, as well as the objective difficulty of moderation endeavors, and how direct threats by Trump may have influenced Zuckerberg’s turnaround.
Oliver went on to suggest Signal, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed as alternatives that “do not seem as desperate to fall in line with Trump”. For those reluctant to completely ditch Meta, Oliver revealed a new site with step-by-step instructions to “make yourself less valuable to them”.
The guide was a collaboration with the EFF, and includes settings’ tweaks for Facebook and Meta, whose 98% of revenue comes from micro-targeting ads, the host previously cited, to increase privacy, and recommends Firefox, Privacy Badger, as “other measures” to take in order “to block advertisers and other third parties from tracking you”.
The segment culminated in a mock advert, in which the new Meta’s approach to moderation is coined as “Fuck it”, and hints to racism, internet scams, and calls to genocide running rampant on Meta’s platforms.
The clip reminds the origins of Facebook as a site to “rank college girls by hotness”, and its implication in genocide in Myanmar, which was more thoroughly discussed in an Oliver’s previous special on Facebook in 2018.
Good, glad it’s getting some main stream attention. If more people start taking advantage of these settings and alternatives it’s going to hurt Meta’s bottom line eventually
it’s going to hurt Meta’s bottom
lineeventuallyJust hurting Meta’s bottom is good enough for me
They’ll just bury the settings, or remove them. Who’s going to stop them now?
one can always delete their accounts
As if Meta actually deletes anything
I don’t want to get my hopes up but is this Facebook’s MySpace moment?
My personal MySpace moment for Facebook was 10 years ago. Best choice ever made.
Nobody left MySpace because of enshitification
Use Magic Earth or Organic Maps instead of Google Maps too. Neither will track you.
Organic Maps is fantastic except for one crucial thing. Traffic info. That is literally the only thing stopping me from using it instead of GM or Waze. I need traffic info, I don’t want to be late to stuff because I didn’t know an accident happened, or a road got flooded, or there’s just high volume traffic, etc.
I’m not sure how they would implement it and keep everything relatively privacy friendly (well it’s FOSS so at the very least they aren’t selling our data ❤️), but I need it.
Have a look at Magicearth.com
Just tried it out yesterday and today, and thought it was pretty good! Compared the routes it showed me with Waze (GM data) and it showed similar/exact routes.
For others who are curious, the only issues I noticed were:
- Has a stroke when trying to navigate to my house, seems to think there isn’t an exact road next to it, meanwhile organic maps shows and navigates to it perfectly fine. Seems to struggle with the exact location of a place, especially in a group of buildings.
- While navigating, if you tap the directions to see ahead, a bar comes up and shows you. However, when you try to dismiss this panel, it goes blank and stays on the screen.
Other than that, seems great, has all the features Organic Maps does and more. Likely to be my permanent navigator app.
good initiative but uh what’s up with that domain name?
There was a whole saga of him buying expensive rat erotica artwork at one point, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write.
sentence I never thought I’d write
🤣 🤣
Why don’t stories like this EVER mention Lemmy?
Well, I get that Lemmy is an alternative social media, but it’s not really an alternative to Facebook. Anonymous usernames, text-based posts, you can’t follow people, Fediverse is somewhat confusing… I’d recommend it as an alternative to Reddit, but probably not the website where boomers want to check up on their neighbors and friends
you can’t follow people
He said “Lemmy” but probably meant “Threadiverse”, and mbin does support both the Twitter-style following user model and the Reddit-style forum model.
To use fedia.io as an example:
I dunno about piefed, haven’t used it.
you can’t follow people
Challenge accepted
That’s what Friendica is for
Because Lemmy is nowhere near as ready for primetime as other platforms.
I reckon Lemmy is actually pretty good. I wouldn’t know if the mobile apps are good, because I don’t use those - but for me the core functionality of Lemmy on my computer is smooth and functional. I don’t see any obvious low-hanging-fruit.
I ditched reddit for Lemmy during the whole API crackdown bs. I’ve only used Voyager, but it seems quite comparable to RIF, which is the only way I ever viewed reddit.
The problem I see with this is that a Meta employee literally came out on Mastodon recently and revealed that non of these settings do anything and are false flags.
John Oliver’s show is doing amazing things, including the Drumpfinator addon.
What is that URL, though? I’m guessing I’m know it if I (happily) watch the episode?
Nice! Just shared this (as a PDF without the domain name lol) with my family!
Coward!
Hey it’s a group chat with my grandma ಠ_ಠ
and now you’ve robbed her of her chance to sell john oliver her collection of valuable rat erotica
Took a long time, but nice to see this topic getting mainstream attention.
Correct me if wrong, but isn’t there a law in the us that says, all us companies have to give the government access to all data without disclosing this information? That would rule out any us based companies for privacy concerns as alternatives atm.
You should expect any data hosted on a server to be accessible by the given government…and thanks to NSA you should expect any data that travels through the US to be accessible by their government
Privacy in this case is around the selling to advertisers
The site doesn’t suggest any alternatives though or am I not seeing that?
The alternatives were suggested briefly in the segment, not the site. Oliver pointed to the site those people who can’t ditch Meta right now.
John Oliver for president ✊
He can’t because he wasn’t born here, but we could totally elect his wife and let him do the whole first husband thing while still advising if she needs it.
Why not just recommend adblockers? No ads, no revenue, no matter how much tracking.
Selling user profiling data is also worth money, even if you’re not shown ads because of ad-blockers you bring value to the dataset by increasing it’s size with useful demographic data.
I’ve been wanting to try pixelfed but I haven’t figured out what to do: start my own for friends or join an existing one.
I heard there were some issues with a dev or something so I haven’t signed up for the original instance yet
