4 ms·

Using this rationale we are condeming ourselves to letting the worse parts of societies to use the propaganda machine -known as facebook- to influatiate people

Using this rationale we are condeming ourselves to letting the worse parts of societies to use the propaganda machine -known as facebook- to influatiate people in a scale never seen before, equaling freedom of speech with freedom of reach is taking this society off the rails by letting anyone with a big enough wallet influentiate a gigantic part of the population; even outright banning all political ads would be a better alternative.

SkyBelow 7y ago
The core question, and one that has existed long before Facebook even did, was how do we protect a population against propaganda. As psychology and marketing improve their ability to manipulate the mind, we have to get answer this or else democracies will fall into the hands of those who have control over these tools. This is a hard problem and I'm hesitant of any solution on the level of 'ban lies'.
- mattigames 7y ago
  With all its problems the solution of "ban lies" seems better than the current behavior: Meaning doing nothing at all.
thu2111 7y ago
You're talking about a social network that's in decline. Most users are moving to Instagram and WhatsApp which don't have any equivalent of politics on the news feed. The idea that people are reprogrammed on a mass scale by Facebook is itself a falsehood: I don't believe this effect exists, nor do I believe social scientists have any credibility, for good reasons. So can you convince me you didn't just spread a political falsehood? If I were the one making true/false decisions and you put something like what you just wrote in a political ad, I'd deem it misleading and punish you. See the problem now?
- mattigames 7y ago
  I can convince you in the same degree you are willing to understand any evidence I give, a similar challenge arises with anti-vaxxers, a group that few years ago was just a laughing stock but now thanks to the online fear propaganda through social media now has created some focus of kids without vaccines creating disease risks believed to be long gone, such risks of social network are measureable, but there are things that are practically harder to measure like if the "pedophile hillary pizza place" changed what people think about that political candidate; in general the way people are influenciated by propaganda is not immediate but take years to slowly aggregate with other falsehoods or uncorrelated facts in order to disrupt society. Of course I see the problem of trying to separate truth/false stuff and you can get all philosophical about it but at the end of the day just trying to remove the blatant lies like "Hillary is an alien" and "Vaccines cause autism" would give a better outcome than doing nothing at all that is what Facebook does right now about it. This guy can explain it better than I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
  - thu2111 7y ago
    I think anti-vaxxers and people who reject modern medicine in general predate Facebook. You know, Steve Jobs managed to get himself killed by trying to cure his cancer using homeopathic/spirit medicine and I don't think he was brainwashed by random people on his Facebook news feed. His fatal attraction to 'alternative medicine' can be traced back to his hippie roots travelling through India: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jobs-regretted-trying-to-beat-cancer-with-alternative-medicine-for-so-long.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-J... The MMR autism scare originates in the early 1990s so it predates widespread usage of the web, let alone social networks. Vaccines are an especially difficult case that are structurally guaranteed to produce something like the modern anti-vaxx movement, no help from Facebook needed. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. The logic goes like this: 1. Vaccines are complex and new, and involve injecting my kids with some kind of modified viruses. I heard from other parents that there might sometimes be side effects. 2. Medicines frequently have side effects so I can believe that. Even if it's very rare, side effects are bad. I don't want to take the risk of harming my kids. Keeping my kids safe is my number 1 priority as a parent. 3. But I could opt out. I'm allowed to, and I learned about herd immunity. If I quietly avoid vaccinating my kids I eliminate 100% of the risk because other parents are taking it for me. 4. Why would I not opt out? Even if I think the risk of taking a vaccine is only 0.1% that's still more than zero, and my child's welfare is the most important thing in my universe. If I gambled and lost I would never forgive myself. Opting out is the responsible thing to do. In other words being anti-vaxx only looks stupid from a society-wide level. From the perspective of a parent who doesn't care about wider social trends but only their own kids, opting out appears to make sense for as long as they believe herd immunity exists, and it doesn't matter how often you tell people there's no real risks: nobody sane believes experts are always right and it's hard for someone to know what the risk "really" is, they can only go on what they themselves have heard from various sources of differing reliability. The fix for tragic commons is usually a law and that'll be the fix here too. Facebook is really just irrelevant. Trying to suppress anti-vaxx speech will just make the problem worse because it looks like a coverup. Censorship is the last resort of people who lost an argument after all.

SkyBelow 7y ago

The core question, and one that has existed long before Facebook even did, was how do we protect a population against propaganda. As psychology and marketing improve their ability to manipulate the mind, we have to get answer this or else democracies will fall into the hands of those who have control over these tools. This is a hard problem and I'm hesitant of any solution on the level of 'ban lies'.

mattigames 7y ago
With all its problems the solution of "ban lies" seems better than the current behavior: Meaning doing nothing at all.

thu2111 7y ago

You're talking about a social network that's in decline. Most users are moving to Instagram and WhatsApp which don't have any equivalent of politics on the news feed. The idea that people are reprogrammed on a mass scale by Facebook is itself a falsehood: I don't believe this effect exists, nor do I believe social scientists have any credibility, for good reasons. So can you convince me you didn't just spread a political falsehood? If I were the one making true/false decisions and you put something like what you just wrote in a political ad, I'd deem it misleading and punish you. See the problem now?

mattigames 7y ago
I can convince you in the same degree you are willing to understand any evidence I give, a similar challenge arises with anti-vaxxers, a group that few years ago was just a laughing stock but now thanks to the online fear propaganda through social media now has created some focus of kids without vaccines creating disease risks believed to be long gone, such risks of social network are measureable, but there are things that are practically harder to measure like if the "pedophile hillary pizza place" changed what people think about that political candidate; in general the way people are influenciated by propaganda is not immediate but take years to slowly aggregate with other falsehoods or uncorrelated facts in order to disrupt society. Of course I see the problem of trying to separate truth/false stuff and you can get all philosophical about it but at the end of the day just trying to remove the blatant lies like "Hillary is an alien" and "Vaccines cause autism" would give a better outcome than doing nothing at all that is what Facebook does right now about it. This guy can explain it better than I do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM
- thu2111 7y ago
  I think anti-vaxxers and people who reject modern medicine in general predate Facebook. You know, Steve Jobs managed to get himself killed by trying to cure his cancer using homeopathic/spirit medicine and I don't think he was brainwashed by random people on his Facebook news feed. His fatal attraction to 'alternative medicine' can be traced back to his hippie roots travelling through India: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jobs-regretted-trying-to-beat-cancer-with-alternative-medicine-for-so-long.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-J... The MMR autism scare originates in the early 1990s so it predates widespread usage of the web, let alone social networks. Vaccines are an especially difficult case that are structurally guaranteed to produce something like the modern anti-vaxx movement, no help from Facebook needed. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. The logic goes like this: 1. Vaccines are complex and new, and involve injecting my kids with some kind of modified viruses. I heard from other parents that there might sometimes be side effects. 2. Medicines frequently have side effects so I can believe that. Even if it's very rare, side effects are bad. I don't want to take the risk of harming my kids. Keeping my kids safe is my number 1 priority as a parent. 3. But I could opt out. I'm allowed to, and I learned about herd immunity. If I quietly avoid vaccinating my kids I eliminate 100% of the risk because other parents are taking it for me. 4. Why would I not opt out? Even if I think the risk of taking a vaccine is only 0.1% that's still more than zero, and my child's welfare is the most important thing in my universe. If I gambled and lost I would never forgive myself. Opting out is the responsible thing to do. In other words being anti-vaxx only looks stupid from a society-wide level. From the perspective of a parent who doesn't care about wider social trends but only their own kids, opting out appears to make sense for as long as they believe herd immunity exists, and it doesn't matter how often you tell people there's no real risks: nobody sane believes experts are always right and it's hard for someone to know what the risk "really" is, they can only go on what they themselves have heard from various sources of differing reliability. The fix for tragic commons is usually a law and that'll be the fix here too. Facebook is really just irrelevant. Trying to suppress anti-vaxx speech will just make the problem worse because it looks like a coverup. Censorship is the last resort of people who lost an argument after all.