|
Jose posted:anyone else feel that mark zuckerberg is probably the single most damaging influence in the world generally rn in terms of just how much stuff is getting hosed because he refuses to get involved and stop it. insane whatsapp groups sharing stuff in brazil was a big part of why bolsonaro won for example and we all know how damaging facebook refusing to properly moderate content is . a ton of stuff that facebook should be doing it doesn't specifically because of him Facebook has facilitated genocide, Zuckerberg should be kept in a little cage in The Hague for the rest of his life
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 21:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 20:03 |
|
|
Jose posted:anyone else feel that mark zuckerberg is probably the single most damaging influence in the world generally rn in terms of just how much stuff is getting hosed because he refuses to get involved and stop it. insane whatsapp groups sharing stuff in brazil was a big part of why bolsonaro won for example and we all know how damaging facebook refusing to properly moderate content is . a ton of stuff that facebook should be doing it doesn't specifically because of him Rumours and conspiracy theories have existed well before the computer, the damage done by Facebook is a reflection of the damage done by the capabilities and development of capitalism to connect the masses AND alienate the masses from anything we might consider good. If he wasn't a lovely person happy to ally with the US military and intelligence services then some other social media giant would have appeared. Continuity NIP posted:Facebook has facilitated genocide, Zuckerberg should be kept in a little cage in The Hague for the rest of his life Well in terms of individual accountability yes but we're getting close to the idea that we can liberate the people by killing the Tsar which just isn't true.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 21:35
|
|
|
Nah. Lol if you didn't realise every terrorist, rogue state, technically non rogue state and general baddun hasn't been relying on Excel and word for the last 30 years to get their poo poo sorted.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 21:40
|
|
|
namesake posted:Rumours and conspiracy theories have existed well before the computer, the damage done by Facebook is a reflection of the damage done by the capabilities and development of capitalism to connect the masses AND alienate the masses from anything we might consider good. If he wasn't a lovely person happy to ally with the US military and intelligence services then some other social media giant would have appeared. The cage wouldn't solve anything it would just be immensely satisfying
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 21:40
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:Again apologies for all the grammos etc I hate phone posting! download Awful app, phone posting is the one true path
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 21:48
|
|
|
kecske posted:download Awful app, phone posting is the one true path I am using the app! It's just these titchy screen keyboards are not suited for my fat fingers. I'm a touch typist in real life so this hunt and peck or swish and swipe kills me.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 21:55
|
|
|
Facebook could make a hell of a positive difference just by banning political ads of all kinds. Sure the crazy groups would remain, but the more sinister Cambridge analytica stuff would be gone.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 21:56
|
|
|
Endjinneer posted:It's helpful to articulate the case for a better world by reference to examples. A freedom as a concept is difficult to fight for because you're asking people to make a change from a real situation to a hypothetical one. When you can show it working in practice, it becomes a change from one real situation to another real situation. Case in point is the steady decriminalisation of weed in the states. That's a good point but I think it should therefore be limited to specific examples and not perhaps to make general judgments about countries? I am kind of thinking out loud as I try to think this through. Guavanaut posted:I've seen the mainstream press here call MBS a 'cautious reformer' and praised him allowing women out of their homes other things to imply that maybe all the horrendous poo poo he's doing has to be in some nuanced context. It's sickening. The hypocrisy of the west embracing him as an ally is stomach-turning. Jakabite posted:I think you absolutely have to be relentlessly critical of your own country, but you have to go about it in a certain way or you're only going to be preaching to the converted. I went through a period of being aggressively down on the UK to anyone who would listen and eventually no one did - I was rightly written off as a misery guts with no sense of perspective or nuance, or any willingness to concede that there are some good things about being here. Sure, in this forum go wild but if you try that with anyone who isn't already a rabid radical lefty you won't convince anyone or make any real terms progress. Also true. I guess since I am not a rabid radical lefty it takes some getting used to and figuring out. namesake posted:Rumours and conspiracy theories have existed well before the computer, the damage done by Facebook is a reflection of the damage done by the capabilities and development of capitalism to connect the masses AND alienate the masses from anything we might consider good. If he wasn't a lovely person happy to ally with the US military and intelligence services then some other social media giant would have appeared. Facebook has made it uniquely easy to magnify it though, and has strongly resisted pressure to do gently caress all about it until they absolutely had to. I am not sure that another network would have arisen that would have accelerated and embiggened it in quite the same way.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:02
|
|
|
Jose posted:anyone else feel that mark zuckerberg is probably the single most damaging influence in the world generally rn in terms of just how much stuff is getting hosed because he refuses to get involved and stop it. insane whatsapp groups sharing stuff in brazil was a big part of why bolsonaro won for example and we all know how damaging facebook refusing to properly moderate content is . a ton of stuff that facebook should be doing it doesn't specifically because of him The Rohingya genocide and a big chunk of the poo poo going on in India are on his hands too.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:05
|
|
|
My tinfoil hat is that he has been flipped by the IC and he no longer has control of his company.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:06
|
|
|
Jose posted:anyone else feel that mark zuckerberg is probably the single most damaging influence in the world generally rn in terms of just how much stuff is getting hosed because he refuses to get involved and stop it. insane whatsapp groups sharing stuff in brazil was a big part of why bolsonaro won for example and we all know how damaging facebook refusing to properly moderate content is . a ton of stuff that facebook should be doing it doesn't specifically because of him Who doesn't agree with this ITT is what I want to know
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:11
|
|
|
Failed Imagineer posted:Who doesn't agree with this ITT is what I want to know I don't agree with it. If people weren't sharing things in whatsapp groups they'd be sharing them in telegram or signal or imessage. The alternative is all electronic communication being censored, which isn't a world I want to live in. To me "_____ is Facebook's fault" is no different to "videogames cause children to ______". It's an uncomfortable mirror that reflects the worst of society, but it's not the cause, and swapping out one platform for another isn't gonna solve poo poo. There are absolutely terrible things about Facebook, but to me they're issues caused/encouraged by capitalism, not with one specific platform.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:26
|
|
|
Well that's a dumb as hell take, sorry
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:28
|
|
|
I mean there is also the whole thing where the laser-targeted ad system on facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica and other politically malicious entities (such as the Conservative Party) are able to reach directly into racist's brains with lies and manipulate them into doing what they want. Like you can literally, if you know enough about a person, target an advert specifically at them. You can select people within an age range and a gender and a household status (e.g. "empty nester"), by device use, within a particular postcode, etc. etc. and in fact people in Labour HQ used it to target Corbyn to trick him into thinking that Labour ads were running widely. WhatEvil fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Dec 12, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:28
|
|
|
Normally they have to use the express for that.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:31
|
|
|
blunt posted:I don't agree with it. If people weren't sharing things in whatsapp groups they'd be sharing them in telegram or signal or imessage. The alternative is all electronic communication being censored, which isn't a world I want to live in. Nobody has (credibly) linked any video game - even Depression Quest - with actual literal crimes against humanity though. It do agree with you that it's worth treating actual person-to-person communication methods like Whatsapp differently from algorithm-driven Skinner boxes like Facebook though. The former probably isn't feasible to moderate in a free society, the latter absolutely is and definitely should be.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:32
|
|
|
Osama Bin Laden played Counter Strike and if that's not proof then I don't know what is. E: But yeah what Twisto said is correct. The algorithm is the evil part, also the fact that they actively refuse to clamp down on islamophobia, hate groups and racism generally. WhatEvil fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Dec 12, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:33
|
|
|
WhatEvil posted:I mean there is also the whole thing where the laser-targeted ad system on facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica and other politically malicious entities (such as the Conservative Party) are able to reach directly into racist's brains with lies and manipulate them into doing what they want. Facebook is the biggest platform doing that, but it is absolutely not exclusive to Facebook. As an example, you think Youtube doesn't do that with recommended videos? Amazon using your purchase and address history to serve you ads on Twitch? Failed Imagineer posted:Well that's a dumb as hell take, sorry Same. goddamnedtwisto posted:It do agree with you that it's worth treating actual person-to-person communication methods like Whatsapp differently from algorithm-driven Skinner boxes like Facebook though. The former probably isn't feasible to moderate in a free society, the latter absolutely is and definitely should be. Absolutely agree with you about moderation of large public platforms - that's not what I was taking issue with. Edit: to try and my position up in one sentence, I believe the issues people have with Facebook are failures of government (lack of) regulation, not of one person or company. blunt fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Dec 12, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:35
|
|
|
blunt posted:you think Youtube doesn't do that with recommended videos I'm well aware that YouTube does that too and I'm not particularly happy about that either.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:37
|
|
|
It is a natural outgrowth of the centralization of information provision in capital's hands, really. Which it was only ever going to be in our society.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:39
|
|
|
goddamnedtwisto posted:Nobody has (credibly) linked any video game - even Depression Quest - with actual literal crimes against humanity though. Doesn't Whatsapp get used in a bizarrely Facebook-like way as well though? Vague memory of reading about giant whatsapp groups of people spreading false information, leading to violence or death. The solution being not allowing enormous groups of people who don't know each other. But I also find that weird about the way some people use Facebook. Before I ditched it, it only contained people I knew in real life (plus one guy from here, and two people who share my name because we added each other in the early days of Facebook). People who I knew, but posted horrible right-wing takes got defriended or unfollowed. So I don't think I had the full political Facebook experience. Plus, who allows their devices to show them ads?
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:39
|
|
|
Bobstar posted:Plus, who allows their devices to show them ads? Old people. And possibly people on a device that doesn't let you turn them off.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:41
|
|
|
Can't believe you're petitioning for euthanasia devices for the elderly.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 22:55
|
|
|
therattle posted:That's a good point but I think it should therefore be limited to specific examples and not perhaps to make general judgments about countries? I am kind of thinking out loud as I try to think this through. "The Seychelles has a higher income equality measured by GINI coefficient than the UK so we in the UK have a right to demand better income equality" is useful because it shows that change is possible and which way it needs to go. "The Seychelles is better than the UK" is not useful and only true if you only value income equality and not, for example, a free press.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 23:13
|
|
|
Endjinneer posted:So ranking countries from worst to best would lack so much nuance and be so susceptible to the ranker's values that it'd be effectively useless for any practical purpose. Sure. I think we are in agreement. I never advocated for a strict ranking system, btw. That would be idiotic. I’m not that dumb.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 23:28
|
|
|
I think the Uk and Seychelles are a pretty obvious and direct comparison to draw.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 23:33
|
|
|
Helter skelter slide, it is 
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 23:42
|
|
|
NotJustANumber99 posted:I think the Uk and Seychelles are a pretty obvious and direct comparison to draw. Which one is which?
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 23:47
|
|
|
Shut up. The UK beaches are some of the best in the country.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 23:47
|
|
|
Article in Morningstar online about 14 members of Great Yarmouth CLP quitting labour. Sorry can't get a link or copy.
|
|
#
?
Dec 12, 2020 23:49
|
|
|
Bobstar posted:Doesn't Whatsapp get used in a bizarrely Facebook-like way as well though? Vague memory of reading about giant whatsapp groups of people spreading false information, leading to violence or death. The solution being not allowing enormous groups of people who don't know each other. Yes and no. It's a thing in some countries for people to just add all of their contacts to one big Whatsapp group chats and start chatting and other people then add all their contacts etc. Sounds like a vision of hell to me but presumably in less atomised societies it's not quite such an outrageous thing. These groups (or rather people being accepting of just being added to random group chats) were definitely a factor in the misinformation campaigns in the lead up to the Rohingya genocide but they're ultimately self-limiting both because of the size limit and because WhatsApp actually try to stop these sort of mass adds now (not because of, you know, the millions of deaths, but because they're used for spam and Facebook *hates* advertising in which they don't get to wet their beak and they've not yet worked out a way of monetising Whatsapp). Algorithm-mediated social media are however drat near perfect radicalisation machines though. Intentionally or not, the phenomenon we've all noticed on Youtube of clicking one cringe compilation and 7 autoplaying videos later we're in caliper-world is replicated across almost all of the big social media sites. It's slightly more abstracted on Facebook but it certainly happens with group recommendations and while the process is longer it's also much more powerful because of the interactivity - I suspect a lot of potential "legitimate concerns" daisy chains are broken the moment someone hears Ben Shapiro's voice, but FB groups (and the looser informal groups on Twitter) are much more interactive, these are Real People Just Like Me telling me that Hillary Clinton cut off a babies face and wore it, not some weird skinny geek in a gaming chair. They also provide a sense of community that's a really powerful draw to all these rugged individualists.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:03
|
|
|
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/14-members-clp-quit-protest-labours-crackdown-free-speech
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:03
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:Article in Morningstar online about 14 members of Great Yarmouth CLP quitting labour. As Great Yarmouth goes, so goes the party
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:10
|
|
|
goddamnedtwisto posted:Yes and no. It's a thing in some countries for people to just add all of their contacts to one big Whatsapp group chats and start chatting and other people then add all their contacts etc. Sounds like a vision of hell to me but presumably in less atomised societies it's not quite such an outrageous thing. These groups (or rather people being accepting of just being added to random group chats) were definitely a factor in the misinformation campaigns in the lead up to the Rohingya genocide but they're ultimately self-limiting both because of the size limit and because WhatsApp actually try to stop these sort of mass adds now (not because of, you know, the millions of deaths, but because they're used for spam and Facebook *hates* advertising in which they don't get to wet their beak and they've not yet worked out a way of monetising Whatsapp). Just replying to my own post because I forgot the actual point I was trying to make. The reason why they'll not stop this isn't even the standard corporate evil of "Having adequate and appropriate moderation is expensive", it's that this sort of radicalisation produces the exact result they want, of people tying up a huge chunk of their lives into these platforms. The algorithms aren't written to produce Nazis, they're written to produce addicts. Social media is rent-seeking of human interaction, the more interaction they can force onto their platform the more rent they can seek.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:15
|
|
|
goddamnedtwisto posted:Just replying to my own post because I forgot the actual point I was trying to make. Zuboff has written about this in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the capitalist business model needs labour to produce value, and all digital platforms harvest their users activity as a form of labour to generate their actual source of profit - advertising and socioeconomic demographic mapping and monitoring. Therefore just as industrial capitalists seek to extend the length of the working day or the intensity of work, digital capitalists seek in increase the monitoring, penetration of surveillance and digitisation of all your activities, encouraging you to neglect all non-digital forms of existence because they cannot be recorded and commodified. To have an internet that is designed to be useful rather than addictive requires a socialised internet, either state owned by a pretty benevolent state or outright socialism and a worker controlled internet. Some of the later examinations of the impact of Cambridge Analytica, etc aren't particularly flattering about their results and I don't think we're at the stage of real conscious control through internet usage but there's a huge echo chamber radicalisation effect which is boosting extremism. As a radical leftist that's good in some ways but it is clear that we're getting outmatched in the scale of results. There's also the obvious problems if the decisionmakers think that they are actually in control and changing things based on the quantifiable metrics and miss the actual driving forces behind society - like the USAs obsession with the stockmarkets rather than the living conditions of the working class. namesake fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Dec 13, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:28
|
|
|
namesake posted:Zuboff has written about this in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the capitalist business model needs labour to produce value, and all digital platforms harvest their users activity as a form of labour to generate their actual source of profit - advertising and socioeconomic demographic mapping and monitoring. Therefore just as industrial capitalists seek to extend the length of the working day, digital capitalists seek in increase the monitoring, penetration of surveillance and digitisation of all your activities, encouraging you to neglect all non-digital forms of existence because they cannot be recorded and commodified. To have an internet that is designed to be useful rather than addictive requires a socialised internet, either state owned by a pretty benevolent state or outright socialism and a worker controlled internet. The right have considerably more money to spend on targeted ads. We need a couple of secret billionaire lefties here to match them. Must check out ukmt.xlsx to see which of you that is.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:35
|
|
|
Jaeluni Asjil posted:The right have considerably more money to spend on targeted ads. We need a couple of secret billionaire lefties here to match them. Eh like I said the manipulation factor of Cambridge Analytica was exaggerated. That's not to say their data harvesting and usage was therefore okay or that advertising isn't effective but it wasn't the master manipulator tool that was initially claimed. Remember these accusations were coming from liberals who just couldn't understand how Brexit or Trump won in a vote and so had to find some reason for it other than the groups they supported ran awful campaigns and material conditions for a lot of people totally sucked and they voted for change. The left needs to organise and attract the working class and that can't be done with targeted advertising. There's plenty of need for conveying information, pushing arguments, etc but it's all for nothing without the organised political force then able to reach those people and turn the familiarity with the argument into latent support and the latent support into active agitation on campaigns over objective reality. Information campaigns, even if they are really good at convincing particular people that things are totally rotten, cannot lead to political power right now. The people who can be organised are already going to be aware that a lot of things suck, they lack a pole of attraction to unite them together to win the class war.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:48
|
|
|
Demographic microtargetting isn't exclusively a social media thing either. For example Royal Mail is one of the largest consumer data brokers operating in the UK. (Fun sidenote: Notice how since 2018 the volume of mail households receive that's addressed to "The Occupant" has gone up dramatically? Turns out that while if I buy Mr Smiths demographic data and send him a mailer addressed to "Mr Smith" violates GDPR, if I batch that data into a group as small as just his address and instead address the mailer to "The Occupant" it's fully GDPR compliant!). Also because Cambridge Analytica has been mentioned a few times in this discussion, it's worth pointing out that what they did is no longer possible and hasn't been since 2018. They ran (both free and incentivised) personality quizes that used the Facebook Graph API to extract everything about that user's account, then used neural networks to create a model to find correlations between different personality traits and demographic data, then used Facebook's ad targetting to put ads in front of the demographics they'd identified as being receptive to those ads. Since then the granularity of targetting that's possible on Facebook these days isn't as extensive as it was back then and the amount of data about a user you can access through the Graph API has been greatly limited. Ironically one of the tentpoles of the FTC's antitrust suit against Facebook is that they've locked down their APIs so much that it's impossible for another service to compete with them because they can't access a user's data to help them migrate. It's funny how these things go. None of this is to say that Facebook is good, just that earnestly suggesting that Mark Zuckerburg is personally the biggest cancer on the world and shutting down Facebook would solve all our problems is either naïve or a misunderstanding of what's driving these issues. Everything twisto said about algorithms and radicalisation is spot on. I'd suggest that our biggest issue is constantly growing inequality is putting more and more people into a position where they're susceptible to radicalisation in the first place and that solving the inequality crisis + putting strong laws in place about how and where algorithms, machine learning and peoples data can be used are the way to solve these problems, not shutting down one social network that will immediately be replaced with another. blunt fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Dec 13, 2020 |
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:51
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/JonAshworth/status/1337907735313133575?s=20 Love to see MPs getting pissy on social media.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:53
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 20:03 |
|
|
forkboy84 posted:https://twitter.com/JonAshworth/status/1337907735313133575?s=20 Emily oldknow who featured in an unflattering light in the leaked report and who was apparently stairmaster's first choice to be general secretary before that report got out is his wife. Wonder if she would have been better or worse than Evans?
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2020 00:58
|
|