6 ms·

I always find it disheartening that people see the propagation of 'bad' information on social-media networks as a bigger risk to society than said networks beco

by ajxs 6y ago

I always find it disheartening that people see the propagation of 'bad' information on social-media networks as a bigger risk to society than said networks becoming the gatekeepers of all propagated information. The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency. When we're confronted with an actually Orwellian phenomena people seem to either not notice or not care. It's not as though the viral propagation of false, misleading and harmful information began with social media, or even with the internet. This phenomena was alive and well long before modern technology, which has surprisingly done very little to change it. I'm genuinely shocked how little backlash there's been against big-tech censorship. I grew up as a liberal in the 90s and early 00s. Freedom of speech and fostering an environment for information to propagate freely were ideals held sacred. It's been sincerely disappointing to see how many of my fellow so-called-liberals are willing to accept huge multinational corporations (of all things) censoring information "For their own good".

dragontamer 6y ago
My mom believes that Obama is a Muslim, and my sister believes Breonna Taylor was a criminal who got what she deserved. The disinformation in our social networks is beyond a breaking point. Its incredibly difficult to have a reasonable discussion when alternative facts exist... I dare say impossible. ----- What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here? While my mother is over the age of 60, I don't believe her to be stupid. My sister is literally going for her PH.D (and is an accomplished Masters with multiple years of experience in the CDC tracking stuff down), she's certainly not stupid. Its an issue of disinformation, not stupidity, that's leading people down the wrong path. There's an entire network of corrupted information that's building up alternative facts. ------- > The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency. We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war akin to "Ender's Game". Peter vs Valentine Wiggin (or better known by their online personas: Locke and Demosthenes). Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain. At first it was just ads, but now it includes a suite of alternative facts for political purposes.
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Breonna was a criminal you dumb nigger. There’s no fixing you. You need to be killed.
- throwawayay02 6y ago
  > What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here? It is disinformation how much disinformation there is. You'd like to believe that people believe everything they read on Facebook, while the truth is people don't care. People don't care about a lot of things and will repeat memes and jokes. We all "believe" things that are more or less false just because we don't care about them. Your relatives believe in things you may think are false but to them is just rubbish tidbits of information that do not affect them. Obama being Muslim or not has no effect on her life, why must we enforce that people now must be informed of the "right beliefs to have"? Who picks what things are important as well? Just stop. The sad thing is you as a human will not recognize in yourself how much your "knowledge" is faulty as well.
  - dragontamer 6y ago
    > It is disinformation how much disinformation there is. You'd like to believe that people believe everything they read on Facebook, while the truth is people don't care. I don't have Facebook. I discussed things with my mother and sister personally. Our relationship is closer than just online crap. We actually talk together on a regular basis. > Obama being Muslim or not has no effect on her life This belief of my mother has an effect on our political discussion. In particular, she doesn't want to vote for a Muslim. It sets the stage for the rest of the discussion to come. Where do I start? Do I start with Muslims aren't bad people? Do I attempt to prove Obama is a Christian? Etc. etc. These facts and beliefs lay the groundwork to the very discussion. And I have to take it seriously if I so wish to have an intelligent discussion with my family. > Just stop. The sad thing is you as a human will not recognize in yourself how much your "knowledge" is faulty as well. I know that Obama is a Christian, and that Breonna Taylor was innocent. I don't expect to know the truth to everything, but I'll start with the facts I know about and work my way up. ----------- I don't believe myself to be the "defender of truth" or whatever. I can point out to my mom and my sister that I disagree with their "alternative facts", but I'm not so arrogant to believe that I can change their opinion on just discussion alone. But when I see such obvious untruths seep into their talking points, it does make me weep inside on behalf of the truth.
tshaddox 6y ago
> I always find it disheartening that people see the propagation of 'bad' information on social-media networks as a bigger risk to society than said networks becoming the gatekeepers of all propagated information. Who thinks this? Are you just assuming that anyone who approves of social media networks removing disinformation also thinks that is a bigger problem than the social media networks being powerful gatekeepers?
- ajxs 6y ago
  The two beliefs are mutually exclusive. If you support social-networks removing what they decide is 'disinformation' by implication you think this is the bigger risk. This is the mechanism by which they become the gatekeepers of information.
  - tshaddox 6y ago
    Not at all mutually exclusive. Whether Facebook removes disinformation does not affect how much power Facebook has to distribute information.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      > Not at all mutually exclusive. Whether Facebook removes disinformation does not affect how much power Facebook has to distribute information. While not mutually exclusive, it is clear that the importance of Facebook removing disinformation is linked proportionally to the power Facebook has to distribute information. The less power Facebook has, the less important it becomes that they, in particular, remove disinformation. The more power Facebook has, the more they become a disinformation SPOF.
      - tshaddox 6y ago
        > it is clear that the importance of Facebook removing disinformation is linked proportionally to the power Facebook has to distribute information Yes, but not proportionally to the power Facebook should have to distribute information.
dunnevens 6y ago
My teen years were the second half of the 80s. Like a lot of kids my age, I’d sometimes seek out weird stuff outside of the pre-internet mainstream. One of my favorite books from back then was “High Weirdness by Mail”. Which was a very funny tongue-in-cheek catalog of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, cults, etc. I won’t detail all the weird stuff I got in the mail, but it suffices to say that most of it was roughly on the same level as Q. But the key difference between now and then was: I had to seek this crap. Someone had to put together their zine or cassette or, very rarely, their full color glossy magazine. All at their own expense and then send it off to me. Ordinary people would never see this stuff. The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff. And this material was too labor intensive & expensive to distribute widely without the mainstream. So it’s obviously very different now. People like my mom would have never sent a dollar to a post office box in Idaho to get a newsletter about how Ronald Reagan was a microchip controlled antichrist. But these days I frequently have to alleviate her fear from some conspiracy crap that popped up on her timeline unsolicited. Or to tell my aunt that there’s absolutely no evidence Biden is receiving antifa messages from a hidden earpiece. I don’t know what the answer is. But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new. Having something like Q approach mainstream status is new. At least for Americans in the past 50 years. It’s a potentially very dangerous situation. Maybe one day, a vast majority of the population will discount what they read online without corroborating evidence, but we’re not there yet.
- free_rms 6y ago
  So, what, we're gonna decide what's "suitable" for normal people to see? Half of mainstream society, respectable people with respectable jobs, just spent 4 years engaged in a conspiracy theory about Russians and Cambridge Analytica which has quietly fallen apart into "nevermind, we just biffed the election is all". But if one had said that in, say, 2017, they'd be accused of being a Russian bot. Bias passes everywhere.
  - lern_too_spel 6y ago
    The Russians engaged in a campaign to disrupt the US elections. That is not in dispute. They were effective in this by hacking the DNC and Podesta and by using thousands of troll accounts to pretend there was anything scandalous in that data. Cambridge Analytica had negligible role in affecting the election. That was just a privacy scandal for Facebook.
friendlybus 6y ago
I also grew up in a liberal society and what made liberalism so valuable was that institutions were locked into a narrow and boring path. It's becoming more clear that general humanity has less and less interesting things to say and is clamouring for power via outrage. I'm all for maintaining the vital ability to sort signal from noise outside of class and cash mechanisms. There's got to be some signal left to find though. Straight commercial censorship is predictable and fightable. The coming danger is thought control from religious people who think their interpretation of what-not-to-do is more important than your liberalism.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Propaganda and censorship are attributes of the same underlying aspect: monopoly. Centralised control. Both problems have the same effective solution: break up the monopolies. Propaganda is a function of amplification, attention, audience, selective promotion, discovery, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and coöption of the platform. Propaganda is an inherent property of centralised control. Gatekeeping and censorship are functions of excludability, audience gating, distraction, negative selection (obfuscation), stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and, again, coöption of the platform. Censorship is an inherent property of centralised control. Audiences, a public, divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to either propaganda or censorship. Or of surveillance, whether of the state, capitalist, or non-state-actor varieties, which is also an inherent property of centralised control. It's importance to realise that the key is not nominal control but actual control, which may be nonobvious or unapparent to many participants. A system with appearances of decentralisation may well be centralised under the surface.
Barrin92 6y ago
>actually Orwellian phenomena This isn't an Orwellian phenomenon. This is just the typical bad reading of Orwell that Americans have tried to squeeze out of the book because of their free speech fetish. The central key issue of the book isn't a big scary guy with a mustache stealing your newspaper, it's reality inversion, it's the inability of everyone in society to distinguish between what is real and what is fiction, which is the basis for, not the consequence of totalitarianism. It's the moment when someone blatantly tells a lie, and everyone eats it up, when the world starts to feel unreal and like a bad movie. The real Orwellian phenomenon is not some kind of scary gatekeeper separating truth from fiction, which is actually a productive use of authority and necessary in any civilisation that doesn't want to turn into a clowncar. What's Orwellian is people going to Facebook, reading blatant lies and untruths, and being unable to distinguish that from what is real. And that is actually caused by the disappearance of gatekeepers, who play a vital role in maintaining liberal institutions.
- npunt 6y ago
  Yeah freedom in America tends to favor 'freedom to' rather than 'freedom from'. Cutting these disinformation sources off gives us freedom from some amount of manipulation. Meanwhile, if we're more concerned with the freedom to say anything anywhere, whatever limits imposed will be perceived by default in a negative light. There's merit in examining from both perspectives for any given issue. However, if our objective is a better signal-to-noise ratio of truth in the context of slamming every human's stray thoughts, emotions, and urges into each other in realtime, the 'freedom from' perspective is probably a better approach right now.
  - sthnblllII 6y ago
    So you just want the thoughts emotions and urges of a tiny number of news editors slammed into my mind in real time. Ever wonder how the US was mobilized to war in 2003? Ever wonder why nothing happened to stop mass surveillance after the Snowden leaks despite massive public outrage? You make me sick.
  - sthnblllII 6y ago
    From your most recent blog: > any individual's reputation, perspectives, and history are difficult to ascertain, and therefore their words must be taken at face value. Coupled with an almost complete lack of standards for participation in the community Let me translate that out of new-speak: "On the internet no one cares about my credentials (or is afraid of my power) so I must defend my positions on their own merits which I can't do, so we should ban people from the internet who express opinions I don't like." Would Hitler disagree?

by ajxs 6y ago

dragontamer 6y ago

My mom believes that Obama is a Muslim, and my sister believes Breonna Taylor was a criminal who got what she deserved. The disinformation in our social networks is beyond a breaking point. Its incredibly difficult to have a reasonable discussion when alternative facts exist... I dare say impossible. ----- What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here? While my mother is over the age of 60, I don't believe her to be stupid. My sister is literally going for her PH.D (and is an accomplished Masters with multiple years of experience in the CDC tracking stuff down), she's certainly not stupid. Its an issue of disinformation, not stupidity, that's leading people down the wrong path. There's an entire network of corrupted information that's building up alternative facts. ------- > The term 'Orwellian' has become so overused that it seems to have lost all currency. We're not in an Orwellian fantasy, we're in an all-out information-war akin to "Ender's Game". Peter vs Valentine Wiggin (or better known by their online personas: Locke and Demosthenes). Several groups have learned how to weaponize information for their own gain. At first it was just ads, but now it includes a suite of alternative facts for political purposes.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Breonna was a criminal you dumb nigger. There’s no fixing you. You need to be killed.
throwawayay02 6y ago
> What is your plan to deal with the disinformation here? It is disinformation how much disinformation there is. You'd like to believe that people believe everything they read on Facebook, while the truth is people don't care. People don't care about a lot of things and will repeat memes and jokes. We all "believe" things that are more or less false just because we don't care about them. Your relatives believe in things you may think are false but to them is just rubbish tidbits of information that do not affect them. Obama being Muslim or not has no effect on her life, why must we enforce that people now must be informed of the "right beliefs to have"? Who picks what things are important as well? Just stop. The sad thing is you as a human will not recognize in yourself how much your "knowledge" is faulty as well.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > It is disinformation how much disinformation there is. You'd like to believe that people believe everything they read on Facebook, while the truth is people don't care. I don't have Facebook. I discussed things with my mother and sister personally. Our relationship is closer than just online crap. We actually talk together on a regular basis. > Obama being Muslim or not has no effect on her life This belief of my mother has an effect on our political discussion. In particular, she doesn't want to vote for a Muslim. It sets the stage for the rest of the discussion to come. Where do I start? Do I start with Muslims aren't bad people? Do I attempt to prove Obama is a Christian? Etc. etc. These facts and beliefs lay the groundwork to the very discussion. And I have to take it seriously if I so wish to have an intelligent discussion with my family. > Just stop. The sad thing is you as a human will not recognize in yourself how much your "knowledge" is faulty as well. I know that Obama is a Christian, and that Breonna Taylor was innocent. I don't expect to know the truth to everything, but I'll start with the facts I know about and work my way up. ----------- I don't believe myself to be the "defender of truth" or whatever. I can point out to my mom and my sister that I disagree with their "alternative facts", but I'm not so arrogant to believe that I can change their opinion on just discussion alone. But when I see such obvious untruths seep into their talking points, it does make me weep inside on behalf of the truth.

tshaddox 6y ago

> I always find it disheartening that people see the propagation of 'bad' information on social-media networks as a bigger risk to society than said networks becoming the gatekeepers of all propagated information. Who thinks this? Are you just assuming that anyone who approves of social media networks removing disinformation also thinks that is a bigger problem than the social media networks being powerful gatekeepers?

ajxs 6y ago
The two beliefs are mutually exclusive. If you support social-networks removing what they decide is 'disinformation' by implication you think this is the bigger risk. This is the mechanism by which they become the gatekeepers of information.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Not at all mutually exclusive. Whether Facebook removes disinformation does not affect how much power Facebook has to distribute information.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    > Not at all mutually exclusive. Whether Facebook removes disinformation does not affect how much power Facebook has to distribute information. While not mutually exclusive, it is clear that the importance of Facebook removing disinformation is linked proportionally to the power Facebook has to distribute information. The less power Facebook has, the less important it becomes that they, in particular, remove disinformation. The more power Facebook has, the more they become a disinformation SPOF.
    - tshaddox 6y ago
      > it is clear that the importance of Facebook removing disinformation is linked proportionally to the power Facebook has to distribute information Yes, but not proportionally to the power Facebook should have to distribute information.

dunnevens 6y ago

My teen years were the second half of the 80s. Like a lot of kids my age, I’d sometimes seek out weird stuff outside of the pre-internet mainstream. One of my favorite books from back then was “High Weirdness by Mail”. Which was a very funny tongue-in-cheek catalog of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, cults, etc. I won’t detail all the weird stuff I got in the mail, but it suffices to say that most of it was roughly on the same level as Q. But the key difference between now and then was: I had to seek this crap. Someone had to put together their zine or cassette or, very rarely, their full color glossy magazine. All at their own expense and then send it off to me. Ordinary people would never see this stuff. The mainstream culture was often bland but it was successful at gate keeping this kind of stuff. And this material was too labor intensive & expensive to distribute widely without the mainstream. So it’s obviously very different now. People like my mom would have never sent a dollar to a post office box in Idaho to get a newsletter about how Ronald Reagan was a microchip controlled antichrist. But these days I frequently have to alleviate her fear from some conspiracy crap that popped up on her timeline unsolicited. Or to tell my aunt that there’s absolutely no evidence Biden is receiving antifa messages from a hidden earpiece. I don’t know what the answer is. But the situation of widely broadcast misinformation utterly divorced from reality is relatively new. Having something like Q approach mainstream status is new. At least for Americans in the past 50 years. It’s a potentially very dangerous situation. Maybe one day, a vast majority of the population will discount what they read online without corroborating evidence, but we’re not there yet.

free_rms 6y ago
So, what, we're gonna decide what's "suitable" for normal people to see? Half of mainstream society, respectable people with respectable jobs, just spent 4 years engaged in a conspiracy theory about Russians and Cambridge Analytica which has quietly fallen apart into "nevermind, we just biffed the election is all". But if one had said that in, say, 2017, they'd be accused of being a Russian bot. Bias passes everywhere.
- lern_too_spel 6y ago
  The Russians engaged in a campaign to disrupt the US elections. That is not in dispute. They were effective in this by hacking the DNC and Podesta and by using thousands of troll accounts to pretend there was anything scandalous in that data. Cambridge Analytica had negligible role in affecting the election. That was just a privacy scandal for Facebook.

friendlybus 6y ago

I also grew up in a liberal society and what made liberalism so valuable was that institutions were locked into a narrow and boring path. It's becoming more clear that general humanity has less and less interesting things to say and is clamouring for power via outrage. I'm all for maintaining the vital ability to sort signal from noise outside of class and cash mechanisms. There's got to be some signal left to find though. Straight commercial censorship is predictable and fightable. The coming danger is thought control from religious people who think their interpretation of what-not-to-do is more important than your liberalism.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Propaganda and censorship are attributes of the same underlying aspect: monopoly. Centralised control. Both problems have the same effective solution: break up the monopolies. Propaganda is a function of amplification, attention, audience, selective promotion, discovery, stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and coöption of the platform. Propaganda is an inherent property of centralised control. Gatekeeping and censorship are functions of excludability, audience gating, distraction, negative selection (obfuscation), stealing the air supply or acquiring of any competion, and, again, coöption of the platform. Censorship is an inherent property of centralised control. Audiences, a public, divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to either propaganda or censorship. Or of surveillance, whether of the state, capitalist, or non-state-actor varieties, which is also an inherent property of centralised control. It's importance to realise that the key is not nominal control but actual control, which may be nonobvious or unapparent to many participants. A system with appearances of decentralisation may well be centralised under the surface.

Barrin92 6y ago

>actually Orwellian phenomena This isn't an Orwellian phenomenon. This is just the typical bad reading of Orwell that Americans have tried to squeeze out of the book because of their free speech fetish. The central key issue of the book isn't a big scary guy with a mustache stealing your newspaper, it's reality inversion, it's the inability of everyone in society to distinguish between what is real and what is fiction, which is the basis for, not the consequence of totalitarianism. It's the moment when someone blatantly tells a lie, and everyone eats it up, when the world starts to feel unreal and like a bad movie. The real Orwellian phenomenon is not some kind of scary gatekeeper separating truth from fiction, which is actually a productive use of authority and necessary in any civilisation that doesn't want to turn into a clowncar. What's Orwellian is people going to Facebook, reading blatant lies and untruths, and being unable to distinguish that from what is real. And that is actually caused by the disappearance of gatekeepers, who play a vital role in maintaining liberal institutions.

npunt 6y ago
Yeah freedom in America tends to favor 'freedom to' rather than 'freedom from'. Cutting these disinformation sources off gives us freedom from some amount of manipulation. Meanwhile, if we're more concerned with the freedom to say anything anywhere, whatever limits imposed will be perceived by default in a negative light. There's merit in examining from both perspectives for any given issue. However, if our objective is a better signal-to-noise ratio of truth in the context of slamming every human's stray thoughts, emotions, and urges into each other in realtime, the 'freedom from' perspective is probably a better approach right now.
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  So you just want the thoughts emotions and urges of a tiny number of news editors slammed into my mind in real time. Ever wonder how the US was mobilized to war in 2003? Ever wonder why nothing happened to stop mass surveillance after the Snowden leaks despite massive public outrage? You make me sick.
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  From your most recent blog: > any individual's reputation, perspectives, and history are difficult to ascertain, and therefore their words must be taken at face value. Coupled with an almost complete lack of standards for participation in the community Let me translate that out of new-speak: "On the internet no one cares about my credentials (or is afraid of my power) so I must defend my positions on their own merits which I can't do, so we should ban people from the internet who express opinions I don't like." Would Hitler disagree?