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Social media is broken – a new report offers ways to fix it
- arkitaip 5y agoLink to report: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/65717082/the-smsmit-report https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/65717082/the-smsmit-r...
- tobr 5y agoReal PDF rather than crummy web viewer: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/download/65717082/a63ac-8cbbd-088e7-a8ff9-2d35b-32c02-c6593-70450 https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/download/65717082/a63ac-8c...
- venamresm__ 5y agoI love it, it's very good. It touches a lot of things I went through when writing this book: https://venam.nixers.net/blog/internet_communication_narrative_control_booklet.pdf https://venam.nixers.net/blog/internet_communication_narrati... I think people agree on a lot of the dynamics in this space and what needs to be done.
- megabless123 5y agoWonderful idea in spirit, albeit nearly every proposal runs counter to the social media company's profit incentive.
- lanevorockz 5y agoThe first note they provide is just about Burning Galileo at the stake. This strategy does not work and the only correct way is to inform the public. Education is the ONLY solution and this indoctrination path will only result in war.
- bopbeepboop 5y agoParticularly because the censors are shown to lie for their benefit: - covering up lab leak for Fauci - dismissing Ivermectin for partisan reasons - hiding the antisemitism and general violence of BLM - hiding that BLM is a Marxist organization - covering for Cuomo and Whitmer killing the elderly with disastrous policies - lying about CRT, which people are rightly opposing as modern racism - dismissing any concern about electronic voting as irrational, amid the two largest cyberattacks in US history (SolarWinds + MS Exchange) Etc. Their whole system is already based on lies — something foreign powers have been able to utilize in PSYOPs by, eg, highlighting attacks on Jewish neighborhoods during the riots. Lying to the public makes a weak country.
- ta8645 5y agoYou're 100% correct and the people down voting should think about what happens if they lose control of the censors and censorship starts being run by right-wing zealots instead of the far left.
- fatsdomino001 5y agoSad seeing the parent comment getting flagged. Censorship by flagging a very real problem on HN, but from what I can tell its mainly the users abusing it not the mod team who are generally well-balanced.
- bopbeepboop 5y agoI’m actually shadowbanned, so all my comments are automatically flagged. My opinions are an “inherent flame war”, according to HN mods — even when I state them calmly and carefully cite sources. It’s not that individuals on HN believe this individual comment is bad — the leadership of HN is trying to silence my views to shape the community’s thoughts. I continue to post anyway, to slowly spread awareness of how HN uses shadowbans to suppress “wrongthink”.
- ta8645 5y agoYeah, I don't think of a fair moderation system as censorship. Groups of people should have the freedom to keep a discussion focused on whatever they desire. Still, it's disappointing just how easy it is for us to be completely blind to things that go against our own preferences, even when they're blindingly obvious to others.
- tzs 5y agoGenerally, producing true and accurate information takes more effort than producing misinformation, and on the consumption side understanding a refutation of something generally takes more time than understanding the original thing. This leads to an inherent advantage for the producers of misinformation. You approach worked say 50 years ago, when most of us had limited sources of information and so had time to actually see and understand the refutations of most attempts at misinformation. Nowadays, we've almost all got more sources of information competing for our attention than we have time to deal with. It is much less likely we'll see the answers to the misinformation, or have time to deal with them. Furthermore, with what we see algorithmically determined to maximize engagement, we are probably going to be shown more misinformation from the same or related sources instead of the refutation.
- uniqueid 5y agoI agree we need more education if people think Galileo was burnt at the stake.
- perihelions 5y agoIndeed! That was a different Italian heliocentrist, Giordano Bruno. (He has an excellent statue in Rome on the Campo de Fiori, un-subtly facing the Vatican). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
- dionian 5y agoAh yes we need to “rescue truth” by “policing content”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- darthrupert 5y agoYes, we really do. Western ideals of information freedom are all good but they are incompatible with modern cyber warfare methods.
- ergot_vacation 5y agoThe solution to misinformation from without cannot be the tyrannical coercion toward state-sponsored misinformation from within. Free speech and a free society have always been vulnerable and difficult because bad people can come in and say bad things to stupid people and make bad things happen. This is not a new problem. But throwing out that freedom is not a solution. You will not like the results.
- darthrupert 5y agoYou really need to propose solutions, not just say that the obvious option is not going to work. Free speech has never been as vulnerable as it is now. This is a new situation that absolutely requires for new solutions.
- dane-pgp 5y ago> You really need to propose solutions No, you're the one suggesting we abandon "Western ideals of information freedom", so you need to propose what ideals we should have instead, and what practical changes those new ideals will lead to.
- darthrupert 5y agono u
- yawnxyz 5y agoNone of these solutions offer any advice on the business model, which means they're dead on arrival. For a new social media to be "fixed", the company behind it needs to have the incentives and business model to steer towards more healthy behavior. None of these cover that. We've had plenty of social media startups try to fix social, like Path, but ultimately they've failed bc a "fixed social media model" almost seems antithetical to "a good business." I'm all for Pinterest and I think it's relatively healthier than the rest, but they barely have a functional business...
- acidburnNSA 5y agoMaybe a foundation could fund a nonprofit to do it better? I'd trust that more. Signal would be a good example in messenging space.
- agustif 5y agoI was thinking about this the other day, a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it sounds like a plausible way to make this... dApps still on it's infancy, but it might come... Not sure if anyone will use it though, like the rest of the blockchains, lol
- partomniscient 5y ago>a decentralized social network where it's own users govern and moderate it sounds like a plausible way to make this... That's what the entire internet was like in its early days.
- agustif 5y agoI actually think the future of the internet might look like this but with micro-payment-transactions enabled by blockchain everywhere... Ads killed the web
- abecedarius 5y agoThe big potential difference is that the early decentralized systems like Usenet and Relay treated costs and spam and paying their developers as out-of-band concerns. Whatever else you think of the newer stuff around blockchains, etc., it changes the game in just this way. If you want an online world not under the thumbs of Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc., you need a thesis about how the same takeover won't happen.
- AbrahamParangi 5y agoI think it is probably not possible to have both “true information” and “control of information” simultaneously. I suspect that this is a false choice, akin to “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”. If we may observe history, we see that societies where one is not free to speak do not have more “true beliefs”, and indeed believe many things we think of as nuts.
- tzs 5y agoHistory trivia: the "essential Liberty" Franklin was talking about was not any personal or individual liberty. It was the liberty of the government to tax property. The "purchase" he was talking about was literally buying things with money. The Pennsylvania Assembly wanted to raise money to defend the frontier during the French and Indian war by taxing land. The Governor kept vetoing this at the behest of the Penn family, which owned a lot of land that would be hit by any such tax, each time finding some objection that Franklin and the Assembly found made little sense. Franklin wrote to the governor arguing that the Assembly should not have to give up its liberty to exercise taxing power over the Penn family lands in order to raise money for defense.
- AbrahamParangi 5y agoYes, the common usage of the quote is more lyrical than Franklin's usage. I didn't quote him specifically because it's sort of a misquote used in his sense.
- shadowgovt 5y agoWithout the appeal to authority of citing Franklin though, it's not a quote that holds as much water when inspected on its own merits. Trading liberty for safety is the crux of social contract theory, so the absolutist interpretation of the quote is clearly devoid of worth. We can instead focus on "essential" and "temporary," and then perhaps it has value but we must then argue about the meaning of those words. ... Is the freedom to shout falsehoods with Facebook's megaphone without Facebook weighing in "essential?" How "temporary" is the safety we gain from Facebook tossing fact-checks on posts?
- jot 5y agoThe "25 ways" were buried in a linked PDF (https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/65717082/the-smsmit-report https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/65717082/the-smsmit-r...). Here they are: 1) Hold platforms accountable for designs that amplify lies. 2) Focus on and shut down prolific disinformation networks. 3) Use content interventions to nudge people toward awareness of falsity and accuracy. 4) Use accuracy nudges to crowdsource falsity labels so that algorithms can be trained to automatically identify lies. 5) Give researchers access to more data, using technologies such as differential privacy and institutional mechanisms, like data safe harbors. 6) Offer platforms incentives, like legal immunity, to share more data with researchers. 7) Create independent panels to oversee research funding by platforms. 8) Require robust legislative remedies to anticompetitive platform practices. 9) Create collaborative global institutions where discussions about governance can take place.FTC or FCC—to vet compliance with guidelines. 10) Establish independent U.S. statutory bodies—not the FTC or FCC—to vet compliance with guidelines. 11) Offer platforms ‘earned immunity’ from civil liability, e.g. under Section 230, if they comply with content moderation regulations. 12) Break up big companies, starting with Facebook. 13) Legislate interoperability as well as social network and data portability. 14) Emulate EU proposals for stricter anti-competitive penalties to deter corporate misbehavior. 15) Create programmability with the major platforms to encourage innovation. 16) Diversify the engineering core to include social scientists, cognitive scientists, and people trained in different types of histories. 17) Create ethics certification programs and degrees for AI designers. 18) Embrace friction to reduce the automatic nature of information diffusion and interactions with AI. 19) Regulate platforms for product safety; hold designers and companies accountable for the products they design and deploy. 20) Develop new business models including subscription and freemium models. 21) Tie consequences of legal violations directly to corporate executives, not just their companies. 22) Strengthen regulations by adding taxes, such as programmatic media taxes, to deter algorithmic amplification. 23) Ensure that users consent to data use; protect data privacy. 24) Distinguish between speech and reach--the right to speech and the right to amplification of that speech. 25) Limit corporate lobbying; enforce stricter campaign finance rules.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y agoWhat do they define as lie and disinformation? And how is this mechanism going to remain impartial if it's going to be enforced by the government?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y agoVery low on details and high on platitudes you read on various blogs. Since it is relatively high level, the only one I can kinda agree with is regulation. Right now it is still a wild west company town.
- CraigJPerry 5y agoUsed to always think just shining a big light was all that was needed to overcome falsehoods and manipulation but turns out that’s not true. How naïve of me. Turns out various philosophers realised this hundreds of years ago. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, i can finally say I’ve found my people now, @thebirdsarentreal :-) (its a satirical take on belief systems that vehemently denies it’s satirical which is just chef’s kiss)
- nabla9 5y agoThe reflexive satire and irony is one of the problems of social-media age. Satire and irony used to be effective. In last 20-years cynical distance and ironic posturing have become so prevalent that it is no no longer considered subversive. Citizens can consume outrage passively through various satirical media products, displacing outrage and abstaining from more active forms of resistance. People consume satirical content, and think they are above it all, while just participating in cynical ha-ha.
- mediocregopher 5y agoWay back in the stumbleupon days I stumbled onto the flat earth society message boards. It was clear to me that everyone involved knew it was satire; just a tongue-in-cheek dig at the way any conspiracy theory, no matter how outrageous, could be made plausible if you throw enough crazy at it. Fast forward 10+ years and people actually believe it. Someone recently launched themselves in a homemade rocket to prove with their own eyes the flatness of the earth (and died for their efforts). I love birdsarentreal, but part of me isn't looking forward to finding out what happens to it as more people come across it.
- nvllsvm 5y agoExactly why I dislike some forms of sarcasm directed at an unknown audience.
- b3morales 5y agoIndeed; Umberto Eco dramatized this phenomenon in Foucault's Pendulum (even before the related Poe's Law was formulated). > People [...] sense instinctively that the [...] truths [...] don’t go together, that [the promoter is] not being logical, that [they're] not speaking in good faith. But they’ve been told that God is mysterious, unfathomable, so to them incoherence is the closest thing to God. This tangles up with the appeal of being an "initiate", "on the inside", and knowing the secret truth, and the combination is powerful.
- acidburnNSA 5y agoGetting both more regulation and more competition usually is a tough ask. Complying with complex regulations often makes it harder to enter a space.
- moomin 5y agoI think it’s important to acknowledge that a) you’re absolutely right and government contracts are a brilliant extreme example of this but also b) regulations are precisely the things that allow markets to exist at scale. We often talk about regulations in terms of volume, but the actual details matter.
- ericls 5y agoHere’s an easy one: just remove all numbers from social media.
- testplzignore 5y agoYup. When Facebook originally added likes and promoted posts based on metrics, that's when I feel things fell apart.
- ajmurmann 5y agoEven if you don't show the numbers, won't more controversial content still be promoted more because the company behind the network still knows the numbers and wants to increase engagement because they need to sell advertisements?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- newsclues 5y agoCharge money to join. Keep the riff raff out and have users real identities linked to payments. I’d rejoin Twitter if it cost $5-10 per year
- phone8675309 5y ago> have users real identities linked to payments I will never use a social media platform that requires me to link my IRL identity. It's DoA for me.
- mordymoop 5y agoFacebook is hardly DOA.
- phone8675309 5y agoI don't use Facebook. Edited the GP to clarify that any platform that requires tying my IRL ID to it is DoA for me.
- newsclues 5y agoJust because it’s doa for you, doesn’t mean others will feel the same.
- fumblebee 5y agoSo, a social media site for the 0.1% of people in the world who'd be willing to pay for it. Count me out. Twitter isn't Twitter without the wide range of people it attracts, for better or worse.
- tomjen3 5y agoThat would make it a ghost town. Social media requires that the people you are interested in are there for it to have any value. Not enough of my friends are going to be willing to join facebook for >0 usd, which means I wouldn't be willing to join it either. Twitter can maybe be saved here, but they would a lot smaller. Sadly 10 usd/year isn't enough to keep out the riff raff, in fact it would probably entice people to see it as an investment meaning we would get ever more crap from influencers, "thought" leaders, etc.
- glafa 5y agomy criticism on some of the potential solutions addressed in the article (number = number in the article): 1. stop the spread of fake new: This has already been happening, most of big offenders are gone (e.g Alex Jones) but what should be noted is that this can (and has) lead to backlash. The fake news ive seen always comes from tiny accounts that have unexpectedly viral content usually taken and reworded from banned sources (Alex Jones et al), I don't think cracking down on the most prolific offenders will necessarily be the fix. The actual report is way clearer and thorough on this then the article. 3. Lack of regulation for social media companies: I feel like if their is global regulation (which there should be) many countries will just ban it (e.g China, Turkey and Russia) and still lead to the same balkanization. 5. polarizing Algorithms: I don't think slowing online interactions will solve this. If someone wants to be racist they will be racist. I think this will just bring annoyance. 6. better social media business models: they say that they worry that "the best, fact-checked information is available only behind a paywall" but that is already the case! I recommend people go to the actual report, the 25 solutions is on page 16
- jayspell 5y ago“There’s always been this division between your right to speak and your right to have a megaphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people,” - that is the argument totalitarians always use. It's the same as you have the right to free speech, but not the right to print it, or you can print it, but you can't distribute it on the street corner, or talk about it in an assembly of over a certain number of people. In every instance it's about whomever has control attempting to limit the expression of an idea that they happen not to agree with. Totalitarians will always use an example of where speech somehow created harm to exhibit the need for control, the truth is that freedom does cause harm, and will always cause harm, because you cannot eliminate harm completely no matter the system. We have plenty of historical examples of the attempts to eliminate harm causing exactly the opposite.
- enraged_camel 5y ago>> It's the same as you have the right to free speech, but not the right to print it, or you can print it, but you can't distribute it on the street corner, or talk about it in an assembly of over a certain number of people. No printing press is obligated to mass-print a book you write. Similarly, you cannot go to a corporation's campus and distribute stuff unless you have their permission — because it is their private property. Just because private parties are refusing to give you a platform does not mean they are totalitarians. >> Totalitarians will always use an example of where speech somehow created harm to exhibit the need for control, the truth is that freedom does cause harm, and will always cause harm, because you cannot eliminate harm completely no matter the system. This is a strawman in the shape of an Argument from Futility. It's no different than saying "why have safety systems in cars when you cannot eliminate car accident deaths completely?" It's a strawman because nobody is aiming to completely eliminate harm from online speech, just prevent it in egregious situations where it can be prevented. It's an argument from futility because harm reduction is still a valid goal even if complete elimination of harm is not possible or feasible.
- gizmondo 5y ago> No printing press is obligated to mass-print a book you write. This is off-topic, I feel. The article illustrates that there is a push to stop "printing press" from printing "your book" in cases when it's perfectly happy to do that. In the name of fighting misinformation, of course.
- helsinkiandrew 5y agoOne big problem that the report doesn't (I think) cover is that the current social media venues encourage competition - it's not a discussion and understanding amongst friends or family (or god forbid strangers), it's a competition for likes, follows, and reposts. Even HN suffers from this - but far less than other places. Poor replies to popular comments will receive more views, there are few detailed conversations, just people sharing their view and leaving, opinions from often very knowledgeable people can get lost in hundreds/thousands of other comments.
- diego 5y agoIt's broken from the point of view of the article writers. It's working just fine from the point of view of the companies operating it.
- ergot_vacation 5y agoBingo. Water flows downhill, systems tend toward entropy, and businesses do whatever makes the most money. If those actions (like child labor) are unacceptable to society, laws have to be made to restrain them, or they will keep happening. In general this reads like a sickening melange of half-true diagnoses (yes, of course lack of competition is a problem) and naive appeals to the nanny state that don't understand what they're inviting. To whit: "Renée Diresta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said policy should also differentiate between free speech and free reach. The right to free speech doesn’t extend to a right to have that speech amplified by algorithms." Yes citizen, you can say whatever you want. You just have to say it in this sealed, soundproof room with no windows! This is almost literally the author saying "You have the right to speak, you just don't have the right for anyone to hear you", which is nonsensical. Free speech is meaningless if you can't actually reach anyone with it. The right to yell your deepest beliefs in the middle of the Sahara desert isn't free speech. But of course, this ability to silence "misinformation" is fine, because it will only be used against the bad people! Surely it will never be used to silence people like the author, because they're good and right! Never mind that this is already happening (Youtube is famous for silencing certain LGBT and sex-positive figures, as well as any number of left-wing activists, for example).
- eric4smith 5y agoUmmm Social media behavior and design is driven by the users in no small fashion. The big companies merely amplify the dominant behaviors. Remember the Instagram, Facebook and Twitter linear timelines??? Yeah. I thought you did. The companies merely made it more attractive by amping up what’s most popular or what we like. Social media cannot be fixed by big tech. It takes users to fix it. It’s just a mirror for our basest instincts.
- high_byte 5y agoI'm surprised the none of the things I want are mentioned. here's (some) of my ideas: 1. know who you talk to if you want to stay anonymous, use an anonymous platform. HOWEVER, that guy you entered a twitter shitstorm with? might as well be some 12 year old, broken english, russian troll. that chick who messaged you? 56 year old chinese gypsy. 2. mark content type sarcasm is (imo) very important. but in the wrong context, lack of context, it can be horribly confused. 3. exact timestamp I don't want to see a post is from "few months ago" (hidden, in a small text similar to the background color). I want posts to be color coded by age & type. 4. exact definitions my language isn't the same as your language. even if we both speak English, there are different meanings to different cultures, regions, etc. if something is ambiguous or unknown, I'd like to get a dictionary definition as reference. 5. I don't care about likes. or views. I want to see views/likes ratio. if a post has 1000 likes is it good? maybe, unless it has 1m impressions. or it's exceptional if it has 2000 impressions. that's a far better measure for quality and there's more if I just keep thinking about it. probably a lot more
- smegcicle 5y ago1: i can't imagine anyone trying harder at this than facebook is? 2: marking content as sarcasm completely undermines it's impact. 'sarcasm tags' are unutilized due to lack of purpose, not lack of visibility. how does facebook's 'react emoji' functionality not cover this usecase better? 3: you don't want the human-readable age, you want the exact absolute date, but also the age, which you want to be exposed as color..? absolute date is generally easily grabbed with js, but hidden to reduce clutter. 4: a product to put cross-culture communication up front would be an interesting prospect, but i've not seen anything like that, and i'd expect a full team, many revisions, and a patient and involved community to get functionality and ui approaching helpful... 5: you don't want the exact views and like, you want a human-readable measure for quality that you just came up with and can easily do in your head? (vs how you feel about predigested data re #3)
- jasfi 5y agoThere is no lack of competition, but due to the network effect (and probably other things), the largest social networks aren't going anywhere.
- sys_64738 5y agoStudies say social media makes people unhappy. Isn't the cure to make us happy pretty simple?
- trompetenaccoun 5y agoThere are also studies that say reading the news makes people unhappy. It's not hard to imagine why that is. I think most of us agree that social media as it is, is broken. But internet forums and social media can also be a massively powerful tool for the people to connect and share information from a grassroots level. Just like journalism has become compromised, so has social media. The solution isn't to abolish both, instead we need to find ways to strengthen their integrity and make them independent of partisan corporate or political interests. https://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/ https://time.com/5125894/is-reading-news-bad-for-you/
- gpsx 5y agoThere is so much emphasis on fake news but I think any story can be shaped by _which_ facts are discussed. Face it, you can't put a complete nuanced view in the sound bite world of social media. At the same time, I think people enjoy being outraged. You get an actual physical energy burst, and you can think how superior you are to the misguided idiots you are talking about. I don't think social media is tricking us into this behavior, it is just helping us do it better. It would be good if we could figure out how to discourage the behavior in the first place.
- blooalien 5y agoFunny thing is … Hacker News discussions and a certain subset of channels on Telegram and Discord are probably among the most actively actually social media I've managed to find online.
- jscipione 5y ago“There’s always been this division between your right to speak and your right to have a megaphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people,” she said. One is the freedom of speech, the other is freedom of the press, we as humans have the right to both. Yet never before in history we have had access to the press power of the social media revolution. For a time, the gatekeepers took a hands-off approach, but that time is over. End Internet censorship now. We need platforms where the battle of ideas can be fought and won on a level playing field without the creeping hand of censorship in the name of "combating disinformation" getting in the way. Fact check all you want, may you win the battle of ideas. But talk of censorship, even from MIT, stinks of totalitarianism.
- MilnerRoute 5y agoFirst, let's explore this a little. Let's say it were possible to lie to a billion people -- a lie that could really and truly end lives. Hypothetically....would you stand back and let this happen? Because that's the problem with the absolutist position against "internet censorship." It denies, ever, the possibility of a harmful kind of speech which should in fact be acted against. People can list lots of examples. (Doxxing. Calls for violence against individuals. Child pornography. Dangerous medical misinformation. Copyrighted information.) Are we really okay with a billion people getting all of these things -- rather than one person being "censored"? And the other problem is we're not talking about a government with a constitution... We're talking about Instagram and Pinterest (and other social media companies). I've heard it said that they very conveniently claimed "We're adopting the same absolutist free speech principles of a country" mostly as a ruse to keep from having to invest in any kind of monitoring of their services.
- thegrimmest 5y ago> a lie that could really and truly end lives Lies don't end lives, people do. You can't say that a lie "caused" someone to do something. It may have influenced them, but they are ultimately responsible for their actions. More generally, I don't think we should be in the business of policing second or third order effects. Responsibility ultimately ends with the perpetrator of an action. If someone lies to one (or many) people, and some of those people go on to murder: punish the murderers, move on with life. > Doxxing Not sure what's wrong with this TBH - publishing public information shouldn't be a crime. Some sites have anti-doxxing policies, some don't. > Calls for violence against individuals Direct threats of violence are already illegal. People that make them should be arrested. > Child pornography Already illegal - find and imprison the pornographers. We already do rather a good job at this. > Dangerous medical misinformation In addition to the obvious idea that people are responsible for their own worldviews, any process to distinguish "misinformation" from "information" requires an oracle that everyone can agree to trust. We have no such oracle. > Copyrighted information. Reproducing copyrighted material is already illegal and pretty well enforced. > mostly as a ruse to keep from having to invest in any kind of monitoring of their services. Why do you think it's OK to impose these costs onto businesses? Why should companies who effectively provide a digital bulletin board be responsible for policing its contents? Why not have... you know... the police be responsible for policing? Then you can clearly and directly send any complaints about their effectiveness to your local representatives, who will actually be empowered to do something about them.
- daenz 5y agoAll of these efforts are being pushed under the guise of making sure people hear "the truth." The Real Truth. As long as that is their emphasis, it makes it very difficult to argue against any draconian measures people want to put in place. Because, why would you be against any measures that help people hear The Real Truth? That means you would be Anti-Truth, and nobody wants someone who is Anti-Truth. Are enough people big enough suckers to allow this to happen under these false promises? We will find out. If you do support measures around controlling what people see and say, at least do the rest of us the courtesy and don't pretend that it will bring about a utopia of free exchange.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y agoSocial media as it is now ("connect everyone together") is definitely a bad idea. Communities of people only work when they're close knit or share an identity, not when you have mash-ups of different people in different communities all randomly tied together and forced to address each other's opinions. You might as well have a barbeque where Hell's Angels, an LGBTQ support group, and a Catholic church study group all sit in a circle for no reason. Online groups only work when they have a uniform identity, an ingroup, a particular set of shared values. They can have other ideas or values, but it needs to be clear to them that they should only bring up that group's values. Communities can also be toxic and stupid, but they do keep cohesion when they're all aligned on a core theme.
- lemoncookiechip 5y agoThis might sound rude and doesn't add much to the conversation, but this issue can't be fixed unless you "fix" people. We can be eloquent, humanitarian, calm and polite, but the reality is that we can also be cruel, vindictive little animals that seek out to ruin everyone's day. There is no fixing social media because our nature doesn't allow it, and you can fix the business aspect, but not how the users utilize it, unless you restrict them to the point we can't call it a social media platform anymore. TL:DR Fixing human nature isn't going to happen. The more popular a platform is, the more positive and negative voices you'll have in the platform, and we all know that we linger and give more attention to the negative more so than the positive.
- Dem_Boys 5y agoThis entirely misses the point IMO. Social media is the most powerful propaganda/idea pushing machine in the history of the world and it ain't even close. Lies, half truths, and everything in between are presented in the most riveting ways possible and our monkey brains just can't help but soak up every last bit of it. If a person believes everything on social media then __they__ should be fixed, not social media. A great solution is for people to see social media for what it is: 99% garbage that gives you a quick dopamine hit. People should be made aware that on social media you are likely: 1. Reading misinformation 2. Viewing content that's created with the sole purpose to manipulate you into a certain view (Often times by a bad actor) 3. Reading opinions by trusted people who've been compromised by the above two points While not perfect, I believe if people assumed everything on social media is false and work from there then people would be a lot happier.
- tobr 5y ago> A great solution is for people to see social media for what it is Just like a great solution to the climate emergency is to stop releasing greenhouse gases, a great solution to war is peace, and a great solution to starvation is to eat food.
- Dem_Boys 5y agoYour right! So simple but I say this because I've never seen a well funded campaign or organization spreading this message. We have large organizations with great solutions tackling climate change, starving children, etc.... I guess maybe like war, spreading this message would hurt pockets that are far too deep to be challenged.
- jcadam 5y agoThe dream of the internet as a global medium for the free exchange of ideas and information died a quick death.
- betwixthewires 5y agoI thought from the title that this would be about actually changing social media - business models, different UX patterns to get rid of dark patterns and antisocial patterns - actual interesting ways to fix social media. Instead its more of the same old "we need more censorship online" rhetoric. It's a shame, there are actually interesting discussions to be had on the impacts of social media and the engineering of it, but it seems most people are not actually interested in solving the real problems.
- zarkov99 5y agoThis seems completely wrong to me. It's just more of the same nonsense. Social media platforms are not to be trusted as arbiters of truth. That isn't their job and if they are "held accountable" for disinformation they will simply double down on censuring any speech that deviates from main stream orthodoxy. What we need is not a crack down on lies but a return of institutions we can trust.
- qwerty456127 5y agoTo me it seems the spread of misinformation probably is a self-fixing problem. The users have no choice but to develop critical thinking about what they read/watch so they probably will and this is good. I actually was glad deepfakes emerged as this can make the fact you can't just believe everything you see more vivid and obvious even to those who were ignorant.
- codyswann 5y agoI still remember when I was laughed out of my Masters class on Mass Communication for saying that giving everyone a voice might result in a net-negative. I’m not sure we’re there yet, but that’s where we’re headed.