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Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#401

Post by Tarsul »

rsynnott wrote: post #361
waylandsmithers wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure self awareness is the best way to put it though if they thought they had the blessing and encouragement of the sitting president. That's what makes this hard to compare to most of the revolutionary uprisings of the past.

I mean, even if they had a signed letter from Trump saying "this is bigly good, do this" that doesn't stop it from being super-illegal. He's not a dictator; he can't just give people license to do illegal things. As they should know very well.

well, as president he could always give them a pardon, couldn't he? (actually, I have no idea for what he could give pardons. And he won't be presdient long enough to do it for those people. But still...)

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#402

Post by manfredo »

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…

The main arguments are proportionality and enforcement. Facebook probably had more violating content in total but out of a much much larger pool of content. In other words, the percentage of violating content on Facebook is still much smaller. Likewise, Facebook still makes efforts to moderate and police content.

Pointing to the large size of ToS violations on Facebook and concluding that Facebook is a dangerous platform is akin to pointing out how many Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas get into collisions and concluding they are dangerous models of cars. They're perfectly safe cars there's just a lot of them on the road.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#403

Post by 52-6F-62 »

yrimaxi wrote: post #340
52-6F-62 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This isn’t so much a counter-argument as it’s a disjointed muddy-the-waters statement. Muffin recipes...? Of course a paragraph-long comment won’t provide a rigorous critique of the media. And I might disagree with that commenter with regards to “fake news”, since you can go a long way without outright lying (omission being one tactic). In any case, there are long-form critiques of this phenomena if one is interested…

I wasn't responding to long form critique. I was responding to several disjointed, self-righteous platitudes strung together.

Not to single out the commenter above, as it's a common phenomenon.

There was nothing muddying about my comment. If someone has an issue to take up with a particular writer and their treatment of a subject in an opinion column that is one thing, but that's not what was happening. What I was pointing out and opposing is the treatment of "MSM" as "fake news" and "propaganda"[0] as a whole. So, unless recipes, arts columns, news reporting, and travel writing are also all "fake news", the NYT is not "fake news".

Media literacy always has been of severe importance, and it really begins with a base level literacy and handling of the language and context the writing comes from. Picking out a couple of opinion columns and using them to brand an entire field of work and study as "fake news" is problematic.

Frankly, the problem seems to stem with many people misreading Orwell (or not at all before raising his name as a moral objection), and not even taking a moment to read that they're browsing the opinion section before they've decided to take off with outrage.

I never argued with their opinions. I countered their understanding of the functioning of North American media with illustrations.

[0] When this word is pegged in next to "fake news", one tends to understand, given the context, that the meaning was idiomatic in the anti-journalism sense and not the larger meaning of the word.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#404

Post by 52-6F-62 »

3princip wrote: post #313
52-6F-62 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your issues with opinion columns from 15 to 20 years ago does not render the entire medium of 21st century journalism "fake news".

I'm certain if you read the entirety of the New York Times (and many other outlets) published articles on the subject you would find a range of perspectives, not just the ones that you're purporting sum up journalism of the past 20 years.

I was reading the same outlets you were at that time. Those large outlets based in the cities were where I (living in rural SW Ontario) gained my understanding of what was going on with the United States response to 9/11.

I'm not making this up. They maintain well-organized archives and it's easy to search, filter by date range, section, and sort. For example, "Bush WMD" search between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2011 returns a wide variety of perspectives and types of journalism: some straight reporting of the news, some press releases, and some opinion columns from varying perspectives—some in line with what you're claiming is the entire stance of North American media, and some not. Those sections are not all equal in their "truthiness" (another fun term from those times, if you recall).

https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=true&endDate=20111231...

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#405

Post by akmiller »

ctrlp wrote: post #177
enumjorge wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was not a peep about their content until from their reps until 1/6. Was it the riot or the senate flipping? Sounds like you answered your own question. Tech companies were lenient on hosting a questionable community, until members of that community tried to overthrow the government. For all the moderation the Parler admins allegedly did, it was an open secret that it was the hang out spot for right-wing extre…

Have you have spent time in parler and can speak to its content? Or are you just amplifying other people's opinions? It is trivial to cherry pick content from Twitter or Facebook that would be outrageous to decent people.

I joined it back in December, not realizing that it was essentially a platform for right wing extremist. I simply thought it was a less restrictive Twitter, based on the conversation I'd heard. After joining and opening the app, and without following anyone, I was immediately slammed with extremist right wing content and outright lies. I'm not one to defend Twitter/Facebook (both should be broken up into smaller companies), but my god...neither do anything close to what I saw with Parler.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#406

Post by mordymoop »

tqi wrote: post #276
mordymoop wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if we could remove and permanently prohibit what we currently think of as "social media", which in my opinion would include things like Discord and Reddit as well as Facebook and Twitter. A full-on Butlerian Jihad aimed at reverting the species back to traditional modes of human interaction. We clearly can't handle this drug. But that won't happen, obviously, so we need to figure something else out.

> include things like Discord and Reddit as well as Facebook and Twitter. Hackernews?

Maybe. It didn’t seem like stuff was this nuts when we were constrained to BBSes, which is closer to what this is.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#407

Post by kridsdale1 »

uncrex wrote: post #273
dcolkitt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of rationales you can give, but the real answer is that banning Facebook would cause Google to miss their quarterly earnings. Many people are willing to take a stand for their beliefs, many fewer are willing to nuke their RSUs.

> banning Facebook would cause Google to miss their quarterly earnings how exactly?

Users love Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. If Google took action, the only thing that would happen would be the world now referring to their Android devices as broken, and iPhones are "The one with Instagram".

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#408

Post by Auracle »

t-writescode wrote: post #372
IgorPartola wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a gun debate. If you want, I’ll rephrase: guns are mostly used to kill living beings, or to target practice so that one may get better at killing living beings. They don’t have a domestic function like knives do: you can’t cook or clean with them.

> They don’t have a domestic function like knives do Hunting for sustenance, depending on where you live

I’d also include putting down rabid animals or animals that threaten livestock/pets.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#409

Post by hker »

Bakary wrote: post #320
hker wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

I agree that:

- the Chinese culture will never be the same as the US, and

- Chinese opinion is not a single blob,

but I think “oriental” countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan show that they could be persuaded (let’s not use “educated” here) to be:

- less aggressive to neighbors, and

- not trying to dominate, to overthrow world order by exporting authoritarianism and censorship.

And regarding swaying opinions, I agree that it happens elsewhere as well (just as Trump was swaying opinions with Twitter and Facebook before he was banned), but I would take a public discourse anytime.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#410

Post by tristor »

IgorPartola wrote: post #332
tristor wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It essentially doesn't matter /why/ guns, tobacco, liquor, etc. are regulated by the government. That reasoning has no bearing on why Amazon doesn't sell them. Amazon is not a moral agent, it's one of the largest corporations in the world with a profit imperative to expand into as many product categories as possible in its goal to dominate e-commerce. Those government regulations make those product types conflict wit…

Substitute Amazon for local pharmacy, grocery store, or gas station. Look, the point isn’t to talk about gun rights. The point is that Parler was the toxic runoff from 4chan, Facebook, and the parts of Reddit it deemed too toxic to keep. Facebook is 99.9% reposting of random memes. It’s 0.1% is doing a lot of harm, but by and large it isn’t obviously designed to be a white supremacy platform, it just happens to be us…

I think rather than trying argue your original analogy was relevant and useful, you should instead simply admit that it was a bad analogy using an (intentionally or not) inflammatory and afactual comparison that detracts and distracts from the point you are trying to make. It's pretty clear that you're trying to make the point that Facebook is a platform for mostly benign things which as an ancillary has functionality that can be used by extremists, while Parler is specifically a platform built for extremists. You're doing a pretty bad job of trying to make that point by over-focusing on a bad analogy.

I'm not sure that's actually accurate. I think it's strongly debatable as to whether or not Facebook ever had any positive intents as a platform. Arguably, Facebook started as a way for predatory men on college campuses to stalk attractive women and comment on their bodies, which I'd be hard pressed to classify as a positive intent. Developing from that, Facebook has taken as many actions as possible to drive user engagement, including actively spying on their users to do so. Not only is the spying itself user-hostile, but the actions taken to drive user engagement seem to greatly emphasize and create rage, lust, fear, and other negative emotions in their user base. I'd be hard-pressed to classify any of this as positive intent.

I think you'll have a difficult time, regardless of the analogy you try to shoe-horn into place, arguing that Facebook suffers from unintended consequences when their ragebaiting mechanisms lead to political extremism and violence, and that Parler was intending that a platform designed for free speech resulted in extremism. Probably the best argument in your favor would be to focus on Parler's genesis story, which seems to strongly indicate that it too was not formed for positive intents. I think a mostly honest take is that both platforms are negative in both their intentions and their outcomes and are directly toxic for a functioning democratic society. The only real difference between Parler and Facebook is that Facebook is socially entrenched and has a massive global user base and the revenue/wealth that comes from that, and Parler doesn't.

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