Mark Zuckerberg Archives - I'm Not Doctor Who

I don't know if you've been following the recent news about Meta, Facebook's parent company, but if you still have an account over there for any reason, I thought you might be interested to learn the following.

A few days ago, Meta (which covers Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp Messenger) published some substantial changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, ostensibly a policy that was devised in order to, among other things, help marginalised groups feel safe using their services as a means of online socialisation. You can see the changelog at this link (click the "7 Jan 2025" link on the left of that page to see the changes highlighted), but here are some notable parts for your convenience:

The green highlighted stuff is newly added, the red strikethrough stuff has been removed. Note that the banning of "dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including women as household objects or property or objects in general; black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as 'it'" has been removed. This was previously a "Tier 1" violation, among the most serious on the platform, and yet now it is A-OK.

Elsewhere:

In this section, you will see that Meta now "allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird'."

Elsewhere still:

So you're cool to, like, blame the Chinese or whatever group of Johnny Foreigners you think created COVID, if you even believe COVID existed at all in the first place because you're a nutcase who believes vaccination programmes are about Bill Gates trying to fit you with a microtransmitter.

I shouldn't have to point out that these changes are Bad, regardless of whether or not you fall into one of the "protected" categories. It's particularly telling that amid the parts people are mostly focusing on — the stuff about homosexual and transgender people — they snuck in a bit about regarding women as objects and black people as farm equipment. You know, just to make sure everyone except white straight cis men gets their own share of a kicking. On top of that, they have deleted the trans and non-binary themes for Facebook Messenger, as well as the blog post announcing them.

This is not a "freedom of speech" thing; this is deliberately courting the worst people in the world and giving them carte blanche to be as sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic as they desire with zero consequences. And you all know exactly why this has happened: because of the election result in the US.

The world's billionaires have been flocking to kiss Trump's ringpiece ever since the election, and of course Mark Zuckerberg is at the head of the queue. Social media is a veritable breeding ground for the worst kind of right-wing attitudes and has been for a while; all Zuck is doing is making it explicitly okay for this sort of thing to go on, much like Elon Musk has done with Twitter, destroying its value as social media in the process.

This isn't the only thing wrong with Facebook, of course. If you're still using it (again, I ask, why?) you have almost certainly seen how the News Feed or whatever it is called has declined over the years. Chances are yours has multiple "Suggested" posts (i.e. ads) in a row before you see anything from someone you actually care about, and many of those posts will be filled with AI-generated garbage slop like the infamous "Shrimp Jesus" and the many, many images of crying multiple amputee soldiers who don't exist saying it's their birthday. And rather than Facebook seeing this as a problem, it is being encouraged.

In fact, Meta announced plans to introduce AI-driven profiles to both Facebook and Instagram, presumably in an attempt to hide the fact that users are (correctly) leaving their services in droves. People stumbled across one of these AI-powered profiles on Instagram recently, discovering it to be, of course, full of images that never happened and hosting a chatbot that was little more than racial stereotyping. Meta were quick to say that this was an experiment from a few years back, but this is exactly the sort of shit they want to introduce.

Along the same lines, some Instagram users have found themselves presented with AI-generated images of themselves in their own feed, without having asked for them. In most cases, this is because Instagram's AI features count "using them once" as "perpetual consent to use your likeness", even if you don't want or need AI-generated images of yourself. Which no-one does.

Facebook is a shithole, and it's only going to get worse. If I haven't convinced you enough, I urge you to read at least some of the following links (plus the ones I've peppered throughout the above) for more on the story, because these folks report on this stuff for a living and can provide a lot more detail on what is going on.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron – a comprehensive breakdown of how, over the last 10-15 years in particular, big tech has been systematically making life worse for everyone online under the guise of "growth". And it seeps into all areas of life, be it Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, or a cheap laptop you buy from Amazon.

AI Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide by Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. Not directly related to Meta, though it is a tale of why AI-powered anything relating to advertising (a category which Meta stuff firmly falls into) is a pile of shit. I will say 404 Media has been doing some of the absolute best reporting on all this for quite some time now.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. About how Zuckerberg doesn't believe the AI sludge that is taking over Facebook is a problem, and how he actually wants to encourage it.

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. Self-explanatory, though you may be surprised at the answer to the headline and the reasons why.

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact-Checking by Matt Husser, The Hard Times. Also self-explanatory. The fact-checking thing is actually where all this started; Zuck is putting this side of things in the hands of the users via a Twitter-style "Community Notes" system, rather than having fact-checkers to combat disinformation on staff. Things just got worse from there.

Meta has 'heard the message' from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen by Dan Milmo and Robert Booth, The Guardian. Some insider knowledge on the situation and how it's happening exactly because of the reasons you thought.

Look, I get it. I appreciate that some of you might not be able to delete your Facebook accounts because it's the only means you have of getting in touch with some people. I can't really delete mine either, because I have to use it for work, though I haven't used Facebook "personally" for years now because I saw it enshittifying a long time ago and jumped ship. The only Meta service I use these days — and that's irregularly — is WhatsApp.

But I would urge you to look over all of the above, and consider whether that is a company you still want to have any involvement with. Not only are the policy changes above actively harmful, the service as a whole has, as Zitron explains in his piece linked above, gradually been getting worse and worse, abusing its users in the name of profit and growth, for years at this point.

There are always alternatives. You can email people, just like in the good old days, or alternative messaging solutions like Discord, Zoom and Skype exist. They all have their issues, yes, but they're not actively being harmful like Meta is now. You can build a website to share your photos. Hell, if you're hooked on social media, there are plenty of better alternatives to Facebook now. (Just don't join TikTok.)

Online is a garbage fire right now, and it's only getting worse. One day, we might be able to look back on this whole sorry situation and laugh, but right now it's getting to a point where it's outright dangerous for some folks online. And I would hope that you, dear reader, don't want to be part of making that problem any worse.

If you didn't know anything about any of this prior to today, I hope you feel a little better informed now. And if you did, I'd urge you to take that step and move well away from Meta as soon as you are able.

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It was announced today that Facebook has acquired the popular mobile photo sharing and hipster filtering app Instagram, which has been available for some time on iOS and recently launched for Android phones. The deal was sealed for somewhere in the region of $1 billion in cash and Facebook stock, which is an excessively large amount of money by anyone's standards.

I shan't go into the ins and outs of the business side of things here (check my colleague's posts over on Inside Facebook for more details as well as a bit about what FB and Instagram have been up to together) but what I did want to talk about a little was the public reaction to the news.

In short, the reaction has not been overly positive, at least among the people I follow on FB and Twitter and their friends. I have seen numerous comments today that are simply along the lines of "oh, fuck" without any real explanation — basing their negative reaction simply on the widespread assumption that Facebook Is Evil.

As it happens, some of these people may be right to be a little concerned for the future of Instagram. Facebook has gobbled up several other social services over the course of the last few years, and the result has often been that said services disappeared without a trace. Location-sharing Foursquare rival Gowalla, for example, shut down its service a short while ago as its founders and key team members were reassigned to work on Facebook's own location service. Meanwhile, group messaging service Beluga was also swallowed up around this time last year, and eventually disappeared off the face of the Earth, only to be replaced by the Facebook Messenger mobile app.

Mark Zuckerberg has taken great pains to attempt to assuage the fears surrounding Instagram, however, noting that a key part of the service is its connectivity with non-Facebook networks such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Flickr and Posterous. If Facebook is truly planning on keeping Instagram as its own independent entity to begin with, it wouldn't make sense to remove the facility to post to these other networks. What is probably more likely to happen is that Instagram's popular photo-filtering features will make their way into the official Facebook apps, making it even easier for people to take faux-retro pictures at every opportunity.

Perhaps Facebook will dissolve Instagram eventually, and that will be a bit of a pain for those who have Instagram but not Facebook accounts — but it won't be the end of the world as some people seem to be suggesting. There are plenty of other "hipster photo filter" apps available — Streamzoo and Lightbox appear to be two popular suggestions — and, in my purely anecdotal experience, the apparent majority of people who use Instagram use at least one other social service alongside it anyway, even if it's not Facebook, meaning they can simply direct followers to their Twitter/Tumblr/whatevr if and when they start using another service.

So Instagram being taken over by Facebook isn't cause for sadness, anger or irritation. It was a completely free service, after all, meaning in practice it had no real obligations to remain the way it was forever. Instead, we should be celebrating the fact that a small team succeeded in living the dream — to create something simple, fun and popular, and subsequently to make an absolute fucking butt-ton of money out of it. It's a success story of the modern age, made all the more notable when you compare it to the $35 million Yahoo! paid for Flickr back in 2007.

So if Facebook taking over Instagram bothers you, simply use something else — there's plenty of alternatives, as outlined above. In the meantime, the two companies can work on better integration of Instagram's popular features into what is, like it or not, the world's biggest social network. If you had paid money to use Instagram then you may well have a slightly stronger case for being pissed off; as it is, what we have here is a small company who offered its services to the public for free taking a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity — and, more to the point, no real evidence that Facebook's involvement will in any way compromise what the service is now.

As with so many things on the Internet, perhaps it's best to wait and see what happens before getting irrationally angry or sad about this. Otherwise all that jerking's going to put your knee right out of joint. So to speak.