I’ve been thinking lately about “misinformation” since Facebook removed one of my posts about Project 2025 as being false (it wasn’t), and comparing the slippery way Meta is defining “disinformation” with what I and most of us in the gay community have witnessed from the homophobic right over the decades.

I’ve been doing a takedown of Dick Hafer’s horrifically homophobic comic book “Homosexuality: Legitimate Alternate Deathstyle”, and I mentioned in the last post I made in that series being stunned at the outright lies I uncovered, simply by following a cite to its source, which was almost certainly something Paul Cameron published.

You dig up various articles about Paul Cameron and you will read that he was either expelled and/or denounced by The American Psychological Association, the Nebraska Psychological Association, and the American Sociological Association for his consistent misrepresentations of psychological and sociological research. But to call what he’s doing “misrepresentations” is itself a misrepresentation of sorts.

I’ll admit that use of that word in regards to Cameron had me bamboozled for a long time. You dig into his cites and you expect to see some sly twisting of the data. But that isn’t it. He straight up lies. He pulls facts and figures out of thin air and presents them as though the study he’s citing says what it clearly does not say, and it isn’t even close. He lies. And lies and lies and lies and lies.

I can appreciate that men and women of science don’t like making declarations that are quite so certain. To work in science is to be well aware of all the areas of uncertainty in the data that you have to navigate on your way to a conclusion. But a decent respect for the human status tells us there have to be limits. When the lies are obvious it does none of us any good to soft peddle that fact, let alone what it says about the person(s) dispensing them.

And if we can’t point out the staringly obvious lies, then how do we deal with the slippery conniving falsehoods hiding behind a lot of word salad?

I’m looking at You Meta…USAToday…

This screen cap from BlueSky just got flagged by Facebook for potentially violating their community standards, which I take it, were written by a committee of centarist pundits…

Blogs people. Blogs! Blogs! Blogs!

Got this charming notice from Facebook a few moments ago…

Like everyone else I know on Facebook who this has happened to recently, I have no idea what the hell they’re talking about. The notice helpfully declines to tell you what “content” it was that triggered the mindless algorithm and Facebook has also helpfully mucked up my activity log so I can’t check that. So I go scrolling back in my posts to see if I can remember anything I might have up up that got deleted. I still have no idea. Everything I remember posting is still there.

But I often put up random trivial happy little things now and then, including shares, that I might not now recall. It was easy with the smartphone app in a way that posting to my blog isn’t. So whenever I saw something online while I’m using my smartphone I’d “share” it o Facebook, just to give some online friends a smile.

That behavior stops now.

Facebook makes its money by selling your Facebook data to other businesses. In theory they let you opt out of that, and I’ve done as much of that as I can for now in their settings pages. But also I’ve deleted the apps from my iPhone and hopefully that prevents tracking. IOS has a setting you can use to block tracking from specific apps. Hopefully deleting the apps altogether takes care of it. They like they can use your smartphone to track you.

Old men like me are probably not a valuable source of data mining anyway. But to the degree I can, I’m going to try and be nothing to “Meta” anymore. Not going to delete my profile there just yet because I have too many dear old friends on the platform. That’s how they trap you of course. But all that happy little trivial stuff I used to put there for smiles and simple random pleasures isn’t happening anymore. That’s probably for the best since political data miners use that stuff to push disinformation at you and an election is coming.

Nearly all the younger friends I had there at one time or another have fled the platform for other online fields. Maybe they just got bored with all the older folks being on there. Or maybe something else about it creeped them out. Maybe I should have been paying more attention to that,

Via James Fallows on Twitter…

Thread “Sociology of a headline, in three acts” Here.