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The case against social media is stronger than you think

arachnemag.substack.com

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Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#171

Post by nobodywillobsrv »

Lerc wrote: post #11

Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack. A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation. There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be hi…

The problem is this kind of long form "thinks" miss the basics and even uses polarising denialist phrases like "fear mongering"

There is a an obvious incoherence and even misreasoning present in the people most ruined by the new media.

For example, you might want to drive the risk of something to zero. To do that, you need to calmly respond with policy every bad event of that type with more restrictions at some cost. This should be uncontentious to describe yet again and again the pattern is to mistake the desires, the costs and the interventions.

I can't even mention examples of this without risking massive karma attacks. That is the state of things.

I used to think misreasoning was just something agit prop accounts did online but years ago started hearing the broken calculus being spoken by IRL humans.

We need a path forward to make people understand they should almost all disagree but they MUST agree on how they disagree else they don't actually disagree.They are just barking animals waiting for a chance to attack.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#172

Post by scarface_74 »

gdulli wrote: post #169
scarface_74 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly when did we make progress? In 2008 - before social media really took off how much of the population was a yelling that a Black man wasn’t a “real American” and was a “secret Muslim”? Before then we had the “Willie Horton ads”. Not to mention that Clinton performatively oversaw the electrocution of a mentally challenged Black man to show that he was tough on crime. https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bill-clinton-rick…

That black man you're referring to was elected President twice, despite his haters. Which does not mean that racism was conquered but does indicate progress since the aforementioned Jim Crow era.

We were talking about “polarization”. Not the fact that he was elected. Was social media to blame in 2008 for the “divisiveness”?

Right now the Supreme Court said that ICE could target people based on the color of their skin and it’s big like Obama won the hearts and minds of the states where Jim Crow was the law of the land in the 60s.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#173

Post by scottgg »

blitz_skull wrote: post #24

The last week has taken me from “I believe in the freedom of online anonymity” to “Online anonymity possess a weight that a moral, civil society cannot bear.” I do not believe humans are capable of responsibly wielding the power to anonymously connect with millions of people without the real weight of social consequence.

Moreover it’s not even possible for us to engage in _honest debate_ about the impact of social media anymore.

Absolutist positions without nuance are the norm, and the folks who control these platforms control to a very large extent the narrative to push surrounding them, both directly through the platforms themselves and indirectly through lobbying and the obscene pool of capital they have siphoned off.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#175

Post by synecdoche »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #77
cramsession wrote: post #59

Without social media, we'd be left with mainstream media, which is a very narrow set of channels that those in power can control. Despite rampant censorship on social media, it's still the best way to circumvent propaganda and give people a voice.

The idea of social media reducing net propaganda is a wild take.

Without it, there would be no way to get information from the source. In msm all we get is the msm view. When compared to what was actually said, done or written then you have a chance to make your own opinion. You only then can compare what is in msm and what is not. And the bias is relentless. Which makes it a propaganda machine.

Of course there is garbage in social media as there is in every field. Find the source if there is one recorded. Msm rarely if ever refer to any. And no wonder. It would risk undermining their publication, which they peddle as unbiased.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#176

Post by procaryote »

Lerc wrote: post #11

Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack. A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation. There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be hi…

> Part of me thinks that if the case against social media was stronger, it would not be being litigated on substack.

It's litigated all over and has been for a decade.

Australia for example has set an age limit of 16 to have social media. France 15. Schools or countries are trying various phone bans. There's research into it. There are whistleblowers telling about Facebook's own research they've suppressed as it would show some of their harm.

Perhaps you spend too much time on social media?

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#177

Post by mid-kid »

nradov wrote: post #159
doctor_blood wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really? On something like Xenforo2, there's a setting that makes a new account's posts invisible until that account is manually approved by a mod - in conjunction with the spam prevention tools - https://xenforo.com/docs/xf2/spam/#content - we really don't need to do much work. Because all new accounts need to be verified by an actual human, we can filter out 99% of spam before other users see it, and between a d…

So then you end up with power tripping mods who abuse their position to push certain narratives. In some cases we've even seen foreign governments paying mods on popular sites such as Reddit to push their propaganda.

You mean like how the current twitter owner tweaks the algorithm to push his narrative? This is why there was never one big forum, and there never should've been.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#178

Post by jpalawaga »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #90
bluebarbet wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between traditional and social media is not just technical. Traditional media hosts a profession (journalism) with a code of ethics, editorial oversight, minimal standards, a mission of truth-seeking. It's easy to be cynical but those things have generally served us well. The Substack jungle is not a good replacement.

> Traditional media hosts a profession (journalism) with a code of ethics, editorial oversight, minimal standards, a mission of truth-seeking Which traditional media outlets follow those things nowadays? Genuine question, looking for information and news to consume.

almost all of the major ones? voices on the internet have lead people to believe that the journalists at major publications are biased, and that somehow also means they're lying and unethical.

what's interesting is that those opinions are taken at face value without ever happening to do any practical evaluation about traditional media outlets.

the reality is, if you ever read any alt-news publication it becomes evident extremely quickly how deprived of any standards those publications actually are.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#179

Post by elric »

isodev wrote: post #4

I think to be clear that’s “The case against algorithmic*” social media”, the kind that uses engagement as a core driver.

Where "engagement" is short for driving eyeballs to ads, optimizing for this ad nauseum, until the platform is raking in the dough and they stop caring about their users in the slightest.

Re: The case against social media is stronger than you think

#180

Post by Llamamoe »

Lerc wrote: post #53
Llamamoe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like regardless of all else, the fact of algorithmic curation is going to be bad, especially when it's contaminated by corporate and/or political interests. We have evolved to parse information as if its prevalence is controlled by how much people talk about it, how acceptable opinions are to voice, how others react to them. Algorithmic social media intrinsically destroy that. They change how information sprea…

I have wondered if it's not algorithmic curation per-se that is the problem, but personalised algorithmic curation. When each person is receiving a personalised feed, there is a significant loss of common experience. You are not seeing what others are seeing and that creates a loss of a basis of communication. I have considered the possibility that the solution might be to enable many areas of curation but in each do…

> the solution might be to enable many areas of curation but in each domain the thing people see is the same for everyone.

Doesn't this already happen to some extent, with content being classified into advertiser-friendly bins and people's feeds being populated primarily by top content from within the bins the algorithm deems they have an interest in?

> Once you feel like it is not necessary to make your case, but just shout the loudest, you lose the ability to win over people who disagree because they don't like you shouting and you haven't made your case.

To some extent, this is how human communication always worked. I think the biggest problem is that the digital version of it is sufficiently different from the natural one, and sufficiently influenceable by popular and/or powerful actors, that it enables very pathological outcomes.

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