Funny, I just signed up for a Facebook account this week after the news,having deleted mine in 2017. In my opinion, they are taking a step in the right direction. Clearly others disagree, which is their right. What isn't someone's right is to dictate truth, which is what Facebook will ostensibly do less of. Bravo
Part of the pushback is because they are still dictating what you can say except for some very particular exceptions which give away their true intentions. You're still not allowed to call someone mentally ill as an insult, unless you're doing it homophobically or transphobically, in which case it's now explicitly allowed.
If they'd removed that rule altogether then it could be handwaved as merely "free speech absolutism", for better or worse, but officially stating that certain minorities are acceptable targets of abuse that's otherwise forbidden is something else entirely.
It’s not a mistake or some kind of ambiguous rule that could be misread. Following is the direct quote from Meta’s new guidelines. You can’t insult people based on:
Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”
They’re carving out specific minorities to exclude them from protections afforded to everybody else.
It’s exactly like saying: “You can’t doxx anyone on our platform, except Jews because that’s political and religious discourse about where heathens live.”
So here we are in 2025, and this barely gets a mention in the press because they’re so overwhelmed by the president-elect pretending to invade Denmark and whatever.
I’m a middle-aged bisexual man. My childhood and early teenage years coincided with the darkest times of the HIV epidemic. At 13 I was deadly afraid of AIDS, and I’m still trying to overcome the internalized homophobia from those times. For years I just tried to blend in, dated women, eventually got married, had children. I thought society had made real progress, but now it’s starting to dawn on me that it’s a mirage like Roe vs Wade or 1920s Berlin, and it can be stripped away at any time. And I feel like a miserable coward for all these years “just minding my own business” and never stepping up to support the community in any way, letting somebody else do the work. That needs to change. I’ll rather be mentally ill than hide in the shadows.
The resurgence in homophobia (amongst other things) is very concerning. Hell, you have people in this very thread that are making homophobic comments openly, attached to their real name and business portfolio. It seems they've stopped even pretending to not be hateful. I can only hope this is a temporary phenomenon.
Yup. The line about the "non serious usage of 'weird'" is another blatant sign of their true intentions. There's no reason to specify that unless you're upset over it because it was used against conservatives.
The new Meta rules have a carve-out that allows allegations of mental illness and abnormality based on gender and sexual orientation, but no other reason.
You’re seemingly making the argument that this is good because those allegations are statistically popular.
If you support freedom of speech, shouldn’t all insults be allowed rather than just those targeted at a specific group?
Lets give them time to cook. It's likely the team refactoring these rules are mostly the same team that was leading the previous censorship. It's going to take some time to open back up.
I consume on social platforms, rather than creating. I was growingly aware of the platform's bias on the content I saw and opted out for reality (as close as one can get to it, anyway). The changes this week are a step in the right direction as other viewpoints are more possible, let alone tolerated.
> opted out for reality (as close as one can get to it, anyway)
I'm genuinely curious to know what about reality warrants "as close as one can get to it". In my experience, every time I close the browser and step outside I'm generally convinced that what I'm experiencing is real.
Precisely. As humans, we use our senses to discover what is true and to what degree. When online, there's always a reality distortion machine running; the question is how much distortion is taking place
Eh, I'm just assuming OP holds views that a lot of people here disagree here with (thus end up getting downvoted), and writes it off as "not allowed to say it" here. That's usually the gist of why people complain about freedom of speech nowadays, regardless of their ideology. Yes, I understand there are billions of exceptions, and I understand how users get banned for "wrong think". But that happens literally everywhere, and all you have to do is to be loud enough to piss of the right people.
Everyone wants to be liked, and search for the venues where they can express their views where they would be a part of majority. Basically the reason why people skew towards echo-chambers, in real and digital life.
> That's usually the gist of why people complain about freedom of speech nowadays
At least in lower-stakes online forums, what really grinds my gears is a lack of transparency, where a site or service doesn't explain the moderation or even hides that any action was taken at all.
Or let’s say, it technically can be said, but you get somehow punished (flagged, downvoted, etc) so you learn not to do it anymore. The incentive is simply not there.
There is a logic, the “community” flags to protect their own interests (financial investments, friends working there, etc).
And since the community is from the same group, they defend the same interests.
The more freely we can talk about a topic, the more genuine and thought-provoking interactions it can create (without intentionally hurting the others obviously).
If you filter too much, you get this LinkedIn-bullshit and it makes a message board super boring, as you live in a closed bubble.
Downvotes don't hurt me. They stop being a disincentive when there is no clear reason for them. It's often people just misunderstanding, misinterpreting or misreading comments and the replies keep flowing anyway.
It's not like you get paid for getting upvoted and a making any kind of joke is usually the fastest way to a downvote.
What about the damage done by the millions of lies that people post on the platform to spread their bigoted agendas? What about how these platforms' algorithms ostensibly promote hatred and shocking material?
Just look at the Rohingya massacre [0] and tell me you're OK with it.
That’s a shallow take. Opting for community notes without any fact checking will transform truth from facts to “loudest voice”. So, who can yell louder will be accepted as the flag of truth, which is very dangerous.
Of course, if you like your propaganda well-done, Facebook will be a great place for that.
I've found X's community notes for the most part to be informative and "neutral", they're usually used to add context to posts when people cut the important parts out.
The feature was not bad when it was first introduced, but I don't know how it fares against brigading and more targeted psyops by bigger actors.
Also are we absolutely sure that community notes have immunity from moderators and they're not manipulated in any way?
Community notes are indeed a good feature at first blush, but considering the current climate of "freedom of speech / post-truth / let's move fast and break society norms", it's more dangerous than a group of allegedly biased fact checkers.
It's a way of deregulating the social media platforms to level of utilities which carry whatever passes through them without prejudice, and shifting blame to the people for believing what they read.
The thing they're designing is very ripe for manipulating people en masse.
You're right, it's a shallow take in response to a straw man of my position. Clearly content moderation is a HARD problem and the decision-makers at Facebook know this better than almost anyone. They made a decision that presumably was in their best interest, of which I happen to support.
Errm, history is full of bad leaders who were elected by people and by democratic means. I won’t start a list here, but their effects on our world is pretty profound.
So, being elected is by no means an indicator of any sort.
Nobody in this thread is stating that Trump is either good or bad, that is a straw man you have created to argue with.
Being elected is obviously an indicator of the will of the people. The platform that leader was elected on includes items that went against the left leaning of third-party so-called fact checking services. This is easily variable by looking at the platform of the winning party and the policies of the so-called fact checkers.
> Nobody in this thread is stating that Trump is either good or bad
That's true, incl. me.
> that is a straw man you have created to argue with.
Did I said or implied Trump is bad? No. What I said is, being elected is not an indicator of goodness of badness of a leader, and said that there's a large list, without giving any names, because goodness and badness is subjective.
> Being elected is obviously an indicator of the will of the people.
Yes. That part is true, too. People wanted that particular flavor this time, and will decide whether they liked the experience or not.
> The platform that leader was elected on includes items that went against the left leaning of third-party so-called fact checking services.
"So-called" from your perspective, so from that point on your opinions are biased, and there's no point on arguing any further.
Of course you're free to vote for whoever you want, and AFAICS, the person you support has won. Congrats. My only hope is what you get in the end won't be more than what you bargained for.
BTW, on that "getting men out of women's sports" thing, watch this video [0]. In the end, performance is enhanced so much, the gap between genders are closed nevertheless. On the other hand, gender in Olympic games are determined with genetic testing anyway, so your looks doesn't have any effect on whom you compete with.
Maybe we should prevent this in the future, so humans can compete with their true potential, not with "monstrous performances" enabled by designer drugs and doping. So there's a whole forest running when people are looking to the wrong tree.
Precisely, you wrote you will see whether Trump is bad:
> Errm, history is full of bad leaders who were elected by people and by democratic means.
You then wrote that being elected is by no means and indicator. It is not an indication of being good or bad, but rather an indication of the will of people. Which in this case, for the fifth time is that men should be out of women’s spaces.
I don’t think this conversation is working. We have very different ways of engaging in debate.
> You then wrote that being elected is by no means and indicator.
Yes.
> It is not an indication of being good or bad, but rather an indication of the will of people.
I did tell "elected by people and by democratic means", which squarely means "this was the will of the people", so we have no disagreements on that front.
> Which in this case, for the fifth time is that men should be out of women’s spaces.
?
> I don’t think this conversation is working.
That's absolutely correct.
> We have very different ways of engaging in debate.
* Trump has explicitly threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg [1]
* Trump has threatened to use the justice system against his enemies
* Trump's 'best mate' (who's about to get a job in government) owns a rival social network
* Facebook banned Trump over the Jan 6th insurrection
* Trump could use the banning of TikTok as leverage
With all that Occam's Razor tells you that an authoritarian leader is taking over the USA and the oligarchy that are the tech-billionaires are lining up behind him lest they feel his wrath.
These are extremely dangerous times for the US. An authoritarian leader paired with an extreme concentration of power (the tech companies). You have something approaching a turnkey feudal system. With willing participants.
Not sure what anyone here gains from a reductive comment like this. In case it wasn't clear, obviously that's not what I'm saying -- I was curious why you'd be OK with a reduction in fact checking when the platform is a means to such despicable acts.
After living in China for 10 years and experiencing true suppression of freedom of speech, the desire of many here in America to silence others in the name of curbing "misinformation" is wild to me. I have no desire to replicate what they have in China here in America. Free speech is a precious thing on this planet. The only acceptable solution to speech one doesn't like or agree with is more free speech. Silencing people that you don't agree with is not something anyone should support.
It's the cult of superficial thought. Hate speech is a small price to pay for the fight against censorship. But there is a not-insignificant amount of people that look at the hate speech, think it should be censored because it's bad, and literally think no further about the potential consequences of censorship.
Yes, lies are bad and dangerous, but censorship is much worse and far more dangerous.
Misinformation is why we ended up in Iraq. Misinformation caused January 6th.
As anti-maskers laid dying in their hospital beds they denounced the misinformation they had been fed. Lets not pretend that misinformation is entirely impotent.
And let’s not pretend like the internet hasn’t exploded the reach misinformation.
How about we settle for a middle ground where Americans are allowed free speech on American platforms but let’s not give foreign actors/governments the same freedom?
Yeah I think this subject is a lot more nuanced than what people like to admit. We shouldn't allow hate speech and misinformation to flourish, but what constitutes as such is in many cases subjective, and leaving that up to corporate oligarchs, or anybody for that matter, is a scary thought.
> In one encouraging sign, some of the most recent attacks failed against users who had activated Apple’s recently introduced Lockdown Mode, which stops some communications from unknown callers and reduces the number of programs that are automatically invoked.
I'm a huge fan of the idea of Lockdown Mode and have it enabled on my iPhone and MacBook, but I don't think it has mass adoption or appeal. It certainly needs some tuning before the masses will adopt it. Specifically, people in your Contacts should have the option to be trusted. Right now, FaceTime calls are blocked from them if they are not in your recent calls (an issue for me as I regularly purge my call history) and iMessage content is blocked (Live Photos, documents, etc).
Is it supposed to have mass appeal? I thought it was for a small number of people who are such high-value targets that an adversary would be willing to burn a zero-day on compromising them.
Fair enough, but some of the protections in Lockdown Mode seem straightforward enough that I'm not sure why they aren't enabled by default. A couple of examples:
1. Device connections - To connect your iPhone or iPad to an accessory or another computer, the device needs to be unlocked.
2. Configuration profiles - Configuration profiles can’t be installed, and the device can’t be enrolled in Mobile Device Management or device supervision while in Lockdown Mode.
That is Apple's statement, but I'd be surprised if 50% of iOS/macOS users noticed any significant change with lockdown mode on. Unless you are using shared albums or answering unknown facetime calls, there isn't much impact. JIT, WebAssembly, etc. can be re-enabled per site.
Well that's good at least, I presume if you're under threat of being targeted by an NSO pwn, you're hopefully running lockdown mode.
How crippled does the device feel? Is it usable? The two things you mentioned wouldn't be a problem for me. I've been considering enabling it for a while but wondered how restrictive it will realistically feel.
I'd suggest turning it on and seeing if you can live with it. Some issues that I've had:
1.) FaceTime calls from people not in your recent calls will be blocked with a silent notification. Sometimes I don't see it for hours
2.) Incoming iMessages will be stripped of Live Photos and document attachments
3.) Using Starbucks in a browser did not work until I disabled Lockdown Mode in Safari for the domain. Fortunately these exceptions are easy to make and persist
I'm not a target for state-sponsored attacks but will generally trade usability for security when reasonable.
(3) is weird. Conceivably it’s using wasm (I recall many years ago wasm had no interpreter mode, no idea of current state), or webgl (which seems plausibly like something that would be blocked)
Yeah sorry I meant to say "wasm in JSC" (which is the only wasm implementation I was ever aware of the technical details for), but was typing on my phone and apparently missed that fairly critical piece of information. Alas it's too late to correct my comment :-/
Animated gifs in text threads don't animate - which, personally, I consider a feature.
And webfonts aren't loaded, which means a lot of forums that load icons as a webfont have a lot of squares instead of arrows for reply and such.
You can disable it on a per-website basis, and I don't do much in the way of facetime and such, so I've not really noticed it. It does remove a LOT of complex attack surfaces, though, which is worth a lot.
Why should they be running lockdown mode? It says it only blocked some, but not all attacks which means that they were successfully attacked. For a targeted individual who "might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats" that does not cut it when your life is on the line. No, this is a existence proof that the Apple marketing that explicitly states that it can protect against such threats is bullshit and criminally irresponsible.
The only smart thing to do if you are such a individual is to not have a smartphone at all otherwise you are 100% going to be successfully attacked because every commercial smartphone is trivial to hack for a dedicated threat actor. In addition, you should never purchase a smartphone from any existing smartphone vendor for the foreseeable future regardless of what dangerous lies their marketing spins because all of their security organizations are structurally incompetent with respect to protecting against sophisticated digital threats. It would require a wholesale replacement of their security leadership, technology, and ideology for it to even be possible to actually protect against sophisticated digital threats.
This is true in general, but not in Apple's CSAM detections that have been abandoned. They were only scanning for images that matched a know hash of CSAM. This did nothing to prevent new CSAM from being created, only possession of existing material.
Detecting known CSAM does help fight its creation.
There's a Venn diagram of people who possess of library of CSAM and are also active child abusers themselves. Detecting possession is one way to try to get people who fit into that overlap.
It can also help reveal criminal networks. Prosecuting possession of CSAM works like it does for other networked crimes like drugs. CSAM is material that is illegal and hard to get. People who possess quantities of it almost certainly acquired it from suppliers, who themselves acquired from suppliers, etc. Law enforcement's goal is to find and flip possessors to walk this network back to the source: people who are abusing children and documenting it to create new material.
They also hope to discourage its creation by suppressing demand and raising risks and costs for abusers who create it (in both cases, by the threat of prosecution).
I've been a PIA customer several years and have been concerned about them since their acquisition by Kape in 2019. This audit is good news for them and does make me more inclined to stick around when my subscription expires. All consumer VPNs rely on user trust and open-source VPN apps, audited no-log policy, RAM-only VPN servers, and court-tested results are about as good as it can get.
One can upload a file to their Dropbox via a cURL post, provided they have created an app and have an access token, which just takes a few minutes to set up.
For the Twitch issue, it's likely that Twitch stored a secret in your Keychain that persists. If you have a Mac, you can enable iCloud Keychain on your devices to sync and explore the contents. Search for Twitch and delete the entry(ies).
Still waiting for Apple to provide end-to-end encryption on iCloud Backup for devices. Their documentation on this has always seemed intentionally vague.
End-to-end encrypted data ->
- Apple Card transactions (requires iOS 12.4 or later)
- Home data
- Health data (requires iOS 12 or later)
- iCloud Keychain (includes all of your saved accounts and passwords)
- Maps Favorites, Collections and search history (requires iOS 13 or later)
- Memoji (requires iOS 12.1 or later)
- Payment information
- QuickType Keyboard learned vocabulary (requires iOS 11 or later)
- Safari History and iCloud Tabs (requires iOS 13 or later)
- Screen Time
- Siri information
- Wi-Fi passwords
- W1 and H1 Bluetooth keys (requires iOS 13 or later)
They won't do this. Its their run-around to giving law enforcement access to the devices.
They can claim that the device is secure and always encrypted, and all the messaging is encrypted, and they don't collect user data. This is all true (i assume, but did not audit).
If you care about security, all you have to do is turn off iCloud backup, and everything is secure. If you don't care, well then you have a great feature.
They upload plain-text versions of messages, etc to iCloud so if law enforcement asks, they can still comply with the juicy data. They don't need to back-door the iphone for the Gov. which was a major PR issue a few years ago.
> If you care about security, all you have to do is turn off iCloud backup, and everything is secure.
No, each conversation has at least two endpoints, and it's unlikely that the people you iMessage with have disabled iCloud Backup.
It's sort of like switching from gmail to avoid Google having access to your correspondence: they'll get it from the mailbox of the people still using gmail (so, everyone) that you correspond with.
Ok yeah, i should have been way more clear here. I just meant that your data can't be snooped from the cloud, due to encryption, if backup is turned off.
Of course, this also assumes you trust apple and the implementations of encryption, blah blah blah typical security-depends-on-trust-someone-somewhere warnings.
It's intentionally vague because they want people to read that page and think "oh, it's all encrypted, it's safe", and not realize that they intentionally preserve this backdoor so that they can provide data to the FBI at any time, with or without a warrant, at the FBI's explicit request:
Apple provided user data on over 30,000 users in 2019 to the US federal government without a warrant or probable cause, per Apple's own transparency report (see FISA orders). All the feds have to do is order the data from Apple, and they get all of it, on anyone they like.
You're going to be waiting a long time; it's a design goal for Apple (and by extension the feds) to be able to read your every stored text, iMessage, and iMessage attachment out of your device backup without your consent/knowledge.
It's not really that different from the situation in China, where Apple provides the same sort of backdoors to the CCP to be able to sell devices there. (There, the CCP requires that it be physically stored on state-owned and state-operated hardware, as I understand it.)
I said without a warrant or probable cause, which is accurate.
The FISA court is a bullshit, rubberstamp farce, to allow the state to pretend that they give a shit about the rule of law. The fact that they surveil everyone, inside and outside of the country, without warrants or probable cause, is evidence that they do not.
The FISA court issues orders without a requirement of probable cause, and its decisions and targets are classified. They are not warrants, and there is no due process. Calling it a "court" at all is a stretch.
Here's the FISA "court order" demanding 100% of all call records, every day, from Verizon, even local calls that start and end wholly within the USA:
This kind of overbroad stuff is precisely why we have the fourth amendment:
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
That's exactly the opposite of what the FISA "court" does.
EVERY US company is legally required to comply with a FISA warrant. Stop acting like Apple has a choice, they don't. And also they are legally considered warrants. Did you read your link?
Apple has a choice about whether or not backups are end-to-end encrypted, using keys unknown to Apple.
Apple, at the request of the FBI, chose to preserve this surveillance backdoor by not deploying their end-to-end encryption system for iCloud Backup, thus making everyone's data available to Apple and potentially responsive to FISA orders. Seriously, read the link:
If that backup data (which includes all your iMessages and attachments thereto) were end-to-end encrypted, which was Apple's original plan, then FISA orders, real warrants, and all the rest would be fruitless as Apple could not decrypt the data. They'd be turning over opaque encrypted data in response to FISA orders and real warrants.
You can use clouds like these with your own cryptography software. A matter of using something standard while not giving the cloud provider your public key. As long as they allow you to specify the backup location (which I don't know if they do), this should be doable. If they don't allow this that is a more severe issue.
You're being downvoted, presumably because of the parallel discussion about the FBI. But I think this is most likely a combination of both:
1) The vast majority of Apple's users care more about getting their data back than they do E2E encryption. Encrypting backups does introduce failure modes that put more burden on the user (to have an emergency key, etc). Apple also cares deeply about things "just working", and so this is a space that was always going to be incredibly difficult to balance.
2) The FBI thing is also true. Given Apple's former plans for true E2E encryption somewhat gave way to what they have now, with little explanation, it's hard not to speculate that they backed away from the original initiative after some...involvement...from the feds.
