Comment by ufo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ufo | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree, we can't frame this discussion on only the content. My whatsapp "feed" is doing just fine. The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics. It hurts when I meet in real life a friend that you haven't met in a while, and then find out that they've been radicalized.

The radical Bolsonaro whatsapp groups are a mix of top down and grass roots content. On one end there is the central "propaganda office", or other top political articulators. On the bottom are the grassroots group chats: neightborhoods, churches, biker communities, office mates, etc. Memes and viral content flow in both directions. The contents and messages that ressonate in the lower levels are actively distributed by the central articulators, which have a hierarchy of group chats to circulate new propaganda as widely as possible. You can see this happen in real time when a political conundrum happens,e.g a corruption scandal. The central office will A-B test various messages in their group chats and then the one that resonates better with their base gets amplified and suddenly they manage to "change the topic" on the news. The end result is that we just had 4 years of political chaos, where the modus operandi of the goverment was to put out fires by deflecting the public discourse whenever a new crisis emerged. It's not merely a content problem that could be solved by a better filtration algorithm. It's a deeper issue of how social media can affect human behavior. How quickly ideas can spread, how easy it became for people to self-organize into "bubbles", and so on.

It’s a hurtful topic and has complicated ramifications, but…

> other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics.

That brings the discussion from you to others users, and your goal seems to be to change how other users are affected by their time on a platform.

> The radical Bolsonaro whatsapp groups are a mix of top down and grass roots content.

You seem to be talking about motivated individuals who formed groups with a specific purpose and express their views and propositions in these specific groups (which you don’t belong to, as mentioned first)

Whatever way we slice it, short of the platform banning their related topics entirely, I don’t see how a neutral service could act about these people/ideas spreading, from a mere platform POV. You’re talking about thought policing private groups basically.

For sure, it would be foolish to assume that the problems could be solved by changing the software, or passing a new law. Policing private groups is impossible. We're living in a new world of social media and we still need to figure out how to deal with that. I hope that in the long term there is some kind of culture shift with how people interact with the internet, because whatever we're doing today isn't working.

By the way, I mentioned Bolsonaro explicitly because those groups are currently the better organized ones in the Brazilian social media space, masters at exploiting the Whatsapp dynamics. But the fundamental problem is not exclusive to the extreme right.

The extreme right is literally the fundamental problem. People keep saying "both sides" in this thread and honestly in most places in the world (especially US, Europe and as mentioned on this thread often, Brazil) the extreme right IS the problem. We don't need to invent scary leftist groups that threaten to overthrow the US government by storming the US capitol with nooses, we can just admit that it is the far right doing this on mass not the left and drop this stupid need to portray these global changes as a political radicalization on both sides rather than white nationalism becoming more openly violent and extreme.

Far right extremists are the problem, keep "both sides" out of this.

> The problem are all the other whatsapp groups that I'm not in, which are filled with hateful politics.

If you do not like hateful politics, just filter them out - of your own feed. My solution, if implemented, will give you exactly that opportunity.

How precisely does that protect you from the people who are seeking those out? Filtering your feed doesn’t cause them not to vote against their interests, firebomb your store, or attempt to assassinate leaders.

People are not seeking those groups out of nowhere.

Most of them are getting pushed there from automated platforms bombarding them with things they can't stand. The automated outrage machines are what radicalize people, not the private message groups.

By the time you have private message groups propagating the same messaging the damage has already been done. To get people out, you need to cut off the source of the outrage and soothe whatever fear is being ramped up.

Censoring the outrage and dismissing/patronizing people from a position of authority doesn't work, it just acts as an accelerant.

I think the crazy groups will sputter out if there's enough space for venting, free association, and ability for the average person to turn off things they don't want to see. I think that last point is the key. Millions of people are bombarded with things they really don't like in systems they have no way to really manage themselves. The legitimate complaints will filter up and out of the crazy circles if people are allowed to form their own groups and don't feel forced to pack themselves together around the loudest people who can given them a voice on the big automated feeds they don't really understand.

People have a much better chance at effectively communicating with their neighbor or family member or old friend with a different perspective than a stranger online with a different perspective, and they are much more likely to engage when in a frame of mind that will actually accept differences of opinion if they are managing their own connections and exposure themselves.

Automated platforms such as twitter certainly play a role in the social media landscape. But in Brazil they are not dominant. Whatsapp rules supreme and is the primary source for news for over 75% of Brazilians. Viral content here starts on Whatsapp and flows out to twitter, instead of the other way around. Some viral content does get bombarded, but it's actively done so by humans instead of by recommendation algorithms.

Interesting, that violates some of my assumptions. I think the basic model I'm suggesting might still be at play, though. I'm guessing most of those whatsapp groups are really big, so they effectively prevent people from insulating themselves from outrage if they just want to know whats happening. They can't just form a group with their friends and find other channels just to stay informed with minimal outrage and can't find news that's just straight news, the main source of news is the big viral firehose where outrage dominates. Does that seem accurate?

This conversation also speaks to the social complexity that gets obfuscated by some of these big platforms and the fact that things are different in all kinds of ways in different parts of the world. I don't know really anything about Brazil besides some fairly superficial basic history/culture and have pretty much zero contextual understanding of what it's like to live/communicate there. The fact that the same thing seems to be happening all over the world is really weird.

That's why I think it has a tight relationship to scale of communication channels, as that seems to be the main thing that's changed recently and is consistent regardless of specific platform/means of communication.

This is all quite naive.

People flock to other people that make them feel the way they want to feel, and tell them what they want to do is okay.

People find these groups organically too, or form them themselves, through friend associations, not just by having them pushed.

A lot of people like to feel angry against someone (the other), as it gives them a sense of control and power. Joining others who are similarly aligned, also gives them the sense of belonging.

People who are in these states aren’t going to filter out their friends, or filter out the people telling them things they want to hear.

They’re going to filter out things that make them feel uncomfortable, or that they don’t agree with - like anyone who would stop them from going further down the rabbit hole!

If the assumption is that as a consequence of allowing people to filter things themselves more, everyone will just get along, understand each other, and all political problems will disappear/people will become enlightened and cease to be ignorant, then yes, it's incredibly naive. This was the case made by people setting up these platforms without filters.

That's not my assumption. I think echo chambers are impossible to prevent and ignorance is something most people gravitate towards. I think many people are likely to find reasons to vilify and misunderstand each other until the end of time.

What I think is possible to curtail and is being ramped up now is viral conflict escalation. If active conflict is curtailed, that expands the amount of peace time available for actually effective communication if and when the opportunity arises over long stretches of time with a lot of effort. If you have an irrational hatred towards people with X quality/opinion because of bad information, are you more likely to become agitated and attack people if you a) people with X quality/opinion aren't visible b) people with X quality/opinion are unavoidable?

The ideal is obviously to get people to understand each other better, but I think we're seeing you can't just do that by superficially exposing everyone to everyone else. It requires a more sophisticated approach that respects people enough to have their own autonomy and seek out understanding and better information voluntarily through more personal interaction and influence.

There are natural forms of competency and organizational filters that allowed us to progress to where we are today and nudge people towards greater understanding of each other and cooperation which punish bigotry and unintelligent assumptions through natural rather than artificial consequences. Increased social cohesion and progress was not a top down process in the past and does not need to be a top process down now, and I think an attempt to manage global conversation is just as naive as the naive open global village kumbaya assumptions that got us into this mess. People's autonomy needs to be respected if you want them to consider a more enlightened perspective.

Near as I can tell, these ‘natural forms of competency and organizational filters’ are not natural, and never have been.

If they were, Nazi Germany would not have been what it was.

Also, baked into what you’re saying seems to be an assumption that if no one was prompted to start a fight, no one would fight. And that is true sometimes, with many people. But that is definitely not true of everyone, let alone everyone all the time!

The forms of social organization which are natural to us are easily directed towards hate of ‘outside’ groups, which can be easily constructed from any easily identifiable group of people with the right set of conditions. Even without prompting, it naturally arises based on visual identifiers and in many common environmental triggers.

In fact, near as I can tell, the only thing stopping larger scale movements of exactly that type is cultural memory of the death, destruction, and terribleness that results from it, resulting in active pressure against anyone trying to form a similar group. The ‘my grandfather fought a war against Nazi’s, you’re not going to be a Nazi’ type of memory.

Which fades with time, and isn’t natural to anyone?

> The IYI [Intellectual Yet Idiot] pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit.

> When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...

> Filtering your feed doesn’t cause them not to vote against their interests, firebomb your store, or attempt to assassinate leaders.

Silencing people so that they will vote against their own interests - it’s the last thing I ever can wish. Ends badly.

As to firebombing and assasination - wouldn’t you rather have them discuss and plan such things openly, so that police can easily apprehend them?

Or, as I’ve already described here - in 1990 during Gorbachev’s glasnost (kinda sorta more freer speech) our county seat newspaper with a proud name Kommunist published my article about some successful economic experiment we’ve done in our town. In the next issue the same paper published letters of angry “workers” naming me “an enemy of the people”. Which is a pretty serious accusation in the Soviet Union, historically speaking. It basically meant I should be killed if Gorbachev ever loses power to conservatives. A death threat, basically. And that threat was THE most important information I’ve ever got in my life. Why on earth I would wish it silenced?

> wouldn’t you rather have them discuss and plan such things openly, so that police can easily apprehend them?

That’s not the threat here: the problem are the changes constantly promoting messages which stay on the legal side but encourage people to do things. People like the woman behind LibsOfTikTok are careful not to incriminate themselves but they know there are people who will hear what they say and act on it.

That’s why moderation can’t be individual: the people most susceptible to lies and propaganda are willingly seeking it out. That’s always been a problem but social media has made it orders of magnitude easier to discover.

> the people most susceptible to lies and propaganda are willingly seeking it out. That’s always been a problem but social media has made it orders of magnitude easier to discover.

What are you basically saying is: democracy (which is impossible without free speech) is not able to work after social media is invented and deployed, because some people are susceptible to lies and propaganda. I kinda doubt the truth of such a radical statement. Democracy is not an ideal thing, but look what happens with alternatives - when some wise men decide what is better for those susceptible (and all others too).

No, what I’m saying is that democracy requires constant reinforcement - people have to stay committed to the ideas around sharing power, respecting other citizens they disagree with, and some basic shared reality.

That doesn’t mean we can’t have social media but it means that we need to have some basic constraints, and that companies need regulation, especially for what they promote.

Also, to be clear I’m not saying that this is unique to social media - for example, the current wave of anti-democratic sentiment in the U.S. has been promoted on cable TV as well - but that we can’t continue to ignore social media at a time when it’s shaping so much popular opinion.

> People like the woman behind LibsOfTikTok are careful not to incriminate themselves

From what I know, this person literally just reposts crazy liberal videos verbatim. The same thing has and will continue to be done to crazy conservative ideas.

> but they know there are people who will hear what they say and act on it.

What is the account saying and hoping people will act on? It's bringing crazy ideas to the forefront to expose the ridiculousness of them. It's no different then people bringing the "lizard people" conspiracy theories to the forefront. It exposes how ridiculous these ideas are by taking the ideas out of the deeply nested echo chambers they're started in.

> From what I know, this person literally just reposts crazy liberal videos verbatim. The same thing has and will continue to be done to crazy conservative ideas.

That’s how this works: Chaya Raichik claims to just be sharing real things but in reality is often providing heavy spin or outright misrepresenting what she shares, encourages hate (e.g. she’ll routinely label LGBTQ people as child groomers), and takes no responsibility for her role in inciting violence.

This culminated in children’s hospitals having to react to blob threats over the summer over false claims she popularized:

https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/08/17/boston-childrens-hos...

Why are they treating adults at a children's hospital? Sounds to me like an honest misunderstanding.

How is that relevant to bomb threats at a hospital?

I'm obviously referring to LibsOfTiktok, not the idiots that went there in person to do whatever they did.

That's not a solvable problem. People are going to try to kill their leaders if they get upset enough. And given how high the stakes are in the modern state which controls every aspect of our lives its going to happen. Whether that's Ortega-Hernandez trying to kill Obama or Hodgkinson trying to kill Republican senators...

The best you can do is try and convince them otherwise, which requires talking to them rather than ejecting them from your community and having them form little communities out of the rejects that then radicalize.

My feed is already fine; no one is posting hateful politics on the group chats that I am in. The problem is that even if the hateful content doesn't reach me, it's still out there reaching other people. In the US, they ended up with stuff like the Capitol Insurrection. Here in Brazil, as we speak there are disgruntled "stop the steal" extremists blocking roads and calling for a military coup.

Why are we trying to bring technical solutions to a social problem ?

Well, noise/signal ratio is rather a technical problem, which can be solved by technical means.

Wrong signal - is not a problem for society, in my always humble opinion. It’s a problem only for those who want bad things. Silence helps them, not the society.

It's a social problem that's largely been created by technical solutions. To put simply, radicalization is a lot easier when you give every loon with an axe to grind both a megaphone, and an echo chamber to invite new recruits into.

Now, there are also problems with a world that doesn't give everyone access to 1:N broadcast media, but they are different problems.

because HN users in royal we strongly believes in an automated technocracy by means of evolutionarily derived information technology techniques. This is a pseudo-religion without a sound scientific basis. Which I have my faith with by the way.

Great solution! What will you do if your users then filter out everyone who disagrees them and end up forming self radicalizing echo chambers which are highly polarized ?

Echo chambers - in my experience, starting from Fido - are usually created by moderators. Unmoderated, people like arguing no less than having others sharing their views around.

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