Yup. People in the West don't understand how much of an advantage social media has been in countries where media was always controlled by corrupt businessmen or politicians.
The fact that information about government's actions can spread to a large number of people, without any control from authorities is a first time in history for many. Organising protests without government censorship. Publishing investigations. Alerting the entire country to corruption as it happens.
It's really life-changing and unfortunately I don't think it will last. It's already routine when civil unrest happens to shut down internet. Facebook is a good one to censor but other networks take its place so creating Great Firewalls is next for many (somewhat rich) governments.
People in the west understand it just fine, thanks.
Some of us see an unfortunate trend recently, in which our political powers collude with or badger the owners of these companies to engage in censorship, and find it highly alarming.
Facebook itself, just like other online media companies, _is_ a political entity. My view is that the risk we in democratic countries face is not from political entities co-opting Facebook, it's from companies like Facebook becoming political entities in their own right. We're all well aware of how America's lobbying system works. What I think is much more insidious is companies who control the flow of information pursuing their own political agendas. Twitter and Facebook can have more influence on the political landscape by altering the algorithms they use to promote information than the equivalent of millions of dollars of lobbying. That should frighten you.
> companies like Facebook becoming political entities in their own right
The worst thing that can happen is having Zuck run for president and win. A pesident with a propaganda tool of his own.
In Ukraine they already have a reality TV actor who played a president as the president. Turns out that he's no worse than any other 'real' politician. Guess it's the Ukrainian way of trolling the vote.
Republican politicians appealed personally to Zuckerberg over fact checks on right wing disinformation and bans of right wing trolls and they agreed to not hold those people to the ToS.
Let's say I have loads of cash to spend. How do I spend it to get control of facebook? Presumably there are limits to that control -- what are they? Is "buying ads on facebook" the same as "controlling facebook"?
1) You can look at the 5 eyes alliance's assault on encryption. That's literally forcing their will on the company (and others)
2) The TikTok ban demonstrates not only capacity but an appetite to exert to control over this domain
3) That whole "summon the CEO of the company to directly answer questions from the group of people literally in charge of policies around reform and control"
Or we could sidestep these questions and conflate income with ownership
Buy a newspaper, spend money lobbying politicians. Use these to exert indirect pressure. Buy ads for direct pressure. Setup a charity "social media consumer advocacy" to which you donate money used to spoil the activists you cultivate.
Next synergize all these efforts: Have the newspaper write about the activists, have the lobbyists talk about the newspaper articles with the politicians, and bring up the articles during sales talks regarding your ads.
Buying a massive ad slate on Facebook doesn't give you direct control but does give you a lot of say in their policies because keeping you happy becomes tied to their bottom line.
Compare YouTube policy adjustments in light of P&G announcing they were planning to yank their advertising from the platform because it wouldn't rope in what P&G considered to be its worst content.
If you have functionally unlimited funds, you can just use them to astroturf, which, as we've seen, can be far more effective than advertising.
Controlling the content is awfully close to "controlling Facebook". Facebook can decide to stop serving your content, but they've shown no interest in doing so.
> If you have functionally unlimited funds, you can just use them to astroturf, which, as we've seen, can be far more effective than advertising.
Exactly, the amount of psy-ops via bots and entities like the CCP's Wumao Army are going to be way more effective at steering the narrative in your favour way more than any short-lived 'viral' ad or targeted ad campaign.
Furthermore, it can be sustained for much longer periods of time and can foment and incite way more resentment than any controversial or persuasive ad, because of the associations to other conflict-based facebook groups.
This is all really to say that the underlying surveillance economy is entirely indifferent to labels such as 'communism' or 'capitalism' and seem ephemeral and fleeting when the means/methods and desirable ends are the same as each other: manipulation by discord.
The fact that this takes place is not a surprise as psy-ops, conspiracy and counter-intelligence have been the mainstays of every single Nation-state's intelligence agencies; what is a surprise to me is how widely adopted and how pervasive it has been for so much of the Human population when there is SO MUCH MORE interesting aspects of the Internet. And how readily people are drawn to go for such shallow fodder when presented the opportunity to do so.
It's all so High School, and for those of us that got fed up with it when we were (forced) in it we cannot see the value or appeal to any of it: I got a small chuckle in passing from the whole 'Space Karen' spat with Elon after he supposedly tested positive for COVID and was not able to go to the Cape, but rather than waste my time digging into it or anything else related to that drama that led up to it I just kept the stream from the Crew flight on throughout the entire mission and then stopped listening to anything related to that entirely until I had time to watch the Sentinel launch this morning. Which was pretty rad, and dedicated to an amazing man who devoted much of his life to the pursuit of studying and monitoring Climate Science and Ocean levels and made incredible contributions to the discipline before tragically losing his battle with cancer this year: Michael Freilich [0].
His children's recounting of their father was incredibly touching and it made my day to hear their story and relationship with Micheal.
By contrast, I felt physically ill for several days trying to follow the impact of Anonymous' Blue Leaks on twitter without an account during the riots. I'm not prepared to subject myself to such a degrading sense of mental health for what seems like vapid forms of entertainment, especially with so much more beneficial and fruitful things to be in engaged in, both on and offline.
The concept of 'de-evolution' comes to mind anytime I hear about the latest twitter beef that spills over into real life that often leads to violence: Follow Live: Violent white supremacists (proud boys) clash with Liberal snowflakes (BLM protestors)! Its often feels like we're filling in the missing parts to the prelude of Idiocracy.
make a large donation to one of mark's favorite charities. at the gala, have a casual discussion about the challenges of moderating a large social media platform.
People will leave certain platforms if they become unpalatable. Look at the amount of outrage generated by the very small level of tampering that facebook and twitter do currently. There is a tremendous amount of scrutiny on these platforms.
Which has already happened on on western social media. I wouldn’t be surprised to read FB has a policy of deleting the ‘leaked’ information and subsequent pages because an authoritative source (seeded by the government and/or at the will of some random uninformed employee) claims its fake news or some unsubstantiated claim or it’s some ‘terrorist’ group or something. Since only expert verified news from pet western sources are fully allowed to post anything controversial.
This seems to be the direction we’re moving towards.
Their only saving grace is that it’s in a fringe political system that not enough people care about. Or maybe the opposite, there won’t be enough counter outrage to handle the gov organized information suppression networks set up during some past emotionally volatile times without thinking of how easy it will be to abuse.
FB has been only slightly better in this context, by not being stupid enough to interfere with politics of random countries, which might explain the ban.
The major issue with social media right now is that people put an absurd amount of trust into them. It’s a new medium, like radio or TV, which also were major sources of misinformation.
As time goes on, people will put less and less stock into sources of information that have proven faulty in the past.
However, I think this kind of thing takes way longer than anyone thinks, and will play out over many years or decades.
>It’s a new medium, like radio or TV, which also were major sources of misinformation.
>people will put less and less stock into sources of information that have proven faulty in the past.
Do you have any idea of the number of people who inherently trust a 'fact' because it was on a radio or television program?
I'm not sure that your assessment is correct. I think what we're seeing is what we see with TV, there is just less of a way to track it with those stations. - when I buy cable, I get both left and right news stations. I only watch one, but nobody but me knows that. When I use social media, I can access right and left, but everyone can see what I access, and the people who see it can cater their message to me specifically.
Anyway, I think you're wrong. I don't believe people inherently distrust traditional media. I think they distrust traditional media they don't agree with.
I’m not saying people no longer trust traditional news sources, but there is a difference in degrees that has to be appreciated.
Think about the way that FDR used his “fireside chats” to directly message the American people. By making them feel like he was speaking directly to them, many Americans felt like they were given access to a greater level of transparency of government. 50 years later, Reagan and Clinton both still made regular radio addresses, but failed to control their narratives the same way FDR did. Why? Because by that time the farce was up. Most Americans knew that radio wasn’t some intimate conversation between the president and them. There was a greater cynicism about the medium, everyone knew that lying was just as easy over the radio as compared to written statements.
Now think about how many assumptions people make about social media. Even forums like Hackernews. You’ve engaged with me, so you probably have made several assumptions about me.
1. I’m an actual person and not a bot
2. I am personally commenting my opinion and not the opinions of someone who has compelled my opinion
3. I am arguing in good faith
4. I am a single person, not multiple people with the same account.
I’ve made the same assumptions about you. But the funny thing is that NONE of these things is guaranteed to be true. And in some cases it’s not even likely that all of these things are true.
Eventually people will stop making these assumptions, and learn to mistrust the Internet to the degree that they probably should.
What is your standard here? If the massacres had been riled up by spreading paper pamphlets you would want to shut down the printers? If it had been though the TV news, shut down the TV stations?
I think Twitter and Facebook should continue to do more to mitigate harms, but the people doing the harm don't get a pass. The Myanmar government must think Westerners are idiots. They kill tens of thousands of people and the general response is Facebook is bad.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted the three most senior managers of genocide, incitement to genocide, and crimes against humanity. They were sentenced to life in prison. The sentences were reduced, upon appeal, to between 30 and 35 years.
A Rwandan court sentenced one of the announcers to life in prison.
This information is easily found on Wikipedia for those curious enough to look.
If you incite violence against a specific group using a specific platform then yes, the publisher has some degree of responsibility for that. What's wrong about that observation?
He just told you what's wrong. It's like putting the blame on the messenger. People need to take responsibility for their actions rather than blame the platform for allowing it to be said. How about you don't say it in the first place? What are we going to do next, ban the air because it enables some bad people to tell and shout their violent opinions and transmits sound pressure waves?
People aren't saying the goverment isn't worse. They're saying that Facebooks lack of moderation is part of the cause and deserves criticism even if they aren't nearly as evil as the Myanmar goverment
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was a Rwandan radio station which broadcast from July 8, 1993 to July 31, 1994. It played a significant role in inciting the April–July 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
Widely listened to by the general population, it projected hate propaganda against Tutsis, moderate Hutus, Belgians, and the United Nations mission UNAMIR. It is widely regarded by many Rwandan citizens (a view also shared and expressed by the UN war crimes tribunal) as having played a crucial role in creating the atmosphere of charged racial hostility that allowed the genocide to occur. A working paper published at Harvard University found that RTLM broadcasts were an important part of the process of mobilising the population, which complemented the mandatory Umuganda meetings.[2] RTLM has been described as "radio genocide", "death by radio" and "the soundtrack to genocide".[3]
You don't shut down all printers but do you think a company that would let Myanmar print thousands of pamphlets calling for genocide should suffer no consequences or at the very least critcism?
What if the pamphlets had been printed on HP printers connected to home PCs? Does HP have a moral duty to install surveillance software in all their printers to prevent genocide?
More generally, does every company that sells a dual-use product/service have a duty to interrogate the motives of the buyer and apply editorial control over all uses of that product/service that they could conceivably have visibility of?
> What is your standard here? If the massacres had been riled up by spreading paper pamphlets you would want to shut down the printers? If it had been though the TV news, shut down the TV stations?
>in countries where media was always controlled by corrupt businessmen or politicians
I think much of the West has always fallen under that umbrella in many ways. Look up "yellow journalism". Hell, look at how the media is currently controlled by corrupt businessmen.
Except now we have corporations controlling the free flow information - which is worse? In a semi free country such as the usa at least we can vote someone out of office that we don’t like. At least we used to be able to and now with all the corruption in voting i’m not even certain of that any more.
On the flip-side, social media has also been exploited by those same corrupt businessmen and politicians. For example, in Cambodia, Hun Sen uses Facebook as his main media platform while forcibly closing independent press. At times his page has had more followers than the entire population of Cambodia (reportedly buying followers to cement a vision of popularity).
Freedom trancends brand names. You don't need facebook to create an encrypted communications channel. You don't need facebook to reach a wide audience either. Honestly, these days it's better not to fly under recognizable brand names or logos because your movement can be easily hijacked by anyone downloading those symbols and reproducing them in different contexts.
It seems the way moving forward will be "crypto-activism" where key individuals distribute information through end-to-end encrypted messaging channels; when they act in the public eye, it will not be obvious that they are affiliated with an organized group. In this way their actions will appear to represent "the will of the people" rather than the agenda of a single organization and it will also shield the organization itself from misinformation.
Just my two cents based on what I observed this year.
In those examples, the authoritarian government isnt tech savvy and able to control the platforms. In China, social media works against people because it’s the main way to communicate and it’s entirely monitored and filtered and meshed with social credit
Social Media is a vehicle for (somewhat random) change.
If your status quo is shit, random change is statistically likely to improve the situation. If the status quo is decent, random change is statistically likely to worsen the situation.
>If your status quo is shit, random change is statistically likely to improve the situation
I even question that. Didn't we have this exact discussion after the 'Arab Spring' already? For a year everyone was elated because the internet was ending the evil autocracies of the Middle East. Turned out in most cases the chaos was even worse than the corrupt status quo
even if you're in a bad place turns out there's still way more ways for it to get even worse rather than better if you roll the dice, you can't fall up a hill
> Organising protests without government censorship.
In Victoria, Australia, the government used social media to track people organising lockdown protests, which led people to be arrested for 'inciting' protest.
'Think speak 101' huh. Like when people post that the government was arresting people for inciting protests without context why they were doing so? That kind of think speak?
For those who want context. There's a pandemic. People are dying. The government stopped an anti-quarantine protest before it could cause harm.
In small rural towns people were trying to organise protests that followed social distancing guidelines. They were arrested for 'inciting protest'.
Specifically, the accusatory wording by the police is 'inciting' which was then used to charge people, under dubious legal conditions.
This was enough to get your door broken in and arrested:
> As some of you may have seen the government has gone to extreme measures and are using scare tactics through the media to prevent the Melbourne protest...
> Here in Ballarat we can be a voice for those in stage four lockdowns. We can be seen and heard and hopefully make a difference!
Oh but "we" do; after WW2, freedom of the press was held in extremely high regard. It was only after a few decades and American interference (e.g. Rupert Murdoch's network) that the press became more and more political, pushing an Agenda. All bets were off when the internet came around.
Anyway, during WW2 the press was controlled by the occupants (and before, possibly influenced?), so after WW2 we said never again. We still take the piss on newspapers that cooperated with the invaders instead of fold.
>People in the West don't understand how much of an advantage social media has been in countries where media was always controlled by corrupt businessmen or politicians.
You severely overestimate the independence and faux-organic nature of "western" social media. Every last aspect of it is controlled by "corrupt businessmen or politicians".
If you're in "the east", wishing for a system like in "the west", be careful of what you hope for and be cautious of what you actually build.
Unverified information about a government's actions.*
Not saying that is the case here, but the truth is this cuts both ways, and I would say this development of free flying unverified information is overall more helpful to bad actors than good.
I agree. The unverified information needs to be investigated by the relevant authorities (prosecutors and the justice system). Under normal circumstances the information would be swept under the rug.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. That laptop was verified by no one. The media wasn't even allowed to access it.
Yet the story was able to spread like wildfire through the US.
I don't know if it was authentic or the origins of it, and no credible media source was able to verify it. Frankly, the story of where it came from was absurd.
So did that story help bad actors or good actors? I would say bad actors because the people pushing the story seem to be playing fast and loose with verifiable facts and truth.
This is tearing the US apart by the seams. We are now in a situation where the president is openly attempting a coup on the popular vote, and using massive amounts of unverified information that is mostly false to push his agenda of destroying democracy.
Democrats are doing a pretty good job on that on their own. They attempt to force thoughts and beliefs on others, “cancelling” anybody getting in the way. When was the last time you saw a republican NOT getting screamed at by some liberal on any of the popular sites? Even now your comment reads as though you don’t want the parties to work together.
> We are now in a situation where the president is openly attempting a coup on the popular vote
We don’t use popular vote though. We use electoral college. And the media is overplaying this to induce panic from people like you. He’s not going to stage a coup, and if he did, even the republicans would stand against him. Calm down.
> We don’t use popular vote though. We use electoral college. And the media is overplaying this to induce panic from people like you. He’s not going to stage a coup, and if he did, even the republicans would stand against him. Calm down.
This is nonsense. Trump is openly trying to overturn the popular vote in PA, GA, MI, etc. That is how electoral votes are decided. He has openly called for the legislature to overturn the popular vote in these states based on nothing.
This isn't some outlier. He made similar accusations about fraud in 2016, and even in a race during the primaries against Ted Cruz.
He has already tried to stage a coup. We are past that point.
I do want the parties to work together, but I don't know what to do about these 2 bubbles I see being created on the right and left of these very deep fantasy worlds.
It is like the world of LOTR, where you read about hobbits, and then there are all these stories about hobbits and this deep web of information about this world that doesn't exist. Except now the right and left are creating these worlds and people can't tell it isn't real.
This has been a growing problem, and it is now at the point where it is threatening our democracy.
Case in point, when you try to tell a democrat they’re doing something wrong they start alibi seeking.
> This is nonsense. Trump is openly trying to overturn the popular vote in PA, GA, MI, etc. That is how electoral votes are decided. He has openly called for the legislature to overturn the popular vote in these states based on nothing.
Yes, he’s trying to overturn illegal votes, he’s well within his right. Had Trump won and Biden lost you wouldn’t be angry. You’re only angry now because there’s a chance, however small, that Trump can still win and this upsets you. Calm down, turn off CNN, this is not what a coup look like.
Republicans tried to secure the vote with national voting IDs, people are too poor the democrats said. India uses electronic voting to secure the vote, yet we’re too poor. So this mistrust in the voting system is again the fault of the democrats. The truth is there’s fraud in every election, it’s just usually not enough to swing the vote. Did you not read of all the problems with non residents and non citizens getting ballots anyway?
> This has been a growing problem, and it is now at the point where it is threatening our democracy.
Agreed, so let’s go for voter IDs so this question never comes up again?
>>>I don't know if it was authentic or the origins of it, and no credible media source was able to verify it. Frankly, the story of where it came from was absurd.
If you recall a lot of outlets didn't want to run the steele dossier. It was leaked by buzzfeed. However, the provenance of it was very clear. We know who wrote it, and who he was working for. It was unverified oppo research and that was also clear.
Oh yes they do. And were very happy with it until they understood the nature of social media is not to connect people, but to socialize them into bubbles that become antagonists to each other.
In corrupt places as well as democratic, peaceful places, it creates disruption and discontent through dissemination of (true - or false - doesn't matter) informations that in turn fuels civil unrest.
In corrupt places, this unrest is an opportunity for improvement.
In non-corrupt ones, it is an opportunity for worsening.
> It's just that the upwards potential is a lot bigger than downwards in corrupt places.
I suggest that the opportunity for downward is just as big as the opportunity for upward, if the Rohingya situation in Myanmar is anything to measure by.
So social media creating artificial strife amongst people has been a good change? Yea, theres some good from social media, but it seems to constantly require "change". Even in perfectly peaceful circles of societies, its dividing people into radicalized factions all in the name of tribe identity. That and the increasing studies showcasing the detrimental mental health affects it has on people. It truly is becoming more of a burden as time goes on. It's not like social media is truly democratic. They're monarchies that give an illusion of public control.
Yes, definitely valuable. On the other hand, people are demonstrably less generous in their assumptions about other people's motivations and more likely to objectify them in the classic sense if they have not and will almost certainly never encounter them in real life.
Double edged sword to be sure. It's great that people get access to better information, but we need to evolve as a species in order to handle bubbles this big.
I think you're missing something about the idea of a bubble. I live around people with many different beliefs, but I am fairly socially isolated from them, meanwhile my information diet consists of a fairly narrow set of ideas and viewpoints. The size of your bubble isn't directly determined by the number of people in it, it's the number of viewpoints, ideas, perspectives, life experiences, etc. you are exposed to.
This is pretty much it. We saw from the Arab Spring that Twitter can start a revolution. Whether you need it or not, whether it improves matters or not. Everyone claims to be some sort of insurgent now.
> true - or false - doesn't matter
I happen to think this matters rather a lot, but not everybody agrees.
Why the pretense of nation states and corporations?
Humans run these organizations and humans deflect responsibility for doing anything.
Are you going around gathering a team to free kids in cages? Where is your group that is registering voters to save your democracy? What does Myanmar have to do with non-citizens? Why does the West think the world is their snow globe to ogle?
I have a hard time feeling like this can approach anything resembling honest debate if we’re going to point at the behavior of ephemeral, external objects and ignore how we individually organize our daily life.
You bow to the common time economy. Being good at rhetorical debate is, to me, nothing more than indifferent humans equivocating and deflecting with themes that sound good but mean nothing.
Focus on your society and culture. More often value comes of it.
> Why does the West think the world is their snow globe to ogle?
> I have a hard time feeling like this can approach anything resembling honest debate if we’re going to point at the behavior of ephemeral, external objects and ignore how we individually organize our daily life.
How can these two sentences coexist in the same message? If you argue in favour of focusing exclusively on our personal daily lives rather than on amorphous imaginary entities (fine), then how can you write in an adjacent sentence about "the West", which "thinks"? And what's wrong with watching the world from afar, as if it were a snow globe, anyway?
So individuals often cannot do anything about it and the only way to solve problems is a change of systems. (This does not absolve one of their personal responsibility to act morally though)
I’m not freeing kids from cages nor registering people to vote, I am not from the US and have never been there so that’s not the issues I have to tackle.
Your point seems to be that we the west should let Myanmar deal with its own problems, when in fact we already play a role in it with having exported Facebook there.
What I see in my society is how Facebook has fueled a resurgence of right wing extremism and led to a wider spread of conspiracy theories. I have deleted my Facebook account but do not see what I can do more than ask my government for better regulation of Facebook.
Not to bring computer science into this, but in any system the chance for corruption increases with both size and complexity. New Zealand, while I'm very fond of it and a great admirer of it, is pretty small and notoriously hard to immigrate to.
The OP's comment resonates with my experience: I'm a Kiwi who's had family members immigrate, as well as talked to many friends and individuals who are trying to immigrate. It's definitely an immigrant-friendly culture (more so now than several years back), but that's not quite the same thing as "easy to immigrate to". Many of my acquaintances (from India, South Africa, and the EU) have found it very hard to find work here, extremely time-consuming and tiring to get through the visa process, and some have had to return home. I'm not saying it should be super-easy, and maybe it is easier than some other countries (I don't really know), but it's definitely not "easy" for most people I've talked with.
You can buy citizenship and noble titles starting at £29.99, and the only business ever based there got 'nationalised' after the founders fell out with the royal family. Try again :D
Not the OP but this assertion is at very least a non-obvious as constructive proof requiring vast elaboration and at worst, obviously wrong on the surface with clear existential proof as mentioned by the OP [except for perhaps a idealized definition of the word "democracy" that does not resemble what you actually get on the ground when you implement it.]
> Unless the people is willingly supporting corruption, a corrupt state cannot be democratic, by construction.
There is nothing about democracy or its construction that precludes corruption. You literally just made up nonsense.
> You're just looking for a fight.
No. I believe you are projecting.
> Go for a fresh air walk outside instead.
Go read about the solomon islands. This issue is about corruption in solomon islands - a democracy. Or go crack open a book and learn about democracy and its history. Why everyone from the ancient greeks, who gave us democracy, and the founding fathers, who gave us modern democracy, all distrusted democracy.
As a matter of fact, democracies are by nature corrupt ( tyranny of the majority ) and that's why most democracies have measures to product the citizens from democracy. Rather than regurgitating nonsense you've seen on tv or the news, learn about democracies or take a moment to think about it.
The establishment in the US is also taking advantage of the absurdity of the Trump administration to push for censorship here too, but make no mistake, it's because they want to cover up their own corruption as well, despite arguments to the contrary.
All it does is further tribalise people. I would be okay with a social media system that did not serve people only the content they would like to see. Also there has to be some sort of gatekeeper to weed out false information. I don’t know how the latter can be implemented in a fair manner besides some sort of arbitration AI that we don’t currently have.
The fact that information about government's actions can spread to a large number of people, without any control from authorities is a first time in history for many. Organising protests without government censorship. Publishing investigations. Alerting the entire country to corruption as it happens.
It's really life-changing and unfortunately I don't think it will last. It's already routine when civil unrest happens to shut down internet. Facebook is a good one to censor but other networks take its place so creating Great Firewalls is next for many (somewhat rich) governments.