4 ms·

Am I the only one who thinks that this is largely the fault of the social media giants?

arcticbull 6y ago
Yeah, this feels like the outcome of echo chambers. The whole idea of "repeating a lie often enough makes it true" is happening constantly on a personalized micro scale. In the past you had one nutter yelling on the street corner about the pedophiles in the pizza shops, and everyone kinda walked on by, thinking man, that guy's nutters. Now he's in your house, 6 hours a day. And eventually, you're like, man, those pizza shops, we've gotta do something about.
- jethro_tell 6y ago
  I just finished 'When Prophecy Fails' It's a study about what people do when they are presented with info that disproves their crazy ideas. It turns out, that when the end of the world doesn't come, if you're by yourself, and don't have any other true believers around to help you explain away the miss, then you usually become disillusioned and move away from whatever movement you're in. On the other hand, when true believers are around, the feedback loop helps soften the blow and find an excuse. It blocks out the doubt and you continue in your beliefs. The really shitty thing here is that with the internet, you never have to go through the disappointment of an obvious failed prophecy alone, you can reach out to 4 chan and explain away and justify and find support and reassurance that you weren't actually wrong, when the evidence right in front of your face is clearly saying you were wrong. This is contributing to a snowball effect where these movements are just connecting and growing and never suffer setbacks when the are obviously wrong. (i.e. pizza gate guy shooting into the closet.)
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Sounds like a good read, I'll check it out! Thanks!
bcrosby95 6y ago
In the current incarnation, sure. But the real "problem" is the internet where people with niche ideas can find like-minded people and let their ideas and followers grow from there. Sometimes the results are benign. Sometimes they aren't.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  It is however exacerbated by algorithms designed to feed you content they know you'll react to. It's no longer that the fringe conspiracies are there for you to go find, they're out there, finding you. This is a novelty in human history. Certainly at this scale. Unless you count the Missionaries, and I'd say that was altogether pretty successful.
- flukus 6y ago
  People could always find like minded people and communicate, it might have been less efficient but conspiracy groups have always magazines in news stands, published books in stores and libraries, international newsletters, less formal letter based communication and conventions. You were probably less likely to come across them because it took a little more effort and you were in a "mainstream bubble" (I don't mean that negatively) but they were always there. Saying it didn't exists before the internet is like saying dating didn't exists before it was online.
  - modriano 6y ago
    Speed, scale, accessibility, and the ability to target susceptible people without geographic proximity make it a novel problem. A person handling out pamphlets (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") can communicate with on the order of 10^1 people per day, and can persuade on the order of 10^1 people per year. The medium is sketchy, the messenger can't be abstracted from the message, one would have to be physically near the messenger, and the messenger would have to be actively trying to communicate with you when you came into proximity. A person posting links to a (fake news) site (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") via FB can reach on the order of 10^6 people in a day or two. And FB promotes that content to the people who are more susceptible. Ideas couldn't spread like this ever before.
anonuser123456 6y ago
Before social media, AM talk radio was the same cesspool, with the same content and a similarly sized audience. Facebook just makes it more visible to those that are rightfully disturbed by it.
modriano 6y ago
Yeah. Up until recently, the ability to immediately communicate information to hundreds of thousands of people at once was guarded. Editors economically metered inches of print, networks (the original 4) were ruthlessly inoffensive to avoid pushing people away, radio stations religiously avoided dead air, etc. To build a fringe movement in the past, one could reach up to dozens of people directly or through pamphlets. Using the model of viral spread, the viral load from a pamphlet or from a conspiracy theorist's mouth was too low to infect most people, so the conspiracy would fizzle. If enough susceptible people were blasted with a high enough load of false information, those people could become infected and start spreading the false information themselves, triggering exponential spread, but in the past there weren't good ways to identify susceptible people. Modern platforms, optimizing for engagement/watch time, leveraged the immense amount of data they generate from user behavior to identify clusters of user behavior patterns, predict the cluster a user is most similar to, and feed that user content that activates other users in that cluster. In short, modern platforms make it far easier to both find people susceptible to a false narrative (or ensemble of false narratives), and to spread the false narrative. Humanity has never faced this phenomena until recently, where anyone can infect hundreds of millions of people with false ideas like "the earth is flat", or "a deadly virus, and strategies to prevent it's spread, should be ignored", or "democracy is a lie and it is not a mechanism for peacefully removing people from power". If we don't demand a solution, we're going to continue to see massive death and destruction from uninformed or even perverse response to disease, climate change, and a myriad of other issues.
Fricken 6y ago
People have been believing wildly untrue things since before the dawn of civilization.

Yeah, this feels like the outcome of echo chambers. The whole idea of "repeating a lie often enough makes it true" is happening constantly on a personalized micro scale. In the past you had one nutter yelling on the street corner about the pedophiles in the pizza shops, and everyone kinda walked on by, thinking man, that guy's nutters. Now he's in your house, 6 hours a day. And eventually, you're like, man, those pizza shops, we've gotta do something about.

jethro_tell 6y ago
I just finished 'When Prophecy Fails' It's a study about what people do when they are presented with info that disproves their crazy ideas. It turns out, that when the end of the world doesn't come, if you're by yourself, and don't have any other true believers around to help you explain away the miss, then you usually become disillusioned and move away from whatever movement you're in. On the other hand, when true believers are around, the feedback loop helps soften the blow and find an excuse. It blocks out the doubt and you continue in your beliefs. The really shitty thing here is that with the internet, you never have to go through the disappointment of an obvious failed prophecy alone, you can reach out to 4 chan and explain away and justify and find support and reassurance that you weren't actually wrong, when the evidence right in front of your face is clearly saying you were wrong. This is contributing to a snowball effect where these movements are just connecting and growing and never suffer setbacks when the are obviously wrong. (i.e. pizza gate guy shooting into the closet.)
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Sounds like a good read, I'll check it out! Thanks!

bcrosby95 6y ago

In the current incarnation, sure. But the real "problem" is the internet where people with niche ideas can find like-minded people and let their ideas and followers grow from there. Sometimes the results are benign. Sometimes they aren't.

arcticbull 6y ago
It is however exacerbated by algorithms designed to feed you content they know you'll react to. It's no longer that the fringe conspiracies are there for you to go find, they're out there, finding you. This is a novelty in human history. Certainly at this scale. Unless you count the Missionaries, and I'd say that was altogether pretty successful.
flukus 6y ago
People could always find like minded people and communicate, it might have been less efficient but conspiracy groups have always magazines in news stands, published books in stores and libraries, international newsletters, less formal letter based communication and conventions. You were probably less likely to come across them because it took a little more effort and you were in a "mainstream bubble" (I don't mean that negatively) but they were always there. Saying it didn't exists before the internet is like saying dating didn't exists before it was online.
- modriano 6y ago
  Speed, scale, accessibility, and the ability to target susceptible people without geographic proximity make it a novel problem. A person handling out pamphlets (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") can communicate with on the order of 10^1 people per day, and can persuade on the order of 10^1 people per year. The medium is sketchy, the messenger can't be abstracted from the message, one would have to be physically near the messenger, and the messenger would have to be actively trying to communicate with you when you came into proximity. A person posting links to a (fake news) site (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") via FB can reach on the order of 10^6 people in a day or two. And FB promotes that content to the people who are more susceptible. Ideas couldn't spread like this ever before.

anonuser123456 6y ago

Before social media, AM talk radio was the same cesspool, with the same content and a similarly sized audience. Facebook just makes it more visible to those that are rightfully disturbed by it.

modriano 6y ago

Yeah. Up until recently, the ability to immediately communicate information to hundreds of thousands of people at once was guarded. Editors economically metered inches of print, networks (the original 4) were ruthlessly inoffensive to avoid pushing people away, radio stations religiously avoided dead air, etc. To build a fringe movement in the past, one could reach up to dozens of people directly or through pamphlets. Using the model of viral spread, the viral load from a pamphlet or from a conspiracy theorist's mouth was too low to infect most people, so the conspiracy would fizzle. If enough susceptible people were blasted with a high enough load of false information, those people could become infected and start spreading the false information themselves, triggering exponential spread, but in the past there weren't good ways to identify susceptible people. Modern platforms, optimizing for engagement/watch time, leveraged the immense amount of data they generate from user behavior to identify clusters of user behavior patterns, predict the cluster a user is most similar to, and feed that user content that activates other users in that cluster. In short, modern platforms make it far easier to both find people susceptible to a false narrative (or ensemble of false narratives), and to spread the false narrative. Humanity has never faced this phenomena until recently, where anyone can infect hundreds of millions of people with false ideas like "the earth is flat", or "a deadly virus, and strategies to prevent it's spread, should be ignored", or "democracy is a lie and it is not a mechanism for peacefully removing people from power". If we don't demand a solution, we're going to continue to see massive death and destruction from uninformed or even perverse response to disease, climate change, and a myriad of other issues.

Fricken 6y ago

People have been believing wildly untrue things since before the dawn of civilization.