Barking up the Wrong Curmudgeon

[The note was deleted from my Facebook account, for reasons I have described amply elsewhere.]

Meta ironically provides its user-victims with tools that enable verification that their posts are being shadow-banned as retribution for content that does not “align”—sorry for using that nausea-inducing newspeak term—with the Meta business model. I have tested this a number of times and have seen it play out, and it continues. Perhaps that behavior shouldn’t be surprising for a platform owned and operated by a serial-lying humanoid who prioritizes accumulation of wealth and control of his willing victims, all of whom have agreed—some unknowingly—to have him vacuum up their souls for commercial and other use by unknown and unknowable actors. And then said humanoid has the chutzpah to ask his victims to “verify” themselves on a platform in which users risk victimization by countless anonymous entities. With me, he is barking up the wrong curmudgeon.

Social media: Authenticity is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and now trust has definitively slipped away.

Not that there was much trust to be lost, but it becomes clearer every day that nothing social media platforms and their broligarch owners do is worthy of trust. To someone who has over the years and still makes his living dealing in the real world, where accountability comes with the territory, this trend turns social media into a very disturbing foreign land.

They make agreeing to ongoing vacuuming up of personal information, including but not limited to behavioral data, a condition of use, and billions of people seem fine with that, to satisfy their social media addiction and FOMO. I would rather pay and be free from surveillance and manipulation by the platform owners, but that is not an option.

And it doesn’t by any means end with what people actively allow the owners to do to them in order to use the platform.

The platform owners accumulate wealth by allowing and encouraging users to engage in unlawful, unauthorized publishing of vast amounts of copyrighted image and video content owned by others. The incorrectly understood acceptability of such unlawful publishing is premised on the convenient misunderstanding that publicly accessible and public domain are the same. They are not.

The platform owners also reward the creation of “content” that is at best worthless garbage designed to evoke engagement that earns ad income for the users and also puts money in the bank accounts of the slimeballs that run the platforms. Recently, that content includes huge amounts of AI-generated dreck, including countless deepfake invitations of viewers to crime scenes as the victim. And the platforms shadow-ban content that does not “align” with their business model of theft and engagement harvesting at any moral cost.

Social media companies operate with a business model in which both surveillance and manipulation of users and unlawful publishing by users of IP they don’t own are essential enabling activities.

The owner of Meta is a serial liar with no semblance of a conscience, and his unvoiced hope that he will never be regulated will probably be fulfilled. Orders to pay huge sums of money resulting from civil litigation are just a cost of doing business. And so it goes.

Japan is an easy target for both hacking and phishing attacks.

The news yesterday mentioned that phishing and the like sent to hacked email addresses is on a rapid uprise, and cites breaking through the Japanese language barrier from overseas as one reason. These phishing emails are being attributed, probably correctly, to the huge number of email addresses that have been hacked from the systems of Japanese entities over the past two weeks. It could be that the email addresses of half the Japanese population have been hacked, along with associated personal information.

Many people here have for a long time felt secure from those baddies overseas, but things seem to have changed.

On a related note, here on Facebook and probably other platforms, it used to be common to see scam posts written in Japanese but with an occasional telltale simplified Chinese character. I don’t see them anymore. 

Just the other day I received a phone call from the Vatican—I didn’t pick it up, of course—and it could have involved my non-payment of my non-existent docomo bill. 

And I get a Japanese language email about once a week from “me,” asking the person they think will be an employee receiving the email at my inquiry alias email address to start a LINE group and not invite any other employees because “I” will soon be sending important instructions related to work. I suspect that it would be an instruction to deposit a large amount of money or crypto somewhere. 

From things I’ve heard, many of the people involved in these scams (including the ones brought to Myanmar or wherever) are enlisted by thugs from whom they’ve borrowed heavily. The same can be said of the bank accounts that are used to receive such money. When you make a bank account, they ask you to declare that the account is not being made on behalf of someone else and specifically an “antisocial force,” but if you’ve borrowed heavily to gamble, for example, another gamble could just be a natural progression. 

Anyway, the age of a safe Japan appears to be over, but it’s at least still relatively safe to walk on the street here.