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"Controversy breeds clicks and pageviews which drive advertising income." I really wish Americans would wake up to this, and realize that Facebook, and news media in general, are breeding grounds for our division.
We are a culture who loves "reality" tv shows and all the made up drama that goes with it. Facebook just feeds right into that.
Controversy breeds clicks and pageviews which drive advertising income. As long as that cycle does not get broken you can expect a lot more misery from that particular corner.
"Controversy breeds clicks and pageviews which drive advertising income." I really wish Americans would wake up to this, and realize that Facebook, and news media in general, are breeding grounds for our division.
In an age of Instagram and twitter, it's baffling and enraging to most Americans that the media pushes a narrative that video and photographic evidence from many different, disparate sources easily disproves. The obvious example in September 2020 is the notion that only peaceful protests are happening, despite much evidence of looting, rioting, and general wanton destruction.
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> this should make you more confident, not less, in the safety of a well-tested vaccine. Indeed it should! The fact that people are about to communicate messages such as "I am worried that this vaccine caused harm" means that it is more likely that this risk of harm is being appropriately managed. A broken fire alarm is a risk to fire safety.
> A broken fire alarm is a risk to fire safety. So is one that issues false alarms every 5 minutes, which is generally a better analogy for anti-vaxxers.
Epistemology is hard.
1. Trump is pushing for a vaccine to be authorized before Election Day.
2. Democrats are saying a vaccine before Election Day should not be trusted.
3. A simple anti-vaxx detection algorithm would identify Democrats as anti-vaxxers
4. Zuckerberg either wants Facebook to stay out of this controversy, or he's siding with the Democrats.
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As The Daily Show once put it, "you are entitled to your opinion; you are not entitled to your own set of facts".
Epistemology is harder than that. If a government body declares that there is no risk of human->human transmission of COVID-19, am I not entitled to evaluate other evidence and conclude that this statement of fact is incorrect? > Based on the preliminary information from the Chinese investigation team, no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission and no health care worker infections have been reported. http…
Fact: On Jan 5, 2020, the WHO had "no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission".
You can hold the opinion that they should've been more aggressive about the potential of that changing. You can hold the opinion that the WHO should figure out a way to rely less on member nations accurately reporting information to them. As the statement notes, much was unknown to the WHO at that point:
> There is limited information to determine the overall risk of this reported cluster...
I get my flu vaccine every year. That said, I agree with Zuck. I want to live in a world where we’re forced to teach our kids critical thinking skills than in a world that relies on controlling the flow of information. Let’s have articles about making critical thinking a required school class as is with English, math, US history, etc. Than Zuck is not blocking this or that.
For critical thinking, you first need to actually have an opinion and be invested in a subject. If you're not interested in vaccines but keep getting chips to the tune of "vaccines are bad", "vaxxines cause this or that", slowly your opinion will change.
If you zoom in to the individual then sure, critical thinking is important. If you zoom out to a society though, it doesn't really matter anymore. There are forces in play that know exactly what they're doing. They don't need to be right, they just need to chip away at people's beliefs and opinions.
And it's working; the US is an oligarchy run by rich nazis and headed by an ignorant scapegoat, the UK is leaving Europe and will be left poor, chaotic and vulnerable. Ukraine is a dictatorship. Russia, China and the US are freely suppressing or killing dissenters and putting people into concentration camps. And the world shrugs because what can they do? The powers that be are stuck in their status-quo; can't sanction the US or China because of trade deals; can't go against Russia because they'll help us win the elections. The list goes on.
Sorry, this turned into a bit of a rant that veered way off topic. Tl;dr critical thinking is not the problem, worldwide campaigns are, hundreds of impressions a year over multiple years are slowly influencing people.
As with almost everything these days, this topic is NOT black and white despite what initial comments say. Take a look at the vaccine for the 1976 swine flu outbreak. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak A comment here already says that expressing concern over a vaccine is basically misinformation. I'm sorry but expressing concern about a vaccine that is developed in about 1 year, which is a record 1…
See that is a fact check; if someone were to state "The 1976 swine flu vaccine was unsafe", that's a fact. If someone has the belief "The Covid-19 vaccine has not been tested adequately", that too is a fact - and the manufacturers have issued a joint statement saying they would not risk releasing an unsafe vaccine either. But the fearmongering? The "Vaccines cause autism" claim (which is massively insulting, for one…
That is very much NOT a fact. "Adequately" is entirely subjective. It is a subjective threshold that might be informed by other facts, but that doesn't make it a fact.
The way I read this: 1. Trump is pushing for a vaccine to be authorized before Election Day. 2. Democrats are saying a vaccine before Election Day should not be trusted. 3. A simple anti-vaxx detection algorithm would identify Democrats as anti-vaxxers 4. Zuckerberg either wants Facebook to stay out of this controversy, or he's siding with the Democrats.
This is the problem with "fact checking". It positions the platform as an authority. Now, any claim that isn't "debunked" by this "fact checking" gains a certain amount of credibility by comparison. The moral hazards are enormous, multiplied by the opaque behavior of Facebook's algorithm and again multiplied by its unprecedented reach in society.
I would also add that part of the worldview has to do with fear of coercion. I don't profess to know how to fight conspiracy theories in general, but if I was tasked with doing it I'd be very wary about using coercion as a method. Streisand effect.
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Marcus Aurelius We need to stop trying to enforce "the truth" to other people. Just let people talk and have different opinions. That includes letting people having conservative values, because lately this thought police is getting out of control.
As The Daily Show once put it, "you are entitled to your opinion; you are not entitled to your own set of facts".
This isn't even a new thing: Op-Eds (i.e. "opinion" and not necessarily "fact") are a common information propagation tool, one that isn't unique to Facebook.