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Manufactured consensus on x.com

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Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#71

Post by smallmancontrov »

ethagknight wrote: post #47
mrdoops wrote: post #20

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

Manufactured consensus is literally the name of the game for the big news networks. News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story. That is Manufactured Consensus. Some countries do a better job making the news seem like a separate arm from the government. The entire point is to direct the populace. That is not the core focus of X, even though it is entirely susceptible to it, and will be encoun…

Musk didn't just put a thumb on the scale in favor of far-right content, he sat his entire pre-ozempic ass on the scale.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#72

Post by jimbob45 »

guywithahat wrote: post #50
mrdoops wrote: post #20

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

For all the negative things one can say about X, their fact checking (community notes) has actually gotten pretty good, which is something Reddit has yet to implement. Pew has also been ranking them more politically center than most social media sites, although I suppose that's subjective

Reddit has stickied posts at the top of each thread. Well-moderated subreddits use them to great effect. Badly moderated subreddits just shadowban everything that doesn’t match with the mods’ politics.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#73

Post by baq »

richwater wrote: post #31
mrdoops wrote: post #20

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

> The worst by far is Reddit The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.

This had been as true when I joined ~15 years ago as it has been true on the day they made me quit cold turkey when they took the API away.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#74

Post by DFHippie »

dismalaf wrote: post #58
RankingMember wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The far-left denies the Holocaust? On what grounds?

It's usually some mental gymnastics related to Israel, Gaza, etc... Because many Muslims deny the holocaust, much of the far-left has co-opted that rhetoric. It's super visible on TikTok, for example. Edit - some comments below this seem to doubt. Just go on TikTok to politically charged posts about Palestine. This whole thread is about social media. Not holocaust denial on the mainstream left, specifically the far-l…

In my many decades as a political observer I have never seen Holocaust denial on the left. I guess it's a pretty niche sub-movement. Where does one pick these nuts?

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#75

Post by RiverCrochet »

aeturnum wrote: post #19

> Social proof used to reflect crowd wisdom. Now it reflects algorithmic endorsement — triggered not by consensus, but by proximity to influence. A single interaction can distort scale, making selected content appear widely supported. I think this is barking up the right tree with the wrong lesson - these things are the same. Elon Musk, for worse mostly, is a social influencer. You can tell because a lot of people fo…

> What does it math

This is a super interesting way of looking at it.

The math works because of the two-party system.

American politics due to the two-party system is fundamentally dishonest. Issues are packaged across parties and you have to buy everything the party is selling. For example there's probably lots of Republicans that would not mind decently run government-subsidized healthcare and there's lots of Democrats that think the government should respect their right to be armed. But because the parties don't really support these positions, it creates significant pressure for people outside of the party buckets to twist their public political talk. Fundamentally this makes political talk and political social media activity dishonest as well. When owners of social networks become political figures, it basically turns all coefficients in this equation to exponents.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#76

Post by xp84 »

arrowsmith wrote: post #11

Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

Idk about the author but I don’t even think it’s a problem. It’s just Elon Musk’s website. It is as important as readers of it want it to be. As someone else said, expecting real social interaction or authenticity on a for-profit website is folly. Of course at best it’ll be optimized for clickbait/rage bait etc, and in practice probably that plus the pure bias of whoever controls it.

If people want to post their ideas on the internet, they can do so on their own websites for nearly nothing. Getting someone to listen to you? That’s much more expensive… everyone who’s been used to getting that free from social media should consider that it used to be much harder to get attention for one’s ideas, which used to be assumed to be uninteresting by default.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#77

Post by [deleted] »

Philpax wrote: post #70
fouc wrote: post #5

Reading that I couldn't help but think there's parallels to HN. At least HN tries to be transparent about "the algorithm", and it's essentially a dumb algorithm compared to what X/FB/etc use.

Is it that transparent? I did not know about the vast majority of the items on this list until I encountered it: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

[deleted]

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#78

Post by alabastervlog »

seadan83 wrote: post #66
ethagknight wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manufactured consensus is literally the name of the game for the big news networks. News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story. That is Manufactured Consensus. Some countries do a better job making the news seem like a separate arm from the government. The entire point is to direct the populace. That is not the core focus of X, even though it is entirely susceptible to it, and will be encoun…

Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"? > Alternative views definitely have reach. Yes, but are we in a 1984 situation where that reach is managed behind the scenes. Reach, but perhaps not too much reach. With respect to the chart, how do we know that Twitter users are not largely partitioned? How representative is the fact you saw s…

> Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"?

Yeah, they wouldn't have to rely so much on Madison Avenue if they were just paying the news agencies to report whatever they want.

Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd characterize even PBS' government funding as "vast sums", either absolutely or relatively (to the rest of their funding).

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#79

Post by viccis »

mrdoops wrote: post #20

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

Reddit is SO MUCH WORSE than most people understand. Ignoring for a moment that peoples frontpage Best sort uses engagement metrics rather than upvote/downvotes since 2021, the moderators there have an iron grip over what is allowed.

r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period.

Of course, reddit couldn't allow this level of scrutiny, so they banned that subreddit for unstated reasons, and now the only good google result for it actually leads back here. See for yourself how bad it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282

That only goes to two years ago. It feels like it's gotten even worse since then. That's not even going into some subreddits (worldnews, politics, etc.) creating the illusion of consensus by banning anyone with an opinion outside of a narrow range of allowed ones.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#80

Post by Jordan-117 »

zoogeny wrote: post #36

It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies. We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion…

It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/

But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v...

That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around, which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years, virtually every single new post on the site was radically right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/

The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding.

You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger, and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.

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