Sadly accurate, but it has been wilful ignorance, now it is enforced by what the machines think we want to see.
I think it is worse now, than before, it was a lot easier to pick up that “other” newspaper than it is to break out of your algorithm.
I am a firm believer in “There is no better disinfectant than sunlight.”
I want to see the most vile aspects of people, I want it to be on full display so we know who they are, and we can counter them directly.
I think the algorithm has done a MASSIVE amount of damage by cordoning things off and creating little pockets of filth festering in darkness out of view until it overflows and spills out on us all.
Honestly, I prefer someone else’s untrustworthy.
I don’t trust China at all, but I trust them over the US, if only because they have no stake in me as a foreigner.
Watching all the new laws spew out in Europe I don’t trust them, either.
I’m down to Romania and Iceland, now.
Been dumping German stuff like a plague lately, and already pulled all data out of Canada.
I have one thing in Amsterdam, but their laws have been getting worse and worse, and they’re… Nine, I think it is, eyes which is bad for trusting them with your data. Even Switzerland is getting sus af.
I refer to it as “Boomer Social” as it is the exclusive form of communication for family members over 60. When I purged my Meta accounts, finally, I completely lost contact with my sister.
Seems that old people who were around for email being the norm can’t manage to use it anymore…
Cards are their own issue…
I had a bank that would always deny my purchase of a game with fraud detection, though I suspect it was because GOG was still banking in Gibraltar then, but then my card was actually stolen and they just let them spend $5 at every store in town until I was overdrawn by the maximum they allowed.
Definitely an adult account, I have kids who are adults, and I had been on Google since I used to use it at the public library. I seem to remember there being a different version of mail from them, before GMail, that was converted when they did the big release. I could be wrong, it’s been nearly thirty years, but I was very relieved to be able to get off Yahoo which only released one good product (Answers, by the way) in the history of ever.
I also started with Android using my account long enough ago to be “adult” as I was using a HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) running Android 1.0 released in 2008, moving from my brief foray into Blackberry from Palm to them and staying through the Galaxy Note 8. Now I use WayDroid to run a few Android apps, Google has just gotten too creepy, and they do derpy things like make me need to fiddle with workarounds to access my files on my device and now they’re pushing the signing for Android trying to kill (or at least data harvest) alternative stores.
They finally lost me completely when I loaded a music video marked “adult” for language and it demanded I upload ID on an account that was legally an adult.
I made that account in 1999, it’s not even from this millennium, and they still derp out on it. I’m getting close to 50, at this point, and the only thing ads, age verification, and extreme right wing content on top of state sponsored disinformation campaigns will get you is a blacklist.
We should have seen it coming, I mean they used to have the “Don’t be evil” motto, removing that was a declaration of intent.
I scrape from the command line, Google doesn’t even tough a web browser, leech the webm/webp/whatever content and transcode it into mkv/mp3 to watch locally, offline, with no ads or tracking.
The “indoctrination” is just another Satanic Panic, the dumbest things you have ever heard being repeated enough by “trusted” sources it becomes fact to them.
It’s Meta and Xitter now, though, not James Dobson on AM radio.