The Hon Debbie Ngarewa-Packer MP was right when she questioned our government’s decision to ban Tiktok from parliamentary devices. If it’s about foreigners getting hold of data, then why not ban Facebook and Instagram? Last I looked, Tiktok had not, unlike Facebook, been party to any genocides. Parliamentary Services says at least Meta is American […]
Read More… from If you take out Tiktok, then why not Meta, too?
Warner Bros. Even though Twitter is now in its MySpaceX era, I won’t shut my account. I have scripts that run through it, and I don’t wish for some schmuck to come in later and claim my username. Mastodon has taken off this week, my Twitter notifications are at a low, and as I […]
Read More… from I’ve left the data farms but occasionally revisit the Matrix
Not much of my old Drivetribe channel left now Sadly, I was late to the demise of Drivetribe—though as some on Reddit point out, the brand still exists on other channels. But as for hosting the content themselves, that ended in January, and we content creators had till then to get our stuff off. […]
Read More… from Farewell to Drivetribe—and a reminder to keep your own copies
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 […]
Read More… from Instagram scammers are next-level lazy (and greedy)
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 […]
Read More… from Even if they don’t delete you, people are deactivating their Instagram accounts
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: […]
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 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 […]
Read More… from How to get your Facebook ad account shut down: do something honest
I’m still blocked from seeing my advertising preferences on Facebook on the desktop, the only place where you can edit them, something that has plagued them for years and which they’re unlikely to fix. I commonly say that Facebook’s databases are ‘shot to hell,’ which I’ve believed for many years, and this is another example […]
Read More… from A sure way to lose customers: upload their private information to Facebook