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.
Why don’t stories like this EVER mention Lemmy?
it’s not an alternative to any meta platform
Well, I get that Lemmy is an alternative social media, but it’s not really an alternative to Facebook. Anonymous usernames, text-based posts, you can’t follow people, Fediverse is somewhat confusing… I’d recommend it as an alternative to Reddit, but probably not the website where boomers want to check up on their neighbors and friends
That’s what Friendica is for
Clean cut kids do not find Lemmy very palatable.
I think we’re too weird and niche.
I guess the hate for Reddit isn’t as great as for Shitter and Fakebook. (yet)
Not as many grassroots advocates. Even on the Reddit alternative sub the consensus isn’t lemmy somehow.
Nice! Just shared this (as a PDF without the domain name lol) with my family!
Coward!
Hey it’s a group chat with my grandma ಠ_ಠ
i like that people are leaving zucc platforms but why is that happening suddenly? did he do something exceedingly fascist? did i miss something?
Zuckerberg hung out with Trump at Mar a Lago and attended the inauguration, then got rid of Facebook and Instagram’s fact checking, relaxed their rules on posting hate speech and discrimination, ended Meta’s diversity initiatives, removed bathroom facilities at meta for transgender and nonbinary employees, made speeches in defence of Trump and expressed gratitude for finally being able to have “a productive partnership with the United States government”, while removing communications channels for employees and threatening them with being fired if they talked to media about any of this. He has gone full MAGA.
This article covers some of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/technology/mark-zuckerberg-meta-trump.html
thats par for the course for facebook, no? they have always helped the fascists, in my country they literally helped elect one. they helped spread misinformation as if they already didnt care, and the diversity stuff feels just about the same brand of fake to me, so much hate in there.
beggars cant be choosers though so i guess im just glad people are actually mad this time.
They’ve gone full mask off, which is why there’s the sudden backlash. The hate speech rules now include a section that explicitly says that it’s okay to call LGBTQ people mentally ill. They’re the only group with a specific carve-out in the rules saying that it’s okay to post hate speech about them.
This is the first time zuck has gone full ass-kisser with curly hair and a gold chain, though
my country they literally helped elect one
Huh? Source? What country?
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.
AFAIK no, but it takes awhile for everything to sink in, and hosts like John Oliver only have so much air time.
He decided to kiss the ring. People don’t like that.
He only now was able to catch up with all the news with Meta moderation from a month ago. He is only a couple weeks back on air.
good initiative but uh what’s up with that domain name?
His team over at Last Week Tonight pull lots of funny stunts like this and have made quite a few hilarious websites. I wouldn’t be surprised if this one is featured on the next episode!
Edit: Hey look, it was! https://www.youtube.com/embed/nf7XHR3EVHo
Remember “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption”? You can’t get stuff like this in stores!
Oh, he just had that lying around
There was a whole saga of him buying expensive rat erotica artwork at one point, which is a sentence I never thought I’d write.
sentence I never thought I’d write
🤣 🤣
rat erotica
aah thank you! now I can make sense of those last jumbled letters, quite the unusual word combination for sure ^^
Newsweek - The True Story Behind ‘Last Week Tonight’s’ Rat Erotica Painting (archive link)
I think is some in-joke having to do with Facebook moderation. Or his typical goofassery with domain names. Can’t help you there.
I don’t want to get my hopes up but is this Facebook’s MySpace moment?
There’s literally billions of people on Facebook, so probably not. But maybe it’s a start.
*Billions of accounts. Hard to tell how many are real people and how many are just slop throwing bots.
Not immediately or probably for some years. Facebook’s main problem is the fact its got an aging population and no young people joining. That’s why Meta bought Instagram and is desperate to get their grubby paws on TikTok or force it to close down in the West.
I think internally, over the next decade, FB will start to die off organically as Meta put ever increasing focus on retention and young people.
I don’t think so. There’s no good alternative to Facebook that is worth leaving it for. When MySpace died, there was a significantly better alternative (FB). Even if people quit using Facebook regularly, they’ll need to keep it.
What do people use Facebook for these days? (I deleted my account about 10 years ago so I’m not sure what it’s for now)
I’ve been gone from FB for about 3 months but for me it was the groups. You could find groups for anything, but I miss my local groups most. Particularly the No-Buy and vegan and political activist groups. Finding an equivalent outside of FB is sub par, if it even exists at all.
Yeah that does actually sound pretty decent.
I’m actually not sure what it is fb offers that people stay on it for. I find that you don’t need it to connect with actual friends. Even just making a Slack for close friends is a far better experience. It’s not great for finding news, it’s terrible for trying to have any sort of discussion. I genuinely don’t understand what purpose it serves.
So much of Facebook is just automated accounts responding to automated accounts in order to milk gullible advertisers. If everyone logged off tomorrow, I don’t know if Zuckerberg would notice.
Seems like a win tbh. Meta stops influencing people and collecting their data, while dumbass corps waste money on ads nobody will see.
Meta will still influence people, because a lot of the influence is through news aggregators automatically ingesting what Facebook shows as “Trending” and regurgitates it elsewhere.
Even better. It’s the fediverses Facebook moment.
I’ve been wanting to try pixelfed but I haven’t figured out what to do: start my own for friends or join an existing one.
I heard there were some issues with a dev or something so I haven’t signed up for the original instance yet
I use https://metapixl.com as mine. Its active and reliable. Also, not having influencers polluting the timeline makes all of Pixelfed a really nice experience.
Are you able to stop your account from federating but subscribe to people who do federate? In other words, is there a way to create a private account
Honestly, I don’t know. I’d suggest reaching out an admin of one of the instances that has the community guidelines that jive best with you. Their contact info is usually on the instance’s home page. They would definitely know.
I love the instance I’m on and it’s fairly quiet. Come on in!
My Instagram is full of fitness content (and good looking people tbh). Nothing comes even remotely close on pixelfed. No offence to federated social media, but we all ain’t good looking :) (or suck at using filters…)
It’s still a very long way off from taking over Instagram.
I’ve been using pixey.org for a year or so. No complaints
I’ve also been intrigued, but it seems like a harder jump to make than mastodon or lemmy. Like with twitter or Reddit I’m mostly interacting with strangers anyway, but I don’t really want my instagram to be photos of people I don’t know.
Would you try to get your friends to make the switch with you?
Yeah, that’s why I’m considering hosting my own, unfederated instance
John Oliver’s show is doing amazing things, including the Drumpfinator addon.
What is that URL, though? I’m guessing I’m know it if I (happily) watch the episode?
it’s an inside joke of the show where he presents himself as a “”“secret”“” furry that loves rat erotica. The content of the link is legit though.
with the sometimes quite insider-y references, there absolutely is at least one furry on the writing team
mildly NSFW?
😏🤤
Oh, absolutely! That’s maybe why the jokes feel so pure and not disrespectful.
huh
Took a long time, but nice to see this topic getting mainstream attention.
Good, glad it’s getting some main stream attention. If more people start taking advantage of these settings and alternatives it’s going to hurt Meta’s bottom line eventually
it’s going to hurt Meta’s bottom
lineeventuallyJust hurting Meta’s bottom is good enough for me
Meta has been quite naughty indeed
They’ll just bury the settings, or remove them. Who’s going to stop them now?
one can always delete their accounts
As if Meta actually deletes anything
Haven’t “shadow” accounts been a thing for years even for people that don’t use meta?
I guess that’s what the alts are for
The problem I see with this is that a Meta employee literally came out on Mastodon recently and revealed that non of these settings do anything and are false flags.
Correct me if wrong, but isn’t there a law in the us that says, all us companies have to give the government access to all data without disclosing this information? That would rule out any us based companies for privacy concerns as alternatives atm.
You should expect any data hosted on a server to be accessible by the given government…and thanks to NSA you should expect any data that travels through the US to be accessible by their government
Privacy in this case is around the selling to advertisers
The site doesn’t suggest any alternatives though or am I not seeing that?
The alternatives were suggested briefly in the segment, not the site. Oliver pointed to the site those people who can’t ditch Meta right now.
For the masses maybe, but Signal & Bluesky ain’t it for a Privacy forum
Use Magic Earth or Organic Maps instead of Google Maps too. Neither will track you.
I’ve tried so hard but I don’t think magic earth, organic maps, or osmand likes me
