donuts

Having no achievements never stopped them before.

There are plenty of things that people do every day that contribute to the potential spreading of diseases, from every kind of sex to not wearing a mask when you're sick.

To single out anal sex as a sign that homosexuality is immoral (despite the fact that vaginal sex can also spread diseases, and despite the fact that anal sex is not exclusive to gay people) is a sign that the person you're talking to is biased and arguing in bad faith.

Ethically speaking, if someone wants to live by a moral system that differentiates between right and wrong based on the potential to spread disease, then that's fine, but that logic still needs to be coherent and apply to all things, not just selectively to things that they dislike.

But anyway, if they're sophists, you probably aren't going to convince them. If you have to engage with that shit, then your best bet is probably the socratic method: ask them targeted questions to poke holes in their flawed logic until they back themselves into a corner. You know what they're saying doesn't make any sense, so simply asking them questions which reveal more contradictions will force them to adjust or abandon their position.

I'm not sure that getting your "news" from random TikToks is any better...

Here's an excerpt from the very beginning of Biden's speech two weeks ago:

In the winter of 1777, it was harsh and cold as the Continental Army marched to Valley Forge. General George Washington knew he faced the most daunting of tasks: to fight and win a war against the most powerful empire that existed in the world at the time.

His mission was clear. Liberty, not conquest. Freedom, not domination. National independence, not individual glory.

America made a vow. Never again would we bow down to a king.

And here's an except from Trump's speech from his most recent rally just a few days ago:

By the way, they never report the crowd on January 6. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley … did you know they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything, deleted and destroyed all of it? All of it, because of lots of things, like Nikki Haley is in charge of security, we offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, national guards, whatever they want. They turned it down.

Biden is old, just like Trump. Nobody denies that. But surely you aren't trying to "both sides" this one by equating the two mentally or physically, right?

Make no mistake, even if he loses the popular vote, Trump is going to take getting reelected as some kind of mandate to act as a dictator and do whatever he wants with the full power of the US government and military behind him.

Democracy will not survive another 4 years of this increasingly unhinged husk of a moron.

Well if you really want me to buy even more shit online (let's be real, from Amazon) this is a good way to do it.

At best I don't like small talk or dealing with other people through meaningless interactions. At worst I might have minor social anxiety. I hugely prefer to just walk into a shop, grab what I need, check myself out, and leave.

At this point I'm also just as fast (if not faster) than the paid cashiers and baggers (who need and deserve chairs or stools by the way).

So yeah, if self checkout goes away, I'm buying as much stuff online as possible and generally making fewer trips to the store.

Great news and I'm sure that more will follow.

I call bullshit. Yeah I'm sure they spend 2/3 of their income on rights holders, mainly Joe Rogan, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift.

The average musician isn't making shit, and yet the spotify execs are sipping champagne.

Sigh... I wish upon a shining star that one day very soon we can all look at this stupid bloated fuckwad as resoundingly say "fuck you, you treacherous piece of filthy human trash."

Wonderful. Nothing will help people differentiate between real, trustworthy news and fake opinion-laden disinformation like AI generated people and content!

/s for the kids in the back.

I can see from your other post that you're talking about Facebook's role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:

The internet.org initiative was brought to Myanmar in 2015. Myanmar's relatively recent democratic transition did not provide the country with substantial time to form professional and reliable media outlets free from government intervention. Furthermore, approximately 1% of Myanmar's residents had internet access before internet.org. As a result, Facebook was the primary source of information and without verifiable professional media options, Facebook became a breeding ground for hate speech and disinformation. "Rumors circulating among family or friends’ networks on Facebook were perceived as indistinguishable from verified news by its users."[227] Frequent anti-Rohingya sentiments included high Muslim birthrates, increasing economic influence, and plans to takeover the country. Myanmar's Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees. [Emphasis added by me, btw.]

Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don't use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don't you agree?

So what's my point? Why is any of that relevant?

As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.

There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I'm saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it's actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta's staff would probably agree to that.

So what's the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?

Frankly I'm not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.

I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that's why we're talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that's simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.

As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.

For me personally there are two main forces at play here:

1. I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don't use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.

2. Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it's a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.

I don't really know for sure, but I'd have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We'd be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it'd also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it...

So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.

I'm perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I'm willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).

From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.

From a cultural standpoint, I'm also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc.. Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase--and that's the Fediverse working as intended, imo.