Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 472 posts

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#211

Post by [deleted] »

sydd wrote: post #90
nr2x wrote: post #5

Somebody from Facebook recently told me they developed the best system to flag radical/violent content in the world, I pointed out they first developed the best system to spread it.

Not trying to defend Facebook, but they did not do it on purpose. They developed a really addicting social network where you do as many interactions as possible. When Facebook started it was a different world: Almost no data privacy laws, internet security in its infancy (e.g. in 2008 HTTPS was a rare new thing, not cross-origin security etc.) and people were spamming Farmville notifications to each other. It just tu…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#212

Post by NickGott »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #87
megaman821 wrote: post #32

Emotional content elicits a larger response, says the article with the provocative headline. There is nothing new here. Why does the responsibility never lie with the people who say these things, only where they say it? It reminds of of the Columbine shootings, where many articles where written about the violent video games that must of inspired the shooters to do it. Those arguments sucked then and they still suck n…

This, right here. In 2016, when Facebook was charged with hosting "fake news", their response should have been "It's your fault for believing everything you read on the internet." When Facebook replied, "We accept responsibility, and we will do better", they spelled their own doom.

"It's your fault for believing everything you read on the internet."

I disagree, it's our fault as a society for not allocating proper resources towards education. You can't expect people to understand critical thinking, media/source analysis, etc. if no-one ever taught it to them.

Now, Facebook capitalized on that societal failure point and developed an algorithm that exploited individuals who lack that critical thinking skill by shoving progressively angrier and more unhinged content in front of their eyeballs, and recommending them groups of extreme individuals, therefore normalizing their way of thinking. They did this because they realized content that causes anger, outrage, and fear is extremely effective at keeping people clicking, scrolling, reading, and overall "engaged" which means more data, more ads shown, more money. They basically took the Fox News model and injected pure racing fuel into it.

This, like most issues, cannot be explained by one specific cause, but Facebook absolutely shares the blame.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#213

Post by posixplz »

pjkundert wrote: post #126
x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parler, unlike Facebook, only existed to foment the kinds of rhetoric and ideologies that lead to the 6th.

Not to provide facts to counter your generalizations, but... I was on Parler for several months, trawling it and other sources quite heavily for the last month or so, trying to keep abreast of ... events. At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members. So,…

Why bother providing an anecdote like this when we have mountains of empirical evidence about the content on Parler? And that evidence directly counters your assertion.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#214

Post by globular-toast »

I've been a huge critic of Facebook right from the beginning. I was that guy who quit Facebook back in 2008 when it was really uncool to do so. But I really don't understand why they are being blamed for recent events.

What, in particular, has Facebook done to encourage this kind of behaviour? Are we really going to blame them for making it easier for people to be heard and to find other like-minded people to communicate with?

What we are witnessing is a societal problem. It's possibly a new problem, or maybe just one that has never been seen at such large scale. But all that's being done about is the oldest trick in the book: scapegoating.

I get it. It's a huge and complex problem and it's easier to focus one entity and call it the enemy. But we can do better than this. All we'll achieve by blaming Facebook is less free speech. Is that really the best solution here? Again? This has been tried so many times before.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#215

Post by analyte123 »

dastbe wrote: post #149
pjkundert wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to provide facts to counter your generalizations, but... I was on Parler for several months, trawling it and other sources quite heavily for the last month or so, trying to keep abreast of ... events. At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members. So,…

> At no time did I see even a single post advocating violent overthrow of the government, white supremacy, etc. Apparently, neither did any of those planning the Capital attack, since they were not Parler members. how do you reconcile this opinion with the reporting that uses gps data from the parler data dump to place parler users at the protest and in the capitol building? https://gizmodo.com/parler-users-breached-…

According to the article "at least several" out of 2+ million active users were in the Capitol. If this is the standard to upload, we would have to ban every social media app ever made.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#216

Post by Bakary »

mrweasel wrote: post #21
nr2x wrote: post #5

Somebody from Facebook recently told me they developed the best system to flag radical/violent content in the world, I pointed out they first developed the best system to spread it.

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.

I actually think this is a good sign. I'd rather live in a world where social norms relax to take into account the loss of privacy and anonymity. The ideal world would be one with those two things still intact, but I guess that ship has long sailed...

The unexpected Trump era served to speed this up, which is probably one of the few silver linings it has. Remember the debates about whether future politicians could be blackmailed on account of what they posted online in their youth? A Boomer of all people just dove right in and bypassed that.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#217

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

spaced-out wrote: post #135
jimmydorry wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As we saw with Parler, your fledgling site can get deplatformed by the few key players in the cloud / app distribution / and service providers. "Just make it" is no longer as convincing a non-sequitor as it used to be.

Parler only has 30 employees, has some very well-publicized security and design flaws suggesting a lack of engineering talent, and is backed by just one private investor. The only way they were even able to release an app of that scale is because of all the services they bought from companies like Amazon. The lesson the business world should take from this is: invest in your engineers.

I’m not sure I follow the “only giant, mature, and billions/trillion dollar companies should be allowed to have public services” argument.

Twitter had 30 engineers at one point, they weren’t deplatformed before becoming a better product.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#218

Post by flowerlad »

Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It is as if the age of reason -- the era of evidential argument -- is ending. Knowledge is de-legitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy which depends on shared truths is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.

The above is by Sacha Baron Cohen, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

More excerpts:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

Re: Facebook Incubated the Insurrection

#219

Post by BitwiseFool »

3princip wrote: post #94
yrimaxi wrote: post #12

NYT engineered consent for the Iraq War?

Absolutely correct. The actions of mainstream media have resulted in countless deaths, destruction and other barbarous acts committed as a result of fake news and propaganda. Yet they call for the censorship of others for deeds that pale in comparison.

Newsmedia positions themselves as the defenders of democracy but in reality they're just a business. And this idea that you need "the press" to tell you the truth is the result of very successful branding.
Post reply on HN