Facebook has a lot to answer for. The internet was supposed to be a new human enlightenment by enabling professionals to remotely connect. We didn't bank on the ability of idiots to connect too...
The downside of this connecting is not "just" idiots, it's the creation of echo chambers in general.
Pre-Facebook social circles only had the capability to form echo chambers when they reached a certain size, something that was greatly inhibited by the reality of the physical world.
Today, even the most irrational minds can meet and reinforce each other's beliefs without any effort at all, beyond a few mouseclicks.
Idiots are just a subset of the problem. The actual problem is people in general just having their misconceived notions reinforced, rather than having them challenged. It's the opposite of intellectual growth.
IMO, Twitter is even worse in this regard.
5 minutes. What is the twitter message character limit again?
Most posts on blogs are much longer, and some of the most listened to podcasts are hours long.
However I see as part of the problem that trust in experts has eroded caused by... those experts themselves. There are many accounts of matter experts turning out to be shills for a certain industry which did harm to public up to upright killing people. Look at the opioid crisis or the latest development with Boeing. How would a layperson distinguish between honest and dishonest statements?
Trust is gone and fear is dispensed as a culture.
They used to be small groups of them all over the world, and they didn't do too much damage. What social media has done is amplified their voice, giving them look of legitimacy.
It is the structure of our media/advertising landscape that keeps nuanced but true views below the average interest and and amplifies outrageous crap, since it generates clicks and eyeballs.
They give kids great examples of things like falsifiability and scientific method.
Only when you meet these people in real life is there a fair chance of sounding them out to discover if they are just playing along or are actually convinced of whatever conspiracy is being peddled. I would expect most trolls keep their flat-earth proselytizing strictly as an online activity.
But they do seem to exist (the true believers that is).
without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views... that cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views.
I meet so few people who are willing to pay for most Internet sites and services. They have to deliver some great value to be able to live on paid subscriptions.
Would you pay for Facebook if all ads were gone? Or Twitter? I can barely find a use case for these services anymore. Strip it to Messenger and the event pages and that's 95% of all use cases that go beyond narcissism.
Also, I am not sure if Facebook is responsible for the observed stupidity and idiocy or if it simply reveals them...
This sentiment is one of the reasons anti-intellectualism is thriving at this very moment.
One hell of a feedback loop that is...
I think the average joe is generally more reasonable and
able to develop critical thinking skills than most people
think
They just don't ever get the opportunity to learn it properly.
This sentiment is one of the reasons anti-intellectualism is thriving at this very moment.
At least 10% of people are functionally illiterate. How are you going to teach them critical thinking skills? How are you going to get them to see the truth about e.g. vaccination? Answer: you don't. This is where we need a government, to take care of those that do not, for whatever reason, take care of themselves.
I don't think that's really true. To congregate, people must first find each other. That takes a certain amount of pre-existing interest plus a certain amount of ability to find something matching that interest. Not much, but some. Now, even the most passive and stupid people - a significant demographic, unfortunately - can basically sit back and let the other crazies come to them. The same filtering/targeting tools that have been such a boon for small businesses advertising their products have also been great for every fringe group that used to rely on old fashioned street-pounding evangelism.
But that's exactly what Facebook already does. How would attempting to minimize the spread of disinformation be any more dystopian than optimizing it for maximum utility?
For that matter, why, in these threads, is it only ever a slippery slope to attempt to counter misinformation, but never such to let it spread unchecked and be weaponized by any interest capable of doing so?
Facebook never was, nor ever claimed to be, a neutral arbiter. Their entire business model depends on distorting the truth, which arguably implies some degree of social responsibility on their part.
Not unless you are willing to avadakedavra them all, and this avenue is also wide open for abuse, as you may imagine
We've been down this route in several countries during the 20th century and it doesn't pan out well.
Not that being free from government influence frees you from the political preferences of your owner, as this recent non-sequitur headline from the Express should demonstrate: “EU BLACKMAIL: Brussels threatens FOOD AID to UK in 'last throw of dice of Project Fear'”.
Every fucking outbreak is serious. Please learn something about epidemiology, and about measles in particular. I've been involved in tracking an outbreak, and have (separately) known people who were seriously harmed by measles. Dismissing any outbreak as "not serious" is truly sociopathic.
There is nobody - no person and no organization - who it's safe to trust with that kind of power.
FB failed on so many basic moral expectations that I have 0 sympathy for that company, and IMHO yes, their purely for-profit product is definitely responsible for the content it provides.
Oh, for sure. But I’m cautious of instituting a blanket policy here that could end up being applied in other contexts where it may end up doing harm.
Given that diseases have killed more people than the Nazis ever did, I don't think it's unreasonable to make that analogy.
I'm absolutely an advocate for free speech, but I am also in support of Amazon's recent move to pull any material pushing the fraudulent vaccine/autism link claim.
You're also an advocate for the removal of free speech. Let's just be clear.
You can be both, depending on the situation. You are both. Many people here are both.
People, both as individuals and communities, also need to have some responsibility over their own willpower, their own souls, their own minds, their own clarity, their own grasp, their own sense of reality. Or else how do we believe in the true heart of democracy -- the citizen and their worthy mind, a mind of ideas worthy of community negotiation and leadership?
Somewhere else people are condemning Google for not showing people the objective truth, and instead giving you what you want to search. Like it's Google's responsibility to regulate you against your own risk for delusion. If people think citizens are that weak then how do you trust the value of their intellect?
Are voters one Facebook network away from losing their trustworthiness as citizens in a democracy?
The public consciousness of Facebook now is such that they're viewed as a pretty malevolent entity in general, but no-one questions the harm that Google's ranking algorithms have done to society.
Most people still believe that when they type a search into Google they're asking for objective results on a topic.
(What it actually shows is the results it thinks the person asking the question wants to see, which is wildly different person-to-person, but presented as objective truth to the user).
This audience knows that because we're deep in the industry, but Joe Public has no idea that Google works this way.
Of course he thinks his own crazy ideas are true and shared by the majority. Google told him so (as he sees it).
The general public doesn't consider Facebook as being even remotely malevolent. I think you're confusing the views within the HN/tech bubble for the mainstream.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16976328/facebook-mark-zuc...
Facebook hired a pollster to survey opinion about them.
32% of respondents in one survey said they're harming society, while only 7% said the same of Google.
I would suggest this difference is largely because the public doesn't understand how Google works, and believe it is as described above.
Facebook has constructed a business model on captivating people to spend _as much time as possible_ on their site. Google's search engine does no such thing.
From my perspective, they are exactly the same, but I'd be interested to know the thoughts of others.
I also think there are differences (youtube has some value that isn't predicated entirely on being a social network), but the distinctions are debatable and opinions will vary.
Facebook needs to realy on content from people pushing an agenda. YouTube gets content from people directly trying to make money.
Net result, it’s easy to find many videos for home repair or learning Calculus on YouTube, not so easy on Facebook.
Cars may do more evil by killing people than most things, but they are not nessisarily more evil becase they also provide a lot of utility. FB unlike YT has no such excuse.
Say the algorithm worked 100% perfectly, 100% of the time.
Joe believes the algorithm is engineered to answer his queries with facts. It's not.
It's engineered to show Joe what other people that think like Joe (based on profiling he is unaware of) have clicked on in the past, in the hopes Joe will click more and generate ad revenue.
I don't think this is anywhere near as significant a problem as you suggest. I just tried a few incognito vs. not incognito searches of various conspiracy theories that have become much more visibly popular in the last few years. I saw little significant difference between incognito mode and not, and most of the results are about why the particular conspiracy theory is bullshit.
In contrast, it's a small sample size, but I've seen first hand a small number of friends (and one family member) become much more extremist anti-vaccine crusaders, and the primary vehicle for me seeing this is facebook.
I think youtube is much closer to having these kinds of problems than google search, but youtube is also a lot closer to being "social media", which is the general problem, not facebook in particular. Facebook is just far and away the biggest and most influential.
You'd need to check with Tor for a fair comparison to rule out geographic/workplace affinity.
also..
Your starting perspective governs the search term. I'm confident vaccines are safe overall - so I'll search for "are vaccines safe?" (positive connotation). Someone who believes that vaccines are causing brain damage has already formed a contrary opinion, so in all likelihood would be expected to search for "vaccines cause autism" (negative connotation). The question is the same, but it's been presented differently, and Google will respond to the question asked.
Believe it or not, I'm not actually blaming Google for this. In essence, it's still trying to answer the question asked, but I think we need to seriously reassess what the heck we're doing and maybe launch public awareness campaigns about how this all works at a fundamental level.
I understand this, in fact, "vaccines cause autism" was exactly one of my test searches.
As for Tor: I don't have it and I'm not going to bother. And if nothing else, my region is a well known hotspot for anti-vaccine idiocy, so I would expect that to bias the test in favor of the filter bubble hypothesis, not against it.
I still think an Internet search / social media PSA campaign is urgently needed.
Frankly, why trust me? Why not try this yourself? I wish no one would trust random commenters on any social media, whether it be facebook or hackernews.
I'd rather you not trust me, I only spent 5 minutes on it. For someone such as yourself with such a strong opinion on the topic, I think it is worth spending a bit more time on it. This is one of those rare issues where if you think there's a problem, it's not hard to check for yourself.
I'm not going to download Tor because honestly I don't want my ISP thinking I'm up to no good (paranoid and ridiculous as I realize that is).
Totally agree otherwise on trust not being a substitute for critical thinking and applied reason, and yes, it's the biggest problem of all of this.
How do we have faith in the notion of citizen communal leadership if we think people can't handle Google giving you what you want? How much faith do we have when we think the members of our community aren't trustworthy as vanguards of clarity, so we want Facebook to step in and judge what counts as dangerous delusion?
What does that say about what we think of their judgment capabilities, and whether they can take on a more serious democratic challenge like a policy debate on Brexit, or the Californian initiative process? I view the judgment necessary for Brexit or other public policy as more than a magnitude harder than judging whether peers or posts in your network are as popular as Facebook wants you to think.
Your response again makes me ask whether we have esteem for the clarity of our peers. Is there even faith that people can manage their own click?
But no, I have little faith that many people (including at least one family member) can handle the firehose of bullshit from facebook. I have one family member that was always anti-vaccine, but it was not really an issue until she got on facebook. The degree of radicalization she has now reached is intense, and I pretty directly blame facebook for this. Her sub-network of friends that post about this regularly did not exist before facebook.
There are many firehoses of bullshit, but facebook is a singular example that has connected enough people to it via people they already trust that it seems to be having a real impact on the world's decision making abilities.
The question I raised is whether not people understand that this is what's happening. It's not explained at all to a user who visits the homepage, hence people believe Google is providing objective truths, when in reality they're not even attempting to.
If they can't get past this information judgment activity (Britney Spears isn't popular just because YouTube shows me), what happens when a more serious intellectual challenge comes along? Like Brexit?
Does the slightest wind blow away the faith you have in the judgment of your peers?
That's not in itself on Google, but as democratic whims over the last few years have shown, the lack of awareness is having out-sized effects on all of us that still isn't being talked about.
Social media may not be actively seeding viral nonsense, but it sure is making bank selling the petri dishes.
The first step, when one is able to temporarily rise above this suffocating morass, is to cry out that it must be torn down. Reform the first-past-the-post voting systems that generate and enforce an extremist 2-party system, stop powerful and wealthy entities from buying their own rules through lobbying and regulatory capture, adapt rules that were written without a concept for what they would mean in a world with broadcasting and instant copying of information, recognize that harmful externalities are not corrected by an irrational purely capitalistic economy...the list of injustices is long and reasonably obvious, from the outside. Tragically, though, these goals are next to impossible to achieve without a critical mass that the systems are actively repressing.
Things have pros and cons, and when the cons outweigh the pros perhaps action must be taken. But in this case, the people spreading the disinformation are to blame.
Seriously, they will punish an account for a nipple and do it even faster for frontal nudity, and it doesn't matter how tasteful the art is. They refuse adverts if they show "too much skin" (uncovered shoulders hinting at possible nudity). I'm pretty sure they can take these sorts of posts and pages down - or at least work towards taking them down.
Instead we elect people who demean the very scientists working hard to protect our society.
This doesn't excuse facebook, however. This isn't just their ad business I'm speaking of - I was merely pointing out that suggestive paintings are too much. Pointing out they punish artists that paint tasteful nudes. Historical photos are a grey area, and it has taken heads of states speaking out for those to be reinstated.
These are merely normal people's posts.
Yet allowing posts that harm others and entire groups that do the same? Yup, allowed. Because they choose to allow such posts, they share responsibility. They choose to turn a blind eye to anti-vax groups and the like.
As far as photos are concerned, age and "famous" do, indeed, matter. The "napalm girl" picture was banned for nudity - even when a head of state sent it out. Facebook said it would allow "historically important" works, but it still lies in a grey area. I highly doubt a new work of equal cultural importance could be posted today.
Unfortunately, it seems that people aren’t capable properly of wielding the power democracy gives them.
It is “not their job” as in it is unreasonable to expect Facebook to start educating its users out of the blue. However, it’s easy to argue that it’s better for Facebook’s bottom line in many respects if their user base is more effective at navigating life and surviving.
And also, it can be made their job if we so desire.
Tobacco companies Weapon makers Oil companies
And they all sponsor powerful lobbies to screw up things even more, which we also allow. The EU fines google for the order that links appear on a page, but they let tobacco companies kill people at our expense free of charge.
Facebook just mirrors society at large. At least those parts, that would use it in such a way in the first place.
Unfortunately, I don't think moral obligations apply to our current economic system.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/15/facebook-...
http://gothamist.com/2019/03/26/orthodox_jewish_nurses_vacci...
But man, did it work at the start. We all had hopes for the future.
And for that bright moment, we do have the Silicon Valley of yore to thank.
However, what’s not forgiveable is staying in the dark and not adapting.
Especially if you land up on HN, Where pivot is a verb, mantra and well respected course of action.
————
Here’s what i postulate -
Any sufficiently large network is a proxy for the underlying state of the population.
At humanity scale this means that commerce is optimized, but then this (through attention farming) exacerbates human fault lines.
It means that anonymity will always be misused by criminals and revolutionaries.
As a result, there will always be a centralizing tendency that begins to apply on large networks. Only small inconsequential networks can avoid this.
(Central tendency as in - government oversight and force to order chaotic activity online,)
Any tool built must always play on this divide - increasing transparency and central control vs increasing anonymity and increasing the are of illegal behavior.
—————-
Most of this would be solved if print media were still a viable business.
We generate tons of data, and content, sifting through it is impossible.
But teams of editors and reliable news papers could once upon a time, do that. However it seems the information industry is suited for centralized, agenda dominated firms.
We are literally witnessing a self-selecting Darwin event here. The vaccinated tribes will live longer than the unvaccinated ones.
Rockland county is home to a large ultra-conservative religious community that is extremely insular and uses local scale to control the civil institutions of their local government. (Village, school district, etc) Members of the community have limited access to outside media and certainly not Facebook.
In this case, the leaders of the communita took a stance for reasons I do not know. Sheep do what the shepards want.
Cheap printing presses were a wonderful idea, but just one of first major application happened was printing books about the "jew/catholic/arab burning."
The publications are funded by these bozos: https://www.nvic.org
C'mon, if you go with an open mind into the serious problems with vaccination safety, you come away with serious questions. As least I do, and I'm part of the usual Ivy-educated CS crowd around here...
Edit: gonna specify that I'm in favor of vaccines otherwise some won't read the message and think this is an anti-vaxx post
We shouldn’t! We should trust a medicine once they’ve published peer-reviewed papers, cleared multiple national efficiency and safety clinical trial standards, been universally recognised by medical professionals as a prudent personal and publish health measure and can look back on decades of evidence that pretty much points one way. When parents can’t weigh that evidence against some hocus pocus sense of unease, they should be liable for the costs of their decisions.
Which is why we delegate that trust to experts. There are many such experts. Take your pick among your government, other governments, pharmaceutical companies, your doctor, anyone else’s doctor, immunologists, or any scientist with domain expertise. They all come to the same consensus.
What doesn’t make sense is distrusting all of them while trusting Internet numpties peddling supplements.