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Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

theatlantic.com

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Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#51

Post by freeflight »

Rjevski wrote: post #3

Sad to see that for the new generation, "news" is equivalent to shitty Instagram pictures. It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news". Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network. > “Flop accounts have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us informa…

> Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network.

Imho that's a bit simplified. While the article doesn't actually mention this, I'm very convinced that this is also the result of news media increasingly relying on social media for their reporting themselves.

At this point, even traditional old-school media like TV and print are constantly quoting social media posts when reporting on something. Used to be that big media outlets would at least interview renowned experts, but that seems to be largely replaced by "Jonny on Twitter said".

For people as young as those in the article, this must be literally the only "news media" they've ever known, but they grew up with social media, so traditional news media just quoting social media is kinda redundant to them, as they are usually so familiar with social media that they don't need the traditional media as a "middleman" but could just as well look up these responses themselves without having them get "filtered" by a media outlet.

> Are they sure? I bet it's just one big echo chamber of people copy/pasting each other, just like every trend on social media (memes, etc).

I also wouldn't be too surprised if a couple of these, supposedly 13 years old, admins turn out to be actual adults who are getting paid for pushing certain agendas.

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#52

Post by esrauch »

dawhizkid wrote: post #46

This might be the first tech trend (at least, that I'm aware of) that I was completely unaware of and do not understand at all because of my age (late twenties).

I think you are giving too much credit to the uniqueness of this.

It seems not any different than subreddits or similar: they just making inflammatory meme posts based on hot topics and then people are discussing them in in the moderated comments.

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#53

Post by freeflight »

soared wrote: post #6
Rjevski wrote: post #3

Sad to see that for the new generation, "news" is equivalent to shitty Instagram pictures. It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news". Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network. > “Flop accounts have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us informa…

Where did you see that young people think flop accounts are news? The article is about discussing issues on instagram, there is no mention of news. Kids today grew up with the internet - knowing that big corporations we're slanting views/news from day 1 because they could go compare the same headline at fox, cnn, and nbc. Previous generations couldn't do that so easily. So a complete distrust of news shouldn't be sur…

> Kids today grew up with the internet - knowing that big corporations we're slanting views/news from day 1 because they could go compare the same headline at fox, cnn, and nbc.

When is the last time you've bought a physical newspaper? They are often lined up in such a way that you can compare headlines of several publications without even touching any of them.

And if that's actually the reason, then why should only kids be privy to this? None of this is actually that new, imho it's a very similar dynamic to that whole "MSM is fake-news, that's why I get all my news from Facebook groups" trend.

But instead of Facebook (which is where by now only "old people" hang out), these kids use Instagram, which happens to be the social media platform of choice for their range of age because it's literally a Facebook product rebranded to do exactly that: Appeal to a younger audience.

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#54

Post by freeflight »

candiodari wrote: post #27
jhobag wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same inquiry could be made to ask you if you thought there were real people behind the boards/chans u were on as a kid as opposed to adult scammers or whatever. kids grow up on the internet like how we did but now the tables turned and they either figure it out or not its up to them

Plus ... when it comes to "better" information sources. There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists. People will need to learn to deal with them, protecting them is not possible. As if that's not bad enough, any attempts to protect them simply creates better tools for people to feed bad information to more people, and might result in outright censorship (if it hasn't already) https://en.wikip…

> There we simply know for sure they're adult trolls and propagandists.

This is a much-underestimated factor that didn't exist, on that scale, previously.

When I was hanging out in chat groups in the late 90's I didn't have to worry about my conversational partner having, financially motivated and sinister, motives to change my opinions about certain topics.

Except for straight up scams, but nobody had a vested financial interest in "convincing" me about something.

These days there's a whole industry built around exactly that (social media marketing), the web is full of dishonest information players, even on a governmental level, on literally all sides. This isn't even that new, it's a development that the US military caught on years ago [0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#55

Post by freeflight »

jonhendry18 wrote: post #24
Alex3917 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news" I mean they probably are. It’s unlikely these kids are running their Instagram channels as loss leaders with the real goal of selling billion dollar military technology.

How do you know they're actually kids and not working for RT?

Why does it have to be RT and not any other interest group? Tbh it's kinda pissing me off how these days everybody on the web pretends Russian people and organizations are the only ones using socket-puppets to spread "misinformation", just like Russia is supposedly the only actor that constantly hacks everything and everybody.

It's just reinforcing the current, rather hysteric, narrative that Russia is to blame for everything from Trump getting elected, to Brexit, and even the generally rising "right wing" sentiments.

As somebody outside the Anglo-Saxon sphere, looking at places like Reddit, it feels like people are being riled up for a war, and it seems to be working extremely well.

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#56

Post by posting2fast »

Mirioron wrote: post #44
losteric wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boils down to one thing: how does the spread of misinformation compare to the spread of a correction? Every subscriber of a traditional newspaper will see their corrections, often published the next day. How does Instagram/social media compare? In my experience, it doesn't. I've never seen a correction come through anonymous social media channels.

Are you crazy? Almost nobody sees or reads corrections. They're usually in small print to some side, where they reluctantly might retract something. At least on social media if the correction is big enough it'll be brought to people's attention. Have you really never seen a correction posted on reddit? Every other day there's some news article that has as the first comment a correction of the article, because the art…

> Almost nobody sees or reads corrections.

Unless they're "big enough".

> At least on social media if the correction is big enough it'll be brought to people's attention.

And if it's not, it wasn't big enough, or if it was big, but people didn't like it enough because it doesn't suit them, then it still doesn't get spread. Doesn't make it less of a correction though, does it? If you apply something super vague as "big enough" to one, apply it to the other as well.

> Have you really never seen a correction posted on reddit?

Same here: have you really never seen a correction in a newspaper? Or letters by readers taking issue with previous articles, for that matter?

> Every other day there's some news article that has as the first comment a correction of the article, because the article is wrong or leaving something out.

That says nothing without looking at the volume of falsehoods that are uncontested, or at the instances where the article is correct, and then the comments contain falsehoods about the subject.

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#57

Post by [deleted] »

5thbootloader wrote: post #28
candiodari wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very worrying that people want to force young people who are learning to form their own opinion to choose "correctly". For whatever value of correctly. By contrast, what these kids are doing, trying to pressure and misinform each other, is exactly what I'd want them to do : they're learning. Maybe, God forbid, they'll learn how that works and when it's being done to them. And that, I'm sure, a decent fracti…

I find it more worrying that anyone would want to support this kind of learning. These young people are not being educated on how to identify misinformation; rather, they're being indoctrinated with values that encourage virtue signaling or worse, trolling. Living inside a bubble of criticism and misinformation doesn't lead one to immediately question and then reform the system. More often, people choose to adapt to…

[deleted]

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#58

Post by sergioj97 »

freeflight wrote: post #51
Rjevski wrote: post #3

Sad to see that for the new generation, "news" is equivalent to shitty Instagram pictures. It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news". Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network. > “Flop accounts have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us informa…

> Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network. Imho that's a bit simplified. While the article doesn't actually mention this, I'm very convinced that this is also the result of news media increasingly relying on social media for their reporting themselves. At this point, even traditional old-school media like TV and print are constantly quot…

I don't think I agree with this. Some news media rely on social media for certain kind of news and to a certain extent. But I don't see it as enough to argue that news media are "increasingly relying on social media for reporting themselves".

I mean, news media quote tweets just as they could quote someone's public declarations. I think the difference between quoting a tweet from a senator and what these pseudonymous accounts do is very clear.

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#59

Post by Apocryphon »

agumonkey wrote: post #13
Rjevski wrote: post #3

Sad to see that for the new generation, "news" is equivalent to shitty Instagram pictures. It's quite funny that they consider this as more trustworthy than conventional "news". Not saying conventional news is always right, but I'd still trust it more than pseudonymous accounts on a social network. > “Flop accounts have a lot of people fact-checking each other instead of just depending on one source giving us informa…

Throwing an hypothesis: since the 50s the drift into youth culture leads to an immature relationship to the world, a distaste with adult lingo because of a lack of habits regarding complexity and abstractions. I think this is a mistake.

What about the conservative pro-Reagan youth in the '80s, the Yuppies?

Re: Teens Debate Big Issues on Instagram Flop Accounts

#60

Post by baza89 »

Just a few years ago these guys had the main mediums of information covered, sure there was internet, but up until now it wasn't in palms of everyones hands.

And this new medium tends to be decentrilised, cheap for everyone to access and anyone can be the creator of content.

And on the issue of quality of information, sure it can be shit. Memes, number of character restrictions etc, forum moderators being biased, thumbs ups and downs do seem like we are going back to coloseum times, boos and hoorays, instead of stating our arguments in words. It kind of does seem like we are going backwards.

However big media is full of shit too, is censored in one way or the other, and is highly susceptible to corruption.

Truth (the whole truth and nothing the truth) cannot be presented in 2000-3000 words. Those people at CERN take petabytes of information to be sure what is truth, on the stuff that is real and measurable. And even when they come up with an answer they say "We are 5 000 000 to 1 sure that this particle exists".

And what we are mostly talking here about are abstract philosophical concepts and social sciences like economy, law, ethics, psychology etc. Unmeasurable things (at least pretty far from accurately and completely).

These philosphical, wordsy, matters are thus super easy to manipulate with.

Fake news, flops, deepfakes, resonating echo chambers.....All I see is big media being scared of loosing their power.

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