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Evidence is Piling Up That Facebook Can Incite Racial Violence (technologyreview.com) 351

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Higher use of the world's dominant social network has now been strongly linked with more attacks on refugees in Germany. From a report: Greater use, greater violence: Specifically, in towns where "per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average," attacks on refugees "increased by about 50 percent," the New York Times reported today, citing a University of Warwick study. Researchers there carried out a detailed analysis of more than 3,000 incidents in Germany over a two-year period. Crucially, the link held true regardless of the city's size, political leanings, or economic status -- and didn't correlate with general patterns of internet use. Those findings strengthen the case that using Facebook in particular can be a driving mechanism of greater violence.

Greater scrutiny: That's more bad news for the embattled social network, which has long portrayed itself as a benevolent company driven by a mission to draw the world closer together. But researchers recently found that coordinated hate speech and propaganda on the site helped fuel violence in Myanmar. And last year, Facebook itself eventually acknowledged that Russian agents had posted tens of thousands of inflammatory posts -- which reached tens of millions of people -- before and after the 2016 presidential election, in a massive campaign to deepen divisions in the United States.
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Evidence is Piling Up That Facebook Can Incite Racial Violence More

Evidence is Piling Up That Facebook Can Incite Racial Violence

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  • No shit, they can influence an election (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It doesnt have to be russia to scream fire in a theater.

    • Being Facebook and Twitter when a message is successful it is often very brief. This is a good way to gloss over the complexities of the issues at hand. And just say group X is 100 in the right while Group Y is 100 wrong.
      To the other side
      Progressives are portrait as inexperienced lazy kids, who just want freebee without any work.
      Conservative are older uneducated hicks, who blame everyone else for the problem they caused themselves.

      Neither is actually true, and neither is completely false as well. But with

    • "No shit, they can influence"

      FTFY. Getting all butthurt because FB can be used to influence people is, it seems, mostly the result of people hating that other points of view are accepted and/or propagated. Gee. Really.

      Of course. AOL did this you know, and for those on the fringe it was IRC before. FB is dangerous not because it's doing what has been done for a fairly long time now, 20 years or so, but because it's ubiquitous. The whole election troll is passe, but it does continue the meme.

      And regulating FB

  • No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)

    by timholman ( 71886 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @10:19PM (#57171258)

    Evidence is Piling Up That Facebook Can Incite Racial Violence

    The entire purpose of Facebook is to monetize having people at each others' throats ... because it increases engagement, and makes Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's shareholders that much richer. Of course Facebook is inciting racial violence, along with political violence, criminal violence, school violence, and any other violence you can think of. If money can be made from it, Facebook will provide more of it.

    I have friends who have stopped speaking to each other because of Facebook. It will only get worse, because Wall Street demands higher returns from the company, which means .... more violence.

    • Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @11:41PM (#57171510)

      Evidence is Piling Up That Facebook Can Incite Racial Violence

      The entire purpose of Facebook is to monetize having people at each others' throats ... because it increases engagement, and makes Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's shareholders that much richer. Of course Facebook is inciting racial violence, along with political violence, criminal violence, school violence, and any other violence you can think of. If money can be made from it, Facebook will provide more of it.

      I have friends who have stopped speaking to each other because of Facebook. It will only get worse, because Wall Street demands higher returns from the company, which means .... more violence.

      Complete and utter bullshit.

      Facebook is not inciting violence. What you are seeing is an unintended side effect of people having, for the first time in human history, the ability to instantly communicate with millions of other people, allowing then to speak out against things going on in the world that they are unhappy about, such as civilized countries being overrun with third world filth.

      This is not a defense of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and everyone associated with Facebook can fuck off and die for all I care. But blaming Facebook for "hate speech" and "attacks on refugees in Germany" is simply using them as a convenient scapegoat and ignoring the real problems faced by society.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

        I have sincere doubts about our level of civilization.

        There's enough first world filth around to make the third world filth the lesser problem.

      • Inciting violence (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @06:01AM (#57172572) Homepage

        Complete and utter bullshit.

        Facebook is not inciting violence.

        Facebook is not inciting violence intentionnally, per-se.
        Facebook is just optimizing for profits, and due to their specific market (advertising, data mining, etc.) they need, as the above poster stated, they need to increase engagement (i.e.: keep more eyeballs focused on facebook, for further reselling)

        And old studies done in the era of TV have already shown, the thing that increases the most engagement is emotions, more likely negative emotion, thus fear and violence.

        Thus even if Facebook hasn't in a "james bond vilain-style" decided to promote violence for pure evil intents, just by having machine learning algorithms that try to feed whatever attract the most user attention, they'll eventually start to automatically promote violence.

        What you are seeing is an unintended side effect of people having, for the first time in human history, the ability to instantly communicate with millions of other people, allowing then to speak out against things going on in the world that they are unhappy about,

        It's not the "instant communication" part that is main culprit (though it contributes a bit).
        It's the filtering going on.

        We're not in the beginning of the age of internet anymore.

        You're not suddenly exposed directly to the speech of the other millions of people, anymore. That's long past ago (you can't download the whole web on a DVD anymore :-P )
        You're not even exposed to a random / representative of the speech of some of that other million of people, neither. Specially not since commercial companies jumped in and they need to profit from their business

        You're specifically exposed to that tiny fraction (tiny enough so that it can fit within the limited attention span of our monkey-brains) of the speech of that other million of people, that the companies' machine learning algorithms have determined to be the most likely to attract your attention and provoke you into staying around (further speaking your own idea).

        Yes, the increase of content has (somewhat) had some influence on the way we communicate. (We've reached the point where we can't follow everything).

        The current data tech giant (Facebook, Google, etc.) are extremely strongly shaping the kind of communication that is going between people. But they need profit, so they focus on whats the most profitable to them even if that fucks everything up.

        Basically, the "information highways" have slowly transmorphed into the "kingdom of the few most attention-grabbing filthy tabloids".

        such as civilized countries being overrun with third world filth.

        Yeah, thank your for this nice demonstration of your opinions.

        • Facebook is not inciting violence intentionnally, per-se.
          Facebook is just optimizing for profits, and due to their specific market (advertising, data mining, etc.) they need, as the above poster stated, they need to increase engagement (i.e.: keep more eyeballs focused on facebook, for further reselling)

          Right, Facebook doesn't personally incite violence*, but they're happy to sell advertisements to those who would. Whores have more discretion than does Mark Zuckerberg.

          * Well, there are those various reports of Facebook playing psychological games with people, maybe that qualifies

      • Re:No kidding (Score:5, Insightful)

        by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @06:36AM (#57172692)

        I think you and the parent are both kind of right and your opinions less contradictory than you think.

        I can remember when Facebook was pretty new and the Facebook newsfeed was a chronological list of your freinds' posts. Then they started manipulating it in various ways, people would comment on not seeing some posts by people they used to, then the flood of companies, advertising and so forth until the 'newsfeed' was a totally manipulated entity where "engagement" was somehow a barometer of clickbaitiness and controversy.

        I think Facebook mostly aligned the newsfeed with how wound up people got, their version of engagement. As it turns out, others found out that with enough effort you could use that to push controversial issues on Facebook since their controversy was likely to result in high levels of "engagement".

        Dislike of refugees in Germany is just another controversy that Facebook's system manages to amplify. And it's not that people aren't *actually* upset in Germany over immigration. Merkel is barely hanging onto her job after bulk-importing Syrians and larger Germany society is taking a beating for suppressing news/discussion of ethnic conflicts within Germany.

        After a while, it's hard to separate the organic anger about issues and the amplified version of it. And there's a point at which being bombarded with people's marginally informed outrage constantly just makes you hostile. I had to quit using Facebook, despite its ease of keeping me informed on some people/family I liked, because it was making me really dislike people I actually liked in real life, people I invite to my house for dinner and have long conversations with without being angry.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )

        Facebook is not inciting violence. What you are seeing is an unintended side effect of people having, for the first time in human history, the ability to instantly communicate with millions of other people, allowing then to speak out against things going on in the world that they are unhappy about, such as civilized countries being overrun with third world filth.

        Ability to voice normally unspoken opinions is only part of this, but it is a minor one. FB emboldens people by giving them a sense of false consensus. All humans are social animals, and would not normally act on believes that are not supported by the community. For example, nudism. It isn't accepted by society as a whole and as a consequence nudists are not going nude in public outside designated areas. However, if they were mislead to believe that nudism is widely acceptable, you might see groups of them

    • What a load

  • Cause, or effect? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @10:31PM (#57171288) Journal

    Cause, or effect?

    I know the conventional wisdom is that we're all supposed to be hating on Facebook now (I mean, they practically GAVE Trump's election to Cambridge Analytica, amirite? It couldn't be that people seriously voted for Trump...they must have been TRICKED by FACEBOOK!), but this explanation is not only terrifically timely for the meme, it's altogether too pat.

    I rather suspect that if one could measure the intensity and frequency of gossip pre-Facebook, one would find a "disturbing" correlative uptick in gossip to all sorts of things...that people like to gossip about. If one correlates an uptick in FB postings to hate crimes, one has to evaluate further if the postings are legitimate or false - I sincerely doubt anyone in the media is going to admit that "well maybe those people complaining about those illegals might have been justified"...ever.

    Humans have always, generally, hated strangers in their midst. It's a tribal thing. Strangers with different habits, hair, clothes, language, food, and especially SKIN COLOR have always been easier to target for frustrations.

    It doesn't help that there seem to be a sadly-not-"fake news" plethora of stories about crime and illegals* like Mollie Tibbetts and Kathryn Steinle - nearly 25% of Federal prisoners are illegal immigrants. Racism is not acceptable, but not wanting criminals in ones' community is a pretty reasonable desire.

    *they're not "undocumented" - that's a flat-out lie; "undocumented" implies that they just don't happen to have their papers, or that such papers actually exist - they're illegal immigrants and farcical games with language only makes it clearer to some that there's a collusive effort to hide that.

    • *they're not "undocumented" - that's a flat-out lie; "undocumented" implies that they just don't happen to have their papers, or that such papers actually exist - they're illegal immigrants and farcical games with language only makes it clearer to some that there's a collusive effort to hide that.

      Eh? Did you just pull that out of your ass? How could undocumented mean that they just don't happen to have their papers or that papers do actually exist? If papers actually existed, they would be documented. You see, documents are papers. So undocumented means that they are without papers. It just seems more polite than to call someone illegal. They aren't illegal. They are breaking the law but there is nothing illegal about their existence. They have just as much legal right to existence as you do.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Well he who controls the language controls the debate. The words we use matter in that they tend to shape our opinions and might very well move us one way or the other given the same set of facts. Clearly calling them undocumented immigrants rather than illegal immigrants or illegal aliens - is an attempt by people with an agenda to distract from the fact the discussion is about people who are in active commission of a crime - being in the United States without either citizenship or a valid visa.

        By the sa

      • They aren't illegal. They are breaking the law but there is nothing illegal about their existence.

        Purposeful conflation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I sincerely doubt anyone in the media is going to admit that "well maybe those people complaining about those illegals might have been justified"...ever.

      May I direct you to the Daily Mail, which has been doing this since long before Facebook was around. Their history of complaining about and blaming immigrants for everything goes back well over a century.

      Humans have always, generally, hated strangers in their midst. It's a tribal thing.

      The key word there is "strangers", i.e. people who they are ignorant of. After all, once they know and understand them they are not strangers any more.

      When people don't know someone it's easier for them to blame them for things, to mis-attribute problems to them or accept conspiracy theories about them. It'

      • The world your comments reflect does not exist outside the prism of western culture but you are using this perspective to denigrate (however gently) that same culture. Let me give you a quick example.. we'll take Hungary. Hungarians in Germany vote overwhelmingly liberal / progressive however Hungarians that are German citizens can also vote in Hungary as well. In Hungarian elections, these same people vote hard right. What this means is that Hungarians (not hating on them I might do the same) will cont

      • The key word there is "strangers", i.e. people who they are ignorant of. After all, once they know and understand them they are not strangers any more.

        I notice you picked the second (less commonly used) definition.

        Stranger :
        1 one who is strange: such as a (1) : foreigner (2) :
        a resident alien
        b : one in the house of another as a guest, visitor, or intruder
        c : a person or thing that is unknown or with whom one is unacquainted
        d : one who does not belong to or is kept from the activities of a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 )

      This. I suspect what's actually happening is that the real causative factor is that people in towns with high immigrant populations are getting fed up with the local immigrants and are taking to Facebook to complain about it while, simultaneously, the more violent/criminal among them are also engaging in more violence against immigrants. The chatter on Facebook isn't CAUSING the violence. Both the chatter and the violence are just by-products of the real cause (that people are getting sick of dealing with i

  • King Maker (Score:5, Insightful)

    by seoras ( 147590 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @10:32PM (#57171292)

    Evidence is Piling Up That Mark Zuckerberg doesn't realise that he's now wielding, badly, the same power that Rupert Murdoch once enjoyed playing King Maker with.
    If election meddling (you decide if it has happened or not) is now done on the FB platform then Zuckerberg is effectively renting out that power.
    Easier to strip him of it, or try to get leverage on him, to get a slice of that power yourself.

    When ever I read these sensational headlines the single piece of information that I think would be the most useful isn't what I'm being told it's "who's behind it?"
    Who started the gossip and the whispers?
    There in lies another problem with our media. This Murdoch understood well. It's easy to hide behind your employee journalists, editors and tamper with the world on a grand scale than to do so out in the open.

    Zuckerberg is very much out in the open and very exposed.

    • Evidence is Piling Up That Mark Zuckerberg doesn't realise that he's now wielding, badly, the same power that Rupert Murdoch once enjoyed playing King Maker with.

      This is totally a joke, but does this mean that Facebook is bigger than MySpace now?

    • Evidence is Piling Up That Mark Zuckerberg doesn't realise that he's now wielding, badly, the same power that Rupert Murdoch once enjoyed playing King Maker with.

      I agree however I think Zuckerberg isn't calling all the shots here. I would imagine that since about 2011/2012 when FB really started gaining influence, that Zuckerberg himself was being influenced. I would think there are some very high level people pulling strings with FB.

      In some ways ZB is just a front.

  • How is this common sense stuff (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cdsparrow ( 658739 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @10:37PM (#57171308)

    Always presented as important news? None of this internet stuff is fundamentally new, it's just more efficient. If a pamphlet or a town crier can influence people's minds, facebook can too - because that's all it is.

    Same situation as sharing songs on the internet. Nothing different than recording something onto reel to reel from a radio 60 years ago, just more efficient.

  • "Can't any longer play off black against old - young against poor. This country cannot house its houseless - feed its foodless. "

  • Yahoo! Anyone? (Score:3)

    by OYAHHH ( 322809 ) on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @11:20PM (#57171454)

    I personally find Yahoo!'s front page to be far far far more egregious player than FB. FB at one time had their "Trending Stories" component which was a blatantly biased attempt to subvert what was actually trending. As time wore on FB realized people simply were not buying their slanted opinion of what was important. Ultimately FB shuttered the "Trending Stories."

    But Yahoo! That's a totally different animal. Maybe, and I mean maybe, one out of twenty headlines presented is not biased. I read their headlines every single day and despite all their trying I still ain't buying.

    FB is bad, but Yahoo! is egregiously bad.

    • So why are you still reading their headlines every day ?

    • Yahoo! is egregiously bad.

      It's yahoo though, so who the fuck cares? The two people who visited yesterday?

    • FB at one time had their "Trending Stories" component which was a blatantly biased attempt to subvert what was actually trending. As time wore on FB realized people simply were not buying their slanted opinion of what was important. Ultimately FB shuttered the "Trending Stories."

      They replaced it with "Top Stories", which is now always the default for your feed. They can and will interject anything in there that they want, so long as at least one of your friends has liked the post. If I select "Most Recent" then I regularly see things with much more activity than what's in Top Stories. The only thing that has changed is how the content is organized.

  • Shooting the Messenger? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DatbeDank ( 4580343 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @12:00AM (#57171572)

    Maybe people need to look at what's being conveyed on these messenger (social media) services instead of of trying to block it?

    You know, if migrants really are stealing and committing sex crimes at a statistically higher rate above the norm then it should be reported.
    Same goes for politicians who commit crimes.

    If anything, it sounds like certain people don't like it when social media serves up a dish of politically inconvenient news and the plebs rightly get angry. Maybe if journalists were doing their job there would be a more balanced way of reporting such news so that it doesn't inflame the public's violence.

    Nah that would all make sense now wouldn't it?

    • This. I've been arguing since the late 1980s (when I first got on the Internet) that banning hate speech doesn't make it go away. It simply drives it underground, swept under the rug out of your sight, but still there. Those who believe banning speech works are basically arguing that sticking your head in the sand makes the threat disappear. If anything, it's much better to have hate speech on public platforms, where you can at least track who is saying it and what they're saying, than to ban it and driv

      • Those who believe banning speech works are basically arguing that sticking your head in the sand makes the threat disappear.

        Yep, tru dat.
        I don't get why young, idealistic liberals think that shouting down or outright banning opinions they disagree with will help the situation. It's idiotic and childish. I've debated with them before to understand why they think that is the correct approach and you can't get a reasonable answer why.

        IMHO, by all means bring the neo-fascists into the light, into the public, instead of hiding behind anonymity online.

    • Re:Shooting the Messenger? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @04:11AM (#57172318)

      Sometimes the truth, presented selectively, can be deceptive. I was reading an article on a right-leaning news site just this morning about a recent murder committed by an illegal immigrant in the US. If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy. By just reporting every crime committed by an illegal they can create the impression that all illegal immigrants are murderous, rapist, thieving scum - regardless of how true that may or may not be, and without ever having to tell a single lie.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Now we also have to deal with "citizen journalists", aka bloggers and Twitter pundits.

        Remember that map of crimes supposedly committed in Germany by immigrants? It included things like accidental toaster fires as "arson" and logged multiple reports of the same crime as multiple crimes.

        The only oversight and fact checking is other bloggers and YouTube debunkings, which of course you rarely see when someone passes the map around on Facebook. Worse still, some people will use it as evidence of the mainstream m

      • The reality is, in the US, immigrants legal and illegal, commit less crime than those born in the US.

      • Re:Shooting the Messenger? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @10:30AM (#57173772) Journal

        If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy.

        I'm blowing mod points to reply to your post, but it's important to point out that in this case you are flat out wrong. This story has been in the national news for a month since she went missing. It has been in the national news all along. When her body was found yesterday that was in the national news. Today it was revealed someone was charged with her murder, and it was an illegal immigrant.

        This was a month ago (People magazine): https://people.com/crime/unive... [people.com]
        Three weeks ago (Fox News): http://www.foxnews.com/transcr... [foxnews.com]
        Three weeks ago (CNN): https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/26... [cnn.com]
        This was two weeks ago (USA Today): https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]

        You get the idea. Google shows 2.7 million hits from news sources for her name. Just pointing out you have made a massive assumption ("By just reporting every crime committed by an illegal they can create the impression that all illegal immigrants are murderous") based on totally incorrect information ("If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy.")

      • Were you reading about Molly Tibbetts by chance? Her story was mainstream news well before there was any knowledge the perpetrator was an illegal. In theory you are correct but the facts are simply that if you look only at native white populations in the US, crime per capita is equivalent to the safer scandanavian countries. Crime statistics are what they are and seem to track for races regardless of where they are re-located to across the globe.

      • Sometimes the truth, presented selectively, can be deceptive. I was reading an article on a right-leaning news site just this morning about a recent murder committed by an illegal immigrant in the US. If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy. By just reporting every crime committed by an illegal they can create the impression that all illegal immigrants are murderous, rapist, thieving scum - regardless of how true that may or may not be, and without ever having to tell a single lie.

        If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy.

        Well, you are wrong. Her disappearance was very widely reported before it was known that she had been killed and that an illegal immigrant had done it

        If anything, the opposite will happen now; she will disappear down the memory hole as the "proper" people won't want to talk about how she'd still be alive if we hadn't allowed this person to wander into our country and stay here.

  • Garbage In Garbage Out (Score:3)

    by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @12:24AM (#57171642)

    Remember kids if you are not continuously outraged and afraid money is being left on the table.

  • Facebook reports the real story (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @12:42AM (#57171682) Homepage

    Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election" https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2... [fb.com]

    "many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."

    Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?

    The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate - and advertise - their views in a wide range of countries. While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so - just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries.

    • the ads were non-political in nature, and didn't feature or favour a political candidate
    • 56% of the ads were run AFTER the 2016 US federal election
    • 25% of the ads were never displayed to anyone due to Facebook's algorithms not finding them relevant to trending interests
    • only 25% of the ads were geographically-targeted
    • Facebook is not sure that the ads were part of an organized campaign
    • Facebook is not sure that the accounts the ads were purchased with are associated with each other
    • Facebook is not certain that the ads were purchased by Russians
    • many of the ads were not purchased using Russia's currency
    • huge numbers of actual political ads are bought and run on Facebook from all countries around the world, and that is normal and OK
    • the "overwhelming majority" of ad-space purchases from Russia by Russians are normal and not suspicious in any way

    So, after all the investigations and debunked conspiracy theories, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all.

    Putting it into perspective: Total election spending: $2.4 billion. Total Clinton/Trump Facebook ad buys: $81 million.

  • Well... not really. But it does something else. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @04:19AM (#57172338)

    Facebook, like every social media platform, has one crucial function: It can connect like minded people. Actually, that's its primary function. Now, while this seems quite positive on the surface, it can be quite detrimental to us as a society too. Because it also allows very unsavory and outright crazy people to connect. Which you might notice in the more recent skyrocketing number of conspiracy theories being peddled loudly.

    What does this have to do with each other?

    Let's say you have an uncommon, unpopular or outright illegal position or opinion. In a "normal" society, you'd feel quite alone with your opinion because nobody shares it. This changes when you're able to connect with like minded individuals who share your twisted world view. Suddenly you're no longer alone, moreover, you feel that your position is verified as true and right, you feel vindicated. And of course you start living in this echo chamber of like minded people who keep telling you that you're right and that your "crazy" opinion is not crazy at all but that everyone else is crazy.

    This works for every kind of fringe ideology. It has worked for religion for centuries without the internet, but the internet gives other insane ideas the same level of self perpetuating reinforcement. From religion to third wave feminism, from white supremacy to black lives matters. And yes, from contrails to flat earth.

    • Facebook, like every social media platform, has one crucial function: It can connect like minded people. Actually, that's its primary function.

      False. Its primary function is to produce revenue. The days when its primary function was to connect like-minded people are long, long gone. In internet years, that was forever ago.

      Now, while this seems quite positive on the surface, it can be quite detrimental to us as a society too. Because it also allows very unsavory and outright crazy people to connect. Which you might notice in the more recent skyrocketing number of conspiracy theories being peddled loudly.

      No, that's a feature. It lets you keep tabs on those people when they use a public website like Facebook. Those people exist with or without Facebook. They find ways to connect through any social venue, with secret signs and dog whistles.

      It has worked for religion for centuries without the internet, but the internet gives other insane ideas the same level of self perpetuating reinforcement.

      Before the internet, people believed in racial purity, alien UFOs, and Bigfoot. The prolifera

  • This can be used for good or evil, the lesson here should be for reasonable people to use them for good as readily as the anti-social criminal cowards are prepared to use them for evil, something that does happen.

  • Facebook is just another medium (Score:3)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @06:35AM (#57172688)

    The people who have been used to running news monopolies are, like medallion cabdrivers, unaccustomed to competition. Now that raw news about what the unvetted flood of refugees is doing in Europe is getting through around the mellowspeak filtration system of the traditional media, they are blaming...the new sources of information for allowing a diversity of news and opinion through.

    Watch for the EU to respond by fining everyone who reports unofficial news or channels unofficial opinions.

  • Somebody's selling facebook stock short. I haven't seen attacks this blatant since stories about Tazers killing people the week it went public.

  • FB, and social media in general have enabled the same tactics and mentality that the radio stations in Rwanda used in 1994. The tribes in Rwanda were incited, "whipped up" into a frenzy of tribal hate, the the point of incredible acts of violence. FB and social media are using the same model, and people like Alex Jones, etc know how to play that game.
  • Instead of standing on a corner, and shouting out the rants of madmen/women. We now use Facebook in the same way. Ban Facebook, people will find another way to rave to the public all of their hatred. I don't get my news from Facebook, unless it comes from a major news source(LA Times, local news paper, Washington Post, ...). Then I go to the actual web site and read the article. And then, I still read it with the mind set that it is probably slanted. I also try to ignore any of the ravings of my delu

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