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There are two types of internet based attacks. The first is “cyberwar” or the kinetic attacks that cause real world destruction. This is the kind the US has alw
by Bucephalus355 8y ago
There are two types of internet based attacks. The first is “cyberwar” or the kinetic attacks that cause real world destruction. This is the kind the US has always been fascinated with and excelled at.
The second kind is the more broad “cyberwarfare” which encompasses the political / psychological. The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives.
What if cyberkinetic attacks aren’t the best way to kill millions? What if simply enflaming tensions over Facebook, leading to revolutions and more ”Arab Springs” will kill tens of millions more?
Facebook could have been a better company, but they chose not to be, over and over again. They are a threat to peace and a catalyst for war and must be stopped.
- methodover 8y agoWhat, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? How could they improve?
- loceng 8y agoNo ads = no potential to manipulate people simply with enough money; I don't care for the arguments that this can have oversight to prevent this, there will be ways around it.
- pmorici 8y agoI don't understand why you think ads has anything to do with it. Much of the content on Facebook is user generated or at least posted by users from a third party source. Removing ads doesn't change that.
- loceng 8y agoAds is an easy and cheap method of adding fuel to the fire. I also wasn't trying to argue that removing ads exclusively solves the problems.
- KMag 8y agoIn that case, "no potential" was poor phrasing. Ads aren't the only mechanism of social influence for sale on the open market to anyone with enough money.
- loceng 8y agoYes, you're right. I need to stop commenting for now, I'm not in a good place - not analyzing as deeply as I normally would or like to. Commenting is a distraction from the chronic pain I have, though it also at times will break my thought processes. It's a tough place to be. Some days are better than others.
- KMag 8y agoI'm sorry to hear of your pain and hope you find some relief.
- dredmorbius 8y agoAds provide some of the capability, but by no means all of it. The engagement objectives of the ad seller (Facebook, here) means that highly-divisive or inflammetory content, which generates pageviews, or increases time-on-site, may be promoted over more socially beneficial material.
- KMag 8y agoI think "no potential" is way over-selling the case. For these purposes, I think targeted astroturfing is probably more cost-effective than ads, and wouldn't be prevented by Facebook dropping ads altogether. I enjoy the thought of an alternate universe where the most common social network is a p2p federated open-source system without ads, just running on alternative firmware in people's WiFi routers. However, that universe would still have astroturfing, and it would likely be harder to detect.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rhizome 8y agoWhat, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? They make it easy to do bad things to a lot of people at once.
- bigdubs 8y agoIt's not just that they have a lot of influence and a lot of people on their platform, it's that they've shown zero interest in responsibility, especially if showing responsibility would reduce usage or advertising dollars.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fvdessen 8y agoThey make it easy to communicate to a lot of people at once. Whether those communications are good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Expecting our communication channels to sort out the good from the bad is how we get to Chinese levels of censorship.
- rhizome 8y agoIt's also why you don't make it that easy. What if there was a device that could beam Facebook directly into a person's head, would you agree there should be some access control on that?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> What, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? They rank content by the degree to which it captures users’ attentions and prompts sharing. This ranking incentive is fundamentally driven by their advertising business model, where attention from eyeballs and shares generates revenue. Things that make us angry get shared more; numerous studies show this. An ad-driven social media service is this fundamentally driven to show us content that pisses us off. > How could they improve? By facing consequences for the violence they cause and profit from.
- methodover 8y agoDo you think that they should make no attempt to rank content at all in the news feed? That is, the feed becomes just a dumb list of posts from friends ordered by creation date, descending? Would that satisfy your concern?
- dawhizkid 8y agohttps://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-facebooks-new-algorithm-and-tortured-my https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-faceb...
- Zak 8y ago> By facing consequences for the violence they cause and profit from. That's a way Facebook could be incentivized to improve, but the question was "how could they improve?". I imagine in a lot of cases Facebook could correctly identify the sort of posts that people get angry enough about to lead to physical violence if it put anywhere near the level of effort into researching that problem that it does into maximizing its share of the user's attention. Such posts could then be given a low rank in Facebook's algorithm.
- aswanson 8y agoZuckerberg is a smart guy and seems to care about policy. I wonder why he's so oblivious to the amount of harm he's causing.
- johnvega 8y agoHe's a smart guy when it comes to technology, but with respect to physiological, emotional human behavior related to habits and persuasion, he may have a mental blind-spot.
- Spooky23 8y agoWho is to say that Facebook isn’t part of the United States broad scope cyberwarfare effort? Given what the government needed to do in the early 2000s, and the runaway success in preventing large scale terror attacks, it seems unlikely that companies like Facebook would not be part of that.
- mc32 8y agoLet’s say they are, who do they answer to? Hillary and team think they contributed to her losing the election, FB, at least publicly seems to favor leftist/progressive ideas, so it’s not clear to me who they answer to, unless you’re suggesting some weird “deep state” conspiracy track.
- Spooky23 8y agoWho does any defense contractor answer to? Look at Tor. It was created for some military purpose. Who controls it? Nobody really, it’s out of control. It’s not about some conspiracy, it’s a power tool without adequate safety measures, in the control of people who don’t understand or care to understand the strategic impact on society.
- pjc50 8y ago> runaway success in preventing large scale terror attacks Bit of a tiger-repelling rock argument, this. How can we count how many incidents didn't happen? Or maybe the terrorist problem is extremely bad, but only within the Middle East? There has certainly been a problem of British jihadis joining factions in the Syria war.
- joe_the_user 8y agoThe eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives. It seems implausible to me that the American/British "power pole" is anything like disarmed in the face of sinister Eastern Psiwar. The US invented public relations and has a vast advertising industry. A wide variety of public companies and private consultants exist mobilizing all the tenants of psychology and sociology for the purposes of influencing the view of the masses. American democracy has served as an excellent laboratory. And that's not even mentioning US secret organizations, who engaging in coups utilizing psychological operations in numerous countries. Anyway, if Facebook can ignites all these powder-kegs, one might also ask where the powder came from. I'd say 30+ years of neoliberal policies have put a wide range of countries under considerable stress and second-string state authorities maintain themselves through inter-ethnic tension (ie, blame ethnicity X, not us). And Britain, colonizing half the world, is no stranger to divide and conquer, which one would usually classify in psychological strategies. One might say, things are coming apart now, not because of those Eastern Psiwarriors but because the psychological tactics of the center and periphery can no longer hold back the problems of material degradation.
- Waterluvian 8y agoI don't think "killing millions" is the point, nor a metric worth measure. You want to destabilize your enemy and civil war is like the ultimate form of that. On that spectrum, I believe, is also simply polarizing nations. Making a red and a blue and setting them against each other. I think the U.S. is a fascinating example of that, and it seems that Russia has done a pretty competent job fanning those flames.
- gaius 8y agoThe eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives Russia knows perfectly well that Western psyops cost them their empire, the old USSR. For them, this is a grudge match.
- Fins 8y agoRussia might believe that it was the evil Western psy-ops, but it doesn't make it so. After all, they believe in the Dulles' Plan, too.
- gaius 8y agobut it doesn't make it so That's neither here nor there, because they believe it and are acting according to that belief. All those decades the West was beaming its propaganda into their territory by the media of the time, now it's payback time.
- Fins 8y agoThere's a certain difference between acting upon rational and irrational beliefs. And all those decades, while Western broadcasts were being furiously jammed by the USSR, Soviets were broadcasting just as much on their own propaganda channels. Which weren't being jammed either.
- mrtksn 8y agoAn interesting thing about FB is that the messages between users and the stuff shared there does not have to be actually sent by the users and don't have to be displayed the way the users wanted. Facebook can curate those or manufacture them from thin air and this is not the case only because FB is not acting maliciously(As far as I know). If the US government wanted to utilize FB as a weapon, they can win a psychological warfare wherever FB is widely used because of the lack of post authenticity verification. Apparently, FB did successful experiments that altered the user's mood by the way their timeline is curated[0]. So, the FB can conduct covert operations to alter the psychological state of a nation. What's more, by looking at location info and communications on WhatsApp and Messenger and the psychological profiling FB can fabricate entirely fictional "snapshot" of the world. For example, FB can display gaslighting posts as if they are posted by the friends of the people while making sure that they don't directly communicate(post displayed from people that have not been contacted since a long time, when contacted on WhatsApp or Messenger reply with AI bot answers to confirm the post). I'm very sceptical that FB will remain a global social network without addressing the huge political risks. I think that politicians will find a way to get rid of FB and have a local social network that they can control, the same way as it is in China. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoWhat if they do it to themselves? Proscriptive societies don't value absolute freedom and setting them up with democratic institutions leads to the most odious demagogues coming to power.
- solotronics 8y agoYou are assuming Facebook wasn't designed to do exactly what it's doing now. Operating as data gathering for the panopticon and precise propoganda via social graph.
- hueving 8y ago> The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives. The existence and prevalence of Hollywood begs to differ. It is probably the most effective propaganda machine in the history of the world. It might not be an overt operation but US-made movies are certainly supported by the government and are given special access to military equipment if the story portrays them in the right light.