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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a megaphone

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.

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That's also missing the greater picture. It's giving _everyone_ a megaphone... but giving the loudest megaphones to the people who can get most people to listen to them.

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.

Yeah I think this the crux of it. Facebook is prioritizing the most "engagement" which means prioritizing the most "reactions" which means prioritizing the most divisive and enraging content on both sides. If Facebook instead prioritized the "ah that's nice" kind of content we wouldn't see the divisiveness we see today

I feel this ignores human nature to engage an in conflict. Or in other words, humans like to debate so we will.

It's also common for people to accept defaults without substantial customization. That's why the algorithms matter. Some people will deliberately seek out rage-bait even if the default algorithm delivers just-the-facts news and heartwarming pictures from friends' families. Most won't. Also, most people won't customize their settings to eliminate rage-bait if that's what gets prioritized by algorithmic defaults.

It also doesn't matter how much you customize your settings if they're inherently useless, minimally functional, or never there in the first place. A lot of the content control settings that Facebook loves to tout are practically useless.

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.

Yeah but it is also human nature to fuck as much as possible but we have rules and laws against things like rape to control those tendencies. Just because we are naturally inclined to do something does not necessarily mean that it is best for us

What? This is certainly [citation needed]

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.

Yeah you're right, not my best take. But I guess the point I wanted to get across is that we shouldn't let our natural desires dictate what is legal or not, time and time throughout history.

It's more interesting to debate subject and preferences where there is not already an overwhelming amount of evidence that one side is wrong.

It's about surprise... content that is surprising has more information content (from the perspective of the surprised person), which drives engagement. The problem is that when you don't make a distinction between true surprising content, and false surprising content, it's a heck of a lot easier to generate false surprising content.

> Half of the population is below average intelligence

This is the real problem

Half of the population will always have below average intelligence.

This is incorrect. At least half the population will always have median or below intelligence.

If we are referring to IQ the median and average is supposed to be the same by definition.

I disagree. Half the population will always have above average intelligence.

But the majority is somewhere near center.

It's not everyone though. FB algorithm is giving preference to the most controversial person. People that are reasonable are boring and don't cause engagement, so their posts also are not displayed.

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.

...and not just "the most controversial", in a lot of cases on both the content creators' as well as the sockpuppets' sides, we're not even talking about "village idiot" type real humans anymore, but — in contrast to Meta CTO's words — about extremely skillful mass manipulators sitting somewhere in Russia and hiding behind international proxies.

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.

> You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree with

I wonder if you're aware of any known effect/research on this topic? I'm openminded to learning more

that's all good points. I agree. I think it's not Facebook gives the wrong people the loudest megaphones, but our human nature and nature of the population are drawn to those megaphones held by the wrong people.

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.

> Half of the population is below average intelligence

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.

Was going to say exactly this. Reasonable people with reasonable views have no reason to promote themselves or their views on Facebook. However non-reasonable people with non-reasonable views promote heavily for clicks/engagement to sell you something, or just to “idiot farm” to sell the idiots something later.

Facebook’s unregulated revenue model will keep ensuring this dynamic.

This is what I'm seeing also. Youtube, Facebook, etc. all prioritize engagement. It's not only the megaphone problem, it's a quicksand problem. As soon as you watch some misinformation to even try to understand what the hell anti-vaxxers are claiming, then you get a ton of related misinformation promoted to your homepage. How the hell are technically ignorant people supposed to keep up with this? Youtube and Facebook will lump you in a category and show you what similar viewers watched.

Intelligence is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Vladimir Lenin and Mao Zedong were quite intelligent by any objective measure, but giving them megaphones resulted in horrific disasters far worse than anything caused by Facebook users so far.

> 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).

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.

> Half of the population is below average intelligence

By definition :)

Only if the distribution is symmetric. [0]

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...

>if the population is an odd number, the number of below average intelligence will not equal the number of above average intelligence

I'll leave counting as an exercise for the reader :D

Not if there's exactly one person of exactly average intelligence. :-)

Or any odd number :)

You're right that if the set is of {99,100,101} then of course 100 falls into neither category and each category has cardinality 1, but we're talking about real-valued variables, so I don't think that's a worry. I imagine it happens 'almost never' (except where n=1).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_never

Good point :-P

> Half of the population is below average intelligence, and giving the wrong people the loudest megaphones has a devastating effect on society.

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.

> why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-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.

They've been able to do that since at least radio and arguably since the printing press. At worst, Facebook is an evolutionary step along that spectrum.

There's effectively no cost to do it now, though.

Radio and newspapers were effectively local, we now have global reach so that it takes just a few to mess things up everywhere.

It's true there are bad-faith actors, but there are definitely lots of idiots who don't know they are wrong.

Is it possible that you're also a wrong idiot but are unaware of it?

Totally

I would say the most dangerous are not the bad-faith actors, but those self-deceived ones who have genuine "good intention" but act out the "bad" consequence.

And everyone of us could be that self-deceived ones, including you and me.

I've been in several debates where I was written off being in "bad-faith", when in reality, I just didn't agree with with the popular opinion on a particular subject. It seems people are all too eager to justify their own position by labeling others as being in "bad-faith".

Except in this case we know that there have been many organizations, FB pages, and fake individual FB accounts set up specifically to spread misinformation and FUD about COVID and vaccines. That's the definition of bad faith.

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.

If it's 'bad-faith' actors, then you're saying that the misinformation is intentional, which makes it disinformation.

Where can I read more on these organisers of miss information?

>Just twelve anti-vaxxers are responsible for almost two-thirds of anti-vaccine content circulating on social media platforms. This new analysis of content posted or shared to social media over 812,000 times between February and March uncovers how a tiny group of determined anti-vaxxers is responsible for a tidal wave of disinformation - and shows how platforms can fix it by enforcing their standards.

https://www.counterhate.com/disinformationdozen

News story: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-doze...

OK so I read through the reports here and... there's nothing there. The report focuses on the reach of these people, which is legitimate, but the report also operate on a tenuous (if not entirely false) premise that the information compiled is "false" or "misinformation" similar terms. The very few (and obviously cherry-picked) examples for each supposedly nefarious actor are hardly damning. The report's authors do absolutely nothing to "debunk" the claims (and I recognize that there are claims that cannot be debunked by virtue of their design), and simply says "This is wrong."

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.

Given enough capability and knowledge of manipulation methods bad actors can not only shape conversations and promote controversial / conspiratorial information, but also fan the flames of the backlash that make collective reason impossible. So long as there are holes in these platforms and a combative stance by platforms to resolve them, this power can be had or hired. You don't need nation state resources to pull it off at this point.

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.

> The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?

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 have had decent luck in reverting facebook back to what it is for: sharing pictures of my kids with people who care to see pictures of my kids. That means every time someone shares something - no matter how funny - I block the place it was shared from permanently. Slowly facebook is running out of things to show me that isn't pictures of my friend's kids.

Same, it didn't really take as much as I thought it would to get it to stop showing me reshares, but now I see either groups content or family/friends original content.

I still wish they had fine grain controls though.

I dropped all groups too. Facebook's algorithm is a terrible interface for groups - it doesn't show me everything instead just what it determines might be interesting, and doesn't have any means to help with discussion of topics.

If only they could advertise your kids to you.

"I picked a free service and was annoyed they wanted to make money somehow"

> The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?

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)

Facebook is not just a hosting platform, through the Facebook feed it exercises a great deal of editorial control over what posts/information is surfaced to users. So while Facebook might be giving everyone a megaphone, it doesn’t turn everyone the same volume. It needs to own that.

Erosion of trust in elites just so happens to also be a long-term goal of polluters, quacks, scammers, and other powerful parasites of the common wealth when they run up against government or science.

I think in general Facebook has a bias towards inflammatory posts - and other platforms for that matter as well including HN actually. Also it's easy to blame the village idiot for everything, but I don't think Donald Trump or Alex Jones are village idiots. They are surely idiots but left the village quite some time ago and gained popularity before Facebook (InfoWars was founded 1999) - although FB surely was an accelerator stage.

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.

> it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone

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.

Facebook (like News) is entertainment. People don't select entertainment for accuracy.

The village idiot (that's successful on Facebook) has self-optimized for being catchy - that's why people are listening.

Not to mention vaccine hesitancy because "when was the last time you got healthcare for free?"

> it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone.

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.

They amplify things that cause you to see more ads, because you picked a free platform

Idiots engage.

Reason doesn't.

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