Former Google CEO Calls Social Networks 'Amplifiers for Idiots' (bloomberg.com) 98
Former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said the "excesses" of social media are likely to result in greater regulation of internet platforms in the coming years. From a report: Schmidt, who left the board of Google's parent Alphabet in 2019 but is still one of its largest shareholders, said the antitrust lawsuit the U.S. government filed against the company on Tuesday was misplaced, but that more regulation may be in order for social networks in general. "The context of social networks serving as amplifiers for idiots and crazy people is not what we intended," Schmidt said at a virtual conference hosted by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. "Unless the industry gets its act together in a really clever way, there will be regulation."
[...] Schmidt also argued Google's massive search business -- the target of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit -- continues to be so successful because people choose it over competitors, not because it uses its size to block smaller rivals. "I would be careful about these dominance arguments. I just don't agree with them," Schmidt said. "Google's market share is not 100%."
[...] Schmidt also argued Google's massive search business -- the target of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit -- continues to be so successful because people choose it over competitors, not because it uses its size to block smaller rivals. "I would be careful about these dominance arguments. I just don't agree with them," Schmidt said. "Google's market share is not 100%."
This, form the "adult supervision" at Google (Score:3)
Given how Google acts these days, if Eric Schmidt was the "adult supervision" while Google was "growing up", then he definitively was a shitty "parent".
Re: This, form the "adult supervision" at Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: This, form the "adult supervision" at Google (Score:1)
Idiots are annoying, even if they have an amplifier.
Selfish and amoral people with political agendas and resources pose an existential threat to mankind.
Eric Schmidt is the latter.
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'Google is an amplifier for idiots'. Well who owns that amplifier, who runs that amplifier, who controls that amplifier, Alphabet, who are the idiots, easy the corporate executives of Google and Alphabet, totally controlled by ego and greed driven stupidity.
Google bragging how green they are, whilst being the number one advertising corporation on that planet, the veritable HIGH PRIESTS OF OVER CONSUMPTION, pushing it and pushing, all day every day, targeted at you, manipulating your thoughts and desires, m
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It's just a question of who is behind the idiocy, who benefits from it.
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The problem is how much mainstream media is just reporting of what happened on social media. It's like amplifying the bullshit to people who weren't engaged with the social media amplification.
I'm continually surprised at how often people want to start conversations about what happened on social media.
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I was just going to say this! Kudos.
Re:This, form the "adult supervision" at Google (Score:5, Interesting)
When Eric Schmidt was at Google, he mocked people demanding privacy protections - saying "privacy is over". Then he got mad when someone published his home address on the web.
I don't really take Eric Schmidt seriously, although I think this particular comment of his is spot on. A certain statement about "a stopped clock" comes to mind...
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Except this is a digital clock that is never right when it is stopped.
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It could be like the old VCR time displays, which often defaulted to flashing "12:00" incessantly until/unless they got set by someone.
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Pedantic alert! Actually that is a correct function of a non stopped digital clock. That is a feature for folks who can't read the manual to set the time.
Nice try though.
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You're trying to render him an idiot, but you're just not being fair to the man. When people are "pro guns" and then get shot does this not make them into idiots either. It makes them into victims.
And when you're against anonymity and somebody deliberately and out of spite posts your home address to endanger you and your family, all while being anonymous themselves, then it doesn't make you wrong or an idiot either. It makes you a victim of malicious and evil bastards.
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posts your home address to endanger you and your family
Shit man, posting an address endangers me and my family? I thought the USA was a first world country.
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Given how Google acts these days, if Eric Schmidt was the "adult supervision" while Google was "growing up", then he definitively was a shitty "parent".
So was and is damn near every CEO birthing/screwing/corrupting every other mega-corp. Parenting? From those we have literally stereotyped accurately as psychopaths? Uh, and expect what exactly?
Perhaps we should first stop assuming Greed gives a shit about anything but Greed. As soon as the bank account hit seven figures at Google, that whole Don't Be Evil thing flew out the window of the corporate Ferrari faster than you can say "PRISM"
Oh and let's also stop wondering who the true "parent" of a free dem
Book Title (Score:2)
"Not what we intended" (Score:1)
Google is a publicly traded corporation beholden to share holders and needs to provide profit to them via legal means. That's all that is important.
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Google is a publicly traded corporation beholden to share holders and needs to provide profit to them via legal means. That's all that is important.
Don't forget what the product they sell is... YOU.
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Amplifiers (Score:5, Funny)
Morans (Score:2)
They go to 99.99995.
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AMP was on 103.3 here, not 99.9/100....
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6 nines? That's just... evil.
Social media doesn't make many idiots (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is, much like nuclear power, there is a real risk that 1 idiot influences 3 normals who can each turn idiot, who each in turn influence 3 more normals that can turn into an idiot..
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So what you're saying is that social media is a pyramid scheme? That explains everything!
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Maybe they were susceptable to it in the first place, but without Facebook they would not have become QAnon believers.
Re:Social media doesn't make many idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
but without Facebook they would not have become QAnon believers.
^^^^THIS
Yeah, Facebook is the gateway to every crackpot belief there is, from chemtrails to 'zebras-don't-exist', it's all there.
QAnon is just the latest thing for the deeply deranged, gullible, and/or ignorant. It's amazing how the QTards keep believing even after 'prediction' after 'prediction' from 'Q' fails to come true.
Re: Social media doesn't make many idiots (Score:2)
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but without Facebook they would not have become QAnon believers.
^^^^THIS
Yeah, Facebook is the gateway to every crackpot belief there is, from chemtrails to 'zebras-don't-exist', it's all there.
^^^^OLD NEWS
It was "all there" 40 years ago too. Saw it time I went through a grocery store checkout isle. Every bullshit peddler you could think of, with the National Enquirer leading the pack. Didn't even bother to hide the cover stories either. (No one thought of the snowflakes back then other than the weatherman.)
So, the Weekly World of Bullshit went off and found a Twitter feed hooked up to the High-Frequency-Trading machine we call Social Media, and now Bullshit is peddled everywhere. So what? T
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It was "all there" 40 years ago too.
40 years ago you had to subscribe to some idiot's newsletter, actually pay for shit with money.
Facebook facilitates the instant sharing of shit between over 1 billion people. Comparing now to 40 years ago is truly an example of failing to understand how the world around you has changed.
Why is peddling bullshit so damn effective it's now dangerous?
I'm not sure why you think no one wants to talk about this. Basically everyone is talking about this very question. It's so effective now because the barrier to doing so is non-existent. And no, it's nothing even remotely sim
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No, it makes trolls more visible, which creates more idiots than there would be.
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No, it makes trolls more visible, which creates more idiots than there would be.
To be fair, there is a lot of overlap in those two groups.
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There are plenty of quiet idiots who still vote and F things up because of that.
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It gives everyone an equal voice. It turns out that combined voice is cancer.
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It doesn't give everyone an equal voice. Leave aside temporarily people who opt out because for some reason having a voice means that you have to opt into every aspect of your life being spied on. People pay for promotions from people who got popular already, in an effort to become become popular to get paid. Or they pay for artificial likes to simulate popularity to get promoted by algorithms. Or a million other reasons that it's not a meritocracy of ideas.
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It doesn't give everyone an equal voice. Some people have a million followers, some have none. Being already rich and/or famous really helps.
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Not everyone is an idiot. I follow quite some dubious groups and channels on facebook and youtube and the likes, for me it's partly entertainment and partly academic interest.
The fact that i follow such stuff does not make me a 'believer'. It's more curiosity - i like to know what keeps people busy. And while mainstream opinion is easy to catch, it's also more often than not a very single-sided story. If you want to counter misinformation, then the first step is to analyze it and see what motivates those pe
Re: Social media doesn't make many idiots (Score:2)
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Personally, my favorite Facebook group is "Dad Jokes". After that, things go down hill pretty fast... Not that "Dad Jokes" is much of a hill.. But that's about all I have time to waste on...
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The problem is, that by providing them with an audience you fund the crackpots. Plus, you help legitimize them in the minds of the stupid, who see all those subscribers.
What I think that many people overlook is that the majority of the true believers of these wild conspiracy theories are people who are mentally unwell. People like Alex Jones exploit people with serious mental issues who have, on multiple occasions, become dangers to society.
Unfortunately, it's difficult to think about how our actions on the
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It just makes the idiots much more visible. .
Yea, the idiots where out in force back in my FIDO net days too. They where around long before the internet, Facebook and Google..
Actually, if you think about it, we've had idiots among us for pretty much the entire length of recorded history.
John Wayne was correct.. "Life is hard, being stupid makes it harder." To which I add, "Social media puts stupidity on parade..."
Re: Social media doesn't make many idiots (Score:1)
I was just thinking that the wing nuts have always been around. Fidonet, usenet and the other nets we read back then, including CompuServe, there was always a lot of garbage we had to sift through. Social media these days seems to be highlighting the garbage.
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One thing that surprised me when I got out of school and got into business, was the degree to which groupthink is the default mode in the real world.
It's not for nothing that juries are discouraged from taking straw polls, because virtually every time I've been in a business meeting dealing with a tough or controversial decision, and a straw poll has been taken, the meeting immediately shifted gears into rationalizing the majority opinion. The number of people who stick to their guns when they're in the mi
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Don't get me wrong -- if everyone around you agrees with you, you really should consider the possibility that you *are* wrong.
There, fixed that for you...
Oh wait. Maybe just ALWAYS consider the fact you may be wrong. I know I have a "90% ratio" with most things, say math. 90% of the time I get it right, 10% is just wrong. Other people's empirical knowledge gets even worse. The only way to get better is reanalysis and retry ad infinium. Oh, and question everything.
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1 idiot influences 3 normals who can each turn idiot
Are they the Zombidiots?
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I think you're giving nuclear power a bad name there buddy.
Circles (Score:5, Insightful)
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I bet he only says that because the only social network that google had some success in was orkut
Not really. There's a difference between saying something is bad and monetizing said something. Or do you think people who work for Philip Morris actually believe cigarettes don't cause cancer?
Actually the dichotomy between his statement and Google's actions is no different to the shirt I am wearing literally right now. It says "Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty, murder."
'Amplifiers for Idiots' he says (Score:2)
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"If money is speech, the wealthy have a lot more of it than you."
The problem is, anything that contradicts conventional wisdom or approved may be considered idiotic or perhaps even mentally ill by the authorities or the mob.
But then... "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." -- various attributions
Even Oprah supported the Iraq invasion. People like Scott Ritter were roundly discredited even though they were right.
"A society cannot be bot
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Bloomberg isn't idiots... they're a bunch of expensive-to-read journalists. If you could read what they're putting out, you'd know about the stock market well enough to make money.
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Bloomberg isn't idiots... they're a bunch of expensive-to-read journalists. If you could read what they're putting out, you'd know about the stock market well enough to make money.
Nonsense.
No one, and I mean no one can tell you with any certainty where the stock market will be in an hour, or a month, or a year. The only way to make money for sure in the stock market is to cheat with shit like "dark money pools" and nano-second trading.
If Joe Sixpack makes money in the stock market, it's either by luck or by unwittingly making the same moves as the big money traders.
The stock market is thoroughly penetrated and gamed and no longer has any connection to reality. Read "The Flash Boys" i
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Being able to predict the stock market and being able to make money in the stock market as an individual investor making medium-to-long term investments (1 week and up) are different things.
Investor's Business Daily offers a technique for buying and selling individual stocks. It's moderately difficult, requires several hours a week of intelligent work, and requires judgement calls in the reading of graphs. I followed IBD's method for several years and found it to be significantly better than the general mar
So, Google+ (Score:2)
Is/was an amplifier for idiots ?
It is still around, by the way ?
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It's gone. Google+ was an attempt to imitate Facebook, but it never built up enough network, and security was hard to manage. If only Facebook would shutdown too because they've got the same problems.
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Google+ committed suicide. They went with a "real name" policy and in the event of any violation, real or imagined, they nuked all of your google related accounts including youtube and gmail. Many decided it just wasn't worth the risk.
By the time Google backpedaled, it was too late.
So glad that advertisements only spread wisdom! (Score:5, Funny)
So glad that Google only sent benevolent, educational, wisdom-rich messages to everybody!
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To be fair Google does a lot more vetting and blocks a lot more abuse than their competitors. Facebook is notorious for it.
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I doubt he'd feel bad. There's a difference between acknowledging something is toxic to humanity and monetizing it. I'm sure cigarette company CEOs are all well aware that their product causes cancer too. They don't feel bad, they feel rich.
Freedom (Score:2, Insightful)
But what is it actually?
Social media are just outlets for the general public to express themselves.
This is just an elitist calling the general public idiots: "How dare you question my paid-for 'news'. My paid-for advertising. You idiots are supposed to listen and believe ME, about everything. I'm your master! You morons need to do and think what *I* say!"
That's all I hear when I read this schlock. He's upset the commoner "pleb" has a voice now. He's not the only one who's thinking this way. Seems there's a
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But the general public is idiots.
(The same can be said for a lot of elitists, too.)
Re:Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
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There used to be some saying about defending the rights of those we disagree with. Oh, and liberty not ending until the tip of my nose...
But it's 2020. That can't still be relevant can it?
After all we must defend our right to jab vaccines up the noses of the unwilling. Oh wait...
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Peace. (Score:1)
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Here here.
Of course, some of us ACT like idiots from time to time. (I know I sure do darn it) Good thing we have the ability to learn from our mistakes, if we so choose.
Wisdom: The result of years and years of past mistakes remembered.
But ya, becoming blind to your own mistakes and thinking of others AS mistakes. That's not exactly constructive.
Former Google CEO Calls Social Networks 'Amplifier (Score:3)
Former Google CEO Calls Social Networks 'Amplifiers for Idiots'
... after failing at several attempts to build a social networking platform.
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They bought Youtube, which is not exactly a bastion of the high browed
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Hey just because we think something is bad doesn't mean we won't try and monetize it.
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those grapes are probably sour anyway. But not as sour as the time an engineer made a popular internal project named "grape" and everyone in HR kept parsing it "gRape"
Funny with all the stock (Score:3)
We used to only amplify smart people... (Score:3)
On Facebook, you get what your friends posted, plus mixed in schemes to get your attention and make money, and there's no journalistic-influence.
On Twitter, you define who you wanted to hear from, then get a mix of news from pros and friends, plus ads based on what you like.
Here on Slashdot, they amplify editors who find stories from responsible journalists... then open the discussion on a point-based scheme where crap gets modded down and good gets modded up.
On the Web 1.0 sites and pre-web services like Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve, you used to get the AP Wire speaking authoritatively, plus discussions and chats on many things from moderated and censored forums.
Before there was computers, only those who could control a press could publish.
Before there was a press... there wasn't very many smart people.
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This gives me an idea: the numeric ranger should be expanded so it goes to 11.
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Then how will anyone score over 9000?
I agree: 'amplfier for idiots and crazies' (Score:2)
Idiots lives matter! (Score:1)
Feeling soooo woke this morning.
Lunatics not idiots (Score:2)
The problem is the outright lunatics not the idiots, those prepared to spend hours everyday copying and pasting nonsense to fool the idiots, while normal people get on with their lives. It is not idiots that turn the nonsense into extremist acts like mass shooting, bombings and terrorism.
Social Credit (Score:1)
Even Slashdot is an Amplifier (Score:2)
Every social media platform is an amplifier - for both idiots and their counterparts. This commenting mechanism in Slashdot is amplifying my comment - you're reading this, right? I could easily be an idiot, a whack-job, a political operative with an agenda. Maybe a stupid agenda, or an evil one. Could be a good one too.
My actual evil agenda is to consume your time with this rambling comment, thus distracting you from posting your own comment - which results in fewer wonderfully truthful and insightful c
Not misplaced (Score:2)
Takes one to know one (Score:2)
Childish, yes. But I am tired of these 'experts on everything' who have their own agenda.
He is stating the obvious, scince the public has a bunch of idiots, but there are plenty of smart people as well who have very good ideas to share.
SM is one big town hall, and yes, yokles show up at the meetings too.
I should not have given this idiot so much of a piece of my mind, whatever. In a perfect world, he would be scrubbing toilets and polishing sinks, where he can't do any real famage.
Re: Takes one to know one (Score:2)
damage :\
Amplifier for idiots (Score:1)
Said by the person whose company created Google+ (for those who don't remember it any more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org])
Given Google+ bombed (Score:1)
Not a big Schmidt fan.... but (Score:2)
After reading many of the posts on Facebook , I think he's right. In the way that your cranky old foul mouthed,ex-Marine uncle is right. You just kinda hate to admit it. In the 10+ years I've been on facebook I have yet to see signs of intelligent life.
Everyone (Score:1)
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Social media can be an amplifier for everyone - including idiots.
Can be, isn't. It's like running for office. From a school board member, county official, State official or national official. We all hope whoever is running our governments is smart, effective and with ethics. Unfortunately when you're in those positions twits come out. Start pelting you with accusations, insults and so on whenever you say or do something they don't like. Rest assured - you will say or do something they don't like. The ultimate being kicked in the crotch every day job is the POTUS. This on
Do the math (Score:2)
The average village of 600 has at least 15 to 20 " idiots and crazies", so the total number of this part of the general population with internet access has to number in the 10's of millions. Factor in obsession and excessive free time (likely due to small or non-existent in-person social networks), they are much more likely to be active on-line than the average non-fixated resident.
While this is obvious now, as we see the excesses, for whatever reason, this reality was not part of the discussion back in th
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Translation: (Score:2)
"I'm so super smart my message is being carried by bloomberg, and not some moron amplifier social media. Peasants should know their place"