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How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

mondaynote.com

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Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#41

Post by Veen »

sanxiyn wrote: post #36
close04 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the protests against the democratically elected leadership during the Arab spring... Oh wait. You may hate something equally under any regime but there's a huge difference when that something is done in a democracy versus basically any other common form or government. In democracies issues can be (are?) solved at the election booth. Not so much in a dictatorship, a monarchy, or any "pseudo-democracy" (see Chi…

Protesting is very democratic. South Korea showed that to the world. Sure, South Koreans could wait one more year and solve the problem at the election booth, but protesting solved the problem faster.

Protesting is one thing. Vandalism, looting, and firebombing are not legal protests.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#42

Post by zabana »

fabricexpert wrote: post #38
zabana wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In democracies issues can be (are?) solved at the election booth. Not so much in a dictatorship, a monarchy, or any "pseudo-democracy" (see China), etc. These people were in these very same election booths last year so clearly issues aren't being solved that way. Also, we need to step down our high moral horse and stop patronizing other nations by bringing up our holy "democracies". There has been an increasing and…

Go look in the mirror, you'll see much greater freedoms in western countries than any you've mentioned. The west doesn't actively persecute homosexuals, protects women's rights and supports a free press. The list goes on.

You're confusing democracy with freedom / progress my friend.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#43

Post by buboard »

stochastic_monk wrote: post #32
buboard wrote: post #6

Facebook is proving to be a bestseller with the media. Not a day goes by without 3-4 of those stories becoming "news for hackers"

It seems that this content source is only concerned about news about prominent tech companies, which matches their Palo Alto location. Facebook’s been going through the grinder because they’ve recently had a lot of evidence against them come out; of course technically interested people care about a leader in research and industry. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=mondaynote.com

doesn't explain why there are at least 2 similar stories at any time in HN frontpage

I mean, from an entrepreneurial standpoint,maybe "antifacebook as a service" is a valid idea?

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#44

Post by sanxiyn »

amelius wrote: post #31
hardwaresofton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as much as I dislike Facebook, at this point I'm kind of concerned about how much bad press is coming out about one company. Most other tech companies (especially the ones still in the "hustling" phase) are just as bad as FB if not worse. It's starting to feel like a coordinated smear campaign, even if all of it is accurate.

> 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.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#46

Post by ceejayoz »

paganel wrote: post #4

> Sometimes, the social network carries obvious fake news, such as images of bleeding protesters taken two years ago in Spain or spreads the rumors of tanks ready to move against the Yellow Vests (15,000 interactions). This video of senseless police brutality looks in fact to be pretty real and from the latest events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK8b4plAlJQ&feature=youtu.be . Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's lots of…

"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...

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#47

Post by stef25 »

paganel wrote: post #4

> Sometimes, the social network carries obvious fake news, such as images of bleeding protesters taken two years ago in Spain or spreads the rumors of tanks ready to move against the Yellow Vests (15,000 interactions). This video of senseless police brutality looks in fact to be pretty real and from the latest events: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK8b4plAlJQ&feature=youtu.be . Yeah, I'm pretty sure there's lots of…

People getting their ass beat for trying to set fire to a McDonalds while protesting the high cost of living deserve no tears, I'm sorry.

Also, if you're going to pick a fight with a crew in full riot gear it's best to not get cornered by them.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#48

Post by pferde »

philpem wrote: post #29
randiantech wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. Facebook is making some traditional media outlets very scare of becoming irrelevant moving forward.

It's like the old RIAA battles of the early-noughties, Napster et al. Instead of spotting the market, buying up the company who built it and slapping a fee on "unlimited music for a month" (a la Spotify), they sought to legislate it out of existence and in turn had their lunch eaten for them. Dinosaurs trying to avoid the asteroid.

These dinosaurs are not even trying to avoid the asteroid, they just keep yelling "bad asteroid, go away!" at it.

Re: How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

#49

Post by XCabbage »

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.

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 about politics on Twitter.

Advocating for outright bans on voicing disfavoured viewpoints is so obviously illiberal and thuggish as to be politically unpopular, which is why it is always platforms targeted rather than individual speakers, and why there is always some rationalisation for the complaint other than the viewpoint being expressed (Russian bots! Fake news! Algorithms optimising for rage! Harassment!) but in the end the root cause of the complaint is always that someone said something that progressives didn't like.

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