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CEO of Meta, which recently joined the newly founded #SocialWebFoundation, suggests that there is "no causal connection" between social media and teen mental health.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/25/24254044/mark-zuckerberg-meta-social-media-teen-mental-health

#news #TechNews #SocialMedia #MentalHealth #meta #facebook #threads #zuckerberg

in reply to Stefan Bohacek

CEO of Meta, which recently joined the newly founded #SocialWebFoundation, thinks that "individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content".

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/25/24254042/mark-zuckerberg-creators-value-ai-meta

#news #TechNews #SocialMedia #meta #facebook #threads #zuckerberg #AI

in reply to Stefan Bohacek

Meta, which recently joined the newly founded #SocialWebFoundation, "cut 21,000 jobs, including in trust and safety and customer service, over multiple rounds of layoffs", leading state and local officials "puzzled by what to expect from Facebook" around voting misinformation.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/meta-misinformation-problem-local-election-officials-worried-rcna172842

#news #TechNews #SocialMedia #meta #facebook

in reply to wendy boooOocek for Kamala

hey, Wendy. Actually, we are a big part of the Fediverse. You know me, of course, but you also know a lot of the open source projects, non-profits, and companies listed as supporters on https://socialwebfoundation.org/. Not everyone on the Fediverse is there, but I think everyone on the Fediverse can benefit from what we do.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Yes, I do, and I’m honestly concerned. I fear that meta, with its extremely lenient moderation, tolerant of thinly veiled racism, sexism, otherism of the most profound kind, and tuned to magnifying algorithms, will potentially harm some of the people most precious to me in this noncommercial fediverse. Please try to understand my reservations…
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to wendy boooOocek for Kamala

"honestly concerned"

We shouldn't be.

When Threads was announced and people started to panic about Meta taking over, I wasn't too concerned. I thought, they're scared, they see the future, and they're not in it, so they must act.

I did start to get concerned after this new effort was announced and Meta was listed as a partner. It's one thing to have Meta start using technology that's free for everyone. It's a whole other story when they attempt to influence it.

in reply to Stefan Bohacek

But really, we don't know yet what this new group will be able to do and achieve. ActivityPub is still overseen by W3C, as far as I know.

And when they can infiltrate that?

Well, the fediverse is vast. There'll always be servers and platforms free from the influence of corporate social media companies. We'll keep moving to stay ahead of it.

We'll be fine.

in reply to Stefan Bohacek

Stefan, I wonder for you what signals you might see a year from now, in terms of processes and programs, that would make you feel more or less concerned about the SWF?
in reply to Evan Prodromou

SWF has its problems covered in other threads discussing it, and to be honest, I'm less concerned about those.

My problem is specifically with Meta being welcome to directly influence the fediverse.

in reply to Stefan Bohacek

I'm more concerned about the triplet Meta, Automattic and Medium.
in reply to Pumpkin Amber

yes, we are going to talk to developers about it and come up with guidelines and maybe an ActivityPub extension for long text.

> Why are we focusing on this when we have other issues to worry about.

Ooh, good question. If you were setting priorities for a Fediverse-related non-profit, what 2-3 projects would you want it to work on in the first year?

in reply to Evan Prodromou

Moderation tooling honestly, we're missing a lot of things on this platform.
in reply to Pumpkin Amber

To come back to this, defederations are not defined by the standard. There's no standard behavior for what should be done when an instance defederates from another. Mastodon severs all the following/follower relations during a defed, misskey (and sharkey forks) do not, allowing for defederations to be reversible. It'd be nice to sit down and come up with what a defederation looks like and how it should be implemented. Personally I don't think that all defeds should sever the connection (so perhaps defining "Soft defed" would be a useful thing to do in this case)
in reply to Pumpkin Amber

Some software allow for "allowlist" defederation too, which means that by default users are not allowed to federate unless they've explicitly been allowed. Only some software supports this (I believe akkoma? I'd have to look). It's my opinion that in order to began the building blocks of making an inclusive platform for everyone we need to look at how instances do defederation, suspension (deactivation and activation of actors) along with "silencing" which is the fedi equivalent of shadow bans. Things like markdown can come later (I'm not saying it's a bad idea, I hate the inconsistency between misskey's mfm and how mastodon, akkoma, pleroma has markdown) I'm just saying that out of the priorities you're gonna want to have the tools necessary to protect the network before some of the cosmetics.

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