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It seems that the problem is more insidious than this study hints at. We know from the behaviour on social media some morally righteous outrage is satiated by

It seems that the problem is more insidious than this study hints at. We know from the behaviour on social media some morally righteous outrage is satiated by furiously liking or sharing something that you might agree with, but most people just harumph and move on once they've satisfied their itch to "do something". However there is a certain element in society that gets truly over-stimulated by this stuff - the over-amplified likes and shares are making it seem like the outraged community you are aligned with is much larger than it actually is. Or more precisely, the number of people actively engaged and willing to undertake actions to back up their likes looks much bigger than it actually is. This pushes our over stimulated friends into over-reactions. This has now fomented a lot of extreme acts - hitting the streets, burning stuff, occupying buildings, safe in the completely misleading knowledge that your in-group is much larger than you think. The outrage machine has been an interesting social experiment but now people are getting killed because of it and it's probably time to nuke Facebook and Twitter from orbit unless they start taking moderation seriously.

xwdv 5y ago
Nuking platforms isn’t the answer, the real answer is to educate the populace to recognize such phenomenon and train them to not be misled. Otherwise new outrage machines will just be created.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I like the idea, but people seem very resistant to things like being de-programmed from Qanon and the like. A lot of the anti-intellectualism that underpins vaccine refusal is grounded in a deep mistrust of authority. It will be quite difficult to achieve without stomping on a lot of sources of misinformation, which in this age is like playing whack-a-mole in a 10,000 acre field. However, deplatforming seems to work. Nuking the platforms doesn't seem too extreme to me given the harm they are causing.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "deep mistrust of authority" won't likely go away if people see "stomping on a lot of sources of misinformation" every day. This isn't a new situation. People spread hoaxes, but also true and unwanted info, in the wars when governments tried to suppress unfavorable news from the fronts. Mistrust / distrust cannot really be remedied by massive shows of force.
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      How else is it supposed to be managed? When a mere 12 sources of disinformation can generate a wide panic, we have a massive problem that needs a sledgehammer to fix. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
      - inglor_cz 5y ago
        I don't know. Taking sledgehammer on human communication does not seem efficient and side-effect-less to me. I grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia. The party cracked down on unwanted information really hard. They had a 13,000 strong secret police with extensive powers to do that, and forty years of experience how to strangle dissent. Kids were schooled in the One and Only Correct Way of Thinking, up to and including university, where you had to clear several classes of Marxism-Leninism before being allowed to, say, build bridges. Things like Xerox machines were tightly controlled and subject to registration, to curtail spread of illegal leaflets. And yet rumors spreaded within days of anything happening and distrust against the government and whatever the government said to the public was absolutely rampant. If anything, at the end of the day they sledgehammered themselves.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Who does the educating and who decides what that education should be? No doubt the most extreme across the spectrums will eagerly volunteer to do both while insisting that they're the moderate center.
  - ArnoVW 5y ago
    Well, for example, schools? We already teach children history, basic statistics, media literacy, basic epistemology, etc. That does not mean that schools teach kids what to think. Rather, we teach kids how to think, and what the common pitfalls are. The problem is that this means that a bad education leaves you vulnerable to manipulation. That, and the fact that it takes 10-20 years for the effect to reach society.
    - maccolgan 5y ago
      Only very successful and very controlled schools manage to do it right, it has been demonstrated en masse that it can't be done on a scale.

xwdv 5y ago

Nuking platforms isn’t the answer, the real answer is to educate the populace to recognize such phenomenon and train them to not be misled. Otherwise new outrage machines will just be created.

smackeyacky 5y ago
I like the idea, but people seem very resistant to things like being de-programmed from Qanon and the like. A lot of the anti-intellectualism that underpins vaccine refusal is grounded in a deep mistrust of authority. It will be quite difficult to achieve without stomping on a lot of sources of misinformation, which in this age is like playing whack-a-mole in a 10,000 acre field. However, deplatforming seems to work. Nuking the platforms doesn't seem too extreme to me given the harm they are causing.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "deep mistrust of authority" won't likely go away if people see "stomping on a lot of sources of misinformation" every day. This isn't a new situation. People spread hoaxes, but also true and unwanted info, in the wars when governments tried to suppress unfavorable news from the fronts. Mistrust / distrust cannot really be remedied by massive shows of force.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    How else is it supposed to be managed? When a mere 12 sources of disinformation can generate a wide panic, we have a massive problem that needs a sledgehammer to fix. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      I don't know. Taking sledgehammer on human communication does not seem efficient and side-effect-less to me. I grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia. The party cracked down on unwanted information really hard. They had a 13,000 strong secret police with extensive powers to do that, and forty years of experience how to strangle dissent. Kids were schooled in the One and Only Correct Way of Thinking, up to and including university, where you had to clear several classes of Marxism-Leninism before being allowed to, say, build bridges. Things like Xerox machines were tightly controlled and subject to registration, to curtail spread of illegal leaflets. And yet rumors spreaded within days of anything happening and distrust against the government and whatever the government said to the public was absolutely rampant. If anything, at the end of the day they sledgehammered themselves.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Who does the educating and who decides what that education should be? No doubt the most extreme across the spectrums will eagerly volunteer to do both while insisting that they're the moderate center.
- ArnoVW 5y ago
  Well, for example, schools? We already teach children history, basic statistics, media literacy, basic epistemology, etc. That does not mean that schools teach kids what to think. Rather, we teach kids how to think, and what the common pitfalls are. The problem is that this means that a bad education leaves you vulnerable to manipulation. That, and the fact that it takes 10-20 years for the effect to reach society.
  - maccolgan 5y ago
    Only very successful and very controlled schools manage to do it right, it has been demonstrated en masse that it can't be done on a scale.