Most Facebook executives didn't allow their own children on Facebook - according to Ms Wynn-Williams. "They had screen bans. They certainly wouldn't allow them to use the product."

And yet she says reports from 2017 - that the company had been using algorithms to target and categorise vulnerable teens - were true.

"The algorithm could infer that they were feeling worthless or unhappy," she alleges.

The company - which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp - could, she claims, identify when a teenage girl had deleted a selfie on its platforms, and then notify a beauty company that it would be a good moment to target the child with an advert.

Ms Wynn-Williams says she "felt sick" at the thought and tried to push back, "although I knew it was futile".

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly820v99ppo

@andypiper yeah really, I wouldn't have wanted to answer that either!

But as valid as that question is, that seems a general question about #RightsCon and Meta, not specifically their presence in the fediverse. So it sounds like there wasn't any discussion #FediPact.

If you told the story of the fediverse, for aa #RightsCon audience did you also include the mass defederation of Gab, as an example of how fedi's historical values opposed white supremacy and fascism?

And (again thinking in particular of an audience focused on rights) hopefully you included @cwebber's famous quote "the fediverse was built by queer people" and talked about the key role trans and queer people played contributing to Mastodon's success back in the early days (and since then too of course but fedi in 2017 was hella queer). Resistance to Meta aligns very nicely with both of those -- I talked about that in We're here, we're queer, fuck Facebook (or whatever they're calling themselves these days)

@andypiper I saw that there was somebody from #Threads on the #RightsCon panel of "How we build a new social web".

Was there any discussion of #FediPact, the "Free Fediverse", and and the strong opposition in so many areas of the fediverse to building a "new social web" that's baed on surveillance capitalism and anti-LGBTQIA2S+ policies?

In this recent communication, SWICG leadership discuss forming a task force to "approach and facilitate [AI] Avatars and Agents" in ActivityPub, and discuss topics such as "using AI for content filtering" and "for algorithmic feed reading": https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Feb/0025.html

These are the people in charge of the ActivityPub specification, and this discourse is occurring in the
context of the chartering of a new working group to oversee the development of AP2. This is where the protocol is going next. Meta is right in the middle of it.

This is why it's critical to lend support and solidarity to protocol projects pointing beyond ActivityPub like @spritely and @VeilidNetwork , as well as the developers of emerging progressive fediverse services which refuse to align with the Social Web Foundation. And it's why we @FediPact advocates and agitators should continue to ring this bell - and zero in on those among us who are selling out the fediverse to a fascist intruder.

4/4 end

It is completely unacceptable, in this moment, for Meta to have the slightest presence in or influence on this network. @jat23 , in their paper on the FediPact movement ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051241308323 ), refers to the praxis of "Strategic Closure". Fair and good, but this is a necessarily defensive response. We would argue that it is time for a complimentary offensive opposition. It may not be sufficient to merely batten down the hatches while a corporation with near-totalitarian reach and explicitly fascist intent insinuates itself into the development processes of the protocol underlying the fediverse.

The leadership of the W3C SWICG ActivityPub working group - and by extension, of the Social Web Foundation, their gambit to privatize and de-democratize the evolution of the protocol - have discredited themselves by colluding with the Zuckerberg entity and accepting its bribes. They do not deserve the trust of the communities and developers of the fedi. They have proven themselves incapable of responsibly wielding the power to shape the future of the fediverse they claim for themselves.

3/4

There is now a notable influx into the fedi of folks trying to escape the Meta networks, both occurring organically and due to the Pixelfed boom and efforts like #GlobalSwitchDay (and not at all, btw, because of the Threads bridge). But does this network really offer them that refuge?

Meta's own terms indicate that they are ingesting the profile data of every account behind every toot that crosses the bridge. That means that new users may be showing up here from FB or IG, setting up profiles with details that match those of their old Meta accounts, then replying to Threads posts unaware that they are still being surveilled by Meta, and that their presence and activities here could be compiled into their identity dossiers back there. The fedi is already serving as a surveillance vector.

Meta was always an abhorrent monstrosity; but with the recent turn, it has now directly telegraphed itself as a Trumpist organ. It is an explicitly fascist entity colluding with a fascist regime. And anyone who is collaborating with Meta in the fedi and enabling their ability to exercise power here needs also to be understood accordingly.

2/4

An English translation of our decision to block Meta/Threads is now available in case it's helpful for others:

https://data.coop/en/blog/defederating-meta/

the real issue is that the fedipact 1 form has well over a thousand submissions and takes like two hours to load

the fedipact 1 list will be a good bit more effort but i'm gonna try to make it work

the official cryptpad account messaged me on here saying they've improved forms a lot the past year and to just remake it but

i wanna do one last look to get all the signatures from the intervening months before i do