[HN Gopher] Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation
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Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation
Author : cbtacy
Score : 177 points
Date : 2021-12-13 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.axios.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.axios.com)
| saboot wrote:
| My bad, sorry everyone. Guess this was all my fault.
| mikem170 wrote:
| What about their algorithm?
|
| Facebook decides what to show people. They could show you your
| friends posts in chronological order, and/or let people have
| control over what they see.
|
| But no, Facebook decides what people see. Therefore they have
| some responsibility for the spread of misinformation.
| freediver wrote:
| And people decide to use Facebook. I am not trying to defend
| it, but blaming it 100% on Facebook is not fair. Even if their
| algorithms were perfect to amplify misinformation, there still
| needs to be enough people reading and sharing content for it to
| have an effect.
|
| A solution could be paying for Facebook, where both the number
| of people and incentives would change.
| nowherebeen wrote:
| > And people decide to use Facebook
|
| I don't choose to use WhatsApp but I have to because that
| what my family members use and they aren't tech savvy enough
| to use anything else. So no, it's not a simple choice. Once a
| product gets saturated in the market, it gets very difficult
| to replace it.
| mithr wrote:
| > blaming it 100% on Facebook is not fair.
|
| The problem is that humans are never 100% rational. If the
| audience for Facebook was purely rational robots, then sure,
| you could make the argument that since they should just be
| able to stop caring about these problematic things, and the
| issue will go away, it's not Facebook's fault that they
| haven't done that.
|
| But given we are talking about humans, once Facebook has
| spent considerable time and money _studying_ human behavior
| and society in general, exactly _in order to_ figure out how
| to maximize their own goals over anything else, I think they
| should take the blame when there are negative side effects to
| doing so. Saying "well if society just stopped caring about
| (e.g.) negative content it'd be fine, so it's society's
| fault" is misdirection at best and ignores both the
| concentrated effort Facebook has spent on achieving this
| outcome, as well as the hoops they've spent the past few
| years jumping through to defend their choices once people
| started calling them out on it.
| freediver wrote:
| This is why I suggested 'paying for Facebook'. Legislation
| could exist that simply says things that have commercial
| interest behind them can not be given away for free.
|
| Even a price of $0.01, would radically change the
| environment on Facebook.
| hardtke wrote:
| Facebook doesn't really decide what you see, but instead
| optimizes what you see to maximize your engagement. If you
| never engage with political content or misinformation, you
| generally won't see it. Once you start engaging, it will drown
| out everything. What they could provide is a "no politics"
| option, but I wonder if anyone would utilize it. There was an
| old saying in the personalized recommendations world along the
| lines of "if you want to figure out what someone wants to read,
| don't ask them because they will lie." For instance, if you ask
| people what kinds of news they want they will invariably check
| "science" but in fact they will mostly read celebrity gossip
| and sports.
| mithr wrote:
| Facebook decides what you see. That they have created an
| algorithm that "maximizes engagement" is just another way of
| saying that they've decided what you should see is what they
| believe will keep you most "engaged". They could choose to
| use a different metric -- it is entirely their choice.
| wvenable wrote:
| Facebook as experimented with a number of different options
| to clean your feed but ultimately they never get deployed
| because they all decrease engagement.
| andrew_ wrote:
| This is really the crux and it doesn't get as much attention as
| it should.
| saddlerustle wrote:
| It's really not. WhatsApp has just as big of a misinformation
| problem without any sort of algorithmic ranking.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| And I, personally, wouldn't blame Facebook for the spread
| of misinformation via WhatsApp because it doesn't make
| sense to.
| dntrkv wrote:
| It doesn't get enough attention? The "algorithms" are all
| anyone talks about when it comes to this issue. I think
| people put way too much weight on them.
|
| Once you have enough people participating in a single
| conversation, from all walks of life, the discourse will go
| to shit very quickly.
|
| Look at Reddit as an example. Small subreddits that are
| focused on a specific hobby are usually pleasant and
| informative. Large subreddits that cater to a large audience
| are no better than the comment section on a political YouTube
| video.
| cronix wrote:
| Facebook chooses what I see while on their platform. If they
| didn't, I'd just see a chronological feed of my friends posts
| that I chose to follow as they came through without any external
| filtering. Going directly to friends walls shows that is not the
| case.
|
| Instead, they amplify emotionally based content that they think I
| will react to (engagement) by studying previous interactions and
| don't show me things they don't agree with (censorship) even if
| it originated from an authoritative primary source. That doesn't
| sound like it originated in society, but more of a purposeful
| curation imposed on users, who have to conform if they want to
| stay. I didn't.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Once again Boz has been reading a bunch of pop philosophy books
| and the press team left him alone with the press again.
|
| He _may_ have made some excellent choices with oculus (price,
| formfactor feature tradeoff). However he still hasn't grasped the
| basics of communication.
|
| His internal posts are long, rambling and at a tangent to the
| point he's making. Someone told him once that allegories in
| stories can be more effective means for communication. Either no
| one has told him he's doing it wrong, or no one who he respects
| has. more importantly the point hes making is normally painfully
| reductive, despite the 8k words implying its well thought out.
|
| The core problem is that he honestly believes that facebook has
| done the best it can. He is firmly of the school of thought that
| he and his team can do anything, and do it better than anyone
| else.
|
| The problem is, he can't do communication, and it shows. Worse
| still he can't empathise with the "other side". I don't mean
| sympathise, I mean mean understand why they are thinking the
| things they are.
| wiz21c wrote:
| >> basics of communication.
|
| It's not communication. He's got a big role at FaceBook and
| FaceBook is a big company. They cannot escape their social
| responsibility anymore. Hiding behind "freedom of choice, of
| individual, etc." is simplistic. But sure, with that kind of
| mind, FaceBook will continue to make piles of money.
| vernie wrote:
| Boz never not giving off psycho vibes.
| handrous wrote:
| We ought to stop mixing up what are effectively mass-
| communication broadcast media with personal social networks. They
| ruin one another.
|
| But of course that would harm profits.
| diegof79 wrote:
| Facebook execs are not responsible for what people think, but
| they aren't neutral either.
|
| The connection between incentives ends generating a situation
| where their decisions had a huge influence on society:
|
| - Their goal is to make the company profitable, and they choose
| ads as the business model.
|
| - Without viewers, there are no advertisers. So, engagement is
| key.
|
| - They need to create incentives to make people both content
| creators and followers: share your thoughts, share your photos,
| and show us what you like.
|
| - Content creation is hard and strong opinions attract people
| (both detractors and followers).
|
| - A long post format doesn't work for casual engagement, and the
| UI is optimized for a quick scan (because that helps with
| engagement).
|
| The result is short posts of shitty content with very strong
| opinions that create an echo chamber. Can they get out of that
| trap? I don't know. I've seen good quality content in smaller
| online communities. (for example, while HN is not small, the
| quality of the comments is usually better than the article
| itself). But, I'm suspicious that optimizing for profit
| contradicts content quality. Something similar happens with TV
| shows. TV networks increased the number of reality shows: they
| are cheap to produce, generate strong emotions, and have a higher
| immediate audience than a high-quality TV series. The high-
| quality TV series came from media companies like HBO or Netflix
| because they don't care about optimizing minute-to-minute ratings
| (they care more about exclusives to attract subscribers).
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Well, thats a narrative that has no cheerleaders.
|
| All evil is either imposed by a outside and completely
| repairable, once that evil is removed.
|
| Or all evil is eternal, unfixable and the best thing one can do
| is to give in.
|
| Nobody seems to be willing to reverse engineer human brain
| architecture, to find reachable local optimas and best outcomes
| with a given, minimally changeable species. I guess it lacks the
| flair.
|
| The irony is, that FB has the resources to do such a job though.
| They have the largest behavioral DB on the planet.
|
| They know us better, then we know ourselves.
|
| They could accomplish some nice Leviathancybernetics, but they do
| not want that.
|
| They want to sell that knowledge as scary tales and social
| engineering advice to governments(palantir) and as marketing to
| everyone with money.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| The medium is the message as the saying goes, the technology we
| interact with shapes what kinds of interaction we have. Blaming
| 'people' makes no sense because 'people' cannot be changed,
| unless we genetically reengineer humanity to be more
| accommodating to Facebook's algorithms, which they would probably
| prefer compared to having to actually fix the problems of their
| platform
|
| >"At some point the onus is, and should be in any meaningful
| democracy, on the individual"
|
| Viewing systems issues that are macro at scale through an
| individualized lens is great for dodging responsibility and
| Facebook's bottom line but it makes about as much sense as
| thinking that dealing with climage change will be achieved by
| everyone voluntarily shopping greener on amazon rather than
| creating systems that are, collectively and at a mechanism level
| oriented towards social good
| anikan_vader wrote:
| In related news, society blames Facebook for COVID
| misinformation.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| I mean did you expect facebook to step up and say they were
| responsible for the spread of misinformation?
| nathias wrote:
| They are right, these aren't problems problems of online
| discourse but rather problems of lack of critical thinking,
| reflection and other education in general that has become visible
| with digitalization. The solution isn't to create a facebook that
| will regulate and rule the masses for good, but to gradually
| educate the masses into thinking.
|
| This just seems as a natural side effect of the new production
| mode that we have had for some time now, selling adds as the main
| source of income.
| threatofrain wrote:
| If I spread business lies on Facebook then Facebook becomes part
| of the problem. But if I spread lies which result in people
| dying, then Facebook is suddenly not the problem and we frame it
| as the fundamentals of democracy.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| The Fb algorithm favors engagement and controversy to the point
| that most people may not even see reasonable takes on a given
| issue. They're not neutral.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Globalization has created winners and losers.
|
| The losers were ignored by the winners creating huge gaps in
| trust.
|
| The winners used to utilize the few media institutes that they
| controlled to keep a lid on discontent.
|
| Social media has complicated the situation.
| csours wrote:
| Not disregarding your comment, but we are all both winners and
| losers. I get a cheap phone with amazing capabilities, but
| healthcare is confusing and expensive for me.
|
| Edit: the balance for is different for different people.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| I largely agree with this, not just in the context of COVID
| misinformation but a lot of the stuff Meta gets flak for in
| general.
|
| With respect to Instagram's effect on teens, people seem to
| conspicuously omit the fact that this leaked internal research
| showed that users were twice as likely to say that Instagram
| improves their well-being than harms it. It's really not clear to
| me how much of this is due to Meta products themselves, versus
| inherent challenges people tend to experience during adolescence.
| And also "Facebook knew instagram was hurting teens" is reductive
| at best, disingenuous at worst given that teens were twice as
| like to say it benefitted them.
|
| Similar analogies can be made with the Rohingya issue. Talk radio
| played a big part in inciting the Rwandan genocide. Is it right
| to say that talk radio was responsible for the genocide? I don't
| think so, the underlying social issues are mainly the cause and
| radio was part of the landscape in which in played out. I think
| it's a similar situation with Facebook. Like radio, they were a
| communication mechanism in societies that were perpetrating
| genocide. Facebook did their best to shut it down, but the
| challenges of suddenly scaling up moderation in a foreign
| language is hard. Yet people seem to genuinely think that
| Facebook was knowingly endorsing the genocide.
| Karsteski wrote:
| > Bosworth defended Facebook's role in combatting COVID, noting
| that the company ran one of the largest information campaigns in
| the world to spread authoritative information.
|
| I find this to be such a creepy, off-putting statement. The last
| thing I want in my society is to have profit-driven tech
| corporations deciding what is and is not "authoritative
| information".
|
| Especially given how time and time again they have censored
| "misinformation" which then proceeded to have merit.
|
| No thank you.
| wutwutwutwut wrote:
| Did you just consume authoritative information from Axios Media
| Inc?
| SleekEagle wrote:
| Well said. I wonder how long it will take legislation to catch
| up to the unregulated information highways that dominate so
| much of our national and global thought and perceptions!
| gimme_treefiddy wrote:
| Won't the regulation force them to censor? I get not wanting
| corporations to moderate discourse, but I can't help but feel
| they get shit from both ends.
|
| Fuck you if you censor, and fuck you if you don't.
| SleekEagle wrote:
| I don't think censorship is necessary given that it isn't
| the only way to address the problem of misinformation. For
| example, providing metrics on how trustworthy a source is
| by reasonable metrics isn't censorship, but providing
| information that's useful in gauging how much credibility
| to assign to a certain report.
|
| Do I think they should _censor_ information? No. But we 're
| all ill-informed with respect to almost all subjects, so
| knowing whether or not a climate report came from e.g. a
| group of Ivy-league researcher vs. ExxonMobil is important,
| and knowing whether or not information on evolution comes
| from PhD evolutionary biologists vs. the Young Earth
| Creationist Museum matters a lot. What I think we're seeing
| is the growing distrust of subject-matter experts, but only
| in select highly political domains.
|
| I understand what you said about pressure from both ends,
| but Facebook is a trillion dollar company with an extremely
| robust AI team. I'm sure they can figure out a solution, or
| at least come up with a gameplan on how to work their way
| towards one.
|
| I also understand a trepidation with respect to legislation
| considering the not infrequent tendency to under-legislate
| or over-legislate, but this is common in every area of law
| and eventually the pendulum swings slow down to a
| reasonable medium.
| pm90 wrote:
| > The last thing I want in my society is to have profit-driven
| tech corporations deciding what is and is not "authoritative
| information".
|
| Most of the National Press (NTY, WaPo etc.) is profit-driven
| though, isn't it? They're the one's who generally report and
| decide what's authoritative...
| gimme_treefiddy wrote:
| I feel like the "toxic" big tech social media platforms have
| been a lot more impartial than any of the MSM sources these
| days. I don't think the parent comment argued for that
| though.
| Karsteski wrote:
| Corporate press interests is also a problem as well, yes
| weddpros wrote:
| That's why I think combatting fake news actually promoted them
| and made the world a worse place: when people hear "fake news",
| they've learnt to doubt the "fake" part and start thinking this
| news is "so worth it that Facebook/Google/the media is
| combatting it, so I remain ignorant of that information that is
| vital to me".
|
| That's how I think combatting fake news made things worse for
| the very people we're trying to protect: it pushed them deeper
| into the fakeverse (TM).
|
| Second order effects...
| changoplatanero wrote:
| The last thing that Facebook wants is to be forced into a
| position where they have to decide what is and is not
| "authoritative information". They are only doing it because
| society gives them no other choice except to shut down the
| whole business.
| SleekEagle wrote:
| Of course they don't want to be in such a position because it
| costs them money. Similarly, it costs e.g Dupont money to be
| responsibly disposing of chemicals, but we're comfortable
| requiring them to do it or else face being shut down.
|
| We learned our lesson with Dupont when they were poisoning
| water supplies. Similarly, I believe Facebook is poisoning
| our information supplies, which you can see in the rapid
| uptick in QAnon believers. Hell, they whipped themselves into
| enough of a frenzy to storm the Capitol building to overthrow
| an election.
|
| I'm not making any political statements, truly. I'm just
| noting that these groups and ideas simply would not exist and
| perpetuate without being facilitated by Facebook's rampant
| misinformation problem.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Yeah I don't think someone in that role from fb is particularly
| qualified to talk about society and human nature in relationship
| to social networking.
|
| It's like listening to someone who builds, designs and optimizes
| production lines in cigarette factories philosophize about why
| people smoke and whether it is their free choice to do so.
| addcn wrote:
| There are no causes, just dynamics.
|
| And Facebook and society are in one together. Society functioned
| 'better' before Facebook, so I'd start looking at that end of
| dynamic first.
|
| QED.
| mc32 wrote:
| Maybe if facebook's graph were designed differently so that you
| have circles of relationships: family, friends, acquaintances,
| business relationships, interests and everyone else, but by
| default as the relationships are closer to the periphery, the
| less they get promoted. The smaller the circle the higher the
| chance of promotion.
|
| That way idiocy's doesn't spread high and far and instead has
| limited transmission radius.
| jonas21 wrote:
| You clearly don't have as many crazy people in your family as I
| do.
| mc32 wrote:
| It's not there aren't crazy relations but rather the
| craziness stays within the family or circle of friends.
| addcn wrote:
| There are no causes, just dynamics.
|
| And Facebook and society are in one together. Society functioned
| 'better' before Facebook, so I'd start looking at the Facebook
| end of dynamic first.
|
| QED.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Also, when it comes down to it I think that, aside from the
| cited exec, most o people would prefer that we dismantle
| Facebook rather than society.
| gfodor wrote:
| Boz is 50% right but would be 100% right if they ditched the
| business model that leads them to be incentivized into spying on
| people and feeding them misinformation they'll click on.
| snthd wrote:
| It's meta being meta about meta.
|
| On the one hand people have free will to believe what they want
| to - and - apparently - Facebook has no influence or
| responsibility on that.
|
| On the other hand Facebook is entirely in the business of selling
| influence to change what people believe.
|
| The meta is that this is a piece trying to influence what people
| believe about Facebook's influence.
|
| I guess that makes this meta about meta being meta about meta.
|
| Outrage against Facebook being too influential is marketing for
| Facebook adverts. It's a logical PR strategy. There's a perverse
| incentive to do it for real, and for Facebook to cause actual
| harm.
|
| It doesn't matter if anyone in Facebook actually believes that
| (following a perverse incentive is a good idea). All that needs
| to happen is for the incentives to be aligned that way. Which
| might literally be the famed "optimising for engagement".
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
| dandanua wrote:
| Society is dumb because execs of Facebook and other mega
| corporations want it to be dumb. They're building walled gardens
| where the herd can graze in a virtual reality, fully controlled
| by them.
|
| Yes, an average man has no idea how viruses work or what is mRNA,
| but he is not dumb to understand that Zuckerberg and other
| billionaires just don't give a ** about his life. That's why all
| the conspiracies and denial of what comes from authorities.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Facebook is discovering what casinos, distilleries, and cigarette
| companies learned from their own experiences:
|
| Sometimes, you stumble across something wildly successful that
| hits so hard partially because it keys into the pathological
| behaviors of some human beings (which can become self-
| destructive).
|
| When you discover something like that, you either volunteer to
| regulate your interactions with your customers or the government
| steps in to regulate them for you.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Thought experiment #1: Facebook/Instagram disintegrate overnight.
| During that same night, a decentralized version appears that
| operates on something resembling the torrent protocol where users
| install a small receiver/transmitter on their machine and are
| able to participate in something perfectly resembling FB today
| (without the ads). The cases of bullying and such remain. How do
| you go about solving the problem in that case?
|
| Thought experiment #2: The timeline is changed such that Bitcoin
| is actually made into a centralized protocol with one company at
| the middle with perfect control. Do lawmakers go about shutting
| it down because it contributes to drug exchanges and black
| markets?
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| This dodges the real issue which is that Facebook profits from
| users spreading disinformation. In fact this content is more
| engaging so their profit maximizers will amplify the
| disinformation. And as Frances Haugen's testimony demonstrates,
| FB knows this internally and chooses their profits over their
| users' well-being.
|
| What the FB exec is trying to do here is akin to oil companies
| cleaning sludge of ducks. "Look! We're helping! Were part of the
| solution!" But the ducks shouldn't have any sludge on them in the
| first place.
| macns wrote:
| Adding to your comment:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/05/facebook-...
|
| Everyone should be reminded of Frances Haugen's testimony. Two
| months after, it's like everyone has forgotten so a Facebook
| exec can blame it on society.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Less than two weeks ago CNN reported that Facebook took money
| for ads relating vaccine to the Holocaust:
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/tech/facebook-vaccine-
| holocau...
|
| Society just doesn't seem to be remember much of anything
| these days.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook's parent company, said
| the ads comparing the US Covid-19 response to Nazi Germany,
| comparing vaccines to the Holocaust, and the ad suggesting
| the vaccine was poison went against Facebook's vaccine
| misinformation policies.
|
| Seems terrifying to me that Facebook has such policies in
| the fist place.
|
| I agree that a shirt comparing US Covid-19 response to Nazi
| Germany or Fauci to Josef Mengele is poor taste, but to
| call a T-shits misinformation is a stretch.
|
| "I'm originally from America but I currently reside in 1941
| Germany"
|
| This isn't misinformation because it isn't information. It
| is political criticism and opinion.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Well - maybe if ads in the linear feed were not treated
| like every other kind of "information" and actually did
| not allow "Likes, Comments & Shares", I could agree with
| you a little more.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Can you expand on how "Likes, Comments & Shares" changes
| disagreeable opinions to misinformation? Is it because
| individuals post actual misinformation in the comments?
| _moof wrote:
| At least he admits there's a problem. I guess that's progress?
| kodah wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Facebook (and more broadly, social media) is to blame for letting
| every idiot in the world go viral with their terrible opinions.
|
| Society is to blame for the content.
| tamentis wrote:
| At this point they define how society behaves.
| hui-zheng wrote:
| btw, is this host a man or woman, or some other gender? I genuine
| what to know so that I could use the correct gender pronouns on
| this person. That host shall wear a badge with preferred gender
| pronouns.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Blame the society. Facebook IS a large part of the society. The
| same way religious people blame things on culture. Religion is a
| large part of the culture.
| rishabhsagar wrote:
| Isn't this the same point as "Guns don't kill people, people kill
| people"?
|
| While that statement is objectively true, the fact remains that
| Facebook amplifies and benefits from sensational posts.
|
| They are in a position to moderate the worst impacts of mis-
| information and yet consistently appear to be falling short.
|
| While I agree that parts of society is to blame for the online
| toxicity online, FB (and other social media companies) are
| certainly in position to do a better job of managing some of the
| worst impacts such as vaccine hesitancy and political mis-
| information.
|
| Infact they appear to be reluctant to act on it, since
| sensational posts and controversial topics appear to encourage
| attention.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Isn't this the same point as "Guns don't kill people, people
| kill people"? While that statement is objectively true, the
| fact remains that Facebook amplifies and benefits from
| sensational posts.
|
| And yet simply looking at Switzerland or Vermont,
| countries/States with a high number of guns per capita and an
| extremely low rate of gun violence, tells us a different story.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're even responding to here. How does it
| matter that there are areas with high gun ownership and low
| gun violence? It remains true that a gun gives the means to
| more easily kill someone, which is all that the analogy needs
| -- unless you're arguing that guns _don 't_ make it easier to
| kill, in which case I don't know why so many people bother
| using them.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Just 11-days ago CNN reported that Facebook sold ads comparing
| vaccine to the Holocaust...
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/tech/facebook-vaccine-holocau...
|
| Hmmm - were is that meme of Gene Wilder from Charlie and the
| Chocolate Factory grinning maniacly while saying something along
| the lines of; "Oh yes, please tell me more..."
| ahartmetz wrote:
| That is the advertiser's fault. /s
| ElectronShak wrote:
| I agree, and to assume that censorship helps society become
| better is just daft thinking.
|
| What happened to things like "Its healthy to question everything
| around you".
| barefeg wrote:
| Facebook is trying to save the internet culture of 20 years ago.
| A teenager version of me would 100% support what they are trying
| to do. But mainstream society is not compatible with the internet
| mentality of back in the day
| imapeopleperson wrote:
| If corporations won't take accountability then they shouldn't be
| allowed to censor
| SQueeeeeL wrote:
| I'm not sure what this comment is trying to get at? It's a
| blanket call for Facebook to take "accountability", but for
| what specific actions. Private corporations will always have
| control on what goes on with their platforms, if the US
| government ran a version of Facebook, it would be a different
| story
| wutwutwutwut wrote:
| That makes no sense to me. So if they don't hire a ton of
| people they shouldn't be allowed to remove obvious child porn
| their site?
| gambiting wrote:
| Like, there's a difference between removing material that's
| actually illegal and removing material that they just don't
| agree with as a company. I think the difference is important.
| SkittyDog wrote:
| Hey, a genuine Strawman argument!
|
| You've implied two separate false equivalences, here:
|
| * That "censorship" necessarily and only means "removing
| obvious child pornography", AND
|
| * that in order to "take accountability", a company must
| "hire a ton of people".
|
| You haven't established why either of those equivalences are
| a reasonable interpretation of the parent statement. And to
| this casual observer, it would appear as though you are
| deliberately conflating extremes in a rather disingenuous
| fashion.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| No, the poster is not implying that "'censorship'
| necessarily and only means 'removing obvious child
| pornography'". They're implying that removing child
| pornography is one form that censorship might take, and
| that entirely removing the ability to censor would remove
| the ability to censor child pornography. You might have
| valid objections to this, but it's not the same as what
| you've written.
|
| As to the second point, either an organization has the
| manpower to defend itself from content that it is
| "accountable" for, or it will be unable to defend itself
| when necessary. It seems pretty clear to me that only
| organizations with decent resources would be able to
| moderate content in the "if you censor, you're accountable"
| regime.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better, I think this exec agrees with
| you that FB should not necessarily moderate. That said, judging
| by the blowback being received, it looks as though this exec's
| position will likely not win the day in the long run.
| SllX wrote:
| " Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation" is the
| actual title.
|
| I thought this article was going to be about something else.
| andreyk wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. A lot of people on HN seem to
| instinctively deride Facebook, but this statements is not wrong
| -- Facebook is a tool for communication, and how people use it
| is not entirely in its control. At best you could argue that
| their algorithms might have promoted misinformation since it
| got more engagement, but I suspect the opposite was true.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Facebook is made of people, it's us. We created it, we operate it
| and we can make it better or cancel it all together. It's just on
| us.
| robomartin wrote:
| > He said that individuals make the choice whether to listen to
| that information or to rely on less reputable information spread
| by friends and family.
|
| > "That's their choice. They are allowed to do that. You have an
| issue with those people. You don't have an issue with Facebook.
| You can't put that on me."
|
| This is such nonsense.
|
| Psychology tells us that we are susceptible to message repetition
| and perceived authority.
|
| At the most basic level this is a necessary element for the
| survival of the species: Parent constantly tells a kid not to get
| too close to the edge of a cliff. If the brain wasn't wired to
| accept such messages without question humanity might have failed
| the evolutionary fitness test.
|
| I've seen comments on this thread attributing aspects of the
| social media effect to the village idiot. That's also nonsense.
| Perfectly intelligent people who are demonstrably not idiots fall
| prey to these psychological effects. Once someone ascribes trust
| to a source --whether it is an individual, group, news
| organization, politician, etc.-- it is nearly impossible to make
| them see the errors in what they are being led to believe. It
| takes a particularly open mindset to be able to look outside of
| what I am going to call indoctrination.
|
| In the US it is easy to identify some of these groups. Besides
| religious groupings, anyone who will generally refer to
| themselves as "life-long democrat" or "life-long republican" is
| far more likely to accept a world view and "truths" from members
| of those groups. Religion, of course, is likely the oldest such
| resonant chambers.
|
| Facebook and other social media outlets, along with their
| algorithms, have introduced segmentation and grouping at a sub-
| level never before possible in society. Worse than that, they
| allow and, in fact, are the source of, a constant bombardment of
| ideas and ideologies in sometimes incredibly narrow domains. This
| is great when you are trying to understand the difference between
| using synthetic vs. organic motor oil in your engine. Not so
| great when it makes someone descend into a deep dark and narrow
| hole of hatred.
|
| That's the problem. And yes, FB and social media are absolutely
| at fault of enabling for the constant repetition of some of the
| most negative, violent and counterproductive messaging humanity
| has ever seen.
|
| I have mentioned this in other related discussions. We've seen
| this first hand in our own family. Over the last four years or so
| we two family members (cousins) who grew up together descend into
| equally extreme opposites thanks to FB. It is interesting because
| prior to this happening they didn't even have a FB account. They
| each got one at the same time to keep in touch with family. Four
| years later one is what I could only describe as a hate-filled-
| republican and the other an equal and opposite hate-filled-
| democrat. And 100% of this happened because FB drove these two
| people into deeper, darker and more hateful dark holes day after
| day, for years. The damage done is likely irreversible.
|
| They (FB) didn't need to do that. Yet, that's what these geniuses
| thought was the "right" thing to do. Brilliant.
|
| I am not generally in favor of heavy-handed government
| intervention. And yet, I have no idea how else something like
| this could be corrected in order to make these social media
| companies stop being radioactive to society. We have probably
| wasted at least a decade optimizing for hatred. How sad.
|
| EDIT: I was going to say "unintentionally optimizing", however,
| at some point anyone with one bit of intelligence could
| understand this was trending in the wrong direction. Not making
| modifications to the recommendations algorithms to reduce the
| occurrence of deep dives into dark holes of hatred is a form of
| intentionally promoting such results. Again, sad.
| specialist wrote:
| Imagine if Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc were run like MMORPGs.
| Imagine them proactively mitigating griefing, bots, brigading,
| etc.
|
| John Siracusa has been making this point on Accidental Tech
| Podcast (http://atp.fm): Zuck's envisioned metaverse would also
| be a toxic hellscape. Because Zuck is ideologically opposed to
| moderation.
|
| The difference, of course, is because social medias sell
| advertising. Whereas MMOPRGs sell experiences.
| kvathupo wrote:
| This is a topic that came up in the wonderful Maria Ressa's Nobel
| Peace Prize speech. She argued that an international coalition of
| governments needs to combat disinformation on social media by
| saying what information is the "truth", a word that came up often
| in her speech.
|
| I don't think this will work at all. Ignoring the implications of
| government interference in private corporations, do we trust
| governments to be arbiters of truth?
|
| I certainly don't, and I'm sure John Locke would have agreed. In
| the case of the US, the government itself was the source of much
| skepticism concerning COVID, and masks!
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| Maria Ressa herself doesn't trust (some) governments to be
| arbiters of truth. She was found guilty of spreading
| disinformation by the Philippine government. She claims that
| she was telling the truth, and the government is corrupt and
| lying and attacking the free press, but authoritative sources
| in the Philippines have stated that she is mistaken. The
| Philippine government was clearly combating disinformation from
| online foreign-backed conspiracy theorists.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I don't think this will work at all. Ignoring the
| implications of government interference in private
| corporations, do we trust governments to be arbiters of truth?
|
| Excluding the obvious bad faith actors (pretty much all on some
| sanction list) some countries will dance around the truth and
| bend over backward to avoid offending some countries [0] [1]
| [2] [3]
|
| [0] https://www.foxnews.com/media/who-china-taiwan-interview
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/senior-who-
| adv...
|
| [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8172031/WHO-
| officia...
|
| [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52088167
| ahartmetz wrote:
| > do we trust governments to be arbiters of truth?
|
| You already do, might as well accept it. The government funds
| science, makes some decisions about education, and makes laws
| based on what it thinks is true. Some of it is always wrong,
| but it's not as wrong as idiots on Facebook. And the goverment
| is something that is (somewhat) controlled by the people, more
| so than Facebook.
| beardyw wrote:
| This headline is wrong. He did not say _society_ is to blame, he
| said individual people are.
|
| Margaret Thatcher said "there is no such thing as society". By
| that she meant we have no collective consciousness, we are just
| individuals. If that is the case then we would have no desire to
| protect people we don't know. Spreading misinformation is not an
| issue. Most legislation is unnecessary.
|
| If you do believe in society, you are part of a larger organism
| and you aim to protect others.
|
| It just depends where you are on this.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| And yet they participate in society.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I worry that's where this is all going: "We've prohibited
| people with problematic opinions from participating in social
| media, but after some careful reflection, we've realized that
| they're still alive even so..."
| Maursault wrote:
| Oblig. Repo Man quote:
|
| Bud: _I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and
| yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am._
|
| Otto: _That 's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like
| me._
| Bendy wrote:
| "The NRA say that 'guns don't kill people, people kill people'. I
| think the gun helps. Just standing and shouting BANG! That's not
| gonna kill too many people." - Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill (1999)
| dandotway wrote:
| Homo Sapiens have been murdering each other on this planet for
| at least 10,000 to 100,000 years, and have only used burning-
| powder projectile launch tubes for roughly the past 1000 years.
| (Poison darts launched from a blowgun are a more ancient form
| of killing tube.)
|
| When convenient projectile launching killing tubes aren't
| available, Homo Sapiens will rapidly revert to 10,000+ year old
| murder methods, and thus a husband inflamed with murder-rage
| who just learned his wife's ovaries have been voluntarily
| fertilized by another man's semen will not infrequently use
| punches or a nearby blunt object (hammer or rock) to fracture
| her skull and destroy her brain function, or use his hands to
| crush her windpipe, or bleed her out with a knife. This has
| been happening essentially every year for at least the past
| 10,000 years. If his wife had been armed with a handheld
| projectile launching killing tube she could have defended
| herself, but women frequently don't carry projectile tubes and
| frequently vote for restricting access to projectile tubes,
| because projectile tubes are loud and scary and make them feel
| unsafe.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Why use many word when few word do trick?
| dandotway wrote:
| Many word have trick. Make see different than few word.
| mcguire wrote:
| Homo Sapiens have been killing each other on this planet for
| at least 10,000 years, and only used nuclear weapons for
| roughly the last 75 years.... If his wife had been armed with
| an M-28 Davy Crockett firing an M-388 round using a W54 Mod 2
| with a yield of 84GJ, she could easily have deterred him, but
| she would not be legally allowed to carry military weapons.
|
| Maintain the purity of your bodily fluids, friend!
| adolph wrote:
| Izzard is from England which has a high degree of gun control.
| The murder rate doesn't seem to be strongly correlated to
| regulation, however. This lends less credence to Izzard's
| conjecture. Maybe people who may murder will use whatever tool
| is available or aren't concerned about breaking gun laws?
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/mur...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_the_Uni...
| root_axis wrote:
| The murder rate seems a lot lower than the US. Also the
| "murderers aren't concerned about gun laws" line is specious;
| a criminal isn't concerned about laws _by definition_ - that
| doesn 't invalidate the reasoning behind passing a law.
| hui-zheng wrote:
| Come to China. we have no gun and we have one of the least
| murder rate in the world.
|
| We welcome you immigrate here, where people are illegal to
| possession any weapon other than kitchen knives, and you
| are fully protected.
| adolph wrote:
| Doesn't seem like China is rolling out the welcome mat
| for many folks.
|
| _In 2016, China issued 1,576 permanent residency cards.
| This was more than double what it had issued the previous
| year, but still roughly 750 times lower than the United
| States' 1.2 million._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_China
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Well, it's partially because police salaries are based on
| the rate of solved cases, no? Surely there is
| underreporting. And the homicide rate in Canada (which
| includes unintentional manslaughter) isn't much higher
| than the reported rate in China and we're fairly well
| armed by international standards:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilia
| n_g...
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Part of my family's muslim. I'll take my chances with the
| US and its guns, thanks.
| root_axis wrote:
| I would not want to live in China due to the government's
| authoritarian tendencies.
| Bendy wrote:
| So long as it's mightier than the sword.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Your link shows the US has 4x the homicide rate as the UK.
| Meanwhile, Japan has incredibly restrictive weapon laws
| (including knives and swords), and they have a fraction of
| the rate of everyone else.
|
| And before you point to Switzerland, I am all for gun
| ownership by certified, well trained, responsible citizens.
| But the US doesn't have that. Either decrease access to guns,
| or enact 2 years of compulsory military service where you are
| trained to respect your weapon and know precisely when and
| how to responsibly use it AND store it. If you do neither,
| you get the US.
|
| And in either case, we need to improve the mental wellbeing
| of everyone in the US by giving more people access to "free"
| healthcare and not stigmatizing mental health.
| adolph wrote:
| > Your link shows the US has 4x the homicide rate as the
| UK.
|
| That isn't germane. If the rate of something fluctuates
| without connection to the action taken to change the rate,
| then the action isn't effective or is confounded by other
| more significant factors.
|
| Izzard's implicit conjecture is that if guns are not
| present, then murder is less likely (please let me know if
| I am misunderstanding it). Izzard's country of primary
| domicile is England which has a recent history of making
| guns less available. However, the murder rate in England
| appears to increase and decrease without regard to the
| timing of key legislation. Since a murder may or may not be
| performed with a gun, if murders do not decrease in the
| absence of guns then it follows that a gun may be a
| particular method but is not necessary for the commission
| of a murder.
|
| I suppose a counterfactual could be asserted: the murder
| rate would have been even higher without England's gun
| laws. I suppose that is possible and would be plausible
| with more information about the natural variation in murder
| rates of various methods. Maybe something like Narwal tusks
| aren't a replacement for guns but have their own natural
| rate of usage in murders.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Some people seem to be blind to the fact that access to a
| firearm lowers the cost of killing (by making it easier to
| do so); and what lowers the cost of something will
| encourage that behavior at the margins. But Switzerland!
| Sure, they've managed to thread that needle through
| education and regulation. But just relaxing gun laws
| without counteracting that in some way will of course
| increase homicides (and suicides, similarly). The US is
| case in point.
| lexapro wrote:
| Society allowed Facebook to emerge and grow into what it is now,
| so I can't say I disagree.
| rdiddly wrote:
| Calling it "blaming society" makes this pretty funny, like when
| Manson did it and the kid in the Suicidal Tendencies song does it
| when his mom won't bring him a Pepsi.
|
| Facebook's self-serving algorithms are of course a scourge in
| this area, but he does have a point. Part of why the messaging on
| COVID has been so fucked is because of this very thing: spinning
| or tweaking the truth. Facebook does it, to increase engagement,
| but public officials and others also do it. People who should've
| just told the simple truth, instead tried to gauge our response
| to it, and spun and tweaked the truth in an effort to "game" the
| response. Just tell the truth. Because you're probably
| underestimating the general public, as usual, and will ultimately
| end up increasing the danger and impact, by two mechanisms: 1)
| people have incomplete or incorrect or insufficient information
| to act on, and/or 2) certain people (who are adults and can tell
| when someone is dissembling, or communicating manipulatively,
| a.k.a. propagandizing) start to distrust the "official story,"
| and the cumulative effect is that they go looking for "the real
| truth" in all kinds of wacky out-of-the-way places and get all
| conspiracy-minded, and the Facebooks of the world pick up on this
| and amplify it in their feeds. You want to combat this? Give them
| an authoritative, trustworthy source. Tell them the whole,
| unvarnished truth. Gauging the response, communicating to achieve
| a goal, well that's not informing, that's either sales or
| propaganda. You want to combat disinformation, start with
| _information_ - all of it, without spin, without censorship.
|
| Seemingly every disaster movie has a character who refuses to
| sound a warning because they don't want to start a panic, but
| then they ultimately cause greater loss of life or whatnot. That
| character is always a villain. We hate them precisely because
| their communication or lack thereof, has an agenda that
| underestimates us and ultimately ends up costing us.
| Grismar wrote:
| Drug dealer blames addicts for substance abuse. No shit Sherlock,
| but you're not accused of coming up with the filth or consuming
| it - you're accused of being a primary trafficker. In fact, the
| comparison with a dealer is mild, as Facebook is to a typical
| drug dealer what Walmart is to your local convenience store.
| Escobar has nothing on Zuckerberg.
| Booktrope wrote:
| Not FB responsibility if they set up and tuned an information
| spreading system that promotes stuff that's inflammatory over
| stuff that's informative? Users of FB only see what FB feeds to
| them, and that's all about how FB aligns the user's activities
| and characteristics to the content FB is supplying. What a total
| cop out to say, the problem is what people say, when FB plays
| such a crucial role in what people see. Before FB (yes and other
| social media) amped this stuff up, a village idiot standing on a
| corner shouting conspiracy theories got very little attention.
| But on FB this kind of stuff feeds engagement, and we know how
| important engagement is.
|
| Yet the guy who's slated to by FB's CTO says, don't put all this
| inflammatory stuff on me! Freedom of speech you know and just let
| us do our job of promoting engagement and building ever more
| effective ad targeting technology!
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| FB shows people what they want to see. They provided the public
| a channel to tune into what anyone has to say and it turned out
| that people sought out the village idiot.
|
| Now the public says show me what I want, but prevent everyone
| else from seeing what they want.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| > an information spreading system that promotes stuff that's
| inflammatory over stuff that's informative
|
| The problem is who's to say which is which.
| throwaway47292 wrote:
| > "Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not
| believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not
| share a thing,"
|
| This is just bullshit.
|
| You can say the same thing about extracting confession under
| torture.. the individual "decided" to tell the truth, why
| shouldn't we admit it into evidence?
|
| Those mega structures, controlled by billion parameter models,
| and then some human goes and does an interview and says 'ye no
| problem, its your choice', is most of all naive and arrogant,
| that anyone can even pretend to say they understand how the model
| is impacting the social structure.
|
| As Jacques Ellul says, the strongest unit against propaganda is
| the family, or small groups of individuals, as they pull each
| other to the center of the group, but imagine now each individual
| is exposed to unique personalized propaganda, so the group
| constantly diverges. I imagine it like a group of friends holding
| hands in a pool, but then there is giant influx of water between
| them, so there is constant force to separate, so they have to
| keep their relationships stronger, and the force increases over
| time.
|
| It is the people that seek propaganda, not the other way around.
| Now however the algorithm satisfies the search in most
| satisfactory way possible (within the limits of current
| technology)
| chris_wot wrote:
| He says if he spends every dollar in removing fake and misleading
| content it won't fix the issue.
|
| More and more people like myself are just... deleting Facebook.
| Not deleting their account. Just deleting it from their phone,
| and never bother logging in from anywhere.
|
| I urge people to try it. Don't bother jumping through the hoops
| Facebook give you for deleting it. Just delete it from your
| phone. You'll spend a day trying to check it, realise it isn't
| there, then you'll completely forget about it. And you won't miss
| it.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| I feel like a lot of people think "the internet" is toxic
|
| When in reality maybe humans are just bad and the internet just
| exposed it
|
| Before the internet there was just no way to see it
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > no way to see it
|
| Sure there was. All the pearl-clutchers who are telling us that
| Facebook has doomed society were saying the same thing about TV
| a few decades ago. Remember Morton Downey Jr? Jerry Springer?
| Sally Jesse Raphael? They were saying that about music.
| Remember 2 Live Crew? People burned Beatles records for fear
| that this "devil's music" would destroy civilization. They were
| saying that about comic books. They were saying that about
| Dungeons and Dragons. I've spent my entire near half-century of
| life hearing about how everything I enjoy is going to destroy
| society.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Both can be true.
|
| Facebook can be both a problem - and a boon. It certainly
| helps people find other people who share the same
| "pearl/rifle" clutching mentality - and amplifies them into
| eco-chambers.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| You're all still on FB? Dropped out and haven't looked back.
|
| Youtube on the other hand...
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I'm still on Facebook, but I don't engage with political
| content and I unfriend acquaintances that post stupid crap.
| Aside from posts by close family my feed is 90% cute animal
| photos and videos, along with a wee bit of PC building content.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| "We are only _bringing_ the worst of people out, it was already
| in there"
| nowherebeen wrote:
| This is such an understatement.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I understand that corp execs are gonna corp exec,, but I gotta
| admit I am still unclear on a fundamental level why social media
| is any more blame worthy for misinformation than broadcast media
| on a qualitative level. FB never made you any promises that what
| your read on it contains any truth whatsoever.
| bitexploder wrote:
| I think it's mostly that they are incentivized to let some
| voices be amplified on their platform. The radical right is
| good for business so they let disinformation fester to make a
| few extra dollars.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| I'm sorry, but I don't see how this is any different than
| networks being concerned about the ratings of each show, or
| Hollywood about projected return on budget when creating
| projects.
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| If you have some time, I very highly recommend reading An Ugly
| Truth (https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062960672). That
| book gave me a new realization - Facebook (and other companies)
| are not victims of their surroundings. There are some very
| intentional, very impactful decisions that are made at the
| highest level.
| LNSY wrote:
| Alas, poor Mark Zuckerberg, a victim of society.
| LNSY wrote:
| Also: Facebook could go a long ways to counter covid
| disinformation by removing the billions of bots and fake
| accounts that infest its service. But if they did that we would
| find out that most of their market share is, in fact, fake. And
| then they wouldn't be worth nearly as much money as they say
| they are.
| ricardoplouis wrote:
| Mental health has been an issue for as long as we've known, but
| Facebook does have a curious way of amplifying societal problems
| such as this and making it worse.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
| mbesto wrote:
| He's right in some sense, but the context is important. The
| problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a megaphone.
| Facebook can't say:
|
| - Amplify your commercial business message to billions of people
| worldwide.
|
| AND at the same time
|
| - Well its your individual choice whether or not to listen to the
| village idiot.
|
| You guys gave them a megaphone, how do you expect society to
| behave?!
| baq wrote:
| it isn't the village idiot, it's the insidious manipulator that
| influences village idiots at industrial scale now.
| api wrote:
| It's much worse than giving the village idiot a megaphone.
| Facebook (and most other socials) prioritize content to
| maximize engagement, and (big surprise) the village idiot
| maximizes engagement. Facebook is a machine tuned specifically
| to spread hate and bad ideas because that's what maximizes the
| time people spend on Facebook.
|
| I thought of a good analogy a while back. Lets say someone
| walks past you and says "hi" and smiles. Lets say someone else
| then walks past you and punches you in the face. Which
| interaction maximizes engagement? Well that's the interaction
| and content that social media is going to amplify.
|
| Social media companies are the tobacco companies of technology.
| They make billions by lobotomizing the body politic.
| freediver wrote:
| > Lets say someone walks past you and says "hi" and smiles.
| Lets say someone else then walks past you and punches you in
| the face. Which interaction maximizes engagement?
|
| Likely the first one. Could also lead to a literal
| 'engagement'.
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| Not on a busy streetcorner. A fistfight tends to attract
| much more attention than a passing greeting. Facebook is a
| very busy streetcorner.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| If you're optimizing for time spent in the interaction,
| which is what FB does - then probably the punch in the face
| will cause you to stay on the scene for longer, whether to
| yell at the person, fight back, when you call the cops,
| etc.
|
| The "hi" is returned with a "hi" back and you both continue
| walking.
| freediver wrote:
| Likely scenario is that the interaction stops the moment
| you are floored by being punched in the face. You may
| stay on the scene longer, but the perpetuator would
| likely take off.
|
| Also answering to hi and a smile with a hi and smile
| _could_ in fact be the right way to optimize for time
| spent in this interaction because it has low probability
| but very high impact outcomes as far as time spent goes
| (dating/marriage).
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Supposedly they were working on detuning this effect.
| soyiuz wrote:
| True, but the financial incentives of many (most?) companies
| doesn't align with public benefits (see pollution, plastics,
| diet etc.) Why is social media singled out in our demands for
| them to act morally good, instead of just profitable?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Why is social media singled out in our demands for them
| to act morally good, instead of just profitable?_
|
| It's not. We're so used to being totally unregulated in
| tech that even minor oversight can be spun as burdensome.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| They aren't singled out.
| canistr wrote:
| Twitter and Youtube, sure.
|
| But the blast radius of a Facebook post doesn't have the same
| reach given the majority of posts go to your explicit network
| of connections. Unless you're specifically referring to
| Facebook Groups? But then are we certain it's different from
| Reddit or other forums?
| itake wrote:
| Facebook Groups and Pages create ways for people to share
| content, triggering exponential growth (e.g. user shares meme
| to their page so that their friends see it. Their friends
| choose to re-share. wash. rinse. repeat.)
| [deleted]
| freediver wrote:
| So should there be a special tax on "megaphones" like Twitter,
| Facebook or YouTube? What exactly is the legal framework under
| witch these companies could be scrutinized? Normally the
| manufacturer of megaphones does not get sued when a person uses
| it to promote hatred on a village square.
| varelse wrote:
| Well since SCOTUS has ruled that it's okay for private
| citizens to sue over abortion, just make it okay for everyone
| to sue Facebook at scale irregardless of the
| constitutionality of doing so. There's a lot they can do
| about this content and they choose not to do so because it
| costs money. Always follow the money.
| adolph wrote:
| The above is SCOTUS misinformation.
|
| _WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that
| abortion providers in Texas can challenge a state law
| banning most abortions after six weeks, allowing them to
| sue at least some state officials in federal court despite
| the procedural hurdles imposed by the law's unusual
| structure._
|
| _But the Supreme Court refused to block the law in the
| meantime, saying that lower courts should consider the
| matter._
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/us/politics/texas-
| abortio...
| varelse wrote:
| Senate Bill 8 is still in effect. The above is SCOTUS
| disinformation.
|
| https://www.kvue.com/article/news/politics/texas-this-
| week/t...
|
| "So, essentially, the Supreme Court left the law in
| effect. We were expecting to possibly see them limit the
| enforcement of it because that was the biggest concern
| that Supreme Court, Supreme Court justices seemed to
| have. And that enforcement, of course, is allowing
| private citizens to sue, under the law, anyone who aids
| and abeits an abortion for at least $10,000 damages, if
| won. And so, that's where it kind of was being targeted
| today. And the Supreme Court essentially put that back on
| the U.S. District Court, allowing that lawsuit to resume
| to determine the constitutionality of the law."
|
| Or TLDR they left it to the states. Can't wait to see how
| the states run with that concept.
| adolph wrote:
| "ruled that it's okay" != "left the law in effect"
|
| "U.S. District Court" != "the states"
|
| _Whatever a state statute may or may not say about a
| defense, applicable federal constitutional defenses
| always stand available when properly asserted. See U. S.
| Const., Art. VI. Many federal constitutional rights are
| as a practical matter asserted typically as defenses to
| state-law claims, not in federal pre-enforcement cases
| like this one._
|
| https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-463_3ebh.p
| df
| sverhagen wrote:
| I think the megaphone is thus more of a metaphor than it is
| an analogy. Or at least, like most analogies, it breaks down
| under even the lightest pressure. For it to be an analogy,
| it'd have to be a megaphone manufacturer that also brings the
| audience together. Maybe Facebook is the megaphone AND the
| village square AND then some.
| noahtallen wrote:
| That's what's challenging about this situation. We're
| experiencing a fairly new problem. It hasn't before been
| possible for a member of society to communicate with all
| other members of society at the same time, nor has it been
| possible for a member of society to get addicted on a curated
| feed of random (sometimes anonymous) folks spreading their
| ideas globally.
|
| All of these things seem new to me:
|
| - Global, direct communication with all members of society.
|
| - Addictive design patterns in software.
|
| - AI-curated news feeds based on increasing engagement.
|
| - Anonymous conversations.
|
| Since it's new, society doesn't have frameworks to think
| about this kind of stuff yet.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >That's what's challenging about this situation. We're
| experiencing a fairly new problem. It hasn't before been
| possible for a member of society to communicate with all
| other members of society at the same time, nor has it been
| possible for a member of society to get addicted on a
| curated feed of random (sometimes anonymous) folks
| spreading their ideas globally.
|
| This comment could have been taken more or less word for
| word from the diary of a monk who lived in the 1500s.
|
| We've been through this before.
| kelnos wrote:
| I think scale matters, though. In the 1500s (through much
| of the 1900s, even), most people were still mainly
| exposed to the viewpoints of people and groups who were
| physically local to them. Your local newspaper and (more
| recently) local TV news was a product of local attitudes
| and opinions. Certainly all of those people were not a
| member of your "tribe", but many were, and there were
| limits as to how far off the beaten path you could go.
|
| If you had some wacky, non-mainstream ideas, you self-
| moderated, because you knew most of the people around you
| didn't have those ideas, and you'd suffer social
| consequences if you kept bringing them up and shouting
| them from the rooftops. Even if you decided you'd still
| like to do some rooftop-shouting, your reach was
| incredibly limited, and most people would just ignore
| you.
|
| Today you can be exposed to viewpoints from every culture
| and every walk of life, usually with limited enough
| context that you'll never get the full picture of what
| these other people are about. If you have crazy ideas, no
| matter how crazy, you can find a scattered, distributed
| group of people who think like you do, and that will
| teach you that it's ok to believe -- and scream about --
| things that are false, because other people in the world
| agree with you. And the dominant media platforms on the
| internet know that controversy drives page views more
| than anything else, so they amplify this sort of thing.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| In a similar sense to how if you've experienced a low-
| pressure shower you've experienced Niagara Falls, sure,
| we've been through this before.
| andrew_ wrote:
| I don't understand how a targeted tax would help at all here.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > the village idiot
|
| One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > The problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a
| megaphone
|
| While you're not wrong that it's giving the idiot a megaphone,
| it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a
| megaphone. The real question is why can't people discern the
| difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?
|
| I'd also note that a big issue now is trust -- trust in
| "elites" (technocrats, wealthy, those in positions of power)
| has been declining for a long time. i think people are not so
| much seeking out the village idiot, but massively discounting
| "experts".
|
| A list of things that come to mind which have broken trust:
| 60's saw hippies which wanted to break norms of their
| parents/grandparents, 70s saw vietnam war, breaking gold
| standard, 80s greed is good, iran contra etc, 90s tough on
| crime policies, y2k fears, 00s - iraq/afghanistan, 9/11
| attacks, governmental data dragnet, manning/snowden/asange,
| Covid statements which did not pan out as planned...
|
| People have good reasons to be skeptical of elites, but I think
| anti-corruption work is more important than trying to silence
| the idiot.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Facebook (like News) is entertainment. People don't select
| entertainment for accuracy.
|
| The village idiot (that's successful on Facebook) has self-
| optimized for being catchy - that's why people are listening.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| > The real question is why can't people discern the
| difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?
|
| Societally we solve this through trust organizations.
| Individually, I have no way to validate the information every
| expert/idiot I might come across. So is "connect the
| frombulator to the octanizer but watch out for the ultra
| convexication that might form" gibberish or just your
| ignorance of the terminology in use in that problem domain?
| Most people don't try to figure out how to navigate each
| field. Heck, even scientists use shortcuts like "astrology
| has no scientific basis so it doesn't matter what so-called
| SMEs in those fields say". So you rely on trust in various
| organizations and peers to help guide you. These structures
| can often fail you for various reasons but that's the best
| we've managed to do. That's why for example "trust the
| science" is a bad slogan - people aren't really trusting the
| science. They're trusting what other people (some times
| political leaders) tell them the science is. Add in bad-faith
| actors exploiting uncertainty and sowing chaos and it's a
| mess.
|
| Silencing the idiot is fine as long as your 100% certain
| you're silencing someone who's wrong and not just someone
| espousing a countervailing opinion (eg Hinton's deep learning
| research was poo-pooed by establishment ML for a very long
| time)
| didibus wrote:
| > it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a
| megaphone
|
| I think this can be argued against, because Facebook does
| recommendation and algorithmic curation.
|
| Even if Facebook didn't purposely tweak things to propagate
| disinformation, you could say it is easy to manipulate their
| algorithms to disproportionately push the information.
|
| So for me it's a case of Facebook not doing enough to fight
| potential abuse on their platform.
|
| There's an element of responsibility here, because we are
| prone to some material more than other. There are primitive
| instincts in us, and content designed to take advantage of
| that is parasitic, and it is manipulative and addictive in
| that sense.
|
| Crazy theories, appeal to emotions, controversy, nudity, clan
| affiliation, and all that are ways to take advantage of our
| psyche.
|
| Even a smart person is as smart as the data more readily
| available to them. If the only thing about gender psychology
| I ever heard about was Jordan Peterson because he's been
| recommended to me, even if I'm the smartest most reasonable
| person, this is now the starting point of my understanding
| and thoughts around gender psychology.
|
| So I think a platform that is optimized to show information
| that is most designed to make people susceptible to it, and
| that also targets information to the most susceptible people
| to present it to is by design going to result in the outcomes
| we're seeing.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| That's also missing the greater picture. It's giving
| _everyone_ a megaphone... but giving the loudest megaphones
| to the people who can get most people to listen to them.
|
| You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a tendency
| to prioritise engaging with things you disagree with (hell,
| half of my HN comments are because I felt motivated to write
| something to disagree with some OP at some point - even this
| one).
|
| What that means is the traditional small-c conservative
| 'village elders', 'parish priests', and 'elected officials',
| who hold authoritative positions not because they're
| controversial, but because they historically represented
| positions of neutrality and consensus end up with quiet
| megaphones, and the madmen claiming the world is flat and
| there's a paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop end up with
| the loudest megaphones.
|
| Half of the population is below average intelligence, and
| giving the wrong people the loudest megaphones has a
| devastating effect on society.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a
| tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree
| with
|
| I wonder if you're aware of any known effect/research on
| this topic? I'm openminded to learning more
| dstroot wrote:
| Was going to say exactly this. Reasonable people with
| reasonable views have no reason to promote themselves or
| their views on Facebook. However non-reasonable people with
| non-reasonable views promote heavily for clicks/engagement
| to sell you something, or just to "idiot farm" to sell the
| idiots something later.
|
| Facebook's unregulated revenue model will keep ensuring
| this dynamic.
| Aunche wrote:
| > You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a
| tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree
| with (hell, half of my HN comments are because I felt
| motivated to write something to disagree with some OP at
| some point - even this one).
|
| It tends to be that platforms with more disagreement have
| healthier discourse. I think that actually the opposite is
| more harmful. Echo-chambers allow for extremist ideas to
| grow and encourage hostility towards those that don't go
| along with the echo chamber.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Yeah I think this the crux of it. Facebook is prioritizing
| the most "engagement" which means prioritizing the most
| "reactions" which means prioritizing the most divisive and
| enraging content on both sides. If Facebook instead
| prioritized the "ah that's nice" kind of content we
| wouldn't see the divisiveness we see today
| Jcowell wrote:
| I feel this ignores human nature to engage an in
| conflict. Or in other words, humans like to debate so we
| will.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Yeah but it is also human nature to fuck as much as
| possible but we have rules and laws against things like
| rape to control those tendencies. Just because we are
| naturally inclined to do something does not necessarily
| mean that it is best for us
| gretch wrote:
| What? This is certainly [citation needed]
|
| I highly disagree that it's human nature to 'fuck as much
| as possible'.
|
| Certainly it is the goal of some humans. I can speak with
| personal experience that my nature isn't just to 'fuck as
| much as possible'. And neither is it most ppl I know. And
| the thing that's stopping us is not just anti-rape laws?
|
| Fucking is great, but if you have a family and young
| kids, you care a lot about taking care of you family and
| not just going to the club and fucking more people.
| satellite2 wrote:
| It's more interesting to debate subject and preferences
| where there is not already an overwhelming amount of
| evidence that one side is wrong.
| philipkglass wrote:
| It's also common for people to accept defaults without
| substantial customization. That's why the algorithms
| matter. Some people will deliberately seek out rage-bait
| even if the default algorithm delivers just-the-facts
| news and heartwarming pictures from friends' families.
| Most won't. Also, most people won't customize their
| settings to eliminate rage-bait if _that 's_ what gets
| prioritized by algorithmic defaults.
| xcjs wrote:
| It also doesn't matter how much you customize your
| settings if they're inherently useless, minimally
| functional, or never there in the first place. A lot of
| the content control settings that Facebook loves to tout
| are practically useless.
|
| Sure, I can hide every post from the "Controversial News"
| page, but I can't stop viewing content from third parties
| entirely. I'm only interested in first-party content -
| what my contacts create. Unfortunately that goes against
| the monetization model of Facebook.
|
| I want a more closed loop social network and think that's
| the model we should return to, but unfortunately that's
| not where the profit/engagement is.
| foogazi wrote:
| > Half of the population is below average intelligence
|
| This is the real problem
| amf12 wrote:
| Half of the population will _always_ have below average
| intelligence.
| d2z-NdEa wrote:
| This is incorrect. At least half the population will
| always have _median or below_ intelligence.
| rightbyte wrote:
| If we are referring to IQ the median and average is
| supposed to be the same by definition.
| waltbosz wrote:
| I disagree. Half the population will _always_ have above
| average intelligence.
| xupybd wrote:
| But the majority is somewhere near center.
| yololol wrote:
| > Half of the population is below average intelligence
|
| By definition :)
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Only if the distribution is symmetric. [0]
|
| Extra pedantic mode: if the population is an odd number,
| the number of below average intelligence will not equal
| the number of above average intelligence.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_probability_d
| istribu...
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| >if the population is an odd number, the number of below
| average intelligence will not equal the number of above
| average intelligence
|
| I'll leave counting as an exercise for the reader :D
| takeda wrote:
| It's not everyone though. FB algorithm is giving preference
| to the most controversial person. People that are
| reasonable are boring and don't cause engagement, so their
| posts also are not displayed.
|
| When you get away from the site, FB will start bombarding
| you with the messages from people that you would mostly
| react, because they want you back.
| endymi0n wrote:
| ...and not just "the most controversial", in a lot of
| cases on both the content creators' as well as the
| sockpuppets' sides, we're not even talking about "village
| idiot" type real humans anymore, but -- in contrast to
| Meta CTO's words -- about extremely skillful mass
| manipulators sitting somewhere in Russia and hiding
| behind international proxies.
|
| Not only was that tolerated in the name of profit, these
| individuals were able to create official looking,
| completely unverified "pages" with bogus attribution to
| create their "engagement" campaigns meant to poison and
| destruct western society (and arguably being successful
| in that).
|
| How this is legally anything different than complicity in
| treason is hard to comprehend for me.
| hui-zheng wrote:
| that's all good points. I agree. I think it's not Facebook
| gives the wrong people the loudest megaphones, but our
| human nature and nature of the population are drawn to
| those megaphones held by the wrong people.
|
| What could we do about this? How could we identify the
| wrong people so that we could take away the megaphone from
| them? Who to decide which people are wrong? Some of them
| are obvious, But some of them are not that obviously.
|
| Maybe we could say madmen claiming the world is flat and
| there's a paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop are
| obviously wrong. We might know Nazi is obviously wrong, but
| what about What about Antifa, what about "woke"? What about
| all those theories behind "group identity"? The most
| dangerous wrong people are the ones hold "good intentions"
| (they could be self-deceiving or could be truly genuine)
| but bad ideas, and its hard to discern.
|
| History repeats itself. I suggest reading history of China
| in 1930-1950, the rise of Communist China, and then read
| "Culture Revolution" in 1970s. You could find that how the
| people with "good intention" ended up being the most evil
| in the history.
|
| How could we avoid that to happen here? I don't have an
| answer.
| lubesGordi wrote:
| This is what I'm seeing also. Youtube, Facebook, etc. all
| prioritize engagement. It's not only the megaphone problem,
| it's a quicksand problem. As soon as you watch some
| misinformation to even try to understand what the hell
| anti-vaxxers are claiming, then you get a ton of related
| misinformation promoted to your homepage. How the hell are
| technically ignorant people supposed to keep up with this?
| Youtube and Facebook will lump you in a category and show
| you what similar viewers watched.
| nradov wrote:
| Intelligence is a tool that can be used for good or evil.
| Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong were quite intelligent by any
| objective measure, but giving them megaphones resulted in
| horrific disasters far worse than anything caused by
| Facebook users so far.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Half of the population is below average intelligence
|
| Maybe the real problem is that everyone assumes they're in
| the other half. Or possibly that intelligence and wisdom
| are the same thing.
|
| I guess what I'm saying is that I would generally agree
| with your post if it weren't for this statement. I don't
| think intelligence really has anything to do with the
| problem as even a lot of otherwise 'intelligent' people
| have engaged with today's bullshit conspiracy theories and
| nonsense.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > why can't people discern the difference between the idiot
| and the non-idiot?
|
| Because it's not idiots that are the problem, it's bad-faith
| actors, and they're very good at manipulating people. In the
| past they'd have to do that 1:1, now they can do it at scale.
| hui-zheng wrote:
| I would say the most dangerous are not the bad-faith
| actors, but those self-deceived ones who have genuine "good
| intention" but act out the "bad" consequence.
|
| And everyone of us could be that self-deceived ones,
| including you and me.
| pier25 wrote:
| It's true there are bad-faith actors, but there are
| definitely lots of idiots who don't know they are wrong.
| nradov wrote:
| Is it possible that you're also a wrong idiot but are
| unaware of it?
| xedrac wrote:
| I've been in several debates where I was written off being
| in "bad-faith", when in reality, I just didn't agree with
| with the popular opinion on a particular subject. It seems
| people are all too eager to justify their own position by
| labeling others as being in "bad-faith".
| kelnos wrote:
| Except in this case we know that there have been many
| organizations, FB pages, and fake individual FB accounts
| set up specifically to spread misinformation and FUD
| about COVID and vaccines. That's the definition of bad
| faith.
|
| Certainly, from there, real regular people pass on and
| help spread this misinformation. Hard to say how many of
| those people are also acting in bad faith or have just
| been manipulated and scared into believing the bad
| information. But it seems certain that the source of much
| of this garbage is bad-faith actors.
| xupybd wrote:
| Where can I read more on these organisers of miss
| information?
| r721 wrote:
| >Just twelve anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-
| thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social
| media platforms. This new analysis of content posted or
| shared to social media over 812,000 times between
| February and March uncovers how a tiny group of
| determined anti-vaxxers is responsible for a tidal wave
| of disinformation - and shows how platforms can fix it by
| enforcing their standards.
|
| https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen
|
| News story:
| https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-
| doze...
| lubesGordi wrote:
| If it's 'bad-faith' actors, then you're saying that the
| misinformation is intentional, which makes it
| disinformation.
| brighton36 wrote:
| I would also suggest that bad faith is contagious. Once bad
| faith enters, the incentives are such that everyone acts in
| bad faith in short time. ('Well if he's lying, then I'm
| forced to lie too' become easy to justify)
| treis wrote:
| They've been able to do that since at least radio and
| arguably since the printing press. At worst, Facebook is an
| evolutionary step along that spectrum.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Radio and newspapers were effectively local, we now have
| global reach so that it takes just a few to mess things
| up everywhere.
| stilist wrote:
| There's effectively no cost to do it now, though.
| rumblerock wrote:
| Given enough capability and knowledge of manipulation
| methods bad actors can not only shape conversations and
| promote controversial / conspiratorial information, but
| also fan the flames of the backlash that make collective
| reason impossible. So long as there are holes in these
| platforms and a combative stance by platforms to resolve
| them, this power can be had or hired. You don't need nation
| state resources to pull it off at this point.
|
| It's pretty widely acknowledged that what happens or begins
| on social media is now shaping the behavior of politicians
| and the narratives of legacy media. So if you successfully
| seed something on social media you get to enjoy the ripple
| effects through the rest of society and the media. If I
| have enough resources and motivation, I'm fine with that
| success rate being 1%, even 0.1% if it gets significant
| traction. And once it's out there, the imprint on those
| exposed really can't be undone by a weakly issued
| correction that never gets the reach of the original false
| information.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _it 's giving _everyone_ a megaphone._
|
| Are they, though? It seems like FB amplifies things that they
| think will generate more engagement and "stickiness".
| Sensational things that cause outrage tend to do that more
| than cold, hard facts. I would not at all be surprised if
| misinformation gets amplified orders of magnitude more than
| the truth.
| mavhc wrote:
| They amplify things that cause you to see more ads, because
| you picked a free platform
| topkai22 wrote:
| Facebook is not just a hosting platform, through the Facebook
| feed it exercises a great deal of editorial control over what
| posts/information is surfaced to users. So while Facebook
| might be giving everyone a megaphone, it doesn't turn
| everyone the same volume. It needs to own that.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| Erosion of trust in elites just so happens to also be a long-
| term goal of polluters, quacks, scammers, and other powerful
| parasites of the common wealth when they run up against
| government or science.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| I think in general Facebook has a bias towards inflammatory
| posts - and other platforms for that matter as well including
| HN actually. Also it's easy to blame the village idiot for
| everything, but I don't think Donald Trump or Alex Jones are
| village idiots. They are surely idiots but left the village
| quite some time ago and gained popularity before Facebook
| (InfoWars was founded 1999) - although FB surely was an
| accelerator stage.
|
| That said, the village idiot is harmless and I think
| aristocracy (rule of the elite) is definitely not the
| solution. But what is true that the normal filters in an
| offline community haven't been translated online yet.
| matwood wrote:
| > The real question is why can't people discern the
| difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?
|
| And here is the real problem with FB, the algorithmic feed.
| Normal life is pretty boring day-to-day, and doesn't trigger
| 'engagement'. Conspiracies, etc... cause an enormous amount
| of engagement. When a person is fed conspiracies all day by
| the engagement algorithm, even the most critical thinkers
| will start to drift. It works for the same reason advertising
| works, familiarity and repetition. The solution is never use
| FB, but that ship has sailed for most.
| bluGill wrote:
| I have had decent luck in reverting facebook back to what
| it is for: sharing pictures of my kids with people who care
| to see pictures of my kids. That means every time someone
| shares something - no matter how funny - I block the place
| it was shared from permanently. Slowly facebook is running
| out of things to show me that isn't pictures of my friend's
| kids.
| bryan_w wrote:
| Same, it didn't really take as much as I thought it would
| to get it to stop showing me reshares, but now I see
| either groups content or family/friends original content.
|
| I still wish they had fine grain controls though.
| mavhc wrote:
| If only they could advertise your kids to you.
|
| "I picked a free service and was annoyed they wanted to
| make money somehow"
| burnte wrote:
| > You guys gave them a megaphone, how do you expect society to
| behave?!
|
| Considering most of humanity is... challenged when it comes to
| thinking critically, this should have been an entirely
| forseeable outcome. I agree it's society's fault, but Facebook
| is part of society. They watched how their tool was being usde
| by these people, and ENHANCED the reach of those messages
| because it was good for Facebook. Facebook is the microcosm of
| the object of it's blame. Idiocy writ large in recursion.
| [deleted]
| Hokusai wrote:
| > most of humanity is... challenged
|
| Most, no. Everybody is blind to one perspective or another.
| Also, time is limited and attention is limited. Do not think
| that others are just stupid because their focus or knowledge
| does not overlap with yours.
|
| "Those people" does not exist. It's just an illusion of your
| own limited perspective. We are on this together and calling
| people stupid not it is true, not it helps.
| d23 wrote:
| "Stupid people don't exist" is a bold take.
| kelnos wrote:
| That's not what the parent was claiming. The grandparent
| was claiming that most people are stupid. The parent was
| pointing out that most people are _not_ stupid. Some
| people are, and many people have various biases and
| preconceptions that make it easier for them to be
| manipulated into believing misinformation.
| d23 wrote:
| > "Those people" does not exist. It's just an illusion of
| your own limited perspective. We are on this together and
| calling people stupid not it is true, not it helps.
|
| I don't understand what's going on on this site. This is
| the second time recently I've come across someone
| claiming a comment didn't say something that's
| essentially copied verbatim mere centimeters higher on
| the monitor. It's basically in the same eyeful.
|
| Hell, the commenter even _added_ the word "stupid",
| which wasn't in the parent comment.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I agree here. My observation is that most of humanity is
| rational but acts on limited or incorrect information. If
| you can provide truthful and complete information (in a
| digestible form), humanity will do just fine.
| kahrl wrote:
| You're pretending that there's no difference in
| intelligence/knowledge/skills between individuals or groups
| of people. There are differences. Can we stop pretending
| that there's no difference between a college educated
| European, your average American who reads at a 7th grade
| level, and a 3rd world farmer who has no perspective
| outside their small village?
| bigthymer wrote:
| > a 3rd world farmer who has no perspective outside their
| small village?
|
| I think this is a disappearing breed. Ubiquitous cell
| coverage means everyone knows what is happening
| everywhere now.
| mavhc wrote:
| Still a lot of people getting their crops burned because
| they knew about science and managed to grow a crop, and
| everyone else didn't and thinks they're a witch
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| To that effect, its worth pointing out that in many
| developing nations, facebook IS the internet. To say that
| this compounds all of the issues already discussed in
| this thread is a fairly drastic understatement.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Ubiquitous cell coverage means everyone knows what is
| happening everywhere now.
|
| I think this assumes facts not in evidence. Just because
| someone is "connected" doesn't mean they're automatically
| informed. As we see in first world countries, there's a
| lot of fucking morons that only listen to comfortable
| lies rather than uncomfortable truths.
|
| There's also industrial production of bullshit peddled by
| disingenuous actors taking advantage of that fact.
| Fleecing rubes can be very profitable.
|
| The very problem being discussed is Facebook trying to
| absolve themselves of bullshit peddling by blaming
| everyone else. They're blaming people for believing shit
| _Facebook_ put in front of them under the guise of news.
| They 're also fine taking money to promote bullshit as
| "news". Yet it's society's fault that they believed
| everything labeled news Facebook put in front of them.
| Jenk wrote:
| > this should have been an entirely forseeable outcome
|
| It was. It is. It always will be.
|
| Could you imagine the outrage had the authorities even
| attempted to prevent Facebook et al?
| danpalmer wrote:
| Not saying you're wrong, but to take a slightly more
| charitable view on humanity: Facebook exploits well known
| human behaviour to amplify content.
|
| It's (unfortunately?) human nature to share shocking things,
| it may have even been evolutionarily advantageous at some
| point. Using algorithms to exploit this behaviour at a scale
| never before possible is harmful to humanity. No idiocy
| required.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > The problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a
| megaphone
|
| What's interesting is that before Facebook, the only people who
| could afford a megaphone were either state sponsored medias or
| billionaires who owned TV stations and newspapers.
|
| For the ordinary citizens, the only way you could be heard was
| to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. If the
| state/billionaire/editor didn't like you, your views or
| anything really (your skin color perhaps?) it would simply not
| get published, period.
|
| With Facebook a lot of gatekeeping simply disappeared. It's
| interesting to see who has an interest in regulating Facebook
| and bringing back the "good old days" of medias.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Internally Facebook works aggressively to combat covid
| misinformation: source I work at fb. Literally most of the
| commonly used datasets are about it. It's easy to hate and hard
| to understand.
| JPKab wrote:
| The problem is that Gutenberg is giving the village idiot a
| megaphone. Gutenberg can't say: - Amplify your commercial
| business message to billions of people worldwide. AND at the
| same time
|
| - Well its your individual choice whether or not to listen to
| the village idiot.
|
| You guys gave them a megaphone, how do you expect society to
| behave?!
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I have no problem with them saying both things at the same
| time. You're responsible for what you give your attention to,
| and so is everyone else.
| fragmede wrote:
| Ultimately, yes, but that's a rather short-sighted position
| to take when there's an cadre of psychologists and other
| highly-trained people who's entire job is to entrap you
| further, just so _someone_ can make (more) money.
|
| Eg when you buy items at the grocery store, do you
| consciously examine all options, including the items on the
| bottom shelf by your feet, or do you just go for the items at
| eye level, and are thus tricked by a similar group of
| psychologists into buying the product you've been trained to
| want. And even if you, personally, do, there's a reason why
| product companies pay supermarkets to have their products at
| eye/arm level - it works.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Sure, but also Facebook has a bunch of doctorate-having
| engineers and psychologists dedicating hundreds or thousands
| of hours to figure out a system that gets for me to give my
| attention to Facebook, whereas I'm one dude who doesn't even
| have a graduate degree who gets tired and bored and struggles
| to sleep sometimes.
| foobarian wrote:
| I think it's not so much Facebook alone but the entire
| Internet. The connectivity between humans is suddenly increased
| manyfold, and reaches much wider. Imagine using a graph layout
| tool on a giant graph with only few localized connections.
| Likely the picture will have evenly distributed nodes without
| much movement. But then as you dump all these new edges onto
| the graph, the nodes start to move into rigid clusters
| separated by weak boundaries. I think this is what's happening
| with the red/blue, vax/antivax etc. groups.
| kelnos wrote:
| The internet alone doesn't connect people. Remove things like
| Facebook and Twitter, and how do you get this giant
| interconnected graph with few localized connections?
| foobarian wrote:
| Given a network like the Internet, things like Facebook and
| Twitter naturally emerge.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| I wouldn't blame megaphones for the fact that "idiots" use
| them. Nor would I expect megaphone manufacturers to dictate
| what messages can be amplified using them. Nor would I expect
| megaphone retailers to determine somehow whether a person was
| an "idiot" before selling them a megaphone.
|
| If someone uses a megaphone in an anti-social manner, that's a
| matter for the police to handle.
| tspike wrote:
| Would you expect megaphone manufacturers to give souped up
| models capable of drowning out other megaphones to only the
| most controversial, destructive people?
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Analogies are nearly useless in making an argument Facebook
| is an online platform with real time access to users
| communications and metrics and analysis of how it's used
| which allow it to make reasonable predictions on how it's
| going to be used in the future.
|
| Comparing it to dumb hardware is ridiculous.
|
| Their ability to predict the negative effect of amplifying
| crazy provides a moral imperative to mitigate that harm. In
| case you don't understand there is a difference between the
| platform allowing Bob to tell Sam a harmful lie, and letting
| Bob tell 200 people who tell 200 people ..., and different
| yet from algorithmically promoting Bob's lie to hundreds of
| thousands of people who are statistically vulnerable to it.
| kelnos wrote:
| Is it a problem, however, if the megaphone manufacturers
| specifically look for people who spread misinformation, and
| sell them the loudest megaphones with the most reach?
|
| FB has not _directly_ done that, but they have consistently
| refused to acknowledge that selling the biggest megaphones to
| the people who create the most "engagement" (aka money for
| FB) tend to be the types of people who generate false
| information and outrage.
|
| Their publicized efforts to shut down fake accounts and pages
| set up specifically to spread misinformation is perfunctory,
| and simply something for them to point at and say, "see,
| we're doing things to fix the problem", when they're merely
| playing whack-a-mole with symptoms, know what the root of the
| problem is, but refuse to fix it because it's their cash cow.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| So i think this is a breakdown of our previous mindset on the
| matter. I don't know what future is "right", what the answer
| is.. but i think it is important for us to at least recognize
| that in the past, a crazy person on the street corner was
| limited quite a bit on velocity.
|
| This megaphone is a poor example imo. A far better example
| would be broadcast television. We're now broadcasting
| everyone straight into not just American homes, but world
| wide.
|
| So i ask, because i don't know, how does broadcast television
| differ from a megaphone in requirements? What responsibility
| is there on broadcast television what doesn't exist for a
| street corner?
| FpUser wrote:
| I am not sure how it goes for the average person. Myself: I
| just do not go to places where village idiots tend to
| accumulate like FB or if I do (hard for me not to watch
| youtube) I just completely ignore all that crap.
| geodel wrote:
| And that might be most reasonable thing to do.
|
| It seems like lot of folks here allude though not exactly say
| that they should be in position to decide on who is "idiot",
| "bad-faith", "anti-science" and so on.
| twblalock wrote:
| Should our society have free speech, or free speech for
| everyone except idiots?
|
| If you agree with the second formulation, who do you think
| ought to be in charge of deciding who the idiots are? Surely
| Mark Zuckerberg would not be your first choice.
|
| Maybe there is a third option: no free speech for anyone, all
| speech must be moderated for lies and misinformation. Is that
| what you want? In that case, who gets to decide what is true
| and what is not? Surely Zuckerberg wouldn't be your first
| choice for that either, right? And what should happen when
| Facebook blocks "misinformation" that turns out to actually be
| truthful?
|
| Those who want Facebook to regulate "misinformation" and
| gatekeep who (and what) is allowed on the site need to admit
| that they don't actually believe in free speech -- they believe
| in limited speech regulated by corporations.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Facebook should ban or suspend accounts which spread
| objective untruths that will tend to be harmful if spread.
|
| You can have your free speech on your own website.
| hpoe wrote:
| Objective untruths like COVID being the result of a lab
| leak?
| JPKab wrote:
| This.
|
| People who support these kinds of activities are youthful
| and arrogant enough to have any form of humility about
| things they once passionately believed to be true turning
| out to be incorrect.
|
| In the 90's, eggs were thought to be as deadly as
| cigarettes. A bowl of cheerios was considered to be
| vastly superior nutrition wise to a plate of eggs. This
| is the opposite of what we know to be true today. If I
| had tried to argue against this with the current form of
| Facebook, I'd be censored. (They also thought avocados
| were bad for you in the 90s.)
|
| The elevation of a collectively determined "objective"
| truth over the freedom of individuals to exchange ideas
| is the first step towards creating an environment for
| authoritarianism to flourish. Subjugation of the
| individual to the collective is the norm in most of
| history, and it's not an accident that our current
| prosperity emerged when in the times and places where it
| was lifted.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| The disturbing things about the social media bans on lab
| leak reporting are:
|
| 1) DOE LLNL reported it was a possible lab leak in May
| 2020.
|
| 2) A Chinese virologist defected to the US in late 2020
| and all of her interviews were deleted, though I saw her
| fotos and summaries before the deletions.
|
| 3) NTD Media started reporting in early 2020 and has been
| persecuted by US socials at every turn since then. All of
| their reports have turned out to be factual. Only Sky
| Australia have had most of their reports not censored.
|
| So there was plenty of early lab leak info, but it was
| virtually all censored.
| JPKab wrote:
| Take any of these arguments about Facebook, replace
| "Facebook" with "printing press" and everything still makes
| sense, which tells you what this really is:
|
| Cultural elites wanting to control what their perceived
| inferiors think, believe, and most importantly, vote for.
|
| The same class of people who wanted to regulate the printing
| press in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries are the
| ones who want to regulate the internet today.
| twblalock wrote:
| To be fair there is also a large contingent of well-
| intentioned people who don't realize the full implications
| of what they are asking for.
|
| Ironically many of those people would say they oppose the
| concentration of corporate power, yet they are asking a
| very large capitalist corporation to exercise power over
| one of the most fundamental freedoms.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I want free speech for everyone except idiots.
|
| > who do you think ought to be in charge of deciding who the
| idiots are?
|
| Think about it. Engineering disciplines have mostly solved
| this issue. Lets take structural/civil engineering and
| something that affects many people - bridges. Through a
| combination of law, codes, and government, not any joe schome
| can build a bridge. Existing bridges generally work well and
| can be trusted. Sometimes bad things happen like the FIU
| collapse, but generally that's very rare.
|
| I don't understand why there can't be a group of people,
| large or small educated and from diverse backgrounds, that
| can set basic standards on what is and is not misinformation,
| with due-process like things such as appeals, etc. It's not
| an impossible task.
|
| > Those who want Facebook to regulate "misinformation" and
| gatekeep who (and what) is allowed on the site need to admit
| that they don't actually believe in free speech -- they
| believe in limited speech regulated by corporations.
|
| If you're going to use a third party for communication and
| that third party is not owned by the people (i.e. a
| government entity) then it follows from the above statement
| that you don't believe in private property rights.
| twblalock wrote:
| How do you ensure that this Ministry of Truth you are
| proposing will remain free of political pressure and
| corruption?
|
| And how do you expect a panel of experts to escape
| groupthink and rule fairly in cases where the expert
| consensus turns out to be incorrect?
|
| Both of those goals are impossible to achieve.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| There is a difference between defining absolute truth and
| identifying obvious lies.
|
| If a medication is approved and then a new risk factor is
| identified the issue goes from unproven to validated but
| if it wasn't based on nothing it was never a lie.
|
| The covid vaccine containing a chip to track you was
| always a lie.
|
| We don't need a ministry of Truth we need a ministry of
| obvious bullshit.
| kelnos wrote:
| Under the -- very rocky -- assumption that a Ministry of
| Obvious Bullshit could still avoid scope creep into
| moderating truth, I still don't think this would fix
| things. People who actively want to spread bullshit will
| find a way. It's like spam vs. anti-spam, ads vs. ad-
| blockers.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| People who want to commit murder might still find a way
| too but we still have laws, police, prosecutors, etc.
| Perfect should not be the enemy of good.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| That's quite the leap from moderating information to a
| murder investigation
| adolph wrote:
| > It's not an impossible task.
|
| Ok, set it up and then maybe removing idiotic speech can be
| considered. Until then you have nothing but a desire to
| define what is undesirable.
| JPKab wrote:
| Your comment can be loosely translated to the following:
|
| "Authoritarianism can work. It's just the wrong people were
| in charge. If me and other people like me had the same
| power as Stalin/Hitler/Mao/Mussolini/Putin, everything
| would be better because they were dumb, but we know better.
| We can create Utopia when nobody else could. We are
| uniquely prescient and intelligent."
|
| The amount of arrogance and utter lack of humility is
| shocking.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| If you thought the world is bad with aggressive bullies
| in power, wait until you see how bad it gets with
| aggrieved nerds in power.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| > I don't understand why there can't be a group of people,
| large or small educated and from diverse backgrounds, that
| can set basic standards on what is and is not
| misinformation, with due-process like things such as
| appeals, etc. It's not an impossible task.
|
| This seems incredibly naive to me. It seems what's
| happening there is we give people a list of important
| figures to bribe to allow their speech to be considered
| information (or for a competitors speech to be considered
| misinformation).
|
| And even if these were incorruptible humans, there are
| several statements that are heavily under debate currently
| as fact or fiction, such as the validity of neopronouns,
| whether or not Spanish speakers anywhere use latinx, who is
| the bad art friend, if kyle rittenhouse should've been
| convicted for murder, do trans children exist and if so can
| they perform any transitioning or puberty delay, what is
| critical race theory, is the Covid vaccine rollout speed
| sinister and if trump lost the 2020 presidential election
| legitimately. And that's just all in America.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I believe speech should be free but people should be
| responsible for their speech.
|
| People behave completely differently when there are
| consequences to what they say.
|
| Speech for "everybody but idiots" is not free speech.
| twblalock wrote:
| What should the consequences be?
|
| Removal of speech is not a consequence of speech -- it's
| preventing speech in the first place. That's what happens
| when Facebook blocks or deletes "misinformation" -- they
| are removing the speech itself. That's not the same thing
| as "consequences" for speech.
|
| Look at what HN mods do -- they ban trolls, but they don't
| delete what the trolls posted. It's there for everyone to
| see -- in fact, if you look at "dead" comments you can see
| flagged stuff too. In terms of free speech, that's very
| different from deleting the comments entirely, which is
| what people seem to want Facebook to do.
|
| And for the sake of argument, even if we accept that
| "consequences" ought to include the right to free speech
| being taken away from bad actors -- who can be trusted to
| decide who ought to be punished? Again, surely not
| Facebook. Surely not the government either -- the winners
| of every election would punish their enemies by taking away
| their rights. So even if we could tell, 100% reliably, who
| were trolls and who were not, we still should not give any
| corporation or government the power to take away the right
| of free speech.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _What should the consequences be?_
|
| The usual when you get up in front of a group and act
| like a jackass: social shame and ostracization. Something
| that's hard to do on internet platforms. Even when people
| are not anonymous, they have plenty of ways to "hide",
| and it's easy to unfollow and block people who criticize
| you for spreading misinformation.
|
| So I don't know. Removal and deplatforming, IMO, is not
| the answer. You don't fix extremism through censorship;
| that just makes it worse and drives it underground.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Yes, removal is not a consequence.
|
| What should be consequences? What are consequences when
| you say something stupid to your family or friends? What
| should be consequences when you knowingly lie to slander
| somebody?
|
| > And for the sake of argument, even if we accept that
| "consequences" ought to include the right to free speech
| being taken away from bad actors
|
| This already exists in the law. Just as your right to
| move freely is taken away in certain situations (for
| example due to restraining order).
| sharadov wrote:
| That's too simplistic and naive, their algorithms amplify what
| will get the most clicks!
| betwixthewires wrote:
| It's not a megaphone, the only people that can see it are
| literally the village idiot's friends and family. It's gossip
| within your social circle.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| But village idiots can share content into their social circle
| from other more popularly known village idiots.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think a better analogy is Facebook gave society a window into
| each others lives, and people can't look away.
|
| Facebook prioritizes what people want to see, and people want
| to see train wrecks and inflammatory content.
| disambiguation wrote:
| > people want to see train wrecks and inflammatory content.
|
| I'm starting to believe this more and more, but what I can't
| understand is why? We know it has no real "nutritional
| value", yet we crave it anyway.
|
| Are we just bored and desire entertainment and drama?
|
| What's the evolutionary drive for drama anyway?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >Are we just bored and desire entertainment and drama?
|
| Essentially yes, We evolved so that we get a chemical hit
| when we engage with social drama. If you are bored, have
| nothing better to pay attention to, and/or have low self
| control, it is a very easy way to get a quick fix.
|
| >What's the evolutionary drive for drama anyway?
|
| Humans evolved as pack animals, paying attention to pack
| drama was extremely important. Picking sides or paying
| attention could mean the difference between getting your
| next meal or being beaten to death.
|
| Because we evolved in small packs, where information was
| usually relevant, we don't have a good filter, or on/off
| switch.
|
| Today we are exposed to the latest and most exciting drama
| from around the world, opposed to our tiny pack, and it is
| really hard to resist paying attention.
|
| Paying attention to anything in the news or on social media
| is unlikely to make an impact on your life. Even the
| biggest topics have a very low risk of impacting you
| personally, but you will notice that most of them have an
| explicit or implicit hook that they _could_ impact you.
| cgriswald wrote:
| People want inflammatory content like a moth wants a flame.
| Facebook amplifying a signal from the lunatic fringe preys
| upon the need of non-lunatics (or different-thinking
| lunatics) to argue against ideas they consider dangerous or
| just wrong. As a side-effect, it makes the ideas appear more
| mainstream, which has the effect of making the ideas more
| popular. This further increases the compulsion of non-
| lunatics to address the ideas.
|
| I'm not sure if that qualifies as being what people 'want' or
| not, but it seems like it's profitable.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >I'm not sure if that qualifies as being what people 'want'
| or not, but it seems like it's profitable.
|
| People want it like an alcoholic wants a drink. Facebook is
| the corner store that sells to the public.
|
| I think we agree on the mechanism. but the question is what
| to do about it.
|
| People generally say, silence people I don't like, and
| blind others from seeing what I don't agree with.
|
| The problem is that this is not a workable standard,
| because everyone has a different opinion on what should be
| censored.
| jeffrogers wrote:
| Right. Prior to social media, people were vetted many ways and
| in every context in which they gained an audience. (e.g. earned
| standing in social settings and community groups, promotions at
| work, editors of one sort or another when publishing to a
| group, etc) Audiences grew incrementally as people earned their
| audience. Social media removed all that vetting and it inverted
| the criteria to grow an audience. Sensationalism was rewarded
| over thoughtfulness. So one of the most important tools we've
| always relied on to judge information was removed. Hard to
| believe, as intelligent as these folks at Facebook/Meta are
| said to be, that they don't understand this. Feels
| disingenuous.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
| salary depends upon his not understanding it.
|
| - Upton Sinclair
| servytor wrote:
| Yeah, I always hear people talking about the great "global
| village" where everyone is 'connected', but I have to admit I
| am against it. I don't want to be prank called.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Asked whether vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or
| without social media, Bosworth...
|
| answered elliptically.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Because it is a loaded question and there is no good answer.
|
| Social media exist, they are part of our world, it is not a
| factor we can isolate, which mean answering that question would
| be science-fiction. It makes as much sense as speculating about
| a world without Hitler, yeah, it can make great stories, but
| that's it.
|
| Maybe the answer would be "no, because a world without social
| media would be a different world", but in which way? No one
| knows.
| ambrozk wrote:
| The public doesn't trust politicians, the government, or its
| official experts. Facebook is a public forum, and the public uses
| it to express their mistrust. Politicians then pretend that
| Facebook is the reason no one trusts them, because shooting the
| messenger is easier than admitting that they don't have much
| authority any more.
|
| Are there major problems with Facebook? Absolutely. But the
| motivation behind attacks like the one leveled by this journalist
| is transparently to deflect blame off our incompetent political
| establishment and onto an easy scapegoat. The truth is that if
| politicians want people to trust them, they're going to have to
| figure out how to convince those people. Making Facebook or
| Twitter delete your enemies' posts hasn't worked in the past and
| it won't work in the future. This is a free society. You don't
| get to replace the public's opinions just because you declared
| those opinions "misinformation." Maybe in China, but it just
| doesn't work that way here.
| zeruch wrote:
| ...as if a corporation exists in a vacuum, outside of society.
| iansimon wrote:
| You know what I blame this on the breakdown of?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw39tcyg7So
| kgin wrote:
| It's not false that there is a societal problem that is not
| unique to Facebook.
|
| But that sidesteps the question of what responsibility they have
| as a company whose profits are, at minimum, powered by that
| problem, if not exacerbating the problem.
|
| "Privatize the profits, socialize the costs" is not sustainable.
| sneak wrote:
| > _"Privatize the profits, socialize the costs" is not
| sustainable._
|
| The church (as well as the integrated state) has been doing it
| for thousands of years. I think treating the general population
| as a somewhat renewable resource to be mined/harvested has a
| longstanding tradition and history of being one of the most
| sustainable things in human history.
|
| Depending on how tax money is spent (i.e. in ways that benefit
| a subset of society, rather than all taxpayers) this is perhaps
| the most common and longstanding tradition we human beings
| have.
| geodel wrote:
| Indeed. Many think if it sounds like feel-good rhetoric then
| it must be true.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| > whose profits are, at minimum, powered by that problem
|
| I don't think it's established that that's the minimum.
| Facebook usually argues that it's a small minority of their
| content and I don't see any evidence against that (it just gets
| a lot of scrutiny). It seems like if you magically removed all
| the "bad actors" they'd make just as much money.
| joshenberg wrote:
| Exactly. Running 'the world's largest vaccine information
| campaign' rings hollow when it's really a mitigation effort.
| That's akin to saying that the Valdez tragedy and subsequent
| clean-up made Exxon the top environmentalists of '89.
| SleekEagle wrote:
| The legislative system has always taken a long time to catch up
| to new technological innovations. It's certainly a problem that
| technology advances so rapidly now and the time scale of
| legislative action can't keep pace, especially given how
| connected the world is.
|
| No longer do laws have to keep up with new technologies that
| affect _how_ we live, but now also information highways that
| determine _what_ we think to some degree. I 'd much rather these
| highways be regulated in a way that at least touches democracy
| than by private companies whose role it is to drive profit.
| bryan_w wrote:
| At 1 hour old, this has 143 comments. Also $FB is up over 1%
| today.
|
| Just some random thoughts; take them as you wish.
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| Neither society nor facebook is to blame. The three foundational
| systems of our lives have been centralized and corrupted: money,
| information, politics. These systems are to blame, and the answer
| is decentralized systems. Decentralized money (Crypto),
| decentralized information (like HN), and decentralized voting
| (DAO's). Once we start using healthy systems, we'll get our power
| back and be able to fix our problems.
| yakkityyak wrote:
| This reads like a GPT-3 response.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Lol for real, don't know if OP is serious. How do you catch a
| GPT-3 commenter bot?
| GDC7 wrote:
| > Decentralized money, decentralized information, decentralized
| voting.
|
| Satoshi Nakamoto, net worth 30 billion and veto power over the
| entire cryptospace (if he's alive)
|
| Vitalik Buterin , net worth 10 billion and veto power over the
| whole Ethereum ecosystem.
|
| "Meet the new boss...the same as the old boss"
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| Satoshi has veto power over the entire crypto space?
|
| Uhhhhhhhhhhh no.
| GDC7 wrote:
| if he/she moves the original coins and proves that he/she
| is indeed Satoshi via technical competence and social
| consensus , then between the immense wealth and social
| status as the creator of Bitcoin their influence on the
| crypto world will be massive.
|
| You can never decentralize power and wealth because they
| obey Power's law and also it happens organically and
| unspectacularly, it's simply a bunch of people agreeing
| that somebody is cool or what they are saying makes sense.
|
| It snowballs from there and a couple of exponentials later
| that person is sitting on billions of dollars and a 70M
| people platform
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| How is HN decentralized?
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| Crowd-sourced content + crowd-sourced voting on visibility.
|
| It's not perfectly decentralized of course, running on a
| server and centralized administration, but the general
| structure of the data flow is many to many.
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| + content moderation by admins.
|
| "but some animals are more equal than others."
| Kina wrote:
| Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| Which claim? Our money is centralized via the Fed. Our
| information is centralized via corporate media. Our politics
| are centralized via Oligarchy.
|
| These systems act to divide and conquer us, sapping our
| power. By switching to decentralized systems, we will be
| reconnected and rediscover our power. It's already happening
| via sites like this, crypto, etc.
| redwood wrote:
| This is a "the media is the message" situation
| actuator wrote:
| Title is really poor compared to the content of the article.
|
| In any case, he is right. Look at the pattern, any large social
| network has these issues, which more or less seems like is
| related to how people interact. Twitter is massively toxic,
| Reddit is. Back in day Tumblr which was not current social media
| huge also used to have content Facebook gets blamed for.
|
| Give a platform for people to publish and share and every opinion
| has the chance to be there.
|
| It also doesn't have to be a massive broadcast platform,
| messaging platforms with small communities in the form of groups
| have these issues on a smaller scale. Though broadcast does make
| it worse.
| delusional wrote:
| The maker of the gun may not be held solely responsible for
| murder, but we surely have to consider if we want guns in the
| hands of murderers.
|
| Facebook isn't arguing this from a neutral standpoint. They are
| arguing from the position of the company that stands to lose
| their business if society decides murderers shouldn't have
| guns.
| actuator wrote:
| But that's the exact issue no.
|
| Social media platforms create immense value as well. I might
| not be a user but I can see how it helps a lot of people as
| well.
|
| Do we enforce license on people to use social media
| platforms?
| baq wrote:
| given what i see in there, yes, please.
| d0mine wrote:
| Said a person crying Fire in a crowded theater (it is a human
| nature to panic, but it doesn't excuse the instigator)
| knuthsat wrote:
| Whenever I see toxicity, I always assume it's a young
| individual. I remember myself in teens, always up for some
| trolling on forums.
|
| Today, I just don't have a need to do such things. Whenever I
| encounter this weird behavior, I just stop interacting, because
| I have a feeling it's some 13-16 year old wasting my time.
| nefitty wrote:
| I don't think that's true. HN is pretty non-toxic, from my
| perspective at least. Reddit is tolerable to me.
|
| I think the problem is misalignment of incentives. If I'm
| incentivized to increase engagement, then I can think of some
| pretty ridiculous shit to say that will get lots of people
| clicking downvote and shouting at me.
|
| I think these platforms could have been more proactive in
| setting those cultural norms that evolve into fruitful social
| interaction.
| actuator wrote:
| Have you been to any thread which mentions say China, India
| or several other topics?
|
| You will see a lot of toxicity and you can find several
| deleted or heavily downvoted comments.
|
| As even HN front page and commenr section is algorithmic.
| Vote brigading happens here as well for posts and comments.
| Ottolay wrote:
| The HN algorithm will de-front page stories where the
| comment section starts looking like a flame war. If you
| look up the stories which were removed from the front page,
| there is quite a bit of toxicity in the comments.
|
| I personally like that they try to play down controversies
| instead of optimizing for engagement from them.
| carabiner wrote:
| Lol tumblr did not have much right wing boomer content that I
| saw.
| forgotmyoldacc wrote:
| That misses the point of the OP. Tumblr (as a general social
| media platform) had incredible amounts of bullying and
| toxicity. Whether its from the left or right is a moot point.
|
| Example found after 10 seconds of Googling:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/3da838/an-attempted-
| suicide-...
| [deleted]
| cletus wrote:
| Look at video games, particularly on mobile. I mean they aren't
| even games anymore. They're just metrics-optimized psychological-
| trick machines to extract the most money from you $1 at a time ie
| in-app purchases and pay-to-win. These aren't games: they're
| engagement bait to bring you and your wallet back each day.
|
| Why do we have this? Because people suck and it just makes way
| too much money for anyone not to do it. Why didn't we have this
| 20 years? Because the technical capability wasn't there.
|
| It's really no different here. Communication and messaging costs
| have really gone down to zero. If it wasn't FB, it'd be someone
| else. There's simply too much money with very little costs in
| engagement bait, whether or not that's the intent of the platform
| or product.
|
| And yeah, that's the case because people suck. Most people aren't
| looking for verifiable information. They're looking for whatever
| or whoever says whatever it is they've already chosen to believe.
| That's it.
|
| I'd say the biggest problem with FB and Twitter is sharing links
| as this is such an easy way for the lazy, ignorant and stupid to
| signals their preconceived notions to whatever audience they
| happen to have. But if Twitter or FB didn't allow sharing links,
| someone else would and that someone else would be more popular.
|
| I honestly don't know what the solution to this is.
| novok wrote:
| There are still many video games that are not click boxes, and
| if you watch what kids are actually into, they tend to be
| actual games like roblox, minecraft, among us and fortnight.
| Even the small mobile games they end up being mostly games vs.
| metrics optimized click games.
| Exendroinient wrote:
| So the biggest obstacle to solving anything about this world is
| stupidity of the general population. People can't stop choosing
| the most stupid things with their wallets and attention.
| bmitc wrote:
| As harsh as I am on humanity, it's not entirely people's
| fault. We have primate emotions that have been grossly
| outpaced by our technological development. This is why I've
| become somewhat anti-technology despite still working on
| technology because it stretches us to lifestyles that are
| distinctly inhuman.
|
| Humanity simply does not have the emotional capacity to
| handle the technology we create. It never has and never will,
| and it's just that software has greatly amplified this
| inability. This is why mental disorders are skyrocketing.
| We're building emotional prisons with technological walls and
| bars.
| kmlx wrote:
| > and never will
|
| don't humans continue evolving?
| bmitc wrote:
| My laymen and superficial understanding of the situation
| is that humans do continue to evolve but our genome is
| also degrading in terms of building up mutations.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/news990204-2
|
| If we're evolving, I don't think it's anywhere close to
| the rate of increase of our technology.
| gretch wrote:
| Not everything that's stupid is harmful.
|
| It's fine if everyone is stupid, or most of us choose to
| engage in stupid things from time to time. I paid $17 to see
| Transformers. That was pretty stupid, but oh well, no one got
| hurt.
|
| People want to be entertained and engaged - I do not think
| they aim to harm. So I think we need to develop alternatives
| to entertain people - these alternatives can still be stupid,
| they just shouldn't be harmful.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > Look at video games, [...] I mean they aren't even games
| anymore. They're just metrics-optimized psychological-trick
| machines to extract the most money from you $1 at a time [...]
|
| Did you just describe arcades?
| notacoward wrote:
| I don't think so, and I used to spend a lot of time in
| arcades. For one thing, _everyone_ had to pay the exact same
| amount to play. Good player, bad player, whatever. There was
| no "free tier" to get you hooked before things suddenly got
| much harder, and when they did there was no way to pay more
| to make things easier (though toward the end some games did
| let you _continue_ by pumping in more tokens). Every game was
| also self contained. There was no persistent state that you
| were in danger of losing if you didn 't keep checking in day
| after day, week after week. Fortunately, the games were also
| _cheap_. Even when I was really poor, I could afford a dollar
| for several tokens that were enough to play the games I liked
| just about as long as I could stand. Hour-long games of
| Battle Zone turned into all-afternoon games of Joust. I could
| turn a game over to someone less skilled, go back to my
| apartment, eat lunch, come back, and pick up again before
| they 'd managed to exhaust the lives I had accumulated.
|
| Arcade games were certainly meant to be enjoyable, and to
| keep you playing, but they were nowhere near the dark-pattern
| psychological minefield that modern games - especially mobile
| games - often are.
| supertrope wrote:
| Arcades may have heavier users but not any "whales" who are
| using mom's credit card.
| aborsy wrote:
| I agree with the title.
| nimrody wrote:
| "When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a
| conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when
| you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks
| are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a
| far more depressing thought." - Steve Jobs.
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