Probing Facebook's Misinformation Machine
getrevue.co
getrevue.co
- use masks => use adblock to avoid contaminants
- cleaning => regularly review who you follow. You're allowing them write access to your brain, and there's some evidence that the subconscious hangs on to ideas even if you intellectually know they're not true
- social distancing => mute, block, or defriend superspreaders
- testing => get things checked by a credible authority that's outside the disinfo bubble
- self-isolation => get off Facebook and encourage others to do so, unless you've already managed to disinfect your feed to an adequate extent
The virus merely gains life from spreading. The disinformation is being actively injected by political actors, some of whom (but absolutely not all or even a majority!) are sponsored by hostile governments; and also by profiteers. The "bleach drinking" thing didn't come from nowhere, there's a group out there selling it as "miracle mineral solution". Straight old fashioned toxic snake oil vendors who want your money and don't care about killing you or your family.
Stay safe.
I probably will be even more thorough in my digital hygiene.
Who decides what's a credible authority? How about critical thinking instead?
You might be able to determine by critical thinking that bleach isn't a coronavirus cure, but chloroquine? You're going to have to wait for someone to run a trial and then decide if they're a credible authority.
Applying critical thinking to your choice of sources is both easier and more important than applying it to their claims.
Have you gone and verified some physical constants yourself, it are you just accepting authority as to the mass of the electron?
And holy shit. The amount of misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories on Facebook is insane. Facebook is a machine that breeds extremists.
I now understand the #deleteFacebook movement much more where I previously thought it wasn't a big deal.
I'd argue that Reddit also does the same thing. On Reddit, you can always find a community that agrees with your radical thinking. Reddit also has a problem with groupthink where the upvoting system heavily rewards popular opinion, even if it's false.
In this day and age, I find that not participating in social networks makes me a happier and less radical person. If I do partake in them, I limit myself to generally harmless hobby and work-related communities.
Even the news is based on getting anger clicks so it's hard to escape
The most prominent example is supporters of Donald Trump being forced off-site, but any kind of conservative or right-leaning community or politically incorrect community is being forced out.
I was there for about 10 years, and a few months ago my account got temp-banned because I said a naughty word. So I deleted my account and left the place for good. Some people on the extreme right have congregated elsewhere, but I'm not sure where right-leaning centrists are supposed to go.
Do you have any concrete examples of this? I won't pretend I'm up to speed on the subject but this just strikes me as incredibly heavily exaggerated.
/r/SargonOfAkkad is quarantined, meaning it's circling the drain before being banned.
Actually just browsing /r/reclassified sorted by top posts brings up a lot of examples. It's not all political of course, there are literal CP subs getting axed like /r/AgePlayPenpals, but banned subreddits are overwhelmingly either conservative, anti-feminist or edgy or equivalent.
Angela Merkel is a right-leaning centrist where I'm from. I'll leave it at that.
> not sure where right-leaning centrists are supposed to go
Given that's basically Biden's Democrat party, I don't think they're an endangered species just yet.
(There is also a disinformation problem on the left, but nowhere near as prevalent in the mainstream politics and news organisations, and a non-aligned smattering of nonsense such as the anti-5G campaign)
In closing, before anyone puts me in a category I don't belong: I'm not american, and I don't follow or care particularly about american politics.
Then why the f are you commenting on it? Don't comment on things you don't know about, especially the politics of a country not your own.
What was the word?
Man was I taken aback every single time. The initial tweets referred to me were quite interesting nuggets. But once I started scrolling some distance down I was immediately in a strange land of turf wars between different groups of tin foil hat people. And people promoting their fake COVID views all over.
From that it was just a short step to adding twitter to my blocked hosts file.
But as soon as you scroll down, the comments make you want to throw up.
Facebook is, more accurately, a machine designed to maximise the amount of time you spend on Facebook. It just so happens that the maxima for that is to provoke arguments. That is why the only safe exposure is zero. You can’t beat a machine that is using every single interaction with you against you. Even people who imagine they’re battling disinformation are in reality, just being held in place to be exposed to more ads.
It just doesn't know how to exploit users influence without allowing them to express their individual views, extreme or not.
More to the point, Facebook is designed to maximize how much marketing influence it has over you, which it does both by maximising time and exploiting the existing trust you have in Facebook friends, to convert that into implied endorsements and peer pressure or popularity based groupthink. Or exploit your mental state of engagement to equate content from an ad with content from a friend.
Which I point out, because Facebook is basically working as intended, they're just upset that they've built a machine which (by it's design and very nature) they can't monopolize control of the content of influence, since they rely on amplifing users' influence to express theirs (or their advertiser's).
Like most tools, it inherently just does a job, which is to get you to to influence your friends. Just like real life, friends can be a good influence or a bad one.
But I don’t think Facebook -the algo - really cares about which way it influences it’s captive audience. It just wants more ads to be shown. It’s up to the humans in charge to decide on what those ads are, and they are very bad at it. Or they don’t care either.
I understand that they've come to mean the same thing, but the latter term makes the intent behind the content these refer to much more clear.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/163857/what-exac...