IG meme pages rejoice!

+ PewDiePie slams Rogan, Hunter Biden's downtown "it girl" mistress, South Korea livestreams, and the nonstop gay sex party on Mexico City's subway

Dec 04, 2024

Creators call having their content removed by Meta getting “Zucced”

Meta finally admits it Zucced too many posts

After gaslighting content creators for years about their moderation practices, Meta has finally admitted that the company has gone too far when it comes to content moderation. Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, told reporters on a press call on Monday that the platform’s moderation “error rates are still too high” and that the company will attempt to “improve the precision and accuracy with which we act on our rules.”

“We know that when enforcing our policies, our error rates are still too high, which gets in the way of the free expression that we set out to enable,” Clegg said during a press call. “Too often, harmless content gets taken down, or restricted, and too many people get penalized unfairly.”

Clegg’s confession comes after years of aggressive moderation efforts and down-ranking creators who post too frequently about news, politics, or social justice issues. Instagram meme pages and news accounts in particular have suffered as Meta cracked down on “disinformation,” often failing to distinguish obvious humor from legitimate false information.

As The Verge reported, “Meta’s automated systems have become too ham-fisted. Examples of ‘moderation failures’ were recently trending on Threads, which has been plagued with takedown errors in recent months. The company publicly apologized after its systems suppressed photos of President-elect Donald Trump surviving an attempted assassination. And its own Oversight Board recently warned ahead of the US presidential election that its moderation errors risk the ‘excessive removal of political speech.’”

Of course, Meta only conveniently “realized” this problem following Zuckerbeg’s dinner with Trump about a week ago. And, while the company claims that the realization was related to a review of its moderation surrounding content about the COVID pandemic, it’s hard to believe that considering Meta is still down-ranking and shadow banning creators who mention Long COVID, masking, and public health.

Ultimately, I think this is Meta trying to appeal to a new Republican-led administration that has railed against content moderation for years. I think it’s going to be choppy waters for Meta however, because despite what Republicans claim, conservatives actually tend to be just as pro-heavy handed moderation as liberals, they just want different content censored.

I would love to see Zuckerberg actually lean into free expression on his platform while providing users with more robust audience controls and mass blocking features to ensure users can remain safe. Instagram and Threads could be thriving places for journalism and free and open dialogue about important topics and events, but significant changes would have to be made.

Meanwhile, Joe Rogan attempted to give Elon Musk credit for the soon to come moderation rollbacks. “It was looking pretty bleak, I would say, in terms of the direction internet censorship was headed,” Rogan said on his podcast Tuesday. “It seemed like the censorship machine was winning until around the time Elon purchased X.”

Rogan then claimed that he and people like right wing billionaire Marc Andreessen see Musk’s purchase of X was a “fork in the road”, where Musk set a new standard for “free speech” for tech companies, including Meta.

Never mind that nothing about Musk’s ownership of Twitter fosters “free speech” — the platform censors content aggressively and arbitrarily, Musk restricts and permanently bans users he doesn’t politically agree with, and abuse has skyrocketed under Musk, silencing many marginalized users speech— but Rogan, Andreessen, etc are also just completely wrong about this timeline.

In the summer of 2022, well before Musk took Twitter’s helm, Facebook had already begun dramatically scaling back its anti-misinformation efforts, and the tide has been turning against cracking down on “disinformation” for quite a while, especially since the start of the pandemic, when Meta and other platforms began banning many users for posting accurate public health information while allowing conspiracy theories to run rampant.

As Jeff Bercovici at the SF Standard posted, “[Rogan gives] a complete misread of what happened. The swing away from aggressive policing of speech and truth by the platforms began well before Musk bought Twitter, mostly in response to political pressure, but also because it was costly and hard and the culture had shifted.”

What I’m reading

The Nonstop Gay Sex Party on the Mexico City Subway

A journalist rides the last car on the Mexico City subway, where a complex sexual ecosystem of public sex hides in plain sight. Each subway line has its own personality. - The Nation

She Met Hunter Biden One Night at a Club. Then She Fell in Love.

A chance meeting in December 2017 plunged Zoë Kestan, a downtown “it” girl and social media star, headlong into an unpredictable affair. - NY Times

How a Billionaire’s ‘Baby Project’ Ensnared Dozens of Women

Disgraced tycoon Greg Lindberg built a network of egg donors and surrogates. Several say he conned them—and that US fertility clinics helped him do it. - Bloomberg

The New Business of Breakups

After getting dumped (by text), a writer investigates the feverish boom in heartbreak apps, breakup coaches, and get-over-him getaways. - New Yorker

More fun stuff

Forbes just released their latest 30 under 30 list of ~~future criminals~~ industry leaders.

PewDiePie called Joe Rogan “dumb” and says podcasts have “gone too far.”

Restaurant plates are getting tinier.

TikTok has become the new GoFundMe as sick Americans take their shot at the viral lottery to try to pay their medical bills.

A lot of people attempted to make a viral mac and cheese recipe from content creator and chef Tineke “Tini” Younger over Thanksgiving and for most it ended in disaster.

NYT Cooking is using Manychat, the popular influencer tool that automatically DMs people who comment a specific word, to encourage link clicks.

Tastemade has launched a subscribers-only recipe app, called Tastemade Cooking. The app, which has over 12,000 recipes—each with its own how-to video—aims to deepen engagement among the 100,000 subscribers to Tastemade+.

Stephen King is closing down his three radio stations in Bangor, Maine, on New Year's Eve after a 41 year run, citing financial losses and his advancing age.

Cameo launched CameoX, allowing creators to self-enroll in the platform (before, celebs had to be hand picked and approved). “The amount of fame in the world is exponentially increasing,” Cameo CEO Steven Galanis said in a blog post announcing the launch.

Native, a body care brand known for its aluminum-free deodorant, has partnered with Dunkin’ Donuts on a body care collection.

Dove is releasing a body care line with viral cookie shop Crumbl.

Ads might be coming to ChatGPT.

Sabrina Carpenter and Barry Keoghan have called it quits.

Researchers asked 100 people to draw different famous logos from memory and the results are very funny and show which brands are really burned into our brains. You can try it yourself here.

IG is testing out photo collages as a response to Pinterest’s photo collage “Shuffles” app (there is not a product on earth Meta won’t copy!).

Both Texas and Georgia are destroying evidence of all maternal mortality, blocking proof that women are dying from abortion bans.

There’s a TikTok debate happening over whether Apple Martin (Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s socialite daughter) was rude to her debutante ball date. Judge for yourselves.

The Wall Street Journal has hired a new reporter to cover the culture of Wall Street.

I strongly agree with Sam Biddle who responded to a post about AI romance by saying, “anyone who resorts to exchanging messages with software as a source of serious comfort/help in the first place has been basically failed by their healthcare system and/or society itself.”

A good 101 rundown on what the hell has been going on in South Korea.