Ilandar

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Not just their soldiers, civilian members of the organisation were also using them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Many of the casualties were not Hezbollah fighters but members of the group’s extensive civilian operations

They went to Hezbollah, as the person you are disagreeing with said.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Meta said it was fully expecting many teenagers would try to evade the new measures.

"The more restrictive the experience is, the stronger the theoretical incentive for a teen to try and work around the restriction," Mr Mosseri said.

In response, the company is launching and developing new tools to catch them out.

Instagram already asks for proof of age from teenage users trying to change their listed date of birth to an adult one, and has done since 2022.

Now, as a new measure, if an underage user tries to set up a new Instagram account with an adult date of birth on the same device, the platform will notice and force them to verify their age.

In a statement, the company said it was not sharing all the tools it was using, "because we don't want to give teens an instruction manual".

"So we are working on all these tools, some of them already exist … we need to improve [them] and figure out how to provide protections for those we think are lying about their age," Mr Mosseri said.

The most stubborn category of "age-liars" are underage users who lied about their age at the outset.

But Meta said it was developing AI tools to proactively detect those people by analysing user behaviour, networks and the way they interact with content.

Source.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

I’m 25 now, but I still always say I was born in the 80s out of habit…

...?

[–] [email protected] 73 points 23 hours ago (21 children)

I'm surprised so many people think this is a good argument. TikTok is a social media platform. Temu is an online marketplace. The potential to cause disruption within US society is completely different.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

The article did mention ad-blockers:

Some users take back control from online ads by installing ad-blocker software. These can be free versions in the form of a browser extension, or more advanced versions with a subscription fee.

I think you underestimate how technologically illiterate the average person is. Many people do not even understand the difference between a web browser and a search engine - they use Chrome because they think that's the only way to perform a Google search.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn't getting worse because there are more bad people online, it's getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

I haven't heard of that one but I'll definitely watch it, thanks for the recommendation! In my city the small Uyghur community has been quite vocal about the treatment of their friends and family back home, many of whom they haven't been able to contact for years due to the crackdowns. In particular, there was a family who ran a restaurant I used to eat at semi-regularly whose story received worldwide media attention. I have felt quite strongly about this issue since then.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Only if we're talking about total users.The number of monthly active users (MAU) shouldn't be affected by this, unless Meta is counting an active Facebook/Instagram who has opened a Threads account as an active Threads user (regardless of their Threads usage).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

They don't clog the feed, the overwhelming majority of posts here are links to articles. Your lack of motor control is also not our problem.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 days ago (3 children)

This is a pretty good overview of the human rights problems associated with the Chinese technology industry. It's why I decided to stop purchasing products designed by Chinese companies a few years ago, after watching a Frontline documentary about it. It just felt wrong to be putting money into a sector of their industry that I know is being used to oppress billions of people. That's not to say non-Chinese technology companies don't have their own significant problems but there is a very obvious and direct link between the Chinese state and the Chinese private sector that doesn't exist elsewhere (at least not on this scale).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

From my understanding, Bluesky (despite its recent growth) isn't particularly big either. Threads claims to have a lot of users and I assume it would have the easiest time attracting normies, but I am still sceptical of its long-term viability. I feel like the people leaving X would have quite a bit of crossover with people who despise Meta.

So that leaves us with a fourth competitor, which is nothing at all. Anecdotally I think this is what I am seeing the most - people who leave X are just abandoning the entire concept of microblogging, since the point of it is to speak to a large audience and none of the competitors can really deliver that right now. The appeal of Twitter was that everyone (who was interested in microblogging) was on it; smaller, niche communities are fine for discussion boards and group chats but microbloggers don't really want to be screaming into a void where most people will never hear them. Microblogging was never even particularly popular anyway (when compared with other forms of social media) and I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the downfall of X eventually kills the concept for most people in society.

 

In sharing this video here I'm preaching to the choir, but I do think it indirectly raised a valuable point which probably doesn't get spoken about enough in privacy communities. That is, in choosing to use even a single product or service that is more privacy-respecting than the equivalent big tech alternative, you are showing that there is a demand for privacy and helping to keep these alternative projects alive so they can continue to improve. Digital privacy is slowly becoming more mainstream and viable because people like you are choosing to fight back instead of giving up.

The example I often think about in my life is email. I used to be a big Google fan back in the early 2010s and the concept of digital privacy wasn't even on my radar. I loved my Gmail account and thought it was incredible that Google offered me this amazing service completely free of charge. However, as I became increasingly concerned about my digital privacy throughout the 2010s, I started looking for alternatives. In 2020 I opened an account with Proton Mail, which had launched all the way back in 2014. A big part of the reason it was available to me 6 years later as a mature service is because people who were clued into digital privacy way before me chose to support it instead of giving up and going back to Gmail. This is my attitude now towards a lot of privacy-respecting and FOSS projects: I choose to support them so that they have the best chance of surviving and improving to the point that the next wave of new privacy-minded people can consider them a viable alternative and make the switch.

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