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Comment by 5trokerac3 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long it will be before the common person understands that social media has become mass scale social engineering.

If a news article critical of something Google is lobbying for doesn't come up in a Google search, then most of the population will never know it ever existed.

If Zuckerberg really is eyeing a political run in 2018 or 2020, will he block his opponent's posts or those critical of him from reaching people's timelines? Will he ban anyone critical of him from the platform? [0]

[0] - http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/street-artist-sabos-fa...

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> I wonder how long it will be before the common person understands that social media has become mass scale social engineering

Never. Most people has no interest in directing their life. They want pre-made solutions to their day to day problems. They don't analyze the news or any kind of information given to them.

If they did, lying again and again and using the same campaign schemes again and again would not work for politicians.

But it does. It always has.

When you see an uproar, it's never because somebody does something bad. It's because either:

- somebody has been badly hurt;

- some kind of important symbol has been badly hurt.

It's an emotional response. No thoughts into that.

I feel sad that we're (and possibly always were?) in a world where what you've said is true.

The collective lack of discernment and the collective lack of outrage (with appropriate action) make it seem like humanity would, probably by the turn of this century, live in one of those dystopian societies that we know of only from science fiction.

I'm trying to hold on to hope that there will be a revolution - decentralized communications, strong encryption as defaults, privacy conscious people understanding how they're manipulated and using solutions that help them stay out of "bubbles" and in control of their privacy, etc.

It would be extremely silly for him to do that. It would backfire immensely IMO.

He could however use facebook to promote his own content more aggressively, it would be less conspicuous and could be very effective.

"Display in timeline" is a zero sum game. Eventually someone's post is shown, and others' aren't. That's effectively the same as "promoting his on content more aggressively."

How to even prove it was done? The effect could be small enough to turn an election but not large enough to be reliably measured from the outside.

> How to even prove it was done? The effect could be small enough to turn an election but not large enough to be reliably measured from the outside.

Facebook is still a company with many employees, and I'm quite sure even Mark Zuckerberg can't simply go rummaging in the code to favour himself.

In other words, there will have to be (quite some) people in the know about this, which makes it likely to leak.

("Requiring many people to be in the know" is basically what convinces me of the impossibility of pretty much every conspiracy theory.)

In other words, there will have to be (quite some) people in the know about this, which makes it likely to leak.

And yet it was a decade before we knew Volkswagen was cheating on emissions tests.

It's amazing what a few unscrupulous engineers and some careful information sharing can do...

This is a good point. One of the reasons for the difference could be that the VW tests software was manageable by a few people, then embedded.

The timeline optimization one is likely to be handled by way more people.

Just a wild guess.

Hmm, that's a good counterpoint I hadn't thought of. Guess I'll have to find a way to refine my conspiracy-detection sensors...

As if they haven't already implemented that sort of mechanism for their advertisers.

He could even do it completely above-board, by paying himself for the advertising. That this effectively makes his campaign budget infinite will let him out-bid any competitors.

> will he block his opponent's posts or those critical of him from reaching people's timelines?

All he needs to do is to bury it to a significant enough degree to change outcomes but retain plausible deniability. He's not an idiot.

How would Google or Facebook stop the articles from hitting front page of Reddit? I would be extremely surprised if any major presidential candidate avoided at least one attack piece hitting the top post.

    > that social media has become mass
    > scale social engineering

I find comments like this exceedingly glib and conspiratorial, and they're usually presented simply as fact, as if proof was not needed.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

> Writing in the New Republic in 2014, Jonathan Zittrain, professor of international law at Harvard University, pointed out that, given the massive amount of information it has collected about its users, Facebook could easily send such messages only to people who support one particular party or candidate, and that doing so could easily flip a close election – with no one knowing that this has occurred. And because advertisements, like search rankings, are ephemeral, manipulating an election in this way would leave no paper trail.

> ...another Facebook experiment, published in 2014 in PNAS, prompted protests around the world. In this study, for a period of a week, 689,000 Facebook users were sent news feeds that contained either an excess of positive terms, an excess of negative terms, or neither. Those in the first group subsequently used slightly more positive terms in their communications, while those in the second group used slightly more negative terms in their communications. This was said to show that people’s ‘emotional states’ could be deliberately manipulated on a massive scale by a social media company, an idea that many people found disturbing. People were also upset that a large-scale experiment on emotion had been conducted without the explicit consent of any of the participants.

>> Facebook could easily send such messages only to people who support one particular party or candidate, and that doing so could easily flip a close election – with no one knowing that this has occurred. And because advertisements, like search rankings, are ephemeral, manipulating an election in this way would leave no paper trail.

I would be interesting if someone setup some kind of monitoring that might detect if that happens. They'd probably need the cooperation of many legitimate and diverse Facebook users, though.

    > could

being the operative word.

Also from your article:

    > The formation of The 
    > Groundwork prompted Julian 
    > Assange, founder of 
    > Wikileaks, to dub Google 
    > Clinton’s ‘secret weapon’ in
    > her quest for the US 
    > presidency.

No conspiracy no conspiracy you're the conspiracy!

I think you're operating on some cognitive dissonance here, because you're not addressing the second quote, which shows that Facebook has engaged in such experiments.

Also, you show cognitive bias by instantly scrapping a multi-thousand word essay because of one paragraph mentioning someone you already have a preconceived opinion on.

> The thousand word essay that turns up absolutely no evidence of foul play or conspiracy by owners of social media

The multi-thousand word essay that not only speaks of verifiable evidence from the author's own research proving the order or omission of search engine results heavily shape opinion, without detection, and:

1. Gives evidence from multiple other sources that Google's results are biased to support their business interests.

2. Calls upon a 50+ year precedent of corporations using all forms of media to manipulate opinion.

3. Recites the fact that two C-level Googlers straight up worked for Hillary Clinton.

4. Recites the fact that Google's search algorithm is a black box.

All this on the heels of a revelation that Eric Schmidt (one of those two that worked for Clinton) is willing to flex his muscle in nefarious ways when people are critical of Google, and you'd have to be unbelievably naive to think that he's above using his technology along with his money.

The thousand word essay that turns up absolutely no evidence of foul play or conspiracy by owners of social media, and instead hits insinuation pretty hard? Yes, I selectively quoted the most important bit.

What part of the reality of social media - and the profit, greed & control agendas that drive it are you misunderstanding?

The difference between it and the printing press

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