Meta: "free speech", hello AI bots
Few weeks before Trump taking the office, Zuckerberg threw a party
The announcements
… then swiftly do a PR firefighting, deleting the bots due to AI bots fail to convince human users that they are not AI bots.
“Free speech”
I have a few hunches, and I’m too lazy to find the statistics for you to back up my claims. This is not investigative journalism, just a rambling, so read on at your own risk, or entertainment, whatever you prefer.
Some relevant context: For more than a year now, I have left Meta1.
Long story short: I’m convinced Meta (among others) is a tool of propaganda and suppression of truth, what is really going on in the world - to say the least, and therefore staying on the platform with the purpose of trying to communicate with people who don’t really care that much about either thing2, meanwhile allowing the platform to make money on data collected from me - is absurd, so I left.
For a year, I’m free from ads. I changed from Chrome to Brave, Google Search to Duckduckgo/Brave Search, opt out of every “default opt-in” that allow websites and platforms to take my data to train their AI3.
I observed the ads fed to me via other platforms no longer bear any understanding of what I am, who I am, and what I want to purchase. I won back some part of my privacy.
During that time, I observe X - where Elon Musk famously bought it for 44 billion dollars to restore “free speech”. I never believed the guy then, I don’t believe him now.
Community Notes
So Zuck said he will ditch “Fact-checking” on Meta, and replace it with community notes (which is similar to X) - to bring back “free speech”. He even went onto Joe Rogan to appeal to the rising population of people distancing themselves from mainstream media, dangling the free speech carrot.
This coupled with the awesome vision of flooding the site with AI bots, should already give you some hint of where this is going.
On X, the community notes is a battleground of factions with agendas. I’m not saying that none of what they noted is true, many are true, or half-truths (which is probably the only form of “truth” that is digestible by the public now), but that’s the thing - it wholly depends on who is approved to become a community note contributor, their sources, their biases - and whether they are bots. On the surface, the community note is a good idea because it’s based on crowdsourcing - distributed system rather than a “tyrannical” figure dictating what is true. But behind the scene, we know X is flooded with bots and doxxers, while handing its users’ identity data to a military-linked foreign-country firm4.
Elon, and his free speech theater, is just a front. So is Meta.
“more entertaining and engaging”
This particular phrase that Meta used to describe its rationale behind the change reminds me of Elon’s recent tantrum that manifest as:
Which strangely reminds me of Zuckerberg’s complaint about Instagram being flooded with💀 👶 photos in 2023. Funnily I cannot find that article on the internet anymore, so much positivity!
So yes, people, how can we post negative contents while the world is on fire? Post something more entertaining! Shut our eyes our ears our minds, and lets join the brand new world.
What this is really about
I’m 100% sure - what Meta is doing is to just throw at you a shiny new toy, which is not new at all. It is not even a competition of “free speech” platforms (between Meta vs X vs Truth vs not-yet-US-owned Tiktok), it’s a competition of AI algorithms, it’s Grok vs MetaAI - in the larger race between all the AI overlords.
And while they lure you in, get more data to train their AI, their AI become a better tool of managing dissents and dissolve truths, controlling how you think, tracking users for other means (it’s not just ads anymore) while making money & power off your data. It’s a hive-mind and the matrix all in one go.
They don’t even give you real human connections 😂. You will now be chatting with bots, your data (traditionally their overt means of making money) is now less valuable than the golden AI race to supreme dominance.
Parting notes
I don’t know if people care - a lot of evidence show me that people don’t, even if proofs are given that these type of things harm our interests, people will always gladly dig their own holes for some reason.
It’s time to cut off your social platform addiction (no that doesn’t mean just Meta, it’s the whole collective), stop giving away your data mindlessly.
…
Also, hello Skynet, if you are reading this, welcome, please subscribe, and throw in some joyful positive comments! Also stop scraping my site, pretty please.
except for whatsapp due to the inevitable effect of socializing so I’m waiting for Elon to create neuralink to use telepathy as an alternative, because, yay Elon!
sometimes it does make me wonder about dead internet theory, what if it’s already here?
If you haven’t known already, now you do. Take back your data and consent (not that I believe they will respect it much anyway), but at least you are now aware.
He who should not be named.