Earlier quoted context omitted.
Politics is not the root value of all things and so this cannot be true.
The question "what has value, and to whom" is extremely political.
That is a philosophical question, of which politics is just a derivative.
Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
121–130 of 150 posts
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#122If we are going to fix this, we need real suggestions instead of just complaining about it. For example
Policy proposal:
Maximize the amount of people that can see a given post / news article. People would have to resubmit in substantially their own words any information they glean that should be passed on beyond that limit. E.g. someone posts a news article that reaches 10,000 people. The 10,001st gets an error saying it has already reached maximum views.
One of the initial 10,000 couldn’t just copy paste what they saw, but would have to generate unique content to reinitiate an information node that would also have a 10,000 view maximum.
This would not be great for national news sites, but it would reinvigorate local news, because that would be the only way for the information to spread.
Decentralization is key.
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#123Frustrating. At the same time, I all too often see claims of "fake news" or "disinformation" that which is simply embarrassing or inconvenient for one party or the other. I'm not sure that there is a way to solve this problem that will not cause worse problems, like censorship of good but unpopular notions, or notions that are true but annoy the powerful
Its not fake news if its true but inconvenient, so there's a pretty firm line there. There are plenty of recent examples of legitimately fake and (intentionally) misleading content that has been propagated on Facebook, I assume anyone with any right wing friends has been inundated with it. But in addition to that, the simple protection against censoring true notions that annoy the powerful is transparency. Complete transparency with when and why and how things are blocked would be a start. Blocking clearly fake content, banning people who (repeatedly) post it, and being transparent about the reasons seems like a fair progress with a fairly clean line between it and proposed dystopian outcomes.
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like your analogy. Maybe it's because I'm older than last time I cared about something this much, but this time I really don't have a solution that's consistent with any ideology that I have. For most of my adult life, I've leaned towards libertarian. I don't see the free market solving this one very well. I'm also skeptical of a government-sponsored ministry of truth, though. I'm at a loss for how to "fix" the eff…
It sometimes really scares me to think about. The power of algorithms combined with big data is showing itself to be scarily good at influencing behavior. It is basically exploiting quirks of our brains to get us to do certain things more (namely stay on a particular platform and engage with it). It is like those optical illusions that are made so that even if you are told what you are really seeing, you are incapabl…
You're onto something. I try to clamp down every unnecessary email, marketing message, notification, etc. that I receive and I still feel like I'm in a fog of "engagement spam." Instagram let's me know that some random person I might know just got on Instagram. Photos reminds me of some random dinner I had this day five years ago with an ex. Reddit says this random topic I don't care about is "trending." Facebook seems to have moved half the news feed into a parallel feed in the "notifications" area. "Someone you barely know just posted for the first time in a while, check it out!"
I'm borderline anal about managing which notifications I allow if a particular service lets you adjust them at all, but I feel like I'm constantly turning off some new one that they must have added and opted me into by default. I know I can turn them off for an app entirely, but sometimes I legitimately want a "ding" if a friend sends me a message. Yet I still feel like I'm in a constant haze of pointless "notifications" that are not about some event I need or even want to know about it. It's just attention theft, where a hostile computer program acts of it's own accord to cause my brain to have thoughts I didn't intend to have and waste my precious attention. I didn't ask for it to remind me of something, or let me know when a specific thing happens. This isn't even a "notification." It's just spam funneled into a channel that spammers know we haven't completely tuned out yet. They'll strip mine it until nobody bothers to pay attention to notifications anymore, and then they'll move to the next channel that still has any attention left in it.
If I could request any feature from Apple right now, it would be to treat "attention grabbing" as strictly as it has access to the device's camera or photos. Instead of a blanket "allow notifications," make developers register exactly which notifications they want to send with a predefined message template. Let me easily switch each of those templates on or off in the general settings app instead of having to hunt through the settings pages of the app itself (if it offers the option to tweak notifications at all).
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#125They made $22 billion in revenue this past quarter helping destroy the country. Every Facebook employee is laughing their asses off at you personally right now. "LOL! Look, HN is complaining about Facebook again! Hysterical!" They're emailing the link above with laughing emojis and dollar signs, while they customize their new Tesla order in another window. The fact is, they will all lose money if Trump isn't reelecte…
> The fact is, they will all lose money if Trump isn't reelected. Every single FB employee knows this, and does their part to keep the rage machine working. I don’t understand what you mean here. Why does Trump need to be reelected? There is always outrage to be generated for clicks. There was no shortage of outrage during Obama’s term. Even things that were objective non issues, like the tan suit, was whipped into a…
> Why does Trump need to be reelected?
The same reason Howard Stern was allegedly so popular. People who hate him listened even longer than people who liked him.
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, in the worst case, under government ownership, social media might be used to manipulate elections to give preference to the incumbent party over the other, but that is infinitely better than manipulating elections based on the financial interests of a tiny minority These are the same thing.
I totally disagree. They look like the same thing today, but this is merely a consequence of the fact that everyone is under Facebook's thumb and Facebook works in the interest of corporations/big money who pay for their ads. If you shift the control to government, the dynamics change fundamentally. The power will once again start at the government (like it should) and not at the corporations. Money will still influe…
> decouple state from economics.
Nationalizing businesses is the literal opposite of decoupling the state from economics isn't it?
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#127Not only Facebook is a super spreader of internet but the whole internet. There are so much misinformation going on that people dont even take the time to check is that true or not.
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what people mean when they say everything is political is that the actions of our politics shapes just about every aspect our lives. You might think that driving to a restaurant to buy a meal isn’t political, but everything about is the result of decisions of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. How smooth the drive is dependent on how much money your city allocated tax money for road maintenance and how cit…
Partly true. On the other hand I think it is a common mistake to attribute economic success to politics. Sure, they lay the framework, but that doesn't mean they are responsible for success or failure. Of course politicians like to claim it anyway. > The point of “everything is political” is to snap people out [...] Oh, wow. That can make sense, but I had a complete different interpretation. I understood it as prompt…
Yes - I think it's absolutely necessary to distinguish between "political", and "partisan". Not everything has to be partisan, and jamming everything into the two-party framework has a destructive Procrustean effect that leads to people making all kinds of increasingly stupid claims.
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what people mean when they say everything is political is that the actions of our politics shapes just about every aspect our lives. You might think that driving to a restaurant to buy a meal isn’t political, but everything about is the result of decisions of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. How smooth the drive is dependent on how much money your city allocated tax money for road maintenance and how cit…
Partly true. On the other hand I think it is a common mistake to attribute economic success to politics. Sure, they lay the framework, but that doesn't mean they are responsible for success or failure. Of course politicians like to claim it anyway. > The point of “everything is political” is to snap people out [...] Oh, wow. That can make sense, but I had a complete different interpretation. I understood it as prompt…
> On the other hand I think it is a common mistake to attribute economic success to politics. Sure, they lay the framework, but that doesn't mean they are responsible for success or failure.
I agree that it is a common mistake. It is difficult to draw direct lines to individual ups and downs to policies and that trying to do that is usually a tool used to swing voters more than what is actually happening. But I think it can’t be overstated the effect political decisions have, in the aggregate, of shaping the economic situation. Internally, look at the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, and the resulting construction of 50,000ish miles of highway over the next 2 decades. While it is a bit harder to draw a direct line from all that to the rapid growth of Walmart and their newfound ability to transport large amounts of goods faster and to more places than rail, it is easy to say that that political decision had a profound effect on how the country operated over the last 60 years. The country would look very different in almost every facet had that not happened.
Externally, look at the trade agreements and foreign policy decision in the post WWII cold war era. If the US had not decided to embrace Japan as a trading partner and had not imposed strict controls on their post WWII government on military spending, the money from the Marshal Plan, the Japanese government’s decision to rebuild the economy through the central planning of the MITI, would they have exploded into the technological powerhouse they became? Maybe, but I can’t imagine it would have looked anything like what they did end up with.
> I had a complete different interpretation. I understood it as prompt to reflect on everything you do with an examination if it furthers partisan goals.
I think it is both. To snap you out of the idea that politics is just those big talking point issues that politicians and voters focus on (or that politicians convince voters to focus on). That it is a lot of everyday things that you may rarely think about being connected to “politics” and partisan actions.
Re: Facebook Is a 'Super Spreader' of Election Misinformation
#130Facebook needs to be nationalized and regulated as a public utility. It's outrageous that this hasn't already happened. How much more election meddling do they need to get away with before everyone understands that this is necessary? At this stage, all remaining Facebook investors are deeply immoral individuals. All the reasonable moral individuals have already cashed out. The government should just screw over the re…
> Facebook needs to be nationalized and regulated as a public utility.
That is the wrong solution. The threat to _democracy_ because of _advertising_ is a US phenomenon.
It says something about social values if journalism and public education/discourse, which are essential to democracy, depend for their survival on _advertising_.