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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

There’s a big difference between fiction when the viewer knows it’s make believe and when it’s presented as factual. Nobody is committing genocide because they saw a violent movie whereas Facebook shares responsibility for at least one recognized genocide and a number of smaller scale events where the company amplified hateful content and was very slow to take it down. A key distinction here is choice: I don’t accidentally start watching a slasher movie or listening to gangster rap, but Facebook / TikTok / X will ensure that I see unrequested content if it’s something their algorithms reward for “engagement” (i.e. it sells ads), it won’t be labeled, and they won’t let you reliably control it because they’d lose money if Facebook had a “only show my actual friends’ posts” default.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

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> There’s a big difference between fiction when the viewer knows it’s make believe and when it’s presented as factual.

The difference is far more nuanced and borders on inconsequential when it comes to mass media influence on society.

Just because something is presented as fiction or for entertainment doesn’t mean it doesn’t impact your psyche or your perception of the world and others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...

It’s complicated, yes, but my point is essentially just that someone saying “<ethnicity> are stealing our country! Force them out!” is specifically calling for violence directed against that group in a way that, say, a movie full of mayhem probably isn’t. That’s because, say, Paramount has editorial control and will never greenlight anything close to what many Facebook / X accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers say every day.

The movie builds the narrative and the subconscious biases which is more sinister.

This isn’t dismissing what Meta is doing, but Cinema in the West has been just as complicit and involved.

You certainly accidentally start listening to gangster rap when it's played on TV, on the radio, or on the auto playlists from streaming services. Or you wouldn't turn on your radio by accident, but then you wouldn't open Facebook by accident either.

Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide, I don't think anybody would deny that anymore. So if we treat it as harmless entertainment, then we should apply the same standard to content published on social media. Publishing genocidal content would be beyond that, nobody would disagree. Still, what music do you think that African child soldiers listen to when they go on a raid to burn a village and kill everybody they find?

As for violent movies or torture horror movies which are so celebrated in mainstream culture, their impact on viewers minds and souls are probably worse than a lot of what people here don't like on Facebook.

> Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide

What's your evidence for this? You seem to be making the claim that without gangster rap there's a bunch of violent crime that wouldn't have happened. But it seems more plausible to me that the bulk of that crime is due to the drug trade and other social and economic factors, and that gangster rap is just the musical expression of what's already going on.

And I'd expect the same to be true of, say, country music. Are you also going to claim that people who listened to a lot of Johnny Cash were more inclined to shoot people, possibly in Reno, just to watch them die? Did many Merle Haggard fans turn to crime because of him?

Personally, I listened to plenty of Ice T, NWA, and Snoop. Sometimes I still do. I have yet to become a stick-up kid or pack a 9 mil. Should I be worried? If there's some sort of threshold dosage, I might go over it at any time.

Well argued. Now will you apply all your same arguments to social media "rage bait"?

> Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide, I don't think anybody would deny that anymore

Citation needed here. I haven’t known anyone to do that despite it being pretty mainstream and U.S. crime rates have been going down for ages so there doesn’t appear to be a general correlation (repeat for the video games which have been so railed against).

I think most people understand the difference between entertainment and reality in that context. What makes social media different is that it’s portrayed as real: people get constant reinforcement that “people like me” think horrible things about Muslims, LGBTQ, liberals, etc. and use that to justify “strike first” messaging. We’ve seen that same playbook in the past (Bosnia, Rwanda, etc.) but those required more money and state control of media whereas social media is far more accessible to even a small minority of extremists looking to spread their messages.

> Still, what music do you think that African child soldiers listen to when they go on a raid to burn a village and kill everybody they find?

I note that you conspicuously omit the white-coded heavy metal used by other war criminals, but more importantly you’d need to again submit show some data supporting causation rather than simple popularity and answer the big question about whether it’s the case that the music has that effect or simply that people trying to indoctrinate use music which is already popular because it’s familiar and had the mood they wanted. For example, I don’t think anyone would say Metallica inspires torture despite it being used in the American torture program in Guantanamo — almost all of the millions of people who listen to their albums have never engaged in serious violence and the people who committed war crimes would’ve picked something else if they were in a different cultural context.

If you truly deny the effect that gangster rap has, then I can't take your comment as honest. Then we might just as well say that ISIS propaganda also has no effect on their targeted audience, and their stuff is just for entertainment. Because what "citations" do you have that people can be influenced by ISIS propaganda.

When a drill rapper makes a song threatening to murder specific people, and also posts these threats on social media, and finally commits to it and murders somebody. Is that not reality? Because it happens all the time. But maybe the social media post is the only problem in this situation?

If political terrorists are listening to music all day about bombing cafés, kidnapping people, smuggling drugs and assassinating their enemies and they actually do so at thousands per year - would you say this music is just entertainment for people living in that world. Because that is exactly the situation with gangster rap, and has been for a long time. And you might listen to it just for entertainment so it's nothing to be concerned about. To you it's entertainment because you're comfortably distant from the effects. How do you think somebody who's had their sibling murdered by a gang feels hearing that gangs music being blasted where they rap about murdering and mutilating people?

> the white-coded heavy metal used by other war criminals

Whatever this is, it is not played on the radio all day and Sony and Warner aren't making millions from it and they're not performing at the half time show. Maybe their songs are catchy and they should be played in cafés and in your Uber. I've heard that some ISIS songs are supposed to be quite catchy.

> If you truly deny the effect that gangster rap has, then I can't take your comment as honest

I’m not denying anything, I’m asking you to support your claim. In particular, if an entire genre loved by millions of people causes this problem, why do we not see it very commonly or with such variability across countries? How can we say the problem is the music rather than other things going on in those people’s lives which are more unique to their experience than a musical genre?

> why do we not see it very commonly or with such variability across countries?

If you don't see it, it is because you have closed your eyes. It is across countries and reported in main stream media all the time. Rap music is a core part of ongoing gang conflicts in many countries, apart from the general violence and sexual crime it inspires and glorifies.

> How can we say the problem is the music rather than other things going on in those people’s lives which are more unique to their experience than a musical genre?

Then how can we say that the problem is anything that somebody has posted on social media or broadcasted? If I make rap music about dealing drugs and killing people and I also deal drugs and kill people, and many of my listeners deal drugs and kill people. What is the difference if I make a social media post about killing people and then me and my audience kill people? The difference is that one behaviour is celebrated - and romanticized extensively by certain types of persons who feel no empathy at all for the victims.

I never said that rap music is the only thing causing people to commit crime.

> If you don't see it, it is because you have closed your eyes. It is across countries and reported in main stream media all the time. Rap music is a core part of ongoing gang conflicts in many countries, apart from the general violence and sexual crime it inspires and glorifies.

It’s weird how this is simultaneously a “core part of ongoing gang conflicts” and something you can’t support in the slightest.

If you want to, you can in seconds use a search engine to find as many obituaries and newspaper reports of rappers killing people or being killed by people as you please, and their gang affiliations and so forth. Or you could just go and talk to people in those circles and get it straight from the horses mouth.

But I suppose that you first will go and find "citations" and evidence that social media content can have any effect at all on people. Because that is just as unproven, if you want to play that kind of game.

But I'm interested in real conversation with real people, who aren't pretending to not see, think or hear.

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