We are asking tech platforms to solve society’s problems.
I’ve said it before but people don’t ask: what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?
I’ve said it before but people don’t ask: what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?
Is there any counterargument to these two statements of his:
> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
> Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition.
TBH other sites like reddit are just as bad or worse, large communities built on ephermeral content will always breed garbage
it's likely people will generally grow to not want to consume it anymore espcially once good altearntives gain traction or just out of bordem eg. tiktok is more fun for a lot of people
This is after all, what they claim as their major selling point to advertisers.
So if we shut Facebook down tomorrow, would the problems disappear? Only if we took out Google and any other organizations pursuing the same dystopian models.
What Facebook offers to advertisers is the ability to choose who sees their ads very accurately and for a very granular set of interests and demographics. Nothing more, nothing less. Advertisers like this because it means they are not spending money showing ads to people who are unlikely to be interested in their product in the first place. That's it.
The idea that Facebook has figured out a way to achieve "population scale mind control" and that they explicitly offer this as a product to advertisers is beyond ludicrous. Again, do you have any evidence for this? Can you show me a screenshot of the Facebook ad buying interface with the "mind control" box checked?
I can see why people would wish this were true. The US is in a downward spiral of political polarization and dysfunction that may well be heading us towards civil war. It would be nice if we could blame this on some kind of mysterious, greedy, rapacious AI-driven boogeyman (like Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook) that we could simply eliminate to return us to normal. I think a lot of the pushback against Facebook comes from people wanting to believe this is possible and not wanting to face the actual root causes of this dysfunction.
In short form: His polling manager tells him that if he runs this ad, at this time, on these channels, he'll get this much of a polling bump. Gore reflects to self that surely people are more complicated than that. Ad is run, polling moves exactly as predicted.
The dangers of population-scale mind control isn't that it's universally effective, but that it doesn't need to be to swing democratic elections. You can usually sway the outcome just by appealing to the lowest-thinking denominator, and micro-targeting on universal platforms is exceedingly good at that.
It's also a mechanism that is equally available to all candidates. It is not as if only Republicans can run advertising on social media.
In fact, I recall a bunch of fawning praise in the media and tech sphere for the 2008 Obama campaign's use of social media, and much prognostication that the old farts in the Republican party would be consigned to political oblivion because they wouldn't be able to master the use of big data and social media to precisely target their spending and efforts to win elections. At the time no one in the media seemed to consider this future the end of democracy - that's only a complaint that comes up when the Republicans use this technique to win, apparently.
And I think the modern reality is a little different, precisely because we aren't talking about influencing the median voter. We're instead talking about influencing the mostly easily influenced voter.
It used to be, that was the median voter, because that's all newspaper / radio / television was able to target.
But now, it's pretty easy for me to say "Show me likely voters who believe the Koch brothers are the Illuminati" or "Show me likely voters who believe in Pizzagate," and craft a winning campaign around motivating them.
Which leads us to... where we are now.
Whenever technology brings a new mass communication medium, this happens, and is corrected. This is no different.
> Hitler came to power before Facebook was a thing. There are periodic waves of fascism. It’s a thing.
"...What if we alcohol and spirits tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?"