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Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

theguardian.com

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Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#51

Post by cblconfederate »

SSLy wrote: post #50
cblconfederate wrote: post #44

Facebook is worse than state-controlled media in those countries, and they have a moral obligation to stop doing business in oppressive countries. People know that state-controlled media is biased, but oppressive leaders can demand censorship from facebook at whim and nobody knows about it. And i would not be surprised if bribes inside facebook are involved , as some of those countries are known to run extensive brib…

I live in one of those countries (Poland), and certainly the state-controlled media/energy/industry conglomerate is worse, thank you.

But you know that it's state-controlled. Would you say that facebook in Turkey is not state-controlled, even though it s not branded as such?

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#52

Post by Kalium »

ethbr0 wrote: post #27
freddealmeida wrote: post #21

I think we need a new journalism. One that can avoid the last 20 years of structured news. Though I think this is impossible now. Not without an outsized reaction by the population that doesn't even care. Facebook exists because most people can accept those crimes committed against them. They really don't even understand them all. Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal. Nothing surprises me anymore

We don't need a new journalism, we need a new economic model to support the old old journalism (pre-1990s). The three foundational planks that we've since lost are (1) strong newsroom editorial control of content, independent of revenue, (2) long form & investigative journalism as a stable, viable profession, & (3) journalists and journalism outlets with reputation (able to counter-balance the weight of those they re…

It's easy for people to look at the highlights of journalism and think we must go back. It's more challenging to remember that yellow journalism and worse came from that old old journalism. Perhaps it's only the best results of the old way we want, rather than all of them?

The greatest tragedy of modern journalism has been its inability to adapt business models to a changing world. The old old assumption was that newspapers and TV had a near monopoly on user attention, with a tragic unwillingness to consider that maybe this wouldn't always be the case. Outlets more focused on subscriptions and less on advertising seem to have come through better.

Perhaps the alignment between advertising and journalism was coincidental, rather than some iron law?

> IMHO, we should just say the hell with it, tax advertising revenue, and fund journalism as a public good.

Don't we already have outlets like that? How do you feel about Voice of America or People's Daily? IMHO, a lot of people distrust them as rather less than independent.

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#53

Post by comeonseriously »

commoner wrote: post #13

The Guardian has more coverage in this article, which was published at the same time: "How Facebook let fake engagement distort global politics: a whistleblower's account" - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/12/facebook-... It's interesting how Guy Rosen, a co-founder of the spyware company Onavo, is now Facebook's "vice-president of integrity": > Facebook had “moved slower than we’d like because of pri…

> It’s a bummer that it’s back and I’m excited to learn from this and better understand what we need to do systematically...

Corporate speak for, "Meh, whatevs".

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#54

Post by nradov »

cblconfederate wrote: post #44

Facebook is worse than state-controlled media in those countries, and they have a moral obligation to stop doing business in oppressive countries. People know that state-controlled media is biased, but oppressive leaders can demand censorship from facebook at whim and nobody knows about it. And i would not be surprised if bribes inside facebook are involved , as some of those countries are known to run extensive brib…

Do you have a list of which countries are oppressive and which are not?

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#55

Post by csemaan »

The Guardian, and a few other outfits in global media sold its readership very hard on the "Gadhafi killing his own people" fallacy to enable Islamist gangs to plunder and maim and kill and ruin the societal fabric of Libya (and a few southern neighbors). Since then, Libya is a wasteland, its inhabitants enslaved as a whole (as opposed to the few political (read Islamists) prisoners' under the Gadhafi dictatorship), deaths in the tens of thousands, prisoners are not accounted for under any authority.

Also the Guardian, just like most MSM holds a grudge against FB: how dare they eat their pie, all of it, and they let people escape from their 'single-eyed war-enabling worldview'?

Lay the FB 'hate' aside, will ya? For all its dehumanizing power (as much as the rest of 'social media' and technology in general) FB has not committed the 1/10000th of the harm these champions of virtue in the MSM have done for the last couple centuries (steamrolling their power on most wars, worldwide or not).

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#56

Post by h2odragon »

Leaders "deceiving their citizens" was never a problem until facebook came along! How unconscionable that they didnt anticipate and fix this problem!

People who want Facebook, or "someone" to be the arbiter of the One True Truth are doomed to fail, because nothing is true.

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#57

Post by nradov »

ethbr0 wrote: post #27
freddealmeida wrote: post #21

I think we need a new journalism. One that can avoid the last 20 years of structured news. Though I think this is impossible now. Not without an outsized reaction by the population that doesn't even care. Facebook exists because most people can accept those crimes committed against them. They really don't even understand them all. Shit Zuckerburg uses Signal. Nothing surprises me anymore

We don't need a new journalism, we need a new economic model to support the old old journalism (pre-1990s). The three foundational planks that we've since lost are (1) strong newsroom editorial control of content, independent of revenue, (2) long form & investigative journalism as a stable, viable profession, & (3) journalists and journalism outlets with reputation (able to counter-balance the weight of those they re…

Substack is that new economic model for a limited number of investigative journalists who have strong name recognition like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. But it probably won't scale to the levels were need.

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#58

Post by sp332 »

csemaan wrote: post #55

The Guardian, and a few other outfits in global media sold its readership very hard on the "Gadhafi killing his own people" fallacy to enable Islamist gangs to plunder and maim and kill and ruin the societal fabric of Libya (and a few southern neighbors). Since then, Libya is a wasteland, its inhabitants enslaved as a whole (as opposed to the few political (read Islamists) prisoners' under the Gadhafi dictatorship),…

So at any given moment, we're only allowed to criticize one thing - the worst thing in the entire world? After all, anything else is, you know, not that bad.

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#59

Post by cblconfederate »

nradov wrote: post #54
cblconfederate wrote: post #44

Facebook is worse than state-controlled media in those countries, and they have a moral obligation to stop doing business in oppressive countries. People know that state-controlled media is biased, but oppressive leaders can demand censorship from facebook at whim and nobody knows about it. And i would not be surprised if bribes inside facebook are involved , as some of those countries are known to run extensive brib…

Do you have a list of which countries are oppressive and which are not?

Many are listed in the article itself.

Re: Facebook slow to address political manipulation outside wealthy, western nations

#60

Post by spazrunaway »

sp332 wrote: post #58
csemaan wrote: post #55

The Guardian, and a few other outfits in global media sold its readership very hard on the "Gadhafi killing his own people" fallacy to enable Islamist gangs to plunder and maim and kill and ruin the societal fabric of Libya (and a few southern neighbors). Since then, Libya is a wasteland, its inhabitants enslaved as a whole (as opposed to the few political (read Islamists) prisoners' under the Gadhafi dictatorship),…

So at any given moment, we're only allowed to criticize one thing - the worst thing in the entire world? After all, anything else is, you know, not that bad.

Yes. We need a hell of a lot less destructive criticism that leads to war.
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