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Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

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Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#101

Post by narrator »

decebalus1 wrote: post #7

Remember this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15790687 To some extent it's still going on. Protests are still happening (and it's really bad) so lately I've been noticing a bunch of - what I think are - shill accounts. Couple of days before I went through some of the posts in news post about the protests and identified several profiles with no personal pictures, no posts, posting in broken Romanian about: - ant…

How do you know what goes on outside of your direct perception anyway? It used to be conventional media channels and they would print what was arguably propaganda, but there wouldn't be any Russian trolls to poke holes in it.

Imagine if the Iraq WMD story broke now. All those Russian trolls spamming Facebook running around saying it was bullshit. That would be total chaos! Why don't people trust the mainstream?

The reality is that propaganda works. You think you know what fake news is and what's reality, but we never did and most people follow the time-honored tradition of letting our chosen authority figures tell us who is conspiring with the bad guys. This frees us from the cognitive pain of considering their arguments and evidence because they are puppets of some nebulous evil forces and therefore safe to ignore.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#102

Post by jancsika »

dqpb wrote: post #67
frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #3

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 the question is how can you enable the users to find "truth", or learn anything, or even meaningfully communicate with other users within this context?

It was a bad idea to think that you could do that generally before the chatbot got there.

If the cost to the chatbot is close enough to $0, or if its a state-level chatbot attack, then you're meaningfully communicating either because a) nobody who owns chatbots has an interest in disrupting you atm, or b) sheer luck.

edit: wording

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#103

Post by Indolat »

ct0 wrote: post #96
Indolat wrote: post #95

Ah Facebook... I stumbled upon a con artist's account on Facebook once. And I couldn't find any way to report it as a scam.

Im taking this comment at face value. It's not that hard to report a user for at least the past 3 years.

You can report a user for "hate speech" or something like that. There isn't any option to report a fraudulent account.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#104

Post by arun_einstein »

Should also remember that media as a industry dislikes new comers like facebook which are taking away their absolute power. They had such sway before social media, that the only news coming from these oligopolies were news and the rest was propaganda.

Facebook with all its flaws is still a much more open system compared to traditional media. If you have fake news campaigns you can also make fact news campaigns, whereas with traditional media outlets, you'd have to setup expensive paper or tv channels to actually even begin to address a problem with the existing industry.

This is felt quite sharply in India, about which this article complains. The person who killed the journalist in the article is yet to be found. Her own brother gave a statement that it might have been the doing of left-wing extremists in India. Unless you know who is culpable how can you insinuate it was due to some 'nationalist right wing trolls'? This article is just another witch hunt.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#105

Post by pstuart »

apearson wrote: post #35
meri_dian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree, it was a close election and yes the system has it's flaws but there was nothing that went majorly wrong with this election.

There was serious disenfranchisement of voters through onerous laws designed to keep people from voting.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#106

Post by Miner49er »

Helmet wrote: post #76
thebokehwokeh2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, but reality tends to have a liberal bias.

I disagree. I think the "natural" state of things is definitely more conservative, and it's reflected in people's attitudes, traditions, and behaviors as they age, and their general resistance to change. 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 mor…

Maybe that's human nature, but I wouldn't call that reality. Humans have to adapt or progress to survive. I think OP here was referring to things like global warming, it's a reality, but many (most?) conservatives in the United States believe it isn't happening. Another example is creationism. 60% of Republicans believe we were created by God 10,000 years ago, and evolution played no role. Yet, we know this isn't true, it's not reality.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#107

Post by nautilus12 »

fortythirteen wrote: post #2

Imagine if ABC/CBS/NBC actively went to political parties and sold them on buying their way into the scripts of the top prime-time sitcoms to shape the opinion of viewers. That's essentially what Facebook is doing out in the open.

Whoa, wait a sec, what makes you even slightly suspect this doesn't already happen?

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#108

Post by barrkel »

arun_einstein wrote: post #104

Should also remember that media as a industry dislikes new comers like facebook which are taking away their absolute power. They had such sway before social media, that the only news coming from these oligopolies were news and the rest was propaganda. Facebook with all its flaws is still a much more open system compared to traditional media. If you have fake news campaigns you can also make fact news campaigns, where…

If you've ever been caught up in a mob and felt yourself losing your identity in the crowd, so that you could get swept away doing things you'd never do alone, you'll know how dangerous unstructured freedom is for people.

We're tribal animals, but we're almost herd-like when we get caught up. It's important that the institutions that whip up the herd and point it around have some kind of checks and balances. We try and get by with the notion of offending public decency, of using concepts like honesty and integrity to shame people into doing the right thing, but it doesn't come naturally - it needs to be chosen, repeatedly and maintained.

Re: Facebook’s Political Unit Enables Propaganda

#110

Post by rock_hard »

Indolat wrote: post #103
ct0 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im taking this comment at face value. It's not that hard to report a user for at least the past 3 years.

You can report a user for "hate speech" or something like that. There isn't any option to report a fraudulent account.

Not true. I just did so myself a couple weeks ago
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