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If Russia was really able to have significant influence with $100k vs $81M the techniques they used could be studied and duplicated. Every startup would love to have marketing that effective. The truth is it had no measurable effect exactly as you’d expect.
You’re repeating the same thing in multiple threads. The fact is Russian interference had an effect on the election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/08/biparti...
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"No measurable effect" is a weak argument - especially considering we're talking about it, and it massively influenced the narrative - amplified by the mainstream media, just like Trump used effectively. "They vote for who they want to vote for" - you understand manipulation is a thing, right? And that people will believe lies, and that people are often irrational - and therefore when they "decide" who to vote for it…
If someone wants to claim that Russia made a measurable impact on the 2016 election with $100k ad spend, then they're going to have to provide proof.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Russia was really able to have significant influence with $100k vs $81M the techniques they used could be studied and duplicated. Every startup would love to have marketing that effective. The truth is it had no measurable effect exactly as you’d expect.
You’re repeating the same thing in multiple threads. The fact is Russian interference had an effect on the election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/08/biparti...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone wants to claim that Russia made a measurable impact on the 2016 election with $100k ad spend, then they're going to have to provide proof.
I just pointed to proof - the fact that you're ignoring or dismissing it doesn't change that.
"Free speech is good" is not a "blithe techno-utopian narrative". The internet makes people uncomfortable because it lives somewhere in between the realm of public discourse (heavily regulated) and private discourse (mostly unregulated). On the internet, these realms mix, and people (especially in the press) have a hard time sorting out which is which. I don't know if "free speech is good" or if it "leads inexorably…
"Free speech is good" is not a "blithe techno-utopian narrative". The internet makes people uncomfortable because it lives somewhere in between the realm of public discourse (heavily regulated) and private discourse (mostly unregulated). On the internet, these realms mix, and people (especially in the press) have a hard time sorting out which is which. I don't know if "free speech is good" or if it "leads inexorably…
"Free speech is good" is not a "blithe techno-utopian narrative". The internet makes people uncomfortable because it lives somewhere in between the realm of public discourse (heavily regulated) and private discourse (mostly unregulated). On the internet, these realms mix, and people (especially in the press) have a hard time sorting out which is which. I don't know if "free speech is good" or if it "leads inexorably…
I think your comment and Zuckerberg’s framing of the issue hides the ball in a way that appears dishonest, though I do not think that is your intent. For instance, what do you mean by this?: > But I do think that any cure will be worse than the disease Because it all depends on what "cure" and "disease" mean, right? Free speech is good is blithe and techno-utopian in the sense that it makes a blanket statement that r…
I'm not sure you should criticise others for hiding the ball or being dishonest when phrasing it like that.
Facebook is a website, a pretty trivial one at that. It isn't attached to flying weapons platforms, it doesn't command an army. It cannot be used for ethnic cleansing in any sensible use of English, no more than paper and ink or radio can be "used for ethnic cleansing".
So yes - your sarcastic statement is correct. If some African warlord goes nuts and starts mass killing his ethnic rivals, Facebook has sweet FA to do that with that, even if lots of his supporters are posting on Facebook. The problem lies with the people pulling the trigger, the people command them to pull the trigger. Don't try and spread it to Zuckerberg because unlike most genocidal ethnic cleansers, he happens to be a meek American you think you can influence.
We must remedy the damage done with speech using ideas and methods that aren't related to speech, somehow.
Yes, exactly. Speech doesn't damage things. People damage things. The conflation of speech with physical violence is exactly how you legitimise thuggery on campus, where crazed students are engaging in actual physical violence against people who are just presenting their opinion. And it's never, never, never acceptable to shoot someone who is merely presenting their opinion.
This seems to me like someone claiming that we can't do anything about drunk driving because "people need to drive to work."
This is a strawman argument nobody ever makes. Drunk driving is a precisely definable and measurable condition with precisely understood outcomes and is trivially avoided. "Bad speech" has no definition at all and thus can't be trivially avoided, as the ever-expanding horizon of what counts as offensive so neatly demonstrates.
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Clinton not winning the election isn’t proof of Russian interference.
It isn’t not proof either. It seems rather strange to posit that dollars spent is the only factor dictating the effectiveness of marketing.
Look, the whole Russia angle is a hoax. When put under enormous external and internal political pressure (remember Twitter/FB are filled with Trump haters), all they could come up with was a tiny number of ads labelled "Russian" that appeared to support nobody in particular. Hardly anyone saw them, so they can't have had much impact. And was that some plot directed by Putin or just ads by people who happened to be Russian? It's never made clear.
Back when Obama was in power and there was Citizen's United, he said words to the effect of "we must consider changing the constitution to limit political spending" and the Clinton wing of politics was spitting bullets about how in future Republicans would just buy elections outright.
Then Trump came along and beat Clinton, despite being outspent 2:1. Clinton's campaign steamrollered Trump's financially yet still lost. The whole theory of elections that had been pushed until that point, that marketing spend determines victory, it was just completely invalidated overnight. Democrats who couldn't psychologically explain voter disagreement via policy arguments could no longer explain rejection as a function of ad spend either, so had to come up something new - hence, this spectre of "foreign interference", as if Putin has some kind of mind control rays.
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The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world , so they're not in a position to lecture any other country about freedom.
This is what-about-ism and it's dishonest. The US's incarceration rate has little to do with concentration camps where people are put because they're a ethnicity the government doesn't like . They can both be problems worth pointing out.
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All governments push propaganda. Russia's miniscule ad spend on FB had no measurable effect (please provide proof if you think this is wrong). Clinton and Trump spent many order of magnitude more on political advertising than any foreign nation and even that didn't assure their win. People aren't mindless robots, they vote for who they want to vote for.
"No measurable effect" is a weak argument - especially considering we're talking about it, and it massively influenced the narrative - amplified by the mainstream media, just like Trump used effectively. "They vote for who they want to vote for" - you understand manipulation is a thing, right? And that people will believe lies, and that people are often irrational - and therefore when they "decide" who to vote for it…
Of course. But you're arguing here that Trump won because of massive scale manipulation to the extent that millions of voters don't have free will at all, which is just conspiracy theory thinking.
By the way, what makes you think that Clinton voters weren't the manipulated ones? The press came out in full force for her, and they're the most obvious source of information manipulation. The press have been trying to stack the electoral deck since forever, and they worked overtime that year to get Clinton in power. Still lost. I'm not seeing any evidence that voters are so easily manipulated as you think.