4 ms·

I find it ridiculous that text on random social media accounts is being associated with "safety". If anything, it's the user's own misuse and mishandling of th

I find it ridiculous that text on random social media accounts is being associated with "safety". If anything, it's the user's own misuse and mishandling of their own information, and their lack of understanding that anybody can publish anything, that makes their specific use of social media "unsafe". The trust and total integration of Facebook into people's lives is the actual unsafe component, which Facebook themselves actively promote; it all should be held at arm's length. There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan.

spaceseaman 9y ago
> There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan. You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook. That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety makes sense: 1.) "Hey everybody! Let's kill all type of people who like X tomorrow. Like and share to get the word out!" 2.) "Hey here's the address and personal info of someone I disagree with politically. Let's organize an effort to camp outside their house with guns to scare them. Or lets "SWAT" them. I am not misusing my information in either of these cases. Instead my information is being misused by others who use the space as an organizing ground. When people ask for Facebook to be regulated, they want hate speech like the above to be removed. People make the argument that this is a slippery slope, but that's a fallacy for a reason. It's trivial to regulate speech of this form on their platforms if they were willing to pay for it, but they aren't. Thus we must force them to regulate this. You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. Hate speech is not simply speech I disagree with. It can be clearly defined in many cases (like above), and in the cases where it can't one can simply err towards allowing it.
- white-flame 9y ago
  > You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. I'm not calling for regulation, nor labeling anything "hate speech" (ergo not conflating the two, either), so I have no idea where this particular statement of yours is coming from. What I'm saying is that trusting sites where anybody can post anything is the core danger of the situations instigating this specific mess, and that trust is the fault of the reader, and of Facebook falsely positioning itself as a trustworthy information source. This situation isn't about "hate speech", incitements to violence, or any other already-illegal acts. To quote, it discusses the "far larger problem, in which the platforms are gamed for profit or political influence." At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust. Facebook wants to discriminate "trustworthy" from "untrustworthy" somehow, and to do so algorithmically. To be very specific, what's at stake here is Facebook's desire to have a particular PR posture as "the" place to be online, for their own gains. There's no actual direct safety issue involved here driving these automated "trustworthiness" speech classifications. It is both unnecessary for the site to function socially, and ultimately unworkable as an implementation from its very concept. What is necessary for a properly functioning mashup of the world's unfettered speech in one place, is more distrust by the users of what's posted, as there's no reason to trust it in the first place. Again, from a content perspective it's no different from 4chan.
  - spaceseaman 9y ago
    Ah I slightly misunderstood your position - I apologize. Personally I find the topics highly related in my mind and so my mind made a jump in your argument I should not have. I do actually still disagree with you though: > At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust. Personally I don't think that people are actually putting blind trust into such sources. Rather, Facebook is instead creating a narrative about how the world is rather than what is truth and what is a lie. I don't think that Facebook is incredibly influential because people put blind faith into it. There's definitely a lot of people who do that, and they're dumb, but I think there's a larger problem at play. Facebook is able to create a narrative about what "the world" is like. If you're liberal, you see a very different "world" on Facebook than if you're conservative. In this way, I don't think Facebook is influencing the world via trust, but by misconstruing what the world actually looks like. People have the perception that Facebook is an "unbiased" perspective on the world at large and especially your social circle. But we know that Facebook doesn't actually present such a world - it instead gives you a highly "biased" (think more of the statistical version than the political one) perspective on life. In this way I think it's not necessary to make Facebook the arbitrator of trust on their network, but instead to require them to arbitrate the way information is disseminated. To say it simpler: It's not a problem that Facebook has fake news, it's a problem that Facebook can create a fake world. Again sorry for misunderstanding you.
    - white-flame 9y ago
      It's cool. I would further dig into the intentionality of who's creating what. Facebook creates a platform where people can be surrounded by very selective & similar feeds, fed by producers of content seeking to gain traction of their ideas as described in the article (ie seeking sales or political power). To say that Facebook creates these narratives can sound like people at the company are intentionally crafting these narratives, instead of it being a substrate where 3rd parties craft them. However, let's contrast this with TV, since it also has the creation of narratives and the problem of getting too sucked into it. Different networks have their different slants, people pick their favorites and get wrapped up in the narratives presented there, be they from news or from consistent themes permeating entertainment programming. But for some reason the response to getting too wrapped up in TV (your fault, watch less or get off it completely) is quite different than the responses to getting too wrapped up in Facebook (regulate Facebook and don't change our habits!). I think the responsibility of the info consumer is the same in either case, and a lot of that is related to how you handle trust vs skepticism regarding these commercial outlets.
wpietri 9y ago
This is not a very thoughtful response. If Facebook and Twitter were no more useful or trustworthy than 4chan, then they wouldn't exist. It's like saying, "I can't believe people are trusting encyclopedias and cookbooks. There's no reason that readers should consider them any different than stuff written on a bathroom wall." The problem is the gap between what they sell themselves as and what the actual user experience is. If Facebook were advertising themselves as the cloaca of the Internet, your vigorous user-blaming would have some merit. But they don't. They aim to be in daily use by every person in the world, a trusted intermediary. They either need to live up to that or quit.
- white-flame 9y ago
  You can generally trust your connections to your acquaintances, and companies/personas you know from elsewhere. It's all the external feeds wanting your attention & commenters throwing in their 2 bits that are the random noise. This is the domain where the propagandists are working, and where there is no and should be no trust. There's no difference between some nobody posting from their personal account, and some nobody posting from their account that they've slapped a logo on. There's no distinguishable difference between 100 nobodies throwing in their heartfelt opinion, and 100 bots repeating the opinion of 1 nobody.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Note that you've gone from the dramatic "it all should be held at arm's length" to the somewhat less dramatic "some of it is ok to trust, but this other stuff isn't". That's precisely what I meant when I said your first comment wasn't well thought out. Your new position is still too extreme; human trust is not binary. We could go another round where I point out exceptions and you come up with another model that is still too simple. And again, and again. Eventually, we might even get to a point where a useful discussion could be had. But it's not my job to force you to think past your taste for dramatic statements. It's yours.
    - white-flame 9y ago
      This article isn't about "human trust" in general, nor how you socialize with your known peers. It's quite specifically about sources that are otherwise completely unknown to you affecting your finances and opinions by pursuing magnified exposure on Facebook. This isn't my distinction, it's what the article raises as a problem.

spaceseaman 9y ago

> There is no reason that users should consider random words on random Facebook accounts any differently than words posted on 4chan. You're right! They're both dangerous. If I posted your public address on both of those websites, how you would you feel about your own safety? Not your Facebook account mind you - just somewhere on Facebook. That's unsafe speech. Other examples of text where being associated with safety makes sense: 1.) "Hey everybody! Let's kill all type of people who like X tomorrow. Like and share to get the word out!" 2.) "Hey here's the address and personal info of someone I disagree with politically. Let's organize an effort to camp outside their house with guns to scare them. Or lets "SWAT" them. I am not misusing my information in either of these cases. Instead my information is being misused by others who use the space as an organizing ground. When people ask for Facebook to be regulated, they want hate speech like the above to be removed. People make the argument that this is a slippery slope, but that's a fallacy for a reason. It's trivial to regulate speech of this form on their platforms if they were willing to pay for it, but they aren't. Thus we must force them to regulate this. You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. Hate speech is not simply speech I disagree with. It can be clearly defined in many cases (like above), and in the cases where it can't one can simply err towards allowing it.

white-flame 9y ago
> You're conflating a regulation of speech one disagrees with, with hate speech. I'm not calling for regulation, nor labeling anything "hate speech" (ergo not conflating the two, either), so I have no idea where this particular statement of yours is coming from. What I'm saying is that trusting sites where anybody can post anything is the core danger of the situations instigating this specific mess, and that trust is the fault of the reader, and of Facebook falsely positioning itself as a trustworthy information source. This situation isn't about "hate speech", incitements to violence, or any other already-illegal acts. To quote, it discusses the "far larger problem, in which the platforms are gamed for profit or political influence." At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust. Facebook wants to discriminate "trustworthy" from "untrustworthy" somehow, and to do so algorithmically. To be very specific, what's at stake here is Facebook's desire to have a particular PR posture as "the" place to be online, for their own gains. There's no actual direct safety issue involved here driving these automated "trustworthiness" speech classifications. It is both unnecessary for the site to function socially, and ultimately unworkable as an implementation from its very concept. What is necessary for a properly functioning mashup of the world's unfettered speech in one place, is more distrust by the users of what's posted, as there's no reason to trust it in the first place. Again, from a content perspective it's no different from 4chan.
- spaceseaman 9y ago
  Ah I slightly misunderstood your position - I apologize. Personally I find the topics highly related in my mind and so my mind made a jump in your argument I should not have. I do actually still disagree with you though: > At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust. Personally I don't think that people are actually putting blind trust into such sources. Rather, Facebook is instead creating a narrative about how the world is rather than what is truth and what is a lie. I don't think that Facebook is incredibly influential because people put blind faith into it. There's definitely a lot of people who do that, and they're dumb, but I think there's a larger problem at play. Facebook is able to create a narrative about what "the world" is like. If you're liberal, you see a very different "world" on Facebook than if you're conservative. In this way, I don't think Facebook is influencing the world via trust, but by misconstruing what the world actually looks like. People have the perception that Facebook is an "unbiased" perspective on the world at large and especially your social circle. But we know that Facebook doesn't actually present such a world - it instead gives you a highly "biased" (think more of the statistical version than the political one) perspective on life. In this way I think it's not necessary to make Facebook the arbitrator of trust on their network, but instead to require them to arbitrate the way information is disseminated. To say it simpler: It's not a problem that Facebook has fake news, it's a problem that Facebook can create a fake world. Again sorry for misunderstanding you.
  - white-flame 9y ago
    It's cool. I would further dig into the intentionality of who's creating what. Facebook creates a platform where people can be surrounded by very selective & similar feeds, fed by producers of content seeking to gain traction of their ideas as described in the article (ie seeking sales or political power). To say that Facebook creates these narratives can sound like people at the company are intentionally crafting these narratives, instead of it being a substrate where 3rd parties craft them. However, let's contrast this with TV, since it also has the creation of narratives and the problem of getting too sucked into it. Different networks have their different slants, people pick their favorites and get wrapped up in the narratives presented there, be they from news or from consistent themes permeating entertainment programming. But for some reason the response to getting too wrapped up in TV (your fault, watch less or get off it completely) is quite different than the responses to getting too wrapped up in Facebook (regulate Facebook and don't change our habits!). I think the responsibility of the info consumer is the same in either case, and a lot of that is related to how you handle trust vs skepticism regarding these commercial outlets.

wpietri 9y ago

This is not a very thoughtful response. If Facebook and Twitter were no more useful or trustworthy than 4chan, then they wouldn't exist. It's like saying, "I can't believe people are trusting encyclopedias and cookbooks. There's no reason that readers should consider them any different than stuff written on a bathroom wall." The problem is the gap between what they sell themselves as and what the actual user experience is. If Facebook were advertising themselves as the cloaca of the Internet, your vigorous user-blaming would have some merit. But they don't. They aim to be in daily use by every person in the world, a trusted intermediary. They either need to live up to that or quit.

white-flame 9y ago
You can generally trust your connections to your acquaintances, and companies/personas you know from elsewhere. It's all the external feeds wanting your attention & commenters throwing in their 2 bits that are the random noise. This is the domain where the propagandists are working, and where there is no and should be no trust. There's no difference between some nobody posting from their personal account, and some nobody posting from their account that they've slapped a logo on. There's no distinguishable difference between 100 nobodies throwing in their heartfelt opinion, and 100 bots repeating the opinion of 1 nobody.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Note that you've gone from the dramatic "it all should be held at arm's length" to the somewhat less dramatic "some of it is ok to trust, but this other stuff isn't". That's precisely what I meant when I said your first comment wasn't well thought out. Your new position is still too extreme; human trust is not binary. We could go another round where I point out exceptions and you come up with another model that is still too simple. And again, and again. Eventually, we might even get to a point where a useful discussion could be had. But it's not my job to force you to think past your taste for dramatic statements. It's yours.
  - white-flame 9y ago
    This article isn't about "human trust" in general, nor how you socialize with your known peers. It's quite specifically about sources that are otherwise completely unknown to you affecting your finances and opinions by pursuing magnified exposure on Facebook. This isn't my distinction, it's what the article raises as a problem.