Ethnic violence in Ethiopia has been supercharged by hate speech on Facebook

Bad ideas and aggressive state actors (doing "PsyOps" or otherwise) were the norm before social media. I see no hard evidence that social media has made any of these problems much worse, other than making people much more paranoid about state actors and the uneducated. (In reality, the traditional press has seeded much of this paranoia. Traditional press feels threatened by social media competition, and so has spent over a decade now raising the hue and cry about social media's "dangers"; they apparently wish to retain their monopoly on fear- and rage-inducing mind viruses only for themselves.)

Furthermore, I see no evidence that in the absence of free speech, state actors will be less aggressive or people will be more educated. I see plenty of evidence that both would get worse in a regime of restricted speech.

I now view a workable democracy as something that should be more like a technocracy with good feedback mechanisms, and not like something that should actually give "people" "power". Exhibit A: people on Facebook.

Are there media which are not susceptible to PsyOps? (Edit: for example, print or online newspapers, television, etc. They arguably, by setting a higher standard of rational and investigative rigor, produce fewer propaganda sock-puppets but, by that same token, coalesce trust into personages which can, in one fell swoop, be assassinated or—in the case of Ellen Degeneres—persuaded to reiterate state propaganda.)

And, are only state-actors to blame? After all, Facebook themselves were experimenting with emotion manipulation[0], and transnational corporations have at least as sophisticated branding, PR, and propaganda departments.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...

Very succinctly put, but it deserves adding something else: the horribleness of the human spirit. Centralized information control by a meritocracy that mostly got it right (modulo all the bigotry) characterizes the mid-twentieth century West, and this idealized, sanitized view of ourselves was optimistic in the extreme. Indeed, I think we can characterize that controlled optimism as morphing from future-tech-worship (50's) to self-worship as the boomers subsumed the hippy ideals along with the apparently easy money they earned in the wealthiest society Earth has ever known. Now instead of morphing into something else, it is the central control that is changing, and we are seeing why, despite its very real flaws, the benevolent dictatorship of even flawed institutions is preferable to the cynical, hateful chaos that reigns when individuals get a chance to shout their bile to the world.

I'm not entirely sure all is lost, however. Perhaps we can have our cake (absolute freedom of speech) and eat it too (some sort of moral standard) by introducing social norms no-one has even thought of yet. For example, I would personally love it if cancel culture would turn its gaze not to sexual harrassers, but to the more obvious problem of baseless accusers: those who make accusations without any proof, not even bad proof. Such people should be shunned by society, and not listened to ever again, for they have squandered their right to speak. Within academia, something similar might work when a researcher publishes deeply flawed research, they should be expelled from academia. If the academy doesn't maintain a high standard, then the entire thing could come crashing down (and that's already happening in slow motion). If a whole field refuses to do this (psychology, social sciences) then those entire fields should be dropped, lest they damage the reputation of the other fields of the academy.

This sounds harsh, but I think its fair, and it lets us have nice things a little bit longer.

Exactly. And they'll say internet-spread panic caused the unnecessary collapse of the world economy in 2020 -- very similiar to the panic of Y2K, but amplified by 20 years of progress in social media.

Meanwhile, in other non-reported news, ~2.7 million more humans were born this week. And about ~1.2 million died this week from regular non-covid causes. [1]

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/births-and-deaths

This is an echo of the "dumb pipes" argument, which characterizes social media as neutral carriers of both harmless and harmful content. While I recognize that harmful ideology originate outside of Facebook, it's really unhelpful to deny that in Facebook's capacity as "a fun-house mirror that magnifies some things and minimizes others" it's really very deliberately shaping the discourse, the zeitgeist and, as such, political reality.

We don't know the algorithm's ultimate purpose. It is, inevitably, biased. What biases Facebook management has decreed (and how closely its implementation hews) is an unknown to those of us on the outside. But it's certainly not, at this point an accident.

Whenever discussing algorithmic bias, I am always reminded of the old programming koan:

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970937

This is not, to the best of my understanding, what's actually happening. Such elements are actively cultivated and their reach is facilitated by powerful benefactors. It's not a natural phenomenon. Right-wing populism must be bred and right-wing terrorists must be groomed. It's not simply an inevitable development of environmental factors, e.g. "the shape of the room," or the structure of online discourse. It's a deliberate campaign.

These grooming networks are not organic.

1. https://datasociety.net/library/alternative-influence/

2. https://datasociety.net/library/media-manipulation-and-disin...

I don't feel like this is a facebook problem (although I wouldn't object to shutting them down - as long as we kill that other cancer, Twitter, too). I think this is a people-with-poor-education problem.

Case in point: The Oregon fires are happening in the politically Redder part of the state, but many not too far from Portland. There are rumors going around in those Red areas that "left wingers" and BLM started the fires. Folks in those areas are generally very well armed. If those rumors get traction (and from looking through social media they seem to be) and people think that the folks on the left burned down their houses and towns... it's not gonna be pretty. We've already had trouble with right-wing groups showing up in Portland looking for a fight on several occasions and the police don't seem to be inclined to try to reign them in probably because these groups are so well armed.

At this point I'd just as soon see FB, Twitter, et al shut down before this gets ugly. But I also suspect they'll find other outlets on the internet for spreading conspiracy theories.

This isn't a fair fight of the rational vs irrational in open discourse.

Facebook has intentionally stacked the deck in favor of the irrational and amplified them artificially because it's correlative with "engagement".

This isn't an organic outcome that just happens to be mediated by Facebook because it's the agora of our times. This is an unintended (I hope) side effect of a business model that intentionally skirts the line between inflammatory and violent because it also happens to be where maximum profit resides. And it was intentional, strategic, and extremely powerful.

Is there any evidence of this? Do you have any research showing the correlation of the rise in Facebook to increased mob violence in the world. The world has actually enjoyed a few decades of low violence compared to the historic mean.

Maybe take "communication" instead of just Facebook so we could go further back in history if there is a good way to objectively measure how much communication is happening.

Hard task for sure, but I'd be interested in reading about it if anyone has done so.

Social media / the internet as a whole, allows you to say and do things without any real fear of repercussion in the real world. That definitely doesn't help. Compound that by the ease of which we all can fall into an echo chamber, only hearing the ideals we seek out, and it's risky for sure.

The dopamine fix of winning in arguments or commentary through the various gamification definitely feed an unhealthy addiction.

Suddenly the world is full of cliques, cabals and clandestine societies.

Just because something is worse somewhere else doesn't mean that it can't be improved.

But to play along, NO, because 42 U.S. Code § 2122 makes that illegal. If nuclear weapons are ever issued as standard individual weapons to soldiers, then they will be covered by the 2A via the Militia Act. Until they are, nukes are not covered by the 2A.

The constitution and current laws, clearly define what you can or can't have under the 2A. NFA laws exist as were voted to control Automatic weapons, SBR's, Silencers, Sawed off Shotguns etc. Until new laws are enacted that change this, it's pretty clear.

I for one don't want new laws written to change my first amendment rights, lest we get to the point where the 2nd is needed to defend the first.

If it was to serve its original purpose, it arguably might need to (just as private ownership of the heaviest artillery was in the early Republic not unheard of) but any hope of it serving its original purpose has been lost since at least the late 19th Century with the expansion of paramilitary police forces, and the final nail in it's coffin was drilled with the transition to a fully professional military after Vietnam, and what weapons are covered doesn't really matter any more to it's intended function, only to the degree of incidental harm it inflicts while failing to protect from the harms of the isolated culture of large permanent military/paramilitart internal and external security forces.

You are free to say what ever you feel like, and if anyone tells you differently say you use a foreign VPN! ;)

> The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."[2][3]:702 Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.

> The Brandenburg test remains the standard used for evaluating attempts to punish inflammatory speech, and it has not been seriously challenged since it was laid down in 1969.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

The context I believe they tried to share is that if we go beyond what we have established as free speech (to include your comments)_then we start our way down a slippery slope. Small changes will have big impacts.

The same is said for control measures around the 2A.

I don't see op's comment as anything beyond that.