12 ms·

Facebook thrives on criticism of “disinformation”

198 points by throwawaysea 5y ago

slivanes 5y ago
Engagement or enragement, they still get you. I get the feeling that visitors on Facebook are often angry and annoyed, and Facebook is fine with that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
m_ke 5y ago
Growth at all cost: https://twitter.com/JesseLehrich/status/1443451725768105986 https://twitter.com/JesseLehrich/status/1443451725768105986
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  https://nitter.eu/JesseLehrich/status/1443451725768105986 https://nitter.eu/JesseLehrich/status/1443451725768105986
AzzieElbab 5y ago
Facebook in 2021 is like aol 10 years ago. No one I know use it. Why is there so much noise about it?
- m_ke 5y ago
  Because their products are used by over 2 billion people a day and according to their own research it's having a negative impact on a significant chunk of them.
  - cratermoon 5y ago
    > according to their own research I mean... you just read Cory's whole story about how maybe Facebook and co. are manipulating the data to make it seem like their product is better than it is, and now you cite Facebook's research saying that Facebook reaches 2 billion people?
    - m_ke 5y ago
      They could be off by an order of magnitude and it would still be pretty bad. Here are their official numbers from Q2: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/Q2-2021_Earnings-Presentation.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...
      - cratermoon 5y ago
        Have you considered the possibility that the numbers they are reporting are accurate but meaningless? What exactly is "reach", anyway?
        m_ke 5y ago
        They know more about you than your mother, I'm sure they can do a decent job counting the users that they track.
        readflaggedcomm 5y ago
        By buying data like all the other companies do? Not impressive. They don't track me directly.
        m_ke 5y ago
        Facebook pixels are on like 95% of major websites these days, so unless you block them they have a pretty good profile of your interests. Even if you block them, they definitely have your contact info and a shadow profile for you thanks to your friends, who definitely gave facebook access to their contacts at some point. The contact graph has enough info to help them figure out where you might live, what school you went to and where you worked.
  - GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
    I want to see minutes per person
    - klyrs 5y ago
      I want to see the number of people who spend 8+ hours per day on the site.
- slig 5y ago
  No one you know uses Instagram and/or Whatsapp?
- nverno 5y ago
  It's the current scapegoat for 'disinformation', giving the government and all other propaganda peddlers a breather.
  - i_like_apis 5y ago
    I wouldn't say they are a scapegoat. But they are the largest platform with the widest audience and are therefor the largest platform to disseminate disinfo.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ecshafer 5y ago
  90% of the people I know use Facebook. And more people use Instagram. Most people over 30 use Facebook.
sayonaraman 5y ago
time to buy more FB shares
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  Probally.
no_butterscotch 5y ago
The problem is nobody seems to hit Facebook where it hurts, their advertisers. Why? Advertiser pressure combined with the losses Facebook is taking due to Apple's policies would certainly foster some change?
- croes 5y ago
  You think the advertisers want change? We are talking about companies that knew about climate change since the last 40 years, that shifted production to China despite the lack of human rights and environmental laws. Correct, not in spite of but because of. These companies pull same ads to pretend to be the good guys who cares but a soon the storm is over they are back again.
88913527 5y ago
If there isn't a "lying flat" movement for social media, there sure should be one. It characterizes my feelings perfectly: I give up on it. Nearing 1 year without Facebook, I can confirm it isn't essential and your strongest network connections will contact you if they wish to. If Facebook could exist as it did one decade ago, maybe it'd be different.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- VonGuard 5y ago
  100% agree. Leave Facebook and social. IRC is much better. Frankly, context is the issue. My group of friends should not intersect with some other random group of friends. Content should remain within its context. Sharing to everyone is the worst thing possible. It just causes huge conflicts from different contextless people clashing over content the original poster usually considers harmless. Like, if anti-vaxers stayed in their own little groups, it might not be such a problem, but their content gets posted to everyone in everyone's networks, and the meme virus spreads, lacking the important "the people saying these things are fucking idiots" context.
  - sk0g 5y ago
    This is pretty much what Google+ had/ failed due to. If only relevant content is shared within a 'circle', people appreciate it, sometimes ignore it, and move on. Consistent controversy and drama is avoided, which just so happens to be a key driver of social media engagement.
  - bmarquez 5y ago
    > IRC is much better. IRC is too technical for many people I know, but they are willing to use, or are already using Discord.
    - square_usual 5y ago
      The only problem with Discord is that it is closed. Otherwise, it's a truly excellent platform. In many ways, the problem with Social Networks isn't algorithms or whatever, it's the scale, and being on a small server with at most 50-100 other people is an incredible experience. I've met so many interesting people from around the world who wouldn't have the technical skills to navigate the IRC world, and I didn't have to blow up my brain in the process.
LurkingPenguin 5y ago
I always get a small chuckle when I read an article about how horrible FB is. Not because it isn't horrible. It literally is the digital devil. But because 90% of those articles have a FB share button on them. As this one does.
square_usual 5y ago
E: The tone and direction of this comment would've redirected from discussion of an otherwise interesting piece, so I've changed it. You can also read this on Cory's own website: https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/ https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hy... or on archive.is: https://archive.is/iAsXZ https://archive.is/iAsXZ (My apologies to people who responded to the earlier version of this)
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  Does anyone know who runs archive.is? I imagine they’ve got some good data on news readership.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  Thanks for the reminder; I forgot he has the same posts available at pluralistic. Unfortunately I don’t see a way for me to edit the link. I agree Medium is not a great platform. Dark patterns aside, I was also disappointed to see their heavy censorship early in the pandemic, which kept many interesting analyses and speculation from being shared.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
  Search engine cache, another way to avoid medium.com website https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://doctorow.medium.com/facebook-thrives-on-criticism-of-disinformation-64b141d7b6c8 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
swayvil 5y ago
I love the accusation of disinformation. When you call somebody a liar you just sound like a psycho. But when you accuse somebody of spreading disinformation you boldly declare yourself a soldier in the army of wokeness. Which is so much better.
- nurettin 5y ago
  Spreading disinformation can be done without any ill intent. The source is trying to willfully manipulate people, but the person who spreads it is just a forwarding agent.
  - swayvil 5y ago
    That logic is historically popular with the goose stepping enthusiasts. We aren't censoring/oppressing/deplatforming/infringing-upon-your-rights because we think you are evil. We are doing it because you have been fooled. Because we know better. We're doing it for your own health and the health of our society. They love to say that shit.
    - nurettin 5y ago
      Are we talking about established facts like "the earth is not flat" or gray areas like "NFTs are good"?
erehweb 5y ago
There are definitely some advertisers who are not getting their money's worth out of FB ads, and likely some political advertisers are among them. But there's a lot of advertisers who are, and can track their sales to FB spend.
idontwantthis 5y ago
I keep getting shown very long and well produced videos of very complicated steak recipes where they end up horribly overcooking it or drowning it in conflicting flavors. Someone made a stew out of what looked like a $60 ribeye. My only conclusion is that their purpose is to draw hateful comments for “engagement”.
bo1024 5y ago
I think Cory misses a really big point here. He seems to assume that the source of disinformation is ads, such as political advertisement. This implies that advertising works if and only if disinformation works. Of course, in reality disinformation goes through many channels on facebook, but (my understanding is) a ton of it is organically shared and commented material and links. I.e. a different kind of content from ads altogether.So facebook ads could still be ineffective, yet disinformation campaigns highly effective. I'd also discount the studies on fake news from Spring 2017. The game has changed significantly since then. My impression is a bit different from "criti-hype": I think Facebook is likely extremely good at promoting engagement, pulling attention, and changing minds -- HOWEVER -- FB has very little control over what content is able to be successful in this environment they've created. It takes an entire web ecosystem (quasi-news sites to host 'articles', etc etc) to conduct these disinformation campaigns and they have to resonate with people organically interacting, not just popping up in ads. The fact that FB can't at-will divert all this attention onto breakfast cereal or brake fluid or whatever doesn't mean the disinformation is ineffective in the political sphere. Edit: it's one thing to build an extremely fertile petri dish, it's another to control which organisms end up colonizing it.
- sufehmi 5y ago
  Indeed most of disinformation in Indonesia is via contents not facebook ads. But there's still problem with Facebook - echo chamber algorithm, it traps people in their own bubble world I once tried to like just funny posts. In just a week, nearly all contents in my timeline are jokes and funny posts Now that's scary.
- podiki 5y ago
  While I partially agree with there being a difference between just ads and what we're seeing happen, I didn't read it as being a 1-to-1 correspondence. Instead, it was pointing out the perhaps limited influence of...influence. In that maybe this isn't really "changing" people but highlighting them, giving them a platform, letting them congregate. Surely it attracts people that may not believe something yet and are susceptible, but the argument seems to be more of amplification and noticing this, rather than creating it as much. In other words, remove FB and you'll still have the same beliefs, just not as obvious to the outside. At least that was how I read some of the article. (I do think FB and the like are making things worse, but does it just look like that because we can see it better? or have the numbers grown rather than just each gotten more bold?)
Barrin92 5y ago
I think Doctorow is largely right about how this uncritical acceptance of tech "magic powers" actually strengthens them, the 'rather evil than incompetent' argument works. As he alludes to in the piece Karp and Thiel used to actively push for PR that presents Palantir as this sort of omniponent surveillance super-tool because it actually makes it seem more intimidating. Criticism of 'precrime' tech or robo judges should be directed towards how goddamn stupid it is to direct machine learning algorithms that were made for perception at tasks that involve complex cognitive and ethical human judgements. Cambridge Analytica was a good example of this as well. The press fell over themselves to characterise their technology as some sort of election tipping, mind controlling super tool. They probably loved it. In reality there's not even any scientific backing for their targeting and it most likely did barely anything, they just wanted to look like James Bond's Spectre. edit: another thing the post made me think of is how much the tech sector loves Yuval Noah Harari. He once said he's surprised by it but I'm absolutely not, because he basically constantly tells them how omnipotent and all-powerful they are. There's actually a fantastic scene in The Young Pope about this (a satirical show about the internal workings of the Catholic Church) > Do you know how many books have been written about me? > Seventeen. > Eighteen. The last one's going to press next week, and it's got the best title of all. > Which is? >The Man Behind the Scenes. I suggested it myself. > Who wrote it? > Manna, that leftist reporter. > That means it'going to be critical of you, Your Eminence. > Of course, those are the best. They turn you into a legend.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  Aside from how absolutely sad the humorlessness of society these days is, it's also a catastrophe that we've taken humor out of the critical tool belt. H.L. Mencken has a great quote about it, something along the lines of the most good being done in the history of man by people throwing cats into temples.
- godelski 5y ago
  They say to never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to incompetence or stupidity. I think the extreme version of this is when emergence through stupidity appears to be a global conspiracy of super rich/geniuses. Humans do love stories and legends. They distract us from the truth which is that the world is exceedingly mundane.
podiki 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this, found it a very interesting read and analysis of FB and disinformation/advertising. One clue should definitely be that "if we just fix FB the problem will be solved or substantially better" can't be as true as people want. It would help, but it is not the real source of the problem. An amplifier that could (not so easily?) be replaced.
rendall 5y ago
The concept of disinformation as it's used today, and Doctorow touches on this in his essay, is itself infected with bias. We all can point to true and correct information that was at one point or another labeled as disinformation when it actually only was inconvenient to one or more powerful actors. Personally speaking, the label has come to mean to me something other than "false information, intentionally spread". To me it has come to mean "something that could be false, but someone definitely doesn't want it talked about".
- pharmakom 5y ago
  My understanding is that disinformation is information that is deliberately spread that is known to be false to further some agenda. Misinformation is where false information is spread without that intent. From this definition, what’s interesting is that you can only identify disinformation by knowing 1) what is actually true and 2) the motivations and methods of the person spreading it. I can think of two good examples of disinformation: 1. When oil companies denied climate change despite their internal research 2. When tobacco companies denied the importance of nicotine in their products
  - CaptArmchair 5y ago
    It's more then that. It's not whether information is "true" or "false". What matters is the "falsifiability" of statements and assertions shared online in the first place: > In the philosophy of science, a theory is falsifiable (or refutable) if it is contradicted by an observation that is logically possible, i.e., expressible in the language of the theory, and this language has a conventional empirical interpretation.[A] Thus there must exist a state of affairs, a potential falsifier, that obtains or not and can be used as a scientific evidence against the theory, in particular, it must be observable with existing technologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability A lot of disinformation boils down to making a claim that can't readily be falsified while defending their stance by using logical fallacies to deflect criticism, such as shifting the burden of proof to the other party. In the past 1.5 year, a lot of claims made about the pandemic simply couldn't be falsified for lack of technology or methods to observe a potential falsifier. That doesn't means those claims are readily false or true. It means they are plausible or probable. Which are very different qualifiers regarding veracity. A typical example is the heated debate about the efficacy of masks and mask mandates. Access to information has also demonstrated a down side. Research studies have been widely quoted / cited within the public debate to support all manner or arguments. However, by pulling studies out of context, they lose their value. Many tried to support their claims by cherry picking, ignoring scientific publication process (e.g. peer review) and so on. The net result is scientific research, regardless of it's veracity, re-purposed as token support for confirmation bias in the public debate via thinly veiled appeal to authority. The relevant questions regarding disinformation isn't the veracity of statements. But rather: Who are you anyway? Where are you coming from? And why are you making these claims in the first place?
joelbondurant 5y ago
USA members deserve mass shootings for any Fact-Check Algorithm errors.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Facebook thrives when talking about Facebook so stop talking about it
- kubanczyk 5y ago
  TIL "criti-hype", a useful label.
bob229 5y ago
Social media is destroying humanity. Good riddance.
wwilim 5y ago
Even if the tech doesn't create the conspiracy theorists, it just allows them to "hatch" in a welcoming environment, it is still far from useless. Had those people not found like-minded company through Facebook, they wouldn't have manifested their inner conspiracy theorist, and in turn could have voted differently if the doubts within hadn't cracked the shell of common sense built around them.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  I agree but I wonder what the solution is. "finding like-minded company" is basically a high level description of what social media is at its core, hence why you find the same conspiracy mindset in so many locations and forms (sometimes ones you wouldn't expect, like /r/superstonk or twitter circles devoted to public transit / public policy on transit)
___luigi 5y ago
Disinformation is a problem for all social media platforms, for all languages, FB is one of those platforms. I have the feeling that media focuses more on FB & English, but we should rather focus on the problem as whole and its harm for all communities around the globe.
aeturnum 5y ago
I think the topline, that Facebook would rather be seen as competently evil than incompetent, is dead on. But I think that, in his larger arc, Vinsel's epistemology isn't correct. Early optimistic predictions about emerging technology are just that - early and optimistic. There are always extreme early ideas about new tech. Just go google up peoples' predictions (and fears) from 2015 about how VR would transform things. The thing that makes them dangerous is when they show potential for being correct society warps around them. We start spending billions of dollars on self driving cars in 2015 with valuations based on them being delivered in 2020. But what is the alternative? Vinsel wants us to have "sound information" - but making predictions that end up being wrong is part of checking that something is sound! The future is uncertain. It's true that nothing is ever as big as people think - sometimes it's bigger - but mostly it's much smaller. That guy who wrote the report for McKinsey (a group one should never trust in general) was really hyped to get headlines or really hyped on AI and because he's good at his job you can't tell which it is. The article is clearly nonsense, but it has credibility because it exists on the far side of a sea of uncertainty about something. It's fantasy to imagine we can "know" what something will be and this process seems unfortunately human and unavoidable. I also think there are a lot of people doing good work in STS on these issues. John Cheney-Lippold, Natasha Dow Schüll, Virginia Eubanks, and Adrian Mackenzie are some of my favorites. I'm excited to read Your Computer Is on Fire but I haven't gotten to it yet. Heck, I think 90% of the bad tech hype is covered the old classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
bumbada 5y ago
I believe that Doctorow is missing the most important issue here. The elephant in the room is the privatization of your social space and that Facebook is a private spy agency. That is what makes FB extremely dangerous. The fact that FB is private, efficient and full of technically brilliant people is not good for the rest of society, because the society can not imagine what those brilliant guys could do with their data. For example, I go to a party with friends. I don't have facebook, but one of my friends have it. He takes a picture of the group and posts it on FB. Now the fact that I went to the party, the place of the party, the time, the people that went to the party, the private opinions of some friends about other friends, girl-boyfriends or lovers(if they used FB channels like wassap to communicate) has been recorded for the rest of my life and can be accessed by American spy agencies like the NSA. Society expects FB will forget because they as humans do forget, but machines never forget. People talk about a crush on someone else with a friend and expects nobody listening(on wassap), but a bug is always on, recording everything they write or say. FB is like Stasi, only way more efficient and that applies to the entire world population instead of just one country. And they are constantly pushing the boundaries of privacy like using "smart glasses" so espionage is full in your life. And they are constantly improving their AI techniques so even when they could technically not do something today does not mean they could not do in five years with the data that they already collected about you.
bronzeage 5y ago
The point of the criticism of "disinformation" is to allow Facebook to increase their censorship. It's like the caricaturial movie scene of someone screaming "somebody stop me". Facebook want to be criticized of "disinformation" so that Facebook gets the excuse to employ censorship and "fact checkers". Those fact checkers will always conveniently focus on exactly the political issues with the most controversy. The value of political censorship is quite higher than normal ads. They are just selling political censorship in some corrupt way (you'll never see an official transaction, but there are deals behind the scenes).
mandmandam 5y ago
It's crazy to me that in all these 80+ comments about FB disinformation there's no mention of the most dramatic recent example of Facebook mass manipulating culture - their admitted systematic censorship of the lab leak theory [0]. They even banned some of the posters. This was done based on the word of a paper in The Lancet that later turned out to have 26 out of 27 authors connected to the lab [1]. Is that insane culture attack not worth a mention, if the topic is disinfo on Facebook? The damage from that particular campaign is hard to measure, but what's not in doubt is that they gaslit the world on the flimsiest of "scientific" bases, and are getting away with it scot free. 0 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-lifts-ban-on-posts-claiming-covid-19-was-man-made https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-... 1 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/10/revealed-scientists-dismissed-wuhan-lab-theory-linked-chinese/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/10/revealed-scienti...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pron 5y ago
> If the best argument for vaccine safety and efficacy is “We used the same process and experts as pronounced judgement on Oxy” then it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical — especially if you’re still coping with the trauma of lost loved ones. That depends on what you mean by "not unreasonable." If a device tells you a lie one time out of 50, it's a misleading device, but it's still preferable to one that lies 1 time out of 3. The process that leads from "authority sources of information are sometimes egregiously wrong" to "all sources of information are equally misleading" is the very foundation of misinformation. Do I believe that the FDA is "the truth"? Of course not. But I still believe it more than any other source on drug safety.
motohagiography 5y ago
Channeling an old po-mo saw, I've commented before to the effect that the social platforms picked "disinformation" as an enemy to persuade you that the rest was real. To be a conspiracy theorist just means to not be aligned to the dominant narrative, and since most intelligent people gravitate toward coherence, when the dominant narrative becomes absurd, you get theories and explanations from the people repelled by it. They usually suck, but when deception prevails, conspiracy theories become the more coherent option and they have better predictive power than the narrative itself. Today, it is objectively more plausible that a cadre of leaders is co-ordinating to exploit a crisis to drive a radical agenda using arbitrary compliance as a signal and lever than it is that paper masks we can smell farts through are necessary to prevent the spread of disease. Gravitating to the former is the direct result of being repelled by the incoherence of the latter. To sustain the dissonance of the absurdities of power, it requires education and practice, because it does not come naturally to anyone. If you want to reduce conspiracy theories, present a coherent narrative that doesn't require sustaining the dissonance of absurdities. I like Doctorow's writing, but if he isn't banned, I'm pretty sure FB and other platforms have nothing to fear from him.
- notacoward 5y ago
  > To be a conspiracy theorist just means to not be aligned to the dominant narrative I don't believe that. One can be skeptical of, or even opposed to, the dominant narrative without becoming a conspiracy theorist. The key is in the word itself: conspiracy. It means people operating together toward some hidden and generally nefarious goal. That's not only attribution of motive (a fallacy) but also positing something that's often quite implausible. How many people would have to retain perfect secrecy for how long to support the "fake moon landing" conspiracy, and how likely is that really? Even if we decide that "conspiracy" is being misused and focus on "theory" instead, that theory is also based on assumptions and coincidences that are as "absurd" (your word) as the dominant narrative. For example, you're assuming that the leaders "exploiting a crisis" to drive a "radical agenda" outnumber those interested in seeking the truth and/or serving the public. You're assuming that being able to "smell farts through" a mask means they're useless, even though the offending molecules are smaller than even the smallest virus particles and real-world results show that widespread mask wearing does reduce transmission. Your theories are no less "dissonant" than anyone else's, but even if they had some sort of internal consistency that doesn't make them correct. Conspiracy theorists are people so desperate to be not only right but more right than others that they throw true skepticism and logic out the window.
gampleman 5y ago
A minor nitpick in an otherwise inspiring article: I feel like the argument about ad efficacy also wants to have it both ways - if advertising sucks, why do we believe that it works? Or in other words, if advertisers are good at advertising themselves, why would they be bad at advertising anything else?

198 points by throwawaysea 5y ago

Engagement or enragement, they still get you. I get the feeling that visitors on Facebook are often angry and annoyed, and Facebook is fine with that.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

m_ke 5y ago

Growth at all cost: https://twitter.com/JesseLehrich/status/1443451725768105986 https://twitter.com/JesseLehrich/status/1443451725768105986

dredmorbius 5y ago
https://nitter.eu/JesseLehrich/status/1443451725768105986 https://nitter.eu/JesseLehrich/status/1443451725768105986

AzzieElbab 5y ago

Facebook in 2021 is like aol 10 years ago. No one I know use it. Why is there so much noise about it?

m_ke 5y ago
Because their products are used by over 2 billion people a day and according to their own research it's having a negative impact on a significant chunk of them.
- cratermoon 5y ago
  > according to their own research I mean... you just read Cory's whole story about how maybe Facebook and co. are manipulating the data to make it seem like their product is better than it is, and now you cite Facebook's research saying that Facebook reaches 2 billion people?
  - m_ke 5y ago
    They could be off by an order of magnitude and it would still be pretty bad. Here are their official numbers from Q2: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2/Q2-2021_Earnings-Presentation.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...
    - cratermoon 5y ago
      Have you considered the possibility that the numbers they are reporting are accurate but meaningless? What exactly is "reach", anyway?
      - m_ke 5y ago
        They know more about you than your mother, I'm sure they can do a decent job counting the users that they track.
        readflaggedcomm 5y ago
        By buying data like all the other companies do? Not impressive. They don't track me directly.
        m_ke 5y ago
        Facebook pixels are on like 95% of major websites these days, so unless you block them they have a pretty good profile of your interests. Even if you block them, they definitely have your contact info and a shadow profile for you thanks to your friends, who definitely gave facebook access to their contacts at some point. The contact graph has enough info to help them figure out where you might live, what school you went to and where you worked.
- GoOnThenDoTell 5y ago
  I want to see minutes per person
  - klyrs 5y ago
    I want to see the number of people who spend 8+ hours per day on the site.
slig 5y ago
No one you know uses Instagram and/or Whatsapp?
nverno 5y ago
It's the current scapegoat for 'disinformation', giving the government and all other propaganda peddlers a breather.
- i_like_apis 5y ago
  I wouldn't say they are a scapegoat. But they are the largest platform with the widest audience and are therefor the largest platform to disseminate disinfo.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ecshafer 5y ago
90% of the people I know use Facebook. And more people use Instagram. Most people over 30 use Facebook.

sayonaraman 5y ago

time to buy more FB shares

hellbannedguy 5y ago
Probally.

no_butterscotch 5y ago

The problem is nobody seems to hit Facebook where it hurts, their advertisers. Why? Advertiser pressure combined with the losses Facebook is taking due to Apple's policies would certainly foster some change?

croes 5y ago
You think the advertisers want change? We are talking about companies that knew about climate change since the last 40 years, that shifted production to China despite the lack of human rights and environmental laws. Correct, not in spite of but because of. These companies pull same ads to pretend to be the good guys who cares but a soon the storm is over they are back again.

88913527 5y ago

If there isn't a "lying flat" movement for social media, there sure should be one. It characterizes my feelings perfectly: I give up on it. Nearing 1 year without Facebook, I can confirm it isn't essential and your strongest network connections will contact you if they wish to. If Facebook could exist as it did one decade ago, maybe it'd be different.

deleted 5y ago
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VonGuard 5y ago
100% agree. Leave Facebook and social. IRC is much better. Frankly, context is the issue. My group of friends should not intersect with some other random group of friends. Content should remain within its context. Sharing to everyone is the worst thing possible. It just causes huge conflicts from different contextless people clashing over content the original poster usually considers harmless. Like, if anti-vaxers stayed in their own little groups, it might not be such a problem, but their content gets posted to everyone in everyone's networks, and the meme virus spreads, lacking the important "the people saying these things are fucking idiots" context.
- sk0g 5y ago
  This is pretty much what Google+ had/ failed due to. If only relevant content is shared within a 'circle', people appreciate it, sometimes ignore it, and move on. Consistent controversy and drama is avoided, which just so happens to be a key driver of social media engagement.
- bmarquez 5y ago
  > IRC is much better. IRC is too technical for many people I know, but they are willing to use, or are already using Discord.
  - square_usual 5y ago
    The only problem with Discord is that it is closed. Otherwise, it's a truly excellent platform. In many ways, the problem with Social Networks isn't algorithms or whatever, it's the scale, and being on a small server with at most 50-100 other people is an incredible experience. I've met so many interesting people from around the world who wouldn't have the technical skills to navigate the IRC world, and I didn't have to blow up my brain in the process.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago

I always get a small chuckle when I read an article about how horrible FB is. Not because it isn't horrible. It literally is the digital devil. But because 90% of those articles have a FB share button on them. As this one does.

square_usual 5y ago

E: The tone and direction of this comment would've redirected from discussion of an otherwise interesting piece, so I've changed it. You can also read this on Cory's own website: https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/ https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hy... or on archive.is: https://archive.is/iAsXZ https://archive.is/iAsXZ (My apologies to people who responded to the earlier version of this)

TechBro8615 5y ago
Does anyone know who runs archive.is? I imagine they’ve got some good data on news readership.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Thanks for the reminder; I forgot he has the same posts available at pluralistic. Unfortunately I don’t see a way for me to edit the link. I agree Medium is not a great platform. Dark patterns aside, I was also disappointed to see their heavy censorship early in the pandemic, which kept many interesting analyses and speculation from being shared.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Search engine cache, another way to avoid medium.com website https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://doctorow.medium.com/facebook-thrives-on-criticism-of-disinformation-64b141d7b6c8 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

swayvil 5y ago

I love the accusation of disinformation. When you call somebody a liar you just sound like a psycho. But when you accuse somebody of spreading disinformation you boldly declare yourself a soldier in the army of wokeness. Which is so much better.

nurettin 5y ago
Spreading disinformation can be done without any ill intent. The source is trying to willfully manipulate people, but the person who spreads it is just a forwarding agent.
- swayvil 5y ago
  That logic is historically popular with the goose stepping enthusiasts. We aren't censoring/oppressing/deplatforming/infringing-upon-your-rights because we think you are evil. We are doing it because you have been fooled. Because we know better. We're doing it for your own health and the health of our society. They love to say that shit.
  - nurettin 5y ago
    Are we talking about established facts like "the earth is not flat" or gray areas like "NFTs are good"?

erehweb 5y ago

There are definitely some advertisers who are not getting their money's worth out of FB ads, and likely some political advertisers are among them. But there's a lot of advertisers who are, and can track their sales to FB spend.

idontwantthis 5y ago

I keep getting shown very long and well produced videos of very complicated steak recipes where they end up horribly overcooking it or drowning it in conflicting flavors. Someone made a stew out of what looked like a $60 ribeye. My only conclusion is that their purpose is to draw hateful comments for “engagement”.

bo1024 5y ago

I think Cory misses a really big point here. He seems to assume that the source of disinformation is ads, such as political advertisement. This implies that advertising works if and only if disinformation works. Of course, in reality disinformation goes through many channels on facebook, but (my understanding is) a ton of it is organically shared and commented material and links. I.e. a different kind of content from ads altogether.So facebook ads could still be ineffective, yet disinformation campaigns highly effective. I'd also discount the studies on fake news from Spring 2017. The game has changed significantly since then. My impression is a bit different from "criti-hype": I think Facebook is likely extremely good at promoting engagement, pulling attention, and changing minds -- HOWEVER -- FB has very little control over what content is able to be successful in this environment they've created. It takes an entire web ecosystem (quasi-news sites to host 'articles', etc etc) to conduct these disinformation campaigns and they have to resonate with people organically interacting, not just popping up in ads. The fact that FB can't at-will divert all this attention onto breakfast cereal or brake fluid or whatever doesn't mean the disinformation is ineffective in the political sphere. Edit: it's one thing to build an extremely fertile petri dish, it's another to control which organisms end up colonizing it.

sufehmi 5y ago
Indeed most of disinformation in Indonesia is via contents not facebook ads. But there's still problem with Facebook - echo chamber algorithm, it traps people in their own bubble world I once tried to like just funny posts. In just a week, nearly all contents in my timeline are jokes and funny posts Now that's scary.
podiki 5y ago
While I partially agree with there being a difference between just ads and what we're seeing happen, I didn't read it as being a 1-to-1 correspondence. Instead, it was pointing out the perhaps limited influence of...influence. In that maybe this isn't really "changing" people but highlighting them, giving them a platform, letting them congregate. Surely it attracts people that may not believe something yet and are susceptible, but the argument seems to be more of amplification and noticing this, rather than creating it as much. In other words, remove FB and you'll still have the same beliefs, just not as obvious to the outside. At least that was how I read some of the article. (I do think FB and the like are making things worse, but does it just look like that because we can see it better? or have the numbers grown rather than just each gotten more bold?)

Barrin92 5y ago

I think Doctorow is largely right about how this uncritical acceptance of tech "magic powers" actually strengthens them, the 'rather evil than incompetent' argument works. As he alludes to in the piece Karp and Thiel used to actively push for PR that presents Palantir as this sort of omniponent surveillance super-tool because it actually makes it seem more intimidating. Criticism of 'precrime' tech or robo judges should be directed towards how goddamn stupid it is to direct machine learning algorithms that were made for perception at tasks that involve complex cognitive and ethical human judgements. Cambridge Analytica was a good example of this as well. The press fell over themselves to characterise their technology as some sort of election tipping, mind controlling super tool. They probably loved it. In reality there's not even any scientific backing for their targeting and it most likely did barely anything, they just wanted to look like James Bond's Spectre. edit: another thing the post made me think of is how much the tech sector loves Yuval Noah Harari. He once said he's surprised by it but I'm absolutely not, because he basically constantly tells them how omnipotent and all-powerful they are. There's actually a fantastic scene in The Young Pope about this (a satirical show about the internal workings of the Catholic Church) > Do you know how many books have been written about me? > Seventeen. > Eighteen. The last one's going to press next week, and it's got the best title of all. > Which is? >The Man Behind the Scenes. I suggested it myself. > Who wrote it? > Manna, that leftist reporter. > That means it'going to be critical of you, Your Eminence. > Of course, those are the best. They turn you into a legend.

planet-and-halo 5y ago
Aside from how absolutely sad the humorlessness of society these days is, it's also a catastrophe that we've taken humor out of the critical tool belt. H.L. Mencken has a great quote about it, something along the lines of the most good being done in the history of man by people throwing cats into temples.
godelski 5y ago
They say to never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to incompetence or stupidity. I think the extreme version of this is when emergence through stupidity appears to be a global conspiracy of super rich/geniuses. Humans do love stories and legends. They distract us from the truth which is that the world is exceedingly mundane.

podiki 5y ago

Thanks for sharing this, found it a very interesting read and analysis of FB and disinformation/advertising. One clue should definitely be that "if we just fix FB the problem will be solved or substantially better" can't be as true as people want. It would help, but it is not the real source of the problem. An amplifier that could (not so easily?) be replaced.

rendall 5y ago

The concept of disinformation as it's used today, and Doctorow touches on this in his essay, is itself infected with bias. We all can point to true and correct information that was at one point or another labeled as disinformation when it actually only was inconvenient to one or more powerful actors. Personally speaking, the label has come to mean to me something other than "false information, intentionally spread". To me it has come to mean "something that could be false, but someone definitely doesn't want it talked about".

pharmakom 5y ago
My understanding is that disinformation is information that is deliberately spread that is known to be false to further some agenda. Misinformation is where false information is spread without that intent. From this definition, what’s interesting is that you can only identify disinformation by knowing 1) what is actually true and 2) the motivations and methods of the person spreading it. I can think of two good examples of disinformation: 1. When oil companies denied climate change despite their internal research 2. When tobacco companies denied the importance of nicotine in their products
- CaptArmchair 5y ago
  It's more then that. It's not whether information is "true" or "false". What matters is the "falsifiability" of statements and assertions shared online in the first place: > In the philosophy of science, a theory is falsifiable (or refutable) if it is contradicted by an observation that is logically possible, i.e., expressible in the language of the theory, and this language has a conventional empirical interpretation.[A] Thus there must exist a state of affairs, a potential falsifier, that obtains or not and can be used as a scientific evidence against the theory, in particular, it must be observable with existing technologies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability A lot of disinformation boils down to making a claim that can't readily be falsified while defending their stance by using logical fallacies to deflect criticism, such as shifting the burden of proof to the other party. In the past 1.5 year, a lot of claims made about the pandemic simply couldn't be falsified for lack of technology or methods to observe a potential falsifier. That doesn't means those claims are readily false or true. It means they are plausible or probable. Which are very different qualifiers regarding veracity. A typical example is the heated debate about the efficacy of masks and mask mandates. Access to information has also demonstrated a down side. Research studies have been widely quoted / cited within the public debate to support all manner or arguments. However, by pulling studies out of context, they lose their value. Many tried to support their claims by cherry picking, ignoring scientific publication process (e.g. peer review) and so on. The net result is scientific research, regardless of it's veracity, re-purposed as token support for confirmation bias in the public debate via thinly veiled appeal to authority. The relevant questions regarding disinformation isn't the veracity of statements. But rather: Who are you anyway? Where are you coming from? And why are you making these claims in the first place?

joelbondurant 5y ago

USA members deserve mass shootings for any Fact-Check Algorithm errors.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Facebook thrives when talking about Facebook so stop talking about it

kubanczyk 5y ago
TIL "criti-hype", a useful label.

bob229 5y ago

Social media is destroying humanity. Good riddance.

wwilim 5y ago

Even if the tech doesn't create the conspiracy theorists, it just allows them to "hatch" in a welcoming environment, it is still far from useless. Had those people not found like-minded company through Facebook, they wouldn't have manifested their inner conspiracy theorist, and in turn could have voted differently if the doubts within hadn't cracked the shell of common sense built around them.

helen___keller 5y ago
I agree but I wonder what the solution is. "finding like-minded company" is basically a high level description of what social media is at its core, hence why you find the same conspiracy mindset in so many locations and forms (sometimes ones you wouldn't expect, like /r/superstonk or twitter circles devoted to public transit / public policy on transit)

___luigi 5y ago

Disinformation is a problem for all social media platforms, for all languages, FB is one of those platforms. I have the feeling that media focuses more on FB & English, but we should rather focus on the problem as whole and its harm for all communities around the globe.

aeturnum 5y ago

I think the topline, that Facebook would rather be seen as competently evil than incompetent, is dead on. But I think that, in his larger arc, Vinsel's epistemology isn't correct. Early optimistic predictions about emerging technology are just that - early and optimistic. There are always extreme early ideas about new tech. Just go google up peoples' predictions (and fears) from 2015 about how VR would transform things. The thing that makes them dangerous is when they show potential for being correct society warps around them. We start spending billions of dollars on self driving cars in 2015 with valuations based on them being delivered in 2020. But what is the alternative? Vinsel wants us to have "sound information" - but making predictions that end up being wrong is part of checking that something is sound! The future is uncertain. It's true that nothing is ever as big as people think - sometimes it's bigger - but mostly it's much smaller. That guy who wrote the report for McKinsey (a group one should never trust in general) was really hyped to get headlines or really hyped on AI and because he's good at his job you can't tell which it is. The article is clearly nonsense, but it has credibility because it exists on the far side of a sea of uncertainty about something. It's fantasy to imagine we can "know" what something will be and this process seems unfortunately human and unavoidable. I also think there are a lot of people doing good work in STS on these issues. John Cheney-Lippold, Natasha Dow Schüll, Virginia Eubanks, and Adrian Mackenzie are some of my favorites. I'm excited to read Your Computer Is on Fire but I haven't gotten to it yet. Heck, I think 90% of the bad tech hype is covered the old classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump.

bumbada 5y ago

I believe that Doctorow is missing the most important issue here. The elephant in the room is the privatization of your social space and that Facebook is a private spy agency. That is what makes FB extremely dangerous. The fact that FB is private, efficient and full of technically brilliant people is not good for the rest of society, because the society can not imagine what those brilliant guys could do with their data. For example, I go to a party with friends. I don't have facebook, but one of my friends have it. He takes a picture of the group and posts it on FB. Now the fact that I went to the party, the place of the party, the time, the people that went to the party, the private opinions of some friends about other friends, girl-boyfriends or lovers(if they used FB channels like wassap to communicate) has been recorded for the rest of my life and can be accessed by American spy agencies like the NSA. Society expects FB will forget because they as humans do forget, but machines never forget. People talk about a crush on someone else with a friend and expects nobody listening(on wassap), but a bug is always on, recording everything they write or say. FB is like Stasi, only way more efficient and that applies to the entire world population instead of just one country. And they are constantly pushing the boundaries of privacy like using "smart glasses" so espionage is full in your life. And they are constantly improving their AI techniques so even when they could technically not do something today does not mean they could not do in five years with the data that they already collected about you.

bronzeage 5y ago

The point of the criticism of "disinformation" is to allow Facebook to increase their censorship. It's like the caricaturial movie scene of someone screaming "somebody stop me". Facebook want to be criticized of "disinformation" so that Facebook gets the excuse to employ censorship and "fact checkers". Those fact checkers will always conveniently focus on exactly the political issues with the most controversy. The value of political censorship is quite higher than normal ads. They are just selling political censorship in some corrupt way (you'll never see an official transaction, but there are deals behind the scenes).

mandmandam 5y ago

It's crazy to me that in all these 80+ comments about FB disinformation there's no mention of the most dramatic recent example of Facebook mass manipulating culture - their admitted systematic censorship of the lab leak theory [0]. They even banned some of the posters. This was done based on the word of a paper in The Lancet that later turned out to have 26 out of 27 authors connected to the lab [1]. Is that insane culture attack not worth a mention, if the topic is disinfo on Facebook? The damage from that particular campaign is hard to measure, but what's not in doubt is that they gaslit the world on the flimsiest of "scientific" bases, and are getting away with it scot free. 0 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-lifts-ban-on-posts-claiming-covid-19-was-man-made https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-... 1 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/10/revealed-scientists-dismissed-wuhan-lab-theory-linked-chinese/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/10/revealed-scienti...

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pron 5y ago

> If the best argument for vaccine safety and efficacy is “We used the same process and experts as pronounced judgement on Oxy” then it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical — especially if you’re still coping with the trauma of lost loved ones. That depends on what you mean by "not unreasonable." If a device tells you a lie one time out of 50, it's a misleading device, but it's still preferable to one that lies 1 time out of 3. The process that leads from "authority sources of information are sometimes egregiously wrong" to "all sources of information are equally misleading" is the very foundation of misinformation. Do I believe that the FDA is "the truth"? Of course not. But I still believe it more than any other source on drug safety.

motohagiography 5y ago

Channeling an old po-mo saw, I've commented before to the effect that the social platforms picked "disinformation" as an enemy to persuade you that the rest was real. To be a conspiracy theorist just means to not be aligned to the dominant narrative, and since most intelligent people gravitate toward coherence, when the dominant narrative becomes absurd, you get theories and explanations from the people repelled by it. They usually suck, but when deception prevails, conspiracy theories become the more coherent option and they have better predictive power than the narrative itself. Today, it is objectively more plausible that a cadre of leaders is co-ordinating to exploit a crisis to drive a radical agenda using arbitrary compliance as a signal and lever than it is that paper masks we can smell farts through are necessary to prevent the spread of disease. Gravitating to the former is the direct result of being repelled by the incoherence of the latter. To sustain the dissonance of the absurdities of power, it requires education and practice, because it does not come naturally to anyone. If you want to reduce conspiracy theories, present a coherent narrative that doesn't require sustaining the dissonance of absurdities. I like Doctorow's writing, but if he isn't banned, I'm pretty sure FB and other platforms have nothing to fear from him.

notacoward 5y ago
> To be a conspiracy theorist just means to not be aligned to the dominant narrative I don't believe that. One can be skeptical of, or even opposed to, the dominant narrative without becoming a conspiracy theorist. The key is in the word itself: conspiracy. It means people operating together toward some hidden and generally nefarious goal. That's not only attribution of motive (a fallacy) but also positing something that's often quite implausible. How many people would have to retain perfect secrecy for how long to support the "fake moon landing" conspiracy, and how likely is that really? Even if we decide that "conspiracy" is being misused and focus on "theory" instead, that theory is also based on assumptions and coincidences that are as "absurd" (your word) as the dominant narrative. For example, you're assuming that the leaders "exploiting a crisis" to drive a "radical agenda" outnumber those interested in seeking the truth and/or serving the public. You're assuming that being able to "smell farts through" a mask means they're useless, even though the offending molecules are smaller than even the smallest virus particles and real-world results show that widespread mask wearing does reduce transmission. Your theories are no less "dissonant" than anyone else's, but even if they had some sort of internal consistency that doesn't make them correct. Conspiracy theorists are people so desperate to be not only right but more right than others that they throw true skepticism and logic out the window.

gampleman 5y ago

A minor nitpick in an otherwise inspiring article: I feel like the argument about ad efficacy also wants to have it both ways - if advertising sucks, why do we believe that it works? Or in other words, if advertisers are good at advertising themselves, why would they be bad at advertising anything else?