Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram on the rise after Meta ends fact-checking | TechCrunch
Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram on the rise after Meta ends fact-checking | TechCrunch
According to Google Trends, related searches like “how to delete all photos facebook,” “alternative to facebook,” “how to quit facebook,” “how to delete threads account,” and “how to delete instagram account without logging in” have become breakout searches, with popularity suddenly increasing by over 5,000% compared to previous periods.
So that is 51 times higher than usual? Am I mathing that correctly?
I wish stories like this wouldn't use percentages this way, and reported hard actual numbers to compare against.
Yeah,
1 + (1*5000%) = 51
Honestly I prefer just writing "51 times more frequent".
Yeah so if it was 100 queries per day before, its now 5100 per day. Or maybe we are both crazy.
And those are real users too. They are intching closer and close to just being a bot hellscape.
So true... When I see 100% more, I interpret it as 2x. But somewhere around, idk, maybe 300% I interpret "300% more" as 3x. I know that's technically not correct, but it's just where my brain goes. I think a good deal of people just throw around "n% more" and "n% as often" interchangeably without much thought.
Luckily, the bigger the number the less of a difference between the two which is aligned with my brain using them the same.
(And obviously, if it's anything technical where it matters I would get clarification.)
I only had to google it because they make it so convoluted to find the delete account button.
i'm so tired of nothingburger feel good 'stories' about search trends
this really is just reddit lite
Eh, it goes harder in some of the bad things about Reddit, but it's better in others. So it's less "Reddit lite" and more discount Reddit.
Super easy, barely an inconvenience. The age of social media needs to die
Once these platforms are perceived as a way for people to make a living somehow, they ain’t leaving. That’s why nice places like mastodon stay niche. Without virality, people don’t see the upside for them. They want a grift they can understand.
That is sounding more and more like a benefit to me. Social media that functions as social media for humans and not just another giant corporate surveillance and marketing machine wearing a fun app costume.
I posted that article on Mastodon. So, yeah...
I hope more people will find that these open source social media sites are much better run. As well, as a much better platform than Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.
Although, I do miss Myspace. The old platform.
I deactivated my Twitter and Facebook accounts weeks ago. I have my friends and family "moved over" to Friendica. They seem to like it so far. I have even posted (on Friendica) a few links of other open source social sites for them to check out.
I'm so happy to be here and read about Zuck, Elon and Google all the time
Will never happen. Those platforms literally push addiction. It’s why the fediverse won’t ever compete imo - there’s no dopamine hit here of likes, # of friends, send a snap right now (or whatever they are called), streaks, etc.
I get it. I left Facebook when they changed the feed like a thousand years ago and I haven’t missed it.
My wife is definitely addicted though. She left it for a year, went back just to check in on family after a friend of hers had a baby and she didn’t know about it. She hasn’t put it down since.
She’s a very family oriented person and everyone is on Facebook. Their family is the type to wake up first thing in the morning and start calling each other.
Within minutes of being up, “Ok kids let’s talk to mamaw. Let’s talk to aunty. Now we’re calling great grandma!” Cousins, aunts, uncles, everybody. They’re always talking.
My family is tight like if something goes wrong, but we don’t talk much otherwise. Sister needs help with a bill, someone’s car breaks down, blah blah blah. We can count on each other, just not to talk.
I get why it means so much to her and why it’s been easier for me. I’ll know my cousin had a kid when I bump into her with it at the grocery store. That’s good enough for my people. :p
Edit:
Not that anyone will see this, but we were talking about it tonight and I was dead wrong. She missed her cousins wedding. That’s why she went back, she’s still very sad about it.
i agree with what you’re saying and i think we’re mostly on the same page here. i just felt it would be worth saying that, from my perspective, the point of the fediverse isn’t to compete with those websites but instead to be an alternative to them. it’s to offer a picture of what social media can be like without dark patterns, extreme surveillance, and constant enshittification. and there is a really comfort in that. it feels really nice to not have to worry about a website or app getting worse every time i use it.
i also feel like the people on here tend to behave more thoughtfully (in general) than people on reddit and other for profit social media websites. and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was in part due to the absence of dark patterns making lemmy feel more relaxed and less high stakes. there’s also a bit of a small town feeling on this website that i kind of like too.
And this is exactly the reason I am here 😃
It comes preinstalled in a lot of phones and cant be uninstalled and in some phones they dont preinstall the main fb app instead they'd have something like 'facebook manager' or 'something service' which only shows up in app list when you select the "show system apps" option.
I've read stories that fb is basically the internet for countries in Africa. It's their version of America Online, but much worse.
In mexico most (if not all) cell service providers give social media for free, ie it uses no data in your phone plan.
What is social media, according to these companies? Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. That's it. Everyone uses Facebook marketplace and WhatsApp for everything, because it's "free".
I think most people don't understand the stranglehold Meta has over a huge portion of the world's population. I'm confident this arrangement is not only going on in mexico.
Thats what internet.org was about, fb partnered with major telecoms in many countries with no net neutrality laws to let people use fb for free and a few other websites but except for wikipedia most were pretty much useless.
It comes preinstalled in a lot of phones
Those are typically carrier-sold phones.
Most unlocked phones purchased directly from the manufacturer (or via a retail store like BestBuy) do not have it pre-installed, and even if it is, its removable.
Just use UAD to disable the service, easy
Dropped Facebook completely in 2018 my mental health was much better for it
that's some glorious schadenfreude
zuck just few hours ago: "people who talk about leaving facebook are just virtue signalling"
Gud gud
I've never had even a single Facebook account, to explain why it's because the UK police once tried to stitch me up and they kept demanding my Facebook account (presumably to fish) I never had one but they would not let that go.
Once I got representation that line of questioning ended but holy hell did they seem to put a lot of emphasis on my non existent Facebook account.
For the curious I was raided due to an anonymous phone (to the mayor's office) call that claimed I was going to shoot up my workplace or something ridiculous.
My belief is the police wanted to impress the mayor so they just wouldn't let it go despite being nonsense until I paid representation to make them behave.
This is actually crazy, on the part of the UK police. I knew the UK government are more like that nosy old granny with binoculars than we have it in the States when it comes to stuff like Facebook and etc, but damn. I will allow that school shooting threats are serious, but in and of itself, actively trying to interrogate someone and demanding their SNS is a new level of invasive imo.
he's replacing it with community notes, which is a good thing. the problem i have with Facebook and Instagram is all the useless junk videos that i didn't ask for and it keeps showing me
Community note: this guy smells and is wrong.
Since Facebook market place is the defacto classified now I keep my account around to buy and sell. My feed is full of AI generated images related to anything I search on market place. Right now it is all trucks because I was looking for truck tires.
i keep seeing dirtbikes climbing hills and fair enough ok
Just because they are calling it community notes doesnt mean that Facebooks notes would work the same way as Xitters notes.
I am now scheduled for deletion.
no fact checking and a ton of bots being added? Sounds like a fantastic place to spend time. /s
I have no clue why anyone takes this seriously or is concerned about this. I have seen maybe three fact-checks during my lifetime on Facebook. That was a long long time ago. I disagreed with two of them and I am not sure if the third one said anything interesting.
Is there a population somewhere I am not aware of, who believes everything they see on Facebook, who will now be ruined by this change?
I dont think fact checking was the main reason, moreso that they decided to allow hate speech (e.g. They're allowing targetted hate against LGBT groups).
Never seen FB disallow fake news or hate speech as long as it is coming from the (extreme) right.
Either they just stop pretending now or irl somehow get even worse?
The anonymous fact-checking is the main thing PEOPLE took issue with. Like, oh I'm supposed to believe your anonymous fact-checkers know better than me or my trusted sources on what's true/false, but you refuse to identify or provide the credentials of those fact-checkers, so their integrity and validity can be certified?
But it's not the anonymous strangers arbitrarily sifting the wheat from the chaff willy nilly, and with no evidence to support their claims, that were the problem /s. , The problem was CLEARLY the people who took issue with an anonymous rando who has the power to declare a reputable source of info is lying, can not be disputed on that front (even in the many instances of them being wrong), and whose credentials can not be verified but is still supposed to be arbitrarily accepted as the supreme arbiter of reality and fiction.
Bought and paid for by a soulless corporation. I'll take "extreme dought" for $500. I was more likely to believe in Santa Clause than an anonymous figure who had no credentials or checks and balances of any kind.
The usual suspects of Gen Boomer and X that first preached to not believe anything on the internet and yet doing exactly that without an external fact check.
Personally for stuff I don't really care, I will always say "Allegedly (...)" before stating something a website says. If the stuff is important (to me or a peer) I might look harder into it.
I don't want to see this human's face again.
"human"
unfortunately yes
I'd like to punchasize his face, for free.
I don't care about Facebook, but Messenger and Marketplace I cannot replace them at all for the moment :-/
Instead of market place I use buy nothing, and offer up, and just give to my local goodwill.
There’s a buy nothing app. It’s a free community run organization for local things that started on Facebook then they made an app and website. It’s all give away stuff but I’ve gotten some really nice & expensive stuff off there and given a lot away too. It’s not as active as their Facebook buy nothing groups, but now maybe that will change. I refuse to use Facebook since I watched my mom turn into a crazy conspiracy trump shit person in 2020.
Ive even made friends with a few people through a few exchanges to them over time on buy nothing, like a nice old lady that I give fruit to from my garden and she makes jam out of it and gives me some back
stop upvoting "news" that only ends up giving more visibility to these clowns
I think Facebook is popular enough, that this kind of news is actually damaging...
Critics see the move as an attempt to cater to the incoming Trump administration and avoid political retaliation,
Give me a break. Since when does the billionaire parasite class have anything to fear from the US establishment?
I'm waiting to see what happens before I make any moves. I've been on Meta apps for over a decade, I don't want to lose the connections if I don't have to.
How many of those connections would you say are actively maintained instead of just passively there?
Those that are actively maintained you can likely send them something like Signal and start chatting on that instead.
I know this got a lot of downvotes, that's fine. Most of my friends are not tech-savvy or young, they're not going to be signing up for Lemmy or Mastodon. I'm not ready to lose touch with them entirely. I have taken steps to limit what info Meta can collect from me and stopped posting there entirely. I check in now and then to see if there's anything big, but that's it.
Meta did not end fact checking.
Meta switched to a system of community notes, which is superior at fact checking than a centralized team of fact checkers.
So community notes can address more instances of misinformation, that part is true.
But if the community provides misinformation as the "note" then it can actually spread and legitimize misinformation.
So superior is definitely the wrong word for it. Perhaps more efficient? But also more likely to reinforce echo chambers.
Superior would be implementing community notes and then having those checked by centralized fact checkers.
Just look at the Proton situation - there will always be soyflakes who will wanna protest even the smallest things that don't fit their agenda.
Cousin that is called voting with your wallet
A valid argument, and a practice that should absolutely be encouraged in and of itself. When it comes to cancel Culture, and weaponizing hearsay and defamation to try to actively sabotage an entire company or a person without evidence or due process, that's one thing I think has gotten out of hand. But the practice of voting with your wallet is your right, healthy for our economy and the businesses that contribute to it, and is not inherently predatory or antagonistic, unlike what Cancel Culture has become.
We all know that in the end only maybe 1 or 2% max will delete their account
Exactly this. Wasn't Netflix going to sink after everyone cancelled when password sharing was banned? But everyone I know just ended up buying extra logins...
That's fine. 1% per uberweird news cycle is the death of facebook.
meh its no longer growing.
I'd delete mine, but I don't have one for 10 years or smth.