Over the past 48 hours, we’ve received a lot of discourse regarding the upcoming “Project 92” platform created by Facebook and the anti-meta fedi pact.
While we’re still in early days of the request for comments, a clear pattern has emerged that users of Pawb.Social services unequivocally do not want their data to be abused by corporate interests, such as those of Facebook.
Over and above the corporate interests, Facebook has also demonstrated a repeated failure to enact meaningful moderation changes to avoid abusive content on their platform, especially misinformation.[1][2][3]
“I do wonder if this discussion is a little academic, because I feel like Meta instances are very likely to get defederated for some reason under the current rules, like poor moderation, spam, or generic abuse.” [4]
As pointed out above, excluding the corporate interests, the discussion is somewhat moot due to the concerns regarding moderation which would lead to a Facebook operated instance being inevitably suspended.
For these reasons, Pawb.Social (including furry.engineer and pawb.fun) will suspend any and all Facebook owned, operated, or affiliated instances in the interests of protecting our users and communities.
sources and references
[1] Emma Graham-Harrison and Alex Hern; The Guardian. 2020. “Facebook funnelling readers towards Covid misinformation - study.” Retrieved June 19, 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/19/facebook-funnelling-readers-towards-covid-misinformation-study
[2] Wes Davis; The Verge. 2023. “Meta is rolling back its covid-19 misinformation rules in the US.” Retrieved June 19, 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/17/23764429/meta-covid-misinformation-rules-facebook-instagram
[3] Kris Van Cleave; CBS Evening News. 2021. " CBS Evening News Internal Facebook documents detail how misinformation spreads to users." Retrieved June 19, 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-documents-misinformation-spread/
[4] Cyrik (@CyrikCroc). 2023. Comment on topic “Join or ignore the anti-meta fedi pact”. Retrieved June 19, 2023, https://pawb.social/comment/239407
@crashdoom Honestly not defending FB/Meta to be clear, I don’t particularly care if they are blocked.
My concern is that moderation decisions are being made by only polling the loudest voices in the community and the polling is happening before there’s enough information to form a useful opinion.
There’s plenty of information out there about what Meta/Facebook does with the data it mines and acquires though. We don’t need a wait and see approach when it comes to them.
If we were talking about Tumblr/Automattic, sure. They seem fine as far as corpos go, but Meta? No way.