6 ms·
Obama warns against irresponsible social media use
- nugi 9y agoIf anyone has truly warned us against irresponsible social media use, it was not this particular president.
- neeleshs 9y agoI'm reminded of a Black Mirror episode!
- gallerdude 9y agoSocial media is really paradoxical and interesting. I can tell the entire internet something, with just the click of a button. On the other hand, echo chambers are being created, and there's no easy solution to it.
- craftyguy 9y agoYou're right, there is no easy solution to it. It will require cultural changes to 'solve' the problem. People will have to be somewhat receptive of differing opinions and to question their own. Maybe I'm just ridiculously cynical, but I don't see that ever happening at the scale required address the echo chamber problem.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoWhat is the current state of empirical evidence about echo chambers and filter bubbles? The last time I read about it, the 3rd hand reports I was getting said that they were less of a problem than you might imagine, because political junkie types actually did read stuff from the other side. Perhaps becaue, they were so into politics that they did some kind of "opposition research".
- gt_ 9y agoI think that’s an extreme minority, and the benefit would be limited. The notion of sides in political media deteriorates the conversation into an argument, which at some point undermines an audience’s fundamental awareness and understanding of issues.
- bornonline1 9y agoSorry not sorry, echo chambers were created by suggestion algorithms and marketing. Algorithms prioritise same content on assumption that consumer want the same content (infuriating). And so many links nowadays are affiliated links. So the only way you can escape the echo, is to put a lot of effort, and no substantial majority will do it to affect the larger picture.
- gallerdude 9y agoI don't think they were created intentionally. The algorithms give people what they want, and it turns out that people don't want to be challenged on their opinions. It'd be like how if an algorithm was trained to optimize for deliciousness, it would probably create something super unhealthy.
- coolso 9y agoWondering if he'd feel the same way had the opposition candidate not used the internet and social media to help overcome the biases of the establishment mainstream media and defeat the candidate Obama endorsed and campaigned for? Suddenly now, probably not coincidentally because of that result, the trend seems to be "social media is really bad guys" among people in the establishment - both government and the media. It's kind of ironic. I find his statements somewhat hypocritical given that the media, and government, has had the monopoly on irresponsibility, bias, putting forth alternative realities, and the Balkanisation of society, until just recently now that people are able to combat it and freely spread information among tens of millions of people instantly and so easily, instead of only getting their information from approved sources without citizens being able to freely discuss, disprove, etc. - e.g., directly from the White House, and a couple of privileged mainstream media organizations that are very in-bed with the government.
- craftyguy 9y agoMeh. Social media has always been a dangerous tool, it's only until relatively recently that the contrast has been turned way up and the danger made very obviously clear.
- mozumder 9y agoThe media is the responsible party here. The public are the irresponsible ones. The public's voice should always be silenced in favor of professional media's voice. Remember, the public doesn't have social media editorial guidelines. Professional media does. Professional media reporters confirm facts with multiple sources, which is why they are more trustworthy. The public is simply allowed to lie on social media. This is why you should trust professional media over the public, since the public is irresponsible. Why would anyone trust a social media person that simply lies instead of a professional media organization that confirms facts with multiple sources?
- lbotos 9y ago> Why would anyone trust a social media person that simply lies instead of a professional media organization that confirms facts with multiple sources? Because they are "local" or because they confirm their biases. The other day on FB a friend shared a photoshopped Nancy Pelosi tweet (For international folks, she's a US Congress Person). Their comment on the shared photo "Did she really say that?". We live in the age of primary sources, we can easily go to their twitter to confirm. (Wasn't there) We also have great tools that help keep our American Politicians accountable: https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/ https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/ (Wasn't deleted either) In the time it took me to confirm that (~15 minutes) 3 people commented agreeing that she was insane for saying it.
- notadoc 9y agoI remain thoroughly convinced that social media is bad for society, and for the self. It is optimized to bring out the worst in people, and rarely offers anything of value.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ashleyn 9y ago>"The question has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn't lead to a Balkanisation of society and allows ways of finding common ground," he said. From a libertarian point of view: given his background and beliefs, I think Obama is missing a crucial element that allows and enables the reconciliation of those with different beliefs: liberty. The way you have a "multiplicity of voices" and a "diversity of views" is through tolerance: the tacit acknowledgement that while you may find what someone is doing odious and reprehensible, if all parties are consenting and voluntary, they ultimately have the legal right to engage in what they are doing free of interference. The sticking point is that "tolerance" also means tolerating the liberty of those commonly perceived as religiously conservative. This comes even to my own reluctant consternation as a transgender individual. The example that comes to mind immediately is the gay wedding cake cases. I think it's heinous to deny service to someone simply because they are gay. But is taking government's hands off private business a lesser evil than fighting over the apparatus used to do so every four years? One government administration violates the rights of Christians in order to protect gays, then the inverse occurs under the next administration, gays losing fundamental liberties and the right to self-determination. All while nobody ever seems to ask why either should be forced to live a certain way in the first place, why the government is involving itself in private matters ranging from business to who you choose to marry. Social media has little to do with this; it's merely a purifier for the underlying contention. Instead of keeping to ourselves and those who agree to associate with us, we've become preoccupied with adjusting an oversized commons to fit the whims of a winning team every four to eight years, hammering in all those who don't fit under the new order. Part and parcel of living in a plural society, is that not everyone will agree to the level where you can ever have such a commons. The "common ground" that Obama is seeking, effectively, is a consistent application of "leave me alone".
- Clubber 9y agoThe problem with blaming bubbles is that it's not new to social media. I would image it goes as far back as tribal evolution, but I digress. Currently, if someone like conservative politics, they read conservative newspapers and magazines, watch conservative news, listen to conservative radio and go to conservative websites, because they like it. There are liberal versions of these and also middle-of-the-road versions. Social media is just another way of consuming information that you like. Another dimension is wether said information is accurate or not. This has also been a historical problem in this country and the world, probably since we, as a species, have been writing stuff down and even before in oral histories. Information in social media is consumed from friends and acquaintances. People tend to give more authority to the validity of information from friends and acquaintances, again throughout history. Social media isn't inherently bad for society, I think politics is bad for society and social media is just another way of sharing ideas, good and bad. Again, most of this is nothing new, including the content. Look up Andrew Jackson's 1828 campaign against his wife: According to Ann Toplovich, executive director of the Tennessee Historical Society, John Quincy Adams' presidential campaigns targeted Jackson's "passion and lack of self-control" in both 1824 and 1828, "making it central to the argument that he would devastate the integrity of the Republic and its institutions."[6] One newspaper ran an article asking, “‘Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?’”
- slumberlust 9y agoIs your quote in support of bubbles being around for a while, or simply that politics are bad?
- Clubber 9y agoIt's more an observation of society and politics in the US throughout it's history.
- divbit 9y agoI hesitate to post a slight disagreement here because I think, for the most part, Obama is right on the money. However, I would hesitate to just put the problem on 'just' social media itself - if person A posts a message that says in a supposedly limited setting and person B uses a datacenter of big data AI / neural net / blockchain / VR or whatever fancy technology you want to put this in a much larger setting than the original statement, it is just a slightly clever (one could alternatively say unscrupulous) way for a person B to say what person A is saying, many many times over, and try to hide being behind it. The same thing happens in real-life (maybe I should say 3-d) discussions, in albeit, a much more nuanced manner, but still with just as great potential effect.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- unethical_ban 9y agoA post on an ex-leader of the United States regarding technology should not be flagged.
- gnicholas 9y agoYeah not sure what's going on today. There have been a couple top posts that have been flagged. Does anyone know the procedure for posts becoming un-flagged? It seems like there is an easy way to flag things, but the only recourse to un-flag is for mods to get involved. I'm curious to know if this impression is correct, and if so what the thinking is behind this set of procedures.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoI think that you use "vouch" to say that the post shouldn't have been flagged. I suspect (but I am not certain) that a post will be automatically killed after a certain number of flags (and I suspect that the number is more than one). I suspect that it takes manual intervention by a mod to undo the flag kill, and that vouch is the way you bring it to the mods' attention.
- gnicholas 9y agoI see how to vouch for a flagged comment, but not a flagged post.
- grzm 9y agoFor submissions, "vouch" appears for submissions that are marked "[dead]", not "[flagged]". Same for comments, AIUI. Some confusion is understandable due to the fact they're usually correlated and the looseness with which "flag" is often used to mean either.
- gnicholas 9y agoGood explanation. I guess the problem is that when posts are flagged, they seem to drop precipitously in the ranking, and there’s apparently nothing that can be done to vouch until the post is marked dead. But if flagging is tantamount to killing in terms of visibility, then the cure comes too late.