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Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#311

Post by pjkundert »

posixplz wrote: post #213
pjkundert wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to provide facts to counter your generalizations, but... I was on Parler for several months, trawling it and other sources quite heavily for the last month or so, trying to keep abreast of ... events. At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members. So,…

Why bother providing an anecdote like this when we have mountains of empirical evidence about the content on Parler? And that evidence directly counters your assertion.

The claims are that Parler’s primary purpose was to accommodate evildoers, but it only takes a single counter example to invalidate such a broad claim.

My example and personal experience does so.

Producing a bunch of bad posts that they had not yet deleted also doesn’t prove the claim.

Just as the never-deleted “Trump severed head” picture doesn’t prove evil intent by Twitter, et.al.

Perhaps they just hadn’t gotten to them all. Perhaps their user-driven moderation scheme didn’t scale.

I’m getting fairly tired of being impugned by generalizations; I personally didn’t join Parler to plan evil; I just didn’t want to be on a site where everyone seemed to hate me.

So, I am a counter-example that invalidates the wildly general claim.

That is all.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#312

Post by ardy42 »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

So is Google going to throw them out of the Play store? What's the argument for banning one social media and not another. Where do you draw the line that manages to keep Facebooks app available, while still being able to defend the removal of Parler. I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass for all the horrible stuff on their platform. Is it…

> So is Google going to throw them out of the Play store? What's the argument for banning one social media and not another. Where do you draw the line that manages to keep Facebooks app available, while still being able to defend the removal of Parler.

Probably something like S/N ratio. Even though there was insurrectionist and para-insurrectionist activity on Facebook and Twitter, it was a far smaller percentage of the total, and they are more effective at moderating it (once it reaches their awareness). Parler's whole raison d'être was to capture people who got kicked off Twitter for posting that kind of stuff, so it stands to reason its proportion must have been far higher there.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#313

Post by 3princip »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #296
3princip wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely correct. The actions of mainstream media have resulted in countless deaths, destruction and other barbarous acts committed as a result of fake news and propaganda. Yet they call for the censorship of others for deeds that pale in comparison.

Sorry, but this comment betrays a lack of understanding about the very functioning of North American media. There is no real world scenario in which they can be lumped as one group. Even individual outlets carry such a variety of voices that you cannot pin one on any given outlet. The organizations that are lumped into the "MSM" branding opponents to a free press like to throw around are just large organizations. Rem…

Just because the media has cooking articles doesn't mean it isn't propaganda.

At the time of the Iraq war everyone who cared to look into it knew the whole thing was absolutely fake news. If I knew it was fake, and all the people involved in the massive anti-war movement (in the UK at the time) knew it was fake then it wasn't much of a stretch for educated in the know journalists of the NY Times or other major media outlets to know. WMD, yellowcake, links to 9/11 etc. Completely fabricated propaganda was spread and promoted by the MSM.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#314

Post by marcusverus »

Steltek wrote: post #275
neartheplain wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Guns are mostly used to kill people. That’s an incorrect statement. Let’s look at the evidence. More than 50 million Americans engaged in some kind of recreational shooting in 2018 [0]. Compare that to 14,000 gun-related homicides across the country in the same period [1], mostly in certain high-crime communities [2]. The CDC estimates there are between 500,000 and 3 million instances of defensive gun use in the US…

Your sources need work. The salient point (defensive gun use) is not substantiated by your linked report as it specifically mentions the CDC may not collect this data: > In addition to the restrictions on certain kinds of data collection, > congressional action in 1996 effectively halted all firearm-related injury research > at the CDC by prohibiting the use of federal funding “to advo-cate > or promote gun control.”…

> Your sources need work. The salient point (defensive gun use) is not substantiated by your linked report as it specifically mentions the CDC may not collect this data

This is an odd claim, given that the "salient point" seems to be a verbatim quotation of the linked report, which contains further citations...

> Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997).

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#315

Post by halfjoking »

3princip wrote: post #94
yrimaxi wrote: post #12

NYT engineered consent for the Iraq War?

Absolutely correct. The actions of mainstream media have resulted in countless deaths, destruction and other barbarous acts committed as a result of fake news and propaganda. Yet they call for the censorship of others for deeds that pale in comparison.

What's surprising to me is that people seem to think that the PsyOps stopped after the Iraq war.

That the Pentagon just decided "oh we're done with wars now, let's stop telling CNN/FOX/NYT what editorial content to push."

Anytime the mainstream media tries to drum up outrage I'm skeptical. That includes the narrative that Facebook/Twitter is the cause for social unrest and not the NYT/CNN/FOX.

The 2000s and were about manufacturing consent. The 2020s are about manufacturing outrage. You can say it's all about click-bait and getting eyeballs, but I'm skeptical this isn't the same people that started the Iraq war. They want civil unrest on purpose. People didn't want to live in a fascist society just because of Al Qaeda, so they needed a new enemy. So they tried to radicalize your gun-loving neighbor, dressed him up as QAnon Shaman, and now we have to live like 1984 because of him. It's absurd.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#316

Post by ralusek »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #279
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the free market at work. It is not. The “free market argument” does not account for entrenched monopolies who buy up - or shut down -competitors long before they can become threats. Anti-trust laws, which have absolutely no teeth since the 80s (and every then...), are not incompatible with free market capitalism.

>...Anti-trust laws, which have absolutely no teeth since the 80s (and every then...), are not incompatible with free market capitalism. That's the first time I've ever heard that. Generally, libertarians will state that the existence of monopolies is an outcome of government intervention.

This is a strawman of free market advocates. SOME monopolies are the outcomes of government intervention.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#317

Post by bostonsre »

mrweasel wrote: post #14

So is Google going to throw them out of the Play store? What's the argument for banning one social media and not another. Where do you draw the line that manages to keep Facebooks app available, while still being able to defend the removal of Parler. I know many will think I'm defending Parler, I'm not. I just don't see why Facebook is continuously given a free pass for all the horrible stuff on their platform. Is it…

Because Google and Facebook made a deal to work together: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-facebook-agreed-to-team-...

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#318

Post by agumonkey »

mrweasel wrote: post #21
nr2x wrote: post #5

Somebody from Facebook recently told me they developed the best system to flag radical/violent content in the world, I pointed out they first developed the best system to spread it.

What makes Facebook worse, in my mind, is that people don't seem to care that it's their real name associated with terrible radical, violent and angry comment. At least on something like 4Chan you'd be anonymous, but nope, people will write the most grotesque comments, while everyone can see their real name, where they live and who they work for. Some people don't seem to care, and that's pretty scary.

We don't know if it's worse or not. Anonymity may help people go wilder than if their name is attached. Or it might be the other way around... it's not clear.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#319

Post by eclipxe »

ctrlp wrote: post #289
stevenwoo wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone published an investigative report on 1/5 about different social media, the calls to violence were worst in his opinion on Parler https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/05/how-the-...

I like and read bellingcat, but, if we're being honest, it is not a neutral source of information.

Yes it is.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#320

Post by Bakary »

hker wrote: post #277
Bakary wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it is difficult to imagine real life within Chinese borders. This is classic orientalism, especially the idea that people can't figure their way out of a plastic bag without Western input. In reality, the Chinese population holds a range of opinions just as diverse as in any other country. And why wouldn't it? It just takes time and effort to cross the language barrier and come into contact with it from the…

It is more than “language barrier” or “diverse opinions” in China: the government actively censors information and sways public opinion [1]. Regardless of your political stance (whether you think Dalai Lama is good or evil, Tiananmen Square is good or bad), the public at large in China receives different information and opinions from outside. This is not orientalism. Concepts that could be discussed freely in Japan,…

Public opinion is swayed elsewhere as well and in plain sight. Most people have barely any knowledge of their own history and usually don't care to find out. Americans have all the information at their fingertips and yet we can all see how that is working out in terms of discourse.

My point isn't to defend the CCP apparatus or to engage in whataboutism, but simply to point out that China isn't a blob of unthinking people as they are often portrayed to be. Nor are they basically primed to instantly adopt Western values should some Westerner bravely bust through the censorship wall and "educate" them. That's where the orientalism springs from: an inability to conceive of other cultures as anything other than relative actors to one's own.[0]

In my view, it is a widespread and serious flaw in thinking that only helps to weaken the West when dealing with China.

[0] For an amusing illustrative example see https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/29/how-weste...

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