To what degree are advertisers aware that the profiles which see their ads may not be genuine users?
I suspect they either don't know, or have no alternatives.
Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
111–120 of 167 posts
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#112To what degree are advertisers aware that the profiles which see their ads may not be genuine users? I suspect they either don't know, or have no alternatives.
Do fake profiles 'see' ads? They don't artificially browse around the site, to create impressions, or do they?
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in their 50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda, There are no lies or fake memes for the left?
I didn't say that, but in order to prevent a "whatabout" or "false equivalence" attack, I will state up front: Conservatives are more likely to create, spread and fall for fake news than liberals. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau4586 "Conservatives were more likely to share articles from fake news domains, which in 2016 were largely pro-Trump in orientation, than liberals or moderates" We can speculat…
I think you are being terribly naive, sorry. From the study you just linked to:
> Posts containing links to external websites are cross-referenced against lists of fake news publishers built by journalists and academics
Have you seen opinion polls of these two professions? They are overwhelmingly, and I mean more than 90% left-voting. Conservative academics have published a long list of stories about how they have been made unwelcome or pushed out. There are virtually no conservatives in academic or journalist circles these days.
So all your study shows is that if you ask a bunch of Democrats to make a list of "fake news" sites, they list out a lot of pro-Trump conservative outlets. What a shock. Anyone could have told you that - this isn't science and doesn't deserve a paper, it's just bog standard political mud-flinging posing as science.
This is the exact sort of behaviour that's driving a wedge between people: biased academics use the vague aura and automatic defence to science that they've inherited from prior generations to make absurd claims. Journalists who came straight from college and who retain an automatic deference to professors repeat whatever they say as "findings", conservatives who double check discover scientific fraud and call it out, then liberals go in for the double smear of claiming their opponents are anti-intellectual!
Speaking now as a foreigner watching from abroad, over the last few years I've watched as what looked like the entire American left descended down a crazy conspiracy theory of Trump being a Russian spy or collaborator. We now know that isn't true. How many millions or billions of Facebook posts must have been shared about the whole Mueller investigation, about the idea that Trump and Russia are connected in some way? And yet it's all false, it was a fiction invented by the media to get clicks and ratings. Stories collapsed left and right, even left-leaning journalists like Greenwald and Taibbi have since come out flaming the journalistic establishment because so many of the stories turned out to be false, and yet the left seem to collectively fall for it in a huge way.
So I am very skeptical about your thesis that there's a big difference in people's susceptibility to fake news, or how intellectual they are. You should be especially self reflective give you just cited a supposedly scientific study that makes extraordinary claims about voter intelligence yet is transparently nonsense - it's literally "we asked a bunch of Democrats to pick websites they disagree with, labelled them as fake news, and discovered Trump supporters share lots of fake news". You should learn from the conservatives and trust academia a bit less!
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is plenty of anti-science thinking in certain camps of the left as well. Phone radiation, GMOs, nuclear power, dietary trends, mushrooms are conscious, the list of foo is pretty long if you look. Along with the anti-math, anti-logic, anti-historical evidence view of economics. But I don't disagree there is a fair amount of right wing kookage spread about. Perhaps more than it's left wing counterpart. For a long…
Being anti-nuclear doesn’t mean you’re anti-science, nor does questioning the value/cost/results of GMO foods.
Indeed not, but I think maybe that's the point. There are lots of cases where you can disagree with the scientific consensus without being "anti-science", whatever that means.
Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion and thus anti-nuclear campaigners tend to make arguments about priorities rather than claim their opponents are anti-science; they argue the risks are underestimated, the costs of waste are too high etc.
As for GMO foods, again, the scientific consensus is there are no health problems with them, which is why the anti-GMO argument tends to be of the form "but what if they're just so super long term problems that we haven't seen them yet" (a.k.a. the EU's precautionary principle on blocking GMO foods from competing with EU farmers).
Look at it the other way around - lots of climate change skeptics make deeply scientific arguments, typically pointing out errors or mistakes in papers, cases of previous predictions that turned out to be false and so on. That doesn't make them anti-science, it arguably makes them campaigners for better science.
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being anti-nuclear doesn’t mean you’re anti-science, nor does questioning the value/cost/results of GMO foods.
Indeed not, but I think maybe that's the point. There are lots of cases where you can disagree with the scientific consensus without being "anti-science", whatever that means. Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion and thus anti-nuclear campaigners tend to make arguments about priorities rather than claim their opponents are anti-science; they argue the ris…
> Basically all scientific or logical analysis about power generation yields a pro-nuclear conclusion
What's the scientific analysis that says power plants have on average cost a metric fuck ton more to clean up than was ever expected or planned for, or that there is still no effective plan to get rid of the waste they produce?
See this is my point. I can admit that some scientists are no doubt pro-nuclear, and pro-GMO.
But you apparently can't admit that there are scientists who don't believe one or both of those things is net positive.
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#116To what degree are advertisers aware that the profiles which see their ads may not be genuine users? I suspect they either don't know, or have no alternatives.
They know, it is measured with some degree of accuracy by the platforms, but nobody wants to remove those numbers from their marketing, except the person paying for the ad..
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#117I wonder how I make my inactive account look fake so they will cull it properly...
Does asking Facebook to delete your account only work in Europe? Perhaps use a VPN if not?
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#118To what degree are advertisers aware that the profiles which see their ads may not be genuine users? I suspect they either don't know, or have no alternatives.
Advertisers simply don´t know. The reason most of them don´t know is because there are virtually no tools available that can distinguish between a real user and a fake user. Only FB can make that assessment with some degree of certainty and even that can´t be trusted. External partners have been given a choice: either advertise at the risk of it being some garbage traffic, or not advertise at all. And for obvious reasons, the latter is what people choose to do.
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#119Facebook has laughably weak moderation.
Twitter, despite having stricter moderation (which seldom seems to result in consequences), seems to have an even bigger problem. An election in a certain country (I'm wary of even mentioning the name of that country, lest I be bombarded) exposed a huge army of dubious accounts shutting down dissent.
In another country, a network of Twitter bots attempted to start a race war.
Then there are the 100k+ follower accounts that seem to get away with blatant incitement and rule-breaking, and Twitter is too afraid of a backlash to shut them down, even when they admit to having multiple admins (something that should disqualify them from the blue checkmark).
WhatsApp seems to be an even more pernicious vector of viral garbage...why it doesn't disable forwarding entirely (or forwarding to groups) remains a mystery.
It isn't an SV phenomenon: in another recent election, WeChat was used to spread fake electoral propaganda.
It may be time, for the sake of democracy, and stability in the world to "de-platform" the platforms entirely. The other option would be for remorseful founders to allow them to be swamped with spam (it might provide plausible deniability to shareholders), and be killed off that way.
Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been freaking me out lately. I am trying to form a model of how a society would typically evolve past this situation and continue to advance and spread while maintaining humane and truly representative systems of government. So far I haven't come up with anything good. But it is a singularity. We don't know what is on the other side. Or if there even is another side. We are stumbling backwards into a world w…
Full email address in profile?
Yep, just gotta pass the robot test.