Summary

Meta’s recent shift to right-leaning policies, including ending fact-checking in the U.S., scaling back content moderation, and allowing anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, has sparked boycotts and a user exodus.

The company also disbanded its diversity, equity, and inclusion team, drawing criticism.

Prominent users like director Cord Jefferson and nonprofits like Equal Access Public Media have left or reduced activity on Meta platforms.

Many are migrating to alternatives such as Bluesky, Amigahood, and Tumblr, while some remain trapped due to Meta’s dominance in communication and business.

  • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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    9 hours ago

    Like 95% of social media users, regardless of the platform, are mostly lurkers. A tiny fraction of the total user base creates the majority of the content. This is a self-selecting group of people who, by definition, don’t represent the average person - the average person doesn’t comment on message boards.

    Reading discussions on Lemmy, for example, can create a skewed perspective of reality. Views like being okay with murdering CEOs are fairly popular here, yet I’ve never met anyone in real life who thinks this way. My work involves going into people’s homes to fix things, and we frequently chat about current events. I find that my average customer is far more reasonable in their views compared to the extreme opinions that often get highly upvoted here.

    There’s also the broader observation that the left seems to struggle to win elections globally. We hear a lot about people moving toward the right, but rarely about anyone moving the other way. I’m not claiming this as absolute truth - it’s simply how I see things. Of course, there’s always a chance I could be wrong.

    • MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Right wing ideologies tend to be simpler and thus appeal to those that tend to dislike nuance.

      You are likely correct that the views here are not the norm though as this is a very fringe form of social media started by leftists so unsurprisingly there are lots of fringe views.

      As for the killing of health care CEO’s that’s something that you might not be seeing people agree with because if you aren’t in America you might not get that the murdered executive made millions denying access to health care to those that were paying for insurance. Do you get mad when serial killers are killed? The victim made his money off of letting people die so he could have more money that he did not need.

      There’s no reason for the US health insurance industry to exist except to take money from the working class and hand it to the investor class. US health insurers do not make health care more available, more efficient, cheaper or safer. The only thing it does is make everything more expensive.

      • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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        7 hours ago

        Right wing ideologies tend to be simpler and thus appeal to those that tend to dislike nuance.

        I don’t agree with this - at least not in the sense that there’s a significant difference between the left and the right here. Both sides tend to oversimplify and misrepresent each other’s views in online discussions. However, when you dig deeper into why someone holds a certain stance, it’s very rare to find it entirely lacking in nuance, regardless of which political side they’re coming from.

        • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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          7 hours ago

          But the issue is that right-wing positions aren’t logically coherent. There’s always at least a couple of points where they don’t logically work, because the positions aren’t derived from axioms or first principles. They only make sense if you ignore lots of counterarguments.

          Even if left-wing positions are held without nuance, the positions themselves can still be complex. This simply isn’t the case with right-wing positions.

          So while the reasons for holding a right-wing position might have nuance, the positions themselves don’t.

          • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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            6 hours ago

            That’s quite a broad generalization. While this applies to some positions, sure, you seem to be implying it’s true of right-wing views as a whole which simply isn’t true.

            • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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              3 hours ago

              I would honestly say that the number of logically coherent and purely right-wing positions is vanishingly small. There are a bunch of right-wing positions that, individually, are logically coherent - but most of them are also part of some left-wing frameworks, so not purely right-wing. Do you have some examples in mind? I’d be happy to be proven wrong!

              • Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
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                1 hour ago

                Even something like being anti-abortion is a perfectly logical stance to hold for someone who beliefs that soul enters the body at conception. That belief is based on what I’d argue is a false premise but I can’t exactly prove that either. It’s not logical from my perspective but it is from theirs.

                I’m not so much talking about right wing beliefs per-se but about the shift towards the centre which is to the right. Where it crosses to the side of the right, I don’t know and I doubt there even is concensus on that. Something like being against DEI programs, I guess, is considered to be quite “right wing” yet virtually all of the people whose opinions I respect are against it and I’d hardly consider any of them right wing. Freedom of speech would be another - also fitting the context.

                • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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                  8 minutes ago

                  If strictly held, anti-abortion positions are one of the rare examples - though you can also find them in some spiritual/religious contexts (though it’s hard to call them logically consistent - if the soul enters the body at conception, twins either share a soul or only possess half of one).

                  When you talk about “DEI programs”, what does that include? Big parts of DEI are outreach programs, but I’ll go ahead and assume you’re not referring to those. But even for the others, is there absolutely no program you think that can make sense? That position is honestly only logically coherent in right-wing worldviews.

                  As an example, in Germany there are fewer women on the boards of big companies than men named “Michael”. Do you think that’s because women don’t apply for these positions, or aren’t a good fit?