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How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

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Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#131

Post by XCabbage »

pjc50 wrote: post #94
XCabbage wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't the majority of the criticism of Facebook been about enabling communication? Indeed, hasn't that been the cause of most of the Left's pearl-clutching about social media's influence on politics over the last few years? Many, if not most, of the complaints about Russian "interference" in the US election and Brexit that I've seen the Left being so distressed about consisted primarily of Russians saying things abo…

No, a key part of this is misrepresentation: Russians saying things about politics as themselves would be one thing, but Russians pretending to be Americans en masse with thousands of fake accounts and promoting obviously false rumours and driven by audience-targeting ad technology starts to become a problem. (This is not an argument against anonymity; I don't need to know where these accounts really live. I do need…

> Russians pretending to be Americans

While I don't claim to have researched this issue in depth and it's worth taking this with a pinch of salt, I'm yet to see any evidence of this, nor has it been a part of most of the leftist reporting I've seen. The only instance I've heard of where a specific Twitter account has been accused of being a Russian misrepresenting their nationality was ian56789, and that accusation was false, as he demonstrated by going on Sky News and giving an interview.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#132

Post by hardwaresofton »

saagarjha wrote: post #35
baq wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, google and amazon and dare I say it apple have access to a similar amount of data about their users. Apple is the one I trust with privacy the most, but how are you going to prove that they aren't selling my profile...?

The only way to know this is by not providing companies with your data in the first place. Unfortunately auditing this is kind of difficult to do today with most operating systems being closed-source and hard to inspect, but it’s still possible to do general checks on what they are sending out.

I wonder if it'll ever be possible to reverse the paradigm -- when Facebook needs some of my data, they ask me (or some proxy Iv'e set up) for my data and use it with a lease.

All the EULA legalese that companies use to enforce their will could be turned in the opposite direction and we'd found out it's real worth -- I can dictate how FB uses the data they pull from my server just like they try, to the extent that anyone can tell someone else what to do with data instead of having near zero power as people who live in non-GDPR regions do now.

I mean I don't think this kind of scheme would actually work but I can still dream.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#133

Post by zabana »

dao- wrote: post #118
zabana wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the fact that we have to separate independent journalists from the ones working for privately owned outlets is problematic in itself.

Right, what I'm saying is that we should uphold objective standards rather than just saying independent journalists are generally more/less trustworthy than established ones.

Yes this is very true. There are honest journalists and frauds on both sides. (wink wink Alex Jones)

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#134

Post by amelius »

sanxiyn wrote: post #44
amelius wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's starting to feel like a coordinated smear campaign, even if all of it is accurate. I don't get it. If it's all accurate then what is the problem exactly? That all the anger is directed at FB? They are the largest social media company, and in the good times I have never heard them say "but other social media companies deserve some love too". Running a business is not supposed to be easy.

> I don't get it. If it's all accurate then what is the problem exactly? Selective reporting is a huge problem. You can distort almost any topic by selectively reporting only truthful things.

True, but it happens in a company's good times as well as bad times. Emphasizing this distortion only now would introduce a bias.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#135

Post by pjc50 »

XCabbage wrote: post #131
pjc50 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, a key part of this is misrepresentation: Russians saying things about politics as themselves would be one thing, but Russians pretending to be Americans en masse with thousands of fake accounts and promoting obviously false rumours and driven by audience-targeting ad technology starts to become a problem. (This is not an argument against anonymity; I don't need to know where these accounts really live. I do need…

> Russians pretending to be Americans While I don't claim to have researched this issue in depth and it's worth taking this with a pinch of salt, I'm yet to see any evidence of this, nor has it been a part of most of the leftist reporting I've seen. The only instance I've heard of where a specific Twitter account has been accused of being a Russian misrepresenting their nationality was ian56789, and that accusation w…

An example of the sort of thing I mean: https://www.ft.com/content/333fe6bc-c1ea-11e6-81c2-f57d90f67... (in this case Macedonians, not Russians, but where did the money come from?)

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#136

Post by vtesucks »

ahje wrote: post #33
vtesucks wrote: post #11

Populist has a derogatory connotation and insulting peoples will seems improper

The basic idea is that the will of the people may change at a whim, and that we therefore need safeguards to protect liberal parlamentarism and the basic order of society from changes that would otherwise be disruptive. This obviously protects the so-called elites from angry mobs, which is the main argument against this system, but it also make sure that our economies don't collapse due to various governments doing t…

Thanks, fair point. But then again that's democracy right? And riots aren't your weekend party- people are on streets because they are fed up of something.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#137

Post by snaky »

beginningguava wrote: post #125
purplethinking wrote: post #16

I don't like Facebook more than anyone else, but at this point aren't we just blaming them for enabling communication? By all means, criticize Facebook for privacy issues, but not for stuff like this, unless you actually want censorship on the largest scale ever in history.

>unless you actually want censorship on the largest scale ever in history that's what they want. The media and many government officials have been implying that the citizens are simply too stupid to be trusted with filtering their information so the glorious government must restrict what they're allowed to see. At what point will they decide the common man is simply too dumb to vote and get rid of democracy as well?…

> the common man is simply too dumb to vote

This is foundation of American democracy actually. In the early history of the U.S., most states allowed only male adult property owners to vote (about 6% of the population).

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#138

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

AlexB138 wrote: post #124
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is fair to criticize unedited internet communication in general, as we have just recently learned that this form of communication did not result in the improvement of public discourse that everyone might have hoped. Facebook just happens to be the largest platform offering that. I don't think it is fair to consider large-scale censorship as the only other alternative. Having some kind of neutral editorial…

> I don't think it is fair to consider large-scale censorship as the only other alternative. Having some kind of neutral editorial process to filter out the unsubstantiated, hateful opinions and leave room for a more nuanced discussion raises the level of discourse, and is the model that have been offered by traditional media for a long time. The problem with this view is that one person's hateful opinion is another…

I did not claim that it was a perfect system, but it is better at avoiding devolving into the hateful rage-soup that unedited online forums often do. It is virtually impossible to have a system that is "perfectly balanced" (can we even define what that means?), so rejecting alternatives on those grounds is holding them to unrealistically high standards.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#139

Post by XCabbage »

pjc50 wrote: post #135
XCabbage wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Russians pretending to be Americans While I don't claim to have researched this issue in depth and it's worth taking this with a pinch of salt, I'm yet to see any evidence of this, nor has it been a part of most of the leftist reporting I've seen. The only instance I've heard of where a specific Twitter account has been accused of being a Russian misrepresenting their nationality was ian56789, and that accusation w…

An example of the sort of thing I mean: https://www.ft.com/content/333fe6bc-c1ea-11e6-81c2-f57d90f67... (in this case Macedonians, not Russians, but where did the money come from?)

Paywalled.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#140

Post by ceejayoz »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #93
ceejayoz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fake news" is sometimes a real photo/video falsely attached to the wrong event. Here's why the Spanish protest pics were "fake news": https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/10/06/inenglish/1507278297_70... The same thing is happening in the French protests: https://observers.france24.com/en/20181129-debunked-videos-y...

No, those pictures of brutal Spanish police action to block people from casting ballots were fake. There are plenty of real ones. As a casual but interested observer, I personally don't remember seeing any of those fake photos shared. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/10/photos-from-catalo...

The fake photos were self-evidently shared enough to receive some media coverage, and the article cites retweet counts. I'm not clear on the relevance of you not having personally spotted these specific ones.

I took a look at the Atlantic link you included, and I'm not seeing any photos of bloodied protesters like the fake ones had. I don't doubt that with rubber bullets and batons flying there were some injuries, but the "fake" photos still aren't accurate depictions of them if they're from previous incidents.

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