4 ms·

> 10 short years ago, huge swaths of the population were swayed to accept non-scientific statements like eating fat and cholesterol were unhealthy. I don't thin

by creato 6y ago

> 10 short years ago, huge swaths of the population were swayed to accept non-scientific statements like eating fat and cholesterol were unhealthy. I don't think Facebook is the problem here. That's a horrible example, I don't think that is even remotely comparable to swaying the population into burning down dozens (hundreds?) of cell towers or accusing Bill Gates of starting the coronavirus pandemic.

2019-nCoV 6y ago
Yes, the misleading dietary advice was objectively worse. How many needless deaths lost to the likes of diabetes and heart disease. The ramifications of the replication crisis (of which social media censorship also runs afoul) run much deeper.
- creato 6y ago
  I think you are knowingly missing the point. Nutritional experts disagreed among themselves, and probably still do. Is there even a single 5G engineer that will take up the cause of 5G causing coronavirus? How about an immunologist that will claim Bill Gates is trying to inject people with microchips delivered in vaccines?
  - 2019-nCoV 6y ago
    Which is why it's a non-sequitur. Any well-adjusted adult with a modicum of common sense can see through such claims. Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after. Removing such content just validates it in their minds — it must be true that's why "the corporations" insist on covering it up! Most of the west has learnt that we should not penalise drug addicts. We treat the underlying problems that brought about their habitual use. The need to self-medicate disappears. Like the war on drugs failed, so too shall the war on misinformation. The solution is tending for the human condition that leads one to not only believe, but want to believe, in these fantasies.
    - square_usual 6y ago
      > Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after The problem is that Facebook's algorithms are directly helping those cults grow by polarising people, as stated in the linked article: > Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.” I'm sure we can all agree that you can't end all cults, but surely actively encouraging their growth is a bad idea.
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      > Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after. Similarly, rats and mold flourished long before we started keeping open trash bags in the kitchen. It's pretty clear that FB is an incredibly fertile breeding ground for such ideas, and that is on them. Not on the ideas.
    - TomSwirly 6y ago
      Hundreds of thousands of people are still in jail for drugs in the United States! Neither presidential candidate is for legalization of cannabis alone, and there is no talk of legalizing anything else. I hope one day the war on drugs will end - but sadly it is still alive and well in the United States and all over the world. As for the war on misinformation, we have lost continuously on this one for years in a row, and there's no evidence at all we're succeeding.
rndgermandude 6y ago
Would literal witchhunts be a better example? Or hunting "communists"? Or Young Earth creationsim? The "idea" that your skintone and level of intelligence are "biologically" linked? Or Jet fuel cannot melt steal beams and 9/11 was an inside job? And don't even get me started about that fake moon landing... Oh no... I can hear an airplane, here come the chemtrails.
disgruntledphd2 6y ago
So, pretty much every new medium in history has been accused of formenting conspiracies at one point or the other. The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least). Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to go along with it. The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea. As an example, right now you are promoting a narrative on an internet site holding FB responsible for the behaviour of others. Do your readers have so little agency that they will mindlessly act on your words without reflection? If so, what differentiates your post from a similar post on FB? If not, what makes FB different? These are genuine questions by the way, I'm actually interested in your answers.
- TomSwirly 6y ago
  I'm probably older than the average YCer. I don't idealize the past at all. Too many bad things to write. However, the internet amped up the level of overall craziness to an unprecedented level. Even the first twenty years, it was much like the regular world, but geekier. But then in a fairly short time all these crazy ideas just started to spread in an incredibly tiny period of time. I have always been a student of the paranormal and conspiracy theories - as a skeptic. Suddenly random people were spouting all the obscure classics, and brand-new ones appeared every day. Last year, before COVID, I decided that this was akin to an infectious disease - suddenly people were thrown in with hundreds of thousands of anonymous people, many with bad but infectious ideas. Before the internet, you acquired most of your delusional ideas at birth from your parents under the guise of religion etc. Now you could pick up delusional ideas one at a time - more, the presentation gets to evolve because the creators get second-to-second feedback. Call these Vemes for virulent memes perhaps? Some once-friends of mine clearly have very poor immune systems as they picked up many vemes. > The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea. 1. Infectious diseases don't work that way! 2. Also, a lot of this is caused by a small number of actual psychopaths who literally just want to cause grief. Allowing a tiny group of people to damage the whole is wrong. --- Trying to assign agency to the crowd is madness and not backed up by observations of humanity en masse or reading a history book. In such a mob scene, crazies, aggressive people and criminals will always win.
monadic2 6y ago
Honestly far more violent and highly accepted behaviors are pushed through media outlets as sane opinions every day, like military intervention or straight up misinformation campaigns (see: the OAS, who for some reason never evaluates the election health of rich northern american countries, who should logically have released some statement about facebook right now, let alone all the primary voting discrepancies). Hell the NyTimes alone had enough fuckups in the 00s alone they should be on the shortlist for fact checking suspicion. If facebook is wading into being a truth-teller, they’re going to run straight into government-media-academia social circles a la Pinker, Chomsky, all the punditry on TV, all the punditry in opinion columns (claims still need fact checking even if the result is an opinion). Then, how do you deal with framing the presentation of verifiable facts with extremely ominous and sinister tone/hinting? You can do an enormous amount of damage just making untestable, unverifiable implications. IMHO facebook is gonna get squeezed till they pop over this, either by blatantly having political double standards or by becoming a misinformation-based hellhole. The accessibility of Truth is much harder than people realize, and I don’t even think it’s fair to off load this responsibility onto facebook. People are just strangely ok with believing bullshit.

by creato 6y ago

2019-nCoV 6y ago

Yes, the misleading dietary advice was objectively worse. How many needless deaths lost to the likes of diabetes and heart disease. The ramifications of the replication crisis (of which social media censorship also runs afoul) run much deeper.

creato 6y ago
I think you are knowingly missing the point. Nutritional experts disagreed among themselves, and probably still do. Is there even a single 5G engineer that will take up the cause of 5G causing coronavirus? How about an immunologist that will claim Bill Gates is trying to inject people with microchips delivered in vaccines?
- 2019-nCoV 6y ago
  Which is why it's a non-sequitur. Any well-adjusted adult with a modicum of common sense can see through such claims. Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after. Removing such content just validates it in their minds — it must be true that's why "the corporations" insist on covering it up! Most of the west has learnt that we should not penalise drug addicts. We treat the underlying problems that brought about their habitual use. The need to self-medicate disappears. Like the war on drugs failed, so too shall the war on misinformation. The solution is tending for the human condition that leads one to not only believe, but want to believe, in these fantasies.
  - square_usual 6y ago
    > Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after The problem is that Facebook's algorithms are directly helping those cults grow by polarising people, as stated in the linked article: > Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.” I'm sure we can all agree that you can't end all cults, but surely actively encouraging their growth is a bad idea.
  - tripzilch 6y ago
    > Cults and conspiracies flourished long before FB's existence, as they will after. Similarly, rats and mold flourished long before we started keeping open trash bags in the kitchen. It's pretty clear that FB is an incredibly fertile breeding ground for such ideas, and that is on them. Not on the ideas.
  - TomSwirly 6y ago
    Hundreds of thousands of people are still in jail for drugs in the United States! Neither presidential candidate is for legalization of cannabis alone, and there is no talk of legalizing anything else. I hope one day the war on drugs will end - but sadly it is still alive and well in the United States and all over the world. As for the war on misinformation, we have lost continuously on this one for years in a row, and there's no evidence at all we're succeeding.

rndgermandude 6y ago

Would literal witchhunts be a better example? Or hunting "communists"? Or Young Earth creationsim? The "idea" that your skintone and level of intelligence are "biologically" linked? Or Jet fuel cannot melt steal beams and 9/11 was an inside job? And don't even get me started about that fake moon landing... Oh no... I can hear an airplane, here come the chemtrails.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago

So, pretty much every new medium in history has been accused of formenting conspiracies at one point or the other. The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least). Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to go along with it. The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea. As an example, right now you are promoting a narrative on an internet site holding FB responsible for the behaviour of others. Do your readers have so little agency that they will mindlessly act on your words without reflection? If so, what differentiates your post from a similar post on FB? If not, what makes FB different? These are genuine questions by the way, I'm actually interested in your answers.

TomSwirly 6y ago
I'm probably older than the average YCer. I don't idealize the past at all. Too many bad things to write. However, the internet amped up the level of overall craziness to an unprecedented level. Even the first twenty years, it was much like the regular world, but geekier. But then in a fairly short time all these crazy ideas just started to spread in an incredibly tiny period of time. I have always been a student of the paranormal and conspiracy theories - as a skeptic. Suddenly random people were spouting all the obscure classics, and brand-new ones appeared every day. Last year, before COVID, I decided that this was akin to an infectious disease - suddenly people were thrown in with hundreds of thousands of anonymous people, many with bad but infectious ideas. Before the internet, you acquired most of your delusional ideas at birth from your parents under the guise of religion etc. Now you could pick up delusional ideas one at a time - more, the presentation gets to evolve because the creators get second-to-second feedback. Call these Vemes for virulent memes perhaps? Some once-friends of mine clearly have very poor immune systems as they picked up many vemes. > The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea. 1. Infectious diseases don't work that way! 2. Also, a lot of this is caused by a small number of actual psychopaths who literally just want to cause grief. Allowing a tiny group of people to damage the whole is wrong. --- Trying to assign agency to the crowd is madness and not backed up by observations of humanity en masse or reading a history book. In such a mob scene, crazies, aggressive people and criminals will always win.

monadic2 6y ago

Honestly far more violent and highly accepted behaviors are pushed through media outlets as sane opinions every day, like military intervention or straight up misinformation campaigns (see: the OAS, who for some reason never evaluates the election health of rich northern american countries, who should logically have released some statement about facebook right now, let alone all the primary voting discrepancies). Hell the NyTimes alone had enough fuckups in the 00s alone they should be on the shortlist for fact checking suspicion. If facebook is wading into being a truth-teller, they’re going to run straight into government-media-academia social circles a la Pinker, Chomsky, all the punditry on TV, all the punditry in opinion columns (claims still need fact checking even if the result is an opinion). Then, how do you deal with framing the presentation of verifiable facts with extremely ominous and sinister tone/hinting? You can do an enormous amount of damage just making untestable, unverifiable implications. IMHO facebook is gonna get squeezed till they pop over this, either by blatantly having political double standards or by becoming a misinformation-based hellhole. The accessibility of Truth is much harder than people realize, and I don’t even think it’s fair to off load this responsibility onto facebook. People are just strangely ok with believing bullshit.