71–80 of 271 posts
I don't really see a problem here. Facebook is providing training/guidance to customers on how to use it's software platform. Every other advertising platform allows political organizations, so why should Facebook be any different.
"How X enables the Dark Art of Digital Propaganda" would be an issue of interest and concern NO MATTER WHAT THE X IS.
Facebook’s Community Standards are a total joke... no later than two days ago I came across a cartoon of a guy on public transport taking an ’upskirt’ without the woman’s consent only to start puking when he saw on his phone that she was menstruate (I kid you not). I of course reported it instantly. I promptly got an anodyne notification that ”I had done the right thing” reporting it it but that it was found ”not to…
Why did this anger you so? Just a cartoon I'm thinking. edit: this is getting ridiculous at this point. downvotes for starting a conversation. come on.
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But their owners and managers who actually tell them what to do and have all of the power over the networks are nearly all Republicans (or right-wing democrats). They don't do it for free, they do it out of self-interest. For example, Sinclair broadcast group that owns a huge amount of local broadcasting in every media market in the US. Their national corporate governance literally requires all subsidiaries run blata…
I've read the "journalists lean left, owners lean right" mantra many, many of times over the last 10 years on various boards, yet the overwhelming majority of network news and shows, cable news and entertainment shows dump on Republicans/Conservatism and fawn over Democrats/Liberalism. IMO, it's a very misleading idea meant to deceive people into thinking their sources of news or entertainment are somehow more honest…
More so than the media leaning "left", I think they lean populist. Human interest stories, people falling on hard luck, natural disasters, terrorism. Some of these things 'feel' left-leaning, some 'feel' right-leaning.
It's a pretty bad look. When I think of social tech I think of the possibility to magnify the voice/reach of individuals. When I read an article like this all I see is that magnification going solely to big spenders. How do I form an independent political ideology if I'm only being told the part of the story that heavily monied interests want me to hear? Would I ever experience an anti-monied-interest being put on a…
Here is a thought experiment: Imagine a social platform with a nice API, no moderators, no global filters, and you're looking at a thread focused on a particular political issue. Now imagine there is a chatbot that can enumerate every position a person could possibly take about this issue and generates a couple hundred thousand slightly unique strings of words that express each of these positions, and floods the thre…
>Now imagine there is a chatbot that can enumerate every position a person could possibly take about this issue and generates a couple hundred thousand slightly unique strings of words that express each of these positions, and floods the thread with these "comments".
If there are hundreds of thousands of strings then I absolutely can't. But I'd say on most issues there are probably max a few hundred positions. If I have to crawl through the same positions restated different ways over and over then truth is lost, if I can quickly browse one unique string for each position then it will take dedication but I can suss out what I believe and have some sort of backing for it.
Dealing with information overload is sort of the unique problem of our times I suppose.
What continues to fascinate me about stories like this is just how nakedly, obviously partisan the post-Trump reporting on the evils of social media is. Compare this with, for example, the tone of all the stories about how the Obama campaign used social media to win the previous election...
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I've read the "journalists lean left, owners lean right" mantra many, many of times over the last 10 years on various boards, yet the overwhelming majority of network news and shows, cable news and entertainment shows dump on Republicans/Conservatism and fawn over Democrats/Liberalism. IMO, it's a very misleading idea meant to deceive people into thinking their sources of news or entertainment are somehow more honest…
Hate to break it to you, but reality tends to have a liberal bias.
Progressivism works as a sort of pushing against the order of things, for better or worse. Its development being the result of our ability to manipulate and change our environment to an extraordinary degree, much more so than any other animal.
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Come now, Zuckerberg doesn't even need public office. He's more powerful where he is now than he could ever be in an elected position. Just based on the information in the article, he could offer technical embeds to campaigns he likes and ignore the ones he doesn't, or provide them with a much smaller degree of assistance, with no one the wiser. I don't think there's a single person in the world with as much potentia…
> He's more powerful where he is now than he could ever be in an elected position. Exactly, an elected position would come with even more publicity, actual responsibilities and the possibility of being held accountable for his actions. It's far more convenient and efficient for him to stay out of that system and just play it from the outside.
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I've read the "journalists lean left, owners lean right" mantra many, many of times over the last 10 years on various boards, yet the overwhelming majority of network news and shows, cable news and entertainment shows dump on Republicans/Conservatism and fawn over Democrats/Liberalism. IMO, it's a very misleading idea meant to deceive people into thinking their sources of news or entertainment are somehow more honest…
Quite honestly, in the past 10 or so years, the Republican party has made itself extremely easy to dump on. More so than the media leaning "left", I think they lean populist. Human interest stories, people falling on hard luck, natural disasters, terrorism. Some of these things 'feel' left-leaning, some 'feel' right-leaning.
Quite the opposite actually. As the contemporary left has taken over mainstream culture and turned into the de facto "establishment" that it originally railed against, it's grown intellectually soft and dishonest.
Both sides play to populist emotional appeals and sentiments, but the left-wing outrage industry and identity politics has left them intellectually vulnerable.
I mean, if you want a case study on this vulnerability just head on over to the major liberal think-piece sites and read some of the essays (Salon, Slate, The Atlantic).
Last night I read a piece in The Atlantic that bemoaned the fact that some people expect their neighborhoods to be orderly and not riddled with crime, drugs, and gangs, arguing that these attitudes unfairly discriminated against minorities. This, from a "respectable" magazine!
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> He's more powerful where he is now than he could ever be in an elected position. Exactly, an elected position would come with even more publicity, actual responsibilities and the possibility of being held accountable for his actions. It's far more convenient and efficient for him to stay out of that system and just play it from the outside.
I don't know if that's true. Do we have more transparency into Trump's income, businesses, or even taxes after he became president?
Owning a bunch of hotels is a fundamentally different type of power than owning a demographic database + messaging system used to manipulate people's moods.
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I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the eating... but my personal hope is that the current election was a fluke caused by things like facebook advertising being so new; The theory, of course, being that we build up immunities to certain kinds of advertising; there's always a race between us humans building up that immunity, and advertisers striving for novelty. If that theory holds, advertisers have a huge advan…
Or maybe there's nothing flukey about it. Trump talked about things people cared about in a straightforward, albeit bombastic, way. You may disagree with his approach, but others appreciated he was at least talking about things they cared about. Sure Hillary talked about those issues too, but she wasn't able to set a clear vision or ground her campaign in clearly defined and solid themes. We can only learn from failu…
Even in discussions with people who could calmly talk about it, Trump supporters would cite obviously fake blog posts and other completely fake information that could easily be discredited with quick online searches. Even when shown that the information was fake they would not change the opinions that the fake information had created in their minds. He was talking about things that they cared about, because they had little grip on basic facts about reality. They cared about the wrong things.