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 […]
Read More… from Lucire’s Instagram account is gone, for no reason
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 […]
Read More… from My first tech post in a while: how I use my social-computing time
We all know what will happen. This is one of two fakes who have sent me a Facebook friend request this week. The first was given the all-clear despite having spam links; and no doubt this will be judged to be perfectly acceptable by Facebook. (In the meantime, a post from Lucire that featured the […]
Here’s a screenshot from the new members of one of my Facebook groups—actually the only public one I still have. Since Facebook lets spammers join now, we have to block them manually. Their posts don’t make it through to the group as we have safeguards there, too. But I’m not going to let them inflate, […]
If someone who has never been authorized to have a role on a Facebook page can have full admin access to it, then it stands to reason that a legitimate owner of a Facebook page cannot do what she needs with it. That’s exactly what happened to my friend Holly Jahangiri, who has a […]
Read More… from Scheduling posts on Facebook and Instagram? Forget it, it’s not worth the trouble
At the beginning of July I noticed Facebook had changed its reporting options. Gone is the option labelled ‘Fake account’, replaced by ‘Harmful or spam’. It’s a small change that, I believe, is designed to get Facebook off the hook for failing to remove fake accounts: since you can’t report them, then you can’t say […]
Read More… from Facebook continues to give in to fake accounts, much like the UK with COVID-19
I was surprised to find that I could access my Facebook advertising preferences again, after the section stopped working in January 2019. What was there was still way off, in June 2021, but it’s nice to be able to edit (read delete) them again after two-and-a-half years. Things move slowly in Menlo Park when it […]
Why are there antitrust or monopoly laws? Why is the usual interpretation of the Chicago School really, really bad for the United States? Umair Haque’s latest post spells it out pretty well, in my opinion. Just an idea: let’s not import any of their dangerous ideas into our society, or allow their ever-growing giants […]
Read More… from Facebook goes even more pro-bot with change in group policy
Just another day dealing with US tech firms then. When I signed up to Anchor, there was no mention of Google Podcasts, so I was very surprised to find later that I was syndicated there. Can you remove yourself? Anchor: ask Google! Google: ask Anchor! All that money (Google, not Alphabet, […]
Read More… from Classic example of tech firms passing the buck
This is a pretty typical story: find fault with Big Tech, try to alert the appropriate people in the firm, get fired. Julia Carrie Wong’s excellent article for The Guardian shows a data scientist, Sophie Zhang, find blatant attempts by governments to abuse Facebook’s platform, misleading their own people, in multiple countries. Of course […]