How to Change Your Meta Settings | Make yourself less valuable to Meta. Brought to you by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
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John Oliver cited a 5000% rise in search queries related to leaving Meta and deleting accounts. Among the topics mentioned in the analysis, attention was drawn to early Facebook’s naivete with regard to moderation requirements, the constitutional framework, and a history of governmental interference.

Oliver debunks common right-wing “cry censorship” talking points, as well as the objective difficulty of moderation endeavors, and how direct threats by Trump may have influenced Zuckerberg’s turnaround.

Oliver went on to suggest Signal, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed as alternatives that “do not seem as desperate to fall in line with Trump”. For those reluctant to completely ditch Meta, Oliver revealed a new site with step-by-step instructions to “make yourself less valuable to them”.

The guide was a collaboration with the EFF, and includes settings’ tweaks for Facebook and Meta, whose 98% of revenue comes from micro-targeting ads, the host previously cited, to increase privacy, and recommends Firefox, Privacy Badger, as “other measures” to take in order “to block advertisers and other third parties from tracking you”.

The segment culminated in a mock advert, in which the new Meta’s approach to moderation is coined as “Fuck it”, and hints to racism, internet scams, and calls to genocide running rampant on Meta’s platforms.

The clip reminds the origins of Facebook as a site to “rank college girls by hotness”, and its implication in genocide in Myanmar, which was more thoroughly discussed in an Oliver’s previous special on Facebook in 2018.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
      7·
      1 hour ago

      brazil. it was a cambridge analytica sort of deal, where the bad guys paid facebook to milimetrically target fascist propaganda, antivax sentiment, and a bunch of other bullshit to vulnerable people.

      they were happy to oblige and even interfered when we tried to regulate this away, a few years later. i hear they abuse it even further on SE asia.

      google did different but similarly heinous garbage to us.

      edit: you might have a hard time finding it through all of bolsonaro’s accusations because hes a piece of shit who laid a lot of it too, but you might find something about the “milicias digitais” or how the far right has been paying off social media to have fascism be favoured in searches and recommendations throughout the country. oh and they still have plenty of influence because of these garbage apps.