5 ms·

Facebook admits: governments exploited us to spread propaganda

21 points by sethbannon 10y ago

sprafa 10y ago
No responses yet? They are essentially admitting what we already know - The Russians brainwashed maybe a few million Americans into believing absolute bullshit, and they might've turned the election towards Trump with what we now know was a highly concise and directed effort towards the blue-collar Democrat states. If you're going to tell me that brainwashing is not a thing, then explain how advertising exists as a billion dollar industry.
- hiram112 10y ago
  Blue collar Democrat states? Lol. Democrats looked at the demographics and made an explicit decision to toss out blue collar (and now even white collar a la H1b) workers in favor of immigrants and corporations. The only difference between the Republicans these days is the Republicans don't hide behind their agenda by labeling those who disagree as bigots and uneducated idiots. You can only call someone a racist, xenophobe, while they are training their own foreign replacement, for so long, before it loses effectiveness. Do the Russians have organizations tasked with influencing foreign policy in their favor? God damned right they do, just like every major nation state on Earth. The US, btw, dwarfs the rest in this type of work. Do these types of influence work in a vacuum? Not as well as they do when a demographic is already teetering on the edge.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Democrats looked at the demographics and made an explicit decision to toss out blue collar (and now even white collar a la H1b) workers in favor of immigrants and corporations Bill Clinton and the neoliberal DLC did, and it's been the source of a lasting divide within the Democratic Party (the party-in-government, not just the party-in-the-electorate) since; see, everything from the vote oj NAFTA through the 2016 Presidential primary and the subsequent DLC leadership campaign. While the neoliberals are still the dominant faction within the Democratic party, they've lost ground to more strongly pro-labor progressives recently (compare 2008, when both leading primary contenders were soldily in the neoliberal faction to 2016) and there's plenty of reasons to think that will continue.
  - sprafa 10y ago
    I wouldn't deny that the Democrats took those voters for granted. But the Russian interference campaign (which you're right about - America does this too and probably a lot better) might've helped tip it one way.
metal 10y ago
Water is wet
makecheck 10y ago
It’s easy to gather some sense of what seems like “good material” or “bad material”, and easy to imagine solutions that try to block what enough people consider bad. And yet, this is not what should happen all. It is too simple, and it hides the real problem. People need to have critical thinking skills, about everything. “How could this be misleading?” is a valuable question to be able to ask in life, whether it is about news or the latest TV commercial or something else. It is certainly useful in capitalist systems; for instance, when being sold something and an advertisement boasts “up to 40%!”, that kind of verbiage should always raise questions like: “how often will this be 0% or even negative, values which are also in that range?”. This kind of thing is used very frequently in advertising alone but certainly in news and even in discussions with other people. Wording is crucial, comprehension is crucial. If you ever suspect you do not really understand what you see, you need to take it as a cue to educate yourself. Echo chambers, or silos or whatever you want to call them, should also be recognized. Skills need to be practiced, and you cannot practice critical thinking if you are surrounded by agreement all the time. This can be a hard sell because you can certainly feel a lot happier when not encountering things that challenge your views but that is not how an intellectual discussion works; you need to at least accept the possibility that even your long-held beliefs are not exactly right. It is dangerous for suppression tools to exist for news or anything else because, like so many things in security technology, something that’s possible to do can eventually be abused by anyone. Claims that “only the good guys will be able to use this” are not relevant to the discussion. At some point in this case, there will be someone capable of masking something that he or she personally does not like, and “propaganda” will have nothing to do with the mechanism by which the material is hidden. In any scientific endeavor, you can never universally support results; you always need to know what was considered to understand if the results make sense within those parameters. And this applies to any source of information. Even in heated political discussions, it is way easier to understand why somebody may hold a view that you consider strange if you can figure out exactly what they have and haven’t heard about.
- r_singh 10y ago
  Your comment me of the book Predictably Irrational. All these examples are testaments to our collective irrationality.
Hydraulix989 10y ago
In what way? As it stands (or once stood), Facebook more or less permits free speech on its platform, modulo pornography and gun sales. I'm against algorithmic "censorship" against their definition of "government propaganda." Let the educated reader decide that for herself (indeed, my Facebook friends -- who are also my IRL friends -- aren't agents of government propaganda by participating in our Democracy via discussing their rather-diverse political views over a public forum). It's a little too transparent that "government propaganda" here means Donald Trump. I hope that Facebook is merely acquiescing to bad PR from the left here with a faux apology. It's a shame that they were pressured to feel responsible when they are merely a communications medium. I don't recall telegraph operators feeling responsible for antebellum slavery or radio broadcasters feeling responsible for the rise of Adolph Hitler (of which Trump's mainstream democratic election as our President cannot even reasonably be held in comparison to either _actual_ historical atrocity). By writing this rather dissident post here, I am not "exploiting" Hacker News.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > It's a little too transparent that "government propaganda" here means Donald Trump. Donald Trump wasn't a government, or in a position to direct the propaganda efforts of one, at the time of efforts to manipulate the US elections, and has never been blamed for efforts to manipulate the French elections, so, no, that's probably not what "government propaganda" means. You may have confused Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin.
  - Hydraulix989 10y ago
    No. I try to be reasonable so I wasn't going to entertain conspiracy theories in my post (particularly when they are "convenient" scapegoats when combined with vague, evasive finger-pointing from Facebook HQ -- always be sure to ask yourself "Qui bono?" when reading these public statements). I am fully aware of FB's misguided definition of "government propaganda" and wholeheartedly feel that it is a gross misuse of the word, so yes I am aware that the ACTUAL "propaganda" here didn't come from an existing government (nor would I commit the transgression of calling the public content "propaganda"). Once there is real proof (and not the left's version of WMDs), I will happily revise my views (from the article, FB declined to provide any or even blame anybody specific). For now, I am outraged that FB even felt compelled by certain groups to publish their own propaganda (this article).

21 points by sethbannon 10y ago

No responses yet? They are essentially admitting what we already know - The Russians brainwashed maybe a few million Americans into believing absolute bullshit, and they might've turned the election towards Trump with what we now know was a highly concise and directed effort towards the blue-collar Democrat states. If you're going to tell me that brainwashing is not a thing, then explain how advertising exists as a billion dollar industry.

hiram112 10y ago
Blue collar Democrat states? Lol. Democrats looked at the demographics and made an explicit decision to toss out blue collar (and now even white collar a la H1b) workers in favor of immigrants and corporations. The only difference between the Republicans these days is the Republicans don't hide behind their agenda by labeling those who disagree as bigots and uneducated idiots. You can only call someone a racist, xenophobe, while they are training their own foreign replacement, for so long, before it loses effectiveness. Do the Russians have organizations tasked with influencing foreign policy in their favor? God damned right they do, just like every major nation state on Earth. The US, btw, dwarfs the rest in this type of work. Do these types of influence work in a vacuum? Not as well as they do when a demographic is already teetering on the edge.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Democrats looked at the demographics and made an explicit decision to toss out blue collar (and now even white collar a la H1b) workers in favor of immigrants and corporations Bill Clinton and the neoliberal DLC did, and it's been the source of a lasting divide within the Democratic Party (the party-in-government, not just the party-in-the-electorate) since; see, everything from the vote oj NAFTA through the 2016 Presidential primary and the subsequent DLC leadership campaign. While the neoliberals are still the dominant faction within the Democratic party, they've lost ground to more strongly pro-labor progressives recently (compare 2008, when both leading primary contenders were soldily in the neoliberal faction to 2016) and there's plenty of reasons to think that will continue.
- sprafa 10y ago
  I wouldn't deny that the Democrats took those voters for granted. But the Russian interference campaign (which you're right about - America does this too and probably a lot better) might've helped tip it one way.

metal 10y ago

Water is wet

makecheck 10y ago

It’s easy to gather some sense of what seems like “good material” or “bad material”, and easy to imagine solutions that try to block what enough people consider bad. And yet, this is not what should happen all. It is too simple, and it hides the real problem. People need to have critical thinking skills, about everything. “How could this be misleading?” is a valuable question to be able to ask in life, whether it is about news or the latest TV commercial or something else. It is certainly useful in capitalist systems; for instance, when being sold something and an advertisement boasts “up to 40%!”, that kind of verbiage should always raise questions like: “how often will this be 0% or even negative, values which are also in that range?”. This kind of thing is used very frequently in advertising alone but certainly in news and even in discussions with other people. Wording is crucial, comprehension is crucial. If you ever suspect you do not really understand what you see, you need to take it as a cue to educate yourself. Echo chambers, or silos or whatever you want to call them, should also be recognized. Skills need to be practiced, and you cannot practice critical thinking if you are surrounded by agreement all the time. This can be a hard sell because you can certainly feel a lot happier when not encountering things that challenge your views but that is not how an intellectual discussion works; you need to at least accept the possibility that even your long-held beliefs are not exactly right. It is dangerous for suppression tools to exist for news or anything else because, like so many things in security technology, something that’s possible to do can eventually be abused by anyone. Claims that “only the good guys will be able to use this” are not relevant to the discussion. At some point in this case, there will be someone capable of masking something that he or she personally does not like, and “propaganda” will have nothing to do with the mechanism by which the material is hidden. In any scientific endeavor, you can never universally support results; you always need to know what was considered to understand if the results make sense within those parameters. And this applies to any source of information. Even in heated political discussions, it is way easier to understand why somebody may hold a view that you consider strange if you can figure out exactly what they have and haven’t heard about.

r_singh 10y ago
Your comment me of the book Predictably Irrational. All these examples are testaments to our collective irrationality.

Hydraulix989 10y ago

In what way? As it stands (or once stood), Facebook more or less permits free speech on its platform, modulo pornography and gun sales. I'm against algorithmic "censorship" against their definition of "government propaganda." Let the educated reader decide that for herself (indeed, my Facebook friends -- who are also my IRL friends -- aren't agents of government propaganda by participating in our Democracy via discussing their rather-diverse political views over a public forum). It's a little too transparent that "government propaganda" here means Donald Trump. I hope that Facebook is merely acquiescing to bad PR from the left here with a faux apology. It's a shame that they were pressured to feel responsible when they are merely a communications medium. I don't recall telegraph operators feeling responsible for antebellum slavery or radio broadcasters feeling responsible for the rise of Adolph Hitler (of which Trump's mainstream democratic election as our President cannot even reasonably be held in comparison to either _actual_ historical atrocity). By writing this rather dissident post here, I am not "exploiting" Hacker News.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> It's a little too transparent that "government propaganda" here means Donald Trump. Donald Trump wasn't a government, or in a position to direct the propaganda efforts of one, at the time of efforts to manipulate the US elections, and has never been blamed for efforts to manipulate the French elections, so, no, that's probably not what "government propaganda" means. You may have confused Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin.
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  No. I try to be reasonable so I wasn't going to entertain conspiracy theories in my post (particularly when they are "convenient" scapegoats when combined with vague, evasive finger-pointing from Facebook HQ -- always be sure to ask yourself "Qui bono?" when reading these public statements). I am fully aware of FB's misguided definition of "government propaganda" and wholeheartedly feel that it is a gross misuse of the word, so yes I am aware that the ACTUAL "propaganda" here didn't come from an existing government (nor would I commit the transgression of calling the public content "propaganda"). Once there is real proof (and not the left's version of WMDs), I will happily revise my views (from the article, FB declined to provide any or even blame anybody specific). For now, I am outraged that FB even felt compelled by certain groups to publish their own propaganda (this article).