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Oh yes they do. And were very happy with it until they understood the nature of social media is not to connect people, but to socialize them into bubbles that b

Oh yes they do. And were very happy with it until they understood the nature of social media is not to connect people, but to socialize them into bubbles that become antagonists to each other. In corrupt places as well as democratic, peaceful places, it creates disruption and discontent through dissemination of (true - or false - doesn't matter) informations that in turn fuels civil unrest. In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement. In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening.

legulere 6y ago
So corrupt Myanmar became better through ethnic cleansing organized with the help of Facebook?
- Rmblnm4n 6y ago
  Why the pretense of nation states and corporations? Humans run these organizations and humans deflect responsibility for doing anything. Are you going around gathering a team to free kids in cages? Where is your group that is registering voters to save your democracy? What does Myanmar have to do with non-citizens? Why does the West think the world is their snow globe to ogle? I have a hard time feeling like this can approach anything resembling honest debate if we’re going to point at the behavior of ephemeral, external objects and ignore how we individually organize our daily life. You bow to the common time economy. Being good at rhetorical debate is, to me, nothing more than indifferent humans equivocating and deflecting with themes that sound good but mean nothing. Focus on your society and culture. More often value comes of it.
  - azangru 6y ago
    > Why does the West think the world is their snow globe to ogle? > I have a hard time feeling like this can approach anything resembling honest debate if we’re going to point at the behavior of ephemeral, external objects and ignore how we individually organize our daily life. How can these two sentences coexist in the same message? If you argue in favour of focusing exclusively on our personal daily lives rather than on amorphous imaginary entities (fine), then how can you write in an adjacent sentence about "the West", which "thinks"? And what's wrong with watching the world from afar, as if it were a snow globe, anyway?
  - legulere 6y ago
    Humans are often bound by the system around them. Meditations on Moloch is a great article about that (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...). So individuals often cannot do anything about it and the only way to solve problems is a change of systems. (This does not absolve one of their personal responsibility to act morally though) I’m not freeing kids from cages nor registering people to vote, I am not from the US and have never been there so that’s not the issues I have to tackle. Your point seems to be that we the west should let Myanmar deal with its own problems, when in fact we already play a role in it with having exported Facebook there. What I see in my society is how Facebook has fueled a resurgence of right wing extremism and led to a wider spread of conspiracy theories. I have deleted my Facebook account but do not see what I can do more than ask my government for better regulation of Facebook.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Juliate 6y ago
  An opportunity for improvement is not necessarily transforming into improvement. Can you read?
  - dang 6y ago
    Personal attacks will get you banned on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
tremon 6y ago
In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement. In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening. Rather, in all places it is an opportunity for change. It's just that the upwards potential is a lot bigger than downwards in corrupt places.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  > It's just that the upwards potential is a lot bigger than downwards in corrupt places. I suggest that the opportunity for downward is just as big as the opportunity for upward, if the Rohingya situation in Myanmar is anything to measure by.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    Yes and the full downwards potential is more like the holocaust I think or actually larger than that
- pydry 6y ago
  I was about to say, the unrest fomented in Syria didn't exactly lead to improvement.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  So social media creating artificial strife amongst people has been a good change? Yea, theres some good from social media, but it seems to constantly require "change". Even in perfectly peaceful circles of societies, its dividing people into radicalized factions all in the name of tribe identity. That and the increasing studies showcasing the detrimental mental health affects it has on people. It truly is becoming more of a burden as time goes on. It's not like social media is truly democratic. They're monarchies that give an illusion of public control.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
disown 6y ago
> In corrupt places as well as democratic, peaceful places As if "democratic" excludes the corrupt. Some of the most corrupt, destitute and backwards countries in the world are democratic. > In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement. In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening. Show me one non-corrupt place on earth. I'm in a mood for a good laugh.
- Juliate 6y ago
  Unless the people is willingly supporting corruption, a corrupt state cannot be democratic, by construction. You're just looking for a fight. Go for a fresh air walk outside instead.
  - mehrdada 6y ago
    Not the OP but this assertion is at very least a non-obvious as constructive proof requiring vast elaboration and at worst, obviously wrong on the surface with clear existential proof as mentioned by the OP [except for perhaps a idealized definition of the word "democracy" that does not resemble what you actually get on the ground when you implement it.]
  - disown 6y ago
    > Unless the people is willingly supporting corruption, a corrupt state cannot be democratic, by construction. There is nothing about democracy or its construction that precludes corruption. You literally just made up nonsense. > You're just looking for a fight. No. I believe you are projecting. > Go for a fresh air walk outside instead. Go read about the solomon islands. This issue is about corruption in solomon islands - a democracy. Or go crack open a book and learn about democracy and its history. Why everyone from the ancient greeks, who gave us democracy, and the founding fathers, who gave us modern democracy, all distrusted democracy. As a matter of fact, democracies are by nature corrupt ( tyranny of the majority ) and that's why most democracies have measures to product the citizens from democracy. Rather than regurgitating nonsense you've seen on tv or the news, learn about democracies or take a moment to think about it.
- hedora 6y ago
pjc50 6y ago
This is pretty much it. We saw from the Arab Spring that Twitter can start a revolution. Whether you need it or not, whether it improves matters or not. Everyone claims to be some sort of insurgent now. > true - or false - doesn't matter I happen to think this matters rather a lot, but not everybody agrees.
- Juliate 6y ago
  It does not matter in the sense that it does create fertile ground for disruption by enabling bubbles of people to form and ostracize each other. It does matter in the sense that what is built on lies, besides being immoral, is unproductive, as it will always come back to bite everyone.
threatofrain 6y ago
The whole world was a magnitude more in the bubble before social media. Many people live their whole lives in a small region.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  Yes, definitely valuable. On the other hand, people are demonstrably less generous in their assumptions about other people's motivations and more likely to objectify them in the classic sense if they have not and will almost certainly never encounter them in real life. Double edged sword to be sure. It's great that people get access to better information, but we need to evolve as a species in order to handle bubbles this big.
- TheMightyLlama 6y ago
  A much larger number of much smaller bubbles whose edges didn’t touch each other. Now we have a few large bubbles who insist that the smaller bubbles become part of them or else...
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    Yes, the Internet makes the antagonistic bubbles larger, and more angry?, I was just going to write
- kennywinker 6y ago
  I think you're missing something about the idea of a bubble. I live around people with many different beliefs, but I am fairly socially isolated from them, meanwhile my information diet consists of a fairly narrow set of ideas and viewpoints. The size of your bubble isn't directly determined by the number of people in it, it's the number of viewpoints, ideas, perspectives, life experiences, etc. you are exposed to.

legulere 6y ago

So corrupt Myanmar became better through ethnic cleansing organized with the help of Facebook?

Rmblnm4n 6y ago
Why the pretense of nation states and corporations? Humans run these organizations and humans deflect responsibility for doing anything. Are you going around gathering a team to free kids in cages? Where is your group that is registering voters to save your democracy? What does Myanmar have to do with non-citizens? Why does the West think the world is their snow globe to ogle? I have a hard time feeling like this can approach anything resembling honest debate if we’re going to point at the behavior of ephemeral, external objects and ignore how we individually organize our daily life. You bow to the common time economy. Being good at rhetorical debate is, to me, nothing more than indifferent humans equivocating and deflecting with themes that sound good but mean nothing. Focus on your society and culture. More often value comes of it.
- azangru 6y ago
  > Why does the West think the world is their snow globe to ogle? > I have a hard time feeling like this can approach anything resembling honest debate if we’re going to point at the behavior of ephemeral, external objects and ignore how we individually organize our daily life. How can these two sentences coexist in the same message? If you argue in favour of focusing exclusively on our personal daily lives rather than on amorphous imaginary entities (fine), then how can you write in an adjacent sentence about "the West", which "thinks"? And what's wrong with watching the world from afar, as if it were a snow globe, anyway?
- legulere 6y ago
  Humans are often bound by the system around them. Meditations on Moloch is a great article about that (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditations-on-moloch https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...). So individuals often cannot do anything about it and the only way to solve problems is a change of systems. (This does not absolve one of their personal responsibility to act morally though) I’m not freeing kids from cages nor registering people to vote, I am not from the US and have never been there so that’s not the issues I have to tackle. Your point seems to be that we the west should let Myanmar deal with its own problems, when in fact we already play a role in it with having exported Facebook there. What I see in my society is how Facebook has fueled a resurgence of right wing extremism and led to a wider spread of conspiracy theories. I have deleted my Facebook account but do not see what I can do more than ask my government for better regulation of Facebook.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Juliate 6y ago
An opportunity for improvement is not necessarily transforming into improvement. Can you read?
- dang 6y ago
  Personal attacks will get you banned on HN. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

tremon 6y ago

In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement. In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening. Rather, in all places it is an opportunity for change. It's just that the upwards potential is a lot bigger than downwards in corrupt places.

arcticbull 6y ago
> It's just that the upwards potential is a lot bigger than downwards in corrupt places. I suggest that the opportunity for downward is just as big as the opportunity for upward, if the Rohingya situation in Myanmar is anything to measure by.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Yes and the full downwards potential is more like the holocaust I think or actually larger than that
pydry 6y ago
I was about to say, the unrest fomented in Syria didn't exactly lead to improvement.
NoOneNew 6y ago
So social media creating artificial strife amongst people has been a good change? Yea, theres some good from social media, but it seems to constantly require "change". Even in perfectly peaceful circles of societies, its dividing people into radicalized factions all in the name of tribe identity. That and the increasing studies showcasing the detrimental mental health affects it has on people. It truly is becoming more of a burden as time goes on. It's not like social media is truly democratic. They're monarchies that give an illusion of public control.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

disown 6y ago

> In corrupt places as well as democratic, peaceful places As if "democratic" excludes the corrupt. Some of the most corrupt, destitute and backwards countries in the world are democratic. > In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement. In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening. Show me one non-corrupt place on earth. I'm in a mood for a good laugh.

Juliate 6y ago
Unless the people is willingly supporting corruption, a corrupt state cannot be democratic, by construction. You're just looking for a fight. Go for a fresh air walk outside instead.
- mehrdada 6y ago
  Not the OP but this assertion is at very least a non-obvious as constructive proof requiring vast elaboration and at worst, obviously wrong on the surface with clear existential proof as mentioned by the OP [except for perhaps a idealized definition of the word "democracy" that does not resemble what you actually get on the ground when you implement it.]
- disown 6y ago
  > Unless the people is willingly supporting corruption, a corrupt state cannot be democratic, by construction. There is nothing about democracy or its construction that precludes corruption. You literally just made up nonsense. > You're just looking for a fight. No. I believe you are projecting. > Go for a fresh air walk outside instead. Go read about the solomon islands. This issue is about corruption in solomon islands - a democracy. Or go crack open a book and learn about democracy and its history. Why everyone from the ancient greeks, who gave us democracy, and the founding fathers, who gave us modern democracy, all distrusted democracy. As a matter of fact, democracies are by nature corrupt ( tyranny of the majority ) and that's why most democracies have measures to product the citizens from democracy. Rather than regurgitating nonsense you've seen on tv or the news, learn about democracies or take a moment to think about it.
hedora 6y ago

pjc50 6y ago

This is pretty much it. We saw from the Arab Spring that Twitter can start a revolution. Whether you need it or not, whether it improves matters or not. Everyone claims to be some sort of insurgent now. > true - or false - doesn't matter I happen to think this matters rather a lot, but not everybody agrees.

Juliate 6y ago
It does not matter in the sense that it does create fertile ground for disruption by enabling bubbles of people to form and ostracize each other. It does matter in the sense that what is built on lies, besides being immoral, is unproductive, as it will always come back to bite everyone.

threatofrain 6y ago

The whole world was a magnitude more in the bubble before social media. Many people live their whole lives in a small region.

neltnerb 6y ago
Yes, definitely valuable. On the other hand, people are demonstrably less generous in their assumptions about other people's motivations and more likely to objectify them in the classic sense if they have not and will almost certainly never encounter them in real life. Double edged sword to be sure. It's great that people get access to better information, but we need to evolve as a species in order to handle bubbles this big.
TheMightyLlama 6y ago
A much larger number of much smaller bubbles whose edges didn’t touch each other. Now we have a few large bubbles who insist that the smaller bubbles become part of them or else...
- cutemonster 6y ago
  Yes, the Internet makes the antagonistic bubbles larger, and more angry?, I was just going to write
kennywinker 6y ago
I think you're missing something about the idea of a bubble. I live around people with many different beliefs, but I am fairly socially isolated from them, meanwhile my information diet consists of a fairly narrow set of ideas and viewpoints. The size of your bubble isn't directly determined by the number of people in it, it's the number of viewpoints, ideas, perspectives, life experiences, etc. you are exposed to.