Consumer advocates demand Safety by Design for all instead of social media bans

The vzbv investigated Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube: Addiction-promoting mechanisms and dark patterns endanger minors despite the DSA.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Consumer-advocates-demand-Safety-by-Design-for-all-instead-of-social-media-bans-11341975.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

#DigitalServicesAct #Facebook #Instagram #Netzpolitik #Snapchat #SocialMedia #TikTok #Verbraucherschutz #YouTube #news

Another, slightly more interesting design choice: Facebook's "feeling" that you can add to a post to say how you are feeling.

1. How was the list of feelings decided? There are a lot. Some of them -- "naked"?? -- are pretty strange. There are many negative ones. How was that list generated? What didn't make the cut? In what ways does that list reflect WEIRD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World) culture? American culture? Silicon Valley culture? The affordances and limitations of English, linguistically?

2. Once you have the list, in what order do you present the feelings? That will affect which feelings people choose, and hence bias their communicated feelings.

3. Why can't I just type in the feeling I want to declare? For example, today is the solstice and I made a post about it. I wanted to say that I feel "tilted" (maximum tilt towards/away from the sun!) or "light" (maximum daylight -- for northern hemisphere folks, anyway) or some similar, somewhat silly thing. But I can't.

#design #ethics #software #facebook #ux #ui

Alt...

The popup you see on Facebook when selecting how you are feeling for a post. The top four choices are: happy, blessed, loved, and sad.

Reddit — It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests

"We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently."

🤯 https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

#reddit #wikipedia #quora #facebook #ai #spam #manipulation #aisearch #aislop #research #chatgpt

Rank One, whose board includes a former CIA deputy director and a former FBI science chief, supplied face recognition to Meta for internal development of its smart glasses app.

Alt...

Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

Cool cool cool. Good times out here I guess... 😒

"When dozens of #Jewish girls emerged from a storm drain in #Nyack, #NewYork, Wednesday after becoming lost on a #school trip, local officials described the episode as a fortunate ending to a potentially dangerous situation.

On #socialmedia, however, the incident quickly drew a slew of #antisemitic comments.

“They can’t help it. Roaches and rats love the sewers,” wrote one #Facebook user on a post by the #Rockland Daily.

“Those tunnels were promised to them 3,000 years ago,” another user wrote, referencing the common online antisemitic phrase ridiculing the Jewish connection to #Israel.

Many of the comments also referenced the 2024 incident at the #Chabad-#Lubavitch movement’s world headquarters in #CrownHeights, #Brooklyn, in which a group from the movement attempted to dig an unauthorized tunnel beneath the building.

“From the tunnels in Brooklyn to the tunnels in nyack! The black coats never disappoint[...]"

https://www.jta.org/2026/06/11/united-states/after-dozens-of-jewish-girls-get-lost-in-ny-creek-tunnel-antisemitic-comments-follow-online

Meta's Disastrous Month. Privacy, Security and Trust issues abound... they need to be shut down.

#News #TechNews #Meta #Privacy #Security #Trust #Facebook #Instagram #WhatsApp

https://youtu.be/NNmXlHpEN7c

Daily podcast: Meta's Disastrous Month. Privacy, Security and Trust issues abound... they need to be shut down.

#News #TechNews #Meta #Privacy #Security #Trust #Facebook #Instagram #WhatsApp #podcast

https://soundcloud.com/nickaesp/dmm

@AwetTesfaiesus danke

Bislang beste Zusammenfassung der Problematiken von #Meta, #Facebook, #Instagram, #TikTok und Co., #Zensur und #Selbstzensur und somit Manipulation der öffentlichen Meinungsbildung.

Deswegen #unplugBigTech und #DIday und ab ins #Fediverse!

Das Video von @morpheus bei #PeerTube

https://tube.the-morpheus.de/w/a7Bk5Gsp7oRzyRLkdPXjJ5

#Meta will use your activity on other websites to personalize your feeds

https://www.theverge.com/tech/946744/meta-website-activity-personalize-feeds

#privacy #Facebook

Meta removed facial-recognition code from its smart glasses app days after reports revealed systems designed to identify people through biometric signatures. 👓
The reversal followed public scrutiny, but questions remain over future deployment plans and any data collected during internal testing. 🔒

🔗 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/victory-meta-strips-facial-recognition-code-smart-glasses-app-after-public-outcry

#TechNews #Meta #FacialRecognition #SmartGlasses #Biometrics #Privacy #Surveillance #DigitalRights #Transparency #Security #Technology #AI #Data #Freedom #Rights #Facebook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA_hmtuAPTY

[copypasta]

Did the Algorithm Change Your Decisions? | How Your Feed Was Engineered

Right now, somewhere on the internet, a video is being uploaded.

Within seconds, a system that no one elected, no one audits, and no one fully understands decides whether anyone else will ever see it.

Sometimes, it decides no one should.

And that’s the end of it.

In this episode of Plain Meaning, we examine how the modern internet quietly transformed from a system designed to deliver information… into one that decides what information exists for you at all.

It didn’t happen all at once.

It happened step by step.

Feed by feed.

Platform by platform.

Until nearly everything you see online is filtered through a machine making decisions on your behalf.

We trace how:

• Social media moved from profile pages to infinite feeds
• Facebook’s News Feed shifted from chronological to algorithmic control
• Advertising—not user experience—drove the need to control timing and visibility
• “EdgeRank” introduced the first large-scale automated editorial system
• By 2016, every major platform—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube—had adopted algorithmic feeds
• Recommendation systems replaced direct navigation across the entire internet

But this isn’t just a story about technology.

It’s a story about incentives.

Because once platforms controlled what you saw, they didn’t just control engagement.

They controlled attention.

And once attention became the product, the system began optimizing for something far more powerful than clicks.

We examine what happened next:

• How foreign influence operations exploited algorithmic feeds during the 2016 election
• The role of Cambridge Analytica and its parent Strategic Communication Laboratories in psychological targeting
• The scale and strategy of Russia’s Internet Research Agency
• How fake local news accounts built trust before deploying disinformation
• Why most influence content wasn’t political—but divisive
• How algorithms amplified all of it without distinction

And then we go further.

Because 2016 wasn’t the end of the story.

It was the beginning.

We look at how:

• Algorithmic systems shape not just what you see—but how you think
• Platforms reward emotional, extreme, and addictive content
• Foreign-owned platforms introduce new geopolitical risks
• Systems like ByteDance’s TikTok operate differently across countries
• The same algorithmic architecture can produce completely different realities depending on its objectives

This episode is not about one platform.

It’s not about one political party.

And it’s not about one country.

It’s about the system itself.

Because the algorithm isn’t just recommending content.

It’s acting as an editor.

And most of the time, you don’t even realize it’s there.

By the end of this video, the next time you open a social media app, you’ll understand:

Why your attention isn’t fully yours.

Why the world you see isn’t necessarily the world that exists.

And how to recognize when a machine—not you—is deciding what matters.

#Algorithm #SocialMedia #DigitalMedia #YouTube #Facebook #Instagram #NewsFeed #TikTok #Twitter

[/copypasta]

As someone with an interest in cryptography and, I guess as an extension, tradecraft (shout out to Minnesota Spy Club), I thought it was interesting that the Irish military intelligence agency (formerly "J2") decided to "decloak" in the Irish Times:

• https://www.irishtimes.com/podcasts/in-the-news/the-spy-service-protecting-ireland-inc/ [podcast]
• https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026/04/04/the-spy-is-the-boring-guy-in-a-suit-inside-the-states-military-intelligence-service/ [interview]

It all seems reasonable enough but I don't know about the whole thing about protecting (among other things) "Irish business interests abroad." And then to tell us that they're working for "Ireland Inc.?" IDK. Not really the kind of public image that inspires confidence.

#Spooks #Cryptography #Tradecraft #Facebook #Meta #RegulatoryCapture #Corporatism