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Tom Steinburg phrases what I've been thinking for years pretty well: "...urgently tell [facebook] that to not act on this problem now is tantamount to actively

Tom Steinburg phrases what I've been thinking for years pretty well: "...urgently tell [facebook] that to not act on this problem now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of society" The filter bubble puts artificial divides between people, strengthening those divides and making it seem as if anyone who disagrees with you is part of a radical group that all agree with each other. Facebook and Google are tearing apart the internet community and the results are already showing. For example, look at the anti-SJW movement. A large chunk of them assume anyone who calls themselves a "feminist" is batshit insane and also wants ridiculous things like "safe zones". I doubt such a movement could have popped up without the filter bubble artificially dividing people on the internet. The filter bubble silently manipulates how people think, in a very destructive manner.

qu4z-2 10y ago
Also take a look at the feminist movement. A large chunk of them assume that anyone who calls themselves "anti-SJW" is batshit insane and also wants ridiculous things like "muslim-free zones". I doubt such a movement could have popped up without the filter bubble artificially dividing people on the internet. The filter bubble silently manipulates how people think, in a very destructive manner. I agree with you that filter bubbles are a huge problem. I also feel like I see more and more arguments about ... not the facts, but what opinions each named group actually has or endorses. There's so much "THIS ONE IDIOT SHOWS WHAT FEMINISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE" and "TRUMP SUPPORTERS LITERALLY WANT TO <bla>". I don't know how much that's been the case historically and whether it's an increasing trend, but it seems like it happens a lot. My experience has been that there's a lot of reasonable people in most groups, and then a few idiots that ruin it for everyone. How do we mend that gap? How do you persuade people to hang out with people from a group they believe are "batshit insane" or "inherently aggressive" or other rubbish like that?
- zyx321 10y ago
  It's a positive feedback loop, constantly reinforcing itself. There's an interesting video on this[1]. The gist of it is such: Nothing gets people sharing an idea like anger and fear. And the clickbait "journalists" know it. Yes, there's a lot of reasonable people, but most of them are part of the problem because they don't have the time or motivation to do the research. They see something like "Why Donald Clinton is the next Hitler and must be stopped at all cost" and just share it without even thinking about the other side of it. Can we fix it at all? I'm not sure. The best you can do is distance yourself from the crazy people in "your" camp, encourage your "allies" to give the "enemy" view point a fair consideration and hope for the best. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
  - onion2k 10y ago
    Can we fix it at all? A possible solution is actually what most people who use Facebook claim to want - show users everything their friends post in chronological order. At least that way any 'filter bubble' is of your own making.
    - zyx321 10y ago
      Which is never going to happen, because the current system allows Facebook to keep charging companies for continued access to customers they've already engaged.
      - kristianc 10y ago
        My email inbox offers a dumb pipe to companies who have already engaged me to engage me again without filtering. I'll take my chances with the algorithms.
- syngrog66 10y ago
  thank you for making a non-PC/non-SJW aligned post minor addendum: I do find it amusing that the mainstream mass media discourse does not seem capable of finding any nuanced intermediate point somewhere in between the two extremes of "all Muslims are evil" and "perhaps we should temporarily stop all rubber-stamp-approvals of immigration from Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan/SaudiArabia/etc/". And I'd argue that, despite all his imperfections, Trump's stated position was more closely aligned with the latter than the former. Because... clearly, not all Muslims are evil. The vast majority, clearly by the data, are not evil in any objective sense. Yet, at the same time, by any reasonable adult human's perception there is clearly a phenomenon going on lately where a disproportionate number of humans are metaphorically going "Allah Akhabar!" before hitting their detonate button, whether that's for ISIS or Al Qaeda, etc. We should not discriminate against people purely based on the color of their skin, of course. At the same time, we the citizens of the USA don't somehow inherently "owe" anything else to any other random person in the world, we have not somehow explicitly victimized them by saying, for whatever reasons, "no, sorry, but right now we do not wish you, in particular, to come into our country." We have unemployed people here already, we have sick people here already, we have elderly, we have children, we have debts, we don't somehow inherently owe you anything or need you specifically.
  - morgante 10y ago
    > rubber-stamp-approvals of immigration If you think that it's a rubber stamp approval for any Muslim from Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan then you need to get substantially more informed on the issues. I suspect you're in the very filter bubble you decry. Seek out some alternative viewpoints.
    - cronjobber 10y ago
      > I suspect you're in the very filter bubble you decry Looks like filter bubble is going to be the next Dunning-Kruger. That's fine, both beat "oh, you're obviously projecting", if only for relative novelty value.
  - qu4z-2 10y ago
    My post wasn't intended to be aligned with any position; if it came across that way I need to get better at communicating. I was intending to point out that people in the opposite camp usually feel fairly similarly. The mass media discourse is, I suspect, bad at middle ground because it turns out reinforcing people's fear and biases sells well. And if it doesn't happen to be true, well, then you get free outrage clicks from everyone else. Even better! To misquote Pirates of the Caribbean: "Fox is the worst news channel I've ever watched!" "Ah, but you have watched it!"
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  > How do we mend that gap? How do you persuade people to hang out with people from a group they believe are "batshit insane" or "inherently aggressive" or other rubbish like that? I don't know how, but I think one place to start is figuring out how to bypass the actually batshit insane/aggressive ones[0] (on your own side trying to keep you in, and on the other side trying to keep you out), since they effectively are the next barriers you encounter if you actually manage to pop the filter bubble. [0] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939
- wvh 10y ago
  You push for true individuality, where people are own agents and don't feel the need to associate (as in mix ones identity instead of subjective taste) with religion, politics, brands or other points of contention. Problem is that those groups have vested interests and human beings are likely too social and irrational to refrain from belonging to "inner circles" and construct inane belief systems. Having a slightly autistic streak might help though, to naturally be less immersed in group-think or feeling the need to belong. We seem to be able to accept differing tastes in for instance food or temperature/weather, so people are capable to disagree on taste without feeling the need to take that difference to an emotional/irrational level and segregate into clans. I guess liking spicy food isn't generally felt to be a crucial defining factor of one's identity... at least to the level of wanting to attack or murder each other.
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    > We seem to be able to accept differing tastes in for instance food or temperature/weather, so people are capable to disagree on taste without feeling the need to take that difference to an emotional/irrational level and segregate into clans. I guess liking spicy food isn't generally felt to be a crucial defining factor of one's identity... at least to the level of wanting to attack or murder each other. Unless of course it is about eating animals or not ;)
mirimir 10y ago
It goes back way before Facebook and Google. Remember Usenet after Eternal September? And before that, CompuServe and AOL. And really, filter bubbles have always been a problem, especially in large cities. The Internet makes it very easy for like-minded people to find each other. For the most part, that's a great thing.
- haimez 10y ago
  The effect is different when literally every member of society is filtering into factions though.
  - mirimir 10y ago
    Maybe so. But it arguably reflects increased freedom, which is a good thing.
    - Thimothy 10y ago
      I thing this issue is completely orthogonal to freedom. If anything, facebook has taken from you the freedom of looking at different political views. Recently I noticed that, even tough I have friends in facebook with opposing political opinions to mine, as I don't usually click in their postings, facebook doesn't show me their posts, it just spams me with political propaganda aligned with my view that an algorithm has decided that I have an slightly higher chance of clicking. I seriously fail to see how my freedom became empowered through this process, last time I checked, facebook doesn't has an optional "Don't show me anything that would make me even slighly upset"
      - mirimir 10y ago
        OK, I don't use Facebook. They nuked my account, because anonymous. But can't you tell Facebook to show you everything that your friends post?
        iamdave 10y ago
doctorpangloss 10y ago
> The filter bubble puts artificial divides between people... I don't think the "filter bubble puts artificial divides" that didn't already exist. I also don't think anything gets "put," or that anything is "artificial," or that there are actual "divides," or that there exists a "filter bubble." Facebook didn't program something called "filter_bubble.php." Facebook uses a privacy-sensitive collaborative filtering approach to selecting newsfeed items for you. If you're describing the consequences of collaborative filtering for the average person as "filter bubble," then you're describing a human condition that an average person is interested in collaboratively-filterable things. There exists a population for whom the newsfeed probably isn't that interesting, and I bet they don't like Netflix, TV networks, organized categories in book stores, newspaper editorials, etc. either. "Filter bubble" is something that happens to people. Like 5 other commenters cover this ground. I really object to this idea of "artificial." Really concretely, choosing what you read next based on what you liked about what you read before sounds super natural to me, at least for the average person. Again, there are people who look hard for "both sides," and I'm sure they love reading Consumer Reports, CQ Researcher and Wikipedia Talk Pages all day. I just don't know if the minority behavior is the natural one. Notice there's no algorithm involved here. Whether its Facebook's C.F. or whether it's just you choosing what to read based on what you liked about what you read before, you get the same result. So even if you think C.F. (and basically what everyone does) is "artificial," I wouldn't peg it on Facebook. And puts? Who forces anyone to read anything? I don't think anyone gets divided. You might mean becoming less uncertain / more committed to your position. But neutrality is just a vote for the status quo—still taking a side. I think you mean political and social divisions, and what you're discovering maybe is that everyone actually has them, you just didn't know what they were until you could read people's Facebook posts. > a movement could have popped up Have some perspective. In _your_ bubble, you'll think "movement." But there are like a billion Facebook users. Hardly any of them—maybe 0.01%, or 100,000 people—will have any idea what an "anti-SJW," "safe zone" or whatever actually means. There's no movement.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  You are just debating semantics. "Filter bubbles" are a real phenomenon, where political information gets filtered to reinforce your existing biases. This is something new. Yes newspapers in the past had a political bias, sometimes. But newspapers were sold to subscribers, individual stories didn't have to compete to be the most angry and the most biased. Papers tried to present a neutral point of view and explain both positions. We've now created an economy where the only way to get clicks is to make an article that is more angry, more provocative, and more biased than the competing articles. The market is optimizing for values that are far removed from what actually benefits society. And the machine will keep optimizing those values to the point of absurdity. To the point where it tears society apart. To the point where the average reader spends their entire life and never hears an opposing point of view. Obviously facebook doesn't have a "filter_bubble.php" and literally no one is claiming that. It's understood this is just a natural result of using machine learning to customize newsfeeds. But it is a real result, that has real consequences. You could maybe even argue that people want this. I'm not sure if that's really true. But it's irrelevant to the argument that it's bad for society as a whole. Just answer this one question. Do you honestly believe the world is better off with this, than if facebook did something else? Now as to whether people actually want this, I don't think they do. The problem with collaborative filtering is that the basic assumption is wrong. That if people click or like a post, that means they actually want to see more content like it. Or that if they don't click or like it, they want to see less like that. This is just obviously false. People like and share things to advertise their political positions. Or at least in the hope that other people will see it. Likewise they don't vote on things they don't want to advertise, or don't want other people to see. If that sounds confusing, concrete example. On reddit I sometimes read an article that I disagree with slightly. I don't upvote it, because I don't want it to be ranked higher so more people see content I disagree with. Or I don't want to give social rewards to the poster. But I still might want to see more content like it in the future. Maybe I'm interested in the subject, or like arguing about it, or just don't care about occasionally reading stuff I disagree with. The only way to properly do collaborative filtering is if "likes" and votes are private, and are only used to predict what articles you will like or dislike, nothing else. It can't feel like "liking" is equivalent to a vote for that position, as opposed merely "show me more articles like this". Then facebook also uses information like whether you clicked on a post. But that just encourages clickbait, articles with provocative or misleading titles. You should only take into account whether people like the article or not, after reading it. Otherwise you are just optimizing for clickbait even the users don't actually want. Lastly there is just standard false information. If I read an article filled with incorrect arguments and information, I might not know the information is incorrect and like it. On a meta level, I don't really want to see articles with false information. But as a random user, I have no way of knowing that, so just my like behavior doesn't take that value into account, and so wouldn't optimize for it.
im3w1l 10y ago
> A large chunk of them assume anyone who calls themselves a "feminist" is batshit insane and also wants ridiculous things like "safe zones" While the West is relatively sane at the moment, there are still a lot of tyrannical regimes in the world telling us how fucked up things can easily become.
- syngrog66 10y ago
  It is interesting to me that the "most insane" regime in the world seems to be North Korea. Yet the negative effects there seem to be limited to strictly within their borders. Whereas the "much less insane, though still far from perfect" regimes (esp the Muslim/MidEast/Arab/etc/) ones seem to be the the ones which are exporting their evil and pain and stupidity out into everyone else's countries. most nuts? North Korea. but they keep it in-house. less nuts? pick random Muslim/MidEast/African nation, but they allow it to leak out. For whatever reasons/excuses.
  - woodman 10y ago
    I've never seen someone accused of racism for expressing a negative opinion about the DPRK - or the behavior of its inhabitants, but I can't say the same about the rest of Asia or North Africa. There is a chilling effect, and it makes it difficult to have frank discussions on important matters like female genital mutilation and incitements to violence...
  - pluma 10y ago
    Frankly, as a non-American it always strikes me as weird how much attention US media and politics seem to pay to NK considering how irrelevant they are internationally compared to other "evil" countries (as well as "friends" like Saudi Arabia). The only direct external threat NK poses is to South Korea and most of the posturing around nuclear weapons and such have for a long time simply been used as a bargaining chip (because NK has literally nothing else to offer than "not try to build nukes"). Obama has snubbed Putin by calling Russia a "regional power" but I think that label is far more adequate for NK than for anybody else. NK's only real ally is China and China would probably drop it the second NK tries to seriously do anything that would harm China's trade (like, say, launching an attack on the US). I guess NK is the only discernible obvious "bad guy" nation state we have left. China is a close trade partner, Russia is too well-spoken (though it's still good for the occasional Red Scare in the US) and nobody can really tell the desert countries apart anyway (plus "nations" like ISIS are making it hard to reason about individual countries and their political affiliations the way we like to).
jandrese 10y ago
I've found the Anti-SJW thing a bit archaic and surprising. When I was in high school in the early 90s there was a sudden torrent of worry over "man hating feminists" who would kick you in the balls if you held the door for them. As far as I can tell, said people were almost entirely fictional (I won't discount a handful of people with deep seated issues/mental illness) and nobody could name one, yet the paranoia lasted until I went to college (which honestly may just be me moving away from those people). For 20 years I don't think much of it but suddenly they are back. I have to assume this is political scaremongering thanks to Hillary winning the nomination.

qu4z-2 10y ago

Also take a look at the feminist movement. A large chunk of them assume that anyone who calls themselves "anti-SJW" is batshit insane and also wants ridiculous things like "muslim-free zones". I doubt such a movement could have popped up without the filter bubble artificially dividing people on the internet. The filter bubble silently manipulates how people think, in a very destructive manner. I agree with you that filter bubbles are a huge problem. I also feel like I see more and more arguments about ... not the facts, but what opinions each named group actually has or endorses. There's so much "THIS ONE IDIOT SHOWS WHAT FEMINISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE" and "TRUMP SUPPORTERS LITERALLY WANT TO <bla>". I don't know how much that's been the case historically and whether it's an increasing trend, but it seems like it happens a lot. My experience has been that there's a lot of reasonable people in most groups, and then a few idiots that ruin it for everyone. How do we mend that gap? How do you persuade people to hang out with people from a group they believe are "batshit insane" or "inherently aggressive" or other rubbish like that?

zyx321 10y ago
It's a positive feedback loop, constantly reinforcing itself. There's an interesting video on this[1]. The gist of it is such: Nothing gets people sharing an idea like anger and fear. And the clickbait "journalists" know it. Yes, there's a lot of reasonable people, but most of them are part of the problem because they don't have the time or motivation to do the research. They see something like "Why Donald Clinton is the next Hitler and must be stopped at all cost" and just share it without even thinking about the other side of it. Can we fix it at all? I'm not sure. The best you can do is distance yourself from the crazy people in "your" camp, encourage your "allies" to give the "enemy" view point a fair consideration and hope for the best. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
- onion2k 10y ago
  Can we fix it at all? A possible solution is actually what most people who use Facebook claim to want - show users everything their friends post in chronological order. At least that way any 'filter bubble' is of your own making.
  - zyx321 10y ago
    Which is never going to happen, because the current system allows Facebook to keep charging companies for continued access to customers they've already engaged.
    - kristianc 10y ago
      My email inbox offers a dumb pipe to companies who have already engaged me to engage me again without filtering. I'll take my chances with the algorithms.
syngrog66 10y ago
thank you for making a non-PC/non-SJW aligned post minor addendum: I do find it amusing that the mainstream mass media discourse does not seem capable of finding any nuanced intermediate point somewhere in between the two extremes of "all Muslims are evil" and "perhaps we should temporarily stop all rubber-stamp-approvals of immigration from Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan/SaudiArabia/etc/". And I'd argue that, despite all his imperfections, Trump's stated position was more closely aligned with the latter than the former. Because... clearly, not all Muslims are evil. The vast majority, clearly by the data, are not evil in any objective sense. Yet, at the same time, by any reasonable adult human's perception there is clearly a phenomenon going on lately where a disproportionate number of humans are metaphorically going "Allah Akhabar!" before hitting their detonate button, whether that's for ISIS or Al Qaeda, etc. We should not discriminate against people purely based on the color of their skin, of course. At the same time, we the citizens of the USA don't somehow inherently "owe" anything else to any other random person in the world, we have not somehow explicitly victimized them by saying, for whatever reasons, "no, sorry, but right now we do not wish you, in particular, to come into our country." We have unemployed people here already, we have sick people here already, we have elderly, we have children, we have debts, we don't somehow inherently owe you anything or need you specifically.
- morgante 10y ago
  > rubber-stamp-approvals of immigration If you think that it's a rubber stamp approval for any Muslim from Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan then you need to get substantially more informed on the issues. I suspect you're in the very filter bubble you decry. Seek out some alternative viewpoints.
  - cronjobber 10y ago
    > I suspect you're in the very filter bubble you decry Looks like filter bubble is going to be the next Dunning-Kruger. That's fine, both beat "oh, you're obviously projecting", if only for relative novelty value.
- qu4z-2 10y ago
  My post wasn't intended to be aligned with any position; if it came across that way I need to get better at communicating. I was intending to point out that people in the opposite camp usually feel fairly similarly. The mass media discourse is, I suspect, bad at middle ground because it turns out reinforcing people's fear and biases sells well. And if it doesn't happen to be true, well, then you get free outrage clicks from everyone else. Even better! To misquote Pirates of the Caribbean: "Fox is the worst news channel I've ever watched!" "Ah, but you have watched it!"
vanderZwan 10y ago
> How do we mend that gap? How do you persuade people to hang out with people from a group they believe are "batshit insane" or "inherently aggressive" or other rubbish like that? I don't know how, but I think one place to start is figuring out how to bypass the actually batshit insane/aggressive ones[0] (on your own side trying to keep you in, and on the other side trying to keep you out), since they effectively are the next barriers you encounter if you actually manage to pop the filter bubble. [0] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2939
wvh 10y ago
You push for true individuality, where people are own agents and don't feel the need to associate (as in mix ones identity instead of subjective taste) with religion, politics, brands or other points of contention. Problem is that those groups have vested interests and human beings are likely too social and irrational to refrain from belonging to "inner circles" and construct inane belief systems. Having a slightly autistic streak might help though, to naturally be less immersed in group-think or feeling the need to belong. We seem to be able to accept differing tastes in for instance food or temperature/weather, so people are capable to disagree on taste without feeling the need to take that difference to an emotional/irrational level and segregate into clans. I guess liking spicy food isn't generally felt to be a crucial defining factor of one's identity... at least to the level of wanting to attack or murder each other.
- elcapitan 10y ago
  > We seem to be able to accept differing tastes in for instance food or temperature/weather, so people are capable to disagree on taste without feeling the need to take that difference to an emotional/irrational level and segregate into clans. I guess liking spicy food isn't generally felt to be a crucial defining factor of one's identity... at least to the level of wanting to attack or murder each other. Unless of course it is about eating animals or not ;)

mirimir 10y ago

It goes back way before Facebook and Google. Remember Usenet after Eternal September? And before that, CompuServe and AOL. And really, filter bubbles have always been a problem, especially in large cities. The Internet makes it very easy for like-minded people to find each other. For the most part, that's a great thing.

haimez 10y ago
The effect is different when literally every member of society is filtering into factions though.
- mirimir 10y ago
  Maybe so. But it arguably reflects increased freedom, which is a good thing.
  - Thimothy 10y ago
    I thing this issue is completely orthogonal to freedom. If anything, facebook has taken from you the freedom of looking at different political views. Recently I noticed that, even tough I have friends in facebook with opposing political opinions to mine, as I don't usually click in their postings, facebook doesn't show me their posts, it just spams me with political propaganda aligned with my view that an algorithm has decided that I have an slightly higher chance of clicking. I seriously fail to see how my freedom became empowered through this process, last time I checked, facebook doesn't has an optional "Don't show me anything that would make me even slighly upset"
    - mirimir 10y ago
      OK, I don't use Facebook. They nuked my account, because anonymous. But can't you tell Facebook to show you everything that your friends post?
      - iamdave 10y ago

doctorpangloss 10y ago

> The filter bubble puts artificial divides between people... I don't think the "filter bubble puts artificial divides" that didn't already exist. I also don't think anything gets "put," or that anything is "artificial," or that there are actual "divides," or that there exists a "filter bubble." Facebook didn't program something called "filter_bubble.php." Facebook uses a privacy-sensitive collaborative filtering approach to selecting newsfeed items for you. If you're describing the consequences of collaborative filtering for the average person as "filter bubble," then you're describing a human condition that an average person is interested in collaboratively-filterable things. There exists a population for whom the newsfeed probably isn't that interesting, and I bet they don't like Netflix, TV networks, organized categories in book stores, newspaper editorials, etc. either. "Filter bubble" is something that happens to people. Like 5 other commenters cover this ground. I really object to this idea of "artificial." Really concretely, choosing what you read next based on what you liked about what you read before sounds super natural to me, at least for the average person. Again, there are people who look hard for "both sides," and I'm sure they love reading Consumer Reports, CQ Researcher and Wikipedia Talk Pages all day. I just don't know if the minority behavior is the natural one. Notice there's no algorithm involved here. Whether its Facebook's C.F. or whether it's just you choosing what to read based on what you liked about what you read before, you get the same result. So even if you think C.F. (and basically what everyone does) is "artificial," I wouldn't peg it on Facebook. And puts? Who forces anyone to read anything? I don't think anyone gets divided. You might mean becoming less uncertain / more committed to your position. But neutrality is just a vote for the status quo—still taking a side. I think you mean political and social divisions, and what you're discovering maybe is that everyone actually has them, you just didn't know what they were until you could read people's Facebook posts. > a movement could have popped up Have some perspective. In _your_ bubble, you'll think "movement." But there are like a billion Facebook users. Hardly any of them—maybe 0.01%, or 100,000 people—will have any idea what an "anti-SJW," "safe zone" or whatever actually means. There's no movement.

Houshalter 10y ago
You are just debating semantics. "Filter bubbles" are a real phenomenon, where political information gets filtered to reinforce your existing biases. This is something new. Yes newspapers in the past had a political bias, sometimes. But newspapers were sold to subscribers, individual stories didn't have to compete to be the most angry and the most biased. Papers tried to present a neutral point of view and explain both positions. We've now created an economy where the only way to get clicks is to make an article that is more angry, more provocative, and more biased than the competing articles. The market is optimizing for values that are far removed from what actually benefits society. And the machine will keep optimizing those values to the point of absurdity. To the point where it tears society apart. To the point where the average reader spends their entire life and never hears an opposing point of view. Obviously facebook doesn't have a "filter_bubble.php" and literally no one is claiming that. It's understood this is just a natural result of using machine learning to customize newsfeeds. But it is a real result, that has real consequences. You could maybe even argue that people want this. I'm not sure if that's really true. But it's irrelevant to the argument that it's bad for society as a whole. Just answer this one question. Do you honestly believe the world is better off with this, than if facebook did something else? Now as to whether people actually want this, I don't think they do. The problem with collaborative filtering is that the basic assumption is wrong. That if people click or like a post, that means they actually want to see more content like it. Or that if they don't click or like it, they want to see less like that. This is just obviously false. People like and share things to advertise their political positions. Or at least in the hope that other people will see it. Likewise they don't vote on things they don't want to advertise, or don't want other people to see. If that sounds confusing, concrete example. On reddit I sometimes read an article that I disagree with slightly. I don't upvote it, because I don't want it to be ranked higher so more people see content I disagree with. Or I don't want to give social rewards to the poster. But I still might want to see more content like it in the future. Maybe I'm interested in the subject, or like arguing about it, or just don't care about occasionally reading stuff I disagree with. The only way to properly do collaborative filtering is if "likes" and votes are private, and are only used to predict what articles you will like or dislike, nothing else. It can't feel like "liking" is equivalent to a vote for that position, as opposed merely "show me more articles like this". Then facebook also uses information like whether you clicked on a post. But that just encourages clickbait, articles with provocative or misleading titles. You should only take into account whether people like the article or not, after reading it. Otherwise you are just optimizing for clickbait even the users don't actually want. Lastly there is just standard false information. If I read an article filled with incorrect arguments and information, I might not know the information is incorrect and like it. On a meta level, I don't really want to see articles with false information. But as a random user, I have no way of knowing that, so just my like behavior doesn't take that value into account, and so wouldn't optimize for it.

im3w1l 10y ago

> A large chunk of them assume anyone who calls themselves a "feminist" is batshit insane and also wants ridiculous things like "safe zones" While the West is relatively sane at the moment, there are still a lot of tyrannical regimes in the world telling us how fucked up things can easily become.

syngrog66 10y ago
It is interesting to me that the "most insane" regime in the world seems to be North Korea. Yet the negative effects there seem to be limited to strictly within their borders. Whereas the "much less insane, though still far from perfect" regimes (esp the Muslim/MidEast/Arab/etc/) ones seem to be the the ones which are exporting their evil and pain and stupidity out into everyone else's countries. most nuts? North Korea. but they keep it in-house. less nuts? pick random Muslim/MidEast/African nation, but they allow it to leak out. For whatever reasons/excuses.
- woodman 10y ago
  I've never seen someone accused of racism for expressing a negative opinion about the DPRK - or the behavior of its inhabitants, but I can't say the same about the rest of Asia or North Africa. There is a chilling effect, and it makes it difficult to have frank discussions on important matters like female genital mutilation and incitements to violence...
- pluma 10y ago
  Frankly, as a non-American it always strikes me as weird how much attention US media and politics seem to pay to NK considering how irrelevant they are internationally compared to other "evil" countries (as well as "friends" like Saudi Arabia). The only direct external threat NK poses is to South Korea and most of the posturing around nuclear weapons and such have for a long time simply been used as a bargaining chip (because NK has literally nothing else to offer than "not try to build nukes"). Obama has snubbed Putin by calling Russia a "regional power" but I think that label is far more adequate for NK than for anybody else. NK's only real ally is China and China would probably drop it the second NK tries to seriously do anything that would harm China's trade (like, say, launching an attack on the US). I guess NK is the only discernible obvious "bad guy" nation state we have left. China is a close trade partner, Russia is too well-spoken (though it's still good for the occasional Red Scare in the US) and nobody can really tell the desert countries apart anyway (plus "nations" like ISIS are making it hard to reason about individual countries and their political affiliations the way we like to).

jandrese 10y ago

I've found the Anti-SJW thing a bit archaic and surprising. When I was in high school in the early 90s there was a sudden torrent of worry over "man hating feminists" who would kick you in the balls if you held the door for them. As far as I can tell, said people were almost entirely fictional (I won't discount a handful of people with deep seated issues/mental illness) and nobody could name one, yet the paranoia lasted until I went to college (which honestly may just be me moving away from those people). For 20 years I don't think much of it but suddenly they are back. I have to assume this is political scaremongering thanks to Hillary winning the nomination.