- Amplify your commercial business message to billions of people worldwide.
AND at the same time
- Well its your individual choice whether or not to listen to the village idiot.
You guys gave them a megaphone, how do you expect society to behave?!
While you're not wrong that it's giving the idiot a megaphone, it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone. The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?
I'd also note that a big issue now is trust -- trust in "elites" (technocrats, wealthy, those in positions of power) has been declining for a long time. i think people are not so much seeking out the village idiot, but massively discounting "experts".
A list of things that come to mind which have broken trust: 60's saw hippies which wanted to break norms of their parents/grandparents, 70s saw vietnam war, breaking gold standard, 80s greed is good, iran contra etc, 90s tough on crime policies, y2k fears, 00s - iraq/afghanistan, 9/11 attacks, governmental data dragnet, manning/snowden/asange, Covid statements which did not pan out as planned...
People have good reasons to be skeptical of elites, but I think anti-corruption work is more important than trying to silence the idiot.
Because it's not idiots that are the problem, it's bad-faith actors, and they're very good at manipulating people. In the past they'd have to do that 1:1, now they can do it at scale.
And everyone of us could be that self-deceived ones, including you and me.
Certainly, from there, real regular people pass on and help spread this misinformation. Hard to say how many of those people are also acting in bad faith or have just been manipulated and scared into believing the bad information. But it seems certain that the source of much of this garbage is bad-faith actors.
https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen
News story: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...
Forgive me for not trusting either side here, but simply saying "you're wrong" to someone else doesn't meet my criteria for believing that you're right.
It's pretty widely acknowledged that what happens or begins on social media is now shaping the behavior of politicians and the narratives of legacy media. So if you successfully seed something on social media you get to enjoy the ripple effects through the rest of society and the media. If I have enough resources and motivation, I'm fine with that success rate being 1%, even 0.1% if it gets significant traction. And once it's out there, the imprint on those exposed really can't be undone by a weakly issued correction that never gets the reach of the original false information.
And here is the real problem with FB, the algorithmic feed. Normal life is pretty boring day-to-day, and doesn't trigger 'engagement'. Conspiracies, etc... cause an enormous amount of engagement. When a person is fed conspiracies all day by the engagement algorithm, even the most critical thinkers will start to drift. It works for the same reason advertising works, familiarity and repetition. The solution is never use FB, but that ship has sailed for most.
I still wish they had fine grain controls though.
"I picked a free service and was annoyed they wanted to make money somehow"
You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree with (hell, half of my HN comments are because I felt motivated to write something to disagree with some OP at some point - even this one).
What that means is the traditional small-c conservative 'village elders', 'parish priests', and 'elected officials', who hold authoritative positions not because they're controversial, but because they historically represented positions of neutrality and consensus end up with quiet megaphones, and the madmen claiming the world is flat and there's a paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop end up with the loudest megaphones.
Half of the population is below average intelligence, and giving the wrong people the loudest megaphones has a devastating effect on society.
Sure, I can hide every post from the "Controversial News" page, but I can't stop viewing content from third parties entirely. I'm only interested in first-party content - what my contacts create. Unfortunately that goes against the monetization model of Facebook.
I want a more closed loop social network and think that's the model we should return to, but unfortunately that's not where the profit/engagement is.
I highly disagree that it's human nature to 'fuck as much as possible'.
Certainly it is the goal of some humans. I can speak with personal experience that my nature isn't just to 'fuck as much as possible'. And neither is it most ppl I know. And the thing that's stopping us is not just anti-rape laws?
Fucking is great, but if you have a family and young kids, you care a lot about taking care of you family and not just going to the club and fucking more people.
This is the real problem
When you get away from the site, FB will start bombarding you with the messages from people that you would mostly react, because they want you back.
Not only was that tolerated in the name of profit, these individuals were able to create official looking, completely unverified "pages" with bogus attribution to create their "engagement" campaigns meant to poison and destruct western society (and arguably being successful in that).
How this is legally anything different than complicity in treason is hard to comprehend for me.
I wonder if you're aware of any known effect/research on this topic? I'm openminded to learning more
What could we do about this? How could we identify the wrong people so that we could take away the megaphone from them? Who to decide which people are wrong? Some of them are obvious, But some of them are not that obviously.
Maybe we could say madmen claiming the world is flat and there's a paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop are obviously wrong. We might know Nazi is obviously wrong, but what about What about Antifa, what about "woke"? What about all those theories behind "group identity"? The most dangerous wrong people are the ones hold "good intentions" (they could be self-deceiving or could be truly genuine) but bad ideas, and its hard to discern.
History repeats itself. I suggest reading history of China in 1930-1950, the rise of Communist China, and then read "Culture Revolution" in 1970s. You could find that how the people with "good intention" ended up being the most evil in the history.
How could we avoid that to happen here? I don't have an answer.
Maybe the real problem is that everyone assumes they're in the other half. Or possibly that intelligence and wisdom are the same thing.
I guess what I'm saying is that I would generally agree with your post if it weren't for this statement. I don't think intelligence really has anything to do with the problem as even a lot of otherwise 'intelligent' people have engaged with today's bullshit conspiracy theories and nonsense.
Facebook’s unregulated revenue model will keep ensuring this dynamic.
It tends to be that platforms with more disagreement have healthier discourse. I think that actually the opposite is more harmful. Echo-chambers allow for extremist ideas to grow and encourage hostility towards those that don't go along with the echo chamber.
By definition :)
Extra pedantic mode: if the population is an odd number, the number of below average intelligence will not equal the number of above average intelligence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetric_probability_distribu...
I'll leave counting as an exercise for the reader :D
I don't think humans need a lot of intelligence to not be gullible. Scientific method for example is simple enough way of extracting truth from lies and does not require massive amounts of intelligence to apply to your measurements of the world.
Generally I don't think people believe in a "paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop" because they are stupid. They just see how unreal politicians behave from their tall platform and extrapolate that behaviour to domestic questions.
Working as a software engineer from a poor family I had seen so many times my CEO (or my upper middle class coworkers) being awkward or plain out low-key abusive with cleaners/waiters/etc that I can totally see where people who don't have ability to directly speak to people in power assume things about them which are not totally true. But let's be honest, they have a reason to think this way.
Are they, though? It seems like FB amplifies things that they think will generate more engagement and "stickiness". Sensational things that cause outrage tend to do that more than cold, hard facts. I would not at all be surprised if misinformation gets amplified orders of magnitude more than the truth.
The village idiot (that's successful on Facebook) has self-optimized for being catchy - that's why people are listening.
That said, the village idiot is harmless and I think aristocracy (rule of the elite) is definitely not the solution. But what is true that the normal filters in an offline community haven't been translated online yet.
I think this can be argued against, because Facebook does recommendation and algorithmic curation.
Even if Facebook didn't purposely tweak things to propagate disinformation, you could say it is easy to manipulate their algorithms to disproportionately push the information.
So for me it's a case of Facebook not doing enough to fight potential abuse on their platform.
There's an element of responsibility here, because we are prone to some material more than other. There are primitive instincts in us, and content designed to take advantage of that is parasitic, and it is manipulative and addictive in that sense.
Crazy theories, appeal to emotions, controversy, nudity, clan affiliation, and all that are ways to take advantage of our psyche.
Even a smart person is as smart as the data more readily available to them. If the only thing about gender psychology I ever heard about was Jordan Peterson because he's been recommended to me, even if I'm the smartest most reasonable person, this is now the starting point of my understanding and thoughts around gender psychology.
So I think a platform that is optimized to show information that is most designed to make people susceptible to it, and that also targets information to the most susceptible people to present it to is by design going to result in the outcomes we're seeing.
Societally we solve this through trust organizations. Individually, I have no way to validate the information every expert/idiot I might come across. So is “connect the frombulator to the octanizer but watch out for the ultra convexication that might form” gibberish or just your ignorance of the terminology in use in that problem domain? Most people don’t try to figure out how to navigate each field. Heck, even scientists use shortcuts like “astrology has no scientific basis so it doesn’t matter what so-called SMEs in those fields say”. So you rely on trust in various organizations and peers to help guide you. These structures can often fail you for various reasons but that’s the best we’ve managed to do. That’s why for example “trust the science” is a bad slogan - people aren’t really trusting the science. They’re trusting what other people (some times political leaders) tell them the science is. Add in bad-faith actors exploiting uncertainty and sowing chaos and it’s a mess.
Silencing the idiot is fine as long as your 100% certain you’re silencing someone who’s wrong and not just someone espousing a countervailing opinion (eg Hinton’s deep learning research was poo-pooed by establishment ML for a very long time)
Reason doesn't.
Considering most of humanity is... challenged when it comes to thinking critically, this should have been an entirely forseeable outcome. I agree it's society's fault, but Facebook is part of society. They watched how their tool was being usde by these people, and ENHANCED the reach of those messages because it was good for Facebook. Facebook is the microcosm of the object of it's blame. Idiocy writ large in recursion.
Most, no. Everybody is blind to one perspective or another. Also, time is limited and attention is limited. Do not think that others are just stupid because their focus or knowledge does not overlap with yours.
"Those people" does not exist. It's just an illusion of your own limited perspective. We are on this together and calling people stupid not it is true, not it helps.
I think this is a disappearing breed. Ubiquitous cell coverage means everyone knows what is happening everywhere now.
I think this assumes facts not in evidence. Just because someone is "connected" doesn't mean they're automatically informed. As we see in first world countries, there's a lot of fucking morons that only listen to comfortable lies rather than uncomfortable truths.
There's also industrial production of bullshit peddled by disingenuous actors taking advantage of that fact. Fleecing rubes can be very profitable.
The very problem being discussed is Facebook trying to absolve themselves of bullshit peddling by blaming everyone else. They're blaming people for believing shit Facebook put in front of them under the guise of news. They're also fine taking money to promote bullshit as "news". Yet it's society's fault that they believed everything labeled news Facebook put in front of them.
I don't understand what's going on on this site. This is the second time recently I've come across someone claiming a comment didn't say something that's essentially copied verbatim mere centimeters higher on the monitor. It's basically in the same eyeful.
Hell, the commenter even added the word "stupid", which wasn't in the parent comment.
It's (unfortunately?) human nature to share shocking things, it may have even been evolutionarily advantageous at some point. Using algorithms to exploit this behaviour at a scale never before possible is harmful to humanity. No idiocy required.
It was. It is. It always will be.
Could you imagine the outrage had the authorities even attempted to prevent Facebook et al?
I thought of a good analogy a while back. Lets say someone walks past you and says "hi" and smiles. Lets say someone else then walks past you and punches you in the face. Which interaction maximizes engagement? Well that's the interaction and content that social media is going to amplify.
Social media companies are the tobacco companies of technology. They make billions by lobotomizing the body politic.
Likely the first one. Could also lead to a literal 'engagement'.
The "hi" is returned with a "hi" back and you both continue walking.
Also answering to hi and a smile with a hi and smile _could_ in fact be the right way to optimize for time spent in this interaction because it has low probability but very high impact outcomes as far as time spent goes (dating/marriage).
It's not. We're so used to being totally unregulated in tech that even minor oversight can be spun as burdensome.
Imagine a food company did metrics that showed the most popular food was hamburgers, so they kept optimizing and optimizing trying to serve nothing but hamburgers. It arguably wouldn't work and they'd be giving up tons of market share and $$$$$$
FB (and Twitter) seem to be trying to optimize where they believe everyone wants the same thing. Unfortunately for them, when myself and lots of others try their services we find it's shoveling stuff at us we don't want. Instead of driving our engagement it drives us away.
There is tons of content I'd like to see on Twitter but every time I check it, now down to about once a month, they shovel so much shit I'm absolutely uninterested in at me that I just remember why I don't look and I leave. If they'd let me opt out of their recommendations my engagement would go way up and over time I'd follow or and more people. Instead they just drive me away.
The same is true for FB though in different ways. They try to fill my newsfeed with stuff I'm not interested in hoping to get me to spend more time. Instead it just prompted me to delete the mobile app and only use the website on desktop since some extension helps me filter their crap out. My usage without the mobile app is probably 25% what it was and falling. Entirely their fault for removing choice and assuming everyone wants the same thing.
What's interesting is that before Facebook, the only people who could afford a megaphone were either state sponsored medias or billionaires who owned TV stations and newspapers.
For the ordinary citizens, the only way you could be heard was to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. If the state/billionaire/editor didn't like you, your views or anything really (your skin color perhaps?) it would simply not get published, period.
With Facebook a lot of gatekeeping simply disappeared. It's interesting to see who has an interest in regulating Facebook and bringing back the "good old days" of medias.
Facebook prioritizes what people want to see, and people want to see train wrecks and inflammatory content.
I'm not sure if that qualifies as being what people 'want' or not, but it seems like it's profitable.
People want it like an alcoholic wants a drink. Facebook is the corner store that sells to the public.
I think we agree on the mechanism. but the question is what to do about it.
People generally say, silence people I don't like, and blind others from seeing what I don't agree with.
The problem is that this is not a workable standard, because everyone has a different opinion on what should be censored.
I'm starting to believe this more and more, but what I can't understand is why? We know it has no real "nutritional value", yet we crave it anyway.
Are we just bored and desire entertainment and drama?
What's the evolutionary drive for drama anyway?
Essentially yes, We evolved so that we get a chemical hit when we engage with social drama. If you are bored, have nothing better to pay attention to, and/or have low self control, it is a very easy way to get a quick fix.
>What's the evolutionary drive for drama anyway?
Humans evolved as pack animals, paying attention to pack drama was extremely important. Picking sides or paying attention could mean the difference between getting your next meal or being beaten to death.
Because we evolved in small packs, where information was usually relevant, we don't have a good filter, or on/off switch.
Today we are exposed to the latest and most exciting drama from around the world, opposed to our tiny pack, and it is really hard to resist paying attention.
Paying attention to anything in the news or on social media is unlikely to make an impact on your life. Even the biggest topics have a very low risk of impacting you personally, but you will notice that most of them have an explicit or implicit hook that they could impact you.
Eg when you buy items at the grocery store, do you consciously examine all options, including the items on the bottom shelf by your feet, or do you just go for the items at eye level, and are thus tricked by a similar group of psychologists into buying the product you've been trained to want. And even if you, personally, do, there's a reason why product companies pay supermarkets to have their products at eye/arm level - it works.
It seems like lot of folks here allude though not exactly say that they should be in position to decide on who is "idiot", "bad-faith", "anti-science" and so on.
If you agree with the second formulation, who do you think ought to be in charge of deciding who the idiots are? Surely Mark Zuckerberg would not be your first choice.
Maybe there is a third option: no free speech for anyone, all speech must be moderated for lies and misinformation. Is that what you want? In that case, who gets to decide what is true and what is not? Surely Zuckerberg wouldn't be your first choice for that either, right? And what should happen when Facebook blocks "misinformation" that turns out to actually be truthful?
Those who want Facebook to regulate "misinformation" and gatekeep who (and what) is allowed on the site need to admit that they don't actually believe in free speech -- they believe in limited speech regulated by corporations.
People behave completely differently when there are consequences to what they say.
Speech for "everybody but idiots" is not free speech.
Removal of speech is not a consequence of speech -- it's preventing speech in the first place. That's what happens when Facebook blocks or deletes "misinformation" -- they are removing the speech itself. That's not the same thing as "consequences" for speech.
Look at what HN mods do -- they ban trolls, but they don't delete what the trolls posted. It's there for everyone to see -- in fact, if you look at "dead" comments you can see flagged stuff too. In terms of free speech, that's very different from deleting the comments entirely, which is what people seem to want Facebook to do.
And for the sake of argument, even if we accept that "consequences" ought to include the right to free speech being taken away from bad actors -- who can be trusted to decide who ought to be punished? Again, surely not Facebook. Surely not the government either -- the winners of every election would punish their enemies by taking away their rights. So even if we could tell, 100% reliably, who were trolls and who were not, we still should not give any corporation or government the power to take away the right of free speech.
What should be consequences? What are consequences when you say something stupid to your family or friends? What should be consequences when you knowingly lie to slander somebody?
> And for the sake of argument, even if we accept that "consequences" ought to include the right to free speech being taken away from bad actors
This already exists in the law. Just as your right to move freely is taken away in certain situations (for example due to restraining order).
The usual when you get up in front of a group and act like a jackass: social shame and ostracization. Something that's hard to do on internet platforms. Even when people are not anonymous, they have plenty of ways to "hide", and it's easy to unfollow and block people who criticize you for spreading misinformation.
So I don't know. Removal and deplatforming, IMO, is not the answer. You don't fix extremism through censorship; that just makes it worse and drives it underground.
> who do you think ought to be in charge of deciding who the idiots are?
Think about it. Engineering disciplines have mostly solved this issue. Lets take structural/civil engineering and something that affects many people - bridges. Through a combination of law, codes, and government, not any joe schome can build a bridge. Existing bridges generally work well and can be trusted. Sometimes bad things happen like the FIU collapse, but generally that's very rare.
I don't understand why there can't be a group of people, large or small educated and from diverse backgrounds, that can set basic standards on what is and is not misinformation, with due-process like things such as appeals, etc. It's not an impossible task.
> Those who want Facebook to regulate "misinformation" and gatekeep who (and what) is allowed on the site need to admit that they don't actually believe in free speech -- they believe in limited speech regulated by corporations.
If you're going to use a third party for communication and that third party is not owned by the people (i.e. a government entity) then it follows from the above statement that you don't believe in private property rights.
Ok, set it up and then maybe removing idiotic speech can be considered. Until then you have nothing but a desire to define what is undesirable.
And how do you expect a panel of experts to escape groupthink and rule fairly in cases where the expert consensus turns out to be incorrect?
Both of those goals are impossible to achieve.
If a medication is approved and then a new risk factor is identified the issue goes from unproven to validated but if it wasn't based on nothing it was never a lie.
The covid vaccine containing a chip to track you was always a lie.
We don't need a ministry of Truth we need a ministry of obvious bullshit.
Substitute "online misinformation postings" for "murders" above.
The point is just because something is difficult to eliminate is not a good reason to give up trying to eliminate it.
This seems incredibly naive to me. It seems what’s happening there is we give people a list of important figures to bribe to allow their speech to be considered information (or for a competitors speech to be considered misinformation).
And even if these were incorruptible humans, there are several statements that are heavily under debate currently as fact or fiction, such as the validity of neopronouns, whether or not Spanish speakers anywhere use latinx, who is the bad art friend, if kyle rittenhouse should’ve been convicted for murder, do trans children exist and if so can they perform any transitioning or puberty delay, what is critical race theory, is the Covid vaccine rollout speed sinister and if trump lost the 2020 presidential election legitimately. And that’s just all in America.
"Authoritarianism can work. It's just the wrong people were in charge. If me and other people like me had the same power as Stalin/Hitler/Mao/Mussolini/Putin, everything would be better because they were dumb, but we know better. We can create Utopia when nobody else could. We are uniquely prescient and intelligent."
The amount of arrogance and utter lack of humility is shocking.
You can have your free speech on your own website.
People who support these kinds of activities are youthful and arrogant enough to have any form of humility about things they once passionately believed to be true turning out to be incorrect.
In the 90's, eggs were thought to be as deadly as cigarettes. A bowl of cheerios was considered to be vastly superior nutrition wise to a plate of eggs. This is the opposite of what we know to be true today. If I had tried to argue against this with the current form of Facebook, I'd be censored. (They also thought avocados were bad for you in the 90s.)
The elevation of a collectively determined "objective" truth over the freedom of individuals to exchange ideas is the first step towards creating an environment for authoritarianism to flourish. Subjugation of the individual to the collective is the norm in most of history, and it's not an accident that our current prosperity emerged when in the times and places where it was lifted.
It's not just that. Usually the folks you'll see on forums like HN, or many other tech spaces, aren't the people who would have had trouble having their voice heard in a pre-internet age. They're usually the (generally not brown or black) children of wealthy families, many of them being 2nd generation scientists or engineers, and would have had privileged access to publishing houses, financial news, or high quality PSTN lines. This is why these spaces usually see so much more of the bad associated with these technologies than the good. The old status quo was very much a benefit to them, their families, and the milieu they grew up in.
Ask someone who grew up or had family in a country where PSTN over copper was a crapshoot and where sending exorbitantly expensive telegraphs and mail out of the country were really the only ways to get your voice heard, and you'll hear a very different story.
That's not to say Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies have society's best interest in mind (I doubt they do) nor that they are impartial operators (I really don't think they are), nor that they shouldn't be regulated as any other neutral communications carrier, but simply that this is one of the main reasons why tech forums tend to hate so much on social media.
Cultural elites wanting to control what their perceived inferiors think, believe, and most importantly, vote for.
The same class of people who wanted to regulate the printing press in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries are the ones who want to regulate the internet today.
Ironically many of those people would say they oppose the concentration of corporate power, yet they are asking a very large capitalist corporation to exercise power over one of the most fundamental freedoms.
But the blast radius of a Facebook post doesn't have the same reach given the majority of posts go to your explicit network of connections. Unless you're specifically referring to Facebook Groups? But then are we certain it's different from Reddit or other forums?
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
- Upton Sinclair
This has assisted valid and invalid minority opinions to be heard.
What wasn’t there was critical thinking on behalf of the people who were already overwhelmingly exposed to mass political marketing and had developed a pseudo Asperger response. I will agree for once with the facebook exec, political philosophy has pretty much come to the conclusion that since there is not a unique definition of good or bad, there is not an algorithm that can do it.
- Well its your individual choice whether or not to listen to the village idiot.
You guys gave them a megaphone, how do you expect society to behave?!
All of these things seem new to me:
- Global, direct communication with all members of society.
- Addictive design patterns in software.
- AI-curated news feeds based on increasing engagement.
- Anonymous conversations.
Since it’s new, society doesn’t have frameworks to think about this kind of stuff yet.
This comment could have been taken more or less word for word from the diary of a monk who lived in the 1500s.
We've been through this before.
If you had some wacky, non-mainstream ideas, you self-moderated, because you knew most of the people around you didn't have those ideas, and you'd suffer social consequences if you kept bringing them up and shouting them from the rooftops. Even if you decided you'd still like to do some rooftop-shouting, your reach was incredibly limited, and most people would just ignore you.
Today you can be exposed to viewpoints from every culture and every walk of life, usually with limited enough context that you'll never get the full picture of what these other people are about. If you have crazy ideas, no matter how crazy, you can find a scattered, distributed group of people who think like you do, and that will teach you that it's ok to believe -- and scream about -- things that are false, because other people in the world agree with you. And the dominant media platforms on the internet know that controversy drives page views more than anything else, so they amplify this sort of thing.
If someone uses a megaphone in an anti-social manner, that's a matter for the police to handle.
This megaphone is a poor example imo. A far better example would be broadcast television. We're now broadcasting everyone straight into not just American homes, but world wide.
So i ask, because i don't know, how does broadcast television differ from a megaphone in requirements? What responsibility is there on broadcast television what doesn't exist for a street corner?
Comparing it to dumb hardware is ridiculous.
Their ability to predict the negative effect of amplifying crazy provides a moral imperative to mitigate that harm. In case you don't understand there is a difference between the platform allowing Bob to tell Sam a harmful lie, and letting Bob tell 200 people who tell 200 people ..., and different yet from algorithmically promoting Bob's lie to hundreds of thousands of people who are statistically vulnerable to it.
FB has not directly done that, but they have consistently refused to acknowledge that selling the biggest megaphones to the people who create the most "engagement" (aka money for FB) tend to be the types of people who generate false information and outrage.
Their publicized efforts to shut down fake accounts and pages set up specifically to spread misinformation is perfunctory, and simply something for them to point at and say, "see, we're doing things to fix the problem", when they're merely playing whack-a-mole with symptoms, know what the root of the problem is, but refuse to fix it because it's their cash cow.