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> The problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a megaphone While you're not wrong that it's giving the idiot a megaphone, it's missing the greater

> The problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a megaphone While you're not wrong that it's giving the idiot a megaphone, it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone. The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? I'd also note that a big issue now is trust -- trust in "elites" (technocrats, wealthy, those in positions of power) has been declining for a long time. i think people are not so much seeking out the village idiot, but massively discounting "experts". A list of things that come to mind which have broken trust: 60's saw hippies which wanted to break norms of their parents/grandparents, 70s saw vietnam war, breaking gold standard, 80s greed is good, iran contra etc, 90s tough on crime policies, y2k fears, 00s - iraq/afghanistan, 9/11 attacks, governmental data dragnet, manning/snowden/asange, Covid statements which did not pan out as planned... People have good reasons to be skeptical of elites, but I think anti-corruption work is more important than trying to silence the idiot.

jonny_eh 5y ago
> why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? Because it's not idiots that are the problem, it's bad-faith actors, and they're very good at manipulating people. In the past they'd have to do that 1:1, now they can do it at scale.
- brighton36 5y ago
  I would also suggest that bad faith is contagious. Once bad faith enters, the incentives are such that everyone acts in bad faith in short time. ('Well if he's lying, then I'm forced to lie too' become easy to justify)
- treis 5y ago
  They've been able to do that since at least radio and arguably since the printing press. At worst, Facebook is an evolutionary step along that spectrum.
  - stilist 5y ago
    There's effectively no cost to do it now, though.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    Radio and newspapers were effectively local, we now have global reach so that it takes just a few to mess things up everywhere.
- pier25 5y ago
  It's true there are bad-faith actors, but there are definitely lots of idiots who don't know they are wrong.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Is it possible that you're also a wrong idiot but are unaware of it?
    - pier25 5y ago
      Totally
- hui-zheng 5y ago
  I would say the most dangerous are not the bad-faith actors, but those self-deceived ones who have genuine "good intention" but act out the "bad" consequence. And everyone of us could be that self-deceived ones, including you and me.
- xedrac 5y ago
  I've been in several debates where I was written off being in "bad-faith", when in reality, I just didn't agree with with the popular opinion on a particular subject. It seems people are all too eager to justify their own position by labeling others as being in "bad-faith".
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Except in this case we know that there have been many organizations, FB pages, and fake individual FB accounts set up specifically to spread misinformation and FUD about COVID and vaccines. That's the definition of bad faith. Certainly, from there, real regular people pass on and help spread this misinformation. Hard to say how many of those people are also acting in bad faith or have just been manipulated and scared into believing the bad information. But it seems certain that the source of much of this garbage is bad-faith actors.
    - xupybd 5y ago
      Where can I read more on these organisers of miss information?
      - r721 5y ago
        >Just twelve anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms. This new analysis of content posted or shared to social media over 812,000 times between February and March uncovers how a tiny group of determined anti-vaxxers is responsible for a tidal wave of disinformation - and shows how platforms can fix it by enforcing their standards. https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen News story: 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...
        jimmygrapes 5y ago
        OK so I read through the reports here and... there's nothing there. The report focuses on the reach of these people, which is legitimate, but the report also operate on a tenuous (if not entirely false) premise that the information compiled is "false" or "misinformation" similar terms. The very few (and obviously cherry-picked) examples for each supposedly nefarious actor are hardly damning. The report's authors do absolutely nothing to "debunk" the claims (and I recognize that there are claims that cannot be debunked by virtue of their design), and simply says "This is wrong." Forgive me for not trusting either side here, but simply saying "you're wrong" to someone else doesn't meet my criteria for believing that you're right.
- rumblerock 5y ago
  Given enough capability and knowledge of manipulation methods bad actors can not only shape conversations and promote controversial / conspiratorial information, but also fan the flames of the backlash that make collective reason impossible. So long as there are holes in these platforms and a combative stance by platforms to resolve them, this power can be had or hired. You don't need nation state resources to pull it off at this point. It's pretty widely acknowledged that what happens or begins on social media is now shaping the behavior of politicians and the narratives of legacy media. So if you successfully seed something on social media you get to enjoy the ripple effects through the rest of society and the media. If I have enough resources and motivation, I'm fine with that success rate being 1%, even 0.1% if it gets significant traction. And once it's out there, the imprint on those exposed really can't be undone by a weakly issued correction that never gets the reach of the original false information.
topkai22 5y ago
Facebook is not just a hosting platform, through the Facebook feed it exercises a great deal of editorial control over what posts/information is surfaced to users. So while Facebook might be giving everyone a megaphone, it doesn’t turn everyone the same volume. It needs to own that.
matwood 5y ago
> The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? And here is the real problem with FB, the algorithmic feed. Normal life is pretty boring day-to-day, and doesn't trigger 'engagement'. Conspiracies, etc... cause an enormous amount of engagement. When a person is fed conspiracies all day by the engagement algorithm, even the most critical thinkers will start to drift. It works for the same reason advertising works, familiarity and repetition. The solution is never use FB, but that ship has sailed for most.
- bluGill 5y ago
  I have had decent luck in reverting facebook back to what it is for: sharing pictures of my kids with people who care to see pictures of my kids. That means every time someone shares something - no matter how funny - I block the place it was shared from permanently. Slowly facebook is running out of things to show me that isn't pictures of my friend's kids.
  - bryan_w 5y ago
    Same, it didn't really take as much as I thought it would to get it to stop showing me reshares, but now I see either groups content or family/friends original content. I still wish they had fine grain controls though.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      I dropped all groups too. Facebook's algorithm is a terrible interface for groups - it doesn't show me everything instead just what it determines might be interesting, and doesn't have any means to help with discussion of topics.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    If only they could advertise your kids to you. "I picked a free service and was annoyed they wanted to make money somehow"
d1sxeyes 5y ago
That's also missing the greater picture. It's giving _everyone_ a megaphone... but giving the loudest megaphones to the people who can get most people to listen to them. You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree with (hell, half of my HN comments are because I felt motivated to write something to disagree with some OP at some point - even this one). What that means is the traditional small-c conservative 'village elders', 'parish priests', and 'elected officials', who hold authoritative positions not because they're controversial, but because they historically represented positions of neutrality and consensus end up with quiet megaphones, and the madmen claiming the world is flat and there's a paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop end up with the loudest megaphones. Half of the population is below average intelligence, and giving the wrong people the loudest megaphones has a devastating effect on society.
- nradov 5y ago
  Intelligence is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong were quite intelligent by any objective measure, but giving them megaphones resulted in horrific disasters far worse than anything caused by Facebook users so far.
- yololol 5y ago
  > Half of the population is below average intelligence By definition :)
  - MaxBarraclough 5y ago
    Only if the distribution is symmetric. [0] Extra pedantic mode: if the population is an odd number, the number of below average intelligence will not equal the number of above average intelligence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_probability_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_probability_distribu...
    - d1sxeyes 5y ago
      >if the population is an odd number, the number of below average intelligence will not equal the number of above average intelligence I'll leave counting as an exercise for the reader :D
downWidOutaFite 5y ago
Erosion of trust in elites just so happens to also be a long-term goal of polluters, quacks, scammers, and other powerful parasites of the common wealth when they run up against government or science.
kelnos 5y ago
> it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone. Are they, though? It seems like FB amplifies things that they think will generate more engagement and "stickiness". Sensational things that cause outrage tend to do that more than cold, hard facts. I would not at all be surprised if misinformation gets amplified orders of magnitude more than the truth.
- mavhc 5y ago
  They amplify things that cause you to see more ads, because you picked a free platform
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Facebook (like News) is entertainment. People don't select entertainment for accuracy. The village idiot (that's successful on Facebook) has self-optimized for being catchy - that's why people are listening.
blablabla123 5y ago
I think in general Facebook has a bias towards inflammatory posts - and other platforms for that matter as well including HN actually. Also it's easy to blame the village idiot for everything, but I don't think Donald Trump or Alex Jones are village idiots. They are surely idiots but left the village quite some time ago and gained popularity before Facebook (InfoWars was founded 1999) - although FB surely was an accelerator stage. That said, the village idiot is harmless and I think aristocracy (rule of the elite) is definitely not the solution. But what is true that the normal filters in an offline community haven't been translated online yet.
didibus 5y ago
> it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone I think this can be argued against, because Facebook does recommendation and algorithmic curation. Even if Facebook didn't purposely tweak things to propagate disinformation, you could say it is easy to manipulate their algorithms to disproportionately push the information. So for me it's a case of Facebook not doing enough to fight potential abuse on their platform. There's an element of responsibility here, because we are prone to some material more than other. There are primitive instincts in us, and content designed to take advantage of that is parasitic, and it is manipulative and addictive in that sense. Crazy theories, appeal to emotions, controversy, nudity, clan affiliation, and all that are ways to take advantage of our psyche. Even a smart person is as smart as the data more readily available to them. If the only thing about gender psychology I ever heard about was Jordan Peterson because he's been recommended to me, even if I'm the smartest most reasonable person, this is now the starting point of my understanding and thoughts around gender psychology. So I think a platform that is optimized to show information that is most designed to make people susceptible to it, and that also targets information to the most susceptible people to present it to is by design going to result in the outcomes we're seeing.
vlovich123 5y ago
> The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? Societally we solve this through trust organizations. Individually, I have no way to validate the information every expert/idiot I might come across. So is “connect the frombulator to the octanizer but watch out for the ultra convexication that might form” gibberish or just your ignorance of the terminology in use in that problem domain? Most people don’t try to figure out how to navigate each field. Heck, even scientists use shortcuts like “astrology has no scientific basis so it doesn’t matter what so-called SMEs in those fields say”. So you rely on trust in various organizations and peers to help guide you. These structures can often fail you for various reasons but that’s the best we’ve managed to do. That’s why for example “trust the science” is a bad slogan - people aren’t really trusting the science. They’re trusting what other people (some times political leaders) tell them the science is. Add in bad-faith actors exploiting uncertainty and sowing chaos and it’s a mess. Silencing the idiot is fine as long as your 100% certain you’re silencing someone who’s wrong and not just someone espousing a countervailing opinion (eg Hinton’s deep learning research was poo-pooed by establishment ML for a very long time)
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
Not to mention vaccine hesitancy because "when was the last time you got healthcare for free?"
dredmorbius 5y ago
Idiots engage. Reason doesn't.

jonny_eh 5y ago

> why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? Because it's not idiots that are the problem, it's bad-faith actors, and they're very good at manipulating people. In the past they'd have to do that 1:1, now they can do it at scale.

brighton36 5y ago
I would also suggest that bad faith is contagious. Once bad faith enters, the incentives are such that everyone acts in bad faith in short time. ('Well if he's lying, then I'm forced to lie too' become easy to justify)
treis 5y ago
They've been able to do that since at least radio and arguably since the printing press. At worst, Facebook is an evolutionary step along that spectrum.
- stilist 5y ago
  There's effectively no cost to do it now, though.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Radio and newspapers were effectively local, we now have global reach so that it takes just a few to mess things up everywhere.
pier25 5y ago
It's true there are bad-faith actors, but there are definitely lots of idiots who don't know they are wrong.
- nradov 5y ago
  Is it possible that you're also a wrong idiot but are unaware of it?
  - pier25 5y ago
    Totally
hui-zheng 5y ago
I would say the most dangerous are not the bad-faith actors, but those self-deceived ones who have genuine "good intention" but act out the "bad" consequence. And everyone of us could be that self-deceived ones, including you and me.
xedrac 5y ago
I've been in several debates where I was written off being in "bad-faith", when in reality, I just didn't agree with with the popular opinion on a particular subject. It seems people are all too eager to justify their own position by labeling others as being in "bad-faith".
- kelnos 5y ago
  Except in this case we know that there have been many organizations, FB pages, and fake individual FB accounts set up specifically to spread misinformation and FUD about COVID and vaccines. That's the definition of bad faith. Certainly, from there, real regular people pass on and help spread this misinformation. Hard to say how many of those people are also acting in bad faith or have just been manipulated and scared into believing the bad information. But it seems certain that the source of much of this garbage is bad-faith actors.
  - xupybd 5y ago
    Where can I read more on these organisers of miss information?
    - r721 5y ago
      >Just twelve anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms. This new analysis of content posted or shared to social media over 812,000 times between February and March uncovers how a tiny group of determined anti-vaxxers is responsible for a tidal wave of disinformation - and shows how platforms can fix it by enforcing their standards. https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen News story: 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...
      - jimmygrapes 5y ago
        OK so I read through the reports here and... there's nothing there. The report focuses on the reach of these people, which is legitimate, but the report also operate on a tenuous (if not entirely false) premise that the information compiled is "false" or "misinformation" similar terms. The very few (and obviously cherry-picked) examples for each supposedly nefarious actor are hardly damning. The report's authors do absolutely nothing to "debunk" the claims (and I recognize that there are claims that cannot be debunked by virtue of their design), and simply says "This is wrong." Forgive me for not trusting either side here, but simply saying "you're wrong" to someone else doesn't meet my criteria for believing that you're right.
rumblerock 5y ago
Given enough capability and knowledge of manipulation methods bad actors can not only shape conversations and promote controversial / conspiratorial information, but also fan the flames of the backlash that make collective reason impossible. So long as there are holes in these platforms and a combative stance by platforms to resolve them, this power can be had or hired. You don't need nation state resources to pull it off at this point. It's pretty widely acknowledged that what happens or begins on social media is now shaping the behavior of politicians and the narratives of legacy media. So if you successfully seed something on social media you get to enjoy the ripple effects through the rest of society and the media. If I have enough resources and motivation, I'm fine with that success rate being 1%, even 0.1% if it gets significant traction. And once it's out there, the imprint on those exposed really can't be undone by a weakly issued correction that never gets the reach of the original false information.

topkai22 5y ago

Facebook is not just a hosting platform, through the Facebook feed it exercises a great deal of editorial control over what posts/information is surfaced to users. So while Facebook might be giving everyone a megaphone, it doesn’t turn everyone the same volume. It needs to own that.

matwood 5y ago

> The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? And here is the real problem with FB, the algorithmic feed. Normal life is pretty boring day-to-day, and doesn't trigger 'engagement'. Conspiracies, etc... cause an enormous amount of engagement. When a person is fed conspiracies all day by the engagement algorithm, even the most critical thinkers will start to drift. It works for the same reason advertising works, familiarity and repetition. The solution is never use FB, but that ship has sailed for most.

bluGill 5y ago
I have had decent luck in reverting facebook back to what it is for: sharing pictures of my kids with people who care to see pictures of my kids. That means every time someone shares something - no matter how funny - I block the place it was shared from permanently. Slowly facebook is running out of things to show me that isn't pictures of my friend's kids.
- bryan_w 5y ago
  Same, it didn't really take as much as I thought it would to get it to stop showing me reshares, but now I see either groups content or family/friends original content. I still wish they had fine grain controls though.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I dropped all groups too. Facebook's algorithm is a terrible interface for groups - it doesn't show me everything instead just what it determines might be interesting, and doesn't have any means to help with discussion of topics.
- mavhc 5y ago
  If only they could advertise your kids to you. "I picked a free service and was annoyed they wanted to make money somehow"

d1sxeyes 5y ago

That's also missing the greater picture. It's giving _everyone_ a megaphone... but giving the loudest megaphones to the people who can get most people to listen to them. You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree with (hell, half of my HN comments are because I felt motivated to write something to disagree with some OP at some point - even this one). What that means is the traditional small-c conservative 'village elders', 'parish priests', and 'elected officials', who hold authoritative positions not because they're controversial, but because they historically represented positions of neutrality and consensus end up with quiet megaphones, and the madmen claiming the world is flat and there's a paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop end up with the loudest megaphones. Half of the population is below average intelligence, and giving the wrong people the loudest megaphones has a devastating effect on society.

nradov 5y ago
Intelligence is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong were quite intelligent by any objective measure, but giving them megaphones resulted in horrific disasters far worse than anything caused by Facebook users so far.
yololol 5y ago
> Half of the population is below average intelligence By definition :)
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  Only if the distribution is symmetric. [0] Extra pedantic mode: if the population is an odd number, the number of below average intelligence will not equal the number of above average intelligence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_probability_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_probability_distribu...
  - d1sxeyes 5y ago
    >if the population is an odd number, the number of below average intelligence will not equal the number of above average intelligence I'll leave counting as an exercise for the reader :D

downWidOutaFite 5y ago

Erosion of trust in elites just so happens to also be a long-term goal of polluters, quacks, scammers, and other powerful parasites of the common wealth when they run up against government or science.

kelnos 5y ago

> it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone. Are they, though? It seems like FB amplifies things that they think will generate more engagement and "stickiness". Sensational things that cause outrage tend to do that more than cold, hard facts. I would not at all be surprised if misinformation gets amplified orders of magnitude more than the truth.

mavhc 5y ago
They amplify things that cause you to see more ads, because you picked a free platform

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

Facebook (like News) is entertainment. People don't select entertainment for accuracy. The village idiot (that's successful on Facebook) has self-optimized for being catchy - that's why people are listening.

blablabla123 5y ago

I think in general Facebook has a bias towards inflammatory posts - and other platforms for that matter as well including HN actually. Also it's easy to blame the village idiot for everything, but I don't think Donald Trump or Alex Jones are village idiots. They are surely idiots but left the village quite some time ago and gained popularity before Facebook (InfoWars was founded 1999) - although FB surely was an accelerator stage. That said, the village idiot is harmless and I think aristocracy (rule of the elite) is definitely not the solution. But what is true that the normal filters in an offline community haven't been translated online yet.

didibus 5y ago

> it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone I think this can be argued against, because Facebook does recommendation and algorithmic curation. Even if Facebook didn't purposely tweak things to propagate disinformation, you could say it is easy to manipulate their algorithms to disproportionately push the information. So for me it's a case of Facebook not doing enough to fight potential abuse on their platform. There's an element of responsibility here, because we are prone to some material more than other. There are primitive instincts in us, and content designed to take advantage of that is parasitic, and it is manipulative and addictive in that sense. Crazy theories, appeal to emotions, controversy, nudity, clan affiliation, and all that are ways to take advantage of our psyche. Even a smart person is as smart as the data more readily available to them. If the only thing about gender psychology I ever heard about was Jordan Peterson because he's been recommended to me, even if I'm the smartest most reasonable person, this is now the starting point of my understanding and thoughts around gender psychology. So I think a platform that is optimized to show information that is most designed to make people susceptible to it, and that also targets information to the most susceptible people to present it to is by design going to result in the outcomes we're seeing.

vlovich123 5y ago

> The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? Societally we solve this through trust organizations. Individually, I have no way to validate the information every expert/idiot I might come across. So is “connect the frombulator to the octanizer but watch out for the ultra convexication that might form” gibberish or just your ignorance of the terminology in use in that problem domain? Most people don’t try to figure out how to navigate each field. Heck, even scientists use shortcuts like “astrology has no scientific basis so it doesn’t matter what so-called SMEs in those fields say”. So you rely on trust in various organizations and peers to help guide you. These structures can often fail you for various reasons but that’s the best we’ve managed to do. That’s why for example “trust the science” is a bad slogan - people aren’t really trusting the science. They’re trusting what other people (some times political leaders) tell them the science is. Add in bad-faith actors exploiting uncertainty and sowing chaos and it’s a mess. Silencing the idiot is fine as long as your 100% certain you’re silencing someone who’s wrong and not just someone espousing a countervailing opinion (eg Hinton’s deep learning research was poo-pooed by establishment ML for a very long time)

BeFlatXIII 5y ago

Not to mention vaccine hesitancy because "when was the last time you got healthcare for free?"

dredmorbius 5y ago

Idiots engage. Reason doesn't.