4 ms·

How did memes, misinformation, fake news and cyber bullying propagate before Facebook and other forms of social media? I know it happened but I don't remember

by mikece 6y ago

How did memes, misinformation, fake news and cyber bullying propagate before Facebook and other forms of social media? I know it happened but I don't remember it being such a high-profile issue.

jansan 6y ago
I existed in the early days of the internet, but it was more genuine and it wasn't used to manipulate people and there were no gatekeepers or editors who decided what informations is visible or hidden.
- oblio 6y ago
  That's so naive :-))) Check out all the censorship laws in the past and even present. Content ratings, censorship committees present even today in many countries, including democratic ones. Just for fun, check out how many pictures of Roosevelt showing him as a cripple you can find ;-)
- pjc50 6y ago
  Books were routinely banned in the UK until the 1960s; this basically ended with the Lady Chatterly trial at which the ridiculousness became apparent.
vxNsr 6y ago
email chains. Super long email chains that you had to scroll really far down to actually see the content
- mikece 6y ago
  I suppose newsgroups might have been a vector for that -- it's where we got the term "flame wars" though I think the popularity of those waned quite a bit by the late 90s.
ISL 6y ago
Once upon a time, it was called gossip.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  Gossip spread much slower.
  - mfer 6y ago
    Wasn't just gossip. It was propaganda, too. We are in the golden age of propaganda due to the pervasiveness or our communications technology and the alert/addictive nature of the communications technology.
  - brlewis 6y ago
    It probably spread at a similar rate relative to how fast truth spread at the time. Lots of old quotes about falsehood spreading faster than truth: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
0x445442 6y ago
Newsgroups, IRC, Email Lists, Blogs... The biggest change is the creation of the term cyber bullying. In the "old" days one just didn't pay attention to opinions they disagreed with. Now they seek government to impose draconian censorship on opinions they don't agree with.
- Raffers 6y ago
  When you have documented cases of, primarily teens. Taking their own lives due to these interactions. Then it becomes a bit more than "opinions they don't agree with" & crosses into full on harassment.
- darkcha0s 6y ago
  >In the "old" days one just didn't pay attention to opinions they disagreed with. Now they seek government to impose draconian censorship on opinions they don't agree with Excuse me for sounding daft, but I think the intensity with which you are confronted with these opinions has changed drastically. I think you're purposefully being a bit ignorant here; no one (viz: 'they') wants to cancel opinions they disagree with. However to think that false information has the same platform today that it had 50 years ago is also just plain wrong-- and whether you agree with it or not, it does shape the public discourse these days. Unless you want to erode discussions to a point where its a battle of who can fabricate the biggest claim (true or not), you're going to have to accept that in a modern information society we will eventually need some form of controls. Case in point: https://twitter.com/0x445442 https://twitter.com/0x445442 (Seems you have a problem with "Leftists" and like to retweet right wing tweets)
  - throwaway3699 6y ago
    Sorry, but posting this guy's Twitter doesn't prove anything. These are _opinions_ he's posting, and it's the responsibility of other people to decide if they care about these opinions or not. Back in the day, the internet just laughed at "stupid people". Now it tries to ruin their lives for daring to say something edgy. "Information controls" is one of the most horrific concepts I've ever heard of.
pizza234 6y ago
They did spread, but significantly slower and with less exposure - communication nowadays is fast and pervasive.
cecja 6y ago
The thing is before facebook, instagram and youtube communication was mostly text based. With the advancing broadband capabilities, smartphones and easier to use software our communication shitfted to a more picture based form of communication and as we all know... one picture says more than thousand words AND it transports hate easier.
chippy 6y ago
The assumption that memes, misinformation, fake news and cyber bullying are propagating at a higher rate than before and is a new problem could be reviewed. It's probably an extension of advertising, behaviour modification and outright propaganda (including agit-prop). Previously newspapers, magazines and televisions were used. Would Facebook etc be giving rise to a new phenomena or is it an existing one in new clothes? Hoaxes are a good subject to look at, like the dead alien hoax. How did a hoax spread before the Internet? Assuming new things are spreading, how can we make a vaccine to protect people against hoaxes and fake news but not against advertising, manipulation, behaviour modification and necessary government propaganda?
pjc50 6y ago
You'd enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... ; published in 1841, but covering events of previous centuries. It covers everything from stock bubbles to catchphrase memes that appeared in London and everyone was saying for a few months before they were forgotten.
rtkwe 6y ago
Forums, email chains, IRC, Usenet, etc. there's several things that make it more potent and spread faster now. For starters the internet is less balkanized, social media platforms are magnitudes larger than the largest forums ever were so an idea can just spread faster and further than before. Email chains could approximate the reach but other factors meant they were less potent and also I think people had fewer emails known in their address books than they generally have friends on social media though I don't have any numbers to back up that gut feeling. Although things are just randomly shared outside of social nets by social media algorithms so that would also help it jump outside of limited social groups too. Next the medium is just inherently more engaging now that photo and video are first class citizens on the major platforms, they're way more attention grabbing and engaging than a wall of text could hope to be. Also I think fundamentally there's an imbalance between how easy it is to lie and to debunk a lie and how much each of those will spread. A lie is exciting/angering and people will spread it much faster than the 800 word debunk that explains just how full of crap the lie was (and often how the person spreading it is using it as a trojan horse for other shittier ideas). "Everything you know about X is wrong" spreads faster than "No most of what you knew was basically right and here's the history of X," it's shocking and new vs familiar and old. Finally I think there's a fair amount of blame on the structure of *feeds and the algorithms that place things on them. It optimizes for salacious, shocking content that gets people to share it because that's what the algorithm selects for (roughly), things that keep users on the site so more ad impressions can be served. Add to that bad actors willing to lie and twist the truth to make money and a decade or so of Darwinian corporate evolution and you've got a pretty nasty combo.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  > also I think people had fewer emails known in their address books than they generally have friends on social media though I don't have any numbers to back up that gut feeling. This is the bottom line. Back in the day you'd join a forum over a particular topic or hobby. Everyone had screen names. Moderation was tight, if there was politics it was confined to a single area that was easily avoided. You only saw "links" to "topics" that included images, not images. Now with social media, people share images, memes, quotes, posts, etc. But while before that could be confined to one particular area and wasn't visible with fully anonymous screen names, now you see a real person that you know saying it, in your feed. It makes it feel more real. And get this - 50 people liked it and shared it themselves. Where Facebook's brilliance comes in - is that it gamed the process of popularity. Most want to have as many "friends" as possible at first, they see old people they knew and want to see what they're up to, want to be popular, etc. But they don't realize that they really just don't want to get to know that many people that well. Some people are insane, some are borderline white supremacists, some are borderline anarchists. Before you never saw that side of people often. Now it's right in your face. My advice? use social media for what it was originally designed for - staying in touch with friends you actually care about. Not politics. And mute/remove any friend who cares more about their agenda than seeing a good friend's cool vacation or neat artwork or cute newborn.

by mikece 6y ago

How did memes, misinformation, fake news and cyber bullying propagate before Facebook and other forms of social media? I know it happened but I don't remember it being such a high-profile issue.

jansan 6y ago

I existed in the early days of the internet, but it was more genuine and it wasn't used to manipulate people and there were no gatekeepers or editors who decided what informations is visible or hidden.

oblio 6y ago
That's so naive :-))) Check out all the censorship laws in the past and even present. Content ratings, censorship committees present even today in many countries, including democratic ones. Just for fun, check out how many pictures of Roosevelt showing him as a cripple you can find ;-)
pjc50 6y ago
Books were routinely banned in the UK until the 1960s; this basically ended with the Lady Chatterly trial at which the ridiculousness became apparent.

vxNsr 6y ago

email chains. Super long email chains that you had to scroll really far down to actually see the content

mikece 6y ago
I suppose newsgroups might have been a vector for that -- it's where we got the term "flame wars" though I think the popularity of those waned quite a bit by the late 90s.

ISL 6y ago

Once upon a time, it was called gossip.

selfhoster11 6y ago
Gossip spread much slower.
- mfer 6y ago
  Wasn't just gossip. It was propaganda, too. We are in the golden age of propaganda due to the pervasiveness or our communications technology and the alert/addictive nature of the communications technology.
- brlewis 6y ago
  It probably spread at a similar rate relative to how fast truth spread at the time. Lots of old quotes about falsehood spreading faster than truth: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/

0x445442 6y ago

Newsgroups, IRC, Email Lists, Blogs... The biggest change is the creation of the term cyber bullying. In the "old" days one just didn't pay attention to opinions they disagreed with. Now they seek government to impose draconian censorship on opinions they don't agree with.

Raffers 6y ago
When you have documented cases of, primarily teens. Taking their own lives due to these interactions. Then it becomes a bit more than "opinions they don't agree with" & crosses into full on harassment.
darkcha0s 6y ago
>In the "old" days one just didn't pay attention to opinions they disagreed with. Now they seek government to impose draconian censorship on opinions they don't agree with Excuse me for sounding daft, but I think the intensity with which you are confronted with these opinions has changed drastically. I think you're purposefully being a bit ignorant here; no one (viz: 'they') wants to cancel opinions they disagree with. However to think that false information has the same platform today that it had 50 years ago is also just plain wrong-- and whether you agree with it or not, it does shape the public discourse these days. Unless you want to erode discussions to a point where its a battle of who can fabricate the biggest claim (true or not), you're going to have to accept that in a modern information society we will eventually need some form of controls. Case in point: https://twitter.com/0x445442 https://twitter.com/0x445442 (Seems you have a problem with "Leftists" and like to retweet right wing tweets)
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  Sorry, but posting this guy's Twitter doesn't prove anything. These are _opinions_ he's posting, and it's the responsibility of other people to decide if they care about these opinions or not. Back in the day, the internet just laughed at "stupid people". Now it tries to ruin their lives for daring to say something edgy. "Information controls" is one of the most horrific concepts I've ever heard of.

pizza234 6y ago

They did spread, but significantly slower and with less exposure - communication nowadays is fast and pervasive.

cecja 6y ago

The thing is before facebook, instagram and youtube communication was mostly text based. With the advancing broadband capabilities, smartphones and easier to use software our communication shitfted to a more picture based form of communication and as we all know... one picture says more than thousand words AND it transports hate easier.

chippy 6y ago

The assumption that memes, misinformation, fake news and cyber bullying are propagating at a higher rate than before and is a new problem could be reviewed. It's probably an extension of advertising, behaviour modification and outright propaganda (including agit-prop). Previously newspapers, magazines and televisions were used. Would Facebook etc be giving rise to a new phenomena or is it an existing one in new clothes? Hoaxes are a good subject to look at, like the dead alien hoax. How did a hoax spread before the Internet? Assuming new things are spreading, how can we make a vaccine to protect people against hoaxes and fake news but not against advertising, manipulation, behaviour modification and necessary government propaganda?

pjc50 6y ago

You'd enjoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion... ; published in 1841, but covering events of previous centuries. It covers everything from stock bubbles to catchphrase memes that appeared in London and everyone was saying for a few months before they were forgotten.

rtkwe 6y ago

Forums, email chains, IRC, Usenet, etc. there's several things that make it more potent and spread faster now. For starters the internet is less balkanized, social media platforms are magnitudes larger than the largest forums ever were so an idea can just spread faster and further than before. Email chains could approximate the reach but other factors meant they were less potent and also I think people had fewer emails known in their address books than they generally have friends on social media though I don't have any numbers to back up that gut feeling. Although things are just randomly shared outside of social nets by social media algorithms so that would also help it jump outside of limited social groups too. Next the medium is just inherently more engaging now that photo and video are first class citizens on the major platforms, they're way more attention grabbing and engaging than a wall of text could hope to be. Also I think fundamentally there's an imbalance between how easy it is to lie and to debunk a lie and how much each of those will spread. A lie is exciting/angering and people will spread it much faster than the 800 word debunk that explains just how full of crap the lie was (and often how the person spreading it is using it as a trojan horse for other shittier ideas). "Everything you know about X is wrong" spreads faster than "No most of what you knew was basically right and here's the history of X," it's shocking and new vs familiar and old. Finally I think there's a fair amount of blame on the structure of *feeds and the algorithms that place things on them. It optimizes for salacious, shocking content that gets people to share it because that's what the algorithm selects for (roughly), things that keep users on the site so more ad impressions can be served. Add to that bad actors willing to lie and twist the truth to make money and a decade or so of Darwinian corporate evolution and you've got a pretty nasty combo.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
> also I think people had fewer emails known in their address books than they generally have friends on social media though I don't have any numbers to back up that gut feeling. This is the bottom line. Back in the day you'd join a forum over a particular topic or hobby. Everyone had screen names. Moderation was tight, if there was politics it was confined to a single area that was easily avoided. You only saw "links" to "topics" that included images, not images. Now with social media, people share images, memes, quotes, posts, etc. But while before that could be confined to one particular area and wasn't visible with fully anonymous screen names, now you see a real person that you know saying it, in your feed. It makes it feel more real. And get this - 50 people liked it and shared it themselves. Where Facebook's brilliance comes in - is that it gamed the process of popularity. Most want to have as many "friends" as possible at first, they see old people they knew and want to see what they're up to, want to be popular, etc. But they don't realize that they really just don't want to get to know that many people that well. Some people are insane, some are borderline white supremacists, some are borderline anarchists. Before you never saw that side of people often. Now it's right in your face. My advice? use social media for what it was originally designed for - staying in touch with friends you actually care about. Not politics. And mute/remove any friend who cares more about their agenda than seeing a good friend's cool vacation or neat artwork or cute newborn.