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Comment by sea2 | Hacker News Reader

Look at the consequences in Dallas!

Humanity has not dealt with bad information reaching this many of its lunatics at this kind of speed.

IMHO this is and should be the highest priority bug on the issue list.

Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page have no idea what to do about it and by keeping quiet about it or being defensive about it isn't helping.

Just try talking about slowing the speed of unprocessed information reaching the mentally ill, the ignorant or misguided and you will be taken out like the communist party is running the show. I expect better from the smart people of silicon valley.

I expect them to work out a fix. No one else has the capability.

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The information was complete even before the murder, and no Facebook censure will achieve what you want: We know that USA institutions including police make undisciplined use of force, lethal or not, legal or not, against any layman interpretation of the constitution or not, against the UN rights or not. We know the police has always been systematically acquitted when charged with the murder of a civilian. We know the police tries to seize all evidence of events and loses it. We also know they use of Civil Asset Seizure of innocents (and we know they are 100% innocents, because they haven't been proven guilty nor charged). We know 1% of the USA population is in jail and we know that 95% (yes, 95%) jail sentences are set by plea bargain, and most of the remaining ones by police-only testimony, which means there is no formal proof that people in jail are guilty. And we know that not a single sentence was pronounced against HSBC drug lords.

For all I'm concerned as a member of the dominating class, the police is daily asking to be shot. Tough luck if you are an uncorrupted agent, but if you are uncorrupted you'd better speak up now.

Obama saying "It's time for a reform" is a mere approximation: If he issued an order for all police to put down all weapons tomorrow, the safety of the street would actually increase.

>If he issued an order for all police to put down all weapons tomorrow, the safety of the street would actually increase.

US police losing all firearms instantly without changing civilian gun controls laws would be a very dangerous situation. Much more dangerous than the current one.

It's not just the mentally ill, the ignorant or misguided, it's the general public that has to deal with so many negative emotions and information at an accelerating pace.

The world didn't got worse, but everybody started to feel that way. Because people now know what they didn't know before.

Two hundred years ago, when your beloved aunt died, you realised that after a week when the letter informing you arrived. During that week you could be happy, because you didn't know.

Now the death, misery, violence and unfairness that happens so regularly in our world is just a fingertip away.

Resulting in fear and anger. Those emotions are good for evading and hunting animals, but not for dealing with complex rules in a globalised society.

>Now the death, misery, violence and unfairness that happens so regularly in our world is just a fingertip away.

>Resulting in fear and anger.

or it could result in increased awareness about the issues and empathy toward the victims of "the death, misery, violence and unfairness". Such awareness and empathy can be very constructive and a force for progress and thus "good for dealing with complex rules in a globalised society."

History of progress is a history of wider and faster spread of fuller information. Police was brutalizing and murdering black people long before cell phone cameras. With cell phone recordings of such events now available, the society can't anymore just dismiss it and has finally to deal with it.

I agree and I'm not advocating to take back information. That is not possible anyway.

I just think that most people, for whatever reasons, do not have the capacity for "relaxed empathy" in stressful situations.

>I just think that most people, for whatever reasons, do not have the capacity for "relaxed empathy" in stressful situations.

It is not about "relaxed". It is about instinct in stressful situation to help the wounded member of your tribe. The modern technology just made the whole human race the same one tribe.

Humans cannot comprehend that many people being part of their tribe.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingroups_and_outgroups

> Now the death, misery, violence and unfairness that happens so regularly in our world is just a fingertip away.

And since they're always a kind of "emergency", an overriding situation for our brains to which we instinctively pay attention, that's the ultimate topic for news. Now with unlimited supply - if there's nothing bad happening in your city, local media will borrow something from elsewhere in the country. And if the whole nation had just a peaceful and happy week, they'll borrow something from abroad.

I do believe that as a society we need to reconsider the "freedom of press" in mainstream media. To be clear - the idea is based on the most honorable of principles. But with few decades of instant electronic communication behind us, we know few relevant things to be experimentally confirmed as facts:

- publishers have every reason to pick up most extreme examples for anything, and with lightspeed access to global information, they'll happily do this every day

- media plays havoc with our brains; in particular, with availability heuristic[0] - that makes us instinctively feel that everyone around us is rich hand happy (since our real neighbors, in terms of what we know about them, are media celebrities) and the world is a dangerous and brutal place (since we keep hearing about some crime or attack every single day - and the distance doesn't matter for availability heuristic)

- most people seem to be unaware that brains are not well adapted to our current technological environment, and in particular that if you don't constantly downplay or ignore most of the news, you're being lead to believe extremely wrong things - by the very virtue of availability heuristic

- those people vote

Something needs to be done about at least some of those points there. Trying to just educate people is too slow and too unreliable. I'm not saying "censor press" or something - but we need to somehow take into the account the standard failure mode media triggers in majority of population.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

I fully agree.

I think you make a salient point.

Historically, news either remained local and did not propagate, or if it did, it propagated slowly, and thus the impact was diffused, largely inhibiting reactionary movement.

Now, we not only have instantaneous hypersensationalised global media, but the filter-bubble echo chambers of social media which amplify and distort events to fit their world view and agenda, whatever that may be.

It's sad, really, as once upon a time we believed the Internet could bring global unity - but rather, it has deepened divisions, pushed political thought to extremes (defensiveness is one hell of a drug), and has brought about much of the societal ill we now see in developed countries.

Is there a solution? Facebook seem to be trying to break people out of their bubbles, but the thing is, people like their bubbles, as they're safe and cozy and they don't get angry at what someone they disagree with wrote.

Now, I'm pretty sure this same argument was espoused about handbills and movable type, and we demonstrably survived print, but again, velocity is the killer. I'm not sure if it's different or not.

Either way, it's the old tribal instincts doing their thing - either we need to collectively adapt (more easily said than done), or we need a technical or legal solution.

Legal solutions take the format of restrictions on speech, which nobody wants to promulgate, technical solutions will be worked around.

So - it's up to us to try to be better, to try to be moderate, to try not to get pissed off.

Maybe the solution is pharmaceutical. Maybe we need Huxley's soma. I don't see how you can change human nature quickly enough otherwise.

Lots of first-world countries have Internet. Not a lot of first-world countries have the amount of shootings, including mass shootings, the US has. That makes me doubt that the Internet is the problem.

It's not just shootings, though - the bitter rift that brexit has wrought is part of the same problem. Hell, gamergate sits in the category too. All this drives division, which ultimately drives violence.

Brexit is just as much, if not more, the responsibility of the newspapers which have spent so long writing misleading articles about the EU and inflammatory articles about "migrants".

Indeed, but that message has likewise been amplified through social media to the point where brexit became possible. Without SM, I don't think it would have happened.

Interesting theory, unfortunately in terms of the Brexit you have the Demographics and their choice of media dissemination, and their vote completely backwards.

The older Brits voted for the Brexit in mass, and they're much less likely to get their information from Social Media than the younger generations who voted to stay in mass. Also the British papers and television were largely in the stay camp as well

I don't think the effect necessarily requires the agents engaged by it to directly consume social media, as the traditional media producers act as surrogates, and have their increasingly extreme views and publications validated by the echo chamber. It's inarguable that SM has fundamentally altered the news cycle. Additionally, even if only a minority of a group engage in SM, it'll likewise amplify their views which then spill into meatspace, and then propagate through more traditional lines. It turns seeds into saplings, providing fertile ground for the burgeoning crop of political insanity.

Add to this reactionary forces, whereby groups step up their rhetoric in defence against a perceived threat to their worldview, and you see that part of what spurred the non SM older brexit group was opposition to theincreasingly shrill and derogatory warnings from the remainers.

Essentially, I think social media catalyses division, regardless of whether you directly consume it or not.

Social networks aren't the problem here. American police being useless and corrupt is.

If anything, social networks can be part of the solution, because they provide evidence in cases where otherwise there'd be none.

Now it's up to politicians and courts to actually punish corrupt cops.

Or you could fix your police. In any other modern country if police kills somebody it's huge news. In US it's usually a footnote (even cheerful sometimes).

And when police gets killed it is OK? Justified?

Honestly, it's the closest thing to symmetry yet. Let them know what it is like to constantly be under attack, to have your brothers slain in the street daily without provocation.

The consequences of such events do not move society in a positive direction, however.

> Let them know what it is like to constantly be under attack

Actually that's what's causing most killings by police. Police feeling like they are constantly under attack and that their lives are in danger every second of the day and that they have to protect their lives with the guns they were given.

Being a policeman is and should be a risky job. Not to the point of people orchestrating mass police killings but you shouldn't try to eliminate risk from being a policemen by shooting every citizen that might pose some threat to you.

Don't hold your breath on it, SV is more concerned on how to invade our privacy and push ads aggresively.

(Has anyone confirmed the identity and motives of the Dallas shooters yet?)

Police brutality leading to counter-riots predates Facebook and indeed the internet. Trying to hide the evidence is not going to help.

> I expect them to work out a fix. No one else has the capability.

Would you have AT&T start filtering phone calls based on content?

Anything that threatens to lessen profits in the least is hard evidence for the communist party running the show.

</sarcasm>

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