Former Mentor Says Mark Zuckerberg Intoxicated by Power, Calls Disinformation 'A National Security Issue' (msnbc.com) 165
MSNBC's Ali Velshi interviewed Mark Zuckerberg mentor (and early investor) Roger McNamee for a special report on "the disinformation epidemic."
McNamee — also the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe — says Zuckerberg is too focused on "imposing his vision" to acknowledge the website's threat to national security, adding "It's about power." Ali Velshi: The fact that rumor, innuendo, conspiracies, outright lies are amplified by social media is no accident. That is a feature built into platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It is part of their business model. Long before the election of 2016, Facebook knew all of this to be true, but it followed a familiar pattern of responses. It denied that was a problem. When it acknowledged the problem, it treated it as a public relations issue, not as a core business issue. It offered up half-baked solutions that changed nothing, and it fought off attempts to regulate it. Because what Facebook has created is immensely profitable...
Roger McNamee says he warned Mark Zuckerberg of the immense problems that Facebook's business model could unleash...
Roger McNamee: The company essentially believes that it is sovereign, the equivalent of another nation. It has nearly twice as many monthly active users as there are people in China. And so Mark Zuckerberg very much has the view that no one can tell him what to do... Facebook's own research says that 64% of the time that a person joins an extremist network on Facebook, it is because Facebook has recommended that they do so...
People sit there and assume it's about money, and I think money is secondary. I really think it's about power. I think Mark Zuckerberg has a vision that connecting all the people in the world on one network — his network — is the best thing any human being can do. And in his notion it has to do with efficiency, it has to do with scale, it has to do with imposing his vision on it.
And that kind of power is intoxicating. Remember, between when the company went public and 2018, the company got very little pushback — in fact what it really got was tons of love from investors and journalists and the like. And they were in their own filter bubble and started to believe their own press and their own point of view about what was going on. And I just think they're at this point now where they are just disconnected, there's really no sensitivity, no understanding that they might have a responsibility to society.
And at this point, with the election coming so closely, this has become a national security issue, because effectively the platform can be used by anybody. These advertising tools can be used by campaigns, they can be used by foreign governments, they can be used by provocateurs, people who would like to make trouble. That happens every single day, and from Facebook's point of view, that's just business as usual.
They want to hide behind the first amendment. They want to say this is about freedom of speech. But amplification is not freedom of speech. Amplification is a business choice for profit.
McNamee — also the author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe — says Zuckerberg is too focused on "imposing his vision" to acknowledge the website's threat to national security, adding "It's about power." Ali Velshi: The fact that rumor, innuendo, conspiracies, outright lies are amplified by social media is no accident. That is a feature built into platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It is part of their business model. Long before the election of 2016, Facebook knew all of this to be true, but it followed a familiar pattern of responses. It denied that was a problem. When it acknowledged the problem, it treated it as a public relations issue, not as a core business issue. It offered up half-baked solutions that changed nothing, and it fought off attempts to regulate it. Because what Facebook has created is immensely profitable...
Roger McNamee says he warned Mark Zuckerberg of the immense problems that Facebook's business model could unleash...
Roger McNamee: The company essentially believes that it is sovereign, the equivalent of another nation. It has nearly twice as many monthly active users as there are people in China. And so Mark Zuckerberg very much has the view that no one can tell him what to do... Facebook's own research says that 64% of the time that a person joins an extremist network on Facebook, it is because Facebook has recommended that they do so...
People sit there and assume it's about money, and I think money is secondary. I really think it's about power. I think Mark Zuckerberg has a vision that connecting all the people in the world on one network — his network — is the best thing any human being can do. And in his notion it has to do with efficiency, it has to do with scale, it has to do with imposing his vision on it.
And that kind of power is intoxicating. Remember, between when the company went public and 2018, the company got very little pushback — in fact what it really got was tons of love from investors and journalists and the like. And they were in their own filter bubble and started to believe their own press and their own point of view about what was going on. And I just think they're at this point now where they are just disconnected, there's really no sensitivity, no understanding that they might have a responsibility to society.
And at this point, with the election coming so closely, this has become a national security issue, because effectively the platform can be used by anybody. These advertising tools can be used by campaigns, they can be used by foreign governments, they can be used by provocateurs, people who would like to make trouble. That happens every single day, and from Facebook's point of view, that's just business as usual.
They want to hide behind the first amendment. They want to say this is about freedom of speech. But amplification is not freedom of speech. Amplification is a business choice for profit.
Well.. (Score:3)
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
India gave Amazon a really hard time. Amazon got law changes there, but against them to protect local businesses from competition.
Re: Well.. (Score:1)
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But Twitter gets a ducking free pass everywhere. I wonder why?
Because it is a small mostly irrelevant company, not competing with existing businesses. Facebook was also mostly ignored until it started affecting politics and causing spontanious lynching of innocent people. Sure Twitter could do the same, but no body outside the US would care, as nobody outside the US uses Twitter.
I will get fooled again... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh... as if corporate control of our lives through undue influence in the elections of our governors is a new concept.
It's simply morphed from the consolidation of newspapers, radio, and tv stations to controlling hearts and minds from the pulpit of a social media gigantour.
Meet the new boss, same the old boss.
It's quite different (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's quite different (Score:5, Insightful)
That is an important part of the story. The quality of mainstream reporting has been declining . Social media have become a competitor for the mainstream. It becomes harder to tell lies in the newspaper and get away with it.
There are an awful lot of people there who run things and don't even have any concept of truth. They think in terms of 'does it matter to me, does my organization benefit'.There is a lot of bullshit on facebook but why would anyone care? What is it to them? Facebook is about harvesting data and getting people addicted. Facebook also has to get along with important people who are interested in controlling narratives. These want to suppress narratives which are against their interests and promote those in their interests. They will often want to suppress narratives which are actually right but go against what is in the newspapers. Or which are wrong and go against the official story. Since there is so much bullshit on social media you can always say it is really about that but that is just the cover.
I doubt if anyone is interested in the official 'Facebook sowing discontent' story. It may be the mainstream which is sowing content most.
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There have been studies about the correlation between education levels and stupid ideas. Education does not help much. The issue is trust. Take an intelligent well educated person and get him as far as to be distrustful of vaccines, and this person will develop a rich and argument about why not to trust vaccines. Or climate change.
It does not say everything, there may be a countering argument too if the thinking is good enough. Since you're libertarian, you may be familiar with climate change skepticism. Ch
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Trilogy? I have them and there are only two. Or do you mean to include the book about Historicism? He is against pursuing grand designs , whether based on prediction or on ideals, and instead advocates for gradual approaches with good feedback from reality: piecemeal engineering.
I am mostly pointing out how judgement works. Distrust is the main driver of critical thinking. It should be a general skill which can be applied to things you trust but people are spontaneously critical about what they distrust. Th
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there is a difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
it is the difference between pre-wwI weapons and wwI weapons.
facebook takes everything that is powerful about previous forms of media, but industrializes it on a mass scale.
facebook collects thousands of points of data on every person using it.
it sells this information to third parties, if not directly, then it sells influence gained by this data through its advertising sales program.
this means that they have gone beyond the level of influence by newspapers, radio, and tv stations. none of those former medi
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Social media, spearheaded by the Facebook, discovered how little people would be willing to take in trade for their privacy.
Interconnectivity and ephemeral inclusion are the new magic beans.
and for those unaware... (Score:4, Insightful)
The same Mark Zuckerberg who has been setting policies at Facebook to supposedly protect our elections has recently pumped a quarter billion dollars into the "battleground" state of Wisconsin on the side of Democrat-aligned orgs dedicated to voter turnout. He's not helping the GOP with voter turnout, just the Dems. We're all supposed to be concerned by tens of thousands of dollars in 2016 Facebook and Google ads (many of which were in Russian and would not have influenced any Americans)...
Russians have tried to meddle in EVERY American election since shortly after the Russian Revolution a century ago. Democrat hero Senator Ted "the Lion of the Senate" Kennedy even directly appealed to them in a letter in 1984 for help defeating president Reagan. Billionaire globalist tech sociopaths interfering in elections is a NEW phenomenon and on an entirely different level - most Americans were wary of Russia, but most are completely trusting of the tech titans, most of who are rather openly left wing. Indeed, many of them are rather tight with various Chinese interests and staff their companies with large numbers of non-US-citizens even as they affect American politics.
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Democrat hero Senator Ted "the Lion of the Senate" Kennedy even directly appealed to them in a letter in 1984 for help defeating president Reagan.
Trump asked them to hack the DNC and release it to defeat Hillary. The DNC was hacked and the data released. Chirps from the GOP.
Re: I will get fooled again... (Score:2)
You are right of course. The difference is now that foreign powers can use national budgets to push their interests invisably on internet platforms like Facebook. It got far worse.
Re:I will get fooled again... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I think you're missing the point here.
The problem is that Facebook actively tries to recruit the general public into extremist groups; I've seen them touted to me myself despite the fact I have very little on my profile and have never posted anything that could remotely imply an interest in that. When I've experimented to see how seriously they take their own policies and reported said pages they refuse to act no matter how much you push and how far down their complaints rabbit hole you go.
The fact is that the mainstream media for all their flaws and partisanship certainly never directed people to join the far right or Islamic state like Facebook does because they knew if they did people would stop buying their paper and outlets would stop stocking it. Facebook continues to do this because there's no alternative; stupidly it was allowed to buy Instagram and ISPs would face merry hell if they "refused to stock" Facebook by blocking it.
This is why you have an army of middle-aged stay at home mom types believing the anti-vaxxer rhetoric, because if Facebook pushes those people towards an anti-vaxxer group before you know it that bored innocent middle aged mom is suddenly falling down a rabbit hole of promises of secret knowledge; they become an extremist, and Facebook gets shit loads of money because mom, who was just looking at the latest baby pics for 5 minutes every week, is now a 4 hour a day anti-vaccine trolling extremist.
So this isn't simply about newspapers pushing partisan agendas, it's about Facebook radicalising people into extreme views for profit. It's creating far right terrorists, Islamic terrorists, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and so on for profit and creating fake policies to pretend that's not the case. That's significantly worse than what the mainstream media has ever done.
Mark Zuckerberg is the Abu Hamza of the 2010s and 2020s, and if he thinks he's sovereign then well, we should treat him like we did sovereign nations that supported extremism in the 00s. Maybe it's time to hold him accountable for the terrorism he's signing people up to for money if that's what he wants?
MSNBC is a Disinfo Operation (Score:2, Insightful)
The examples of propaganda on all the big news outlets are abundant and readily available. These are the people and organizations that have perpetrated crimes against humanity in the form of shutdowns, mass sensorship, deplatforming, cancel culture, big brother orthodoxy impersonating medical science. Now they're growing a tantrum because they can't have a complete monopoly on your mind. These are the authoritarians
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If the majority disagrees with your beliefs it could be because of a global conspiracy against you. Or just maybe it's worth considering the possibility that you have been misinformed.
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Re: MSNBC is a Disinfo Operation (Score:2)
My comment wasn't specific to msnbc.
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The two wolves and the sheep voted and the majority agrees with you!
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If the majority disagrees with your beliefs it could be because of a global conspiracy against you. Or just maybe it's worth considering the possibility that you have been misinformed
So you're saying the global conspiracy has finally misinformed absolutely everyone else?!? See -- I KNEW I was right about that!!
Me being wrong is just too unbelievable.
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It is a very common idea that if many people think the same thing it is either right or a conspiracy. It is wrong but many believe it so it must be that there is a conspiracy behind it to make everyone believe it.
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They do and they will continue to as long as the US has the largest military, and the USD is the world's reserve currency.
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I regret to inform you that large numbers of conservative leaning voters in foriegn countries think that Mr Trump is deranged, dangerous and an enemy of his former friends. Left leaning voters think that he is a fascist dictator in the making. So you might have the reserve currency and be capable of starting proxy wars all over the world against China but we don't like you. Also Facebook is being used to subvert our societies by spreading hatred and encouraging conflict by anyone with a pile of cash who thi
Re: MSNBC is a Disinfo Operation (Score:2)
I am from the test of the world and that sums it up. The mildest view on things you can get is that Trump is a serious thread to the US.
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It’s much more than Europe, pretty much the entire world thinks the Trump base is fucked in the head. Lake Travis, well done the perfect analogy of Trumpers, next they will be bleating about boater supression.
Re: MSNBC is a Disinfo Operation (Score:2)
Serious question - do you not include fox news in that list?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You can see the violence escalating with both sides being afraid of the other. We now have two incidents of protesters getting shot, and in both cases the shooters are claiming self defence. Both sides see it as a far for their culture and their very survival.
Of course anyone who benefits from this will keep stirring it up. Russia, clickbait "news" sites, politicians looking to get re-elected, accelerationists, all kinds of people.
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I would like clear evidence, not that it happened, because of course it did, just like I am certain the USA has tried to manipulate other countries elections as well, I would like so see clear evidence that manipulation had a significant impact on those elections. Just because someone posted on Facebook does not mean that a significant portion of the population believed it.
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Well here's a fun article showing that Russia has a hand in boosting the Qanon conspiracy theories, which a lot of people definitely do believe to the point of turning up places armed for citizens arrest:
https://www.mercurynews.com/20... [mercurynews.com]
Unfortunately I don't know if Mercury News is a "media bullshit outlet" or not, you'll have to ask OP I guess.
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Just because someone posted on Facebook does not mean that a significant portion of the population believed it.
Hey, half of the voters believed that trump is not part of the established elite and serves for the common good of americans. By now i'm pretty sure it's clear that you can make any percentage of the american population believe anything you want.
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The actual evidence itself.
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Indeed it may not be the Russians - because at this point anyone with a pile of cash and an agenda can incite violence and attack America just by injecting hatred into Facebook. ISIS, Iran, Left wing South American leaders, China, North Korea - any of them could organize a civil war in your cities and laugh at you as you burn. You see just having the global reserve currency and a military larger than the next five biggest militaries combined won't save you if we can just get you to fight each other. Good lu
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I'll count that as the most demented post of the day , just because it captures american lunacy so well.
The US doesn't have real enemies. These countries are insubordinate and have to be crushed before they become a problem. That is not enemy in the classical sense. In the US it is standard practice that any country, however small and insignificant, which tries to get a minimum of independence will be represented as having only one mindless ambition: destroying America. And every problem will be represented
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A real enemy can be insubordinate. Muslim nations convinced that Sharia law is the goal of all righteous people are enemies of the free will and individual liberties of so-called "Western' thought. So are devout Marxists, convinced that capitalism should be outlawed so that all resources can be re-allocated to eliminate group differences.
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Yes. The weakness of the argument is : how much weight does it have. What are you going to say, you have to fight it there so you don't have to fight it here? Sunni extremism has generally been an ally. Occasionally something goes wrong , which is a nuisance but also an opportunity for 'muscular foreign policies'. There were a few hundred AQ people in 2001 when it was considered a huge problem. Now Libya, Syria, Iraq were secular states which urgently needed to be overthrown, there are hundreds of times mo
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Yes, the Russians are that smart. But masses of people are stupid.
The troll farms are well known: the names of the companies, where they are, the people who run them and the campaigns they have orchestrated.
Just google "Russian troll farm" and you will find many, many articles about them.
Their tactic is not to support one side or the other, but to sow discord.
Here is a summary of some actions taken by one of them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Russian news channel RT isn't innocent either, and often q
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Key word: substantial. A big driver of conspiracy thinking is 'tip of the iceberg' extrapolations. You see something tiny and if you are set up to see Russia as an evil powerful adversary then a tiny observation is treated as proof of something huge and malicious going on. The IRA was about a 50,000 $ project, half of which after the elections, many of the posts not related to politics. It should not even have been investigated. Bloomberg payed 300 million and got nowhere.
Re:Election night might be a disaster. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe people are fucking fed up with the Republican/Democrat duopoly and voted for Trump because they felt he was an outsider.
Just because cows get sick of voting for farmers who send them off to slaughter, doesn't mean it's a good idea for them to vote for the guy who runs a slaughterhouse, because he's not a farmer.
In case the analogy hasn't made it clear enough: people like Trump are exactly why we have the sort of problems we're experiencing in this country. They've used their money and influence to manipulate the political process to suit their agendas, because if democracy actually worked as intended, the 99% of us who aren't rich would make them pay their fair share.
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I'm not sure you understand your own analogy.
Cows get sick of voting for the farmers. They vote for the first guy who says farmers are bad, and it turns out he works in the slaughterhouse. So far so good. But the guy in the slaughterhouse is not the cause of the problems in the US. Are you saying he is different from the farmers or the same thing?
The cows don't trust the farmers anymore. Instead of the farmers earning the trust they make a big noise about disinformation but even when they point out the othe
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Next time try reading the words I actually wrote, instead of making up some bullshit to support your argument. Our system of democracy is rigged so no actual outsiders can win - in either major party. Look at how quickly they shut down Pete when the voters didn't coronate Biden.
Anybody who believes they were supporting an "outsider" by voting for Trump was sold a false bill of goods. That has nothing to do whatsoever with the Clintons, unless you needed to dust out that old strawman before Halloween.
Re:Election night might be a disaster. (Score:4, Insightful)
Trump is a problem because he is a wannabe strongman, looks up to leaders like Putin, Duterte, Kim Jong-Un because of their "firmness", and acts as if strength and toughness are the highest virtues of life and public office. He lacks candor, selflessness, morality, and doesn't take responsibility for his own actions. Un-presidential is the nicest way of putting it. You could say a lot of the same about a lot of politicians, and in another life Trump as he is is just another "good businessman" that America is full of, but we shouldn't trust any of them with our highest office either. It's also kind of stupid to point fingers at the swamp when there's an alligator in the Oval Office.
What were your other impressions of the Soviet Union?
I was very unimpressed. Their system is a disaster. What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.
You mean firm hand as in China?
When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak as being spit on by the rest of the world"
https://www.playboy.com/read/p... [playboy.com]
Re:Election night might be a disaster. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think all these things are not exclusive.
People can be sick of the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats, not satisfied with the doctrinaire nature of either side. But the Russians can also contribute to polarization easily via social media.
point of the first amendment (Score:2)
Isn't the point of the first amendment to protect expression of ideas that the government doesn't approve of? Facebook itself makes very few statements. It is 'the people' who are using Facebook to express themselves.
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It is 'the people' who are using Facebook to express themselves.
How is it 'the people' when you can buy targeted propaganda campaigns on social media?
As far as i know 'the people' mostly consume information on platforms like facebook. Even trump re-tweets misinformation produced by external trolls. There are a lot of other factions besides 'the people' who inject the consumables into these platforms and 'the people' are yumming it up like it was christmas pudding.
The first amendment is actively being abused against the majority of the US population. What was it again
The New Facebook Interface Will Fix That (Score:4, Funny)
It's so absolutely horrible that once it's installed everyone will stop using the platform in disgust.
There! Problem solved!
misuse of tools (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone using Facebook for news is MISUSING THE PLATFORM. The equivalent of trying to cook your dinner with a hand grenade or trim your eyebrows with a lawnmower. Wrong tool for the job. And demanding that Facebook be more politically responsible is like demanding that a lawnmower be able to give you a much closer shave.
Facebook is for SOCIALIZING and nothing else. Not for news, not for factual information, not for thoughtful analysis. We have this whole thing called JOURNALISM that specializes in that, and Facebook doesn't give frick about journalistic standards in the slightest. People who get their politics from facebook are too far gone to salvage. They are sheep. Facebook will feed them a constant drip of what they already believe in order to.... repeat after me.... selll..... more..... ads.......
Facebook simply CANNOT be a part of the solution to our political problems. There is no point in discussing how to make them behave more responsibly. Zuckerberg gives absolutely no craps about this, no matter what he might say. His business is selling ads. Period.
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This is my problem with all this hysteria about fake news on Facebook, just because people see the posts on Facebook does it really mean that they are listening. I do use Facebook, maybe to contact a person I don't see often or find out a birthday, to me the feed is just irrelevant trash I can't remember the last time i looked at one.
If people are listening we need to educate people to realize the internet is full of trash, were anybody can post anything, if you don't like it go back to watching TV news and
they are listening, and obeying (Score:4, Interesting)
the thing about facebook marketing is that it is scientifically proven to modify behavior.
when you record thousands of data points on someone over a period of years, then patterns can be identified and messages can be targeted to that person, such that there is a high probability the person will take some action.
this was the whole point of hiring cambridge analytica. they had cracked the nut of psyops using mass surveillance, analytics, data science, machine learning, microtargeting, and the new tools of the new information landscape.
CA worked on brexit, they won, then they worked on Trump, Trump won. Both of these things were generally agreed to be impossible, but CA did it.
c.a. is closed now, but the techniques they used were not a secret. They are the 'new normal'.
Facebook is the biggest social network, but any social network will do, providing it gathers enough data to create masses of psychographic profiles that allow microtargeting and manipulation.
There are numerous articles and books about this.
Re: they are listening, and obeying (Score:2)
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Yes making hundreds of millions of people suddenly crititcally think is one option. Also, if you just write bug-free code you don't need QA, if you make people honest you don't need to lock your door or if you make people unselfish communism can work!
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just because people see the posts on Facebook does it really mean that they are listening
Polling shows that many are listening. They're also unwilling to accept "the Internet is full of trash" because they're listening to the trash declaring itself the only source of truth and everything else is "Fake News", or "all sides lie exactly the same, you can't know reality".
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This is all because people are trying to GET NEWS from an AD DELIVERY PLATFORM.
Ad delivery platforms have been the primary venue for news forever. Before the interwebs you had four primary news sources; "free" OTA TV networks with their nightly news broadcasts sponsored by advertisers every few minutes, "free" radio broadcasts sponsored by advertisers at similar intervals, newspapers festooned with ads and periodicals festooned with ads. The fact that Facebook is funded by advertising isn't particularly novel.
The problem is that Facebook isn't as aggressive as Twitter at suppressi
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At Facebook, the ad department runs the whole thing and they have no news department. So it's nothing but all ads, all the time. Very different.
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Ad delivery platforms have been the primary venue for news forever.
Sure thing, but things changed a bit when 'Ads for the purpose of news' became 'News for the purpose of ads'.
Re:misuse of tools (Score:4, Interesting)
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I get news through Fb regularly, and I don't see ads. Just like here! If the news looks like bullshit, then I check to see if it's bullshit before echoing it in any way. Just like here!
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Voter turnout is staggeringly low.
I live in the city that kicked off "DEFUND THE POLICE" and experienced the inevitable backslash.
Out of curiosity, I looked at the last city council election results. The very best level of turnout was in my ward, a whole 50%. It's literally the election with the most daily impact on where you live and where your vote counts the most (we even have ranked choice for city elections, so there's not even wasted votes). Yet the best turnout was only half of registered voters.
Mark Z should be emporer for life (Score:1)
It's just a freakin' website (Score:2)
People are going to have to stop being herdable like sheep, cause the AI and propaganda and deepfake sheepdogs are getting better all the time.
Disinformation a National Security Issue? (Score:3)
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" - CIA Director William Casey
Facebook is just another vector for misninformation - one that pretends to be not under state control because it fits in with the bullshit narratives.
You only need to look as far as the suppression of evidence being brought forward by Palestinians on Israel's crimes against humanity by Israel's embedded Facebook editors to see Facebook is just another surveillance/disinformation tool.
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What kind of disinformation? Censorship/suppressing(through myriads of ways) is not directly a way to spread disinformation and as far as I can see the main methods for controlling social media are negative: suppression/ deranking/demonetising. All kinds of harassments, accounts being temporarily restricted for all kinds of reasons, random unfollowing of followers, links which cannot be followed, the list is endless. But it is always suppression.
Some people are ... (Score:2, Insightful)
... really, really afraid of free speech.
Personally I find Facebook et al annoying for promoting left wing drivel. But I'm an adult, so I either ignore it or add my own speech.
Get rid of it. (Score:2)
Re:What a campaign (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook was a huge issue back when Trump was just a TV show guy who inherited some hotels. Facebook has only become more of a threat to democracy since then and would be the same threat regardless of who is or is not president.
The world has never seen a brainwashing tool like facebook.
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The world has never seen a brainwashing tool like facebook
It's not just a facebook issue. It's also YouTube and any other content-management network that uses an algorithm for recommendations.The algorithm is designed to get more clicks so that users spend more time on the site. The way to get more clicks and more activity just happens to be funneling users towards more extreme and divisive content within their respective sphere of interest. Our brains are wired like that, and those content delivery systems take full advantage. They radicalize us to get more views
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This is a story about facebook.
Are you the same guy that keeps spamming with the nazi ascii art?
Re: What a campaign (Score:5, Interesting)
The people spamming the nazi ascii art are simply encouraging readers to increase their moderation filters so they can then down-mod the posts they disagree with and make them invisible to those readers. It's a typical brigading tactic universally used by one side.
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it's amazing that only registered users can post as anonymous cowards - and of course they post irrelevant crap like Nazis because you know, we gotta keep pretending Nazis still matter - not the people acting like Nazis today.
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People who bitch about Trump never had their fucking legs blown off with an IED in one of Obama's/Bush wars.
Well, we certainly know that no Trump ever has, or likely ever will, don't we?
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Your boat didn't sink yesterday, did it? I heard the Battle of Lake Travis was a doozie.
Re: Bolton hates Trump for not starting any wars (Score:2)
Re:Bolton hates Trump for not starting any wars (Score:4, Insightful)
And Obama was also the first to draw down troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which were wars he initiated. Obama was never pro-war, but he was practical about it. He knew we need our allies, and he knew the U.S. needed to show leadership on the world stage. Trump has completely abandoned the U.S.'s role as a leader against movements and countries that are anti-democratic and anti-Western. He has weakened our relationships with our allies and for some mysterious reason only really seems interested in strengthening the relationship with Russia, the one country and the one leader (Putin) that he has never attacked on Twitter, even after the opposition leader to Putin was poisoned just last week. How curious.
Is this what you mean by TDS? Observation of Trump's actions and simple logic?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Never mind ISIS, literally the worst state agent since Nazi Germany went away, becoming estabilished while they knowingly did nothing because as a top US oficial said in a leaked audio, they believed "ISIS would bring Bashar Al Assad to the negotiating table".
Re: Bolton hates Trump for not starting any wars (Score:2)
Re: What a campaign (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: What a campaign (Score:2)
How about going though that one point at a time, because all together it's impossible to talk about. I never saw Obama commended for using Facebook manipulation tactics. Do you have a source for that?
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]
https://www.infoworld.com/arti... [infoworld.com]
https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]
https://www.scmp.com/yp/learn/... [scmp.com]
There are hundreds of other stories. Obama was celebrated for it.
Re: (Score:1)
They think burning churches and beheading statues of Jesus is going to win them votes in small town america.
That is how disconnected from the rest of us they are.
Re: (Score:2)
You guys are vicious.
Still better than being complete morons.
Also, person X being unable to handle criticism doesn't make other people vicious; it just makes person X a crybaby, for any value of X.
Re: What a campaign (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> Echo chambers have a much more difficult time existing
If only this were true. Facebook tends to channel its subscribers into quite small ideological echo chambers. I sometimes wish that David Brin's suggested policy in his book "Earth" of needing to read content _outside_ of one's special interests to keep the right to vote could be meaningfully enforced.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Every social network is a pox on society. Your crazy uncle was sending everyone conspiracy theories and other weird shit by e-mail before he knew how to use Facebook, and was down at the pub gossiping before that.
The difference is that Facebook keeps track of the crazy and tells the professional trolls just who's most susceptible to their particular lies.
Re: (Score:2)
That swings too much the other way. Social media has its own serious problems it's just that people in power are only interested in the part where social media interfere with the official storyline.
Fighting disinformation is censorship 2.0 . More subtle, more advanced, but the same thing and who said censorship 1.0 did not serve to suppress things which were wrong? It did that too.
Re: What a campaign (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well at least that's different to the standard nazi flag spam.
I do agree with you about paypal. Best to stay as far away from them as possible.
Re: (Score:2)
Well.... don't just bitch and shrug and give up.
For starters, register a domain and set up an email server. Then you can set your own rules and have as many email addresses as you'd like.
Actually, back up a step. Find yourself an oldish computer. Something cheap. Stick a couple of TB of disk in there, maybe a small SSD for the OS. Install Linux on it. Or get a VPS if you don't want a box running 24/7. Cheap as chips.
Now you got your email server set up, maybe do OwnCloud or some other sort of file /