Facebook removes QAnon conspiracy group with 200k members
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Normalis.Elethez.Ragaszkodok...
There is not even a category to report them because Facebook only has limited options (nudity, harassment, hate speech, unauthorized sales, violence)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/08/05/trump-p...
> Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said, “This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from COVID-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful COVID misinformation."
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article
"Although mechanistic studies support the potential effect of hand hygiene or face masks, evidence from 14 randomized controlled trials of these measures did not support a substantial effect on transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza. We similarly found limited evidence on the effectiveness of improved hygiene and environmental cleaning. We identified several major knowledge gaps requiring further research, most fundamentally an improved characterization of the modes of person-to-person transmission."
That study is not the CDC's current stance (and a single study on their site isn't a stance), nor does it reflect more recent research.
Here's July, for example: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/p0714-americans-to-w...
> In an editorial published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), CDC reviewed the latest science and affirms that cloth face coverings are a critical tool in the fight against COVID-19 that could reduce the spread of the disease, particularly when used universally within communities. There is increasing evidence that cloth face coverings help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others.
> This review included two case studies out today, one from JAMA, showing that adherence to universal masking policies reduced SARS-CoV-2 transmission within a Boston hospital system, and one from CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), showing that wearing a mask prevented the spread of infection from two hair stylists to their customers in Missouri.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...
If you go through the literature, there's genuinely very little concrete useful stuff on mask efficacy pre-COVID. "We're not sure" was a pretty reasonable statement back in March.
"Masks don't work" like the US Surgeon General was tweeting at the time wasn't a very supportable statement, though.
(The lie didn't work, either, and likely harmed trust in public officials on the matter.)
What a world that would be to live in.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
It is not your or Facebook's job to censor people. Btw. Sweden made most of the things work what this particular group is asking for (no masks). Do you want to ban Sweden too?
Weird how "let's not send the Jews to the gas chambers" didn't catch on in Nazi Germany. Good ideas sometimes get swamped by bad ideas pushed by effective people/propaganda. It's quite clear from human history that good ideas are neither a sure weapon, nor a fast one.
? In the commons, there is limited ability to discriminate between 'good' and 'bad' ideas.
Among the crowds, the craziest ideas usually win.
Individuals are intelligent, but crowds are dumb.
Most people who push for ultra freedom of expression think of it in intellectual terms, you know, people having reasonable discussion, but it's not that, it's yelling, cursing, death threats, crazy ideas and 'actual racism' (and I mean the bad stuff like 'kill all those XYZ people, they are cockroaches').
It is the same on Twitter and YouTube, and probably on every other social networking site. There is an unending stream of blatant misinformation spread by accounts ranging from ‘misinformed loudmouth’ to ‘obvious troll’, and no options to report these posts or users. It is frustrating.
If these companies really want to tackle misinformation, the very least they could do is have a mechanism that collects reports for analysis.
They need public-facing mechanisms to report content so it can be removed, just like all the other disallowed content which can be reported. It’s not good enough to plaster “get the facts” banners above the comments section or in users’ feeds, or occasionally take sweeping actions against highly visible groups/accounts. My frustration is that no option exists to report misinformation even though (1) it’s banned content, and (2) the reporting mechanism is already there.
1. The person believes what they are saying strongly enough to say it openly and conspicuously. Attempts to correct them with facts triggers a backfire effect which causes them to believe the false information even more strongly[0].
2. The person is a troll. They don’t actually believe what they are saying. They are only saying it in order to make others (you!) upset because it makes them feel powerful[1].
3. The person is actually a bot or part of a coordinated disinformation campaign. Their goal is to create false division between people to create instability, and engaging only helps them achieve their objective[2].
In all cases, an action which causes people to feel the need to repeat false information may cause more people to believe the false information due to the illusory truth effect[3], which can lead to the sort of spiral we find ourselves in today. My understanding here is that false information existing is not a problem so much as the ubiquity of the false information, and from that perspective it’s more important to make it harder to find than it is to try to correct it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll#Psychological_c...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/28/russia-covid...
Saying outrageous things you don't believe can unfortunately be quite lucrative.
Perhaps it falls under your second category, but I think the profit motive makes them even more motivated & nihilistic than a mere troll.
Please embrace the difference between "conspiracy" and "conspiracy theory".
That's what makes it so difficult to 'package' truth as a conspiracy.
Obviously YouTube comments are generally quite shit, but this was an unending stream of Bill Gates/5G/anti-vaxxer conspiracies. I've also already met a handful of them in my day to day life, and these were not particularly crazy or uneducated people.
There never was. Don't limit yourself to the concept of a single objective truth.
I always believed they work, even when the government first lied about that.
Embrace... falsehood?
Masks work to help stop the spread and hydroxychloroquine has no evidence that it helps anyone who is sick.
There, was that so hard?
Internet or no, those people were always going to be misinformed. Because they choose to be.
(+) What happened to mass shootings? Have they just vanished from the news cycle from outside the US, or vanished under the high covid death rate, or been ended by lockdown?
It's not Fort Knox to need defending.
What really happens is - it turns out a significant portion of human beings are vulnerable to what, for lack of a better term, could be called bullshit. It's part just plain ignorance, part honest mistake, part willful deception. As long as only a few fall prey to it, as long as times are not too trying, as long as the bullshit doesn't make them do crazy and/or destructive things, then it's more or less okay - I mean, that's basically the default state of humanity since forever.
But when those conditions are not true anymore, some feedback loops need to be activated.
I realize that "privilege" is a very overloaded word these days so perhaps I'm just not understanding its use in this context.
I don’t have hard laws to point towards, but laws are made based on culture. The US is in the midst of a cultural revolution. The majority is realizing that we should have a society that treats people fairly. That is pissing some people off.
The root of much of conspiratorial thinking is attempting to make sense of a chaotic world by assuming that everything is being organized and controlled by a small group. The feeling of being "in the know" about the "way things really work" gives adherents a sense of control.
Put another way: modern conspiracy theory could be seen a coping mechanism for information overload.
I think that it's at least in part rooted in epistemic heuristic, and I suspect that the reason people engage in conspiracy theory today is exactly the same reason ancient humans imagined the movement of the sun and the tides as being controlled by anthropomorphic deities. Of course this isn't the complete story, there are social aspects as well, but it is a very large part of it.
I personally believe it is. Or at the very least it's closely related.
The terrible thing that happened to me does not feel like "secret knowledge" or a "conspiracy theory" at all. It is very real and the consequences I deal with are relevant to every minute of every day of my life.
I don't feel depressed. My life is fulfilling and I find a tremendous amount of meaning in the work I do. I know many others who are prone to considering "conspiracy theories" who are the same.
You seem to be confusing "people in power abuse said power and never face consequences" (true) with Hilary Clinton operated a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza place" (not true).
People in power face consequences all the time. I never denied that. It just takes a long time for a reckoning to happen. Often decades, or lifetimes.
And I doubt QAnon conspiracy theory is as simple as "Hillary Clinton operated a pedophile ring out of the basement of a pizza place".
You are oversimplifying my point, turning it into a false dichotomy, and assuming the QAnon conspiracy theory is only the idea that Hillary Clinton operated a pedophile ring. My point was that depressed losers aren't the only people open to controversial theories about people in power.
I don't know many details about QAnon, and I don't care much to research it and come to an understanding myself. I have much more important things to spend my time on. But I do know from random posts I've encountered by QAnon people is that there is a wide range of beliefs regarding who is involved and to what extent. Actually, I haven't seen anyone accuse Hillary Clinton of involvement in a few years now.
There seems to be a growing consensus that child sex rings exist, corruption is involved, and something needs to be done about it. But it also gets blown out of proportion by less careful minded people. Isn't Jeffrey Epstein and "pedo island" considered to be part of QAnon? Isn't Epstein's involved with child sex trafficking generally accepted as true now?
> I don't know many details about QAnon, and I don't care much to research it and come to an understanding myself.
Cool.
> Isn't Jeffrey Epstein and "pedo island" considered to be part of QAnon?
No. They falsely took credit for bringing him down, when it was journalists in the "mainstream media" (specifically one reporter for the Miami Herald named Julie Brown) that broke the story and brought him down. To be clear, they had nothing to do with his downfall.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwnjx4/people-tell-us-how...
The reverse is also true, if someone has to say they are important, then they are likely not actually important.
Applying this to the QAnon 'motto' of 'Where we go one, we go all', I think you can conclude that if they have to say it, then it's not true. Most adherents are then, mostly, alone.
The feeling of community and belonging that these people get is obviously missing in their lives otherwise. That they find these feelings via image macros, chat boxes, and videos speaks to the depth of loss they feel in their lives.
It's not an issue of misinformation, but I think, loneliness.
I never understood that as a moto. Right wingers are known for being hyper-individualistic, WWGOWGA seems like some quasi-socialist slogan.
But you are right, there are multiple crises of poverty, loneliness and poor education in the US. The thing that really baffles me are the "Q" followers that are none of these things, and aren't American.
I think you're discounting the number of people involved with such conspiracies for whom that discription is not true.
Everything he is against doesn't affect his life one bit, its like hobby to him and it gets good reaction from others. His conspiracy theory articles can be debunked in few minutes and then he throws in even bigger article and he hasnt even read those, so if you keep pushing he has nothing to say.
But typically the person feels like they have no control, so inventing this universe that makes sense to them allows them to retain some (fictional) control. Or they may feel worthless or low-status, and if they imagine they "know" things that most people "don't know" that would restore them some of their perceived status. Or they may completely disagree with how the world looks like and the direction where it appears to be going, so let's invent this other world that's more satisfactory.
I mean, if all of the above (and similar) explanations fail, you'd just have to assume the person is not very intelligent. I'm not sure what else could possibly explain it at that point.
Or religions.
https://www.businessinsider.com/true-government-conspiracies...
Next best guess: the conventional truth is inconvenient.
Who has time to peruse dozens of papers of technical jargon on COVID? Who's got the time to read a book by Chomsky, compare and contrast with a conservative writer on the same topic, a historian, while looking at the experts' interpretation of these things?
Out best understanding of things is just as fragmented as the wild conspiracy theories, with the difference that the experts debate minutiae that requires deep knowledge and patience.
We cannot deeply research more than a couple of things at a time, at best. We crave easy answers and grand narratives.
Humans have thought patterns like this by default. We invented things like science to _prevent_ us from falling into those traps.
Flat earth, anti-vax, Qanon, etc. are more of the same. If there's a difference it's the scale and speed afforded by social media.
This hard pull towards conspiracy theories is happening in contrast to a period of about 100 or so years of relative enlightenment supported by mainly centralized liberal institutions(not saying that doesn’t have a cost), but this pattern is as old as civilization itself.
But why now? IMO it’s modern day mythology created by a tremendous lack of trust in fragmented and unreliable cultural and political institutions. Authority and expertise to explain and deal with the events around us been either drowned out by false prophets or ignored after committing enough reputation suicide as to be rendered untrustworthy.
It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest.
Impossible really.
Maybe on a small scale, village level. Now the village is global, and that's what makes the whole thing extremely dangerous.
> It’s hard to see the path out of this dark forest.
Agreed.
How about we aim for just plain old un-modified "truth" and realize that it can be quite elusive?
The idea of a separate objective truth outside ourselves is a relatively recent development.
We generally credit the Ionian Greeks with adding this idea to human civilization and there has always been push-back against it.
I remember watching this as a child and thinking it was the least important episode, but upon reflection I realized it was the most important one.
Then the internet fragmented that, providing real time alternative narratives, around the same time that 9/11 and the wars afterwards happened. So people got very interested in the news and it was very obvious that the mainstream news was lying right now.
Now your entire worldview start falling apart, how do you know what's true and who's trying to kill you? You need to find someone else who can tell you what's happening. You aren't quite sure how this whole "critical reading" thing is supposed to work, never learned that stuff in school, but you did find some trustworthy folks who are a lot like you online who seem very confident about what's happening. Even more like you than the old people at the newspapers, and more certain about things, which means they are more likely to be right! This is great, now you will be safe and you actually understand what's happening, unlike those people who keep making things so bad.
QAnon (like all conspiracies) start with a grain of truth, but it seems to also want to frame Donald Trump as a savior of a sick and broken system instead of its greatest and more literal manifestation.
Conspiracy theorists have plenty of actual material, but they seem to like to make shit up instead of seeking the truth of the matter.
Since this need for alternative narratives is a media market you get grifters who say what makes the most money and not what they actually believe. Not surprising at all, so expecting Alex Jones to seek actual truth completely misunderstands what he is doing and what he knows he is doing.
But if you have a political plan and it requires some people to believe a specific thing, but it is hard to convince people (for example, because it isn't true) you have a problem. If you are smart you start to think about how there are these professional convincers who are very popular and their business model is "say things that make me money" and you come up with a pitch for them.
It's not exactly news that one of the most prevalent types of actual historical conspiracies involve plans to spread untrue conspiracy theories as propaganda, but it does have that perverse ironic flavor to it since it means saying things like "no, no, these conspiracy theories are spread as part of a conspiracy"!
Anecdote: I am in a privacy group where everyone likes to talk about the three letter agencies and big companies in a grand manner. Some of it is possible, other seems plausible and some part is a joke. I don't think everyone knows which part is which though.
Worse, for a lot of people their social media feed is their main or even only source of news.
The 40-year project to undermine expertise and specialization of all kind magnifies this effect in some, and brings it out in others for whom it had only been latent, but it's not the real driver. The real driver is that people feel slighted and ignored, operating in a supposedly egalitarian public sphere and seeing other "ordinary" people gain extraordinary status, but unable to do so themselves without taking risks.
If Facebook disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t cry all that much.
I will point out that there are many really good social networks that don’t also have the same problems as Facebook. Things like instant messaging groups, subreddits, Discord servers, phone calls, Imgur, etc. Every medium and platform has its drawbacks but I find that using multiple networks that aren’t FB has been a huge boon to the quality and quantity of meaningful experiences I’ve had.
I really enjoy these chance interactions.
My credit card works great - I still have a backup card with a separate bank from the primary one.
Be careful conflating "I don't do X" with "no one does X".
If you were, you'd have his imessage / whatsapp. Facebook is a 3rd tier form of communication for a reason.
FB Messenger is just fine. It has the same features as iMessage and WhatsApp, and plenty of folks use it as primary comms.
In the physical world, where attending rallies or meetings costs time and physical effort, the assumption may be more valid. In the digital world, where group membership is almost costless, it fails.
With Covid, people were having scientific discussions around R0, transmission of viruses, etc. Then it became about hating "anti-maskers" and all that stopped.
Once it became about hating a group of people, all intelligent discussion immediately stopped. This same pattern plays out in almost every major news story in America.
Because of language? hating “anti-maskers”?
Because it assumes that there’s still something to discuss about covid?
In case it wasn't clear from my comment, I think this stuff is at the very core of anti-intellectualism. People who rail against "pro-maskers" are just as inane as those who rail against "anti-maskers."
Please don't sign me up for either side of your made-up societal divisions.
One of the great things that the Internet does is make it possible for any group to make their own echo chamber (see Parler as an example), and complaining that people don't show up says more about the people who created it and less about the regulatory environment.
Both chapo trap house and the Donald that were banned from Reddit quickly created their own websites.
What people are demanding is not just freedom of speech but the right to appear in everyones newsfeed no matter how dangerous or bigoted their views maybe. We tend to conflate the two freedoms.
Reputation systems like HN and Reddit, lack nuance in their expression. Does a downvote mean "I don't agree?", does it mean "I don't like you?", does it mean "This makes me mad?", does it mean "This comment doesn't add value?", or maybe "This comment is inaccurate."?
Because this sort of voting is such a blunt instrument, I don't see a lot of value in trying to tease out the "why" of up votes or down votes. At the end of the day, does it matter? Any comment on this site with regards to a link is just a data point amongst many from which the reader may develop an understanding.
Even Ma Bell, in its most powerful and abusive days as a monopolist, would never have dreamed of enacting such hostility towards its users.
It's worth asking, for how long will people tolerate an increasingly unreliable communications infrastructure?
Facebook isn’t necessary infrastructure for communication. It’s an ad platform.
Anyone using it accepted an arrangement where Facebook is under no obligation to permit them to continue to use Facebooks property (Facebooks servers).
You should really climb out of the web and read up on the laws that you tacitly give control over you by your ignorance of how they work.
The historical root of power in America is owning real property. The masses seem happy to sign theirs over to employers and banks.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
In short: (C)(1) - publishers are not speakers (C)(2) - publishers can remove content at their discretion.
How did the law come to be understood to do the exact opposite of what it does? There is also no requirement for them to be transparent or fair.
The comparison to 'Ma Bell' is irrelevant.
'Verizon or AT&T' - the actual modern incarnations of 'Ma Bell' are not intervening here, nor will they.
If you want to make up stories about people raping children in basements, then yo can do that on your own website.
" for how long will people tolerate an increasingly unreliable communications infrastructure?"
This question is upside down.
The real question is 'How long will most people tolerate a social network full of stupidity, make up stuff, fake news, and other garbage'?
QAnon is not the reason people use FB, it's the reason they leave.
De-facto it is both a 'communications infrastructure' and a 'public square' - due to the simple fact that it is used as such by hundreds of millions of people.
The fact that they get away with pretending that they aren't is unfortunate. The fact that so many people are eager to defend this is sad, to say the least.
Facebook has always had policies concerning content, that was never up for debate.
There's really little to argue about here.
If you want to talk about Lizards in control of the White House, you can make your own web site.
I don’t think they really care about secret conversation, though. I think they want to recruit new followers. Every new recruit reaffirms that they’re “correct” in their thinking and solidifies the sense of belonging.
At this point Facebook, Google, and all other operators of similar platforms should be viewing their hoard of user data, not as a gold mine, but as a superfund site.
The demise of these companies starts with demands to purge the platforms of "content violating policies." The only problem is that these polices can never quite be pinned down. So the takedowns will be all over the map, guided only by the prevailing wind.
These calls inevitably will lead to even more urgent calls to track the users of the objectionable content. After all, if the group was dangerous, so must be its users.
The problem is that there are infinite ways for humans to be offended. Each takedown ensures that the next round of calls will be that much louder and more insistent.
If you wanted to engineer the boringest platform possible, this is how you'd do it. Ad revenues will follow the departure of users for greener pastures.
It's what the Americans point to when they discuss reforms of their education system - and I am the one saying it's not really that strong, or rather, does not seem to be the actual solution.
This seems more like an emotional intelligence problem than anything else.
You need both the skills and the desire to seek the truth versus accepting whatever information galvanizes your preexisting belief and value systems. High hill to climb.
People believe what they want. I’ve seen many smart successful programmers spouting off crazy conspiracy theories.
Quite the contrary, many successful people believe they and they alone are responsible for their success, despite their contribution being less than that of others.
https://www.cdc.gov/mentalhealth/learn/index.htm (Control-F “How common are mental illnesses?”)
Your statement was "People believe what they want."
You're both saying the same thing.
People who can't think critically never believe in conspiracy theories. They believe the official story every time.
I've never understood this argument against conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are the ultimate form of critical thinking.
I don't disagree with you, I'm just stopping right here. Like you said, it's a requirement. So contrarians are more likely to have it.
It's just a technical truth. It doesn't mean they're more likely to be right or that they have a better grip on reality. They just have one of the prerequisites, so they're more likely to have the thing.
Are there no conspiracies? Are all conspiracy theories necessarily untrue?
I don't really care about the group analysis stuff. Not gonna apply that kind of reasoning to anyone I come across.
People who believe in conspiracy theories rarely, if ever, change their minds. Everything is controlled by some small group that is pulling the strings.
Critical thinking doesn’t mean to never believe authorities. It means to actually be able to judge the evidence and the sources yourself.
Despite knowing the flaw of scientific institutions, I still trust scientists in general for ground truth facts, even when they get things wrong.
Hell, when I follow a known expert lecture and followed the citations for just the first lecture, I found minor errors or discrepancies.
I don't understand the major theories at the gut theories. I don't have degrees or the knowledge needed to understand them. I haven't followed the citations and look at the facts.
And the thing is: nobody in the world have time to follow the citations and see if it match up with what everybody else said, let along actually verify the raw facts and follow the thought process of the original scientists.
That being said. I am pretty sure that the modern world is based on a system of rational thought and technology built on the accumulated knowledge of generations of scientists.
You and I could easily weave conspiracy using ordinary facts.
Anyone who has the skills to find /pol/ and interact on that board has the digital skills needed to find true information. You don't just stumble upon that.
One notable example is climate change. Among Republicans in the US belief in climate change actually declines with increasing education.[2]. Higher education or reasoning facilities don't stop misinformation because misinformation isn't the result of a literal lack of information, it's a rationalisation strategy of adopting fact to preconceived beliefs, and if anything highly educated or capable people are more likely to be able to justify their assumptions.
This even literally shows up in the QAnon slogan which is "question everything". Conspiracy theorists virtually never lack the ability to critically think, if anything they think too critically.
[1]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691169446/de...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/14/upshot/climat...
People in power, in the West, are disproportionately lawyers with humanities skills, or business types with no skills (lol). As our society increasingly fails, knowledge of math and science is increasingly important to convey truth. Politicians have long repeated repeated what experts tell them (when they are telling the truth), but now that they are repeating something they cannot well understand themselves, it just comes us stale / on faith alone.
> Lawyers are paid to defend their clients. Every politician is a lawyer by trade.
No, that would be true if "people paid to defend their clients are Lawyers". Lawyers offer a specific service to client, distinct from bodyguards and others who provide defense.
Politicians do want to get reelected, but there are many ways for that to be.
Nothing about politics is inherently sublimely, or sleazy things like ALEC inevitable. It rather the due to very specific problems in the US such as terrible voting systems.
> This is the expected result, anyway
To whom?
No, most conspiracy theories are based on ignorance or fallacious reasoning as well as mistaking cynicism for reason or critical thinking.
A lot of this, I think, is driven by people badly wanting or not wanting things to be true. Religious history is another good spot where you can see highly-trained researchers buy into their community's biases, but in the last many years, we've gotten better as a society at acknowledging that religion is the sort of thing that can go sour like this. We haven't gotten good at acknowledging this about other forms of allegiance to a community. Most of the QAnon stuff is driven by patriotism gone sour, and with the benefit of hindsight, we've absolutely seen historians write to fit their worldviews, but we're not as good at seeing it in real time, when it matters.
And yes, that's more or less exactly what logic is in a sense... except the people I'm talking about skip the part about checking the base premises they are building their argument on - because they so badly want to arrive at a specific conclusion.
I don't know the answer. I don't know how you get people in general to plow through emotional reactions first and then give in to them only after a thoughtful process.
Education seems to help though, and lacking some other solution it seems a reasonable thing to focus on. Yet even that is now more of a political issue than it has ever been.
Degrees are often conflated with education. People need to be able to think critically, something that is only partially practiced at a modern institutions. There's plenty of people who can tell you the facts of some field without being able to explain what a theory is, or how evidence works.
Never mind that theory alone and statistics alone are both recipes for bias (either flat out fictional narratives (Freud) or p-hacking and over fit crap (bad science).
At least when we erred on the side of theory, it was more "catchy" and better fit our narrative brains. Theory-based truths also derive more from subject-matter-specific reasoning, whereas statistics based truths derive more from subject-matter-agnostic reasoning.
I started reading this https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-cou.... It does seem like Ulrich Beck was on top of lots of this stuff first.
This was believed by a Canadian friend who has a PhD, who is also addicted to Twitter.
May be more of a psychographic than demographic reason.
I would hesitate to say this. There have been emergences of qanon adjacent conspiracies popping up out of tiktok, the Wayfair one being the most obvious example.
People need to understand how to question, investigate, and challenge the sources of information they consume. If we can't do that, in the US or otherwise, then we are doomed.
Right now, they absolutely do discriminate on the information they feed me - most of that discrimination comes in the form of "Did the author of the information pay us?"
I shudder to think of what a world will look like, where the only things known to the public are things that their authors paid for. That'll certainly be a great improvement to the status quo.
People wring their hands over the fifty cent army, but I suppose the five-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-day political ad spend is just something we get to shrug our shoulders at.
To sum it up like that reduces both the enormity and complexity of the problem they are faced with. You say you get spammed with Trump ads; how many of those ads make claims that you could prove are irrevocably untrue? Politicians and people designing political ads are often experts at dancing in the "gray area" of truth.
I don't think it is fair to deny the fact that Facebook takes this problem very seriously, certainly beyond what would be expected from them as far as business obligations go. (I'm even saying this as someone building a product that would compete with them.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American...
> Most of what we're seeing today is really just a symptom of a deeper issue.
Well, a whole cascade of deeper unresolved issues, plus a very modern Bernays-derived system for injecting nonsense into people and getting them to proliferate it.
Clearly marking it, might be. Much like you can buy all manner of food supplement, but they don't pretend to be drugs, because they are marked with "efficacy is not clinically proven". (Even if "objectively" some of them are efficacious.)
But this ends up with an unsexy task of picking a conspiracy theory to pieces and marking unconfirmed pieces as such, logic contradictions as such, etc. I'm very grateful to people who take take the time to do that. But definitely there are fewer such people than conspiracy theory outlets.
It might be great to have a central repository of such analyses and refutations, crowd-supplied and peer-reviewed, like Wikipedia. The Lesswrong site could be part of it, but it has its own ...biases. TVTropes can be surprisingly useful for learning about and detecting common narrative devices used to drive the narrative and fiction, as opposed to trying to describe reality. But a level-headed, balanced site with systematic analysis of conspiracy theories either does not exist, not not publicized nearly enough.
This is QAnon's very first post.
https://i.imgur.com/ycdpCmS.png
Can you point me to any NY Times article that is even remotely close to this level of BS?
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gentrification...
http://careymorewedge.com/papers/Scopellitietal2015BiasBlind...
Education may help, but it needs to be focused specifically on bias blind spot reduction. There is some evidence mindfulness training is effective. Mindfulness is presently not taught in traditional education.
https://medium.com/inclusion-insights/mindfulness-bias-liter...
What does "smart" mean then? You write like everyone knows what the definitions are of the words you use, but the way you use them makes it clear that they all need to be defined before any understanding could happen.
I am completely apathetic about expert opinion and "studies" when I get a glimpse of some sort of community that just assumes everybody agrees on axioms and definitions.
I remember spending a lot of time reading about the reptile conspiracy, 9/11 conspiracies. I actually spent a lot of time seriously considering whether some of this information was true.
The internet turned me into an atheist inspite of growing up in a religious setting.
Blogs on the internet were much more aware of the impending financial crash in 2008 and the fact that Iraq did not have WMD.
It takes a while of using the internet to learn how it works and the fact that any random lunatic can start a blog.
My heuristic these days is that 80 % of mainstream opinion is true.
The real world is quite complex and the internet is wonderful for doing your own research.
To be clear, I'm against everything QAnon has done and have had numerous debates to disprove their theories and it is _exhausting_.
But it everyone's right to have their own beliefs. This _is_ a form of censorship. Facebook is a private platform and so has the right to do as they please, and we have the right to choose another platform -- but we shouldn't mistake what we're doing as some sort of noble act.
The right to freedom of thought isn't about defending your right when you agree with it, it's about defending the right even when you _don't agree_ with it.
It's not the conspiracy itself. It's the people holding it up and actively opposing anyone that disagrees with them in harmful ways.
The whole Q thing is dragging our most vulnerable citizens into a conspiracy that is probably run by a few nerds from 4chan who are using it to make cash and have a joke.
I picture these dorks, sitting in a basement, smoking dope, playing video games, throwing out suggestions to further the conspiracy.
Nerd 1: "Hey! Let's tell them JFK, Jr is alive and will come back to help Trump!"
Nerd 2: "Holy shit that's brilliant."
Nerd 3: "Tell then Trump will replace Pence with JFK, Jr as VP. That will totally rile them up."
Nerd 1: "Brilliant!"
Nerd 2: "This is so much fun. What a bunch of idiots."
[0] https://gnet-research.org/2020/06/15/assessing-the-threat-of...
Because this is not analogous to book burning?
People freely choosing which viewpoints they will use their resources to relay.
Freedom of speech is not (indeed, is opposed to) entitlement to others active participation in your speech. Freedom of speech means you need to convince others of the merits of your speech if you want them to help you spread it.
Anonymous accounts run by various secret agencies, trolls, and even just ordinary people who are wrong can cause tremendous amounts of damage to millions of people. These should be banned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of... (famous 1903 example)
Also while theories political in nature are most likely believed by those they benefit the same but opposite holds true for those who would not like them to be true.
Allowing someone like Facebook to be an ‘unbiased’ ‘arbiter of truth’ is laughable.
In the case of FPH, the new clubhouse was harder to find and didn't affect its neighbors as much.
http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf
> More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreasedtheir hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate andr/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage. In other words,other subreddits did not inherit the problem. We conclude by reflecting on the apparent success of the ban,discussing implications for online moderation, Reddit and internet communities more broadly.
1. FB can do what it wants on its platform, but by cancelling this particular group it becomes a truth arbiter and/or censor, which is a scary proposition ( maybe not proposition, they have already been acting in this manner; QAnon is only significant, because of its size and overlap with R party ). I dislike censorship, but the fact that US population draws information from FB is scary to me.
2. It further undermines freedom of speech and association. It only pushes those voices further into.. not fringe exactly, but it does seem to amplify their determination and allows them to claim they are being repressed by the powers that be.
3. It implies that as humans we cannot survive sufficiently dangerous thoughts. This, to me, is horrifying. I believe we can. I believe the only way to allow humans to deal with the level of Qanon idiocy is to keep it in the light and not throw it into darkness where it only grows stronger. Just like with any disease we need to be able to build healthy immune system, our mind has to build healthy firewall to protect against idiotic ideas. It is not up to FB/gvmt. It is up to us and maybe parents. I would also accept critical thinking class as an answer.
In Canada, we have something call the 'Laurentian Consensus' - which is basically Ottawa/Toronto/Montreal traditional, small-c conservative centre left, very establishment view of the world, propagated systematically by most of the bureaucracy, national banks, established systems, academia.
When you live in Ontario or Quebec, it doesn't seem obvious.
But when you live outside Ontario or Quebec, it becomes really quite obvious.
I do not believe a guy like Donald Trump has the best interest of the nation at heart, even if he thinks he does, and there's probably good reason the 'deep state' is rejecting his many appeals to authority. After all, the ultimate apparatus of the 'deep state' are literally things like 'the Justice System' etc..
But at least, theoretically, there is something to be said for it, and there are actual material concerns about individual expression vs. more statist and globalist forces.
The European Union bestows incredible power upon unelected leaders. Very few people vote in EU elections, their 'elected' MEPs do not really have a say in who the leadership will be. Not until the treaty of Lisbon were the elite even required to consult elected MEPs! Now, it's just ceremonial. Ursula Von Der Leyen, one of the most powerful people in the world was not on the ballot or even a known figure during the election. She was chosen after the election in back room, completely non-transparent deals by the French PM, German Chancellor etc.. MEP's cannot enact legislation, they have no say in executive level conduct. In the last 10 years, two elected leaders (Greece, Italy) were effectively overthrown without real legal and certainly no democratic legitimacy. So this is an example of where I think most of the elite do in fact have 'mostly good intentions', but wherein the lack of democracy and transparency lends very credibility to populist concerns of 'deep state'.
The 'nature of power' in politics and business is very opaque, and a little bit hard to understand without exposure to it, and there actually is no 'one power', nobody really is in control, it's more about understanding the memes that interest the elite than anything. Which is not an easy to communicate idea. Hence - Lizards and Aliens.
Insane populists, with a few bad actors who don't mind knowingly spreading falsehoods, take advantage of this and make stuff up.
I don't think this is a new phenom, it's as old as time, it's just that the 'rumour mill' has metastasised.
If the proles ever were truly 'educated' as to how our financial and political system worked, here probably would be a real revolution, maybe a 'good one'. But until then, it's a mess.
Finally - it's a serious issue. I have University educated friends asking me 'if I believe this stuff' trying to determine the legitimacy of it, without being able to write it off themselves.
We are entering a new ere wherein in the fiction of pop culture consciousness, nothing needs to be factual to have weight, and nobody is really in charge.
I really think that most libertarians and anarcho-socialists etc thought we'd have some kind of enlightened utopia, but really we get mostly Lizards and Aliens.
can you unroll this phrase a bit?
I didn't see Facebook banning the Catholic church for its stance against contraception.
Reuters reports that Official Q/QAnon "crossed the line" on bullying, harassment, hate speech and the sharing of potentially harmful misinformation.
The FBI last year issued a warning about "conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists" and designated QAnon a potential domestic extremist threat.
Want to argue the world is flat? Fill your boots. Start to say there's a cabal of scientists with nefarious motives? You're heading toward the hate speech line. Plan breaking into prominent scientists homes to obtain evidence? The line's behind you.
It seems like the reason for the ban is that the group
"repeatedly posting content that violated our policies"
I assume that if a religious group also repeatedly violated policies, it would meet the same fate. But the article doesn't clarify what policies were violated.
Edit...missing words.
You should read the article.
Just because some members of a particular religious or social group do bad things, doesn't mean you should ban all members of that group. If it did, all of Facebook would have to shut down.
And while that might not be a bad thing - it's not the point in question here.
P.S. I fully agree with the removal.
For people who actually believe in conspiracy theories this is not at all true. And there are some religious people who might think this way, but I would guess it's a small minority.
One of the biggest problems I have with conspiracy theories is that nothing can be trusted because there's always something corrupt behind it all. I believe the United States' biggest challenge right now is the lack of trust of our most fundamental institutions like the CDC and the law. I think the lack of faith is due to people in trusted positions believing and promoting some of these crazy theories.
Conspiracy theorists and deep state lunatics - great, ok, we got rid of them. But is no one concerned that we're putting a lot of trust in Facebook or Twitter or other companies mentioned to correctly deem what's correct and incorrect information?
If you go back in time, there have been countless cases of journalists uncovering important cases but who were suppressed by the authorities and institutions. Yes, they come off as "conspiracy theories." Until, later we're very thankful for their bravery and sacrifices.
Just because QAnon peddles silly theories, doesn't mean that we should clap and smile and puts our thumbs up at this, or the removal of people like Alex Jones.
Let's put on our creative thinking caps and consider what happens if someone who you happen to like, or a more obscure or unpopular group who thinks differently is muted.
A basic principle of pluralism of ideas is, yeah, some ideas are just not agreeable. That's up to us to bite our tongues and tolerate it. If you think the conspiracy theories die along with QAnon Facebook Groups then you've been living under a rock.
Since it isn't, step out of the shadows and step up with a counter-argument.