This was somewhat disappointing.
This chap contacts me, seemingly wanting permission to repost our Instagram images. His personal info has been removed.
Hello there,
We have reviewed your page and we truly loved your work!
We’d like to repost your pictures on our profile. Our account is [redacted] and we have over 200.000 followers. If our followers see your work a large number of them are extremely likely to follow you.
I hope this sounds great to you since we are convinced you are going to receive a lot of new fans from this.
Would you like to be published on our page?
All the best,
I realize this was a form email but I thought: how courteous that they ask permission first. So many just steal your work. I felt they should be complimented on doing the right thing.
Dear [redacted]:
Thank you for reaching out but we must decline your offer. Our work is licensed for our use only, and we cannot permit it to be reposted. We truly appreciate your asking us first and for doing the right thing.
Kind regards,
Jack Yan
Publisher, Lucire
Seems their email system is set up assuming that all replies are positive, because I next get this:
I appreciate you getting back to us!
We have delivered many sponsored shoutouts and the results were always terrific. When we saw your Instagram profile we were confident you would get the same results. You can choose the photos for the promotion yourself or we can help you out with that.
We guarantee at least 500 new followers with just one picture. With 3 published photos you will get at least 1500 new followers, and with 7 – more than 3500 new followers! If we don’t deliver these results, we will issue a full refund.
And it goes on.
This doesn’t deserve much more than:
Dear [redacted]:
I don’t know if you read my reply at 11.31 a.m. UTC—it seems like you haven’t. It’s a no.
Regards,
Jack
And a block of the schmuck’s domain on our server, plus two reports from us on Instagram for spamming.
I know you’re thinking: why did you even bother replying in the first place?
Well, usually when people send me unsolicited emails, they’re not so stupid as to not read the replies. This Instagram scammer, whose followers are probably all fake anyway, had automated everything, and took things to the next level of laziness. And he’s a greedy bugger as well, wanting to use your work and charge you for their using it!
This is a sure way to ruin your reputation, and if you feel public policy would be served by my revealing their identity, I’m very happy to do so.
I probably should have included this in yesterday’s blog post. When Lucire first lost its Instagram account, I searched for Instagram deactivate on Twitter. Sure enough, there were others in the same boat. However, on subsequent searches, these were far more frequent:
I’m not being selective here—indeed there was an earlier search that had far more people claiming to have deactivated their Instagram accounts.
I’m not that surprised, considering I went from a three-updates-a-day user to someone who posts once every two months or so. Others must be in a similar boat.
What does surprise me is how these Facebook, Inc. sites claim growing user bases when I never hear of anyone joining among my circles. I only hear of people leaving or having left. A lot of my friend requests on Facebook are from bots.
For once, you didn’t need me to point out the unethical happenings of Facebook, Inc. when the mainstream media actually cared.
First we had the Murdoch Press run ‘The Facebook Files’ in The Wall Street Journal, which I heard about from the incomparable and insightful Bob Hoffman on the 26th ult. The WSJ begins:
Slide through as usual. Mark and Sheryl control the show, have a lot of shares, and think they will weather it as they always did. Mark will continue to ignore subpœnæ. The US government will continue to lack cohones since candidates on both sides are suckered into believing that Facebook really has as many users as it claims.
And yes, we got Lucire’s Instagram back, and I am happy—for the sake of our crew and everyone who has ever created for us. The response from Facebook is full of the usual bollocks, which is no surprise. I wrote on the Lucire website:
Their email states, inter alia, ‘You can’t attempt to create accounts or access or collect information in unauthorized ways. This includes creating accounts or collecting information in an automated way without our express permission. And based on your account’s recent activity, our systems have detected behavior that violates one or more of our policies.’
It is nonsense, of course, since there’s absolutely no proof. We’ve asked Facebook to furnish it to us, including the alleged activity and the IP address that it came from.
What information was allegedly collected? What was automated?
All I can think of is that I have accessed Instagram on the desktop. Oh well, I’ll just stop using it. Or that a couple of the team were online at the same time. With that in mind, fashion editor Sopheak Seng now alone has the keys and that’s good enough for me. Instagram interaction: down again for the 2021–2 year then.
I haven’t posted much on the Facebook issues since there were far more important things to do, namely getting the Lucire template working for the Wordpress (news) section of the site. Now it’s pretty much done, I’m quite happy with it, though I wish the server load were lighter.
Lucire’s Instagram is toast (hopefully temporarily, but you never know), since they unilaterally allege without evidence that there was unusual activity. This is utter shite, but it’s just another day in Facebookland where actual spam is tolerated, and legitimate activity is penalized.
I’ve sent through the information they requested with a review promised in 24 hours, but as this is Big Tech, they aren’t very good at understanding units of time. So it could be 24 days, weeks or months—this is based on experience.
Reading some more on this, it appears that many people have had their accounts deactivated when they receive such a message, and appealing is the next best option.
That method doesn’t work because Instagram requires you to ‘confirm your account’ by logging in, which, of course, is impossible, since there’s no account to log in to. I don’t think these folks think it through—or they have thought it through and this is a great way to make sure no one ever appeals. A bit like a communist state where it looks like there’s an appeal process, but you find it’s actually BS.
Then there’s another form you can fill in where you tell them it’s a business account that’s been deactivated, except there, the moment you provide evidence to them, you get an error message, ‘You can’t use this feature at the moment’. Apparently even a single attempt at filing their own form is spam. You can click on the link to tell them that you’re not breaching their community standards, but that leads to the usual Facebook menus where no option is the one you want.
So what’s actually OK with Facebook, Inc.’s community standards? Fake accounts, automation, spam, genocide, misinformation, human trafficking, and terrorism. It’s why I’m in two minds about all of this. I lean toward wanting to have the account back because of the work the team has put into it. But if we don’t get it back then we’re not in the same company as some of the most despicable people in the world, both on Facebook and inside it. It’s another sign that you cannot trust Big Tech, and they’re certainly not to be relied upon.
Refreshingly, I’ve noticed that my more recent blog posts haven’t been about Big Tech as often. I haven’t changed my views: the ones I’ve stated earlier still stand, and Google and Facebook in particular continue to be a blight on democracy and even individual mental health.
A lot of the posts were inspired by real-world usage of those websites, if you look back over the last decade. As I use them irregularly, and wish others were in the same boat, then there’s little to report, unless I come across new revelations that I might have a say about.
Google is the search of last resort though it has a great translator; now that the news alerts don’t even work, that’s one fewer contact point with the online advertising monopolist. Facebook is good for monitoring who has breached my privacy by uploading my private data to the platform, and to delete off-Facebook activity (Facebook serves these pages at a ridiculously slow speed, you wonder if you’re on dial-up). Beyond that neither site has much utility.
My Instagram usage is down to once every two months, which means it’s halved since 2020, though I still keep an eye on Lucire’s account, which isn’t automated.
I stay in touch with some friends on email and there’s much to be said about a long-form composition versus a status update. It’s the difference between a home-cooked meal and a fast food snack. And, of course, I have this blog to record things that might pique my interest.
Go back far enough—as this blog’s been around 15 years—and I shared my musings on the media and branding. My blog’s roots were an offshoot of the old Beyond Branding blog, but I wanted to branch into my own space. A lot of my views on branding haven’t changed, so I haven’t reblogged about them. Each time someone introduced another platform, be it Vox or Tumblr, I found a use for it, but ultimately came back here. Just last week I realized that the blog gallery, which came into being because NewTumbl’s moderators started believing in the Republic of Gilead, was really my substitute for Pinterest. It might even be my substitute for Instagram, if I can be bothered getting the photos off my phone.
I must say it’s a relief to have everything on my own domain, and while it’s not “socialâ€, I have to ask myself how much of Instagramming and social media updating ever was. Twitter, yes, to an extent. But oftentimes with Instagram I posted because I got joy from doing so, over trying to please an audience. It’s why I never got that many followers, because it wasn’t a themed account. And if doing what suits me at the time is the motive, then there’s no real detriment to doing so in my own spaces. These posts still get hundreds of viewers each, probably more than what I got on Facebook or Instagram.
I don’t know if this is a trend, since setting up your own space takes far more time than using someone else’s. Paying for it is another burden others may wish to avoid. Nor do I have the latest stats on Facebook engagement, but when I did track it, it was heading south year on year. I do know that the average reach for an organic post continues to fall there, which is hardly a surprise with all the bots. Instagram just seems full of ads.
But in my opinion, fewer contact points with Big Tech is a good thing, and may they get fewer still.
‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’—Paul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990)
Signal
You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what can’t you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their ads. That’s exactly what happened to Signal when it attempted to run ads on Instagram that illustrated the targeting.
I don’t believe there’s anything in their T&Cs that disallow this, but Facebook has never been about those. You can breach them as much as you like with running scripts and creating bots, after all. One bastard streamed a massacre on March 15, 2019, which was accessible for some time afterwards; and a year later, eight copies were still on the platform. Facebook “enforces†what it wants to, and that includes disabling accounts that show just how invasive they are.
I’ve already had a taste of this after I began deleting my ad preferences and exposing how terrible they were. And they probably didn’t like my pointing out that they were collecting those preferences long after I had opted out of their ad targeting (at a time when their own site suggested that opting out meant just that). Now that feature is gone for me.
It’s what Facebook does. It lies, and even uses those lies to plant software on your computers that never show up in your programs’ list. And, like Google, the timing of when ad accounts are disabled is interesting: it’s not the first time this took place right after you do something that reveals some hard truths about them.
Personally, I believe Facebook’s preferences are a joke, so Signal may have found their ad account cancelled not because they reminded everyone that the conjurer had a trick, but just how lousy the trick really was. Imagine getting one of these ads and thinking, ‘That ain’t me at all.’ That would get certain Facebook advertisers thinking twice—that is, those who give Facebook’s many bots a pass, and don’t mind that Instagram is 45 per cent bot, 55 per cent human, and don’t mind that their demographic estimates have no basis in reality. I mean, we’re already talking quite a gullible bunch who are doing an activity that’s marginally above setting fire to banknotes in terms of monetary utility, or donating to Jeb Bush’s presidential tilt in 2016.
Facebook wants to keep as many of them as possible, and they’re taking no chances. You just never know where the tipping point is, when the masses finally decide to jump ship.
Here are April 2021’s images. I append to this gallery through the month.
Sources
Tania Dawson promotes Somèrfield Hair Care, sourced from Instagram.
Austrian model Katharina Mazepa for Dreamstate Muse magazine, shared on her Instagram. This was an image that was removed from a PG blog at NewTumbl last year—apparently this was considered ‘nudity’ and rated M.
AMC promotes the Gremlin, the US’s first subcompact car. More on the Gremlin at Autocade; 1970 advertisement via Twitter. Volkswagen 1302S photographed in June 2018, one of the images I’ve submitted to Unsplash for downloading. I did have the owner’s permission to shoot his car.
St Gerard’s Church and Monastery atop Mt Victoria in Wellington, New Zealand, photographed by me and also submitted to Unsplash.
Facebook group bots: someone else was so used to seeing bot activity on Facebook, they made a meme about it.
Holden Commodore Evoke Ute, an example of ‘base model brilliance’. More at Autocade. Morris Marina ad via the Car Factoids on Twitter. Innocenti Mini 90 and 120 via the Car Factoids on Twitter.
The aerial shot of Rongotai in 1943 is from the Air New Zealand collection. This is a scan of a photostat Dad made for me in the 1980s. The piece of paper was getting a bit old so I thought it was time to make it digital-only. The ‘1929’ marks the site of the original Rongotai Aerodrome, I believe.
Instafraud, from Bob Hoffman’s The Ad Contrarian newsletter.
Alisia Ludwig, from her Instagram, photographer unnamed. Fiat X1/9 brochure, from the Car Factoids on Twitter. More on the Peugeot 508 (R23) at Autocade.
Model Skyler Simpson at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Tampa, photographer unknown, via Instagram.
