6 ms·

I think misinformation and conspiracy theories on these platforms are a huge problem. A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of

by mrxd 5y ago

I think misinformation and conspiracy theories on these platforms are a huge problem. A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The results were far-reaching. The US violated the UN charter and launched a disastrous war in Iraq where millions of Iraqis were killed, injured and displaced. They used a platform called The New York Times to spread their lies. All of the problems of Facebook and social media are just problems of the media in general. Misinformation? Conspiracies? Social comparison? Outrage-driven content? Body image issues? All rampant in the mainstream press, but no journalists are calling for regulation of their industry. If you were to propose federal regulation of the New York Times, journalists would object and talk about the first amendment, the 4th estate and the need for a free and independent press. It's an elitist double standard with content controls for the masses and first amendment rights for the graduates of Princeton and Columbia with jobs at prestigious publications.

misiti3780 5y ago
* J. Miller and M. Gordon at the NYT[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...
sysihyk 5y ago
> crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction Don't blame NYT, they are just like proverbial broken clock which displays correct time twice per day. WMDs from Hussein's stockpile were still used in Syrian War until recently by Baath Socialist militants, the pathway for sarin is pretty clear.
shadowgovt 5y ago
Is Facebook (the company and the social media platform) the masses or the Princeton graduates? You could say that it shares content generated by the masses, but arguably so does the New York Times every time it quotes someone to support a story. And these papers suggest what Facebook does to a person's wall looks a lot more like editorializing than laissez-faire regurgitation of community-generated content.
bjt 5y ago
> A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ... They used a platform called The New York Times to spread their lies. Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence. Setting that aside, there's a big difference between an institution like the NY Times getting it wrong on occasion, despite all their research and fact checking, vs an institution like Facebook building a platform that systematically rewards disinformation at massive scale.
- sumedh 5y ago
  > Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair
- speeder 5y ago
  I googled it and found some articles about it, link to one of them: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-wmds-an-intelligence-failure-or-white-house-spin/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-... Now for more context why I did this: Back then when Bush started pushing for the war, I immediately considered him a liar, I am not from US, and from my perspective and from many people where I live, it was blatantly obvious he was lying, for example some of the "evidence" he used was obviously bullshit, like his description of satellite photos on UN, or saying that WMD was found in certain places right after UN inspectors visited those places and said they found nothing there. Sometimes I wonder how people from USA don't see how evil they country is, for example when Brazil said they would vote against the war in the security council, John Bolton just went and threatened his family (his exact words were: "I know where your kids live."), while the rest of the world was horrified by the lies spouted by US media, the US public was cheerily supporting the warmongers, in some cases even more than needed, for example some public polls done at the time found out a majority of the population were in favor of the wars, in Afghanistan case some people even agreed with the assertion that USA should "glass" afghanistan.
  - nurgasemetey 5y ago
_3u10 5y ago
The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
- cto_of_antifa 5y ago
  Love seeing debord in the wild
ReptileMan 5y ago
>A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I mean ... there was a joke at a time - how does the USA knows about the WMD - they keep the invoices. Saddam was a product of US and everyone in the know knew exactly what he was having. I am not sure that there was a convincing of the Congress since everyone knew to and they were just playing theater. The neocons pitched successfully invasion, but the US had a strong bipartisan desire for powerbase in the middle east. The rest was show for the public.
yholio 5y ago
>It's an elitist double standard with content controls for the masses and first amendment rights for the graduates of Princeton and Columbia with jobs at prestigious publications. It's called power. Journalists are people, and desire power just as much as the next politician, CEO or movie star. Unlike those, journalists get that power by controlling broad narratives and having disproportionate control over the free flow of information. It's an immense power that has evolved alongside modern democratic society and we have developed strong accountability mechanisms. Strong peer pressure and integrity requirements control that journalistic power. Social media and the internet are recent invention that lack that evolved institutional and social framework. They are stripping power from the elites specialized with controlling that flow, and putting control in the hands of tech firms and anonymous "content optimization engineers" that make the algorithms work. They are only accountable to the bottom line. So yes, it's a power struggle and huge double standards at work, only we shouldn't assume every revolution and upheaval of the traditional social order works for the benefit of the people.
- makomk 5y ago
  The fact that peer pressure is the "accountability mechanism" means that pretty much the only thing journalists are ever held accountable for is stuff that goes against the beliefs of the class of people who graduate from Princeton and Columbia and get jobs at prestigious publications. Stuff like spreading misinformation, inciting political violence and falsely undermining trust in democratic elections is fine so long as it's done in the name of the correct elite-supported political causes. Hell, I've just watched the media over here in the UK create a fuel supply crisis through irresponsible reporting - they posted breathless headlines about petrol stations running out of fuel and having to close which actually created the crisis by scaring everyone into going out and filling up their tanks at once. In reality, about five stations in the country were shut prior to the panic buying - so few even the people who'd tried to go to one probably wouldn't realize there was meant to be a crisis. But our fuel supply chains just don't have the capacity to cope with everyone buying several times as much as usual once the press started a panic. Is there any accountability for this? Of course not. They just kept on running endless sob stories about the people affected by the crisis and how terrible it is for them, making money off suffering they created.
Fckd 5y ago
Media houses should be held responsible for lies that they spread
md_ 5y ago
The big question, of course, is not whether media--mainstream or social--have ever "gotten it wrong", but what steps we can take to make them better. The mainstream media very much got it wrong on Iraq. I agree with you. Yet the reality is more complex than your anti-elitist tirade suggests. It's inconceivable to me that a well-functioning democracy can exist without trustworthy--and trusted--institutions who (yes) have an outsized influence on public opinion. The policy issues faced by citizens in a modern democracy are too complex to expect everyone to "do your own research." So the question is, how do we foster those trusted institutions? How do we hold them to account when they go wrong? And how do we make them more deserving of our trust? If the answer is, "We won't, but at least we'll have an algorithm that rewards CTR", well...I respectfully disagree.
- ds206 5y ago
  It's easy. They have to hold themselves accountable for their own (weekly?) mistakes. People would trust them again (imo) if they called themselves out and proactively fixed their mistakes.
  - md_ 5y ago
    I think that's not as simple as you describe. The glib answer is, "They publish corrections." Which many do. But I don't think that addresses the (valid) criticism about the Iraq invasion: while there were some errors of fact, there were primarily errors of omission, where the media were too willing to act as uncritical stenographers for politicians' claims. We see, in a way, the same phenomenon in the Trump era: whatever lunatic allegation Trump or his acolytes would make, the media felt the need to cover it; after all, whatever the President says is inherently news, no matter how crazy. Yet in both of these examples, the problem isn't that the media represent some sort of powerful cabal, which I think was what the OP implied: it's that the media are too spineless to truly hold to account those in power (in both cases, the President of the US). Viewed that way, the premise of the original question is incongruous: it's deeply strange to criticize only the "Princeton and Columbia"-educated "media elites" who too-uncritically reported on the claims of the President, and not the Yale- and Harvard-educated President (and son of a President)--or the billionaire heir to a fortune President who came later--who uttered those false claims. The media absolutely deserve to be criticized for their uncritical reporting before the invasion of Iraq, as I said before, but the original criticism sounded like we want a weaker media who will be less able to question false narratives espoused by powerful players. And I think if you look at these stories more closely, you'll realize we want the opposite.
jedimastert 5y ago
It's really interesting to see this as a top comment here, then rage against youtube for trying to self-regulating.

by mrxd 5y ago

misiti3780 5y ago

* J. Miller and M. Gordon at the NYT[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-iraqis-us-says-hussein-intensifies-quest-for-bomb-parts.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...

sysihyk 5y ago

> crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction Don't blame NYT, they are just like proverbial broken clock which displays correct time twice per day. WMDs from Hussein's stockpile were still used in Syrian War until recently by Baath Socialist militants, the pathway for sarin is pretty clear.

shadowgovt 5y ago

Is Facebook (the company and the social media platform) the masses or the Princeton graduates? You could say that it shares content generated by the masses, but arguably so does the New York Times every time it quotes someone to support a story. And these papers suggest what Facebook does to a person's wall looks a lot more like editorializing than laissez-faire regurgitation of community-generated content.

bjt 5y ago

> A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ... They used a platform called The New York Times to spread their lies. Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence. Setting that aside, there's a big difference between an institution like the NY Times getting it wrong on occasion, despite all their research and fact checking, vs an institution like Facebook building a platform that systematically rewards disinformation at massive scale.

sumedh 5y ago
> Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair
speeder 5y ago
I googled it and found some articles about it, link to one of them: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-wmds-an-intelligence-failure-or-white-house-spin/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-... Now for more context why I did this: Back then when Bush started pushing for the war, I immediately considered him a liar, I am not from US, and from my perspective and from many people where I live, it was blatantly obvious he was lying, for example some of the "evidence" he used was obviously bullshit, like his description of satellite photos on UN, or saying that WMD was found in certain places right after UN inspectors visited those places and said they found nothing there. Sometimes I wonder how people from USA don't see how evil they country is, for example when Brazil said they would vote against the war in the security council, John Bolton just went and threatened his family (his exact words were: "I know where your kids live."), while the rest of the world was horrified by the lies spouted by US media, the US public was cheerily supporting the warmongers, in some cases even more than needed, for example some public polls done at the time found out a majority of the population were in favor of the wars, in Afghanistan case some people even agreed with the assertion that USA should "glass" afghanistan.
- nurgasemetey 5y ago

_3u10 5y ago

The Spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

cto_of_antifa 5y ago
Love seeing debord in the wild

ReptileMan 5y ago

>A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I mean ... there was a joke at a time - how does the USA knows about the WMD - they keep the invoices. Saddam was a product of US and everyone in the know knew exactly what he was having. I am not sure that there was a convincing of the Congress since everyone knew to and they were just playing theater. The neocons pitched successfully invasion, but the US had a strong bipartisan desire for powerbase in the middle east. The rest was show for the public.

yholio 5y ago

>It's an elitist double standard with content controls for the masses and first amendment rights for the graduates of Princeton and Columbia with jobs at prestigious publications. It's called power. Journalists are people, and desire power just as much as the next politician, CEO or movie star. Unlike those, journalists get that power by controlling broad narratives and having disproportionate control over the free flow of information. It's an immense power that has evolved alongside modern democratic society and we have developed strong accountability mechanisms. Strong peer pressure and integrity requirements control that journalistic power. Social media and the internet are recent invention that lack that evolved institutional and social framework. They are stripping power from the elites specialized with controlling that flow, and putting control in the hands of tech firms and anonymous "content optimization engineers" that make the algorithms work. They are only accountable to the bottom line. So yes, it's a power struggle and huge double standards at work, only we shouldn't assume every revolution and upheaval of the traditional social order works for the benefit of the people.

makomk 5y ago
The fact that peer pressure is the "accountability mechanism" means that pretty much the only thing journalists are ever held accountable for is stuff that goes against the beliefs of the class of people who graduate from Princeton and Columbia and get jobs at prestigious publications. Stuff like spreading misinformation, inciting political violence and falsely undermining trust in democratic elections is fine so long as it's done in the name of the correct elite-supported political causes. Hell, I've just watched the media over here in the UK create a fuel supply crisis through irresponsible reporting - they posted breathless headlines about petrol stations running out of fuel and having to close which actually created the crisis by scaring everyone into going out and filling up their tanks at once. In reality, about five stations in the country were shut prior to the panic buying - so few even the people who'd tried to go to one probably wouldn't realize there was meant to be a crisis. But our fuel supply chains just don't have the capacity to cope with everyone buying several times as much as usual once the press started a panic. Is there any accountability for this? Of course not. They just kept on running endless sob stories about the people affected by the crisis and how terrible it is for them, making money off suffering they created.

Fckd 5y ago

Media houses should be held responsible for lies that they spread

md_ 5y ago

The big question, of course, is not whether media--mainstream or social--have ever "gotten it wrong", but what steps we can take to make them better. The mainstream media very much got it wrong on Iraq. I agree with you. Yet the reality is more complex than your anti-elitist tirade suggests. It's inconceivable to me that a well-functioning democracy can exist without trustworthy--and trusted--institutions who (yes) have an outsized influence on public opinion. The policy issues faced by citizens in a modern democracy are too complex to expect everyone to "do your own research." So the question is, how do we foster those trusted institutions? How do we hold them to account when they go wrong? And how do we make them more deserving of our trust? If the answer is, "We won't, but at least we'll have an algorithm that rewards CTR", well...I respectfully disagree.

ds206 5y ago
It's easy. They have to hold themselves accountable for their own (weekly?) mistakes. People would trust them again (imo) if they called themselves out and proactively fixed their mistakes.
- md_ 5y ago
  I think that's not as simple as you describe. The glib answer is, "They publish corrections." Which many do. But I don't think that addresses the (valid) criticism about the Iraq invasion: while there were some errors of fact, there were primarily errors of omission, where the media were too willing to act as uncritical stenographers for politicians' claims. We see, in a way, the same phenomenon in the Trump era: whatever lunatic allegation Trump or his acolytes would make, the media felt the need to cover it; after all, whatever the President says is inherently news, no matter how crazy. Yet in both of these examples, the problem isn't that the media represent some sort of powerful cabal, which I think was what the OP implied: it's that the media are too spineless to truly hold to account those in power (in both cases, the President of the US). Viewed that way, the premise of the original question is incongruous: it's deeply strange to criticize only the "Princeton and Columbia"-educated "media elites" who too-uncritically reported on the claims of the President, and not the Yale- and Harvard-educated President (and son of a President)--or the billionaire heir to a fortune President who came later--who uttered those false claims. The media absolutely deserve to be criticized for their uncritical reporting before the invasion of Iraq, as I said before, but the original criticism sounded like we want a weaker media who will be less able to question false narratives espoused by powerful players. And I think if you look at these stories more closely, you'll realize we want the opposite.

jedimastert 5y ago

It's really interesting to see this as a top comment here, then rage against youtube for trying to self-regulating.