Today, stories bounce from fake news, to Russian propaganda, to user data mishandling, to fueling genocide in Myanmar.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that was Twitter as the major player RE: Arab Spring.
I think 8 years is a more than long enough time for backend changes in a platform to change sentiment. Also, the platform may not have been used for as many nefarious purposes in the past.
The rhetoric around this has shifted, not because Facebook has done anything different. Or because subsequent uprisings have been any different.
But those mini revolutions of the Arab Spring were not what we thought they were. "The People" taking power from the dictators, created the society they want, but it is LESS in line with liberal values than the previous one. This is what we failed to realize at the time.
Facebook has done an amazing job empowering the will of the people. Which we are still inclined to view as positive.
But when the majority of people WANT a government that is less tolerant of other religions than a dictator would be, what should we do? Should we blame Facebook? Or should we try to use Facebook to counter the hateful ideas that are being spread?
How trivial would it be to make sure this leader in the article who 'never met a Muslim', was forced to scroll through a feed with positive messages about Muslims and religious tolerance?
If Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today could they sway our elections with a billion dollar ad budget? We can't force any other group to live by our values. But we can promote what are values and ideas are, in a way that might be help them spread.
Maybe we should ask Facebook to help with this, instead of trying to take down the whole network just because some groups are using the platform in a way that we don't like.
This is tragically true. A revolution is a re-spin of the the roulette wheel when it comes to outcomes, the result is absolutely not guaranteed. In the case of Egypt, the semi-secular military dictatorship was overthrown and became .. an Islamic theocracy, which was actually worse for the average woman on non-devout Muslim, and the ensuing counter-revolution back to military dictatorship was reluctantly acquiesced to.
So when the users don't conform to the world view of the platform operators, the answer is platform sponsored propaganda? That is incredibly dystopian.
Facebook sponsors propaganda all the time. Its algorithms favor certain posts and messages over others, based on a long list of attributes, including ad dollars. But apparently that's OK, while suggest that Facebook display some positive third-party post about Muslims in Myanmar - while a genocide is underway - is suddenly "platform-sponsored propaganda"?
Of course this is much easier to rationalize in this situation. However that's how you end up giving away liberty. You give it up in little pieces in response to extreme situations, then when you go back about your life you don't get it back.
The real issue here is that this gets the whole problem backwards. We shouldn't be looking at a state-sponsored genocide and then claiming that "if only Facebook had more control over public discourse then we'd be able to solve this problem". The "problem" in that statement can be anything from this genocide taking place, to your preferred candidate losing an election. "We need more propaganda" isn't going to solve any of that, and in reality it's just a veiled power grab by companies that wish to control public discourse more effectively.
The genocide in Myanmar has both state-sponsored and spontaneous characteristics. Facebook can and should help with the latter, if it's going to allow folks to pass around pro-genocide messaging using the site.
In the end, I advocate for everyone to abandon all large-scale, centralized, corporate social media, but given how unrealistic this goal is at present, my next hope is for the large social media companies to assume more responsibility for their actions. The same standards that we've traditionally held all media companies to.
Again, this may be a more compelling example of how you might define "hate speech". But if you think facebook has a responsibility to start moderating speech based on its perceived "hatefulness", then you're still going to end up at the same destination, where genuine public discourse is gradually replaced with corporate approved discourse.
I think you are hearing something I didn't say.
I'm just talking about promoting some TED Talks. Making sure everyone can name at least 1 good Muslim. Maybe trying to raise the profile of the people who should be winning the Nobel Peace prize.
If someone is IN a hate group. I would like them to have some limited exposure to the views of the other side. I don't think that's propaganda.
I think 'content moderation' has a much higher potential for abuse, and a nightmare future.
Advertising is propaganda dedicated to getting you to conform the advertiser's preferences, and it's already targeted however the advertiser prefers, which could be by lack of conformance to those preferences.
You are basically suggesting that the platform operator doing themselves what they already build their business around allowing anyone with a checkbook to do is dystopian.
I would suggest it is no more dystopian than the status quo.
>A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.
The idea that the government is going to go after Facebook because it is used to fuel the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite is very scary.
From the wiki on Populism:
>Populism is most common in democratic nations and political scientist Cas Mudde wrote: "Many observers have noted that populism is inherent to representative democracy; after all, do populists not juxtapose 'the pure people' against 'the corrupt elite'?".[6]
Sure, populist upheaval can lead to American Revolutions. But it can just as easily lead to pogroms, and one of those patterns is repeated far more often throughout history than the others.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/populism
I disagree with your sense of unqualified populism implies authoritarian populism. In my experience it's used without qualifiers to describe both Trump and Bernie. I suppose whether you think those two are authoritarian probably depends a lot on your own political leanings. But generally it means "fight the power." Or in Trump's case, "drain the swamp [0]." Here's a NYT article that, having skimmed, seems reasonable to me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/how-can-donald-t...
[0]: This comment is not intended to confer any positive feelings towards Trump or imply that he did anything other than make the swamp even swampier. It was only in reference to his rhetoric
I think both the Trump and Bernie movements have some frightening populist characteristics. But between the two leaders, only Trump has been broadcasting blatant authoritarian messaging.
That's not to say that Bernie would never engage in any authoritarian action if he were elected, but he's not made overt any authoritarian tendencies like Trump has.
The mantra of "move fast and break things" has driven us off a cliff, where our moral backbone is what has been broken.