Are a Few People Ruining the Internet For the Rest of Us? 93
A small fraction of hyperactive social media users generates the vast majority of toxic online content, according to research by New York University psychology professor Jay Van Bavel and colleagues Claire Robertson and Kareena del Rosario. The study found that 10% of users produce roughly 97% of political tweets, while just 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news.
Twelve accounts known as the "disinformation dozen" created most vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic, the research found. In experiments, researchers paid participants to unfollow divisive political accounts on X. After one month, participants reported 23% less animosity toward other political groups. Nearly half declined to refollow hostile accounts after the study ended, and those maintaining healthier newsfeeds reported reduced animosity 11 months later. The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.
Twelve accounts known as the "disinformation dozen" created most vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic, the research found. In experiments, researchers paid participants to unfollow divisive political accounts on X. After one month, participants reported 23% less animosity toward other political groups. Nearly half declined to refollow hostile accounts after the study ended, and those maintaining healthier newsfeeds reported reduced animosity 11 months later. The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.
Busy (Score:4)
Delusions of solutions (in 3D!) (Score:2)
I bet I don't get the Funny and the FP was too empty, so I'm sure it will be moderated deeply insightful.
Actually my joke is that three is far too few dimensions. Does anyone know of a website with deep moderation? Many dimensions and reactions to comments will reflect back to the poster along the corresponding dimensions. Imagine a virtual circle of good behavior?
Then look at the Web and despair.
There's a perverse advantage in collapsing things to a single dimension. Whatever the decision, it can be made b
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Imagine a virtual circle of good behavior?
Just a moment.
Yep. I see Communist China.
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There are a lot of sites without toxic blather, where you're not the product. They behave well. Sometimes they're cranky, more often, useful and amazingly useful.
Consider the many sites surrounding the groups.io platform for starters. They're not the only ones. Some are moderated into numbness, and others are loosely moderated yet fun and useful.
Social media only devolves into the abyss when you're the product.
This isn't really a surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
And it's also about 95% certain that most or all of those source accounts are information / social warfare efforts run by nation state actors.
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I think its equally likely that its privately funded by wealthy elites that do it to keep the masses fighting with each other. This seems to be an issue that transcends national interests and specific borders
Re: This isn't really a surprise (Score:2)
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I think its equally likely that its privately funded by wealthy elites that do it to keep the masses fighting with each other.
That's the same thing, though.
This seems to be an issue that transcends national interests and specific borders
Yes, absolutely, that's how Trump can be working with foreign dictators with whom he has nothing else in common but money* and power.
* Yeah, it looks a lot like Trump was worse than broke (in a shitload of debt, that is) before he became president again and leveraged that to collect bribes. But he still had enough money in his little hands, even if it wasn't actually his, for that to still make sense.
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We know for a plain jane fact that Russia has been waging an info-war against the west, attempting to divide both left and right parties and supporting the extremes within both, since 2013 at a minimum. China runs a lower-key effort, mainly focused on keeping America from paying too much attention to China.
Given the number of rich pedophiles involved in Epstein's sordid rape island, is there really any doubt that someone - some Trumpist, some MI5er prodded or blackmailed by Prince A
History (Score:2)
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I'm pretty sure I predicted this about 5 years ago and was modded down for it.
Old news (Score:3)
Yes, thank you we already knew this. It also implies that there are at least as few, very likely fewer, actual people perpetrating all of the toxicity and divisiveness.
Now, dealing with the problem brings to mind a quote from the TV series Person of Interest:
Kill 100 people at random, nothing much changes. But kill the right 100 people...
Re: Old news (Score:2)
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Kill 100 people at random, nothing much changes. But kill the right 100 people...
We really only need to kill a certain 13% to bring back a thriving high trust society.
The first people against the wall should be all the people who think you can kill your way to a thriving high trust society.
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The first people against the wall should be all the people who think you can kill your way to a thriving high trust society.
You certainly cannot, but it's unclear how you can get past the being attacked by people who are trying to kill you stage without doing some of it. I'd love a nonviolent solution, but not if it gets me killed in the process of making the attempt. I'm willing to risk death to some degree, because life is a risk, but most of us have limits.
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
And these sociopathic assholes have names: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Shou Zi Chew (CEO of TikTok), Steve Huffman, etc...
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The problem is that a social network is a natural evolution of hyperconnected personal devices that are everywhere across the planet. It's something that is going to occur at some point. You can't unsqueeze that toothpaste.
The more pressing issue is that kind of network is the perfect weapon for a closed society to use against an open society, and we have a couple of toxic, authoritarian closed societies whose existence we've tolerated for way too long. They're the source of this problem on those networks.
T
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In the meantime, there's Mastodon. https://mastodon.social/ [mastodon.social]
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You sound as bad as the leaders of those nations. Maybe you should enlist.
Re: Yes (Score:1)
Even ignoring these countries, there is a shift towards authorianism happening in the US right now.
The system of checks and balances built in to the constitution is unfortunately failing.
Propaganda, online or in traditional broadcast media, has played a huge role in how we got to this point.
You just did not have it to the same extent 30 years ago, before Fox news was created in 1996, toxic AM talk shows, or social media algorithms that prioritize engagement over anything else, and contribute to radicalizing
Re: Yes (Score:2)
You only pick those countries because you live in the one that is and has been the worst of the lot.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
I think you need to add Sundar Pichai to the list. Youtube algorithms are also out of control.
Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Solution: don't use that shit!
I don't use that shit.
What gets posted there doesn't matter a fuck all to me.
Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't use that shit either, but it matters to me. That's what empathy is, ask your mom.
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I have empathy. I feel sorry for people that use that shit.
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What gets posted there doesn't matter a fuck all to me.
It should. I don't "use that shit" either, but the shit that gets posted there has killed people that I care about. It's also at least partially responsible for the rapidly developing police state and the newly constructed concentration camps, like "Alligator Auschwitz".
Solution: don't use that shit!
Ignoring the problem won't make it go away. We need real solutions. What those look like, I can't say, but I'm confident that algorithms designed to drive engagement will probably need to go, as will systems controlled by a single entity
Here's the rub. (Score:5, Insightful)
The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.
Yes, the algorithms favor toxicity, and amplify it because it tends to drive further engagement. This is the problem that emerges when the only metric you care about is further engagement, more eyeballs, and more controversy. The algorithms have been put in charge of society, because our "news" such as it is, tends to grab the most viral social media posts, which tend to be the most controversial and the most engaging, which are almost always the most toxic.
And people tend to stick with this toxicity once embroiled in it.
Re:Here's the rub. (Score:5, Informative)
"Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know the boys in the newsroom
got a running bet.
Get the weirdo on the set.
Give us dirty laundry."
(from "Dirty Laundry" by Don Henley)
However, I believe it works best on viewers that are not actually suffering.
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It's been going on before social media, too. Toxicity and sensationalism drive eyeballs to the news.
"If it bleeds, it leads!"
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I would expect that it would work even better on viewers who are in fact, suffering.
Just remember, Fauci was granted a pardon by President Biden. What crimes did he have to commit in order to deserve that pardon?
Re: Here's the rub. (Score:2)
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"What crimes did he have to commit in order to deserve that pardon?"
None. If fact, committing crimes never results in deserving a pardon. No one deserves a pardon more than an innocent man.
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What crimes did he have to commit in order to deserve that pardon?
The question you should be asking is what crimes he had to commit in order to need one, and the answer is none, because Cheeto Benito was returning to office and promising to attack him on specious bases.
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The difference between the 1990s and the Social Cancer era however, is the existence of gatekeeping.
When one needed a printing press or a television studio in order to access 1-to-many media, someone - generally speaking, someone with at least some iota of human decency and sanity - had to make the decision to hand you the megaphone. Nobody at a television studio was going to hand a microphone to a fucking Nazi. With th
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Yes, the algorithms favor toxicity, and amplify it because it tends to drive further engagement.
This is the standard explanation, but I am somewhat skeptical that this is the real one, at least for Xitter. Its utilization has been dropping and its owner does not care because the content the likes had taken over, by design (he is not trying to hide it). The "favor toxicity" because "engagement" is neutral as to the type of toxicity, but clearly the result is driving in one direction only. Xitter is toxic because its owner wants it to be, engagement be damned.
The Zuckerbot is more subtle but favors the
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Facebook just wants to get paid, Twitter wants power for its owner.
ruined long before social media (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'll remember than the next time Cloudflare has an oopsie and 15% of the Internet just disappears.
Yeah, I know you're talking about the hardware, but the Internet that people actually use has been increasingly moving towards centralization, especially since only a very small number of companies issue all those security certificates.
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Who decides what is fake? (Score:2, Insightful)
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Free speech is a contract between rational people of a common society who have agreed to resolve their debates peacefully.
Right now we have Russian, Chicom, and Iranian botnets spewing deliberate lies and disinfo ops into our discourse with the sole and specific aim of creating strife and chaos, to harm our society. Their ultimate goal is quite literally to crash our nation so that we are no longer in the way of their goals - goals which we work to stop them from accomplishing because those goals are vile t
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The problem is due to statements like this folks like yourself either don't know the difference or purposely conflate the difference between the two of those.
The conspiracy theorists think all of academia and and all of government are activists who can't be trusted, leaving you with either
a> actual corporate activists pretending to be academia with crazy perverse incentives
b> alternative media who have even worse perverse incentives to perpetuate this idea
So we are left in a world where nobody can be
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Withholding both sides of an argument has morality issues
Oh, the irony! Watch as the troll buck-yar, downvotes the other side of the argument.
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His bullshit is not new. He assumes no one pays attention or remembers anything he previously posted.
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The people against the covid vaccine were suppressed.
There was a metric fuckton of anti-vax shit. There were plenty of people here advocating chowing down of horse pills, presumably in the hope that a dose designed for a half ton herbivore wouldn't blow some part of their anatomy.
The rejection of debate
Dissenting views are not the same as a debate. Some people just want to be contrarian.
Re:Who decides what is fake? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was around during the pandemic too, and I remember encountering an overwhelming amount of anti-vaccine arguments. Not just here on slashdot, but in popular media too. What I saw didn't look like suppression at all, it looked like a desperate attempt at presenting facts in a way that ordinary people (non-scientists, non-staticians) could understand it, to counter all the lies that were being spread by malicious actors (and the innocently mislead).
I remember some of the utter nonsense that was proffered as science. One claim was that Covid was created by 5g towers. I saw another that everyone who got the vaccine would die in two years, no way to save them. Another said that the vaccine had tiny microchips in it to track or control people. These were utter nonsense but were effective in frightening people right out of rational behavior.
So, yes, there was a large and loud push to counter this misinformation, and there needed to be. And in some communities, it failed.
Re:Who decides what is fake? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who is the supreme arbiter of what is fact and not?
A statement of fact (rather than of opinion) is true if the statement aligns with reality and false if it does not. It is merely the state of the universe that determines what is fact and what is fiction. So who can be trusted to verify the state of the universe on any particular statement of fact? Typically, that should be selected based on the fact in question. No one person could possibly verify everything. That's why as a society we have experts. While any one expert can be fallible, it is typically considered good critical thinking to prefer the statements of a body of experts on a subject of their expertise than it is to prefer the statements of Joe Blow, Keyboard Warrior.
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and that's why Trump wages a war on experts. He must be accepted as the arbiter of all facts. The crime Fauci committed was having expertise.
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And OF COURSE this post is immediately modded Troll because slashdot refuses to do a damn thing about the "0.1%" of the jerks who have ruined the moderation system by downvoting content they disagree with.
And utterly without any sense of irony.
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
"Then all there was, was pro-vaccine arguments. The people against the covid vaccine were suppressed."
No they weren't. They were scared shitless.
"Informed decisions were not possible..."
A total lie.
"I was staunchly pro vaccine until the pandemic."
That is either a lie or something tragic happened to you. I'd go with the first answer.
"Anything that could be construed as leading to vaccine hesitancy was labeled as misinformation."
This also a lie.
COVID anti-vaxxers were all Trumpers punishing discredited trea
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Moderators, who value civility over truth. Who tolerate trolls and punish those who call them trolls because name calling is "uncivil." Who, as MLK said, are "more devoted to 'order' than to justice."
They try to claim they aren't the arbiters of what is fact and what is not but their moderation powers prove otherwise. They try to claim neutrality, but that's a delusion:
"Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he tak
Not just social media (Score:5, Interesting)
My dad knew someone who was on a few medications and regularly watched the Fox tabloid. The guy seemed always upset/concerned/whatever. My dad told him to stop watching the tabloid.
A few months later the two were talking and the guy had stopped taking most of his meds (except the one or two he needed) and he felt much more relax. Less stressed.
When your goal is to "engage" people, whatever it takes is the rule. Stir the pot. Get people riled up.
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My elderly mother is one of those someones. She lost her ability to watch Fox News and quickly stopped raging about the imminent destruction of the country by Democrats.
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Nothing I am about to say excuses Fox's obscene weaponization of attention, but this has always been true of all news media starting at least with bards, criers, and orators, and that's assuming that prior primates didn't have members of bands that fulfilled the same function. Sensationalism has always gotten eyes and ears and what news is or isn't reported, and how it has been reported, has always been a means of manipulating the masses.
Articles like this are important (Score:2)
Social media is relatively new, and many people haven't develop[ed immunity
As the extent of lying and manipulation becomes more and more obvious, hopefully people will develop a bit more skepticism
Limit their screen time. (Score:2)
I tire of people thinking they should be listened to or they are of more worth because they have 15,000 followers on X.
Like wow go tell your mom.
In fact what's happening is very normal. Some hyperactive semi-sane social media addicts just keep having beef with everyone and everything and the rest of us just so something else.
If you spend hours on social media every day doom scrolling then your brain may have fallen for algorithms feeding you crap nonstop.
Time to go for
No. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they aren't.
First, it's not ruined. There's lots of cesspools, but there's lots of good out there too. Also, while we all get a bunch of shit presented to us, you also attract what you put out, and what you go looking for. The algorithms make sure of that. You get more of what you interact with.
Second, it's not a few people. It's the majority of people ruining the internet. Eternal September proves this. The masses of dumbshits have a multiplying effect on scum content. They interact with it, making sure everyone sees more of it. They even repost it in the name of mocking it, likewise.
It's piloted (Score:2)
Sigh (Score:2)
One man's meat is another man's poison ...
Yes, I totally trust our respectable betters to determine what is "toxic" and forbid it, lol.
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I learned long ago that posts from you are toxic.
Yep! (Score:2)
Since 1991.
News for nerds, stuff that matters.
Internet, films, publishing, libraries, schools... (Score:1)
Loudmouths who insist the earth is flat...
Loudmouths who think doctors just guess about babies' gender...
Loudmouths who think accusations are just as good as evidence...
Loudmouths who think modern medicine is a scam...
Loudmouths who think modern medicine is unquestionably correct about everything any of its practioners say at the moment... ...and insist you humor their delusions.
Yes, mods here (Score:2, Informative)
These people should be identified and banned.
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Be careful. I got modded -1 troll for posting the same thing. The trolls don't like being told they shouldn't troll.
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100% agree.
I believe that in Slashdot's current moderation system (with scores capped to five, and the content of comments being outright unavailable on mobile if the scores fall too low) moderators' identities (that is, their made-up slashdot ones, not their actual identities) should be public. You should be able to see who is responsible for which mods.
This is not as good as a proper web-of-trust system where e.g. your chosen Slashdot poster relationships would affect how moderation was applied to comment
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Nobody gets "banned" on Slashdot. (Well, maybe in directly criminal acts...) That is probably the only reason it still exists.
In a related headline (Score:2)
Negative feedback loop/dampening needed (Score:1)
Algorithms that put "possibly interesting" things in my feed that I didn't specifically subscribe to need to have some "dampening"/"negative feedback" built in to reduce the chance of "runaway algorithmicly-generated virality," much like a steam engine has "negative feedback" to prevent an explosion.
If a post or topic or poster is starting to "go viral," the algorithm needs to dampen/partially-squelch the post/topic/poster so it appears less in people's algorithmicly-generated feeds.
Of course, if I'm subscr
A few people ruin _everything_ for the rest of us (Score:2)
The Internet is just one place where this is easy to observe. But look at the super-rich, the war-mongers and those that cannot get enough power or control over others. If the right 5% of the population did drop dead today and then people of that type of person were prevented from getting born again, this planet would be paradise. Well, maybe 10%. Most people are essentially decent, but have no clue how things works and can hence be easily manipulated into doing the most abysmal crap.
The worst of the internet: bots, trolls, and peopl (Score:1)
I definitely think a lot of it is bots, trolling, and state actors. For example -> Putin Fueling Independence Plans in California, Texas: Republican [slashdot.org]
The unfortunately part of our bubbles is we lose the ability to treat others like human beings, primarily based off of what someone looks like. I think a list poster above used a derogatory maga term which is also one of those wyd to dehumanize people
I lost my leg to cancer. I have been homeless in my life. After getting married, when I was unable to walk
That's the way it works (Score:2)
If it wasn't this particular set of twelve accounts, the "disinformation dozen" would have been some other set of 12. People were sharing what they wanted to share, and that is what made those accounts popular. It was content people wanted to hear and wanted to share. Once any of those accounts reached some critical mass the viral snowball affect kicked in and they got more and more exposure, so that particular group was the ones churning out the content. That's the way social media works, due to a combinat
What's wrong with these people? (Score:2)
How come those 90% aren't making political posts?
Statistics are hard (Score:2)
(small number)% of users produce (large number)% of content related to (niche topic). News at 11.