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Facebook is conspiring with The Man to ruin your life over thoughtcrimes, so you... use it to livestream yourself participating in an insurrection? What exactly

Facebook is conspiring with The Man to ruin your life over thoughtcrimes, so you... use it to livestream yourself participating in an insurrection? What exactly are people self-censoring, if not conspiracies to overthrow the United States? I thought this was a cool theory the first time I read it, but it's aged poorly. If anything we might have the opposite problem... social media freeing people from the norms of polite society, which turned out to be load-bearing.

mastazi 6y ago
Sure, but the remaining 99.9999% of people are not participating in an insurrection. Their data is being collected too.
- closeparen 6y ago
  Their data is being collected, but if not even the wackiest conspiracy theorists care to practice the slightest bit of OPSEC, do you think regular people are changing their behavior over it?
  - mastazi 6y ago
    No but that's precisely the thesis of OP. 20 years ago no one cared about global warming, just like not many care about data security right now. This is going to change in the future.
throwaway13337 6y ago
What's missed in that analysis is grouping. People are now more likely to be performative in a way that is encouraged by identity group. That would mean some people will say less and some will say more. Overall, though, you'll see more normalized groups wherein being different from that group has a higher cost. In this way, both the extremism and the self-censorship we see can be explained.
- closeparen 6y ago
  If I understand the thesis here, people are allegedly afraid of Facebook the corporation and whomever it might share data with, not the groups of like-minded people they intentionally communicate with.
AI_WAIFU 6y ago
This only applies to people smart enough to not storm the capital.
ben509 6y ago
> ... social media freeing people from the norms of polite society, which turned out to be load-bearing. I'm the first to acknowledge human nature has a dark side to it, but I think this phenomenon is heavily tech driven. These problems weren't so bad back when mailing lists and forums were the predominant modes of communication. We did still have issues back then, due to the flat-comment systems. In them, every man is an island, so you're routinely staking your reputation on everything you say, which is nuts. And commentary doesn't scale; comment sections are either dead, or overwhelmed. Once they're overwhelmed, people aren't getting their ideas noticed. We have a natural impulse to raise our voices to be heard, so we do that rhetorically. Social media makes it far, far worse, because beyond the problems of the flat-comment system, it has an incentives problem. They get paid for more user engagement. That leads them to prioritize content that drives user engagement, which means everyone is being rewarded for amping things up. And this is feedback loop is fully automated by AI.

mastazi 6y ago

Sure, but the remaining 99.9999% of people are not participating in an insurrection. Their data is being collected too.

closeparen 6y ago
Their data is being collected, but if not even the wackiest conspiracy theorists care to practice the slightest bit of OPSEC, do you think regular people are changing their behavior over it?
- mastazi 6y ago
  No but that's precisely the thesis of OP. 20 years ago no one cared about global warming, just like not many care about data security right now. This is going to change in the future.

throwaway13337 6y ago

What's missed in that analysis is grouping. People are now more likely to be performative in a way that is encouraged by identity group. That would mean some people will say less and some will say more. Overall, though, you'll see more normalized groups wherein being different from that group has a higher cost. In this way, both the extremism and the self-censorship we see can be explained.

closeparen 6y ago
If I understand the thesis here, people are allegedly afraid of Facebook the corporation and whomever it might share data with, not the groups of like-minded people they intentionally communicate with.

AI_WAIFU 6y ago

This only applies to people smart enough to not storm the capital.

ben509 6y ago

> ... social media freeing people from the norms of polite society, which turned out to be load-bearing. I'm the first to acknowledge human nature has a dark side to it, but I think this phenomenon is heavily tech driven. These problems weren't so bad back when mailing lists and forums were the predominant modes of communication. We did still have issues back then, due to the flat-comment systems. In them, every man is an island, so you're routinely staking your reputation on everything you say, which is nuts. And commentary doesn't scale; comment sections are either dead, or overwhelmed. Once they're overwhelmed, people aren't getting their ideas noticed. We have a natural impulse to raise our voices to be heard, so we do that rhetorically. Social media makes it far, far worse, because beyond the problems of the flat-comment system, it has an incentives problem. They get paid for more user engagement. That leads them to prioritize content that drives user engagement, which means everyone is being rewarded for amping things up. And this is feedback loop is fully automated by AI.