social media hacking

[ironymaiden]

i've been staying away from facebook, which is great for my mental health but cuts off a major communication channel for my friends with kids. that blows. it also means that i don't see posts from my niece and nephew, who are awesome young adults.

one of my friends has been trying to get me to use Facebook Purity but since it's a browser extension and i'm more likely to look at facebook on mobile, it's not useful to me. which is too bad, because i need keyword blocking.

but i found the best thing: Friendly. (or at least it's the best thing as of today.) for my purposes it's definitely worth slipping them a couple bucks. basically they take the facebook mobile page designed for developing countries and customize the display. it even includes messaging.

here's my preliminary keyword list: trump, homeless, clinton, hillary, congress, share, 45, copy, white house, breitbart, bannon

i probably don't need "homeless", it's just instinct from NextDoor. i added "45" and "white house" after my first browse.

i can still see topical stuff and news that doesn't mention the forbidden words. i can't see earnest "copy don't share" memes, i can't see rage posts about political stuff. i'll probably need to shape some keywords for the left-leaning fake news sites (the people who used to share the right-leaning ones have mostly unfriended me) but they need to slip though first.

that said, check out a not-atypical screen:


Edited to add: i use the Make America Kittens Again extension. apparently the T-word in this post triggers replacement of the above screenshot with sweet kitties. took me a couple attempted edits before i realized there was nothing wrong with my photo hosting 😆

Comments

[annofowlshire]

I hate that "manage Facebook" is now on our list of social responsibilities. I tried to check in on a friend recently but couldn't see anything personal through more than 100 shared memes/gifs/etc.. they'd posted in the last 48 hours and gave up. It makes it less useful of a tool for the job, but it feels like it's the only universal one.

[ironymaiden]

i feel like it's an addiction - people complain about how it's a waste of time and it makes them sad, but they don't stop engaging. i guess i just posted about that myself.

at least now i can only see actual life updates.