How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
By all means, criticize Facebook for privacy issues, but not for stuff like this, unless you actually want censorship on the largest scale ever in history.
That’s manipulation by traditional media upset their worldview and power to project it is slipping away from them.
I'm from India where we have a similar term in the political lexicon - "vote-bank politics". It's means a policy that a plurality of voters (the "bank") like and want, but you don't. If you're within the vote bank, then it's no longer vote-bank politics, it's democracy in action.
The sort of "populism" without a leader discussed in this article is nothing like that. But there are political powers that wish to ignore that a lot of people can be legitimately angry at the same time.
Now of course editorials and editorializing _is_ understandably different but unfortunately that wall has been completely breached and demolished.
CSPAN and arguably PBS are probably the only TV "news" networks that don't use every trick in the book to try and keep you watching so they can make more money by showing you more ads.
Advocating for outright bans on voicing disfavoured viewpoints is so obviously illiberal and thuggish as to be politically unpopular, which is why it is always platforms targeted rather than individual speakers, and why there is always some rationalisation for the complaint other than the viewpoint being expressed (Russian bots! Fake news! Algorithms optimising for rage! Harassment!) but in the end the root cause of the complaint is always that someone said something that progressives didn't like.
(This is not an argument against anonymity; I don't need to know where these accounts really live. I do need to know where political advertising is funded from, because there are laws about that.)
While I don't claim to have researched this issue in depth and it's worth taking this with a pinch of salt, I'm yet to see any evidence of this, nor has it been a part of most of the leftist reporting I've seen. The only instance I've heard of where a specific Twitter account has been accused of being a Russian misrepresenting their nationality was ian56789, and that accusation was false, as he demonstrated by going on Sky News and giving an interview.
There's really two parts to the populist wave: "establishment politics isn't delivering what we need" and "we must turn to what seems like a Man of the People". The first has some extremely valid points, the second has (mostly) been a total disaster.
Enabling horizontal communication, not controlled by the Mainstream Mass Media.
that's what they want. The media and many government officials have been implying that the citizens are simply too stupid to be trusted with filtering their information so the glorious government must restrict what they're allowed to see. At what point will they decide the common man is simply too dumb to vote and get rid of democracy as well?
All this talk is demeaning and shows what our cultured elites really think about us, that we're a bunch of dumb cattle that need to be controlled
This is foundation of American democracy actually. In the early history of the U.S., most states allowed only male adult property owners to vote (about 6% of the population).
I don't think it is fair to consider large-scale censorship as the only other alternative. Having some kind of neutral editorial process to filter out the unsubstantiated, hateful opinions and leave room for a more nuanced discussion raises the level of discourse, and is the model that have been offered by traditional media for a long time.
The problem with this view is that one person's hateful opinion is another person's oppressed minority opinion. There aren't many objective truths, moderators just end up enforcing their own world view (which we've already seen Facebook do).
If the internet is meant to be a platform on which people can express themselves freely (and I believe it is) then unsubstantiated and hateful opinions are a given, not a sign that the internet has failed, but that it's succeeded.
What failed is the naive, idealist expectation that the internet would raise the level of intellectual and cultural awareness of the planet, but I don't think many people really believed in that to begin with.
It depends on how exactly you define 'improvement'. Millions of people, speaking freely to each other, finding new friends sharing common interests would disagree with you.
The improvement I was talking about was the hope that the increased access to online communication would engage more people in constructive public discourse, include the voices of minorities and bring people with different backgrounds to a greater understanding of each other. Platforms like Facebook have utterly failed at that.
I'm of the view point that censorship is exactly the point of articles like this. They want Facebook to enforce a very bias view of what is acceptable speech, and intentionally conflate being a communication platform with being responsible for the outcomes of that communication.
How The Paper And Writing Is Fueling the French Populist Rage
How The Ability To Speak Is Fueling the French Populist Rage
Most other tech companies (especially the ones still in the "hustling" phase) are just as bad as FB if not worse. It's starting to feel like a coordinated smear campaign, even if all of it is accurate.
I don't get it. If it's all accurate then what is the problem exactly? That all the anger is directed at FB? They are the largest social media company, and in the good times I have never heard them say "but other social media companies deserve some love too". Running a business is not supposed to be easy.
Selective reporting is a huge problem. You can distort almost any topic by selectively reporting only truthful things.
Again, I'm not defending Facebook, but it's pretty peculiar -- they just seem to have been in hot water every day for the last few months. Maybe it's a vicious PR cycle where regular media outlets are now being incentivized to report on FB's negative press because that's what's getting clicks.... because negative press is being produced.
[EDIT] wanted to add that this is part of how people get sucked into conspiracy theories... No one has time to verify and fact-check every single fact, and editors/media outlets are doing it less and less these days. A few lies mixed in with a bunch of facts are sometimes really hard to find but can have lasting impacts on your world view/view of some subject. Of course, sometimes conspiracy theories, outlandish-seeming claims, and smear jobs are sometimes true and justified.
You mean like, determining what users see on their timelines?
"Others are just as bad" may be true, but they largely (barring Google/Amazon/etc.) don't have the power Facebook does.
"Facebook Gives People A Voice in France" - or something along those lines, a few years ago, if the Arab Spring is anything to go by.
The writer's perspective very much matters in this type of articles. It's especially obvious in politics (although many people still don't notice it, and think they are just being served "the facts").
That said, I'll hardly spill a tear over people "over-criticizing" Facebook. If there's one company that's worthy of waves and waves of criticism, Facebook certainly qualifies for that role.
It certainly deserves it more than Tesla, which, with the exception of the criticism of the reckless promotion and implementation of Autopilot, I think the criticism of Tesla lately has been largely off-base and undeserved.
But for some reason, people seem to assume that both good news and bad news should be delivered evenly throughout the year, or something. Like they get surprised when there's a lot of bad news/negative press continuing for many months about something (whether it's Tesla, Facebook, or cryptocurrencies), but forget the same has been true about the good news about those things in the past, too. The good and bad news are almost never evenly distributed over a period of time. They are far more likely to come in bursts of either positive or negative stories.
Not long ago, I remember reading on this very site comments dismissing the idea that Facebook will suffer over the Cambridge Analytica. I said then that Facebook will likely not see an immediate effect, but will likely see it over the long term, when it starts declining, the Cambridge Analytica will be one of the reasons for that decline.
All of these negative news stories you see now are connected to the Cambridge Analytica story, which seems to have opened a kind of "Pandora's box" for Facebook. It's all downhill from here for Facebook. Some people just haven't realized it yet.
All the EULA legalese that companies use to enforce their will could be turned in the opposite direction and we'd found out it's real worth -- I can dictate how FB uses the data they pull from my server just like they try, to the extent that anyone can tell someone else what to do with data instead of having near zero power as people who live in non-GDPR regions do now.
I mean I don't think this kind of scheme would actually work but I can still dream.
Instead of spotting the market, buying up the company who built it and slapping a fee on "unlimited music for a month" (a la Spotify), they sought to legislate it out of existence and in turn had their lunch eaten for them.
Dinosaurs trying to avoid the asteroid.
The gilets jaunes is not a political movement, it's a fuck you movement. Like many of Trump's electors in the USA, like Bolsonaro's electors in Brazil, like many of the M5S electors in Italy. Populists and fascists always have a simple answer to everybody's problem, if we can't give the people a solution, they will, and they'll win.
Greed is killing us all. It's killing the climate, it's killing democracy, it's going to be the end of us. Merry Christmas everyone!
Facebook is indeed a huge distribution model, one that's defective and one that's become a vector for disinformation. That is newsworthy, it's one of the biggest and most interesting media stories of the past half century.
Facebook's reach is why it's newsworthy, but Facebook's actions (and inactions) are why you hear more about them than Google, etc.
This video of senseless police brutality looks in fact to be pretty real and from the latest events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK8b4plAlJQ&feature=youtu.be . Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's lots of fake news related to the recent events but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater by saying that everything that gets shared on social networks is fake news.
Also, if you're going to pick a fight with a crew in full riot gear it's best to not get cornered by them.
More to the point, the protesters seeing this video will know that surrendering to the police will probably get their arms and feet broken so next time they protest they'll do almost anything in order to not let that happen, i.e. they'll become even more violent or/and they'll come better prepared for physical confrontations (better body-gear, actual weapons).
The ones getting their limbs smashed weren't protesting, they had destroyed and broken in to property with the probable intent of causing more damage.
All of this in a setting where police is massively outnumbered while being pelted with 10 pound rocks, bottles, fire crackers and tear gas.
Giving someone a beating to incapacitate them (no time for arrest & paperwork) is fair game in my eyes.
This is a very wrong view to hold, imho. Modern political concepts like the German Rechtsstaat or the English "Rule of law" depend on the police not doing what they're seen doing in videos like this one. If the general populace feels (or even starts to feel) that the police and the powers that be play by no rules then we'll be in a world of hurt and anarchy.
Macron's body guard getting filmed (out of context) beating a protestor led to him being arrested, suspended and then demoted and profuse apologies from France's head of state.
So I think police is still being held accountable the way they should.
Of course they would say that.
You can clearly see the restaurant wasn't open by the way the sliding doors were being pushed open (0:06), and a "fermé" sign on the door (meaning "closed") at 0:16. No employees visible anywhere.
To get away from the gas, why not run down the road the camera man was chased down by the cop? No gas there, no resistance from police and much easier than breaking & entering a restaurant.
In fact if you look on a map, the location of that BK is on a roundabout with no less than 10 roads branching off it.
But yes, those are my guesses based on the information available and I may be wrong.
Here is one of the many articles that have been published, I am linking this testimony by two journalists since liberation is a reputable publication, but you'll find more articles and more witness interviews if you look around.
https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/2018/12/05/la-video-des-...
Everybody present has told that the riot police just waltzed inside and starting beating people up, then let people leave but only going through a tunnel of cops beating them up some more. There are also more videos from different angles.
Assumptions are dangerous, and so are these stormtroopers.
It's still not clear why they would enter a BK (full of tear gas, according to the journalist) while at least some of the surrounding roads were free.
If they really were beating innocent bystanders then they should be punished to the full extent of the law, while at the same time I understand the violent reaction of the police after having been pelted with rocks for hours just for wearing a uniform.
I've been in these kind of protests before, you can tell well in advance that things are going to get ugly. When you have police being attacked from all sides and you intend no harm, you know it's time to gtfo because you will get caught up in the violence.
There were highschool protests today. Just look at the videos from this feed, and even with great sympathy for the police, even keeping in mind that context can be missing, I believe you'll see that we are beyond maintaining the civil peace :
https://twitter.com/Obs_Violences
I would argue that the protesters' violence (and i'm not denying there is) is a response to the state's own violence. I was still living in Paris about 2 years, when the protests were peaceful gatherings and the cops were unleashed without provocation, just to prevent people from being together. Repression and disdain form the people have grown the peaceful protests into violent protests, and now the protests are growing into an insurrection.
That's not blind rage, or an appetite for destruction : that is a democracy self-correcting when its government has consistently been too far over the line. That is standing up to the bully.
There's plenty of violence from the other side https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx8CjZv8-HA
It's actually you who is hiding behing the fact that there is a riseup email address, as if that allows you to ignore anything, and just "guess".
> There's plenty of violence from the other side
Yeah, collective punishment goes great with police brutality. Anything else?
It's also not clear why you're excusing police brutality, but you're still doing it.
> I've been in these kind of protests before, you can tell well in advance that things are going to get ugly.
That's all true, but doesn't excuse the police brutality.
> When you have police being attacked from all sides and you intend no harm, you know it's time to gtfo because you will get caught up in the violence.
Oh, so they didn't means you can deduce they "meant to cause harm", and that in turn excuses the harm we see?
No.
The comment you are replying to clearly says that unjustified police brutality should be punished at the full extent of the law.
Violence toward police, bystanders and property is never criticised. Burn down Paris! But as soon as they raise their batons everyone starts crying. If you're going to fight the state at least do it like a man.
If you're convinced France is a totalitarian state your ability to reason is probably quite limited.
Yeah, and you still leave it open whether it might be "justified", it goes on to say "When you have police being attacked from all sides and you intend no harm". Which prompted the following question you seem to avoided:
> Oh, so they didn't means you can deduce they "meant to cause harm", and that in turn excuses the harm we see?
So you think "unjustified police brutality" should be punished, (by the full extent of the law no less, how very generous and princpliped!), but you still leave this on the table:
> People getting their ass beat for trying to set fire to a McDonalds while protesting the high cost of living deserve no tears, I'm sorry.
> If you're convinced France is a totalitarian state your ability to reason is probably quite limited.
That's a total non-sequitur. Right now, you're not even up to speed on the meaning of your own comments heh, no need to insult me to distract from that. I'm not talking to France as a nation, I'm talking to you. If you think you can just handwave a bit and play sophistry games and call me stupid you're mistaken.
Or is it because "the other side" also rioted in other instances and/or previously in that scene, and you think collective punishment is a thing -- while talking about the "full extent of the law" at the same time no less?
Just by all the stuff you brought up to excuse and distract from it, by how bankrupt it is to just go "France is not a totalitarian nation, if you think that you're stupid bai" -- I would guess you know what this is.
When I saw this a few months ago
https://twitter.com/SeinUndSeid/status/1045656778342629376
which is so cute and harmless in contrast, I was called all sorts of names for saying this is totally uncalled for, unaccetable. Everybody else in that thread was super righteous about protecting the upstanding police blah blah blah. (When in fact the opposite is true, being spineless and excusing this stuff is supporting thugs, and stabbing ALL professional police in the back.)
They called it riot control, too. Self-defense, even, someone understandably snapping at their poor colleagues being so horribly mistreated by the crowd, so kicking at a guy who is already held down by 500 guys is obviously normal. Just like you, they mentioned what "the other side" was doing. NO TEARS for someone resisting arrest near an angry crowd! How principled they were, what upstanding, well educated, democratic, intelligent citizens they were, and what a little hoodlum I was for talking back.
The most hilarious plot twist there was it turned out it was civilians that stopped other civilians from throwing bottles, the police with their liberal use of pepper spray, and kicking that guy, achieved jack shit in that regard.
Anyway, the Berliner Polizei saw it more like me rather than the people who had defended the abuse. Their press release actually was amended with something about an officer "arriving and kicking at the fixated person", and started an investigation about that. It sounded serious too, they didn't use any euphemisms at all. They made no effort to call police brutality anything but that, in total contrast to the posts that had defended it.
I don't know how good or bad the French police is, but I know potential for denazification when I see it. Which has nothing to do with whole nations, but by definition with individuals and individual actions. Cops like that need to be punished period, if the law shields them, then the law needs to be changed.
The same thing is happening in the French protests: https://observers.france24.com/en/20181129-debunked-videos-y...
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/10/photos-from-catalo...
I took a look at the Atlantic link you included, and I'm not seeing any photos of bloodied protesters like the fake ones had. I don't doubt that with rubber bullets and batons flying there were some injuries, but the "fake" photos still aren't accurate depictions of them if they're from previous incidents.
- fiction not labelled as such: items invented from whole cloth with no regard for evidence. Conspiracy garbage. "B52 FOUND ON MOON".
- correctly reporting an official statement that turns out to be false, without checking the underlying facts ("WMD in Iraq": the newspapers accurately reported what the officials said!). Various other sorts of bad, sycophantic or "yellow" journalism.
- hostile propaganda, malicious lies, racial slander, and the like: protocols of zion/blood libel/etc material. Similar slander of Muslims. QAnon and Pizzagate. Previously the mainstream media refused to touch this stuff, but now it's being spread to a large audience via social media. Various sorts of government psyops, including but not limited to Russia.
The problem is that people correctly see the "old fake news" (2), but then replace it with even less accurate news (3).
What you consider alternative / independent journalists could be charlatans by journalistic standards. It's hard to say in the abstract.
How government officials are panicked over losing control of narratives.
Please trust us Plebes. we'll give you the information you need.
Fast forward a few years and the president-elect is a far-right idiot who ran on a platform of conspiracy theories and attacks on the press, supported by a huge disinformation campaign on anonymous, encrypted and widely popular messengers, completely bypassing all forms of campaign accountability.
Ignore the symptoms at your peril.
Just because you don't like a person or company or country or whatever doesn't mean that it's reasonable to accuse them of all the ills of the world.
I'd even argue that it can be detrimental. If you get enough "Facebook killed my puppy" stories, folk will start ignoring stories about Facebook and miss the stuff that's genuinely a problem.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-hired-firm-h...
I mean, from an entrepreneurial standpoint,maybe "antifacebook as a service" is a valid idea?
Facebook and Twitter play a key role in these influence operations by not adequately detecting and removing accounts controlled by these despotic governments until after the fact.
Traditional media outlets are not blameless as they frequently treat the results of these intelligence operations as though they were authentic grassroots movements.
It's major, but quite far from the worst we've ever had.
"in one of the worse civil unrest ever seen in France"
The spread of fake news at viral speed is somewhat new, but people taking to the streets is a much more normal part of French politics.
That's a poor, cheap shot at women's rights. How sad that an article that wraps up with this can sit at #1 on HN.
Back then, the narrative among western governments and press was that Twitter was a beacon of hope, allowing free democratic expression in dictatorial regimes. Not a word about the potential for bad actors to leverage the power of such networks to create political instability so they could take the throne.
Am I wrong to find it weird that the seemingly liberal, "woke" French are rioting over a carbon tax? Aren't carbon taxes progressive and environmentally responsible?
It's the combination of (real and/or perceived):
- rise of inequalities
- new taxes (including the carbon tax)
- removal of taxes impacting only the rich
- sentiment of neglect of the rural areas by the government
- disdain for lower classes by Macron
- lower purchasing power for low/middle class
and probably some other stuff. It's really an aggregation of all that. Add the fact that there is no leader, no precise demands, this makes a nightmare for the government to fix or contain.
Far right would be openly pro-nazi, or Vichy nostalgic small organizations like Oeuvre Française and other dissolved and then formed again groups. Add unaffiliated fascist skinheads in the mix.
Then again, almost every nuance of the spectrum between those two is represented in the protesters.
We're at a point now where we have to give up priviliges to slow down climate change. Even if the majority agrees to do it, some will refuse and turn violent. And unfortunately, the violence will cause more headlines.
Yes, the French routing over taxes is not historically uncommon, and the French aren't unified ideologically, and particularly aren't uniformly left-wing. And, as I understand, it's not as simple as just carbon taxes, either.
We see much less representation of their conservatives here. Pardon me for being slightly ignorant on this, and thank you for the reminder.
LePen's Rassemblement National is anti-immigration, and anti Europe or anti globalization, so in this regard could be close to some of Trump's positions but is not at all against welfare state.
Most people protesting want less gas taxes, but not at the cost of lesser healthcare or education.
I believe this is a position that does not really exist in the American political spectrum.
So it was explained by the speaker that culturally French people are more on the side of "Social Justice" rather than "Freedom", but that does necessarily means there are more "liberal" than "conservative". It can look similar but if you are looking really close, you cannot really apply American labels. I believe this is one of the reason it looks confusing and it is hard to explain from an outsider perspective.
Sure, most Western countries are; by the standard of most other developed Western, the dominant faction of the Democratic Party is somewhere between center-right and right-wing, while the Republican Party as a whole (not just it's extremist fringe) is far-right. But that doesn't mean that other countries don't have as much (or, often, more) left-right range as the US, just different centers.
You get someone elected, someone who is far from perfect but he's the only likely candidate to win, so what can you do. And then that person has 4 years to screw you over. That's not just.
I think people tend to conflate liberalism (in the classical sense), and democracy. You can have undemocratic liberal states (the Austro-Hungarian empire was a good example).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22451908-the-revolt-of-t...
You may hate something equally under any regime but there's a huge difference when that something is done in a democracy versus basically any other common form or government. In democracies issues can be (are?) solved at the election booth. Not so much in a dictatorship, a monarchy, or any "pseudo-democracy" (see China), etc.
Sure, South Koreans could wait one more year and solve the problem at the election booth, but protesting solved the problem faster.
The same act can have very different meaning in different contexts. In this case it doesn't feel like those protesters have exhausted their options before jumping to violence. As such this is a condemnable act.
These people were in these very same election booths last year so clearly issues aren't being solved that way.
<rant> Also, we need to step down our high moral horse and stop patronizing other nations by bringing up our holy "democracies". There has been an increasing and almost delusional portrayal of countries like Russia, China, Iran etc. That's not to say they don't have flaws but let's just take a good long look at the mirror before we hop on the <insert non western nation> bashing hype train. </rant>
Edit: formatting
This being said, to this day there is no better real world alternative to democracy. I take it you know very little of how Russia and China work internally. It's going to sound cynical but if you did you'd appreciate the "lesser evil" of western democracy. Think at least of the fact that you're now free to express these opinions, as you do.
You know the upside of democracy? With enough people behind you you can easily install dictatorship. The other way around needs slightly more sacrifices. Pretty sure those people fighting in the Arab spring against their not elected leaders weren't doing it just to jump on the bashing hype train ;).
Alas, this order is often defended in the name of "democracy" when it's outright anti-democratic and patronizing.
That's also the point of the article, but the author blames it all on Facebook not preventing populist bubbles, when the main issue is that the entire industry has a problem with bubbles.
For a very good reason.
> insulting peoples will seems improper
It does seem improper, but drawing the connection between calling out people drawn to populism and insulting them is one of the least discrete attempts at muddying the waters I've seen recently.
...also at the point of a gun.
You're being disingenuous in evoking the monopoly of force but only applying it to "the left", in order to imply that, "socialist" governance is more coercive (and thus less legitimate) than any other.
If you live in a state that collects taxes or regulates the market, or any system other than anarchy, then you live under a regime that distributes wealth at the point of a gun.
And with anarchy, you're just trading the monopoly on violence for a free market of violence.
Market Populism seeks wealth redistribution for organizations by using force against organizations exclusively to break up local maxima (monopolies, duopolies, etc.).
Both use force, but one operates on the individual level, the other at the organizational level.