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People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

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Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#101

Post by jonfw »

clSTophEjUdRanu wrote: post #90
digi59404 wrote: post #75

Did anyone stop and consider these aren’t fake people but people who value anonymity? I have 20 friends who use such tools and tech to hide their identities. Yes they lean right, slightly but they do. They all do this to avoid being found by employers and other. One of my friends is a prominent person in a legal field, another one is a member of a three letter group. Other than my real name - My Facebook profile has…

Why are they all, in unison, spreading political bs? Don't be naive. These are not accounts for privacy minded people, this is orchestrated bad-faith people attempting to sabotage elections.

> Why are they all, in unison, spreading political bs?

People enjoy participating in discussions about their interests. Many people are interested in politics. It seems natural that people would enjoy discussing politics.

This is common place. Anybody who has ever been on Reddit knows that people enjoy discussing politics via pseudonym. It seems natural that people would do so on facebook as well.

Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#102

Post by knzhou »

zo1 wrote: post #93
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this worse than tightly controlled mass media? I think people like to look back on this non-existent golden era of News where it was fair and balanced and just reported the truth. That era never existed. At least now you have options. I hate social media as much as anyone, but it's not bringing an end to the world. It's easy to manipulate people of Facebook. But it's way easier on Fox News or CNN.

You have options but you are being manipulated in subtle ways, whether nefariously or not. And that "manipulation" is a whole lot more hidden due to simply being "algorithms". On some level it is getting a free-pass compared to traditional media where you can clearly see the bias.

"Algorithms" aren't mind controlling magic. Even if they can shift your political opinions accidentally, there are tons of people trying their hardest to do that on purpose. Your feed is filtered, so are the articles in your favorite newspaper.

Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#103

Post by jordigh »

lightedman wrote: post #100
jordigh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler alerts are a 20th century invention. Everyone has been taught to get angry about spoilers, but the very word "spoiler" itself is an internet invention coined in Usenet. The idea of society at large working hard to keep a fictional story secret is a marketing ploy invented by Alfred Hitchcock to sell more movie tickets to his mystery films. It used to be common to know everything about a story before you even…

" but the very word "spoiler" is an internet invention coined in Usenet," Spoiler as a word was around in avionics well before UseNet even existed.

Obviously I mean in the meaning of "spoil a story"; of course the precise sequence of characters of "ess, pee, oh, eye, ell, ee, are" existed before.

Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#104

Post by catalogia »

btilly wrote: post #96
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am (mid-forties) and started using Photoshop around version 2. People definitely worried about the integrity of photographic evidence. I think what's different now is the combination of much more powerful cheaper tools (those fake GAN generated faces are likely taken from one of the sites making them for free) vs Photoshop at the time was thousands of inflation-adjusted dollars. This is coupled with a much more eff…

What is even crazier about the Dan Rather story is that the story about how George W. Bush avoided Vietnam due to political manipulation and bribes was actually TRUE. Before it was ever reported in the USA it was reported in the UK by The Guardian among others. Dan Rather's team started their investigation with sources in hand which already constituted very strong evidence. Given that the story was true and Dan Rathe…

Part of the problem may have been the story didn't really resonate with the American public. In theory I guess I'm meant to hate cowards and hypocrites, but learning that Bush the Younger once feared war is almost humanizing.

Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#105

Post by fzeroracer »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26
sjwright wrote: post #22

It doesn’t matter how autonomous and free thinking you are or any other individual is— social media is transforming us into a collective. Like ants excreting pheromones, our actions in aggregate are more powerful than any individual, the result being whatever results from this untested cocktail of biology, language and global connection. It’s unprecedented and borderline unpredictable. Nobody is in a position to dire…

How is this worse than tightly controlled mass media? I think people like to look back on this non-existent golden era of News where it was fair and balanced and just reported the truth. That era never existed. At least now you have options. I hate social media as much as anyone, but it's not bringing an end to the world. It's easy to manipulate people of Facebook. But it's way easier on Fox News or CNN.

You don't really have options. They're just replaced with the equivalent of dark patterns nudging you into buying things or doing certain things.

You immediately know where the government stands. You have no clue whether or not the user you're interacting with on Twitter or Facebook is an actual user or someone paid to spread bullshit.

Similarly, we all know the exact stances of Fox News or CNN whether or not we agree with it. But when you see an article on Facebook with a lot of likes or a trend on Twitter, do you know whose pushing it and why? Did it occur through an organic series of social actions or is it a narrative pushed by unaccountable bots?

Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#106

Post by loceng »

schnevets wrote: post #92

Facebook won the social media war by cultivating a smaller, more selective group of users (college students). It meant sharing had some more definitive meaning, and provided some added safety for marketplace and message board functions. It was their secret weapon against the MySpaces and CraigsLists, and yet they completely abandoned it. If they really wanted to further their company mission, their Manhattan Project…

It wasn't Mark's original philosophy - it was a stolen mechanism that the twins who hired him to develop ConnectU had come up with, so unsurprising that it wouldn't be kept as a cornerstone.

Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#107

Post by rvz »

I'd like to remind everyone that as we are fast approaching the prospect of hundreds of thousands of AIs and bots graduating from their Turing Tests, we must take the internet's own proverb very seriously.

  Do not believe everything you see on the internet.

Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#108

Post by knzhou »

schnevets wrote: post #92

Facebook won the social media war by cultivating a smaller, more selective group of users (college students). It meant sharing had some more definitive meaning, and provided some added safety for marketplace and message board functions. It was their secret weapon against the MySpaces and CraigsLists, and yet they completely abandoned it. If they really wanted to further their company mission, their Manhattan Project…

That is a catch-22, isn't it? The common definition of "winning the social media war" is to get a lot of users. That is inherently contradictory to "cultivating" a "selective group". Just as water flows downhill, there will inevitably be a few most popular social networks, which will inevitably be driven by clickbait and moral panic and targeted by all bad actors.

I already saw that happen with atheism. When I was young you had to be pretty far from normal to be really into it, and there was some fantasy that once everybody was an athiest, society would be cool and rational. Now about a hundred million Americans are effectively athiests and we're no more rational than before. The problems stayed the same, because people stayed the same.

Re: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook

#110

Post by saalweachter »

boring_twenties wrote: post #60
saalweachter wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally think about the end of The Man in the High Castle, when the characters realize they are living in a fictional alternate history.

WTF man? Not everyone has read everything already...

While I am fine with the social conventions that hold spoiling recent works as anathema, or even older works within limited contexts (for instance, /r/WoT tries to allow readers to talk about the early books without instantly being spoiled for the later ones), the absurd demands people make to not "spoil" any book or movie people still read or watch recreationally -- and not just as a homework assignment -- is harmful.

The metaphors, the concepts, the philosophies expressed in books, even trashy 1960's SF, are important. They are tools we can use to explain, to convince, to argue, to communicate.

Demanding that we never speak aloud in any public place the words from any work of art more recent than Black Beauty (is that too recent? Is it OK to at least reference the end of Romeo and Juliet?) is demanding that we weaken ourselves, like Harrison Bergeron in Kurt Vonnegut's short story of the same name, and only communicate at the level of the least well-read individual in any society. If books are not going to contribute to discourse, if we cannot tell other people of what we read, we might as well burn them all, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

And at the end of the day, the only thing being protected by fervent cries of "spoilers!" "spoilers!" are the barest, sparsest facts of the story: if finding out the ending of a story is the only reason to read it, you were probably done a favor by having it "spoiled". Journey before destination.

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