iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

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— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) March 20, 2018

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— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) March 20, 2018

because it's too gruesome to even to think about? about how public sentiments being manipulated en masse to swing an election isn't a flaw in the system? it is rather the ultimate perfection of marketing? that it's just an exaggerated version of what we live with all the time anyway? that our thoughts aren't really our own? or maybe they are, but how are we to know? sorry to get all p.k. dick ~think abt it~ but i feel like we've reached a kind of event horizon here somehow

Exaggerated version of what we live with all the time for me. Every time we talk about this swinging an election I think it's important to remember how that happened: bullshit links from dodgy sites being favoured by the algorithm, and for me that sorta comes down to a lack of media literacy amongst people, which has been a problem for decades and decades. I don't want to sound smug about that, and have no real solutions to offer that aren't just wonky "talk more about this in schools" shit, but it certainly feels like an old problem.

it gets down into the marrow of communication and sociability - the now-definitive proof that people are more likely to pay attention to and be interested by strong opinions, rather than evidence-based sifting. and yes i think this has probably always been true. but the speed and penetration of opinions and news has weaponized this disparity of effect. organizations like the bbc which, natural tendencies to toady to those in power aside, yes i see you there calzino, have a statutory duty to present all sides of an argument, find themselves at a yawning, material disadvantage compared with accounts and organizations that can publish what they like. on a fairly innocuous level it means the bbc could never make a podcast like "pod save america" because it has a slant. the less innocuous effects are well documented obv. i don't really see the way out of this. even if facebook did all the things they should do privacy-wise i don't see how we avoid the trollbot battalions armed with inflammatory, juicy headlines. on whatever platform.

Yeah, it's a difficult situation, for sure. It's a question of there no longer being a perceived centre that discussion can spring from - which is interesting from a leftist pov because for much of the 20th century the left worked hard at explaining that this centre is artificial, that its claims to objectivity are false, that it toadies to power, etc. and now you have this type of Chomsky analysis dumbed down and used by wide swathes of the population to justify their biases. At this stage I mostly see people who're aware of this trying to return to this centre, which I find both impracticable (for the reasons you listed) and also disingenuous. I suppose one way of looking at this which is cozy/hopeful for leftists is that the breakdown of a centre of consensus is a byproduct of the breakdown of social cohesion as a whole - if there's no community why bother about what anyone else thinks? - and so the solution is more welfare state/social justice hooray, though I don't know if I even believe that.

on a really bone-simple level, the extent to which platforms can turn a profit off of effectively targeted advertising matches pretty exactly with the extent to which our inner lives and public politics are undermined or turned against us. so it's a question of where the balance of power is on this spectrum. clickbait matters less if it's not targeted accurately.

I don't care about facebook because I joined late and barely share any info. I knew something was way off when my first profile got corrupted and the actual real famous hockey player goalie's (that I share a name with and was linked to my full name gmail account) candids started appearing in my profile that I wasn't using. I btw still have access to this account where his friends and family send me messages. I care that my dad fell into that targeted fb hellmouth, started posting complete trash before the election and it was the swan dive for our relationship.

:(

even if facebook did all the things they should do privacy-wise i don't see how we avoid the trollbot battalions armed with inflammatory, juicy headlines. on whatever platform.

That's because doing all the privacy things is antithetical to the company's business model. As someone observed, it's really hard to take seriously any proposed efforts by these companies to self-police to prevent data mining and micro marketing because that is how they make their money. The Russians (for example) exploited Facebook (for example) but they did it by doing exactly what the platform was designed to do.

I was relatively late to Facebook, but have been distrustful from the start. Once it became clear that the company was more or less scrambling posts to show or order what it surmised was what I wanted to see - in a roundabout way, what *they* wanted me to see - I started looking less and less. God knows I don't get news from the site. Otherwise, if Facebook is my only "connection" to certain people then it's really not much of a connection, and if those people can't or don't want to reach me some other way, then they don't really want to reach me. It's like not answering a suspicious or unfamiliar number on my phone. If it's important, they'll call back.

zuckerberg steals facebook idea --> becomes real billionaire --> enables fake billionaire trump to become president, in part by letting him steal / launder stolen and deceitful information on facebook. who woulda thunk it?

Per that, xpost, almost no one in my immediate extended family, afaik, uses Facebook. Too old, too disinterested, too distracted. I'm very thankful for that.

I lasted 4 months being my dad's fb friend. Thank goodness no one else in my family posts material opinions.

My mom chose yesterday of all days to a) join FB and b) add me. B-b-but she HATES the internet!

No, I haven’t taken up her add. Probably going to ignore until I get a call asking why I haven’t added her yet.

I ignored my dad's request for 3 years and then decided I needed more agony right before the election.

even if facebook did all the things they should do privacy-wise i don't see how we avoid the trollbot battalions armed with inflammatory, juicy headlines. on whatever platform.

About social media in general rather than Facebook, but an interesting thread going on here nonetheless

We must have an honest conversation about how social media affects society.

But that means listening to knowledgeable people. Not sniffy refuseniks like Lionel Shriver who think social media is a waste of time.

I have some interesting research on this.https://t.co/qS3Ujprndv

— Chris McCrudden (@cmccrudden) March 21, 2018

Democracies have lived and flourished during the 20th century while marginalising (or, in some cases, making illegal) certain opinions and ideologies.

xpost

so then the problem is free speech?

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm just not sure that Facebook is the problem, rather than the opinions that it enables to be promoted. & if those are the opinions that people want, then democracy entails that those opinions should form public policy.

surely algorithmic media like fb is driving a wedge between what ppl say they want and what ppl will actually click on. it's like trying to eat well with the fridge permanently open in front of you

people like guns and like to shoot guns, so democracy entails that we should let people have and shoot guns

it's how democracy™ works, dummy!

“democracy” is a little more nuanced than the way you seem to be thinking about it, Euler?

I mean we have “democracy” here in the US, where the less popular people with the less popular policies control everything, because we have shit like “why not two dakotas?” in our history.

guys go easy on him, he's an academic

french too

lol

how is democracy more nuanced? you mean like republicanism? democracy means people vote on stuff for whatever reason they want, no?

I am pretty dumb & genuinely not trolling or whatever, it just seems like people’s shitty opinions are the problems, not the means of distribution of shitty opinions

people only have opinions as shitty as they are enabled to circulate by their socio-technical environment

the plutocracy will let you have as many shitty opinions as you want - a frightened and confused people is a people found indoors not causing property damage after all - but there is only really trouble when you start to talk sense. this country had a massive panic attack when it was told that black lives do in fact matter. don't rock the boat with stuff like that and everything is fine.

Heard an important distinction made on the radio, that it is one thing to collect and exploit data about what we buy, but it's another thing to collect and exploit data about what we think. That is, trying to convince us to buy one particular laundry product or see some movie or whatever is one thing, but trying to effect what we think, particularly when it comes to politics, is propaganda. When we see a political ad, we know what it is. It tells us so. But as we've seen, the exploitation of social media for what might seem a similar purpose - to sway opinions and feelings - is a lot more insidious and sneaky.

i kinda miss the days when the laundry product commercials were considered insidious.

i don't know how marshall mcluhan turned into jello biafra and frank zappa boring us to death but it happened and i for one am not happy about it. i'll just blame adbusters. and noam. need people to blame...

the mechanical bride kicked ass!

there's just no way out. everyone is in too deep. we will sink with this shit. jello biafra probably has a 401(k) plan. he's not a young man anymore. he probably has a Moody's app.

Idgi good luck yalll

I don't think people's shitty opinions are the problem in (my version of) a properly functioning democracy - but that's where the nuance comes in, because that brexit shit was def a referendum

It was funny when Mordy said my opinions were all formed from "social networks" or Facebook status updates or whatever

Euler, it's just that this "the majority of ppl think something is good -> it gets done" scheme is not at all how any democracy has worked, ever, and that's a feature not a bug. Political systems are always concerned with their own survival, above anything else, and so in a liberal democracy there's gonna be hurdles for any thinking that is incompatible w/ the values of the system - laws, constitutional framework, checks & balances. You can't, for example, hold a referendum in most current democracies on whether a certain social group should be slaughtered. And on a more holistic level, media, education, etc. all work within the framework of the values of the system. So there's gonna be a certain consensus on a lot of major issues, and ppl who hold views incompatible w/ those values are gonna be in the margins. And yeah all of this is somewhat ad odds with the idealistic view of democracy as it's taught, and it's designed to keep out a lot of stuff most ppl on here would probably be for but it's also there to keep out, say, fascism (insert Hitler was elected cliché here).

The thing about the internet is it has smashed that consensus - a conspiracy news site can get as many hits as a respected old news source. That's a new problem, and it might not be entirely down to technology, but it couldn't have happened in the same way some years ago.

a lot of people were concerned about radio, in the early days, when it seemed like everyone might own their own transmitter, and broadcast their vile views to millions of people. it didn't work out that way in the end but now it has

but with knobs on obv

that's one of the reasons the printing press was regulated, and then the telegraph and the radio, and television, and soon it'll be the internet, and ultimately we'll be okay (right before the planet becomes uninhabitable, at least to things that look like you and me)

I use Facebook to promote myself, never to donate content to them, so Putin will have to pry the app from my phone with his cold, dead etc

i still don't buy the narrative that media informs people, rather i feel it's the other way around. but it is in media's vested interest to convince us of it's importance. see all the "You have to keep watching -- it's the only way to fight back!" crap so many are still buying.

but it's a convenient narrative and one you hear all the time. "if only people read the right stuff, they would think right" is a simple minded and self-flattering solution, basically pimping your own enlightened media choices. people don't learn that way, they learn by lived experience.

anyways FB is fine for what it is, a post it board, a chain mail letter factory, memes, etc.

democratization of meaning is an unstoppable force now, the genie is not going back in the bottle.

http://honisoit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Computer_Cat-600x400.jpg

like im not going to cry that CBS can't dictate top-down a third of all media watched by everyone anymore, glad those days are long gone.

yes but we've traded that so that a shady-ass firm of ex-spies and Eton men can dictate "bottom up" and nobody knows who they're working for or why

Yup. Democratization of meaning isn't really that if you can still buy views with $$$.

I use Facebook to promote myself, never to donate content to them

you don't have to donate anything to them, though. all they want is to improve their model that predicts who will click what, and using facebook to promote yourself helps them to do that.

i quit facebook a few months ago, but it was mainly to try to pry myself off of the internet in general (i ended up just shifting more of my online time to other online places, similar to when i quit drinking coca-cola and coincidentally started drinking loads of coffee when i was 18). i loathe the way that facebook surveils me and my friends so that they can sell their psychographic profiles to third parties, but that's happening all the time across the internet. i bring a long trail of cookies with me wherever i go. i would feel less fatalistic about the direction of social media/internet it if i thought that it would be regulated appropriately, but i don't share tomboto's optimism on that

that's one of the reasons the printing press was regulated

the financier of the first Gutenberg Bibles was a money lender named Johann Fust (possibly demonized as one of the inspirations behind the Faust/Mephistopheles character). the demon famously prefers human knowledge to the divine and this was back when the drawing of horns was still a thing. also when they would publicly burn writings (like if you copied the Bible but you did it in your native language) to discourage it in the future.

It was once believed that Johann Fust was working for the devil. After several of Gutenberg’s bibles were sold to King Louis XI of France, it was decided that Fust was performing witchcraft. This idea came about for a few reasons, including the fact that some of the type was printed in red ink, mistaken for blood. It was also discovered that all of the letters in these bibles, presented to the King and his courtiers as hand-copied manuscripts, were oddly identical. Fust had sold 50 bibles in Paris and the people there could not fathom the making and selling of so many bibles so quickly, because printing had not come to the forefront yet in France. Parisians figured that the devil had something to do with the making of these copies, and Fust was thrown into jail on charges of black magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Fust

that is a cool story that I did not know. but you get that's not my point, right? I'm not calling for zuck to be charged with working for lucifer. I just kind of want him to die a pauper

you don't have to donate anything to them, though.

yeah this feeling of "aha but I use THEM" is tempting but just being there and using it builds value for their company y because network effects

have we posted chrome extension already? theres a facebook-specific ad blocker and another that blocks the facebook tracking from other pages

Ultimately, I just want the most vulnerable of society to be protected from the shitshow that we may be able to readily determine as a shitshow but so many others aren't able to.