"Meta is a criminal enterprise" -- Gruber

I didn’t need Gruber to tell me that. From its inception, Meta/Facebook has been sleazy.

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Going to go off the rails for a moment…in grade 3 or so, I had a teacher who said she didn’t like wishy-washy words. “Nice” and “fine”.

I dislike the word “ostensibly”. As an adult, I’d call it more a “try hard” word.

I asked ChatGPT if I was being unreasonable.

Blockquote
ChatGPT said:
You’re not wrong — ostensibly is one of those words that feels like it’s trying a little too hard to get invited to the party. It often shows up in writing that wants to sound intelligent or skeptical but ends up just sounding like someone thumbing through a thesaurus mid-sentence.
And yeah, in most cases people could just say “supposedly,” “apparently,” “on the surface,” or even — gasp — “seems like.” But no, they go with ostensibly because they want their point to wear a monocle.
It’s one of those “look at me” words. Right up there with “utilize” instead of “use.”

I feel better. :joy:

To the point, I deactivated my Facebook for months earlier this year. I came back recently because I had a lot of friends posting things that I didn’t get to see so I figured “what’s the harm”. It’s just a sea of angry people posting nonsense, memes, ads, and drivel.

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It’s just a sea of angry people posting nonsense, memes, ads, and drivel.

Other than that, it’s a good use of time. :rofl::wink:

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They have been already criminal, and even anti-human because they manipulate users’ mentality with the black-box algorithms, like promoting posts which make you angry enough to engage in.

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I read the book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Facebook tried to stop its publication and dismissed the revelations as coming from someone who was fired rather than a whistleblower, but I tend to believe Sarah.

Very controversial, even within my own household, as she peels back the public persona of Sheryl Sandberg and her book Leaning In with evidence that Sheryl actually did the exact opposite in how she acted at Facebook and (mis)treated women directly under her supervision.

But the detailed insider perspective about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and their direct involvement in so many really bad things is worth the read.

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Simply the fact that Facebook tries to stop a book from being published is damaging enough. Then add to that all the other stories we hear about their conduct and our own experiences on the platform.

Yeah, I believe Sarah.

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No one should be surprised by this. I blocked Facebook across our entire network years ago to protect the family from tracking and have never felt the need to undo it. Unfortunately it’s not just them at it.

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What I find a little alarming is that people can look at Meta/Facebook and Twitter and think “those are utter moral wastelands run whose leaders who have consistently shown that they cannot be trusted, but I see that they’ve got a Gen AI product. I must give it a go.”

If you’re going to trust an AI at all, surely simple self-preservation would suggest you don’t use Grok or whatever the name for Meta’s AI is.

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My brother won’t join Facebook. They’re evil. They can’t be trusted. It’s a cesspool.

He has 3 Instagram accounts.

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Not sure about the US regulators, but the EU is going to have a field day on this.

Also not a surprise if you watched the move, The Social Network. Zuckerburg basically stole the idea from the Winklevoss twins while a student at Harvard.