Facebook accused of introducing extremists to one another via suggested friends | Hacker News Reader

Facebook accused of introducing extremists to one another via suggested friends

telegraph.co.uk

36 pointsahiknsr18 comments

Doesn't the government do this on a regular basis via incarceration?

"well yes officer, I was stealing from the store. But did you see the other guy who stole from the store five minutes before me? It seems unfair to single me out"

Garbage outrage bait.

For more than a decade these same people cheered and clapped for every benefit of the web and algorithms and software and automation and social media and all of that.

Now it's becoming fashionable to turn around and point fingers at completely obvious and trivial consequences of it and act as if the citizens are helpless infants and the corporations are the babysitters responsible for anything and everything.

"OMG lies found on the internet" "Facebook accused of allowing people to lie" "children allowed to view slightly creepy animations on YouTube ... oh wont somebody think of the children" "Public information shared on the internet was scraped and sold to 10 companies ... everybody go nuts"

I'm happy that these concerns have finally reached the mainstream but there's an alarming "brain dead" theme to these waves of news articles.

Like just a particular flavor of news articles becomes fashionable and then every journalist pushes out every possible variation of that topic at all cost just to stay relevant?

How do you go for more than a decade not caring at all about any of these concerns and being so dismissive to suddenly turning around in such extreme way?

If it was more of a balanced transition from not caring to caring I'd understand better.

But this pendulum swing makes me think that not many people are thinking for themselves anymore.

They just go with the group-think mindset of the year.

I get the feeling there's been a persistent campaign to attack whatever is deemed the current symbol of American hegemony, for quite a while, but every now and then people move on in a coordinated way. I distinctly remember when there was a constant focus on fracking for a while. Fracking is still around and the US is still one of the top oil producers in the world, but it's as if someone decided attacking it wasn't fruitful, and everybody moved on in more or less unison. This is conspiratorial thinking, but I can't seem to shake it.

It was recently reported that the Jade Helm conspiracy theories of a few years ago were encouraged, if not originated, by a Russian disinformation campaign:

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/cia/386156-ex-ci...

That's not the same thing as the majority of the media being controlled by a single entity though, so I still have no idea what is happening. But it doesn't feel natural or spontaneous.

It's partly because news feeds on itself. Something is news because it is news. The "news cycle" is a thing. Remember the "pink slime" issue that was a big story until one day it wasn't. See also: Kardashians

It's also because lobbying is directed toward the media. Fracking in the USA is a huge threat to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others. These nations will naturally find ways to push the story that fracking is bad. It is a weird sort of attack on the US economy, done to prevent the US from getting an advantage.

Restaurant accused of feeding criminals?

Yeah, in some sense this is the system working as expected.

As intended? Because intentionally introducing terrorists to each other is a serious criminal offence in a lot of places.

I can see how this kind of thing comes about; it's very silicon valley to assume that 'murder' and, say 'gardening' are just rows in a database and it would be inappropriate bias to declare one to be better than the other.

Intended and expected are two different things. A person may intend to be a good person, but others may expect them to fail.

More interesting is how Facebook classifies these traits automatically? I can see someone specifying gardening as an interest but even one of those asswipes presumably have enough intelligence not to specify terrorism as a hobby

It'll be like the Netflix tens of thousands of micro-genres. A statistical clustering of words and liked pages.

(Also, if it's anything like western rightwing extremism, it's surprising how little euphemism a page needs to evade banning)

It seems highly unlikely that there's a person at Facebook that's intentionally recruiting terrorists by linking them to other radicalized folks.

This is almost certainly just blind algorithm that links people found dawdling in the same corners of the social graph.

Don't feed the trolls. This article is outrage bait. As someone said below, it's hyperventilating because a restaurant served a criminal.

Facebook is not a restaurant, it's a news and ideology aggregator.

So are restaurants, actually, if you count bars.

Or old-fashioned diners. I was in one and some old guys at the counter were talking about the conspiracies that control everything.

“Over a period of six months the [US based user] went from having no clear religion to becoming a radicalised Muslim supporting Isil.”

That certainly escalated quickly.

So, if it's possible to be a Facebook user and a supporter of a known terrorist organisation ... Should the rest of us really be worried about what we reveal to Facebook?

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