Meta fired all the support staff and now influencers have no-one to turn to

Among the layoffs at Meta, the company formerly known as and dependent upon Facebook: the staff whose job it was to manage and support influencers. If one is tempted not to care–it suggests that these influencers' fame and their participation in it were marketing campaigns that have now ended–there are broader consequences: scammers, imposters and harassers are running riot in the comments and once they're done with these uncelebrities everyone else is next. — Read the rest

Meta Slams Telco Fee Proposal, Says ISPs Should Pay Their Own Network Costs

Proposals to pay for broadband networks by imposing new fees on Big Tech companies "are built on a false premise," Meta executives wrote in a blog post today. From a report: "Network fee proposals do not recognize that our investments in content drive the business model of telecom operators," Meta executives Kevin Salvadori and Bruno Cendon Martin wrote. Meta's comments came a few weeks after Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters spoke out against the proposal being reviewed by European regulators. Meta executives said telecom operators and content application providers (CAPs) "are symbiotic businesses, occupying different but complementary roles in the digital ecosystem. Every year, Meta invests tens of billions of euros in our apps and platforms -- such as Facebook, Instagram, and Quest -- to facilitate the hosting of content. Billions of people go online every day to access this content, creating the demand that allows telecom operators to charge people for Internet access. Our investment in content literally drives the revenue and business model of telecom operators." Internet service providers in the EU argue that Big Tech companies should pay a "fair share" toward network-building costs. In the US, Federal Communications Commission Republican Brendan Carr claims that "Big Tech has been enjoying a free ride on our Internet infrastructure while skipping out on the billions of dollars in costs needed to maintain and build that network." Big Tech companies don't actually get free access to the Internet, though. Anyone distributing content over the Internet pays their own providers, builds their own network infrastructure, or does some combination of the two. For extremely large companies like Netflix and Meta, investments include building their own content-delivery networks. "Over the last decade, CAPs have collectively invested over $880 billion in global digital infrastructure, including approximately $120 billion a year from 2018 to 2021," Meta's blog post today said. "These infrastructure contributions made by technology companies save telecom operators around $6 billion per year."

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The Virtuous Image: Femininity and Portraiture on the Internet

Images of bodies impact young people, especially young girls and women. The normative implications of those images—what a body ought to look like and what a body ought not to look like—affect their self-esteem. A 2021 exposé of internal research conducted by Facebook (now Meta) on its photo-sharing app Instagram revealed the company itself tracked […]

Facebook's Powerful Large Language Model Leaks Online

Facebook's large language model, which is usually only available to approved researchers, government officials, or members of civil society, has now leaked online for anyone to download. From a report: The leaked language model was shared on 4chan, where a member uploaded a torrent file for Facebook's tool, known as LLaMa (Large Language Model Meta AI), last week. This marks the first time a major tech firm's proprietary AI model has leaked to the public. To date, firms like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have kept their newest models private, only accessible via consumer interfaces or an API, ostensibly to control instances of misuse. 4chan members claim to be running LLaMa on their own machines, but the exact implications of this leak are not yet clear. In a statement to Motherboard, Meta did not deny the LLaMa leak, and stood by its approach of sharing the models among researchers. "It's Meta's goal to share state-of-the-art AI models with members of the research community to help us evaluate and improve those models. LLaMA was shared for research purposes, consistent with how we have shared previous large language models. While the model is not accessible to all, and some have tried to circumvent the approval process, we believe the current release strategy allows us to balance responsibility and openness," a Meta spokesperson wrote in an email.

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Meta Has a New Machine Learning Language Model

The buzz in tech these last few weeks has been focused squarely on the language models developed and deployed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. But Meta, Facebook's parent company, continues to do significant work in this field and is releasing a new AI language generator named LLaMA today. From a report: LLaMA isn't like ChatGPT or Bing; it's not a system that anyone can talk to. Rather, it's a research tool that Meta says it's sharing in the hope of "democratizing access in this important, fast-changing field." In other words: to help experts tease out the problems of AI language models, from bias and toxicity to their tendency to simply make up information. To this end, Meta is releasing LLaMA (which is not actually a single system but a quartet of different-sized models) under "a noncommercial license focused on research use cases," with access granted to groups like universities, NGOs, and industry labs. "We believe that the entire AI community -- academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry -- must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular," the company wrote in its post. "We look forward to seeing what the community can learn -- and eventually build -- using LLaMA."

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The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing

How, in bid to get off of Facebook as a platform, Buy Nothing founders Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller have struggled to find a viable business model for a gifting movement conceived to flout capitalism while building community.

AT THE ONE-YEAR anniversary of its launch, the Buy Nothing app had been downloaded 600,000 times, but only 91,000 people were regularly using it, not many more than at the beginning. Meanwhile, the Facebook groups from which the founders had disengaged were thriving without them. Global membership had surpassed 7 million. When I asked what Rockefeller and Clark thought would happen to Buy Nothing Inc. if they couldn’t come up with additional funding, they said they weren’t interested in thinking in such fatalistic terms.

The Desert of the Virtual

The metaverse heralds an age in which hardly anyone still believes that tech firms can actually solve our problems.

Meta Announces Paid Subscriptions Offering Extra Verification, Promotion, Protection, Support

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Meta announced a new $11.99-a-month subscription service on Sunday (or $14.99-a-month for Android and iOS). For your money you mainly get the privilege of authenticating your own account with a government ID, so that it can then display the official "verified" badge. (Accounts must have a prior posting history, with account holders verified to be at least 18 years old.) Meta promises they won't change already-verified Facebook and Instagram accounts — at least, not "as we test and learn." But they immediately follow that sentence by warning that in the longer-term they're "evolving the meaning" of verification, aiming to making everyone want to subscribe. Meta calls this "expanding access." Paying subscribers will also get: — Protection from account impersonation (at a higher level that's apparently not made available to non-paying members), including "proactive account monitoring". — "Help when you need it with access to a real person for common account issues." — Exclusive "stickers" for Facebook and Instagram Stories and Facebook Reels, plus 100 free Facebook "stars" each month "so you can show your support for other creators." But most importantly, Meta is also promising to grant "increased visibility and reach" to paying members, promising "prominence" in parts of the service (including search, recommendations, and in comments). Although a footnote warns this may vary — depending on what you're trying to post about — and all content "will be treated according to our existing guidelines for recommendations on Instagram or Facebook and our Content Guidelines." George Takei once calculated roughly 80% of your friends never see the things you post on Facebook. But now Facebook is deliberately evolving into a two-tiered system where some will always be relegated to less-likely-to-be-seen status, always outshined by wealthier friends with $144 a year to spend on upgrading their Facebook accounts. The internet already has a two-tiered system for news, where the best news articles are only available to those with the funds to climb over multiple paywalls. But now even the lower tier of discourse — all that non-journalistic content floating around Facebook — will transform from a pool of burbling anger and misinformation into something worse. It's like Facebook's algorithm went from promoting just the most divisive content to promoting content from whoever most desires to foist their ideas onto other people. This may not end well. Is it just me, or does this seem like a desperate grab for money? — They're monetizing Meta's inability to stop account impersonators. — Their announcement admits that "access to account support" remains a top request of their creators. Yet paying members are apparently more likely to get it than non-paying members. Maybe that can be their new marketing slogan. "Help when you need it — sold separately." — This is happening. It becomes available for purchase this week on Instagram or Facebook in Australia and New Zealand.

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Report: Truth Social ads dominated by fake merchandise, misleading users

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For Facebook addicts, clicking is more important than facts or ideology

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Social Quitting

This week on my podcast, I read my latest Locus column, “Social Quitting, about the enshittification lifecycle of social media platforms.

But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from users to advertisers: engaging in more surveillance to enable finer-grained targeting and offering more intrusive forms of advertising that would fetch high prices from advertisers.

This enshittification was made possible by high switch­ing costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial, and romantic ties. And just to make sure that users didn’t sneak away, Facebook aggressively litigated against upstarts that made it possible to stay in touch with your friends without using its services. Twitter consistently whittled away at its API support, neuter­ing it in ways that made it harder and harder to leave Twitter without giving up the value it gave you.

MP3

Facebook approves ads calling for children’s deaths in Brazil, test finds

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Facebook Killed the Feed

There’s a movement to reclaim blogging as a vibrant, vital space in academia. Dan Cohen, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Alan Jacobs have written about their renewed efforts to have smart exchanges of ideas take place on blogs of their own. Rather than taking place on, say Twitter, where well-intentioned discussions are easily derailed by trolls, bots, or careless ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Or on Facebook, where Good Conversations Go to Die.

Kathleen recently put it more diplomatically:

An author might still blog, but (thanks to the post-Google-Reader decline in RSS use) ensuring that readers knew that she’d posted something required publicizing it on Twitter, and responses were far more likely to come as tweets. Even worse, readers might be inspired to share her blog post with their friends via Facebook, but any ensuing conversation about that post was entirely captured there, never reconnecting with the original post or its author. And without those connections and discussions and the energy and attention they inspired, blogs… became isolated. Slowed. Often stopped entirely.

You can’t overstate this point about the isolation of blogs. I’ve installed FreshRSS on one of my domains (thanks to Reclaim Hosting’s quick work), and it’s the first RSS reader I feel good about in years—since Google killed Google Reader. I had TinyRSS running, but the interface was so painful that I actively avoided it. With FreshRSS on my domain, I imported a list of the blogs I used to follow, pruned them (way too many have linkrotted away, proving Kathleen’s point), and added a precious few new blogs. FreshRSS is a pleasure to check a couple of times a day.

Now, if only more blogs posts showed up there. Because what people used to blog about, they now post on Facebook. I detest Facebook for a number of reasons and have gone as far as you can go without deleting your Facebook account entirely (unfriended everyone, stayed that way for six months, and then slowly built up a new friend network that is a fraction of what it used to be…but they’re all friends, family, or colleagues who I wouldn’t mind seeing a pic of my kids).

Anyway, what I want to say is, yes, Google killed off Google Reader, the most widely adopted RSS reader and the reason so many people kept up with blogs. But Facebook killed the feed.

The kind of conversations between academics that used to take place on blogs still take place, but on Facebook, where the conversations are often locked down, hard to find, and written in a distractedsocialmediamultitaskingway instead of thoughtful and deliberative. It’s the freaking worst thing ever.

You could say, Well, hey, Facebook democratized social media! Now more people than ever are posting! Setting aside the problems with Facebook that have become obvious since November 2016, I counter this with:

No. Effing. Way.

Facebook killed the feed. The feed was a metaphorical thing. I’m not talking about RSS feeds, the way blog posts could be detected and read by offsite readers. I’m talking about sustenance. What nourished critical minds. The feed. The food that fed our minds. There’s a “feed” on Facebook, but it doesn’t offer sustenance. It’s empty calories. Junk food. Junk feeds.

To prove my point I offer the following prediction. This post, which I admit is not exactly the smartest piece of writing out there about blogging, will be read by a few people who still use RSS. The one person who subscribes to my posts by email (Hi Mom!) might read it. Maybe a dozen or so people will like the tweet where I announce this post—though who knows if they actually read it. And then, when I drop a link to this post on Facebook, crickets. If I’m lucky, maybe someone sticks the ? emoji to it before liking the latest InstantPot recipe that shows up next in their “feed.”

That’s it. Junk food.