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Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can
by 1101010010 3y ago
Social media access to user data (whether foreign or domestic) is bad, but it is a distraction from the real evil: behavioral management at scale. When you can target specific demographics and control what they see 8-10 hours of the day, you can change what they think, say, do, and most importantly, how they vote. People are literally being programmed (euphemistically, "conditioned") by the specific triggers and stimuli with almost surgical precision, and completely unbeknownst to them. This is uncomfortable to recognize and discuss, so the conversation is sadly reduced to "China/AI is bad/evil" to further foment hate and division.
- password4321 3y agoAlso on the front page: TikTok Feeds Teens a Diet of Darkness https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932387
- ChrisRR 3y agoJust look at how people were programmed into believing that masks were bad. At best they could save lives, at worst they were an inconvenience. But some people acted like you had just punched them in the face if you asked them to wear one And why? Because certain politicians and media outlets decided to randomly make it a political issue, and then suddenly you have people angrily spouting all kinds of crap rather than be slightly inconvenienced and have to smell their own breath
- capableweb 3y ago> When you can target specific demographics > control what they see > People are literally being programmed [...] by the specific triggers I hate marketing/PR as much as the next person, but have become part of daily life. How do we get rid of it? Outlaw the practice of trying to influence people by marketing? Edit: Rereading your comment I realize you're talking about something else, but I guess the same applies nonetheless.
- millzlane 3y agoI feel like a large push from the AD council would be appropriate. (Not sure what the exact message would be) It feels like some of the largest industries rely on the masses being easily programmable. TV, Radio, Billboard, basically advertisements. Most are designed to make you give them your money. It's easy to spot and ignore when you realize it's happening.
- godelski 3y agoHow do we get rid of it? Can you get rid of it? No. Doing so would result in the loss of many important rights and have unintended consequences. Not even China can get rid of this. BUT that doesn't mean you can't put regulations and limitations on them. As one example, we may want to make laws that ensure that ads are easily recognizable as ads. I'm referencing Native Advertising. I want to use an example from the NYT[0] that is marked, to give an example of how nefarious this can actually be. The article itself only mentions the show once, in the middle, and mostly discusses women's lives in prison. It would not be surprising to believe that this is not an ad but actually a news story. It is both, but that's why it is nefarious. Is this ad easily recognizable? Even with the notice? We can talk about dark patterns (native advertising might be one), and prevent many of them. Not allowing for bait and switches. Ensuring that options are easily conveyed. I don't think it matters which side of the political spectrum you're on or many of your philosophical ideals, but tricking people into buying things they don't want or need is not ethical. We live in a specialized world and one person can't be an expert in everything. If the game is supercomputers and teams of psychologists and lawyers against individuals then I think we all know this is an unfair game. We have to talk about how to level this playing field if we want to preserve individual freedoms and safety. So I know this doesn't really answer your question, and the truth is that I don't have a good answer. I think the topic itself is surprisingly complicated and we need to think carefully about it. The path we're going down clearly isn't acceptable to most people. But overreacting will also be similarly bad. We need to have a tough social conversation and figure out what we want together. We have to learn, a lot, because this is nuanced. We have to be open to being wrong, with a focus on learning and improving rather than asserting our positions (because they are all wrong in some form or another). Which that might be the hardest thing of all, but if we can do this then we can solve a lot more problems. Maybe this is the great filter? [0] https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separate-but-not-equal.html https://www.nytimes.com/paidpost/netflix/women-inmates-separ...
- paulcole 3y agoIf you’re an adult watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day that’s on you to fix. When I was at my “peak”, I was watching 2-3 hours a day and that felt like a lot. If a kid is watching TikTok 8-10 hours a day, that’s on the parents to fix. This is like the hot dog man meme. “Who’s responsible for this?” Ultimately you are in control of your eyeballs and your time. Stop watching! Or not. TikTok is awesome. Watch it 8-10 hours a day if you want.
- hiatus 3y ago> Ultimately you are in control of your eyeballs and your time. Stop watching! There are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars whose sole job is to get you locked into a feedback loop in these apps. We are engineering addiction.
- whitemary 3y agoThe addiction is a side effect of a society built on exploitation. In other words, capitalism is literally the problem.
- hiatus 3y agoDoes addiction exist in non-capitalist countries? Could you expand because I'm not sure if I understood the point you're making.
- meowtimemania 3y agoWhy would TikTok or FaceBook not engineer addiction? It generates more money for them. If they don't engineer addiction, another company will emerge and engineer addiction. I think this type of problem has to be solved by the government.
- Joeri 3y agoShould all addictive products be allowed? When does such a product deserve being regulated or outlawed?
- MuffinFlavored 3y agoFOX news and CNN don’t change what people think/how they vote?
- brainphreeze 3y agoThey're all doing it. Big tech, social media, left/right.
- whitemary 3y agoThere is no left in the US
- xienze 3y ago_rolling eyes emoji_ Yes, as has been pointed out countless times, the US left would be considered further right than the Nazi party to all you enlightened Europeans. We know, we get it. Doesn’t change the fact that there is something called left wing politics in the US, and it’s considerably different from right wing politics in the US.
- deprecative 3y agoThere is nothing called left wing politics in the US. Just people with their heads so far up their own ass they don't realize how far right the US is.
- DirkH 3y agoWhataboutism
- noptd 3y agoAs if that's relevant or excuses this behavior.
- warning26 3y agoAre you suggesting that FOX and CNN are good things? If it's possible, I'd say we should ban anything working in this way.
- makach 3y agohow does this differ from newspapers, books and the spoken word?
- millzlane 3y agoYou have to actively seek it out, or be told about it. Rather than it being presented in your face the moment you wake up out of bed. Referring to folks so addicted it's the first thing they grab, see all the notifications, and are back at it by morning time.
- smeej 3y agoNewspapers aren't nearly as effective at keeping attention indefinitely/at every opportunity, nor at controlling what you read next.
- shawabawa3 3y agoFox news seems to have done a pretty good job of this in the US
- vosper 3y agoFox News isn’t a newspaper
- robocat 3y agoPresumably most viewers have chosen that echo chamber, so it really isn’t the same to compare it. Also Fox News has only a few million viewers each night e.g. “Fox News Channel coasted to an easy win in prime time Monday night, delivering an average total audience of 2.351 million viewers”.
- wolpoli 3y agoFor newspapers, it was relatively easy to see and compare the content of the different papers side by side. I am not sure how I would jump out of my social media news bubble.
- akudha 3y ago
- throwaway038519 3y agoRegarding your comment about behavioral management at scale. Carl Sagan once said: "If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." It would be interesting to know if this were true in that case.
- klabb3 3y agoThis is pretty much Plato’s cave. But yeah, it seems to be absolutely true.
- whitemary 3y agoYour understanding of the meaning of Plato's cave is questionable.
- syndacks 3y agoNot sure Plato’s cave applies here.
- swayvil 3y agoYou clearly skipped the footnotes.
- wmidwestranger 3y agoForgive my dusty memory but I think the relation is that most people stay in the cave, not because they enjoy the experience or they're completely ignorant of the sky, they stay because they are unprepared, incapable, or unwilling to leave. I doubt most people believe that TikTok is valuable to them but I'm sure many find it irresistible once they are hooked.
- quarok 3y agoMy understanding of Plato's cave is that it is about the disparity between the ideas in our head and reality. For example, you know what a triangle is, but there is no such thing as a triangle in the world, only imperfect shapes with three sides that approximate a triangle. This means that it is not "most people stay in the cave" - it is, "we all stay in the cave because it is impossible to bridge the gap between theoretical construct and lived experience, but we all know about both".
- slim 3y agoFurthermore you can target specific persons : heads of states, gov personnel, parliament representatives,... and their families, friends. You can get them "conditioned", you can drive them to commit errors for the purpose of black mailing them, etc...
- slowhadoken 3y agoCorrect. The other issue is to not develop pro-CCP rhetoric out of this false dichotomy too. It’s all just varying degrees of social pollution created by some propagandists.
- bt4u 3y ago[dead]
- pessimizer 3y agoThis is literally just the anti-China "brainwashing" propaganda warmed up for a new paranoid generation. I used to collect John Birch and anti-communist publications from the 50s for their histrionic historical value, but now I'm thinking I should start reprinting them and changing the dates. Both Democrats and Republicans would eat it up. edit: somehow Cambridge Analytica's bullshit marketing material combined with The Manchurian Candidate in the boomer mind. ----- edit: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-brainwashing-and-how-it-shaped-america-180963400/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-brainwashi... > “The basic problem that brainwashing is designed to address is the question ‘why would anybody become a Communist?’” says Timothy Melley, professor of English at Miami University and author of The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State. “[Brainwashing] is a story that we tell to explain something we can’t otherwise explain.” > The term had multiple definitions that changed depending on who used it. For Hunter—who turned out to be an agent in the CIA’s propaganda wing—it was a mystical, Oriental practice that couldn’t be understood or anticipated by the West, Melley says. But for scientists who actually studied the American POWs once they returned from Korea, brainwashing was altogether less mysterious than the readily apparent outcome: The men had been tortured. > [...] > Meanwhile, the American public was still wrapped up in fantasies of hypnotic brainwashing, in part due to the research of pop psychologists like Joost Meerloo and William Sargant. Unlike Lifton and the other researchers hired by the military, these two men portrayed themselves as public intellectuals and drew parallels between brainwashing and tactics used by both American marketers and Communist propagandists. Meerloo believes that “totalitarian societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union or Communist China were in the past, and continue to be, quite successful in their thought-control programs… [and] the more recently available techniques of influence and thought control are more securely based on scientific fact, more potent and more subtle,” writes psychoanalyst Edgar Schein in a 1959 review of Meerloo’s book, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control—Menticide and Brainwashing.
- codedokode 3y agoThis is not something new. History shows that when the government controls the media, it can control people's opinions and beliefs. The only difference is that now the control over TikTok users' minds is not in the hands of US Government and that's why they are unhappy.
- maxloh 3y agoIs there a political party that the Chinese government considered less hostile than the other?
- brandall10 3y agoThe Century of the Self by Adam Curtis is a great doc on how this took shape in the early 20th century; its primary focus was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud who invented public relations and was a powerful political consultant for many US administrations. One of his main areas of research was using media as a tool for crowd control... he had a somewhat noble viewpoint about it, believing that large crowds by nature devolved into anarchy: "Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos".
- browie 3y agoWhat do you mean devolved into anarchy?
- brandall10 3y agoThat the larger the population got, the harder it would be to control, politically or otherwise. That there would be all sorts of competing factions for mindshare and ideology, radicalization, etc, in a fully free society. He more or less viewed consumerism as a means pacify these tensions, to indirectly exert control... hence the development of closer ties between big business and the government.
- wmidwestranger 3y ago> This time it'll be different, we're way better than the last bunch to do it, double-promise!
- quadcore 3y agoIt may be new to the extend it's hyper centralized indeed.
- useEffect 3y agoHighly recommend reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism on this topic
- wslh 3y agoI wonder if full homomorphic encryption plus ZKP are the way to go and if time will prove it in this decade.
- throwaway4575 3y agoIf your democracy can be thwarted by free speech from a bad actor, then your democracy is shit.
- electrondood 3y agoThis is exactly what Russia did in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The Trump campaign gave voter polling data to Konstatin Kilimnik. Russia then proceeded to exploit Facebook to target swing voters, and Trump won because of 80k voters across Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThat is one of thousands of reasons, yes.
- user_named 3y agoNo they didn't. Source.
- ryanmerket 3y agobeen saying this for years... the response is always: "they didn't spend enough money to sway enough people" but who did they target? which zipcodes or DMAs? specific UIDs? Trump won be 80k votes in the swing states.
- jdkee 3y agoRussia's reach on Facebook was minimal and likely did not meaningfully alter the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election. See https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-select-committee-intelligence-united-states-senate-russian-active-measures https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-sele... See also https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-election-facebook.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/us/politics/russia-2016-e...
- hedora 3y agoIn particular, the lawsuit alleges they are in compliance with a Chinese law that sounds identical to the US CLOUD Act. Is that terrible? Of course. However, US law is as bad or worse.
- wmidwestranger 3y agoAbsolutely correct. Along with the usual reduction, there is also the, "Actually, it's too free speech that is bad we need censorship." Meanwhile, no issues with operant conditioning from the Skinner Box Phone.
- polyomino 3y ago8-10 hours a day? Basically nobody is using social media this much.
- mikrl 3y agoMemetic warfare I think they call it.
- bigbluedots 3y agoThis is frequently asserted as fact, and I don't disagree that it is possible. But do you have some specific evidence that you can provide?
- dotnet00 3y agoBrings to mind that old leaked Google internal 'thought experiment' video "The Selfish Ledger": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVVo14A_fo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDVVo14A_fo
- xnx 3y agoAKA advertising
- gnarbarian 3y agoI think this is always been the case with media going back as far as language existed. We are more aware of it now. the big innovation recently has been the ability to manage content of peer to peer communication as well through social media.