Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads
Facebook Allegedly Detected When Teen Girls Deleted Selfies So It Could Serve Them Beauty Ads
Saint Luigi deliver us from villains like Facebook
As if there would be no social networking without Zuckerberg.
Like any sin, the change starts with us. If we want a healthy social network, we can build a healthy social network.
Tom from Myspace never treated us like this.
I'm not sure if it's possible to build a healthy social network.
Smaller communities can work, if they're well moderated. The small size also helps norms become established.
Once the network gets really big, you have eternal September problems. You have too many bad actors in absolute numbers to deal with.
So yeah, the problem is us but we suck.
Maybe federation would work, since that can keep the moderation workload smaller and distributed.
If I could go back in time to the moment when ARPANET was created and show them what it would become, I would also beg them to stop their efforts.
"You will create the thing that will destroy us."
Even though Luigi Mangione didn't actually commit any crime and his trial is a flimsy sham, I agree. He is the public face of whoever really did it, and they are an icon of justice.
Praise the king!
can't believe a social network started by incels in college to rate girls sexually would do something like this.
Zuckerberg’s $330 million mega yacht may be tracked here: https//wwwvesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9857511
My thoughts exactly.
Ah right, still in the north sea outside of Norway. Recently there was news of Sami villages being bribed to not put up a fuss when a "prominent person" wanted to go heliskiing, then his yacht arrived on site:
Translation of article from behind paywall:
"The Facebook CEO's enormous yacht has been anchored in a Norwegian fjord near the Swedish border.
Now DN can reveal that several Sami villages have been offered compensation for not saying no to a "prominent person" going on a luxury helicopter skiing trip in the mountains.
At least three villages were contacted in March by a company that arranges helicopter skiing trips. The Sami villages have been offered compensation, ahead of a very secret group of tourists arriving to ski in the Swedish mountains in April. A Norwegian village team has also received a similar offer.
Helicopter skiing in untouched lands, known as heliskiing, has been criticized by reindeer owners for destroying nature and disturbing the reindeer – and the issue has been raised by the Norrbotten County Administrative Board to the government.
According to sources from several Sami villages, the plans for this particular April visit were somewhat out of the ordinary.
The Sami villages, which use helicopters in their reindeer husbandry, were offered six hours of helicopter use by the organizer – which corresponds to around 50,000 kronor.
On April 1, one of the largest private luxury yachts in existence arrived in Bodö, Norway – something that caused a stir in the Norwegian media.
It is owned by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the Facebook company Meta, who is one of the richest people in the world. He is one of the billionaires who has tried to approach US President Donald Trump by, among other things, donating money.
Zuckerberg's luxury yacht is called Launchpad, and he bought it last year for $330 million. The boat is almost 120 meters long. There is room on board for 26 guests and 42 crew members.
"Among the distinctive features are a private outdoor owner's deck with a jacuzzi, two certified helipads, a swimming pool with a moving floor and a spacious beach club," the manufacturer writes on its website.
Zuckerberg's smaller "supply ship" Wingman, which was included in the purchase of Launchpad, was also seen in Bodö. Wingman is also equipped with a helipad and helicopter.
Both ships then headed north and last week they arrived in a small coastal village, Drag, in northern Norway, where, according to information to DN, a house has been rented in order to, among other things, be able to cook for the guests from the boat.
It is from there that the controversial extreme sports event is said to have taken place. Helicopters are said to have traveled across the border to Sweden to drop off guests in the Swedish mountains for skiing on the pristine top snow. According to several sources to DN, the yachts' own helicopters were used. In addition, at least one more from a local entrepreneur.
A businessman in the area who was asked early on to contribute to the event, tells DN that the plan was for the group to come with a large yacht with its own helicopters and that they hired a Swiss organizer as an intermediary:
DN has not been able to confirm that Mark Zuckerberg himself was on board any of the ships.
A representative for a company that accepted said to DN before the visit:
– We have a duty of confidentiality when it comes to the customer. But honestly, I don't know who is going to ski. That it is some prominent person possibly, if they can afford to pay for all that. But I have no idea who or what they are. We sell a flight service. We fly a helicopter – it is a logistical solution for this event.
There has been reluctance from Sami villages that you have been in contact with. What do you say about that?
– The Sami villages are very important customers for us too and we have constant contact with them. It is an ongoing dialogue that takes place continuously all the time.
The company does not want to comment on the fact that the event takes place in connection with the calving period.
One of the villages that has been offered compensation is Unna tjerusj Sami village. They have – like the other respondents that DN has spoken to – declined the compensation. Chairwoman Helena Omma:
– My position is no. There is a word in Sami called joavdelaš. It means something like “useless”, things that you do completely unnecessarily. And heliskiing is the definition of joavdelaš, there is no benefit in this, she says.
– It is harmful to the climate, it disturbs reindeer as well as wildlife and nature in the area and I am completely against using nature as a playhouse. Nature has its own value and its own rights. In this case, it is not even the public’s interest in outdoor recreation that is being taken into account – only the richest people have the opportunity to do something like this.
How do you feel about the fact that the arrangement seems to have been carried out despite you and the other Sami villages having said no?
– Then they have asked so that – if we are lucky and we say yes – they can say that they are doing it in cooperation with the Sami villages. So it is only worth something if we are positive, otherwise they ignore what we say.
Both Launchpad and Wingman have crossed the Atlantic to get to the Norwegian ports, with very large climate emissions as a result. When the lifestyle website Luxury Launches in December calculated the emissions of the two ships during the 10 months that Zuckerberg had owned them until then, they concluded that the emissions amounted to over three million liters, equivalent to 52,000 full tanks in a normal-sized car.
– My advice is to respect the sensitive environment you have the privilege of visiting and understand that you have arrived at the planet's "ground zero" when it comes to climate change. The temperature is increasing two to three times faster in the Arctic Circle, which has caused sharp shifts in snow and ice conditions that are blocking reindeer pastures, changing vegetation and causing accelerated melting of all glaciers, Johan Rockström tells DN.
A reindeer herder who wishes to remain anonymous tells DN that it feels ironic that a group of people using private jets, luxury yachts and helicopters are traveling around the world to find the last snow-covered mountains.
– Climate change is clearly visible – it is an extremely snow-poor year and this may lead to having to move the reindeer to the northwest earlier than usual.
After the adventure in the Swedish mountains, Zuckerberg's luxury yachts continue towards Svalbard according to the port's arrival lists.
On Monday, he was in court in Washington DC to defend Meta's purchase of Instagram and Whatsapp, which according to the US Competition and Consumer Protection Authority has created a monopoly.
DN has sought Mark Zuckerberg through Meta's press service.
Criticism of heliskiing for several reasons
At the end of March, Professor Johan Rockström, among others, called for a ban on heliskiing in an opinion article in Expressen, due to high emissions, destruction of sensitive nature and the fact that the activity itself is dangerous.
In March, two men died in an avalanche accident in Abisko during a heliskiing excursion. The organizer is now suspected of causing death to another person, among other things.
Many Sami villages elsewhere are experiencing major problems with heliskiing on their land.
In the areas currently in question, several people DN spoke to say that heliskiing must be said no – regardless of whether there are reindeer in the area at the time or not. The risk, they say, of allowing one operator in is that more will gradually join, who will later run tours where reindeer are present."
Can't go skiing with the plebs, no.
That's 0% surprising. FB had always been about making girls feel bad. It's in its sorce code
Facebook started as a Hot or Not website. Fucking creepy.
YouTube also started because the founders wanted to see the Janet Jackson nipple slip. (Which fuck them for that.)
Teenagers should not be on social media. I rest my case.
Not just teenagers. Facebook and quite a few others should outright be banned. Not only they are scientifically proven to be a mental health catastrophe and a political threat to democracy, it's also pretty clear now that both these things are part of their design, not bugs or unintended emerging properties.
Facebook actively contributed to the genocide in Myanmar, and did basically nothing about it because they didnt want to hire more moderators that spoke the language, so that they could adequately remove pro-genocidal content
Ok, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Arguing like this is kinda pointless.
I don't think it will be possible to get them off social media (or the internet in general), so you need to find ways to make it work.
E.g. minors can not be advertised to, no algorithmic content, no doom-scrolling, and heightened data protection. I think teenager should get access to as much as possible to reduce the "risk" of them trying to go around it. "Their" version of social media might even be the superior one in the end.
If the world wasn't on fire at the moment, people could calmly discuss possible solutions and propose laws in every country to actually protect their children from e.g. the stuff mentioned in the linked article. Sadly, this isn't going to happen ...
The thing is that social media have an oversized influence that makes a calm discussion of possible solutions very hard to have. When the US recognized the implications of letting a foreign power exert so much control over their people, they tried banning TikTok, or breaking it up so their US operation would be under US control.
Facebook should also be split and its EU operation purchased by a European company, that could then spend more time implementing the other changes you mention (doom-scrolling, data protection) and less time lobbying to get all these pesky EU regulations removed.
And yes, it does feel heartbreaking to count the US as a threat to national security, but China has never threatened to annex Greenland with military force, so what would have been paranoia and extreme anti-americanism last year is now the sensible, level-headed thing to do.
Ya!
Important to keep a semi-reasonable option in the major app stores, unless we want Social-Media-Tor dot Mirror or something to become the new hotness
How isn't it possible? Just don't give them phones, it's not that complicated
No one should
They shouldn't, but also PSA to any parents but modern parenting advice typically is to let your kids use social media if they choose, and guide them through the social and emotional difficulties with good communication. Don't blanket ban it because they'll just use it anyways without guidance, and be unprepared the moment they turn 18.
It's a case of: 99.9% of kids are smoking cigarettes so yours will too. Better to show them how to use a weekly cigar without inhaling, than just ban it which won't work.
Humans should not be on social media.
Fixed.
That's sounds like blaming teens for the actions of the adults behind Facebook.
I wish I could ban old people from it as well because when their mental processing ability declines, so does their ability to detect bullshit news from bots
I hearby petition an amendment for an expansion of the child protective laws to widen the definition of abuse, neglect, and reckless abandonment of children to include:
"letting children browse without ad blockers"
Advertising targeted towards minors needs to be banned.
As with basically everything bad in the US, it’s another reminder that Reagan was a human shitstain.
Your classic 80s cartoons were toy commercials. Candy, toys, cereals started being marketed directly to children.
And I genuinely loved all that stuff as a kid, usually liking the ad (e.g., TMNT cartoon) more than the toys (e.g., TMNT action figures).
As your typical Lemmy user who loves Linux and hates advertisements, I sometimes have to remind myself about that when my son is watching today’s dumb kid shows. Teaching him about the systems in play rather than isolating him from it has been working well IMO.
The bonus is that he doesn’t watch full-on advertisements and commercial breaks like we were forced to in the 80s when it was live TV or no TV.
All ads suck, but ads based on user rather than content go too far.
Advertising should be illegal.
Wonder how much of a bonus the sick fuck who pitched that got for the idea?
Probably nothing. Most likely, a paid consultant to give ideas. And if it was a worker, they were just doing their job and at most got a "great job, keep up the good work," praise email.
Who the fuck comes up with this stuff?
The most generous assumption is that they use statistics to determine correlations like this (e.g., deleted selfies resulted in a high CTR for beauty ads so they made that a part of their algo). The least generous interpretation is exactly what you're thinking: an asshole came up with it because it's logical and effective.
Either way, ethics needs to be a bigger part of the programmers education. And we, as a society, need to make algorithms more transparent (at least social media algorithms). Reddit's trending algorithm used to be open source during the good ole days.
This is the sort of thing machine learning algorithms are pretty good at at.
Coupled with however many millions of interactions a day, you would have no problem correlating changes to your algorithm against increases in revenue.
But. It’s often not that impressive. Humans are equally good at noticing patterns.
All it takes is for one person at FB to see their wife or daughter delete a post, ask them “why did you delete that post” and take away from the response of “It made me look fat” to go “there’s a new targeted ad that’ll get me a bonus”.
In a similar vein, 80% of your banks anti-fraud systems isn’t deep learning models that detect fraudulent behaviour. Instead it’s “if the user is based in Russia, add 80 points, and if the account is at a branch in 10km of Heinersdorf Berlin, add another 50…. We’re pretty sure a Russian scammer goes on holiday every 6 months and opens a bunch of accounts there, we just don’t know which ones”.
I'd bet on it being algorithmic from Facebook because leaning into algorithms is part of that company's culture. A bunch of manual tweaks require maintenance, though it wouldn't surprise me if someone was thinking about this when deciding that deleted selfie should be a different signal to the algorithm than deleted picture of cat.
People who traded morals for money.
The kind of person whose past probably includes more than a few vivisected animals.
Per Careless People, the recent memoir that this article pulls from & facebook has been trying to kill, this was one of the many unethical advertising schemes that ultimately traces back to Sheryl Sandberg. A woman who didn't allow her own children to use fb because she knew she was making it a toxic capitalist hellscape.
Happy I got AdNauseam after uBlock Origin. Deleted my facebook a year ago, shit is an AI slopfest built upon the greed and manipulation of every part of the chain. Defcon 31 has a good talk that brings this up. "Disenshittify or die" by Cory Doctrow, cann recommend to watch.
I support the use of AdNauseam. Not sure if there are any more extreme alternatives, I now choose to be actively hostile towards advertising/tracking rather than just passively blocking it.
My dad has been talking about wanting something like AdNauseam for years, i was very happy when i found it. The extra mile would probably be to expand it with a VPN and constantly spam clicks, clear cache, switch IP and obfuscate data. Now we just wait for someone with enough time to build it...
I stopped using mainstream social media in 2019 but my accounts are still active so I can snoop on random people I went to college with and holy shit every time I get on Facebook it's so much worse on ways I don't even understand. Most recently I got on to look at something and my feed was completely unrecognizable because it was all AI generated slop from pages I have never heard of and not any updates from people I know. It's crazy what people will accept if it's done slowly enough I guess. I legitimately don't understand why anyone would use Facebook as it exists today. At least when I quit I could at least understand why people used it.
The more time you spend glued to your screen the less you notice slow changes. I assume this is part of why user retention is so important...
What's AdNauseam?
An extension of uBlock Origin. It does the same thing but also clicks on every ad before it removes it.
Facebook... now even more toxic than previously known!
This type of advertising isn’t new. There is that famous (although the claims from the father have been questioned) New York Times article written by Charles Duhigg in 2012. A father of a teenage girl in Minnesota got upset for receiving coupons from Target for infant care related products. As the story goes, he later learned his daughter was in fact pregnant. It turns out Target was using some predictive algorithm to identify would-be mothers and straight up sending them coupons for infant care products. It seems ever since this article was published that they stopped doing this in such a direct manner. Again, there have people who questioned the validity of the claims for this specific story, but Target did confirm they were doing this.
My doctor's office (allegedly) handed my info to a plastic surgery clinic so they could send me a "happy 40th birthday, now fix your sagging bullshit!"-email the literal day I turned 40.
Needless to say that put a damper on things.
People have been doing evil shit for money since the invention of money. These days it's just automated.
I'd call my former Dr's office and flip my shit. Them giving out your info may have been a HIPAA violation. You should really follow up and harass the fuck out of them.
Uh that’s new doctor time
Don't normalize this
I think I read somewhere that that was apocryphal, but it strikes me as 100% plausible. It doesn't even have to be a matter of "write a system that detects pregnant women via their purchase history and send them coupons for maternity stuff" I think Amazon's Frequently Bought Together feature could get it done. The same algorithm that suggests a tacklebox and some lures when you have a fishing pole in your shopping cart might recommend diapers and formula to those who buy maternity pants.
Goddam I had to read that headline 3 times before I understood the implication!
That is outright disgusting, and such practices ought to be outlawed.
Or as Trump would say, very cool and very legal way to make money.
Be aware that the companies would have paid Facebook handsomely to identify users in this way. The world we live in has a sickness with greed for money at its heart.
That's some cartoon villain level shit jfc
Remember: someone went out of their way and put effort into programming this.
An entire team.
A study published in a medical journal showed that Facebook (primarily) along with other social media was responsible for the rise in teenage suicide in girls. Let that sink in.
I 100% believe that Facebook and friends are contributing to this trend but it's important to note that the linked study does not conclude that causation is present:
There is an independent association between problematic use of social media/internet and suicide attempts in young people. However, the direction of causality, if any, remains unclear. Further evaluation through longitudinal studies is needed.
Dystopian as fuck
Just evil but you’ll never see anyone punished for it.
lol, Jesus. It is like what a screen writer would come up with for a movie that contained a terrible company run by terrible people doing stuff so outlandishly terrible everyone watching would think "the absurdity of the terrible is how you know it is made up".
Why do we as a species hate teenage girls so much?
We don’t hate them, it’s just that capitalism has found them to be an easy and vulnerable target for manipulation.
I agree.
I feel like the powers that b have people working overtime to ensure that most Western women feel like they need to consume to be accepted by their peers.
What's particularly sad is it's the exact opposite. That culture of consumption also comes with an aura of exclusivity. Most of these girls are miserable because they've been conditioned to consume as much as possible while thinking anyone who consumes less isn't good enough for them.
It's really good for putting them to work, not so good for making them or the people around them happy.
It's mot that we hate teenage girls (and women) so much. It's just money. Soulless, apathetic money making.
A teenager is in a vulnerable state. Some more than others. But self esteem, self worth, and existentialism are things that a teenager as, at the very least, a brush with.
An emotionally vulnerable person is more open to suggestion. Religion does this a lot. Advertising is no different.
We don't. You're just more squeamish about seeing them run over with the cold unfeeling tires of capitalism than other groups.
Capitalism can feed by double the negative emotions on them easily.
Gross
Sometimes you can't help but acknowledge the cleverness of evil.
I'm so glad I quit Facebook long ago and also started using uBlock Origin.
even a scathing rant about surveillance capitalism becomes fodder for the machine, as you can clearly see with the ads on this page.
Ads? I can see no ads...
Centralized social media is an advertisement platform that targets advertisements according to information & conduct users feed the platform, and some of those users are teenagers?
They're advertising cosmetics to teenagers unlike ever before in the history of teen-centric media?
Let's not pretend that we don't have this type of thing happen to us. Maybe not beauty products but any time I slip outside of my ad blockers I'm made accurately aware that they're always listening. It's not a coincidence the ads you see, the TikToks, and the Facebook ads. It's just used for adds right now but it should scare the shit out of people.
And tiktok is supposed to be our enemy?
Big tech is our enemy. It doesn't matter if it's facebook or tiktok.
I agree!
Both can be enemies.
both ARE enemies.
I agree. I'm addressing the obvious hypocrisy of big tech
Por que no los dos?
TikTok absolutely does the same kind of thing and worse. Engagement is all that matters. Doesn't matter what kind, what about, or how that engagement is generated.
I'm very skeptical that the Chinese government having your data as an American is worse than the American government and corporations (you know, the people with applicable jurisdiction) having it. Seems more likely to me that American interests just weren't happy about a huge platform of Americans not being under their umbrella of control and censorship. Sure, you could argue that China of course has their own, but the two wouldn't completely overlap, so there were windows where things could be freely and organically discussed and organized by Americans, without American government and corporate interference. Obviously that couldn't be allowed to stand.
That's very nice and cute that you're skeptical, but they're literally doing the same thing, except with a goal of weakening America instead generating more money.
Your skepticism doesn't matter- it's an attack on you, stop excusing it.
Yes there definitely would be an alterior agenda to the reasons for the push to hate on tiktok data fears. But that's not to say that people are any safer (data wise) with US big tech.
The book is very good. Reading it now. The writer starts off with a great story about a shark attack.
If any of the big companies were turned into a human, they would all be Epstein
How did they come up with this idea? Did the algorithm suggest this pattern, or did someone in marketing come up with it?
Another reason I'll never use Facebook. It's been a hellsite for a long time
Fucking hell. That is vile!
Added to idcaboutprivacy (which is open source). If there are any other similar links, feel free to add them or send them my way.
Based and marketing pilled
At some point we need to start criminalizing shit like this and actually holding people accountable.
💯 Big tech companies think they’re above the law.
Thus far, they’d basically be right. Any fines are simply chocked up to “cost of doing business” expenses and since no one wants to either make solid laws against this stuff OR hold them accountable for current ones, they’ll just keep at it.
they ARE above the law, at least it would seem so.
History has shown that they are.
No, they are the system, and the system is held together by the law.
It’s so much bigger than this. It starts young. iPad kids. Strict gender roles. Sexualization of children. Learning from parents who have been conditioned by capitalism, sexism and more. We got little girls that want skincare products and teens talking about plastic surgery. It’s bad.
Agreed though. Punish people for ruining society. I think I read a while ago that France had required social media posts to flag when images have been altered. We need more laws like this too.
As little kids we got like no genderbased education from our parents. When we moved our grandmother got a lot more control and dumped blue boyish stuff on my brother and forbid the girly things. Has never worn a dress since and now is still not willing to wear one
(it could be that us older sisters influenced that he wants to wear dresses too)
And mass sharing of images/videos which has made it so much easier to connect people, specifically in one case I saw today of someone on Telegram sharing child porn. How do you even put the cat back in the box?
Oh you mean fines? Sure here's some money $$.
Meanwhile AD rev is $$$$$. Just the cost of doing business!
Hahahaa