Facebook thrives on criticism of “disinformation”
doctorow.medium.com
doctorow.medium.com
Criticism of 'precrime' tech or robo judges should be directed towards how goddamn stupid it is to direct machine learning algorithms that were made for perception at tasks that involve complex cognitive and ethical human judgements.
Cambridge Analytica was a good example of this as well. The press fell over themselves to characterise their technology as some sort of election tipping, mind controlling super tool. They probably loved it. In reality there's not even any scientific backing for their targeting and it most likely did barely anything, they just wanted to look like James Bond's Spectre.
edit: another thing the post made me think of is how much the tech sector loves Yuval Noah Harari. He once said he's surprised by it but I'm absolutely not, because he basically constantly tells them how omnipotent and all-powerful they are.
There's actually a fantastic scene in The Young Pope about this (a satirical show about the internal workings of the Catholic Church)
> Do you know how many books have been written about me?
> Seventeen.
> Which is?
> Who wrote it?
> That means it'going to be critical of you, Your Eminence.
So does Mr. Doctrow.
Everyone who has shelled out cash for marketing and advertising knows its crap. People who work in adtech know its crap. Politicians know. CEOs know. They pay the bills.
BUT its better than the previous crap and all other alternatives thanks to more data. Which is why anyone who want to influence, persuade or control others sits 24*7 on social media.
When it comes to the Game of Persuasion if everyone is using crap tools who ever uses it more has an advantage. Momentarily atleast untill someone else has more energy or outspends you.
Attacking the crapiness of the tool wont reduce disinformation.
Billions have been spent on reducing the crapiness and its unsolvable, because you never reduce the number of mindlessly ambitious chimps, who will use whatever crap tools exist, to gain influence, persuade and control others.
Also Corey correctly identifies, but dismisses the real power of FB and similar tech, which is connecting people with stuff they're interested in.
"Seen in that light, “online radicalization” stops looking like the result of mind control, instead showing itself to be a kind of homecoming — finding the people who share your interests, a common online experience we can all relate to."
We know this. Algorithmically tuning your feed into torrents of stuff you already like is the issue. He is right that yes we can relate to this. The reason we use search is to find stuff we know we want more of, but being dumb chimps the uncomfortable fact is we don't always know what's good for us. Hence Oxycontin, it feels great until you depend on it to feel anything at all, and then you're dead. Or slagging off humans with vaginas for being TERFs. Or storming the capitol building chanting "shoot him with his own gun".
The problem then is, who gets to decide what's good for us? Maybe it's our right to die or become brainwashed however we choose. I don't know, I've got no easy answers for you here.
I guess it's human nature to prefer attacking on a moral angle as opposed to a pragmatic one (even though the latter is usually more effective).
We see this all the time even outside the tech sector, people will cry "omg you're such a racist" sooner than "you don't even understand numbers, you bozo".
The thing I like about your insult vs "you're racist" is that you're attacking what someone is doing, rather than what they are. When confronting someone for being wrong, it's a lot more constructive to say, 'Hey, you're wrong about this, and this is why,' than it is to say, 'You're a moron (or a bad person), and this is why.' It's also more accurate. Labeling is helpful for navigating thousands of people in our communities/millions online, but keep those labels to yourself, and be ready to question them. During confrontation, though, it will cause the other side to shut down, and that's where we are. We're more concerned with defining each other as others than working together to find commonalities and building on points of agreement.
I'd just add that significant power imbalance significantly changes things and how we ought to attack disagreement.
However, in such cases I think it's actually even more harmful to resort to those accusations as a first resort. Those arguments are usually wrong in at least two ways: wrong as in "incoherent, logically flawed", and wrong as in "defending reprehensible behavior".
Failing to point out the logical flaws can lead others to believe "he's unlikable but he's right", another type of posture that these people just adore acting out.
There absolutely exist genuinely racist, sexist, etc. people, and one should definitely call them out when appropriate. But those terms are very susceptible to "cry wolf" type of scenarios. If everything is the worst thing ever, then nothing is. Being more cautious with how one plays those cards allows them to be more effective when needed.
I completely agree with you about labeling, I couldn't have said it better myself.
Reading what’s still out there about Cambridge Analytica ignores the findings of the UK’s Information Commissioner which indeed found they were basically throwing data at scikit-learn hoping for a result — the script kiddie version of machine learning.
How many of the journalists gone back to correct their misinformation on the topic? Many of the articles are still out there in their original form and those hacks are still making hay on the subject.
What was their misinformation? It seems like they were right about Cambridge Analytica’s goals and tactics. You are claiming their technology wasn’t great, but that doesn’t change how they obtained it or what capabilities they were selling.
If you eat fast food for every meal, is your obesity your fault, or are you a victim of food corporations' incredibly effective advertising?
If you smoke a pack a day, despite all the public information that smoking is harmful, is that your fault or the fault of the tobacco industry's advertising?
If Doctorow is right, and advertising is ineffective, there's a lot of people who will have to accept that their situation is a product of their own actions. For a lot of people, this is "victim-blaming" and unacceptable. It's a lot easier to have large corporations being evil powerful baddies who control us and therefore absolve us of responsibility for our actions.
Of course, in reality disinformation goes through many channels on facebook, but (my understanding is) a ton of it is organically shared and commented material and links. I.e. a different kind of content from ads altogether.So facebook ads could still be ineffective, yet disinformation campaigns highly effective.
I'd also discount the studies on fake news from Spring 2017. The game has changed significantly since then.
My impression is a bit different from "criti-hype": I think Facebook is likely extremely good at promoting engagement, pulling attention, and changing minds -- HOWEVER -- FB has very little control over what content is able to be successful in this environment they've created. It takes an entire web ecosystem (quasi-news sites to host 'articles', etc etc) to conduct these disinformation campaigns and they have to resonate with people organically interacting, not just popping up in ads.
The fact that FB can't at-will divert all this attention onto breakfast cereal or brake fluid or whatever doesn't mean the disinformation is ineffective in the political sphere.
Edit: it's one thing to build an extremely fertile petri dish, it's another to control which organisms end up colonizing it.
But there's still problem with Facebook - echo chamber algorithm, it traps people in their own bubble world
I once tried to like just funny posts. In just a week, nearly all contents in my timeline are jokes and funny posts
Now that's scary.
From that article
>These groups, based largely in Kosovo and Macedonia
Sometimes big true-true different from small true-true.
Presumably to make money somehow. Seems far more likely than your vast conspiracy of attempts to destabilize Western Christianity through shitposting.
More often, people who lie to you about the small things are also lying to you about the big things.
One might even nurse a prejudice against accepting the word of sources who lie consistently, casually and without need, suspecting that "true" actually means something different to them. Taking the more charitable interpretation.
Nobody did take Alex Jones selling man pills seriously. Banning him turned him into a martyr and confirms his theories that he is enemy of the state nr. 1. A self fulfilling prophecy.
For people affected the best advice is to not engage. Only then it quickly becomes boring for the attackers and they will quickly be enraged by something else.
Sucks, but I believe this is an inevitable consequence of networking everyone to each other. The old tip to not expose to much information publicly helps here too. Public personas have to handle it like in meat space, if you become too popular or infamous, you have to think about PR management. Sucks too, but I don't think there are too many alternatives.
I still think this is mainly on those that actually do send the threats instead of the instigators. Even if you think of his fans as mindless drones, they do have a responsibility for themselves.
The fact is that people do take him seriously, and it's a huge problem. You can ignore the problem, but the problem won't ignore you.
It will be and always has been the goal of those with power to deflect attacks directed at them, usually to other groups who are attacking them. For all of his faults, Biden has been extremely good at convincing the lefties that "well, we'd be back to normal now if those damn Republicans would just get vaccinated", effectively turning the normal folks on the left against the normal folks on the right instead of where the anger should be directed: toward the institutions that let millions of folks go homeless, financially and medically insecure, etc. in the face of the pandemic.
The Republicans in power are, I think, a little better at playing this game: they whip their base into a furor over the group in power but only in such a way as they (those already with power) still come out on top. The people are angry at the right group, but for the wrong reasons (and really just to further the agenda of the _worst_ people).
If Facebook could exist as it did one decade ago, maybe it'd be different.
IRC is too technical for many people I know, but they are willing to use, or are already using Discord.
In many ways, the problem with Social Networks isn't algorithms or whatever, it's the scale, and being on a small server with at most 50-100 other people is an incredible experience. I've met so many interesting people from around the world who wouldn't have the technical skills to navigate the IRC world, and I didn't have to blow up my brain in the process.
The difference between open and closed is meaningless for the cloud. Give me the raw storage used by any piece of software and I can knock out a script that will serve it. Give me any open source network and without the data you have a ghost town no one will use.
If only relevant content is shared within a 'circle', people appreciate it, sometimes ignore it, and move on. Consistent controversy and drama is avoided, which just so happens to be a key driver of social media engagement.
Do you remember when the bottom had a quote "too close for missiles, I'm switching to guns"? My friends and I wondered what that ment for a long time.
Aside from being from Top Gun, what it refers to is a principle of fire control of being "danger close," meaning you or other friendlies are within the collateral damage radius of a weapon. When one fighter jet is close enough to an enemy that blowing it out of the sky might also blow themselves out of the sky, they switch to a less destructive weapon with a smaller collateral damage radius.
It's sort of interesting to think that something like this meant anything except early web 2.0 pioneers were largely xennials raised on Top Gun, Terminator, and John Hughes movies.
So basically a normal conversation between typical adults?
I miss the "Random Play" interested in field. The modern incarnation is Facebook Dating which requires the mobile app, so I'll never use it. I also suspect they use the attributes to target ads (e.g. shirts for tall men if you fill out the height field).
A few months ago something happened over at Zerohedge.. The site became unviewable with JavaScript disabled so I stopped going to the site. But it looks like they’ve had a change of heart and can now be viewed with JavaScript disabled.
But it also seems like the content has changed from what it used to be.
Did they change ownership or is it just my imagination from taking a break from their site when it became dependent upon JavaScript?
Personally speaking, the label has come to mean to me something other than "false information, intentionally spread". To me it has come to mean "something that could be false, but someone definitely doesn't want it talked about".
From this definition, what’s interesting is that you can only identify disinformation by knowing 1) what is actually true and 2) the motivations and methods of the person spreading it.
I can think of two good examples of disinformation:
1. When oil companies denied climate change despite their internal research
2. When tobacco companies denied the importance of nicotine in their products
> In the philosophy of science, a theory is falsifiable (or refutable) if it is contradicted by an observation that is logically possible, i.e., expressible in the language of the theory, and this language has a conventional empirical interpretation.[A] Thus there must exist a state of affairs, a potential falsifier, that obtains or not and can be used as a scientific evidence against the theory, in particular, it must be observable with existing technologies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
A lot of disinformation boils down to making a claim that can't readily be falsified while defending their stance by using logical fallacies to deflect criticism, such as shifting the burden of proof to the other party.
In the past 1.5 year, a lot of claims made about the pandemic simply couldn't be falsified for lack of technology or methods to observe a potential falsifier. That doesn't means those claims are readily false or true. It means they are plausible or probable. Which are very different qualifiers regarding veracity. A typical example is the heated debate about the efficacy of masks and mask mandates.
Access to information has also demonstrated a down side. Research studies have been widely quoted / cited within the public debate to support all manner or arguments. However, by pulling studies out of context, they lose their value. Many tried to support their claims by cherry picking, ignoring scientific publication process (e.g. peer review) and so on. The net result is scientific research, regardless of it's veracity, re-purposed as token support for confirmation bias in the public debate via thinly veiled appeal to authority.
The relevant questions regarding disinformation isn't the veracity of statements. But rather: Who are you anyway? Where are you coming from? And why are you making these claims in the first place?
The end result is that lies become truth and truth becomes lies because dogma spread by tech companies (lobbied by other companies or political groups) is what is pushed and accepted while dissent is punished in varying degrees.
All in the name of "the greater good", non ironically. Seems we learned nothing from fiction or history.
That's FB censoring discussion of the origins of a pandemic responsible for millions of deaths, and even banning people who posted about the possibility.
I reckon conflating the two actually makes censorship politically easier by implicitly endorsing the view that censorship is the only effective way to combat disinformation at its source.
Never has a private newspaper been required to publish every comment or opinion that they receive despite its inaccuracy or obscenity.
But two things happened. First, something that explicitly fake is actually pretty easy to identify in an automated fashion and thus easy to root out once you know you're looking for it. Two, Trump himself took the word after it became apparent that much of the suckers being suckered into clicking on this crap were his strongest supporters, and completely poisoned the well by calling anything and everything he didn't like "fake news" as if an actual professional reporting operation at least attempting to do real investigations and interviewing real people was equivalent to two guys in an apartment making up headlines completely from their own imaginations.
Disinformation campaigns are somewhat orthogonal to that and a thornier issue. We're conflating many things. Some are just larger troll farms that are exactly equivalent to the two guys in an apartment, but operating with professional backing and financing in a more sophisticated manner. But they're just trying to make money. Some of what they say might actually be true. They don't care and aren't trying to push any particular agenda. But they're also not trying to produce true information and do so only incidentally if they do at all. At least some of it is actual foreign intelligence services conducting psyop campaigns, which definitely do care and are trying to push a particular agenda, but it's just to sow internal discord. They don't really care about one side or another of a contentious debate and will gladly inflame the worst actors of both sides. But these are being conflated with likely sincere people and organizations who are doing some level of real investigation and actually believe what they're writing, whether or not it's accurate. These are all umbrella'd under the "disinformation" term, but they're not the same thing.
Having Covid happen destroyed all hope of cleaning this up, too. We're now in the middle of an important global event affecting nearly everyone, but about which there are little in the way of facts, and we certainly can't know with certainty what an optimal course of action as a response was or should have been. We'll never be able to observe counterfactual worlds. Many important facts will only become known years in the future, and some will never become known at all.
"I'm not anti-sneetch, I just..."
Assuming that people use a term because of their own agenda is not helpful IMO. Maybe they actually do believe the information was false, and that it was spread deliberately. Why not give them the benefit of the doubt that you insist on yourself?
You can also read this on Cory's own website: https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hy...
or on archive.is: https://archive.is/iAsXZ
(My apologies to people who responded to the earlier version of this)
I agree Medium is not a great platform. Dark patterns aside, I was also disappointed to see their heavy censorship early in the pandemic, which kept many interesting analyses and speculation from being shared.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
The elephant in the room is the privatization of your social space and that Facebook is a private spy agency. That is what makes FB extremely dangerous.
The fact that FB is private, efficient and full of technically brilliant people is not good for the rest of society, because the society can not imagine what those brilliant guys could do with their data.
For example, I go to a party with friends. I don't have facebook, but one of my friends have it. He takes a picture of the group and posts it on FB.
Now the fact that I went to the party, the place of the party, the time, the people that went to the party, the private opinions of some friends about other friends, girl-boyfriends or lovers(if they used FB channels like wassap to communicate) has been recorded for the rest of my life and can be accessed by American spy agencies like the NSA.
Society expects FB will forget because they as humans do forget, but machines never forget.
People talk about a crush on someone else with a friend and expects nobody listening(on wassap), but a bug is always on, recording everything they write or say.
FB is like Stasi, only way more efficient and that applies to the entire world population instead of just one country.
And they are constantly pushing the boundaries of privacy like using "smart glasses" so espionage is full in your life.
And they are constantly improving their AI techniques so even when they could technically not do something today does not mean they could not do in five years with the data that they already collected about you.
I get the feeling that visitors on Facebook are often angry and annoyed, and Facebook is fine with that.
But I think that, in his larger arc, Vinsel's epistemology isn't correct. Early optimistic predictions about emerging technology are just that - early and optimistic. There are always extreme early ideas about new tech. Just go google up peoples' predictions (and fears) from 2015 about how VR would transform things. The thing that makes them dangerous is when they show potential for being correct society warps around them. We start spending billions of dollars on self driving cars in 2015 with valuations based on them being delivered in 2020.
But what is the alternative? Vinsel wants us to have "sound information" - but making predictions that end up being wrong is part of checking that something is sound! The future is uncertain. It's true that nothing is ever as big as people think - sometimes it's bigger - but mostly it's much smaller. That guy who wrote the report for McKinsey (a group one should never trust in general) was really hyped to get headlines or really hyped on AI and because he's good at his job you can't tell which it is. The article is clearly nonsense, but it has credibility because it exists on the far side of a sea of uncertainty about something. It's fantasy to imagine we can "know" what something will be and this process seems unfortunately human and unavoidable.
I also think there are a lot of people doing good work in STS on these issues. John Cheney-Lippold, Natasha Dow Schüll, Virginia Eubanks, and Adrian Mackenzie are some of my favorites. I'm excited to read Your Computer Is on Fire but I haven't gotten to it yet. Heck, I think 90% of the bad tech hype is covered the old classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump.
My only conclusion is that their purpose is to draw hateful comments for “engagement”.
Why? Advertiser pressure combined with the losses Facebook is taking due to Apple's policies would certainly foster some change?
These companies pull same ads to pretend to be the good guys who cares but a soon the storm is over they are back again.
To be a conspiracy theorist just means to not be aligned to the dominant narrative, and since most intelligent people gravitate toward coherence, when the dominant narrative becomes absurd, you get theories and explanations from the people repelled by it. They usually suck, but when deception prevails, conspiracy theories become the more coherent option and they have better predictive power than the narrative itself. Today, it is objectively more plausible that a cadre of leaders is co-ordinating to exploit a crisis to drive a radical agenda using arbitrary compliance as a signal and lever than it is that paper masks we can smell farts through are necessary to prevent the spread of disease. Gravitating to the former is the direct result of being repelled by the incoherence of the latter. To sustain the dissonance of the absurdities of power, it requires education and practice, because it does not come naturally to anyone. If you want to reduce conspiracy theories, present a coherent narrative that doesn't require sustaining the dissonance of absurdities.
I like Doctorow's writing, but if he isn't banned, I'm pretty sure FB and other platforms have nothing to fear from him.
I don't believe that. One can be skeptical of, or even opposed to, the dominant narrative without becoming a conspiracy theorist. The key is in the word itself: conspiracy. It means people operating together toward some hidden and generally nefarious goal. That's not only attribution of motive (a fallacy) but also positing something that's often quite implausible. How many people would have to retain perfect secrecy for how long to support the "fake moon landing" conspiracy, and how likely is that really?
Even if we decide that "conspiracy" is being misused and focus on "theory" instead, that theory is also based on assumptions and coincidences that are as "absurd" (your word) as the dominant narrative. For example, you're assuming that the leaders "exploiting a crisis" to drive a "radical agenda" outnumber those interested in seeking the truth and/or serving the public. You're assuming that being able to "smell farts through" a mask means they're useless, even though the offending molecules are smaller than even the smallest virus particles and real-world results show that widespread mask wearing does reduce transmission. Your theories are no less "dissonant" than anyone else's, but even if they had some sort of internal consistency that doesn't make them correct.
Conspiracy theorists are people so desperate to be not only right but more right than others that they throw true skepticism and logic out the window.
Anyone who makes predictions based on percieved incentives and not official narratives is a conspiracy theorist. You can't just use the epithet as a synonym for inferior and outgroup and expect people to treat it as a serious argument. This qualifer that the goal of a conspiracy has to be nefarious is ridiculous, because that just means it's fine when our side does it becuase no-nefariousness means no-conspiracy.
People who think that way aren't engaged in discourse, they're at war, which is fine, but pretending you're not at war when you in fact are is called perfidy. Calling something a conspiracy theory isn't discourse.
I'm pretty sure we landed on the moon, but I'm also pretty sure that hundreds of thousands of people worked in secrecy over decades and conspired to intercept the private communications of pretty much everyone in the world, while subverting standards bodies, science, academia, and open source projects, as we found out in 2011-2013 thanks to Binney and Snowden. Conspiracies are not exceptional, they're common as muck, ask any regulated professional.
We could probably share an Ig Nobel for comparing virus cells to fecal particulates (farticles?), but even charitably, comparing any transmission reduction effect of masks to the cost of enforcement and the effects of cynical policy response still yields a co-ordinated effort to decieve the public with noble lies "for their own good." There has absolutely been a co-ordinated effort to leverage the crisis to institute radical policies, denying that is so unserious as to be gaslighting.
What we're likely haggling over is the point where facts dissolve into focus and narrative, and where shared ideology becomes conspiracy. My view is that ideology is inextricable from conspiracy, where a more materialist view would be that a conspiracy is just when you've been caught and convicted of it.
Exclusively? Really? Like there are no actual crazy or malign conspiracy theories out there? Literally none?
> This qualifer that the goal of a conspiracy has to be nefarious is ridiculous
I very specifically said "generally nefarious" to indicate that nefariousness was non-essential. The essential parts (as you'll find in a dictionary) are "operating together" and "hidden" and you already conceded on those. Your original key claim ("to be a conspiracy theorist...") was clearly ridiculous, and you even seem to have admitted as much. What's the point of quibbling about non-essential and secondary parts?
> conspired to intercept the private communications
Nice red herring you've got there. Be a shame if anyone thought you were avoiding actual productive discourse by resorting to it.
> You can't just use the epithet as a synonym for inferior and outgroup and expect people to treat it as a serious argument.
Never did. Is that a strawman, or attributing motive, or both?
You've dug yourself a nice deep hole of bad faith here. Either start climbing out of it, or at least stop digging.
This tone is working against you more than you realize.
Don't respond until you can process what they're saying without wrapping it off with such provocative emotionally-charged bait please.
One hopes you will one day use your powers for good. See you in battle!
That depends on what you mean by "not unreasonable." If a device tells you a lie one time out of 50, it's a misleading device, but it's still preferable to one that lies 1 time out of 3. The process that leads from "authority sources of information are sometimes egregiously wrong" to "all sources of information are equally misleading" is the very foundation of misinformation.
Do I believe that the FDA is "the truth"? Of course not. But I still believe it more than any other source on drug safety.
We aren't censoring/oppressing/deplatforming/infringing-upon-your-rights because we think you are evil. We are doing it because you have been fooled. Because we know better. We're doing it for your own health and the health of our society.
They love to say that shit.
They are just selling political censorship in some corrupt way (you'll never see an official transaction, but there are deals behind the scenes).
I mean... you just read Cory's whole story about how maybe Facebook and co. are manipulating the data to make it seem like their product is better than it is, and now you cite Facebook's research saying that Facebook reaches 2 billion people?
Here are their official numbers from Q2: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q2...
Even if you block them, they definitely have your contact info and a shadow profile for you thanks to your friends, who definitely gave facebook access to their contacts at some point. The contact graph has enough info to help them figure out where you might live, what school you went to and where you worked.
2. Since they have detailed information about your friends the contact graph has enough information to predict your age, probably what your major was, political leanings, etc. Not to mention photos of you that might have been posted by your friends on facebook.
3. They used to buy 3rd party data that they could join on your phone and email address.
Sure some HN users might have enough knowhow to block most of their tracking but 99% of facebook users don't.
They even banned some of the posters. This was done based on the word of a paper in The Lancet that later turned out to have 26 out of 27 authors connected to the lab [1].
Is that insane culture attack not worth a mention, if the topic is disinfo on Facebook? The damage from that particular campaign is hard to measure, but what's not in doubt is that they gaslit the world on the flimsiest of "scientific" bases, and are getting away with it scot free.
0 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/may/27/facebook-...
1 - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/10/revealed-scienti...