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The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

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Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#51

Post by sliverstorm »

md224 wrote: post #9

I have made this case before, but I will make it again. The Internet is the largest information system in the world, and Google is the primary portal into that information system. Google's "organic" results are accompanied by AdWords results, which are based on a mixture of bid price and relevance. These ads are marked with a small "Ad" label that many people miss, and even those who know they're ads can't really "un…

What if your local library (you know, those old things) had a card catalog with "sponsored" results? If this already exists, then maybe we're already lost. But it seems to me that as a basic rule of information ethics, the salience of information in a given information system should not be biased by monetary influence.

But it is biased! The card catalog might be an unbiased representation of what the library has- but have you considered that what the library has is biased by monetary influence? What the book costs. Whether the book is demanded (advertising). Jacket design (you grab the most interesting-looking book).

The flaw to libraries is their naturally limited capacity.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#52

Post by nsxwolf »

Something like this recently disturbed me. Mitt Romney published a tweet storm a few days ago making his case against Donald Trump. They all showed up in my feed - I don't follow Romney, and the tweets weren't marked as sponsored, but somehow Twitter decided I should be seeing them anyway.

I'd hate to think Twitter decided it was for the public good that everyone read what Romney had to say about Trump.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#53

Post by erikpukinskis »

Google could send people to places that are contrary to the user's interest, but that's essentially deliberately decreasing the quality of one of their products so I'm not that worried about it. If they do it's a (big) market opportunity for someone else.

I would go even farther: I'm not particularly worried about individual interests at all, on any subject. The Internet is very good at exposing them.

I am much more concerned with bad classes of actors than bad actors. We see many ways in which competition breaks down because entire classes of people benefit from working in synchrony. The classic example is politicians: crooked elections mean longer terms which benefits basically all of them.

The other classic example is the capital class. If everyone in the capital class plays by he rules of property then they can exploit the labor class. Once you're in the capital class there are few reasons to compete with private property. Social pressure mostly neuters whatever capital class activists might try to keep working.

It's these class barriers that we should be worried about. But new weapons (like search engines) and new villains (like Islam) make much better news stories.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#54

Post by nickff »

md224 wrote: post #22
pcmaffey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The library is a catalog of books produced by publishers for the sake of making money. Your example doesn't hold weight, as there is no "purity of information". Even your own insights are filtered through the perspective of your personal influence, your wants, your desires, your history, etc. Google is no different. The organic search results are largely from commercial, or at a minimum, self-interested sources. That…

I'm just saying I wish we could have only organic results. Why should people with more money have more of a presence online? Money shouldn't be able to buy speech. The Internet should not be a place where those with more money get to cut the line in front of those with less. Let PageRank sort it out. Also, what's this about my example not holding weight because "information purity" doesn't exist? It's not about the i…

Money always buys speech; whether it is by allowing a columnist to write full time, affording the puchase of a computer to post on the internet, or giving someone the ability to travel to a public square.

Using money to purchase a magazine, newspaper, television, radio, or online advertisement is just another way that money helps people express their views.

In any case, I wouldn't be too worried about money changing people's minds, as it rarely does that.[1] Advertisements and the like usually serve to give voice to the views people already hold, and inform them of things they were not aware of. An advertisement will never convince people to buy things they don't want and don't need; if you disagree, please go and try to sell a bad product, and we will see how well your 'mind control' works.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Righteous_Mind

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#55

Post by x5n1 »

nsxwolf wrote: post #52

Something like this recently disturbed me. Mitt Romney published a tweet storm a few days ago making his case against Donald Trump. They all showed up in my feed - I don't follow Romney, and the tweets weren't marked as sponsored, but somehow Twitter decided I should be seeing them anyway. I'd hate to think Twitter decided it was for the public good that everyone read what Romney had to say about Trump.

How do you think the media mughals made their billions. They made them doing exactly this.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#56

Post by manachar »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #40
manachar wrote: post #5

This read like anti-Google FUD. The basic argument is search engine rank determines trustworthiness of a source. This influences people's opinions on politics, what they buy, what they think, etc. This is absolutely true, and the core of their research (it seems). But then it goes into FUD territory when talking about Google backing Hillary. Hillary and Trump have received the lion's share of attention in media, soci…

"Hillary and Trump have received the lion's share of attention in media, social media, and such. Google searches SHOULD show them prominently." I'm not sure I agree with this. An alternative is easy to conceive, that all candidates that meet some external criteria (such as being on a ballot) are randomized to be favored equally in results. I'm not convinced that it's inherently better to favor candidates with a lot o…

Google tries to show what the web and web users think is relevant to a search term. Not what is true, neutral, peer-reviewed, curated, balanced, etc.

It'd be interesting to see if Google could come up with a way to use machine learning to do fact finding and remove the web's biases. I strongly suspect such an effort would be seen as more dangerous than just reporting on the web.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#57

Post by return0 »

md224 wrote: post #16
ska wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we letting money influence the salience of information? Because it's the only practical and effective way anyone has every come up with of building such a system? This isn't a comment on the ethical nature - just that I don't believe there was any point where you could choose between commercial drivers to the growth of the "information system", and any other approach that would have resulted in similar growth…

Ah, the "Omelas" bargain. Fair enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om... It sucks that the idea of funding Google via taxes is anathema to so many because people fear government influence. So basically we're stuck between government influence and monetary influence. I wish there was a third way that we could crowdfund a platform without making it beholden to any specific set of donors.

There are only so many options in this world. Yes it sucks that unicorns dont exist.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#58

Post by 13thLetter »

nsxwolf wrote: post #52

Something like this recently disturbed me. Mitt Romney published a tweet storm a few days ago making his case against Donald Trump. They all showed up in my feed - I don't follow Romney, and the tweets weren't marked as sponsored, but somehow Twitter decided I should be seeing them anyway. I'd hate to think Twitter decided it was for the public good that everyone read what Romney had to say about Trump.

Unfortunately that train has already left the station, and to thunderous applause from the media. Twitter already carefully curates hashtags; it's not hard to imagine they'd take the liberty of promoting a series of tweets that they feel are important.

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#59

Post by EGreg »

This article is speaking about something that has existed as long as mass media has. Whether it's google or newspapers or TV, the companies running the sources we turn to have control over what information we are exposed to, and can influence our views. Our grandfathers read the newspaper, our parents watched TV. What, google is a monopoly? Ok, so that's the big issue.

On the other hand, our susceptibility to having our political system be disproportionately affected by a company or two with a top-down chain of command is a reflection that our system of representative democracy has weak links and can be easily subverted.

I wrote about the solution to this a while back: replace voting with polling! Have people cast their voice for POLICIES not REPRESENTATIVES. It is much more costly to fool all the people all the time, than to fool them at election time, and then go on to lobby the representatives they chose.

Voting depends on turnout, which skews the results and is susceptible to sybil attacks (remember facebook's vote about the newsfeed that got 3% turnout?)

Polling doesn't. It can be refined using better and better statisical techniques. We can gradually replace costly and stupid elections where candidates talk about their penis, with polling of the population on issues like gun control etc. Replace the bickering lawmakers and filibusters with polling and threshholds.

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=212

Re: The New Mind Control – The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence

#60

Post by EGreg »

J_Darnley wrote: post #33
ashurbanipal wrote: post #32

Hold on, so we call it "Mind Control" when Google shifts our preferences toward one of two pre-selected choices? What do we call the state of the world that leaves us with only 2 pre-selected choices who happen to agree on 90%+ of all policies?

Inevitable. Do you really think the power brokers let you have a real choice?

Not power brokers. It's an emergent phenomenon predicted by public choice theory.

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=212

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