this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024

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Here's the column Meta doesn't want you to see: Read the Kansas Reflector's piece about Facebook's climate change ad policy (www.thehandbasket.co)

submitted 7 months ago by psychothumbs@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 45 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Imagine my surprise when I attempted to “boost” a post on Meta’s Facebook to begin our online promotional efforts — and the company summarily rejected it.

Why? According to the automated response I received, the post “doesn’t comply with our Ads about Social Issues, Elections or Politics policy.”

Apparently, Meta deems climate change too controversial for discussion on their platforms.

I had suspected such might be the case, because all the posts I made prior to the attempted boost seemed to drop off the radar with little response. As I took a closer look, I found others complaining about Facebook squelching posts related to climate change.

I can imagine it started with climate change denialists, but its probably way too much benefit of the doubt for the company that knowingly swung opinion to trump based on russian assets in 2016.

[–] boredtortoise@lemm.ee 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Joel Kaplan

[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 8 points 7 months ago

What a nightmare of a person.

[–] nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 40 points 7 months ago (1 children)

And people continue to say that defederating from Threads is premature/uncalled for...

[–] qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think there's room for philosphical differences here though. One can acknowledge Meta being evil but not advocate for defederation.

The standard federation analogy is to that of email. Google has shown themselves to be evil at times (prone to enshitification at the very least). But if my email provider drops support for any email from gmail.com, well... that's kinda not a good thing.

Obviously ActivityPub is not email, but still, I think it's a somewhat nuanced issue.

And with regards to the EEE issue, I'm personally not convinced of any threat. Slack embraced IRC then killed support, and no harm was done that I'm aware. XMPP always gets trotted out as an example, but I think it's a weak argument at best, disingenuous at worst.

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I don’t want ads getting federated to my instance.

There’s not any room for philosophical debate on that point for me.

There’s a lot of other reasons to not federate with Threads, but that one is the only one I need to cite to realistically appeal to literally any and all fediverse users with at least a couple neurons in their skulls. And it’s definitely the only argument I need to cite to an instance admin who’s running a lemmy container on their home server.

[–] msage@programming.dev -4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Ads are the absolute least problematic thing about Meta.

Unmoderated content, a literal firehose of absolute vile stuff is my biggest fear.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

That's what the block function is for.

You can block the problem users.

You can block communities that attract problem users.

You can even block entire instances of communities that attract problem users (on your own, without the instance choosing for you).

The Fediverse isn't completely unmoderated, but it's not hella huge either. Plenty of moderation issues due to lack of having mods available 24/7 already exist. Just a few weeks ago, CSAM was being spammed all over the place and it took almost an entire day for action to be taken.

I for one am not in favor of giving my ability to curate my experience myself up to have someone else choose for me, so in almost every case I would be against defederation from the admin level.

[–] msage@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Instances like threads.net?

Moderation might be lacking now, but it will become unmanageable after.

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Of course. I'm not advocating for Threads to not be blocked by those who don't want it. I'm just not in favor of someone else making that choice for me. If they become a problem, I can block it myself. I don't need or want to be babied by the admins/instance operators.

[–] msage@programming.dev 1 points 7 months ago

So make your own instance then?

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 months ago

Oh, for sure. But you missed part of what I was saying.

Regardless of where you fall on the political ideological spectrum or how you use social media - or really, anything else about you - I’m pretty confident that nobody wants to have ads force fed to them, so that’s a very easy point to unify on.