Former Google CEO Calls Social Networks ‘Amplifiers for Idiots’
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You can't just ban or regulate social media and expect the toothpaste to just magically go back into the tube. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are doing their best to suppress information that goes against the popular narrative, but that's not helping me trust those narratives more, but instead making me trust those internet companies less.
Address the issue of trust, and you can fix the real issues here. Not "idiot" amplification.
Trust is not an all-or-nothing proposition. I know that institutions and established media have systematic blind spots and an agenda, and I think everyone with some critical thinking skills should know that, too. But that doesn't mean that there is no value to news, it means that maybe you should read from multiple sources, try to correct for known biases, ask critical questions etc.
Amplifying vox populi isn't the solution here.
(Also, empirically, while trust in media and institutions has eroded, I don't believe that "most" people don't trust institutions. Maybe that's the case in the US, but certainly not everywhere.)
What makes you say that? Isn't the purpose of a democracy so that the government can change with a changing population? (For those who don't know, vox populi means voice of the people.)
As to your statement on the trust of institutions, there may be regional variations in this. In the Midwest, nobody I talk to trusts the government or media.
Switzerland is a special case because the country is small and wealthy with a mostly well educated population and their democratic tradition is a very old one, but in many other cases, moving to a more direct form of democracy can have significant downsides, see e.g. the Brexit vote.
And I'm not talking about suppressing anyone's opinion here, that would certainly not be right. It's more about how we as a society shouldn't overemphasise loud people on social media.
Note that California does something very similar, although the votes are less frequent.
The Brexit vote is an excellent example of giving people participation in government. By the way, as you seem to be under the charming impression that members of Parliament are intellectually superior to the people who vote them in, you'll be pleased to know the UK now has a massive majority of MPs in favour of implementing Brexit properly. As their opinions are more valid than everyone else's, including yours, you presumably must now concede that Brexit is a superb idea.
By contrast, if there hadn't been a referendum, either the MPs would have agreed on a specific Brexit proposal, with everyone exactly knowing what they were getting into, or they wouldn't have been able to reach any consensus and would have remained in the EU (similar to how the Trump administration couldn't repeal Obamacare because nobody could agree on the alternative), both of which to me seem preferable than the mess which Brain had to endure for years after the referendum.
Also, it's not necessarily just the fact that MPs are intellectually superior than the rest of the population (although I do think that, generally, the dumbest of the dumbest make it into parliaments somewhat more rarely), but the fact that parliamentarism and the associated procedures, laws and standards has some checks and balances built-in that pure mob rule (in the most extreme of versions) doesn't.
(and as a final remark: I'm not generally opposed to any sort of plebiscite. I'm just saying that there are definitive drawbacks to direct democracy - you can see that even in Switzerland, where the system is generally much better thought out and established than in the case of the rushed Brexit referendum - that you need to prepare for, and you shouldn't just say "the will of the people counts" because there are huge pitfalls in trying to figure out what "the will of the people" even is (see: basically every populist government, and/or politician in world history, there are even examples of this dating as far back as the Roman Republic)).
The only thing it produces reliably is dogma and absurdities because it is insensitive to all input conditions. A proper "referendum" would produce a stack of plans to be voted upon. Instead the result is an incoherent demand is to spin straw into gold because mining for gold is too dirty. Even ignoring how they expect the rest of the world to give them better deals by being more selfish and with less leverage they expect an impossible border which neither divides Ireland nor limits freedom of movement within the UK nor ceding any territory. So they just have a buck passing contest instead.
The constitutional crisis and mess that followed was created entirely by people who desperately wanted to not do what they had promised to do. Those people have now been cleared out at the last the election, or so it seems at the moment.
"if there hadn't been a referendum, either the MPs would have agreed on a specific Brexit proposal"
I really wonder where you learn about British politics. The problem was created by MPs refusing to implement the vote they gave people, and doing everything they could to then weasel out of it. The only reason they granted a referendum at all is they were sure they'd win, and because UKIP were forcing them to. There is zero chance they'd have ever agreed on a specific proposal in the absence of a referendum.
pure mob rule ... I'm not generally opposed to any sort of plebiscite
You clearly are. Calling them "plebiscite" and "mob rule" is a pretty big give away, as is this belief that simple questions with simple answers are some huge intellectual puzzle that somehow politicians are incapable of solving.
Brexit was and is the right decision. It is an excellent example of why referendums are a good thing. Staying in the EU dictatorship much longer would have destroyed British democracy completely. Look at how much of a fight the establishment put up over leaving. It's a toxic, regressive project that runs counter to the last 200 years of history, in which vast empires were all steadily got rid of, often at great cost in blood, by people who recognised the huge value of nations. Look at this thread: arguments that MPs are somehow better than the people and have a natural right to rule. No thanks.
However, regardless of our respective personal views, you contradicted yourself earlier. Brexit is now the policy of the indirect form of democracy as well as the direct form. It is, by your own logic, the right decision and by implication, was the right decision before as well.
This is not to say that popular media outlets are lying or have an explicit agenda, it's just virtually impossible to find one that seems to reflect a world coherent with the one you live in.
Also, nobody says that you have to read the NY Times. There's, both in the US and internationally, a huge range of media of all sorts of political convictions, which you can read instead, although as said: the best possible option is to read from multiple sources with hopefully different takes on a particular topic (e.g. it's also sometimes good to read foreign media because they will inevitably have a different perspective). The point is more that there is value in editorialised content as opposed to random people screaming on social media. Plus, your favourite professor or historian is likely to have written columns for newspapers, too.
Are you sure? Joe Rogan seems to get a pretty good mix of people from across the political spectrum and explore their views in far more intellectual and nuanced ways than any TV channels I know.
Joe Rogan is a worldwide phenomenon larger than most TV channels. Around 200 million downloads a month, and he's basically a guy who interviews people on YouTube. Plenty of independents online with huge reach compared to older media.
People here (and, I wouldn't be surprised, elsewhere) are missing the point that I think you are trying to make. And partly as a result you're getting downvoted by the idiot brigade.
To the rest of you:
It's not so much to do with disinformation, which is a separate conversation entirely. It's specifically to do with institutions that we rely on reporting to us more or less "fair and balanced" factual information distorting things by not reporting on everything that is happening within that subject, choosing to only focus on a part of the whole picture that promotes their agenda[1] in a positive light, completely ignoring the other pieces that intertwine that bring about a more "Well, it isn't so black and white" perspective. They are using weak and pathetic framing devices that I'll get into later.
When you start to pick up on this to the degree where you can predict and see how things will unfold, there is little reason for you to actually believe any of the published information. So this isn't just about lizards, it's also about far more basic things that occur day in day out.
And this isn't even the tip of the iceberg. The language that is used is carefully chosen to force you to agree with certain assumptions so that the rest of the piece makes sense, when really, it's nothing more than shitposting by some Opinion section columnist. These assumptions once again come from a place so blatantly obvious to have an agenda[1] that when you start to pick up on it, there is no reason for you to take anything they say anymore as having basis in reality.
That's how trust in media and reporting institutions erodes from people who know how to tell apart what's fact and what's propaganda. And once those people are off your platform, things just go downhill from there.
So, it's much more sinister than the lizards. And focusing on the lizards is just you being naive.
[1] If you have a problem with the word "agenda" here, you haven't been paying attention.
How can the issue of trust be fixed when most of these institution's goals are not really aligned with the general public?
A company with the goal of profitting as much as possible from consumers and a government with the goal of helping those companies line their pockets as much as possible isn't really inline with what the average person wants. Because typically it's the average person's pockets they're draining to line their pockets.
There's no trust because there is nothing to trust.
Actually, that's not true, there is trust, we can trust that whatever they're doing or saying, it's for their benefit and not the general good of most people.
It's blatant and obvious and if people are losing faith in these institutions, it's not distrust, it's the coming to the obvious awareness that these institutions are not and have never worked for anything other than themselves.
This is an excellent feature of capitalism. Incentives are front and centre, people don't (usually) try to deny them. Everyone understands them and is taught about them as children. People constantly recalibrate their levels of trust in corporations and distinguish between them based on clearly marked and well protected brands. Firms seek out and inform consumers about reasons to distrust their competitors as well. There are systems like bankruptcy, the stock market, and CEO bonuses that at least try to align company behaviours with what people want them to do, as expressed through purchases in the markets. Of course they aren't perfect but they do at least exist.
Non-corporate institutions are a much murkier affair. NGOs, charities, governments and universities tend to make a lot of very dubious claims about their own trustworthiness and incentives. Many people have an utterly blind faith or even ideological loyalty to them. They often blur the boundaries between themselves, make unfounded claims of political neutrality, claim higher moral purposes, may claim they are indispensable or can't be shut down or allowed to fail, and invariably say they aren't "corrupted" by profit.
In a lot of ways I feel like there needs to be some kind of separation of corporation and state, much like was done with religion and state.
I mean state as in generally, governments and other publicly funded things. Treating corporations as people with the same rights to donate and influence those organizations is inevitably going to lead to them becoming the dominant influence over those things.
Despite what the law says, there is no way and individual person can ever match up to what a corporate person can do. Corporations will always dominate those other groups as long as they are given the same ability to as an individual person.
I can't trust the government (and education) to do anything but try to hoard more money at the expense of citizens.
The only problem is the governmental parasites polarising and dividing the people, while increasing spending every year.
Example: Wikimedia Foundation. How many people who donate realise that their money isn't paying for Wikipedia but rather a huge very well paid staff that work on separate websites? How many people realise the Foundation has plenty of money and doesn't need more? Virtually none - they just take it for granted that a charity would never mislead them by claiming it was essential that you donate RIGHT NOW to stop Wikipedia going offline or being covered in ads.
That's what I mean by capitalism working very well. When dealing with a company you give them some money but also get something in return that you can judge. There are also lots of review sites, magazines, friendship circles and other forums where people can compare notes to see how their experiences match up. Reputations roughly correlate with actual quality of results. Outside of capitalist interactions reputation is often entirely artificial or even circular, for instance, in academia "this person has a great reputation because everyone says they have a great reputation" is de rigour.
I trusted Steve Jobs' Apple far more not because of some RDF or whatever Media spin. I trust it because it fits my world view and most of their action could well be explained. Trust is hard to build up, and normally after many incidents happened.
I lost that trust once you repeatedly find they were lying. Tim Cook's Apple lied during the Qualcomm case, and in the IMG case. Obviously Tim Cook was acting in Apple's best interest. But it was no longer Steve Jobs Apple.
It just shows Money and incentives are often ( for most people ) their motives.
If you actually want to improve trustworthiness you need reforms and a purge all management who would resist or interfere.
There seems to be more than a bit of a logical misstep here.
[citation needed]
Now, if they did this for every kind of sensational story, okay, but this very clearly seems to be a partisan issue. There have been a few Trump stories that are similarly sensational and were not censored the same way.
By the way, I don't know how much of that story is correct, but it's pretty clear they treated that story differently than anything else, and it leads to people becoming very suspicious of what these companies are doing. It's also very scary that Twitter or Facebook would just say, no this story from a newspaper can't even be shared.
Today's institutions are relatively stable, as is the world situation overall, yet polarisation is significantly more extreme than during past times in history.
Institutions in the US aren't much more partisan then they were at any other point, because institutions in the US in particular are very independent and hard to take over. This has nothing to do with the state of the real world and everything to do with the uncontrolled flow of information.
People choosing to believe whatever that fits their worldview. And they have their own bias in choosing to view those information. Their bias were formed from years if not decades of their experience and observation with real world.
Even if we have a magic wand to restore everything to the old days. These people's world view wouldn't have changed.
Modern Day Media amplifies and solidify those world view. Creating an even more polarising society than ever before.
Google selects a large set of search results based on what it thinks your query means, then weighs each result according to many, many criteria, I've heard there are about 140 but that's a long time ago, and finally orders them by aggregate weight.
You may assume that all of those criteria are "boost pages that seem to be written by idiots", but do you really think so?
If you've been watching lots of conspiracy YouTube videos and reading lots of conspiracy blogs, Google is more likely to give you conspiracy search results because it thinks that's what you want to see. This is called a filter bubble [1], and it's how social media as well as search amplify questionable content.
Perhaps IBS is also a relevant abbreviation to your work, and Google can tell that you often search for that, so it'll also boost results that pertain to that sense of IBS if you search.
None of this is about what you like. One is about where you are, the other is about your work. Perhaps your work interests you, perhaps one may say that your work necessarily interests you, in a compelled sense of "interest". But it's not about preferences or opinions.
So you could say, fairly and honestly, that your interests as indicated by search history influences how Google interprets the search term. Returning to the "IBS" example, your search history hints to Google which IBS you have in mind. This is good, not bad, as long as there are more senses of IBS than will fit on the search results page.
I would be fine if Facebook and co. continued to exist - but the whole thing is maybe a little bit too connected. I really hope that the future of social media can focus on smaller and more intimate groups that (mostly) know each other IRL. For example I love my family's group chat, my little fitness group, etc. and all of those things happen on social media. Social media just needs to be scaled down to be a more human-friendly environment.