231–239 of 239 posts
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That is the real answer. Facebook and news are two separate phenomenon. Or at least they should be.
I would very much say: any form of social media and news should not be mixed. Social media is basically attention whoring for everyone these days, truth or value does not matter much in that regard.
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If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force. Your "solution" isn't a solution, but a hot fix that will cause more damage in the future. It's exactly the shortsighted crap politics are t…
"Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force." Just as a sort of general, broad response to this sentiment: yes absolutely. I envy your optimism, but the belief amongst the Hacker News set that humans are universally capable of educating their way out from under deeply-rooted biolo…
> “There’s too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world today [ed: because we rely on users to decide what can be trusted],” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, wrote in a post on Friday. “We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective.” Its a bit tone-deaf, Mark. Remember the "we had no effect on the election" line that every…
Also, that people were using some sleazy disinformation on Facebook as a convenient excuse.
> "I think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news,” Zuckerberg said. “If you believe that, then I don’t think you internalized the message that Trump voters are trying to send in this election."
This is the opposite of what they should have done. Shows just how much of an echo-chamber Facebook has become. This is just adding another metric by which garbage can be made legitimate and vice versa. Facebook would be a much better platform if they removed the like and comment count from every post. It’s those numbers that lead people to believe that garbage is legitimate in the first place. By hiding these number…
If you really want to fight the root of the problem, it's not likes and comments, but education. Should we censor social media, because people are too stupid to deal with it? I don't think so and if you do, you're playing in the hands of corporations who want a cheap work force. Your "solution" isn't a solution, but a hot fix that will cause more damage in the future. It's exactly the shortsighted crap politics are t…
But https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis... convinced me that this is a case where education is NOT enough and there's a time where the only solution is plain censorship, unfortunately.
The censorship doesn't have to be confidential. It can be auditable and publicly recorded. But in that case in Ukraine, they did all the education stuff and let the fake news through, and that wasn't enough to stop the country from being ripped apart.
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I would very much say: any form of social media and news should not be mixed. Social media is basically attention whoring for everyone these days, truth or value does not matter much in that regard.
News is attention whoring. Ever heard of sensational headlines and clickbait?
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It's more like, letting users "legitimize" news is how you get bots screwing with everything. It may not be a problem for some, including myself since my feed is similar to how you describe yours, but network waide, it will pose an issue.
So, your feed seems fine, my feed seems fine, but somehow the electorate at large is subject to mass mind manipulations by bots?
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I'm not sure what's obtuse about the second bit. If the goal is just weakening the US Russia is not the only actor with the motive.
The point is only reasonable when divorced from all context of Trump's Russian contacts, Russia's interest in getting sanctions overturned, Russia's known past disinformation campaigns, DNC hacking, wikileaks, etc. Within the proper context it is entirely unreasonable to even posit some other actor working to influence the election.
None of these claims have any actual evidence backing them, and when claims can be sourced the sources collapse under examination; see my article above.
But we shouldn't need to deeply analyse academic papers to see that this narrative is nonsense. It is just not internally consistent. Putin had clear reasons to want Trump to win, that I accept. So why would his staff post things supporting Clinton? There is no logic to this idea whatsoever, and it's not where the narrative started.
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Maybe it makes sense, but Vladimir Putin has superpowers if everything people blame on him is true. And Mr. Hearn's article nicely illustrates how shaky the foundation is for a lot of claims of Russian influence.
This is one of the most absurd talking points of this whole thing. It doesn't take "superpowers" to zero in on existing rifts in a society and magnify them. It has been well documented that Putin has a well-oiled disinformation machine that is adept at exploiting existing social issues.
I've looked into these stories about Russia repeatedly. They never survive basic fact checking, and I'm not a journalist with special sources or access.
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>feels like the most democratic media I’ve ever seen. The Democrats thought the same thing too, before Trump won the election. Perhaps you are falling victim to a filter bubble confirmation bias? A democracy implies independent national sovereignty. When anyone (govt, corp, or rogue hackers) across the world can effectively manipulate your elections at scale, sovereign democracy is no longer a thing.
A $100,000 ad campaign overpowered the dems $1.4B budget? The DNC should hire those guys! They're political geniuses!
Then they decided to spend ~$100 on buying fake reddit upvotes for their initiative and it received millions of views and ended up being highly successful.
It's interesting how far a little money and technological finesse can have such far reaching effects.