4 ms·

Not sure if I fully agree with that argument. With the US being a superpower, the stakes are high and this invites unique foreign influence via social media. Th

Not sure if I fully agree with that argument. With the US being a superpower, the stakes are high and this invites unique foreign influence via social media. That foreign influence could be state coordinated or just come from regular people who have an emotional stake in US politics. I've seen it myself, outside of the US people are more concerned about US politics than their own and engage with it on social media which only adds to the pile of insanity. Also, because of limited bandwidth, only a small handful of topics tend to monopolize, and as such they are usually US topics.

LordHumungous 5y ago
This is the kind of conspiratorial thinking that makes me think we're in a moral panic here.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  I think the facts on the ground preclude the moral panic angle. Skyrocketing teen depression since 2012, a genocide in Myanmar, ethnic violence in India, a riot/insurrection borne out of fake news on election integrity, woke cancellation mobs empowered by Twitter and the power of wokeness over institutions, large amounts of vax hesitancy. All of these nasty things are circumstantially tied back to social media in one way or another.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  I hate how "conspiracy" has been turned into a way to dismiss inconvenient truths. There is a long and well established history of interference and manipulation of foriegn elections (often by the US). It predates social media and can't be just be blamed on facebook. Pretending this isn't happening is just burying your head the sand. It isn't a "conspiracy" to think that the most influential elections in the world draws more attention and are more heavily influenced.
- 1shooner 5y ago
  >conspiratorial thinking I wasn't aware there was any question that foreign groups (state supported or otherwise) actively coordinate on Facebook to influence US political campaigns.
  - LordHumungous 5y ago
    There's evidence for limited activities, no evidence that foreign action is responsible for the macro trend of partisanship im the US
  - native_samples 5y ago
    There absolutely are major questions about that. Most of the research and claims you see about bots manipulating people on social media fall apart when examined. For example they often rely on a badly trained ML model that labelled nearly half of Congress as "bots". This sort of thing is never admitted in the media - if you don't double check for yourself you'd never realize. Here's a talk that goes into a lot of detail: https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_People_Are_Not_Bots.mp4 https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
    - 1shooner 5y ago
      I was thinking most recently of Facebook's own internal reporting on the problem: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
      - native_samples 5y ago
        That's a good example of the problem. Well, it's not about bots, but the same definitional and logic problems are evident. The story defines "troll farms" as "professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks". That description is so vague it could describe almost all news outlets and political parties, along with many charities. But, they aren't going to classify CNN, PETA or the White House itself as a "troll farm" although it would be easy to argue otherwise. Facebook obviously has big problems with internal activists who are trying to convince the company to pursue an ever-spiralling purge against their ideological enemies, and good evidence of that is the unfalsifiable nature of the descriptions of the enemy.
    - freeflight 5y ago

LordHumungous 5y ago

This is the kind of conspiratorial thinking that makes me think we're in a moral panic here.

fighterpilot 5y ago
I think the facts on the ground preclude the moral panic angle. Skyrocketing teen depression since 2012, a genocide in Myanmar, ethnic violence in India, a riot/insurrection borne out of fake news on election integrity, woke cancellation mobs empowered by Twitter and the power of wokeness over institutions, large amounts of vax hesitancy. All of these nasty things are circumstantially tied back to social media in one way or another.
shkkmo 5y ago
I hate how "conspiracy" has been turned into a way to dismiss inconvenient truths. There is a long and well established history of interference and manipulation of foriegn elections (often by the US). It predates social media and can't be just be blamed on facebook. Pretending this isn't happening is just burying your head the sand. It isn't a "conspiracy" to think that the most influential elections in the world draws more attention and are more heavily influenced.
1shooner 5y ago
>conspiratorial thinking I wasn't aware there was any question that foreign groups (state supported or otherwise) actively coordinate on Facebook to influence US political campaigns.
- LordHumungous 5y ago
  There's evidence for limited activities, no evidence that foreign action is responsible for the macro trend of partisanship im the US
- native_samples 5y ago
  There absolutely are major questions about that. Most of the research and claims you see about bots manipulating people on social media fall apart when examined. For example they often rely on a badly trained ML model that labelled nearly half of Congress as "bots". This sort of thing is never admitted in the media - if you don't double check for yourself you'd never realize. Here's a talk that goes into a lot of detail: https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_People_Are_Not_Bots.mp4 https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
  - 1shooner 5y ago
    I was thinking most recently of Facebook's own internal reporting on the problem: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook-troll-farms-report-us-2020-election/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
    - native_samples 5y ago
      That's a good example of the problem. Well, it's not about bots, but the same definitional and logic problems are evident. The story defines "troll farms" as "professionalized groups that work in a coordinated fashion to post provocative content, often propaganda, to social networks". That description is so vague it could describe almost all news outlets and political parties, along with many charities. But, they aren't going to classify CNN, PETA or the White House itself as a "troll farm" although it would be easy to argue otherwise. Facebook obviously has big problems with internal activists who are trying to convince the company to pursue an ever-spiralling purge against their ideological enemies, and good evidence of that is the unfalsifiable nature of the descriptions of the enemy.
  - freeflight 5y ago