An address to @Ruud and the lemmy.world team:

I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the hard work you’ve done with lemmy.world. But I am strongly opposed to federating with Threads. Please read this comment in full, as I believe it outlines our community’s sentiment and reservations.

I think it might be helpful to use an analogy that I think will help express the feelings of many of those within our community regarding the problem with the “wait and see” approach.

What’s to say Threads won’t follow in their very well-established footprints under Meta as a company?

If I go to a friend’s house and their child spits in my face every time, I don’t want to go to my friend’s house. I tell them this. The friend says, “Well this time just might be different, let’s just wait and see!” Meanwhile, this kid spits in my face without fail, every chance they get. There is a very consistent and pervasive pattern of this.

Why should I believe this kid won’t spit in my face all of a sudden, when they’ve taken every single chance they could repeatedly, knowing that it was wrong and not caring what repercussions would befall them? Do you really think this kid is going to refrain from spitting in my face this time?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -Albert Einstein.

Meta/FB have continually demonstrated their core business practices are unethical and that they will continue carrying them out without regard for laws or their users’ well-being. There’s no reason to wait and see. It’s not logical to believe this time will be different.

Threads would bring such a large influx of hateful, racist, violent, bigoted political extremists to the fediverse. They will also do whatever they can to exploit users on this site for their own gain. Their modus operandi has been to exploit their users.

Instead of just conjecture and analogies, I will now provide factual information regarding Meta’s practices as a company.

This really should be obvious by now… but Meta mines and sells their user’s information. Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads… That alone should tell you there’s no reason to “wait and see.” Just look right now. They haven’t changed…

FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. Their first published research was where they manipulated users’ feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

Meta has played a very key role in spreading misinformation, perpetuating dangerous conspiracy theories, and radicalizing the alt right. This is present across nations, but it certainly contributed heavily to the climate of political extremism that led to a mass of insurrectionists to attempt to overthrow my duly elected government…

I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

• Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];

• Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

• Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

• Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

• Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

• Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.

I ask you now if you truly believe this is the sort of player you want on the Fediverse? Do you really want to federate lemmy.world with such a blatantly immoral and detrimental corporation?

I have really enjoyed my time here on Lemmy.world and have so greatly appreciated the hard work of you and your team. I have been donating to you to help with the costs of running this instance.

However, federating with Threads contradicts my philosophy and ethical principles, and I will be sadly canceling my donations and finding a new home should we federate with Threads in the future. I firmly believe that most users on lemmy.world share this sentiment. I hope this comment helped express the resistance and fears of our community.

Once again, I appreciate the work you guys have done. I greatly respect you all, but I humbly and severely dissent on this issue.

Any social media or advance size plays a role in promoting disinformation. Even small social media sites do.

There is an entire federated server full of nothing but communists

Any social media or advance size plays a role in promoting disinformation. Even small social media sites do.

Only one of my many criticisms. And the fact that misinformation happens on other social media sites is a strawman fallacy you have created. The problem does not lie in the existence of misinformation; it is all about Meta’s response to it. They ignored, enabled, and perpetuated harmful misinformation and outright propaganda that led to deaths and radicalization of the masses. Don’t obfuscate from Meta’s aberrant practices with the shift in topic critism and whataboutism.

There is an entire federated server full of nothing but communists

Not a good thing, and a total red herring and more whataboutism.

It’s not whataboutism if it’s serving my original point. You can’t remove all bad actors from social media because eventually the bad actors are just the gullible. It’s the same reason companies with good security policies can still have breaches due to the human element.

There has never been and will never be a social media platform that doesn’t contain morons spreading disinformation. My example of a community in this SM family being entirely communists is supporting that initial thesis.

I am aware it’s only one part of your post but the rest of your post is largely opinions (e.g. “harvesting my data is bad”) and not worth digging into. One either shares that opinion or does not.

You are absolutely engaging in whataboutism. Two things:

Wow, what a compelling argument!

You sound amoral. You are arguing that mining and selling user data is permissible, and you are arguing that the clearly unethical business practices (in regard to widely accepted international ethical business standards) listed above does not qualify them as a bad actor.

What does in your opinion?? Do you find them providing information that leads to persecution, that aids in genocide as acceptable business practices??

I don’t know what to tell you man. You sound like you’re straight up astroturfing for Meta. We clearly fundamentally disagree.