Meta under fire for auto-following Trump & Vance, Blocking Democrat hashtags

It is almost like meta is a terrible company.

Gosh, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call a privacy nightmare terrible… /s

Zuck can eat a bag of dicks. Cancel your account. Stop enabling this rich loser.
- Tiktok is doing similar shit like banning words/phrases.

It is important to note that if you followed the official VP Harris or POTUS Biden, those accounts were turned over to Vance and Trump yesterday. It's not actually an auto-follow because you were already following them.

Great context
- Important context, yes.
  
  But also of note is that there were users who tried to unfollow and it would re-add. Only blocking worked.
  
  So its not as clean here as it seems.
Friend of mine showed a screenshot that the official FLOTUS was just renamed to add "archive"
- Well that is pretty fucking shitty then. Either conceptualize the potus account as being all presidents ever or don't autosub people to the new different account.
- Probably because Melania doesn't want to use it.
I wonder if trump is now paying people to comb back through previous posts to look for things he can delete or edit to rewrite history. Now that I've said I feel fairly sure he's doing exactly that because he does anything dishonest that he can which is tolerated
- Yeah, except he'll never pay them.
- I don't think so. My understanding is NARA actually owns those accounts. He'll disable NARA and then go back and change posts made during Obama and Biden's presidencies.
- Oh there will most definitely be a Ministry of Truth.
That just sounds like a dumb way to do it.
- That's the way they do it, these accounts belong to the current potus and vp
- Itsan outdated practice but its not stupid in a traditional democracy. Who the elected official is should not make a difference in wether or not people are interested to know what government communicates.
  
  Changing it would be like if in the old days your dedicated radio station changing frequencies because they got a new boss. Plenty (old people) would just be confused on why there is no news.
- It's almost like the president doesn't actually matter and the state will violently serve capital regardless.

Deleted my fb account today. Instagram too. Hadn't really used it other than to talk to my parents. My mom quit too, so I told my dad we can chat over sms and use other video platforms. Been a Facebook user since 2010, a little sad that the site has degraded so much

Lol not even a fuckin full day.

Do your service and convince your parents to leave every Meta product.

My mom wouldn't leave Facebook if you paid her. She treats it like it's the entirety of the Internet
- I thought Facebook was dying a few years back and I only became more convinced when an older family member was trying to convince me that it wasn't.
  
  A social media app that targets old people can't last.
- Block it at their router and blacklist it on her phone
What's the equivalent easy(ish) to use / post replacement for them?
- Friendica for Facebook
  
  Pixelfed for Instagram
  
  Loops for Tiktok maybe, Haven't tried either though
  
  Choice of XMPP/Signal/Element for whatsapp
- For kids there is TinyBeans. That's half the reason my older family uses FB anyway... and no way in hell am I putting my kid on FB.
Thankfully, mine are too old to ever give a shit about anything on the internet. Sadly, my mother watches fox 24/7... my father doesn't care for any of it at least and also pokes fun at her for watching that garbage. He still thinks Trump is good because, in his views, he made his stock the highest it ever was, and that's all that matters. I'm only grateful we never talk about any of it when they see my kids or on holidays.

I've just sent messages to my elderly relatives that they'll no longer find me on Facebook.

That was my only remaining reason for using it. I've never had a use for Instagram, or Xitter for that matter.

Ditch the apps.

You are not married to apps.

Anyone on Lemmy should understand that. We came here from elsewhere.

DITCH THE APPS.

Me thinks you're preaching to the choir 😅
- I never even had "the apps" 😄
I need for my job, in my country everyone uses What'sApp, this includes the company I work for, I work on the street and that app it's how they chose to handle communication between co-workers, clients, my boss. It's the only thing from meta that I have an account. It sucks.

Looks like Zuckerberg got into Trump's face paint

It’s actually from motorboating trumps ass..
- Ahh, that explains why Trump's face looks like that too.
- Jesus fuck this is a mental image I didn't need.
Maybe they had a sleepover!
- Yeah, Vance slept ~~with~~ on the couch.
they're both accidentally gonna come out in blackface one day and some real hijinks will ensue!
- RFK jr is super close

Meta under fire ...

... and not a single person stopped using it.

Naw there's serious momentum for an exit. Most subreddits are banning X links. Anecdotally a lot of people who I would have never expected have reached out to me about Instagram alternatives. We have power here. Let's not squander it by pretending we don't.
I did.
interestingly my wife, who isn't very techy or very online, deleted all her profiles and apps.

Not really under fire though, are they?

Also not really blocking democrat hashtags.
- Sure.
  
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g32yxpdz0o

Let's not forget to blast the assholes responsible for this (the individuals, not the company) as we all leave the crappy platforms so it doesn't affect us personally.

Yes the correct answer is don't be on facebook or anything it owns, but also nobody should be doing this, anywhere. Keep the heat on the bastards.

Also, use a good adblocker to prevent Facebook tracking you as a non-user. Ublock and Privacy Badger are useful.

Right-Wingers were never anti-censorship look at how they handle books in school.

If you search #trans, or #transgender, or #lgbt absolutely no results lol. Searching just #lgb works fine though. Awesome

Searching just #lgb works fine though

Let's Go Bisexuals!

still feel like there's need to be federated with threads?

As someone who was happy my instance was initially federating with Threads, I am also happy they stopped federating after Meta's moderation changes. Some people see this as an "I told you so moment" but I see it as the situation changed and we adapted. (I'm also not saying that instances who blocked threads from the start were wrong. Even if we agree on the facts of the case, we can come to different conclusions based on our values and priorities.)
- facebook was a nazi bar since cambridge analityca, they just went mask off a bit

Holy Shit. It's real and it's nuts.

I only use the website instead of the app but searching for #Democrat results in démoratie and démocratieparticipative while searching for #Republican results in republican, republican party, republicanmemes, republicanwomen, republicans.

It's shocking to experience this sort of censorship in real time.

I wish I had more influence to get people to more to a federated platform. Me quitting IG isn't going to do anything other than cut myself off from information I occasionally want to access (local business events).

Do it, quit. Even if no one else does it. Stop relying on these tools.

Stop justifying using their services. Businesses should have multiple avenues to get the information you need. If they're solely dependent on Meta, they won't change unless people leave.
- I completely understand the theory and moral argument; but in practice, how does this take effect?
  
  If I delete my account, I'm not longer able to see events and sales, etc at local businesses.
  
  My favorite local grocery store has 32,000 Instagram followers. How many of them have to leave to convince that business owner to start using a federated platform? A local bar I go to maybe six times a year doesn't even have a website - only an IG account with 5k followers. It's only because of their IG account that I know they have a chili cookout coming up that I want to enter.
  
  So logistically, how do we, those who want to jump ship, make these businesses jump with us?
  
  The best I've got is some avatar change to bring awareness but I don't post enough that anyone would see it anyway. Or maybe actually post something on IG and leave it pinned there. I don't have any posts on my account so maybe leaving an inspiring post would help. This would require not deleting my account.
  
  Moreover, for small businesses, I know a lot of them are spending a few hundred or thousand dollars here and there to promote events and sales. This is one of the weaknesses of the fediverse. I don't think it's unfair that a business or person has the ability to spend money to ensure their announcement is noticed. Another fed weakness / powerful feature of corporate-social media is the lack of tools for businesses to conduct business. It's just a lot easier to use these platforms that have ten years of updates to make things work best for the most people.
They boil the frog for decades and this is what you get. You shouldn't be shocked.

"What are you going to do? Leave? Hahaha."

--Marky Mark, probably

“Yes, if I could, please. Would that be okay?” — more people than you’d like to imagine

Can you see how Zuckerberg's face is turning orange?

Are you suggesting that zuckgöring wasn’t always cheeto orange? News to me.

Wait, I thought they were going to end censorship.

META wouldn't go and just lie like that, would they?

The world weeps, however the US is the embodiment of the skinner meme.

One user said their cousin noticed a notification about Trump changing his profile picture.

Some quality reporting there.

I rarely use Instagram but am about to delete my account there. Will be ceasing to use Whatsapp too, and hopefully deleting my account. I'm otherwise off of meta products. Only problem I foresee is that when traveling outside the US, everyone tends to want to use WhatsApp.

Edit: anyone recommend a WhatsApp alternative? Privacy and widespread adoption are the top concerns. I'm defaulting back to Signal, but I know there have been some issues with it

Signal is the best option. The only downside being that it relies on your cell number. Otherwise it's the most secure platform/protocol.
- What's the best option if you don't want to use your phone number?
Signal

So no auto-follow for me on any three accounts.

However #Democrat on Insta returns no hashtags

AUTO FOLLOWING? HOLY SHIT.

Honestly I'm sure they will come up with some bullshit excuse for the others. But the auto-follow? Damn.

Is it auto following or did the Biden and Harris accounts many were already following get transformed into Trump/Vance accounts?
- The POTUS accounts.
  
  But users also reported it automatically re-following after un-following, and having to resort to a block.
I checked and I'm not following them. But I wasn't following anything political on Instagram
Reminds me of Tom on MySpace

Everyone who is semi intelligent knew this was going to happen. People need to quit acting like theybare surprised. It's going to get worse, and the only people protected are rich white people who suck up to evil. Even then you're not safe. Bumpler was good friends with Epstein until Epstein bought a piece of property that krumpler wanted. That's why they stopped being friends. It wasn't the sex trafficking that turned him away.

"Under fire". Wake me up when someone actually does something about it.

I wonder if people will finally leave things like xitter and FB. So many people that ARE politically aware are still using those fucking sites, giving all kinds of excuses (but my followers).

And I'm not just talking about corporate stooges working for the "liberal media".

Ugh. And they can do whatever they want. The vast majority of people, even if they care a little, won't jump ship.

Social media is looking more like a religion these days.

Unless they just rolled back the change, #democrat hashtag is definitely working on Instagram:

I wouldn't put it past them to hastily roll back the change, say "Sorry, we just had a glitch", and blame Trans people somehow.
- They won't blame anyone. They'll passive-voice it and do it more subtly.
Rolled back. Update in the article.