QAnon and Pinterest Is Just the Beginning | Hacker News Reader

QAnon and Pinterest Is Just the Beginning

hapgood.us

27 pointssmacktoward11 comments

The way Pinterest presents images with very little context can also discourage users from connecting images to their source websites (which they may never visit). It's like a social Google Image search with recommendations.

I believe this is a big part of the "fake news" problem on Facebook and Twitter as well -- both of them present stories from all different kinds of sources as visually identical "cards," with the only included indication of where it came from being the domain name the story is posted on. And that domain name is typically presented in tiny, light gray type, making it super easy to miss. The result is that a headline from, say, the Wall Street Journal is presented with the exact same visual weight as a story from BobsConspiracyBunker dot biz. The casual reader scanning through his feed has no quick way to distinguish which stories are actual journalism and which are not. Doing that takes work, and work is something we know people are not going to go out of their way to do.

> The way Pinterest presents images with very little context can also discourage users from connecting images to their source websites

Or hide it from them. After landing on pinterest through a search a few times, I figured that sources are not a thing there and just started blocking pinterest results. Besides presenting content in a horrible way, the interface is even worse.

I don't understand why people like it.

Part of this seems founded on serving content based on what people do versus what they say. In the case of the video shown, they said they were interested in recipes, yet didn't bother to pin anything for recipes. From the standpoint of the algorithm, they must not be very interested in recipes, no matter what they claim.

Good or bad, this 'actions speak louder than words' approach isn't merely a social media thing. "Oh, the politician says they are for good thing, but they voted against the Bill for Good Thing." That is regardless of context, too.

I don't know whether they have this feature, but it seems to me this could be mostly addressed with a 'Less of this' button.

With a feedback mechanism, even if someone manages to inject an unrelated meme into a given demographic profile, those memes could be weeded out by a subset of those people who are just trying to keep their view the way they want it.

Honestly scary stuff. I can see a good number of middle-aged women be very receptive to the fake information being disseminated on Pinterest, so long as they think that such information just "organically" appeared in their home feeds.

Clicked for me. The Democratic party should absolutely be looking into it, because for the life of them they can't seem to explain why they aren't reaching white suburban women (I've seen a slide literally titled "where are the white suburban women?") they assumed they had locked down with Clinton.

Either way I hope some organization with a lot of resources delves further, my "spreadsheet of Twitter bots" doesn't exactly constitute research and I'd love to see something bigger/better/more effective.

So what are some strategies in terms of recommendation systems to avoid overly personalizing your user's recommendations? Any literature on mitigating this issue?

Let them do it themselves.

>I don’t know how compromised Pinterest is at this point. But everything I’ve seen indicates its structure makes it uniquely vulnerable to manipulation. I’d beg journalists to start including it in their beat, and researchers to throw more resources into its study.

If we've learned anything from recent doxxing culture, he's dogwhistling journalists to harass tech platforms into purging users he views as problematic, only this time, with a patriarchal flavor:

>So why don’t we talk about it? My guess is that its perceived as a woman’s platform, which means the legions of men in tech reporting ignore it. And the Silicon Valley philosopher-king class doesn’t bring it up either. It just sounds a bit girly, you know? Housewife-ish.

Indeed, Mike, it's time for the MEN to step in. /s

You don't view qanon memes as problematic? Or does your /s tag apply to your whole post?

Have you ever seen much reporting on Pinterest? I buy his theory - nobody in tech reporting takes it seriously because few in tech reporting falls into Pinterest's audience.

Maybe we're both missing some articles on the subject though?

I'm unsure about this class of problem. On the one hand, it most definitely is a problem (the quote about 'engines of personalisation' being engines of radicalisation was particularly resonant here).

But on the other hand, I don't know that it's a problem to be fixed in-platform. Society has dealt with unsourced or decontextualised information in the form of gossip for millennia, and it's done that by building up an immune system of sorts, in that people (mostly) grow up knowing to take stories they hear in the pub (or wherever) with a healthy pinch of salt.

What we haven't done is start giving people chatting in pubs "citation needed" tickets. Maybe that's a bad thing - I don't know - but it seems like the real solutions to these problems all involve instilling healthy scepticism in the populace at large, and a habit of treating online interactions just the same as offline, rather than altering the medium.

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