"So when your #mastodon instance censors you, you have to move to another instance to avoid it? THAT SUCKS!"
"Well, what do you do on x/bluesky?"
"Get on my knees and beg and rally all my friends to do the same, and if x/bs doesn't respond, I'm screwed."
What Mark Zuckerberg’s Washington, D.C., Mansion Says About His Ideological Shifts - Mark Zuckerberg’s political ideology and tastes have evolved. His real estate portfolio r... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/realestate/mark-zuckerberg-washington-dc-mansion.html #unitedstatespoliticsandgovernment #realestateandhousing(residential) #antitrustlawsandcompetitionissues #presidentialelectionof2024 #metaplatformsinc #zuckerbergmarke #washington(dc) #socialmedia #facebookinc
heise+ | Messenger-Apps: Spezialisten und Exoten
Neben WhatsApp, Signal und & Co lohnt sich der Blick auf weitere Messenger, die robuster gegen Ausfälle sind und mehr Autonomie und spezielle Funktionen bieten.
From: blenderdumbass . org
I shall complain a little bit on a stance from EFF and how I think they should be pushing harder. Not so long ago Australia decided to ban any platform where users can upload things, to anybody who is younger than 16 years. This is an ageist, paternalistic atrocity and has to be fought with viciousness. Yet EFF seem to only understand the ...
Read or listen: https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/eff_is_not_opposing_age_verification_hard_enough
Meta vor Gericht: Zuckerberg sagt 13 Stunden lang aus
Anzeigen in WhatsApp, Instagram und dem Facebook Messenger bringen Meta zehn Milliarden US-Dollar ein, sagt Zuckerberg im FTC-Prozess.
Bluesky is down. You know what you could do if ATProto was truly decentralised right now?
It feels ironic that xTwit want me to "celebrate" my 11th year with them.
The year with my lowest level of engagement in years.
The year where I'm about to delete almost all tweets (yes, tweets).
The year I've been like-pinged by the most bots and felt the least safe on the platform.
The year where I don't post much, especially personal creations as they'll be snarfed for database consumption.
Masto is calming for me. I've had great chats and comfortable silences.
Thank you.
"Mark Zuckerberg called the head of the Federal Trade Commission in late March with an offer: Meta would pay $450 million to settle a long-running antitrust case that was about to go to trial.
The offer was far from the $30 billion that the FTC had demanded. It was also a fraction of the value of Instagram and WhatsApp, the two apps Meta had bought and were at the heart of the government’s case.
On the call, Zuckerberg sounded confident that President Trump would back him up with the FTC, said people familiar with the matter. The billionaire Facebook co-founder had been developing closer ties to Trump—his company donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and settled a $25 million lawsuit—and had been pressing the president in recent weeks to intervene in the monopoly lawsuit.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson found the offer not credible, and wasn’t ready to settle for anything less than $18 billion and a consent decree. As the trial approached, Meta upped its offer to close to $1 billion, the people said, and Zuckerberg led a frenzied lobbying effort to avoid the FTC trial.
It wasn’t enough. On Monday, the trial kicked off. The FTC called Zuckerberg—who privately expressed reluctance about taking the stand—to testify for four hours.
Zuckerberg was back on the witness stand Tuesday, where he faced questioning from an FTC lawyer over whether Facebook had paid $1 billion to buy Instagram to “neutralize” a competitor.
Asked if he would have preferred that Facebook’s own camera app would have grown faster, Zuckerberg responded, “I guess so, yeah. A billion dollars is very expensive.”
Former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal that the company’s $450 million settlement offer was “delusional.”"
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/mark-zuckerberg-meta-antitrust-ftc-negotiations-a53b3382
I don't get it, either. When I first grasped the implications of decentralization -that I can set up my own server and be completely immune from network-wide blocks and censorship- I thought it was the coolest thing on earth.
I can understand why sports-obsessed normies wouldn't care, but why is this concept so hard to sell to activists, whose use of a corporate platform could literally get them killed?
I don't get it.
Actually, a pretty good take on #SocialMedia and the tech giants.
Netflix's actual competition is sleep
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jt67JewYnoQ&si=O144Rgc2Sa2e7wAo
The one good thing about this whole Christian Conservative Nationalism nonsense happening in America is at least the Canadian working classes should theoretically realise what voting for the Conservatives could easily create here, and that the right is definitely not on the side of anyone who earns less than $500,000+ a year and who isn't a white male.
The working classes in the US are facing costs of living going up by tens of thousands of dollars a year, because they are being told they will save a few hundred dollars a year on things like cheaper gas, a lack of carbon taxes, not having to pay for regulation. They can't do the maths because they don't have the data from their propaganda disguised as TV (although Fox is slowly starting to realise what's happening, I am pleased to say). And they have been indoctrinated with the belief that the news-sources they should trust are the enemy and broadcasting fake news - All of them, all around the world.
The first step in the dictator's playbook is to take over the media and make the people think that other media is all lies. Do you think people in North Korea would trust a CBC, NBC or BBC documentary on anything, even just kids going to school and wondering what jobs to take when they leave? Nope, that's fake news to the Koreans, same as it's fake news to so many Americans sitting at home watching Newsmax all day because Fox has started lying to them.
Social security, if it's not completely scrapped, will be made work dependent - So people who rely on that will be doing the jobs that the immigrants or people in China can no longer do, because "America First" - So we will have Veterans and the Disabled working in factories and fields, they will become the new indentured workers, working till they die. And this isn't a wild prediction, it's what they say they are going to do, it's no secret.
Trump says he loves the "poorly educated" (note - He didn't say the poor), and Pee Pee, with his Trump, Christian-nationalist, Canada First playbook, does too.
Thankfully, Canada mostly has a decent education system - But still, propaganda and misinformation is well crafted (by the very educated, we social psychologists have to do something with all of those degrees now we can't sell you tobacco) and it works very well. It doesn't help that the liberals here are very much into shooting themselves in the foot, presumably with the guns they want to confiscate for no reason from a huge chunk of their potential voters. So we'll see what happens.
I am preaching to the choir on here, obviously, but it's a good place to store rants :D
#Politics #USA #Canada #USPol #CanPoli #PeePee #Trump #Cartoon #ChristianNationalism #Education #PreachingToTheChoir in a #Mastodon #EchoChamber #SocialMedia #SocialPsychology #Psychology #WannaBuySomeTobaccoMan?
Jordan's TikTok viewing history is 'not just raw, pointless data'
By Julian Fell and Teresa Tan
A new tool created by researchers at the Queensland University of Technology is allowing people to see themselves through the eyes of the algorithm.
The prime minister’s secret podcast strategists
The prime minister has appeared on many podcasts this year to make his case for re-election. It turns out the firm quietly facilitating these appearances was a left-field choice.
On #Mastodon there are now
382 verified accounts from #news organizations in
21 languages and on
118 instances.
249 were active today.
Some accounts, that were active today are
@queerde (GER)
@serinletici (TUR)
@Guka (BAQ)
@heiseonlineenglish (ENG)
@Podnews (ENG)
Find the whole list on:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ixsccIFQ4uD2HFlf92Ag7VS3rNOGwa97wFsSb3JxCwo/edit#gid=876665327
Built by @mho
I don't know why people just accept Facebook and don't even try other options. It is a broken system.
Facebook spent over a week repeatedly showing a post from a friend asking if anyone could give her a ride from place A to place B sometime that same day.
Today I saw a post from a friend encouraging people to vote for her in a union election a week after this election took place. Don't worry, she got voted in, Facebook let me see that post almost immediately.
#BreakingNews im Fernsehen, Beiträge in #SocialMedia und Live-Kommentare: Wie sähe die #Ostergeschichte heute aus? Das Bistum #Aachen nimmt mit einer Digitalkampagne ab #Gründonnerstag den Auftrag an, eine Brücke über 2.000 Jahre hinweg zu bauen:
Ostergeschichte neu erzählt: B...
@kuketzblog „#signal und #threema für normale Nutzer, #matrix und #xmpp für Menschen mit starkem Autonomiebedürfnis, und #Bria für #aktivistinnen und politisch Verfolgte.“
#messenger #digitalisierung #vernunft #socialmedia #verschworungsmythen #politik #widerstand #kommunikation
DSA: Bürgerrechtler legen Beschwerde gegen Meta wegen News-Feeds ein
Meta biete auf Facebook und Instagram keine alternativen und fest einstellbaren News-Feeds an, die nicht auf Nutzerprofilen basieren, kritisieren Aktivisten.
X's UK division saw revenue decline 66% in 2023 following Musk's takeover.
X has not been faring well in the UK, which used to be a major source of revenue for the social network prior to Elon Musk’s takeover.
Still named Twitter UK Ltd, revenues and profits for X’s UK entity collapsed by over 60% in 2023, according to accounts filed this week with the UK’s companies register.
