Facebook is not equipped to stop the spread of authoritarianism
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The way discussions about Facebook policing content are framed rubs me the wrong way. Facebook should not be put in a position where it's responsible for dealing with authoritarianism, extremism, and other societal ills. The only reason it seems like it has to do this is that we've allowed Facebook to become a near-monopoly on a certain form of social networking.
The solution is not trying to compel or convince Facebook to act as an arbiter of morality for the world; it is to break Facebook up and restrict it's ability to monopolize the online space. Real competition in social networking would mean communities could form their own rules and norms around what's acceptable - like in the forum era - without relying on a central authority such as Facebook to do it for them. A decentralized protocol/system like Mastodon allows this kind of partitioning of the social space.
Would this stop authoritarianism? No. But it would turn censorship into a game of whack-a-mole, and limit the spread of authoritarian ideas to the social networks whose communities are already OK with that.
Same goes for YouTube and its algorithmic recommendation system, which subjectively seems much worse to me.
If you program a computer to select social content to drive engagement, you are pretty much programming it to push negativity. Negative, controversial, and divisive content always gets the most attention. The media and entertainment industry have always known this and used it, but never before had the feedback loop been so tight and efficient.
The other side of this pendulum are affects worth mentioning as well-when we talk about the 'algorithmic platform', not long ago there was a discussion about Tumblr and it's recent decision to remove certain types of material: is the very nature of "optimizing for engagement" itself.
Someone came along and shared a tale of how his pre-teen daughter got addicted to blogs and content that promoted and encouraged anorexia on the platform targeted at her because of her likes, follows and interactions and eventually developed an eating disorder and serious anxiety issues. More than one person came along and commented along of how they've seen friends go into similar communities and come out a different person, often times for the worse, with several longstanding and previously healthy relationships irreparably damaged and in some cases wholesale destroyed when the platform optimized for engagement and sends innocent people down destructive rabbit holes.
The other side of the negative, controversial and divisive are the isolating, unhealthy, and dangerous to individuals susceptible to manipulation through plain jane ignorance/not knowing better when presented with material that might not be divisive because of trolls, bullies or agents of political avarice, but encourages destructive tendencies to the uninitiated or ill-equipped. All facilitated because 'the platform' rewards you for likes and shares.
I remember following rabbit holes as a teen but for some reason my natural tendency toward skepticism defended me from the crazier stuff. If anything contact with nutty sorts of conspiracy theories and cult ideologies just made me more of a skeptic. It seems that some people are more prone to getting sucked in.
Obligatory cautionary/curiousity-laden counterpoint to inquire if people are more prone to it now or if we as observers are exposed to more examples of the phenomenon taking place-thanks to social networks and the one-to-many nature of broadcasting our every thought out to the aether?
Yes. One thing holding back competition is network effects, i.e. if I create a new social network, it isn't very useful until a significant number of people are on board. Fortunately now we have the federated social networking with the Fediverse, so a new network can piggyback on all the users in the Fediverse (and the new network in turn helps grow the Fediverse).
> A decentralized protocol/system like Mastodon allows this kind of partitioning of the social space.
Nitpick: Mastodon is a system, the protocol is ActivityPub.
That's a common misconception. As a social network creator, your job is to create a substantial amount of single player value in addition to multiplayer value, precisely to avoid this sort of chicken and egg problem. If your social network isn't both useful and differentiated (i.e. doing something completely different than FB) even when no other people are using it, then you have a real problem.
That's why when Facebook launched it was basically just a prettier skin over the Harvard student directory, so that way it was valuable even if there were no other people using it.
> That's why when Facebook launched it was basically just a prettier skin over the Harvard student directory, so that way it was valuable even if there were no other people using it.
Facebook also launched in small, elite communities first, which allowed it to exploit network effects in communities that were more manageable than the global internet.
I think that many people make the mistake of thinking of the "social" network as global-level vat filled with a solution of essentially identical nodes, and the "network effect" as a power caused by a product having a high concentration in that solution. In reality, the global "social" network is more like a warehouse full of jars, and smaller players start by building up their product's concentration in a fraction of those jars, instead of all the jars at once.
Far-right tried to do exactly that with gab.ai. Turned out, there are another central authorities besides facebook..
Maybe it would limit the meddling/damage that can be done. Not that this is very elegant, but it seems better then the suggestion often aired in media and politics which discriminate against free speech ...
This sounds silly (probably because it is) but would be interested what the rest of you thinks. Personally I'd have no problem with totally regulating ad-tech in a way that prohibits targeting users in other countries/jurisdictions. Also facebook should be held responsible in that country so that when a genocide like with the Rohinga happens then the CEO of that entity can answer questions in The Hague
We essentially need a Google (the framework which they use to algorithmically understand web content) for social networks with a front-end UI for topical mapping.
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Also to add to your idea, I'd be very interested in a social network that can do that, but also requires real ID's and has some sort of public display of the topics that any user talks about and engages with often.
That way if I'm talking to someone I can gauge if they're really someone I want to be talking to about a particular topic. (can also be used to better map taste to reviews of products/services/companies/etc)
If YouTube's algorithm recommends a hateful propaganda video to me, I shouldn't be angry at Pepsi for the preroll ad, they obviously don't specifically endorse that content. But the acceptance of targeted ads implies that endorsement. I just wish we could entirely abolish targeted advertising, it would make the internet overall a better place. And it wouldn't even make the ads less relevant, considering that Amazon and Google apparently can't recommend products I'm interested in even with all the data they've collected.
At a certain point, the welfare of society outweighs the freedom of the individual. And you agree with me. Hence the phrase "nearly unlimited".
That's one of the supporting principles of all totalitarian regimes. The problem is who defines what's the "welfare of society" (Normally is "the Party" or "the Leader").
Individual freedom is an inalienable right, and should not be curtailed, unless you're physically hurting others or infringing on their own freedom.
How about if you're planning to hurt others? That's "conspiracy" in most "totalitarian regimes" (that is, societies with laws). Is it a crime to point a loaded gun at someone, or only to pull the trigger?
How about incitement? Also a crime for any government. If someone encourages a murder, are they at least partly responsible for the murder?
Your definitions of freedom and oppression here are trivial mental exercises that fail in real-world application. Who defines what's the "welfare of society"? Depends on the society. You're confusing who defines it with how it is enforced. Governments have a monopoly on violence in the ideal case. Who controls the government? If it's a representative democracy, then it's more or less the will of the people.
I've seen this bullshit argument before, rather a lot. I saw it made when I asked if it was okay for the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville to surround a synagogue, torches in hand (which they did). And people with similarly shallow, trivialized senses of freedom and society argued that such behavior was fine, as long as they stayed on the public sidewalk.
Is enabling fascism a form of fascism? That's a good question for the theorists. As a friend of mine put it, "If you have to ask what the definition of fascism is in order to argue that you're not a fascist, you're a fascist".
The rule of thumb that I go by is "we should allow whatever it is that the United States Supreme Court allows".
The thorny edge cases that you are talking about have been explored in depth by the Supreme Court, and I think that they have made good decisions.
(IE, the good decisions that they have made is to almost always side in favor of free speech).
Further The USA SC is an unrealistic expectation and pointless bar of value when talking about Facebook and international speech.
I am not talking about the time that it would take to decide a case. I am instead using the Supreme Court as a general example of where on the scale of freedom/ censorship that platforms should take.
The location on that scale should be "What would the supreme court do?" I think that they have chosen a good balance, is why.
Actually that's one of the supporting principles of all regimes, period.
SO I can agree with this comment.
Heck, FB sucks. Or rather, seeing my supposedly libertarian friends support Tariffs and Wall spending has sucked.
I've been somewhat active on Mastodon for about a fortnight and I'm finding the experience much better. I'm peered up with people with similar interests and it doesn't feel like I'm screaming into the void as is the case on Twitter.
More decentralization is a recipe to spiral further and further into fragmented echo chambers with their own self-reinforcing ideologies and their own alternative facts.
No. Facebook critics want centralization so that people exposed to viewpoints within the narrow, mainstream window of acceptable opinion and completely isolated from anything outside that window.
But as an aside, free speech is the biggest thing keeping the press alive. The “mainstream media” has much more to fear from authorities than from fringe alt-politics. This has been true through history and it’s true now.
Seems like they are cutting off their nose to spite their face by calling for increased censorship. Do they honestly think that people who hold fringe views will stop holding them if they can't express them on Facebook?
The question is whether Facebook either is or should be putting their thumb on the scale based on the ideas being presented. The idea of a naive engagement algorithm that, in a roundabout fashion, shows people what they want to see might be shitty, but only because most people actually want the shit. The idea of a "truthiness algorithm" or a "hate algorithm" that de-ranks content that Facebook finds "false" or "problematic" is fucking dystopian, and yet it's exactly what Facebook's critics are calling for.
Surely it is not radical to expect Facebook's editorial algorithms, which by the way, are already changing the rank of material based on the effect it will have on readers, to draw some sort of line between "typical well sourced stuff from a well established and respected paper" and "some anonymous dude on the internet spins a tale of how the Democratic Party is actually a sex trafficking ring operating out of a pizza parlor".
Every other media company is held responsible for the material they spread, and are expected to curate it with editors. Facebook thought they could let an algorithm be their editor, and it didn't work out so well. They fired their editorial staff for "breaking news" in August 2016, and the very next day, a fake story about "Ann Coulter outed as a socialist traitor!" was at the top of the list.
The news media does a damn fine job of that all by themselves: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contag...
Also, I mentioned candy bars for a reason. The leading cause of preventable death isn't mass shootings, it's obesity. And, while Facebook doesn't really have an incentive in inspiring mass shootings (unlike the mainstream media!), 7/11 has an incentive in inspiring you to drink a soda and eat a candy bar, and you're orders of magnitude more likely to eventually die from doing too much of that.
> Surely it is not radical to expect Facebook's editorial algorithms, which by the way, are already changing the rank of material based on the effect it will have on readers, to draw some sort of line between "typical well sourced stuff from a well established and respected paper" and "some anonymous dude on the internet spins a tale of how the Democratic Party is actually a sex trafficking ring operating out of a pizza parlor".
Anonymous dudes spinning tales on the internet make for engaging content that a lot of people want to read. Conspiracy theories are a time-honored tradition ever since the CIA had Kennedy assassinated because he was going to reveal the truth about the alien spacecraft that crashed at Roswell and was being held at Area 51. Everyone knows that.
Setting aside the obvious nutjobs, you're literally calling for Facebook to enforce an oligopoly of "well established and respected papers" by making it harder for independent journalists and bloggers to get their message out. Or, at the very least, you're expressing an unwarranted level of faith in Facebook's ability to distinguish normal bloggers from nutjobs. Especially when you and I both know that the words "nutjob" and "conspiracy theorist" will be defined and used in ways that are equivalent in meaning to the words "dissident" and "whistleblower".
> Every other media company is held responsible for the material they spread, and are expected to curate it with editors.
When I go to Facebook, the only "material" I see is from other Facebook users whom I follow and from advertisers. It's bad enough that Facebook ranks this stuff with their "special sauce", but if they "curate" my feed by making "editorial decisions", they have stepped out of their lane. If I want to follow someone on Facebook, I want to see what they post. I don't want Facebook hiding it from me because they don't agree with who I follow, or with what the people I follow choose to share.
As early as the 18th century, it was obvious that in any elected democracy, the concern wasn't top-down repression from "the authorities", but rather either the tyranny of the majority, or the risk of some repressive demagogue rising to power on an explicit platform of crushing the rights of some unpopular minority.
Mainstream media outlets within a democracy are not going to be shut down or silenced. Nobody would ever stand for such a thing, and such a move would be so unpopular as to end the career of anyone who attempted it. If something is popular enough to be labelled "mainstream", it is too popular to ban or censor, and is at no real risk from the authorities. (Outside of a democracy, of course, whatever "mainstream media" exists only exists at the bidding of the authorities in the first place.)
There may be more of a risk if there truly is no mainstream, but this only increases the incentive for the mainstream media to protect their oligopoly which is what they are doing when they attack Facebook.
What people have and do stand for is for silencing "fringe alt-politics" by any means necessary. It wasn't that long ago that people were driven away from their careers and livelihoods for being real or suspected communists. These days, people are driven away from their careers and livelihoods for other real or suspected ideological heresies.
Frankly, having marginally less free speech actually benefits the mainstream media the same way that all forms of regulation and government interference benefit established incumbents and hurt the little guy. CNN and the Washington Post have the resources to comply with complicated and ever-changing sets of rules and regulations. Individual commentators do not, unless they can get a lot of money, which is kind of hard when your primary sources of money are companies like YouTube and Patreon with a history of silencing people in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that Facebook's critics want Facebook to silence people.
The sad part of it, to my mind, is those who critisize Facebook for this want to be exposed for opposing viewpoints to be able to fight opposing viewpoints. I do not want my viewpoints were exposed to those who oppose it. Opposition is too way ready to fight, I'm not. I'm happy to discuss them, but not to fight for them. Even your comment hints the same: you want exposure to make some viewpoints impossible, to fight them to death.
These critics are declaring openness and freedom but they are authoritarian by their nature, they want to one (their) viewpoint to win all others. It is irremovable contradiction between declared goals and real ones that cannot be fixed by Facebook.
The story from Bangladesh shows it in some sense. Authoritarian reign wants to be exposed to opposing views to fight them. Students do not want to be exposed to opposed views, they want to expose to their views only those who is ready to accept them.
SJW want to be exposed to opposing views to be able to scream "fire him". They also want to expose others to their views to hurt them.
Trolls of different colors and sizes want their shit to be exposed to a fan of public opinion and to make fun of hurting others.
I do not want my views to be exposed for general public because the goals of that public are under doubt, they do not want to learn my viewpoint to shift their beliefs close to mine, they want to learn my viewpoint to fight my viewpoint.
The trouble is not a degree of exposure, the trouble is people thinking that contradicting viewpoints should fight to death. And too many people looking not for viewpoints but for a fight of viewpoints. Of course it leads viewpoints to guard theirselves in a fragmented echo chambers, to self-reinforcing ideologies.
Students do not want to be exposed to arrest and torture either. There's the problem with your analysis.
Though maybe humanity not that bad and hopeless, maybe it was my English is that bad and hopeless?
The way I see it, there is an asymmetry of power. Governments are able to harm individuals far more than individuals can harm governments. This needs to be taken into account when we talk about "freedom" online.
When we differ, there are many options besides deathmatch politics fueled by righteous indignation.
Seek understanding of others. Be secure in that, and who you are.
Celebrate differences and gain perspective.
Amplify good, talk through and maybe past bad.
I no longer judge much for past votes and difficult politics. I am most interested in votes and politics to come.
A whole lot is possible. Getting along better is the root of the possible.
We need more of the possible and line in the sand type conflict gets in the way.
What is "fight for them"? You want to discuss your views but not be criticized for them? Are you surprised people fighting for social justice have a strong reaction against viewports they feel are attacking their very personhood?
Yes, that is how civilized discussion works. You criticize the idea, not the person who disagrees with you. Ad hominem attacks that escalate into trying to get people fired are not a debating tactic, they're an attack on the mechanism of open discussion itself.
Also people often take criticism of their ideas as personal attacks so framing criticism as an ad hominem attack is often used to silence the criticism.
I think the problem is that these huge social network companies actively push people into narrower and more radical subcommunities because those subcommunities probably perform better on whatever trendy metrics they’re focusing on this quarter.
You certainly see that with YouTube. If you watch a short clip criticizing or discussing some radical politician or online personality, for weeks you’ll see a ton of video recommendations for that personality’s actual videos or from his supporters.
Except the problem possibly isn't decentralized, separate echo chambers, it's centralized, connected echo chambers. Facebook was a single source through which you could easily find your echo chamber of choice, with a standard interface, no need to login or commit to anything, but you could easily find and follow the type of content you like.
If instead each echo chamber needed to set up its own site, with its own sign up and follow process, you weed out a lot of the fast and easy paths to disseminating bad information.
This is half a trillion company, after all. The cascade of margin calls will remind you about bear sterns in 2008.
Once whatsapp becomes an independent company, I will probably start getting personal messages from Ford, Nike and KFC.
It will be a great company to invest to and make money from, I agree.
There was a plan in place to split them up, which was only scuttled because Pres. Bush won the election.
Try it now though, when FB is already what, 30% down from ATH.
The only authoritarianism here is your call to forcibly break up Facebook to silence speech you don’t like.
What prevents the separate entities from forging close partnerships?
I don't see how breaking up FB would work in practice. Maybe someone more knowledgeable could clue me in.
Nothing would stop close partnerships but GDPR-style regulation would hopefully stop the most egregiously invasive kinds of data brokerage.
The truth is that regulation is always and everywhere a game of whack a mole, and as long as capitalism exists someone will have to wave the comedy mallet around.
Normally when businesses are split up, they are broken into multiple pieces that each have their own revenue and are viable standalone businesses.
In this case, the ad-selling part of Facebook is the entire business as far as financials are concerned. It's the only material source of revenue for Facebook. If you were to split the ad-selling wing from Facebook, then the "remaining part" would have no revenue. A regulator action along these lines is tantamount to crippling or shutting down the business.
Source: Facebook Q3 2018 earnings show that the only material revenue is advertising at $13.5 billion (Q3 2018): https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/event-details/2018/F...
For comparison, Microsoft reports earnings from many separate lines of business including Windows OEM, Office, Office 365, Enterprise Services, LinkedIn, Azure, server products, Gaming, etc. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2018-Q3...
Facebook isn't the bad guy here. They were the target because they provided the function of being a great place to share stuff.
All this bullshit about Mastodon and whatnot isn't going to help anyone. I can just imagine the police. "Oh no, you are using a decentralized tool to describe the protests. I guess we can't torture you. After all each of the communities on this decentralized tool have their own independent rules and what you posted doesn't violate the rules of the community you posted it in. You're free to go."
If FB didn't enforce a "real name" policy then the police wouldn't have been able to identify and/or hold those people to account. The comments make good sense.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/facebook-real-...
and
https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/15/facebook-makes-changes-to-...
Ultimately, though, people probably don't use fake names on Facebook because a large portion of the service's value is lost when trying to keep one's identity obfuscated. None of your friends, acquaintances, or co-workers will recognize the profile with the false name. Unless the profile picture is real, but that opens a vector for the government to find out in the real identity of the user too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
They've created a tool where you can literally search entire countries for dissidents and demographics and political allegiances.
They've given powers that only authoritarian gov'ts have had to upstart authoritarian elements that haven't power in the region they're trying to over-turn.
I know this just sounds like sidewalk doomsayer stuff, but we're seeing these effects globally... this is no longer a "what-if" scenario.
Centralised networks are a perfect match for authoritarianism.
> They're (arguably wittingly or unwittingly) a digital stasi; listening and collecting everyone's conversations, tracking and collecting social interactions and connections between groups of people, tracking and collecting people's online interests.
It's definitely wittingly: Facebook's entire business model is based on knowing as much as possible out of people in order to monetise that knowledge.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)
A centralized social network is extremely valuable to an authoritarian government and has little value to a democratic government.
Radio was definitely a great platform for propaganda among authoirtian states, but the nature of radio infrastructure lends itself to be controlled by the state so if the state is authoritarian then they will naturally turn the radio.
Facebook is a platform that has no borders, and it is ubiquitous in a way that TV, radio, and even other parts of the internet are not. Add on the all seeing nature of AI and machine learning and I think over time Facebook could definitely prevent the spread of these ideas on it's platform.
The major point of contention for me is the question of if it's Facebook's rightful place to regulate political speech, Zuckerberg definitely seems adverse to putting his thumb on the scale but at this point I'd say that not weighing in is a form of weighing in. The bring up the often cited Voltare/Ben Parker quote: "with great power comes great responsibility", Facebook has reaped all the benefits of becoming the social infrastructure of the internet, at some point they have to draw a line in the sand when it comes to accepting that responsibility head on.
The fact that Facebook can even be compared to radio or TV speaks to the level of centralization the internet has experienced in the last decade. We've nearly come full circle - from restricted, centralized media like TV, to the wild west of the early internet, now back to re-centralization with a few huge companies which control access to a huge chunk of the internet audience.
I think we need a new push for de-centralization.
And yes, there was always a push to decentralize. However, network effects lead to some nodes becoming more heavily connected than others until such time that the consolidation of resource in hypernodes starts to have unintended side effects that are deleterious to the system as a whole. That tends to intensify the push to decentralize, while damping pushes to centralize.
Nature as acted out through man.
Decentralization is great for those of us who don't have the cognitive overhead, but adds a lot of complexity that this tribe underestimates. My mom, for example, hasn't been able to understand the difference between a text message and an email, and she's been actively online for about 5 years now. To her, it's all a way to communicate, but when I try to explain that email has a subject line, and text messages don't.... it's beyond her grasp.
Decentralizing will help with some of the issues that are currently front and center to technologists, but it will exclude a huge number of people.
I think your mother is a bit of an outlier. My dad is over 70 but can navigate the basics of the internet: how to text, take a photo, stream content on Youtube, etc. I think now that this basic level of competency has been reached decentralization can occur.
I think you're correct in terms of the friction, no one but nerds wants to go through the hassle of setting up their own private, decentralized network. We need systems that are as frictionless as going on Facebook or typing a query into Youtube, in my opinion this has been the main flaw of decentralized platforms.
Centralization has significant advantages. People love one location for what they need because it simplifies things. That enables more folks to participate due to lower friction. Whether the downsides outweigh the positives is left to the reader.
My broader point is the centralized/de-centralized discussion should be framed in terms of tradeoffs. One is not necessarily superior to the other; it depends on how each person weights the relative benefits and downsides.
It's important to acknowledge that the general internet public, so far, seems to prefer the advantages of centralization. That may be because the disadvantages are hidden, or it may be a legitimate preference.
I believe that it will eventually happen and that this moment is prime for a decentralization push. The internet is still a bit too young to call out trends, but I'd be surprised if 50 years from now we don't notice a cyclical nature that straddles the line between centralization and decentralization when it comes to the internet.
The early web started as decentralized, but to increase the rate of adoption, drive standards, and break into the mainstream it probably needed centralization in the form of Yahoo, Google, Windows, Facebook, Apple, etc. Sometimes centralization is the best way to work out the kinks in a new system and drive quality, now that the internet has reached a certain maturity we no longer require online platforms to "hold our hands" so to speak and drive the way we interact online -- everyone knows the rules and the boundaries.
The big question for me is what does decentralization look like? There are a lot of ideas but to be honest in my opinion none of them are good (Bitcoin, federated social networks, etc.). We're still working out the model, but I think in due time we will get there. When the internet reaches its next big milestone, I think centralization will come roaring back.
Truthfully, this goes right out the door as soon as Facebook starts kowtowing to Government demands in order to continue operating. From the article:
>Facebook has removed posts critical of the prime minister in Cambodia and reportedly “agreed to coordinate in the monitoring and removal of content” in Vietnam. Facebook was criticized for not stopping the repression of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, where military personnel created fake accounts to spread propaganda which human rights groups say fueled violence and forced displacement.
While Facebook has walked back on the Myanmar situation, the fact stands that the initial response in these countries was to get comfortable with the Governments, not with the users and not with people they claim to serve. Facebook is a business, and I get that to some degree it answers to shareholders and chases potential revenue streams. But looking at some of the place that Facebook has been complacent, I'm really curious; is there honestly that much money for Facebook to chase?
Facebook __could__ be doing a lot more than it is if it honestly believed in protecting freedom and all that jazz. Their conversations about protecting users and such ring pretty hollow when repeatedly they just bend over to get a foot in the door in whatever country is the target for that year.
Of course it is. All social media platforms are. If Twitter or Youtube or Facebook or anyone wants someone gone from their platform then they are gone. Witness Milo, witness Alex Jones.
But "enragement is engagement", if hate speech keeps people on the site longer and shows more ad impressions, we can't expect Facebook's management to do anything about it, at least, not until they are forced to by the regulators.
Plus You can turn the radio off in a way you can’t with Facebook.
It’s The new kind of propaganda which can ONLY exist on FB/social media that is the problem.
Which is it? Should facebook be a tool for or against authoritarianism? Or is authoritarian behavior good when it suits the media's agenda?
Also, another social media story by techcrunch on the frontpage. They guys are really overdoing it with the facebook/social media spam.
I also don't understand how Tech Crunch, BBC, LA times, CBC, Miami Herald, CBS etc, etc, etc, could possibly be part of a coordinated anti-Republican "the media" conspiracy either.
Also, why are you assuming partisanship or anti-republican anything. I'm not a republican. Never have been.
Also, you forgot foxnews and wsj in your list of media entities involved in the "conspiracy". They have been attacking social media for much longer than any of the media companies you listed.
Any particular reason why you are reading so much into my comment?
I'm against all torturing and all jailing and all censorship. Whether it is of democrats, republicans, foreigners, etc. You?
There is a catch!
Authoritarians are currently, and successfully, exploiting economic grievances. This is true in many neoliberal nations.
Middle classes are shriking. Incomes relative to labor and cost of laborers (what they need to exist, show up for work, feed families) are increasingly inadequate. This makes people desperate.
They do not want more of the same, and may turn to facists who make promises they do not intend to keep.
Those of us who speak against authoritarians on a social basis are on the right side of history. The long arc of social progress favors anti-authroitarians.
Our struggle today is more economic. While current neoliberal policy is rapidly improving poverty in some of the most needy regions, one cost is a lack of progress and some regression in more developed regions, the US, EU and friends being case in point.
To clear majorities in these developed regions, they see a long arc of econoomic decline. That is challenging confidence, resulting in more volitile elections.
An improved economic strategy is needed to bolster already solid social progress strategy. The lack of it puts social progress at ever increasing risk.
So Facebook should allow anonymous posting but it should also magically block fake bots and Russian troll accounts?
No, forcing Facebook to stop authoritarianism might be authoritarianism, but asking Facebook to stop authoritarianism is simply an expression of a concern and a request for action.
We really need to stop seeing every opinion with which we disagree as either fascism or folly, here.
Try looking at YT channel subscriptions, try to see what happen with sport event comments and confront that with subscriptions/comments on tech/sci channels, medium-high level culture contents etc.
As always people in large groups with good enough megaphone start to act as beast, small groups or other kind of interaction do the opposite.
Continuing down the path of policing content is a no-win situation.
Your interrogators would demand to see your real account. You'd give them the duress password and they'd get the wiped or sanitized account. Then they would ask you to logout and log back in this time insisting that you give them the duress password.
If you can't do this, they will assume that you gave them the duress password the first time, consider that sufficient proof of guilt of whatever they suspected you of, and away you go to jail or worse.
Of course you can insist that the one password you gave them was the real account and you never set up a duress password because you obey the law. That would work in a place with decent civil rights and due process requirements, but that's not the kind of place the article is discussing.
These are places were you are guilty as soon as you are accused and it is up to you to prove to them you are innocent, and they consider throwing an innocent person in jail massively preferable to letting a guilty person off.
But with web-centric corporations, they flip a switch and bam, they're online everywhere.
If you want to post radical* content, any tool which makes it easy to connect said content back to your real identity should be a non-starter.
On the flip-side, gaining enough of a following with throw-away, anonymized accounts is a challenge unto itself.
I’m not sure what the answers are to help people understand the differences and offer alternatives. How many of the students described in the article who were beaten and imprisoned after posting “objectionable” content did so knowing they’d likely serve as martyrs for their causes?
* in the eyes of the authorities you are disagreeing with
However, a "democracy" where the intellectual/media/political elites decide what is good for the unwashed masses to hear or see yet they become corrupted by wrong ideology rubs me wrong way. Too many fools think themselves members of those elites.
OTOH I do recognize that Facebook is a great tool to manipulate! I'm not blind.
There is a simple solution: either 1) get off Facebook, 2) stop posting things on Facebook.
Facebook = phone book.
I don't post or reply to posts. I add people I cross paths with and I chat with them on Messenger sometimes or if we chat more often WhatsApp or Telegram or something outside FB itself.
At the end of the day facebook is an advertising platform - isn't influencing people the ultimate goal of advertisement/marketing? At what point do we call marketing manipulative vs. effective? Obviously you shouldn't allow foreign countries to engage in these markets for elections but those same strategies can be carried out within a nation by competing forces and they come with similar consequences.
I think this is a fundamental problem worth addressing because representative democracies rely on well-informed, independent electorates for good outcomes. Marketing on the other hand aims to influence individuals in a coordinated manner towards a given outcome. How do democracies ensure electorates continue to make independent decisions in a world where marketing and advertising tools are increasingly powerful? I think this is a bridge we have to cross - these tools to influence are here to stay and democracies and electorates will need to adapt accordingly in ways outside of just regulation.
Governments can be very sensitive if someone undermines their control of "free press". Most people in the US don't understand this, but in much of the third world papers (not to mention TV) just print what the government wants them to print, or they find themselves under some kind of scrutiny (taxes, criminal, etc).
If anything, even with censorship, in those countries FB would be a far less controllable medium, because it's harder to fuck up an international megacorp in the same fashion and not cause a massive blowback.
But ultimately, FB has to comply with the local laws, which can be arbitrary. There's no way out of this simple fact. So whatever mechanism one uses to "stop the spread of authoritarianism" can't be provided by a corporation, and it has to be resilient, distributed, and by definition, illegal in those countries.
And still FB can't touch this, because it'll then be responsible not only for breaking the laws in the countries where it operates, but also for the lives of activists, if something goes wrong.
Make your algorithms downplay controversial stuff (which is often controversial because it uses dishonest language tailored to sow discord and minimize common ground interpretations).
Make your algorithms promote level headed, honest, non-tribal language and verifiable truths so that areas of global consensus are elevated.
Democracy will work again and we can get rid of the despots.
Controversial stuff is often verifiable truth that is politically inconvenient for some interested party.
> Make your algorithms promote level headed, honest, non-tribal language and verifiable truths
Algorithmically detecting content that is either “honest” or “verifiable truth” is a pair problems go beyond mere hard AI problems.
Read "In Defense of Troublemakers" for an overview of where research on dissent is at.
It's pretty scary, because there just isn't anything you can do to turn the political machinery in everyone's heads off and it's default behavior is to shutdown opinions it doesn't agree with seeking consensus not truth.
It's doubly scary if you read books on our cognitive shortcomings. We are not capable of computing the truth values of most truth claims. It's so expensive to know anything that most of our mental models are ultra-low resolution. We are a guess-and-check species who rationalize and politicize everything. To top it all off we barely ever think we are wrong.
It's not a mystery why the world is so chaotic and crazy. It's not a mystery why authoritarianism has run rampant throughout history.
I wish we were far more educated on the subject of how we get things, so terribly wrong.
I'm coming strongly to similar conclusions - people are poor thinkers and totally unaware of this fact. They're not self-critical, but they are very critical of anyone who disagrees with them.
I summed it up in a quickie comment recently that has stuck with me. "Nobody thinks they're a racist. When they say racist things, they don't think they're being racist. They think they're being reasonable."
Maybe social networks are not the right place for these types of controversial discussions as everything gets distorted by the worst elements of each tribes.
I admit that verifiable truth is hard but they must be able to see what stuff only gets "liked" in a tribe-wise manner and they could downplay that.
FB has a fiduciary responsibility to make their platform show content that it's users with engage with the most, for the longest amount of time. If that happens to be controversial content, it's going to be difficult to convince them to change their algos to inherently downplay controversial content.
Not sure it's possible to make them change like that without government intervention. And even then, what change can one government impose vs a a massive global company like FB? (I actually don't know this, but would be interesting in learning from some examples if anyone has any)
It seems like Facebook is blamed for all of the worlds woes at this point, without any thought given to the fact that there have always been authoritarian governments and bad leaders, and just because in the internet age some of these bad things take place online doesn’t mean Facebook or the internet is causing them.
If anything it just goes to show Facebook is not the ideal platform for political dissidents and protesters and maybe there is an opportunity to create something better for that use-case. The platform was designed for US college students to socialize and plan parties and post photos originally, not for people to combat authoritarian regimes. Those two use cases are drastically different. The fact that Facebook is not ideal for all use-cases shouldn’t surprise anyone.
I agree they now have great opportunities to do a lot more than simply catering to safe and secure Americans, but they are still a young company with a lot to learn.
And you are asking the government to step in? I hope people can see the irony and risk in this.
I would love to hear people debate this, to me, this sounds like one of the worst ideas.
There's a problem with this argument. Where it is is an exercise for the reader.
That said, as we all know, the internet is a magnifier, and effects of a network (as opposed to unconnected node) even more so. Again, not FB's fault. But it does need to embrace it's place and potential in history's ecosystem.
More-so, though, it sounds like the protesters and activists should use the right tool for the job and Facebook is not it. Or if they are going to use Facebook, they should try to be a bit more savvy about it given the bad, authoritarian state of the local government.
Pokemon Go is not going to stop racism.
Breaking news! Apple Watch does NOT cure cancer!
The title leads you to believe Facebook has or had any interest what-so-ever in stopping the spread of their best customers...
If you click on the weird X button at the top it says "An error has occured", and if you click back the error still remains.
Awp, got a downvote from someone who doesn't believe Facebook is authoritarian. Its merely being a corporation places it among the most authoritarian social structures in history, hate to tell ya, but let's look at the characteristics of authoritarianism (paraphrased from britannica.com):
1) Blind submission to authority is prized over individual freedom of thought and action. The very first act demanded of you, upon first contact with Facebook, is to fill out a form and submit (the word choice is coincidental, yet apt) your personal details/data. By clicking, you're declaring you trust their authoritah. If you refuse and go your own way, Facebook users whom you know will make no bones about their disapproval. Oh you won't go to any gulag or anything. I'm not saying it's a government.
2) Power is concentrated in the hands of a leader (a.k.a. autocracy) or small elite (a.k.a. oligarchy) that isn't responsible to the people. This one is so obviously true of Facebook that I'm starting to feel foolish for starting this list. "In other news, the sky is blue." But I'll continue. For starters you can just ask yourself whether you were consulted about any of the endless string of privacy-policy changes. (Or where to hide and obfuscate all the opt-outs in the UI.) Or whether you approved any "sharings" of your data with some person or company about whom you had no idea. You didn't, because Facebook controls your data. And they control what you see.
3) Power is exercised arbitrarily and without regard to existing bodies of law. https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/congressional-...
4) Leaders cannot be replaced by citizens in fair elections. If we take "citizens" to mean "users" or "customers" this is true. That's a characteristic of every corporation. If we take "citizens" to mean "shareholders," those people get a bit more democracy. Although at Facebook as I understand it, Mark Zuckerberg is the largest single shareholder, so I'm not sure how that all plays out, and am rapidly getting bored of this. Wish I knew more, or gave more of a shit, about Facebook... but I don't know what's inside a giant stinky turd either and I think I'm OK with that. Can anyone take over? I'm sorry this comment sucks.
5) Opposition parties or groups are limited or nonexistent. On this criterion, Facebook fails the "Is it authoritarian?" test. These groups are all over Facebook. (Generating data for Facebook and profits for Facebook.)
I'm sure there are enough people who would believe it, but I wonder how long it would take to be debunked.
I don't really know why I thought about that, I just hope people would just believe it, but I'm curious how the world would react to it.
That’s authoritarian. Not people freely reading and writing.
I fear my fellow Americans have completely lost the plot...