Best thing I've done: delete Facebook/Meta. It was very difficult because you kept coming back... Think I "deleted" 20 times and still crawled back to login. Yeh....

So I came up with a plan to purposely delete and lock myself out of it.

This was like 5 yrs ago, I didnt have much uploaded photos so the process was easy. First, I changed the email on Facebook/Meta to a temporary one. Then I went further to use some random password create a new password.

Then I deleted the account with that temporary email and random password and closed the browser. Finally, I nuked my entire OS and reinstall a new one, just in case if the cache contains data about the email and password.

Different applications employ different strategies for sifting content.

Facebook (and Google) pivoting to pure engagement bait was a more recent development, closer to 2018+, and synced up with their AI obsessions.

Nah, and cool opinion.

As someone else wrote, why should anyone put much confidence in "some giant/evil megacorp"?
They're not a philanthropic organization & they're not real authorities.
We can expect them to act in their own interest.

If content is truly illegal or harmful, then the real authorities should handle it.
Simply taking down that content doesn't help real authorities or address credible threats.
If it's not illegal or harmful, then we can block or ignore.

People already curate their information offline.
It seems reasonable to expect the same online.

That's hilarious.

Do we really like people, though?

Tbf, having a central authority dictate the truth to you ain't so great.

I don't think the phrase "third-party fact checkers" (plural) implies a central authority.

Neither is having classes of people who you aren't allowed to offend.

Facebook can't stop you from offending people. What they can do is make it slightly more difficult by disallowing slurs, etc.

No newsgroups? No IRC?

There are speech police in the real world. Workplaces don't allow you to use slurs or to harass your co-workers. That's just one example. In fact, any social group that I can think of will punish you for saying something. Some are more lenient than others, but every one has a line that you cannot cross.

No text. ASCII was a mistake. HTML is heresy.

I found I wasn’t getting anything out of it so I just stopped using it, after three months I just deleted it. Facebook legit sucks, like it’s nothing but ads and garbage so it felt super easy to get rid of for me. I also figured if there’s pictures there they’re also already on my phone and if they’re not it’s not like I know which ones to miss them, like it if I don’t know it exists anymore I can’t actually miss not having it so I just straight up chucked the whole thing in the trash. I’ve had zero interest in going back. I think years ago it would have been harder but now? There’s literally nothing of value to bring me back

Idk I’ve never considered forums where you talk to strangers to be social media. If I don’t know anyone it’s not “social” to me, it’s one step away from talking to myself to be on a site like Lemmy or Reddit

Friends don’t let friends use Facebook[1].

[1]Corporations are the only ‘persons’ it’s acceptable to explicitly deadname.

True which is why I think an upvote/downvote system is the best form of moderation. Of course there are things you cannot allow, but it’s mostly the illegal stuff. I’m for low moderation, not no moderation. Facebook et al were not doing low moderation, it was heavy handed and unnecessary.

Remember when, at the dawn of the decade, conservative media would whine about "BIG TECH CENSORSHIP!"?

Those were the days. /s

There are speech police in the real world. Workplaces don’t allow you to use slurs or to harass your co-workers.

That "speech police" traces to the government in the form of labor laws & regulations in the remit of the EEOC, eg, Title 7 of Civil Rights Act, Age Discrimination in Employment Act, Americans with Disabilities Act.
Employers didn't conceive of such workplaces policies on their own to invite lawsuits & put targets on their backs.

These laws do not apply to social media as a communication platform.
Offensive expression doesn't deny equal access/opportunities to platform resources they are under any legal obligation to provide.
Should we put much confidence in social media companies voluntarily assuming unnecessary obligations just because?

It never made sense.

any of the popular social media is now heavily infested with propaganda bots or fake promoted slop.

niche forum and sparse space like lemmy are the only thing left to have any decent interactions.
even lemmy.world was heavily brigaded during election.

FB at least did a mediocre job at curbing hate speech. Then the progressive backlash against genAI broke the techbros so much they went full fash, since 2023.

Yes and no.

Yes people are this stupid. But also bot networks. But also alt accounts. And many of those stupid people let the algorithm to pick them their political views, which is manipulated by both the bot activity and the platform holders.