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Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#461

Post by tester34 »

sn_master wrote: post #260
tester34 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or saying that something can be done more efficiently with Windows are people here this naive?

I loved developing all kinds of command line and UI tools for Windows, so I might be a little biased, but I found the Linux equivalents..well..not as easy and straightforward to say the least. But, there is countless posts here passionately defending and stating otherwise, that I don't even know if I should bring it up in a discussion. What do you think?

>I loved developing all kinds of command line and UI tools for Windows, so I might be a little biased, but I found the Linux equivalents..well..not as easy and straightforward to say the least.

Well, I think very often commands have very not intuitive names of parameters, very often some seemingly random letters

When it comes to me,

I use Linux for server related stuff, hosting my things and stuff, also I like raw terminal Linux because there's nothing happening, so no distractions

but day-to-day I use Windows.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#462

Post by shlant »

ctrlp wrote: post #131
shlant wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't deny there is probably some favoritism going on, but is Facebooks willingness to moderate their content not at least part of the reason? Parler was completely hands off when it came to any sort of moderation of the content its users were posting (by design) which allowed for threats of violence to go unchecked and flourish within the platform. That seems like a pretty significant determinant when considering…

That's false. Please don't spread false information, whatever your politics. Parler had very similar terms of service to other content companies prohibiting illegal, violent, or copyrighted content. They also paid a team of content moderators to adjudicate flagged posts. They worked happily with their reps at Apple, Google, and AWS right up until the Friday Night Massacre. They were a small company experiencing massi…

> "There was not a peep about their content until from their reps until 1/6"

as per articles linked below, you are wrong:

"Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...

You have not provided any evidence to back up your claims, however.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#463

Post by lesstenseflow »

freeone3000 wrote: post #441
lesstenseflow wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretty narrow Not so for better or worse. Multiple people have been banned from Twitter for calling a human rights litigation troll (and Twitter troll) a man (he is male). https://nationalpost.com/news/free-speech-activist-lindsay-s... https://mobile.twitter.com/bindelj/status/118726943929891225... Calling a male troll “he” is definitely not illegal, yet you can be banned from Twitter for it. It’s not an incitement…

No, she is female. Before we had all this mess with real identities on the internet, nobody cared about your genitals when you wanted to be addressed with "he/him" or "she/her", they just did it. I wonder how we lost that.

I encourage you to familiarize yourself with this case before commenting that nobody should care about the subject being male. He went around booking bikini-waxing sessions (often in-home) from various women who provide this highly intimate service to women, then brought human rights complaints against them when they refused to wax his (male) genitals or allow him to come undress in their homes. This fellow’s sex very much mattered in this case, and people shouldn’t be forced to pretend it doesn’t as he goes around harassing and bringing frivolous suits against women. The courts ultimately agreed https://nationalpost.com/news/trans-activist-jessica-yaniv-f...

He also engaged in other behaviour so vile I won’t repeat it here https://www.womenarehuman.com/male-transgender-trans-activis...

Do you still think anyone who refuses to pretend-along with this predator/troll and echo his self-image back to him should be banned from Twitter? And do you think the speech is illegal?

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#464

Post by LatteLazy »

bzbarsky wrote: post #442
LatteLazy wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are a couple: Facebook could have 100 times more violent content than parler, but it would be a much smaller percentage of content because Facebook is 1000000 times bigger. It's that simple really. Banning Parler is more efficient. Also, Parler went out and sold itself as somewhere this was allowed, protected and encouraged. Facebook didn't, quite the opposite in fact.

Just to make sure we're clear on the numbers, Parler had ~2 million accounts last I checked. Facebook being 1e6 times bigger, as you claim, would be quite the feat. I get your larger point, but the actual numbers you picked to illustrate it are just completely divorced from reality.

So it looks like Facebook is 2.7bn. So they're 1000 times larger. So the question is, are there 1000 times more racist/antisemitic/violent posts on Facebook as there are on parler?

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#465

Post by spiralx »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #238
mrweasel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From newspapers’ biographical sketches of the people who were arrested for the Capitol siege, some of them were on the dole and so they didn't have an employer they could shock, why the others came from parts of the US where their small-business employers may well have sympathized with “Stop the Steal” rhetoric.

And some were business owners who flew in on their private jet, some were privately-schooled children of millionaire parents, and others were Olympic medallists.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#466

Post by spiralx »

syndacks wrote: post #138
goto11 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what direction does HN radicalize us?

Not sure I agree that HN "radicalizes" but I would say that the obsession with the need for sources and the tendency to apply algorithmic-level logic to comments leaves this place lacking imagination and/or a touch of humanity that the world otherwise applies to thinking. In other words, there isn't much reading between the lines or "zooming out", it's a lot of nit-picking. Can one be too logical? Too empirical? Too…

HN for me is far too convinced of its own rationality and the rationality of others, leading to arguments based on weird idealised versions of human behaviour at odds with the real world. It could do with being a lot more empirical to be honest, but it's about what I expect from a site with a lot of Silicon Valley-flavoured naïve libertarianism.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#467

Post by spiralx »

tayistay wrote: post #189

I think we should ban the use of opaque algorithms to mediate communication between individuals. You need to be able to understand and predict the semantics of communication.

Yeah, I would say that algorithmic curation is the key difference between "before" and "after" here. Social media makes it easy to form filter bubbles, but on its own it's just an iterative change to an existing phenomenon. But when you curate and present content for engagement, especially content from outside of your chosen set of interactions, it becomes a positive feedback loop of ever-increasing extremism - even in the most benign of topics.

Google's search personalisation and targeted ads fall under this even if they're not as effective at radicalisation IMO.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#468

Post by brlewis »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #28
mrweasel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> people don't seem to care that it's their real name associated with terrible radical, violent and angry comment The hypothesis of real name policies was that people would be civil online if their real-world identities grounded them. In reality, the tail wagged the dog.

Was that the hypothesis, or just the marketing? Obviously real names make it easier to integrate marketing data from disparate sources.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#469

Post by Bakary »

hker wrote: post #444
Bakary wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I concur with the general sentiment. I don't want to speculate too much and go into armchair territory. That said, I wonder if it isn't more productive to look at China and each country in the region based on its own characteristics instead of a regional idea. Looking at all those you cited, they all have pretty specific ways of doing things and very different histories. I think they have less in common than say Fran…

I agree that: * each country has their own history and trajectory, including China, its neighbors (Japan, Taiwan, etc.), or others. * China has much to gain from changing the world order. But, I speculate that: * a transition of power from a US dominated world order to a bipolar (or China dominated) world order would be chaotic and likely non-peacful, given the history of the bipolar world order of the Cold War with…

I must admit I have no idea at all what will happen when it comes down to it (nor does anyone, let's be real). I can't say I reject your vision outright, but I tend to believe that multipolar worlds (excluding bipolar) are more stable and in this case I do not believe it will only be China and the US in the game. Your comparison between the domestic situation in China and the world order is something I had never considered before.

But like you said it's fun to speculate about these things. Online discussion may lead to a lot of... issues but it also allows us to discuss intense topics where we might not otherwise be able to.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#470

Post by carapace »

ashtonkem wrote: post #447
carapace wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that too, not that they're a cult so much as a kind of Live-Action Role-Playing that escaped into the real world. I don't know to what extent that's true, but it helps me try to answer one of the questions foremost on my mind, to wit: what the hell did these folks think they were going to do? What was the plan here? - - - - From the article you posted there's a line that seems particularly telling to me as…

I don’t think “LARPers escaped into reality” is a good metaphor, because LARPers know they’re playing a game. The QAnon crowd unquestionably has a lot of members who genuinely believe this stuff. Generally LARPers don’t play act their way into hundreds of federal felonies, nor do LARPers vote along LARP lines. Also, those guns and bombs are sure real.

> I don’t think “LARPers escaped into reality” is a good metaphor, because LARPers know they’re playing a game.

That's all I meant by "escaped into reality". These folks (and it seems like most of them were pretty young) seem more like Pokemon GO players who think Pokemon are real than a out right cult.

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