It's funny because Facebook's news feed in the last couple years is unusable, filled with AI slop and clickbait. Twitter similarly requires aggressive use of block + mute to eliminate scams, clickbait, and other content I'm not interested in.
I don't know if this is due to their changes in moderation policy, or if AI has overwhelmed them, but I vastly preferred the old news feeds
If you want to see what's been "moderated" away from you on Hacker News:
Click your username at the upper right:
Turn on "showdead": showdead: yes. (defaults to "no")
There are a number of dead posts in this thread. I'd post some here (some of which don't appear to violate any HN guidelines, I'll note), but probably those same moderators would kill this one, too.
HN allows everyone with sufficient karma to vouch for dead comments (or flag comments), I suspect most of the comment-level moderation you see is crowdsourced to fellow commenters; a still-dead comment means most of those who see choose to keep it dead.
HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans); any unmoderated forum devolves into a cesspit; and it only takes a surprisingly few bad apples to ruin a community.
The HN crowd like reddit leans massively progressive/democratic. As such any thinking outside normal or contrarian views are massively suppressed. Classic contrarian (to HN) around WFH, Capitalism, Elon Musk, Tesla, Regulation is downvoted and even flagged
The HN crowd is far right but they would never admit it. Most people are unaware of how political parties shift in composition and ideology over the decades.
The contemporary American software engineer resembles the professional class Reagan Republicans who dominated the suburbs in the 80's and 90's.
This observation is always highlighted by the absurdity of american politics when they describe candidates like Joe Biden as "far left" when on the european political spectrum (or even an absolute one, if such a thing exists) he'd almost certainly be on the right.
This observation is always highlighted by the absurdity of american politics when they describe candidates like Joe Biden as "far left"
Joe Biden is by all accounts, center-left. However, the parent comment also describes the "HN crowd" as far-right. What probably is actually happening is that America is extremely polarized, where any side you don't agree with has the "far-[left/right]" label slapped on.
I disagree with your characterization of why I called the HN crowd, or technology professionals, far right. Having read my God how many comments, articles, tweets etc over the years. I see extremely conservative policy positions. No better example than asking a software engineer, developer VC there opinions on whether "gig" workers should be treated as full time employees with benefits, unionization etc.
The former use technology to do things economically to workers we haven't seen since Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Like preventing a driver from getting new deliveries if those 10 minutes put him over 1 hour of work. It's robber barron extreme right wing economic policy.
No better example than asking a software engineer, developer VC there opinions on whether "gig" workers should be treated as full time employees with benefits, unionization etc.
And that's a "far right" position? So far as I can tell, even in europe, in most jurisdictions gig workers are treated as contractors rather than employees.
I mean these meanings aren't concrete. Left vs right etc. But historically it was a far right wing position to find ways to exploit labor for profit. The tech industry uses their skill set to accomplish this with algorithms.
Can you give a historical example of such far right stance? Hitler's national socialist and Mussolini's fascist which are historically considered far right certainly didn't have such policies.
But historically it was a far right wing position to find ways to exploit labor for profit
and historically LGBT rights were far left positions. That doesn't mean they're far left positions today. Moreover if being pro-capital (as opposed to being labor) is "far right", then is being pro-labor "far left"? Is there even a "centrist" or non "far-left/right" position?
In Canada and most of Europe, Joe Biden would be a hair right of centre-right on most things and centre-right on a few other topics. Only in America is he centre-left, which says a lot about America's Overton window shift.
Biden sounds a lot like Stephen Harper (pre-barbaric-practices-hotline) and just to the right of Brian Mulroney. Joe Clark would be well to his left.
Comparing political rights, lefts and centers across cultures is futile, it's apples and oranges. For example, compare the immigration and integration policies of Biden [or the US] to that of Europe, and you'll find that he and most democrats are, for the most part, further "left."
Looking at the past 10-20 years, how are the immigration policies of the US or the Biden administration [1] further left than France, Germany or the UK - even under a conservative government post-Brexit? The US does have jus soli but I don't consider that to be a left wing thing.
1. Biden was promoting - and willing to sign into law - a border bill written by a Republican; it very nearly passed as it initially had bipartisan support before being scuppered by a presidential candidate.
Not trying to start a political discussion but people describing someone like biden as center-left are usually basing this off the policies people of his particular political flavor say they want. What they end up doing is usually very much right-aligned.
No need to involve whatever "political flavor" of people making the judgement. If you compare his views to other politicians, or the electorate as a whole, he's clearly a centrist.
I don’t think that’s clear at all, and I’m not involving the political flavor of people making a “judgment” - I’m saying his particular brand of establishment democrat politics all tend to have the same tendency.
Center-right, I'd argue, but that's true of the Democratic party. HN is very far from far-right in that bigotry and racism isn't tolerated here (nor should they be). But HN is USA in origin and USA politics are further right than most of Europe.
Moderators don't tolerate bigotry and racism on HN. I agree with that. But there were quite a few comments yesterday discussing Fyodor Dostoevsky who implied it was impossible for Russia to produce culture because it's people are monsters or something. Extreme ethnic hatred. So the users within the software community share many of the same faults regarding bigotry that the rest of humanity has.
Same goes for commentary on Chinese people or Palestinians, though nowhere near as extreme in animosity as that towards the Russian.
Just by coincidence, I was posting some moderation comments in that thread a couple hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41379890.
If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, that by no means implies that the post is ok or somehow blessed by the mods. The likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it*. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here.
You can help by flagging such a post or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com. It was only because someone brought those unacceptable comments to my attention that I was able to respond. We can't moderate what we don't see!
* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The general problem with "racism" online is that people tend to use the word for things that they don't like hearing. E.g. there is an issue of some sort, let's say unemployment caused by subsidized temporary foreign workers being brought in to act as wage suppression for corporations. Saying that you have a concern with policy can often result in a response of "that's racist!".
This is a variation of the little boy who cried wolf. If "racism!" is cried for every single little thing that needs discussion, then one day it actually is racism and nobody will be listening.
Very few people ever complain about this in an egalitarian way, though, like: if wages are too low, let's make them higher. If the market isn't doing what we want, we should change the market.
Instead, it's always about how the immigrants should be locked up or deported. And that's always about immigrants from Mexico, never from Canada or other places.
HN is very far from far-right in that bigotry and racism isn't tolerated here (nor should they be).
As in no outright slurs, right? I've seen plenty of race realist comments, as well as "James Damore is right about women in tech".
Sure nobody says slurs. But I see misogyny and what I would classify as racist every time I'm on hackernews.
Complaining about Indians, complaining about women. But they don't even know that's what they're doing so you can't say "hey stop being sexist". They're surrounded by men all the time, of course it will never click in their heads.
The HN crowd is far left but they would never admit it.
Go watch Bill Clinton talk about illegal immigration and border security in the 90s. He'd be considered far right today. Read a book or newspaper from 50 years ago or 100 years ago and look at how much more freedom people had to build homes and businesses without a thousand licenses, permits, taxes and inspections.
There was a time in America where the notion of an income tax or of restrictions on running a business out of your home were considered far-left authoritarian and unconstitutional, but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property, the government surveilling our communications and finances, government oversight and permission required for all activities.
Admittedly "left vs right" is hardly useful in contemporary politics, things are so multi-faceted and people's notions of what those terms mean is variable. But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously.
In some sense, the 1960s counter-culture liberal progressives "won" and became the center and the establishment. A leftwing extremist in 1968 on issues of feminism, race, social welfare, tax policy, foreign policy, housing policy and probably others is a centrist today.
Environmental issues and unions are the only two areas I can think of where America has stayed the same or moved right since WWII.
But nonetheless, it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously.
Ronald Reagan gave 3 million illegal immigrants permanent resident status.
The US has a lot more people than it did 100 years ago. A lot of rules and regulations are a direct result of that.
Things change as we scale, for better or worse.
I think you have it backwards. Open borders are a right-wing goal. See Bernie Sanders comments on the subject circa 2015. How the Koch brothers want open borders to weaken labors leverage.
The wealthy and powerful don't benefit from citizenship. When you have wealth you can just pay for what you need or want. It's the common person who needs the benefits and protections that come from citizenship.
You're on the right path, pointing out how counter-culture liberals won but they are in fact right-wing. They LARP as liberals/leftists.
The US is the most right-leaning country out of the first world.
but now we've all gotten used to a million regulations on how we use our private property
Many of these originating from the right. Because the right is not, and has never been, a party of small government. They want big government, just their big government. That has meant historically enforcing slavery, then segregation, suppressing women's rights, suppressing abortion, dictating what you can do in the bedroom, and on and on and on. These are all conservative policy - and all HUGE government.
it's obvious that "the center" of American politics today is drastically far to the left from where it was previously
Yes, this is called the progression of time. This is why people who are unable to change their mind over time end up falling behind and sounding crazy.
Have you ever asked an old dude about how they feel about black people? Whoa! Clearly they grew up in a different time. Some let that shit go like they should, some don't. Those that don't are destined to be left to the past.
Just a few decades ago a slight right winger might be anti-integration. Slight. A far right-winger would be lynching people in their neighborhood. So you're correct - we've moved past that.
And, in 40 years, if I personally don't change my beliefs, I will also sound crazy. To conservatives that's scary or something. To me, that's how the world works. I say either adapt or be relegated to the insane.
"Far right" as measured by a hardcore leftie, maybe. If you stand against illegal immigration, criticize superficial DEI "me-too" gestures that do nothing to solve the real issues underneath, or are moderately conservative in any other way, you will have you comments routinely downvoted into oblivion and will be called a Nazi and the second coming of Hitler. Not only in this place, it has become the the norm these days.
Illegal immigration is a far right wing policy goal. It's how mega corps keep wages down. The old "we need illegal immigrants because who else is going to pick lettuce for $1 an hour!" When the answer is well without illegal immigration you'd be forced to pay a legally protected citizen a fair wage.
I think you're looking at the DEI phenomena incorrectly. It's a way for the economically comfortable class to signal virtue without having to experience any of its detractors. Check the Wikis of many DEI proponents and writers. They live in both highly segregated economic and racial neighborhoods.
They live a 1950's far right wing lifestyle at home but wax poetic about DEI for the virtue.
I find that HN is generally receptive of criticisms of those things granted you're using enough tact in your post and not just going "I'M SICK OF THESE WOKE JEWISH LEFTISTS RUINING EVERYTHING" in which case go to 4chan and cry there.
The HN crowd is far right
???
Is anyone who isn't a card carrying DSA member "far right"?
Most of that stuff is a LARP.
Because orthodoxy blinds the masses, the people upvoting this are the very far-right who LARP as leftists/liberals I'm referring to lol. The detractors are actually liberals who have been painted as far right. Ideology is such a powerful delusion. Nobody can be sure of who they are due to external labeling.
I'm pretty far out the mainstream thinking on some topics and I've felt like I've been treated fairly in most interactions over the years on HN.
I would not call HN progressive. Democratic yes, but Democrat nowadays means centrist at best/leaning right.
HN crowd is democrat but not progressive. Reddit crowd is progressive
Also HN doesn't censor as much, libertarian-right posters that would've gotten downvoted to hell on reddit actually have an outlet here. Religious right has no outlet on either site
That's the gospel, for sure.
However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
However, look at the dead comments here and, for each, tell us why it would turn HN into a "cesspit."
This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith.
Looking at a selection of dead comments on this thread, I see flame-baiting on israel/palestine, flame-baiting on trans and racial issues, assorted comments whose content might have been acceptable if it wasn't 40% profanity by wordcount, a bunch of unnecessary personal attacks, and assorted people redefining words and then asserting that only their new definition is the correct one.
I see basically nothing that would improve HN if it were not dead. I see a lot that would make HN actively worse if it were not dead.
This is an impossible task and you know it. Asking your opponents to enumerate every dead comment on a thread with hundreds of comments is not approaching the issue in good faith.
No, it's not impossible. I count 15 dead now, not "hundreds" (when I said that originally, it was about 5).
Let's make it easy: why does bigbacaloa's go, and all the others stay?
I was prepared to disagree, but actually I don't see what the problem is with that post.
Here it is, so others don't have to dig around for it. It appears to have been a top level comment.
"This pseudo-apology is the worst sort of political expediency. He did what the government asked while denying doing it, now apologizes for it to curry favor with the rightwing world he alienated. It's like the NY Times pushing the weapons of mass destruction narrative during the Iraq war and later running long articles about what bad journalism that was."
This post is dead not because this post was flagged. It is dead because the user was shadow-banned some time ago.
Whatever they post now shows up as dead
If the comment is not a comment that should be dead, then the shadow-ban is not helping HN.
Another point of evidence of why HN is great. Even reading this point in this argument had me thinking and wondering why it was banned and then the moderator comment right below (but can't be replied to?) explains the reasoning.
One of the best uses of HN for me is watching my brain jump to conclusions only to have them slapped down by a well thought out counter argument.
This forum isn't perfect but I haven't found a better public discussion board on the internet. Hat tip to the moderators and others making this happen. Your work is appreciated.
Because of this (and I agree it should be banned):
Sure I'll do it, as long as you agree to pay me $1000/hr, 2 hour minimum-- up front, to do your work for you.
No refunds.
to do your work for you
It's not my work, since I'm not the one defending putting some comments to death while leaving lots of other, equally stupid comments up.
If you have a point you want to make, just make it. Comments like your previous one are asking people to do work for you.
I think my "points" as you put them are all over this thread. I don't plan to ask you to do anything for me.
I didn't flag any of them; I do not owe you an explanation on behalf of the flaggers.
Conversely - why didn't you vouch for each of the dead comments, if they are so great?
Vouching doesn't unflag reasonable comments.
Sometimes, the actual mods in charge of the site have heavily penalized certain accounts, either manually or via an algorithm (I don't know the details). The comments posted by these accounts appear to start off "dead", though they may be vouched for by high-karma users. This will make those comments appear normally.
I've moderated a number of forums in my time. And the hardest users to deal with are the ones that insist on breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who refuse to stop. Even if they contribute positively much of the rest of the time, they create far too much work.
(Also, I have zero interest in participating in unmoderated forums. Unmoderated forums are either overrun by spam, or by users who somehow manage to spend 50 hours a week flaming people. Look at any small-town online newspaper where the same 5 people bicker endlessly after every single news story. And if I don't like how a forum is moderated, I find another one.)
And the hardest users to deal with are the ones that insist on breaking the rules 10% of the time, and who refuse to stop. Even if they contribute positively much of the rest of the time, they create far too much work.
There is _always_ a technical solution here. If you can't figure it out, keep thinking. There's never a reason to ban/moderate your core users for 10% rule violations. Instead, that shows a weakness of the software. More transparency helps.
Either it's from someone who happily continues to break rules and is effectively shadow banned because they continue to cause problems and break rules, or the comment doesn't contribute well enough to the topic. This could mean it's just being insulting, or off-topic.
In short: Nothing of value was lost. Especially since you can toggle it on.
Broken windows theory: actively moderating is precisely what keeps shit posters away. There's no gain from doing it when their posts are removed so they give up quickly.
Look at the posting history of the comment posters, not just the comment.
In many cases it's not the particular comment, it's the particular poster who is shadow-banned, and all of their comments are dead on arrival (to everyone but themselves, the definition of shadow banned). But people with showdead=true and enough karma can vouch for them to resurrect them if they're worthwhile.
I'm sure we can pick and choose good/bad examples from every thread, but I for one definitely feel the bar for civility/respect here is way higher than virtually anywhere else, so I'm choosing to believe this current system contributes to that and that the pros outweigh the cons.
After reddit's nonsense last summer I appreciate HN more than ever. If it means the moderation is a bit "too strict" then so be it. That was also the case on some of reddit's (and other sites') best communities. /r/AskHistorians immediately comes to mind.
HN is awesome because of the rules and moderation (including bans);
It was awesome. Then it jumped the shark when people realized they could flag posts they don't like with no repercussions.
There was some post about Israel the other day (might have been Google's relationship to Israel or something) where every comment about the war starting last year was highly visible, while every comment about what happened prior to last year was dead.
Those contentious threads never last long here for that reason. Reddit is 90% those sorts of heavily moderated comment threads where everyone agrees with each other and those who don't align get removed or downvoted. People can always just go there.
Comparison to Reddit: bogus.
Yes, HN is better than a toxic cesspit full of ignorant teenagers. That's a low hurdle.
I'd be careful about generalizing from one case, or even from all the cases you've seen, because people (all of us) tend to notice and put much greater weight on the posts we dislike. (Basically the same mechanism by which painful memories tend to be deeper than pleasurable ones.)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I wonder if something like Slashdot's metamoderation system could be used to tamp down such abuse.
One problem with metamoderation is that once a particular forum becomes an echo chamber, even metamoderation will unconsciously but repeatably ignore "valid" information from the other side and amplify misinformation from their own side. But if the site owners specifically searched for good-faith users from multiple viewpoints to serve as the jury pool for metamoderation, this could be workable.
I think this is a very complex subject and no one, in good faith, can claim that heavy moderation is either awesome or terrible.
Presumably those accounts are dead because of repeated rule breaking, not because their specific post in this thread broke the rules. And there might be more dead comments here on average because politics+tech draws a lot of a certain type of commenter(the type of commenter that might get banned)
"Presumably" ?? which ones? How do you know?
Some context on a user (bigbacaloa) who made one of the dead comments you've referred to elsewhere:
It's a fairly safe prior - Dang does a pretty great job moderating here & I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
It's possible to search for moderator replies (dang, earlier sctb and pg) to specific userIDs with the syntax:
https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=<CommentUserID>&by=<ReplyUserID>
<https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=bigbacaloa&by=dang>
That (presently) turns up two admonishments dating back 11 months and two years: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423572> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33132910>.
The first of those (11 months ago) is where the account was banned.
If you have specific questions on accounts, users, sites, comments, posts, etc., which you feel are improperly flagged, killed, or banned, you can always email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com. I do this frequently, usually with suggestions (e.g., title or URL changes), sometimes with questions (earlier today a site which showed up dead, turns out it's a hard paywall, which I eventually tracked down dang's comment on, though not in an easily-searchable way).
People generally know from participating in moderation because they flag comments and posts themselves.
Of the four dead comments I see, two are content-free trolling and one is a completely unrelated discussion about Jim Jordan. The fourth is a bit more borderline, but I think a reasonable person could conclude that the commenter is more interested in getting people riled up than having a discussion.
The fourth is a bit more borderline
The vast majority of comments on political/social topics fit your description. If you're thinking of the one I'm thinking of (not mine, if it matters), I can't think of any reasonable test that would conclude "this should be dead, but all those others can stay."
Edit: it's bigbacaloa's
I agree that the vast majority of comments people would like to make on political/social topics violate the HN rules. Having seen political threads on Reddit, where any genuine insight is buried under a flood of namecalling and polemics, I think that's for the best.
the vast majority of comments people would like to make on political/social topics violate the HN rules
Correction: delete the "would like to"
Also, comparing this to Reddit is sort of Godwin's Rule transposed to a different domain. "Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick" is pretty much what you're saying.
I took the time to find it and dig why they were banned.
Here is dang’s explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37421874
It sounds a fair banning for me.
[Dead] means they've been downvoted to oblivion. Moderators had nothing to do with it -- those were other users on HN. I always browse with "showdead" on and the vast majority of [Dead] posts are awful. They don't need to violate HN Guidelines, they were killed by the community.
[Flagged] means it was killed by a moderator. Those are more rare. I don't agree with everything that is flagged but I think HN has a great moderation policy overall. Often when posts are flagged, the moderator responds explaining why.
Comments cannot be hidden by downvoting. Comments are marked [flagged] [dead] only after other users have clicked on the timestamp and selected "flag." I think that these things get conflated because comments that tend to attract heavy downvotes also attract flagging. The [flagged] [dead] comments are mostly (entirely?) killed by the actions of ordinary users, not moderators.
Comments that are marked [dead] without the [flagged] indicator are because the user that posted the comment has been banned. For green (new) accounts this can be due to automatic filters that threw up false positives for new accounts. For old accounts this shows that the account has been banned by moderators. Users who have been banned can email hn@ycombinator.com pledging to follow the rules in the future and they'll be granted another chance. Even if a user remains banned, you can unhide a good [dead] comment by clicking on its timestamp and clicking "vouch."
It's usually possible to find the banning event using the "replies" HN endpoint:
Flagged 100% does not need moderator involvement. Even being post restricted needs no moderator involvement.
I have had no shortage of comments flagged by a certain group of people that like their “alternate facts” and share their HN posts to discord for brigading / mass down voting anyone that calls their lies out.
It only takes 2-3 quick user flags for your comment to be permanently, automatically flagged, and only a couple of those to get comment restricted.
Thanks for sharing this, otherwise I may never know tge meanings of the terms on HN. I hope there was a guide.
Meanwhile I saw a dead post 0 minutes ago, is is true that someone flagged it immediately? I personally don't find the post evil but only little boring.
If they've been flag killed, it will say [flagged][dead] (and yes I've seen it happen within a minute of someone commenting on very popular threads). If it's just [dead], you should look at their comment history because chances are they've been banned by dang. Alternatively, some people register on HN via Tor which also auto-shadowbans them until enough people vouch for their comments.
It's very easy to claim censorship these days when in fact it's usually more benign than that, companies with large communities generally like to avoid anything inflammatory. Even still, like it or not, you don't have a right to say whatever you like most places on line. It's a privilege. Right or wrong that's just how it is.
Authors note :
It's super interesting to see the sentiment on this comment. During EU hours, it was upvoted a surprising amount, and then when the US active time zones come in, it's downvoted pretty significantly.
What a beautiful little bellwether from a place (hn) where I appreciate the discourse I really appreciate. I actually expected the opposite.
[flagged]
HN has had plenty of major threads on Israel-related topics.
Your submissions are getting flagged and moderated, not because they're Israel-related, but because you're using the site primarily for political battle and flamewar. In fact it looks like you've been using HN exclusively for that. We ban accounts that do that, whichever side of whichever issue they're doing it about, because it goes completely against the intended spirit of the site. That ought to be obvious to anyone who has read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I'm not going to ban you right now, but if you keep this up, we're going to have to.
Hacker News is the only online community that doesn't feel like it's actively driving me insane. Whatever censorship is being done, whether in good or bad faith, I'm all for it.
I would, but then I'd have to read comments that peers on this site have decided aren't worth my time, and more often than not they're right.
I don't think they are removed by moderators, they are flagged.
HN is a small community , and frankly more moderate than everywhere else (except twitter these days).
Sadly, censorship in 2024 is coming by the people, for the people.
I did this. I spent 10 minutes diffing, only a few things weren't listed. One was just full of cursing and not a useful piece of discussion. Another was a comment claiming that Trans was a concept made up 2 years ago.
So far seems working as intended.
What might be more useful is to get your nerd hat on and run a few diffs through sentiment analysis and post that as a topic. I'd definitely read a ML / Sentiment Analysis / Bias analysis type document, would be a great topic.
I always use showdead. There's not a lot of dead comments, but I often (maybe 1 every 4) have to vouch for them.
You can't see which users Dan has down-weighed. Their posts are not autodead, but their comments decay rapidly to the bottom of threads.
OK, so Facebook at the request of the Biden Harris administration censored the Hunter laptop story and knew it was not actually Russian disinformation.
It’s not like you could draw a straight line between this action and something you’d categorize as election interference.
There was no "Biden-Harris administration" in 2020.
There was. They just weren’t in office yet.
Yet, they still pressured Facebook to suppress truth and opinion they just didn’t like.
You can chose to not defend bad actions.
You’re thinking of the FBI, who reported to Trump. The Biden campaign reported things like the non-consensual nudes which did not have any justification as a public interest story.
You’re thinking of the FBI, who reported to Trump.
You wrote that I’m sure doing your very best to believe it. Bless your heart.
Out of curiosity, if Trump was President for 4 years and near the end of that term, didn't have control over the FBI (which seems to be what you're insinuating, please forgive me if I've misunderstood you)... Why would anyone want to elect him again?
Cool, so you have self-discovered that there is a bureaucracy class of nobility.
You'll have to clarify your meaning. "Nobility" doesn't apply literally in this context and there are too many metaphorical applications to follow what you're trying to say.
If I might infer you are implying that the President can't fully control the bureaucracy due to various checks and balances put in place against capricious replacement of the whole thing (which the US tried early in its history and discovered was hellishly disruptive)... The question presents itself again. If Trump can't "lead the nobility," as it were, why elect him again?
That’s one possibility. Another is that your guy just isn’t very good at management, which would be supported by his business career, or that the problem here is that the FBI was acting in good faith following relevant code and policy but you wish that was not the case.
I don’t have to make an effort to believe it. It’s what all of the evidence shows – even your guys running through Twitter’s internal communications for months couldn’t find any evidence of the alleged censorship campaign. The best Taibi could come up with is presenting links to deleted tweets and counting on his readers not to check archives to realize they were nude photos rather than something politically relevant.
"Why this, why now, why you?"
Why did Zucc stamp his name on this now, after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020, and willingly censor in favor of the 2020 Biden campaign (covid + Hunter biden).
You've got to wonder why he seems to be signaling to the Trump campaign that he is taking sides.
My guess is either hoping for kickbacks or to thwart retribution for 2020.
after putting $450m into Biden's campaign in 2020
This is false; he donated to state and local election offices, not Biden's campaign.[0]
[0]https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-mark-zuckerberg-ele...
The evidence shows that a disproportionate amount of funding went to urban areas in key swing states, which generally lean Democrat. Never saw a single ballot drop box out near a corn field. The money helped fund those sorts of initiatives.
Does it? The article I linked says
But election officials have said there is no indication of favoritism in how the money was distributed, according to previous AP reports. The board of the Center for Tech and Civic Life also includes Pam Anderson, a Republican and former elected clerk of a suburban Denver-area county. Republican election officials have also vouched for the program’s impartiality, including Brian Mead, a Republican election director in Licking County, Ohio.
But even if it was true that urban election offices received disproportionately more funding (obviously they received more in general since more people live there), that's still not the same as "putting $450m into Biden's campaign", which is what was claimed.
what was the outcome?
95% of campaign contributions in favor of a campaign are not directly to a campaign.
What was the outcome of the $450 million?
95% of campaign contributions in favor of a campaign are not directly to a campaign.
Yes, they tend to go to super PACs, not government election offices.
What was the outcome of the $450 million?
Election offices having more funding to do their jobs.
Is that a US constitutional violation by the biden government? I guess not because they weren't really forced to. Yet again , putting pressure on media is not negligible
The first amendment specifically uses the word "congress," and the President is not congress.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
From what I understand, the executive branch generally uses the power of persuasion to influence media. There's no legal consequences for failing to comply; but instead the media has to weigh political consequences.
To put it differently, if your social network is used to push conspiracy theories and otherwise undermine democracy, you're going to have a tough time asking for political favors.
but if the president had the power to censor, that power should come from a law that the congress made. it wouldnt make sense otherwise
It's a moot point; FB said it was 100% their decision to suppress speech.
Basically, aides call up media outlets and aggressively nag.
The media then gets favors if they comply. There's no law against a politician playing favorites in the media.
The media can also choose to ignore. It's not in the White House's interest to make enemies in the media.
Was it an official act?
If yes, totally immune from consequences.
If not, then was it really "pressure"? In what sense?
This was recently decided by the US Supreme Court.
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-social-media-biden-...
Key point here for me was that this was on FB, and no one else. Zuckerberg might regret doing this, but he did it. No one else. And, unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this. So, really, nothing more to add.
Should note:
The Supreme Court in June tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 content. The majority ruled that because Facebook "began to suppress the plaintiffs’ COVID-19 content" before the government pressure campaign began, platforms, not the Biden administration, bore responsibility for the posts being taken down.
... What?
Apologies if I'm missing the sarcasm, but Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Pinterest and even LinkedIn all suppressed certain stories, keywords, etc. For Twitter and Google at least we have documents proving Biden admin requests. I think there's a whole lot more, but the point stands regardless.
unless he is lying, he wasn't forced to do this
"We could make things real hard for you for four years. We were thinking about breaking you guys up actually, you're sort of a monopoly. Anyway, here is our request - we'd never force you though. The choice is yours." [Ominous stare.]
The choice is yours.
Correct, the choice was theirs. They probably didn't want to keep spreading ivermectin conspiracy theories, it's bad for advertisers.
You don't find it interesting that both Meta and Google had monopoly lawsuits aimed at them in 2020?
And at the exact same time, the exact same people were "asking" for scientific discussion of many kinds to be shut down across Whatsapp, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook, among many others?
Because it wasn't just Ivermectin. It was the lableak hypothesis, investigating the WIV, following back GOF funding, vaccine contracts, vaccine side-effects, vaccine effectiveness, lockdown effectiveness, natural immunity discussion, etc etc etc; all restricted and suppressed to fit whatever the Biden admin decided.
That's not hyperbole, that's simple and well documented fact. And, as was directly pointed out in this letter/article, the Biden admin wasn't above using lies to shut down politically inconvenient (and true) stories.
had monopoly lawsuits aimed at them in 2020?
Who was President in 2020?
Yes, the case against Facebook was filed in December of 2020, less than a month before Biden was sworn in.
The Facebook case was then refiled by Biden's FTC pick Lina Khan in 2021, and made "more robust and detailed than before". [0]
Khan (who was fast-tracked to the position) also went after Microsoft and Google during the same period. [0] And Twitter. Some of those cases could have begun earlier too - what's important is that all those cases were active while Biden's admin was making "requests".
The Biden admin had a massive stick to wave at the tech giants, regardless of who started each lawsuit and when, and demonstrated both the power to make judgments and to easily make problems go away [1]:
“You are now 0 for 4 in merger trials. Why are you losing so much?” demanded California Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley at a House oversight hearing this summer. “Are you losing on purpose?”
...
In her interview with CNN, Khan said she was “quite happy” with the FTC’s merger work
All the leverage was sitting right there for any request from Biden to have a lot of implied 'stick' behind it.
Companies consented to remove content without looking too deeply at it, and a lot of problems went away. I guess that could be a coincidence, but the giant 9+ figure lawsuits would certainly be worth a mention, no?
* * *
0 - https://www.vox.com/2021/8/19/22632826/facebook-ftc-lawsuit-...
1 - https://edition.cnn.com/2023/10/16/tech/lina-khan-risk-taker...
Zuckerberg should learn to plead the 5th when asked about political intervention questions.
He keeps apologizing, thinking it will gain him respect, but the general public only sees this as a grand admission of guilt (ostensibly for some crime they didn't know of until now, and still don't know any details about).
Many other CEOs get asked similar questions, and they refuse to engage in the discussion; the result is no news coverage.
I think the grand admission of guilt is what was wanted from him. This is setting up to say that the Biden admin influenced platforms.
Facebook usage is tanking I think, they're losing market share because nobody trusts facebook for anything but the marketplace anymore, with exceptions of course but I don't know many people who use it anymore for anything but birthdays and the like.
Actions speak louder than words. Just log onto Facebook and see what he wants you to see.
I don't know what he thinks he is selling folks on, but it's mostly spam and garbage...
funnily enough, that's the name of their recent recommendation algorithm paper
Engagement. In fact, IMO, trying to achieve engagement should be illegal psychological experimentation on humans, but I'm an outlier.
Notably, Meta's algorithmic feed evolved so rapidly that it had major consequences before they were well understood.
1) FB launched and was able to scale past MySpace by making its feed algorithmic and gracefully degrading the freshness of content to get good uptime while MySpace was unusable during peak hours of the day.
2) FB realized that the feed being algorithmic could be a good thing, and could drive engagement directly, apart from simply avoiding downtime.
3) FB realized that the algorithmic feed was the heart of its ad platform.
4) Users got an explosion of sponsored content that overwhelmed the useful human content from friends and family.
5) Zuck decided to focus on News content and vowed to make FB the place to go for news.
6) The algorithmic feed created incredible virality and rapid spread of sensational, triggering content. Donald Trump's campain in 2016 exploited this characteristic and was able to exert great control over attention simply by Donald saying outlandish and intentionally polarizing things.
7a) This tactic, combined with viral content from other fringe groups (with questionable sponsorship & eaily funded via the ad platform) was credited with Trump's victory in the 2016 election. News orgs, motivated by profits and engagement, kept publishing more and more of the sensational stories which gave Trump's approach more and more power. Those opposed to Trump unwittingly fueled his rise in their naïveté about how the algorithm was amplifying his worldview when they shared stories about how abhorrent it was.
7b) This was a stunning blow to Meta and led to the rapid creation of internal censorship teams in response to pressure from political leaders.
8) Facebook's voluntary censorship was among the first in a movement to de-platform a wide variety of political speech in the US and other nations. Family members of top US officials were high level execs and FB, and there was/is a revolving door between Meta and government, even between Meta and the CIA (Meta's internal "disinfo" team is staffed mainly by ex-CIA info ops experts and analysts).
9) All this led to the creation of new, "anti-censorship" platforms, the purchase of Twitter by Musk for political reasons, and a variety of other consequences.
10) Now Zuck finds that consumers have lost some trust in the FB brand and there is tremendous pressure to keep the ad business profitable, but most importantly that hiring thousands of content police is very expensive and has unintended consequences.
We can hope that the US Government chooses to resort to more direct attacks on free speech and gives up the approach of pressuring firms to do anti-democratic things. With most Americans happily consuming an algorithmic feed that aggressively suppresses dissent, it is funny to think about the impact on society it has compared with something like China's great firewall.
1-10 sound about right. Though I'd question how relevant the algo/scaling component really was for FB to outcompete MySpace.
it is funny to think about the impact on society it has compared with something like China's great firewall.
I mean, it's not like the CCP isn't doing a superset of the same things...
Always, as a good hedger Zuck, anticipating regime change in the White House by November, is minimizing the potential fallout of his treacherous behavior. Hold him accountable.
Last time it didn't work out , so it s not always
Does this mean that Facebook's internal analysis predicts a Trump victory? That's how I read it.
Or panicking and trying to turn the wave like CNN'n'co.
I wonder how his wife, a medical doctor feels about letting medical informative spread.
His line "we should not compromise our content standard" tela me he doesn't personally use Facebook. I can't scroll down more than a few screen length before closing the app due to poor quality ads and recommended content. I rarely see posts from my own network.
The fact that he honestly believes Facebook has any sort of content standard is hilarious anyway.
translation: disinformation and lies welcome here
This guy decides^
Why is this t regretful to stop misinformation? I don’t get it, is he hedging against a trump win this election?
He's telling half truths. Facebook started censoring Trump during his presidency!
What I don't understand about this is the partisan spin of the story - much of Covid 19 happened under the Trump administration, including the most severe lockdowns before vaccines, and corresponding information warfare and articles about how people out on the streets are evil.
Blaming Biden/Harris for this is an incredibly revisionist take thats surprising considering its very recent 'history'.
But he has no regrets pouring gasoline on the bonfire of Brexit, I guess? He's only concerned when there is a real danger of someone going after his wealth. It will be interesting to watch the business community of the US unite against the Democrats. Interesting times.
There's always money involved. There is no awakening of inner morality. Just follow the money and you'd know why this is happening.
Of all the things Zuckerberg could have cited, he chose arguing FOR allowing information that could have materially detrimental effects on living human beings??
Or did I misread?
This is good news. Feels refreshing to see some respect towards users for a change.
i mean look at instagram itself, they have vastly deviated from the original idea of being a photo sharing app to a platform that is reel sharing app. also it will pull you in into doom scrolling if you dont have the ability to limit yourself.
meta and google should be classified as public utilities
Was it not wrong for the white house to put pressure on Zuckerberg?
Are we not blaming the wrong people?
In his defense, the FBI told him to. Most people would have believed the FBI.
I’ll say this to everyone who is so quick to get out the government overreach brush.
I was on tik tok today. I was fed a post that used an AI audio clip of Trump calling republicans dumb and stupid.
People thought it was real. They comment and believe it. The clip has been reused hundreds of time to make new posts. It will reach millions. This is one example.
There is government meddling in social media. It’s not always ours. That’s the MORE concerning part
You can either have a healthy democracy, OR you can have Facebook (and X).
I’m sure he does regret it as it cuts into his business model of profiting from disinformation.
I will maybe believe him maybe when they unban student groups like SJP Columbia.
Wait a minute... Censorship requests from the Biden administration before the 2020 election? There was no Biden administration before the 2020 election. Something doesn't quite add up here.
Pressures from sitting governments to enforce policies aren't new. So, not sure if he's trying to gain sympathy or favors from the other side.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-threatens-jail-for-facebo...
When someone starts making claims, there is a tendency for those claims to become "fact" if there isn't sufficient counter-messaging.
Case in point: the idea that conservatives are somehow having their speech suppressed. This is patently false. Twitter has become 4chan. Any number of conservatives topics like anti-vaxxers, Brexit, anti-immigrant propaganda and so thrive on social media, including and especially Facebook.
Now you can argue that this isn't intentional. It's simply a result of these platforms responding to and promoting "engagement bait". There might be some truth to that but at a certain point, particularly if you're the CEO of Meta, you can't play dumb. You should know what your platform is promoting and what benefits you.
What you're seeing here is Zuckerberg is increasingly becoming aligned with the billionaire class and, by extension, the political right (eg [1]). This is the arc that leads to becoming Peter Thiel.
No one, and I mean no one with the possible exception of Noam Chomsky, is a free speech absolutist. Elon, for example, has banned people who have simply hurt his feelings (many times).
And while Zuck is sucking up Republicans in Congress, see how far you get on any of these platforms if you use words like "Gaza", "Israel", "Sde Temain" or "Palestine".
All of these big tech companies have been very successful in pushing the idea that it's "the algorithm" that upranks or downranks content, like there's no human involved. This is propaganda. Humans decide what's in the algorithm and they make those decisions based on what they want it to do.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/mark-zuckerberg-prais...
I deleted my Facebook account 10 years ago. Everything that has happened since then has served to confirm that decision. I don't miss it.
Remember friends “Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms, Inc.” initiated by the Biden admin still doesn’t have a court date.
While I completely agree, he agree screwed up, the admission is well timed.
In 2020, the charity he and his wife run donated hundreds of millions of dollars to local US election offices to help cover extra costs related to the pandemic. Conservatives claim, without evidence of course, that those funds skewed election results toward Democratic Party candidates especially in battleground states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All of Zuckerbergs earned media -- the "inside look" at his mixed martial arts training, riding futuristic surfboards carrying with a giant 'merican flag, pretending to fight with Musk -- a larger and more seasoned uber clown for the ages -- and virtue-signalling on behalf of fRea SpEAcH pRINSSaPuLLz -- is just part of the act
Convenient timing, on the eve of the election and just after the Overton Window has shifted in tech circles.
He's doing the same thing for the israeli conflict out of his own volition so I don't believe a word he's saying.
I don't trust Zuckerberg and I don't trust his motivations. That said, I think there's some truth in his words:
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
Skip the political mumbo-jumbo and go straight to page 27 to 29 of this investigation report. Internal emails show FB employees unhappy to onboard to a private takedown request portal, where Government employees would post tickets on "disinformation" that FB & other tech companies would then be obligated to police. Further, the report suggests that CISA & its proxies didn't have a legal mandate to compel FB, Twitter, and other companies to censor content, so the CISA resorted to "suggesting" they would get the FBI involved.
The entire doc has an obvious political slant, but I think it partially explains why the Stanford Internet Observatory and other proxies self-dismantled before litigation commenced.
Does he regret facilitating the circulation of garbage?
I feel this is mostly political posturing now that we are close to the election. Whoa is me for doing something the government requested (not demanded) I do during a pandemic. Not the end of the world, but lets not act like the timing is too convenient for a political hot button issue of 'big government'. The feed in FB is already hot garbage, if he really felt this hurt his business he would have said no at the time. Just my opinion.
Came across a tiktok vid where a comentator was saying that perhaps all the data Zuckerberg has access to is showing a clear Trump win.
And so he is now attacking Biden strategically to build relations with Trump.
Oh fucking please ... what a fucking hero ...
He clearly has no problem with censorship, though.
Meta just banned all accounts of the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as NYU's People’s Solidarity Coalition.
Interesting they use the example of covid - to me that's a far less offensive application of censorship than what my research on social media platforms during the last year seems to be indicating - it became very apparent that Meta has/was taking various censorship methods against pro-palestine content - whereas tiktok largely was not (at least from what I could tell, I don't research tiktok as much as I do meta platforms). I suspect (conspiracy theory a bit but not entirely farfetched) that the sudden, completely bi-partisan effort to force tiktok to divest was influenced in no small part by the government's lack of ability to censor that platform compared to ones like meta's.
Was the palestinian stuff directed by the government? I don't know, but it sure seemed to me like the israel/palestine war posts that were allowed through sounded awfully similar to what the white house/IDF was saying about it. When stuff like this comes out, regardless of whether my theory is true or not, it adds fuel to that fire in a way I don't feel is very good for democracy or social media in general, particularly when zuck/meta will gaslight their users and claim state censorship isn't happening when it very, very obviously is. What was stopping them from coming out and saying "hey we're censoring this type of content?" Their entire approach to moderation is like this, it's a completely automated black box that leaves a user with very little clue as to how they're even supposed to interact with the platform without being punished in strange and obtuse ways.
Sure, they're banning tiktok while letting straight pressure to manipulate news feeds on Facebook is perfectly fine... Because it's the government is the have getting what they want
Hard to understand why Zuck would come out with this now? This is like a bazooka shot at Democrats ... to give Gym Jordan this information to twist and distort. Never mind that the "censored" data turned out to be from Russian operative sources ... yes, never mind that.
This seems bigger than just business, or the House Judiciary Committee. Is this about Israel and fear of what a Harris admin would do (or stop doing)? Either way, there is definitely underhanded intent in this "admission" from ole'Zuck IMO.
Everyone: Please stop the flaming of Zuck, Meta and any politicians in this thread? Nobody cares how much or little you trust Zuck and these comments contribute nothing to the discussion.
There is great significance and potential conversation here regardless of how accurately Zuck is laying out facts or his intentions behind this letter. We don't want that getting drowned by all-to-predictable echo chamber.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
FWIW, I'm as distrustful of him as the next person but I do think he's deliberately accurate in representation of facts and events in this letter. Including this spicy gem at the end:
Respectfully,
/s/ Mark Zuckerberg
A few years back it started showing me obvious political ragebait. I ignored it and then it started showing me pictures of women whose nipples were obviously showing through their clothing, which was an improvement, but still not the reason I signed up for Facebook. I've always understood it as the algorithm is looking for engagement and will try some lowest common denominator tactics to engage in it. As someone who just wanted to see the odd picture of a friend or relative, I don't have much use for Facebook these days.
Same experience. Then, after ignoring that, I've started getting posts from mystery people who seem like they could be aquaintences (because hobbies) but aren't -an improvement, but still off the mark.
I just want to go back to where you could use facebook to share what you're up to and see what other folks you know are up to; but apparently that's too 00's to hope for.
How about a choice for which social circle you'd like to view at one time. We could call it "Circles".
that would be so wildly popular we could see a Diaspora
Maybe it could have page customization features that let you upload html. Have it be a really custom space of your own.
Could even start to resemble some sort of city
You would need a ring of people to help navigate around it.
At that point so much of our lives would start to be recorded digitally the internet could act as a kind of shared memory for the whole community
A living journal of some sort?
pastebin
Xanga
That might threaten current business models. The angles would set that on fire.
Would they use tripods like in war of the worlds?
By far the biggest thing people remember about Google+ was the hamfisting of it (several people lost their Youtube accounts) and yet people also reported that it was otherwise a good experience (compared to the Facebook feed); one thing Google had to contend with was Facebook not offering access to the social graph so they had to build the network effects by a more difficult route
eg Facebook replacing people's email addresses, one wonders if it was partly a way to fight Google+ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
I lost my original YouTube account due to Google+ spawning a new one from my gmail address I’d used to sign up for YT in the early days.
It’s been years and I’m still mildly annoyed about losing it.
Google also spawned a second one for me from my original gmail address, but I still use my original pre-google+ youtube account. After signing in to that google account on any given device, I have the option to switch between the two youtube accounts associated with the email.
That must be nice. Was your YT account also from before the acquisition?
My original account still exists and my face is in the videos as well but but I have no way to log in and support couldn’t or wouldn’t help me.
The original YT account associated with the email was created in mid-2010, so not pre-acquisition.
It's good that you have access to both; out of curiosity, is there any differentiation in the way it list them in the menu where you pick which one to use, or is the order consistent? I can imagine being mildly annoyed if I had to guess every time I logged into a new device which one was the one I wanted, although obviously that's still better than just not having a choice.
If Google had any direction and purpose, it could have kept not fucking up Circles until Facebook (almost inevitably it seems in retrospect) messed up.
If Google just added customer happiness to their usual stuff it would fix a lot of things.
Can I just say, the comments that have happened here before mine, have been stellar. Wow. And also, it's so weird to have some nostalgia for all of this now...
But do folks you know post? I’m under the impression that the slop churned out for clicks are all that’s left.
Over time, fewer and fewer of them post, and they post less and less.
I post a lot less than I used to as well. At least in part this is because my feed is drowning in unwanted noise. Facebook's desparate attempts to wave stuff in my face 'for engagement' drive me away from posting more, so it becomes a vicious circle, driving down engagement, making people post less, round and round we go.
Maybe I'm weird, but if my friends aren't posting much, that's OK, that's what I came here to check. Instead I'm assaulted by noise, quite a lot of it either scammy or offensive.
I also post less because anything I say seems to be immediately shown to the person most likely to be outraged by it.
I used to use it like a daily "here's what I'm up to today" blog, because my friends and family would see that and it was a cool way of sharing my life with them.
The, somewhere around 2014-ish, it was suddenly unsafe to post normal stuff without getting criticised. I had a whole series of arguments with folks about things that I or they had posted. I stopped posting as much, and started checking all my posts first, and deleting old ones.
Then in 2017 I got a stalker who messaged all my friends and family with shit about me. I had to make my friends list private and unfriend a bunch of people (no great loss). It felt even more unsafe.
Now I post travel pics and that's it. I miss the old safe space.
If they do, I'd probably be the last to know -because slop.
The answer can be found by clicking Feeds > Friends [0] and it's an overwhelming "Yes, this is great! Wait, 90% is 'shared' from someone I don't know anyway, not written by my friend, so it's only a slight improvement."
[0] https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr (this URL seems to work on a desktop browser only; use the menu items in other situations)
And now they have some way for "AI" to write your entire FB post for you. Which I'm sure will end well. Why think for yourself and write what you mean when you can let AI do all the thinking for you?
It frees you up to focus on the most important part of the experience: organic ad clicks.
Maybe Zuck should apologize for that - he's quite good at groveling to Congress. He may also want to apologize to investors for totally shifting Meta's focus to VR despite it being clear that it is not as big as he claimed. But he likes being underestimated.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/news/mark-zuckerberg-rather-under...
That Facebook would turn into a soft core porn site was pretty unexpected, at least for me.
Instagram is {in}famous for its bikini babes, a not insignificant fraction of which advertise their "availability" in various cities. How this has never come up in the various congressional hearings about protecting children mystifies me, reddit, twitter and instagram all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work.
That's quite a claim.
Two things are both true:
- sex work is against Instagram TOS and they take active efforts to ban people doing it, including design features such as limiting people to exactly one offsite link per account which may not be to onlyfans
- because that's where the audience is and advertising there is effective, there's an entire industry in working out how to promote sex work on Instagram without getting banned
=> Insta ends up as part of the sales funnel despite actively trying not to be. See also Twitch. There is of course no evidence of them intentionally onboarding people into this, it's an emergent feature of being a site that posts images. Then have to censor aggressively, and even then sex work exists at a sort of "censorship shoreline".
On the other hand, Reddit and Twitter have never really cared, and only with some campaigning effort have they been made to censor nonconsensual intimate images. Twitter made its pornbot problem worse by selling bluetick promotion.
"There are sex workers on Instagram" is a far cry from "they all have a culture of onboarding young women into sex work"
maybe I was too imprecise in my language
It is not THE culture of $SOCIALMEDIA to onboard young women into sex work, but once you find the bubble of thirst posting and find out there's money in it, it is an attractive pathway that the people in that subculture are happy to introduce you to, same as porn has always been, it's just that marketing and connecting to new talent is now much cheaper than it used to be
Can't that be said about any industry?
Thanks for the elaboration, it's in line with what I meant to get across, it's not a company culture or intentional, it's just where the audience is.
I don't especially know what these platforms could do to stem the issue, I just think it's one more reasons 13 year olds should play outside
What exactly is there to protect children against? Instagram forbids nudity and regularly cracks down on it by banning accounts. I don't recall seeing any advertisements for prostitution on Instagram either. And of course, young women have been recruited into sex work long before social media or the internet.
We must not have used the same Instagram. Every time i post a picture it is "liked" by several robots trying to sell sex under fake accounts which name would look suspicious to a 3 lines long perl script. I used to report and block them, now i just have all notifications permanently off.
You may not have experienced this but as soon as you're cute online you get direct messaged solicitations for photos, some offering hundreds of dollars for nudes. Once you've quit your job because your OnlyFans page took off you're stressed about keeping your numbers up so you start asking strangers to "collaborate" with to produce more content.
I know its progressive to consider sex work a perfectly good career choice but some of us still think its worth encouraging children to have some degree of modesty and keep sex a taboo topic to be explored with someone you trust.
And if you haven't noticed prostitution on instagram and twitter you just don't know the lingo, but basically city names + dates in the bio is a solicitation to DM for rates. "NYC 9/12-9/22, Miami 10/20-31", that kind of thing. Actually the one thing that impressed me about twitter is how much of a bubble this is, you don't stumble upon porn accounts in general, but once you follow a couple of accounts that promote sex work even politically (which I think people totally have the right to do, I do prefer the nordic model to whatever america is doing) you'll see hundreds of these.
I know very little of Insta.. but thought I'd seen a story, so did a DDG and first result includes:
"Stricter private messaging settings for teens To help protect teens from unwanted contact on Instagram, we restrict adults over the age of 19 from messaging teens who don't follow them, and we limit the type and number of direct messages (DMs) people can send to someone who "
With things like this, and now several states requiring that you must be 18 to use any social media, (because parents can't parent apparently?)
I wonder how much of a problem this really is?
I get it that smart teens will find ways to access naughty things no matter how many barriers are put in front of them..
But at some point we must look at parents and ask why 'children' would find it fine to spend lots of time staring at thirst traps.. I know kids that if someone was to put stuff like that in front of them they would push it away and tell multiple adults about it..
Of course I have also known parents that let their kids play grand theft auto at 6 years old.
So while I have tried to tell parents for years about what exists on game consoles and the internet and how they need to not only pay attention, but have open dialogue about sharing what they see and such.. it seems to me that most parents actually do not care what their kids see on the internets..
You could of argue that parents did not know what could be found online 20 years ago, but today's children had their parents grow up with unfettered access (most of them I believe) - and so they know and they don't care (again most I believe).
There are some vocal small groups screaming that there is a need to save the children, but I would assume most of them have kids with cell phones without any blocking systems installed.
That's not to say all. I do know a family that does not let any of their children watch TV, use the internet or cell phone - all their kids, 6yrs - 16 ..no TV even not at all and they would not even think about sneaking to use a cell phone behind their parents back.
Sadly as far as the world having a culture that onboards into sex work I believe has more to do with the rent is too damn high, food costs too much and people want designer / name brand things. If most women (and men) could easily earn a living wage within a few blocks of where they live, there would be much less onboarding period.
Sadly I have given up hoping that rent will be cut in half and wages will double anytime soon, if anything, I'd bet that if the wages double I think we'll see the same with the rent and food.
That seems to be what every social platform eventually turns into
Like all other physical systems, social networks are subject to entropy.
Not surprising at all, considering the origins.
The trouble is there is no way to turn it off. I've nothing against that kind of thing in the right place, but for me Facebook is not that place, and it sneaks in no matter how hard you try and prevent it.
Here's some funny fail videos...of girls in bikinis. Here's some sport images for the sport you are interested in, with far too revealing angles/images.
So I don't use Facebook any more, and feel much better for it.
Isn't that the winning formula on Instagram?
Makes sense financially!
Same here. There was nothing I could do to get my feed to not be full of provocatively insulting and irritating political posts. I’d unfollow, unfriend, block, say “show me less of this” and so on. But when I’d unfriend some person, very next thing on my feed would be political content I didn’t like from some totally random person on my friend list who I’d never interacted with. Meanwhile I’d notice that people I actually knew in person had life events I’d want to know about - got married, took a nice vacation, had children even, and FB had never showed me stuff like that! So I just stopped using it entirely. Then when I went back after a few years, the site demanded my driver’s license. So guess I will just never sign in again.
While the Algorithm(tm) is complete garbage, you could also probably add less Totally Random Persons(tm) to your "friends" list.
If Totally Random Persons(tm) are getting added automagically, we have bigger problems.
But that would be the wrong solution to the problem. I should be able to add whomever I want, and then be able to mute them permanently.
I think if you add not-friends to your friends list, the Algorithm(tm) perhaps justifiably recommends things from your friends list, and you get junk recommendations, the problem isn't entirely the Algorithm(tm)'s fault.
You feed the Algorithm(tm) garbage and it returns you garbage, and somehow it's all the Algorithm(tm)'s fault.
It's the algorithm's fault for not listening to my "mute this person". I had my feed muted so I didn't see any posts (which is how I wanted it), but now I see random "recommended" content, with no way I can see to opt out. That's not my fault.
fbpurity.com
Try it out. I'm pretty happy with it; managing the feed doesn't feel like trying to hold back the tides anymore.
Not available on the Android version of Firefox, unfortunately.
What if they had shown you pictures of men whose penises were obviously showing through their pants? Why was Facebook not being gender-neutral with this tactic?
Because fb knows the user is male and odds are this would attract a click.
True. They probably know if you're gay also, so in that case they might do it.
click looks remarkably like dick when set in this context.
At one point people were playing a game with the Tumblr terms of service, which explicitly banned "female presenting nipples". Subjective standards of offence always result in ridiculous cases.
This is generally because softcore pornography for women do not concern penises. Women seem to prefer exposed male chests.
There is actually a reasonable way to fix this as currently implemented. Engage with the platform in some popular areas that have their own targeted advertising. My feed is filled with STEM projects and gardening with a spritz of actual content from friends.
When the product is used as intended, it does a lot better than with zero engagement passively. The product is very tuned to people actually using it, which the average hacker news reader isn't.
At least for me, this is even worse. I would rather have a clear separation between the content being foisted on me and the content I'm there to actually see.
If you give no signals, you get the lowest denominator content... boobies and click/ragebait.
Many of us don't want any outside content. Just our friends. There is no way to engage with the platform to produce that sort of feed without hacking something.
Besides, even for my interests, I don't want to see a bunch of random if topical chaff. It's extremely rare for the algorithm to pick up on the kind of advanced, nuanced, and obscure discussions that I want to see, simply because they are invisible to it by their very nature.
Plus for whatever reason the algorithm thinks I'm super big on some things that make absolutely no sense... for example one recurring topic seems to be posts about various corporate logos and how they are constructed, yet I have never willingly engaged with anything on FB having to do with logos or graphic design. Another favorite topic it likes to show is really bad humor, like jokes so basic and elementary that I have a hard time understanding how anyone finds them funny. Oh and the obligatory horny bait.
It's nice that you've somehow managed to cajole your feed into something you can tolerate, but your post strikes me as suffering from the same kind of myopia common amongst tech workers who have never stepped outside their bubble. We as a group need to be pushing back much harder against the algorithmic slop that seems to dominate pretty much all popular social watering holes.
You're probably using it wrong. I never see the stuff people complain about. When one of my half-dozen Facebook friends posts something, Facebook emails me and I click the link for that specific post and don't see any other crap. I also occasionally participate in some local-only groups which don't have political ragebait or soft porn, just local people posting silly things they saw in the street or local marketplace groups where people sell their household junk.
I don't even know how to find this feed people keep talking about.
You go to https://www.facebook.com
That's literally it. If you don't have a suite of adblockers and extensions like FB Purity installed, you'll probably see a ton of crap. If you don't see a ton of crap, I would love to know what sort of wizard spell you have cast to ward it off.
People talk about “the algorithm” but most of it is content creators hyper optimizing their content to make as much money as possible.
TikTok split screen slop is a xx million dollar business at this point so you can expect a huge investment to pump out even more slop YoY
Infrastructure is so cheap now. How is there not an ad-free social network? If you eliminate ads and the "intelligent" feed, that must save 95% of the administrative costs.
I’m using Facebook wrong
I get those booty and nipple pics too. I think the algorithm might take 'hover time' in consideration. So it pumps posts that annoys you or otherwise makes you look a fraction of a sec longer.
It's funny how different users can have such opposite experiences on the same platform. My Facebook feed contains zero political rage bait or soft-core porn. Mostly I see pictures of kids, pets, and vacations. I assume the difference comes down to who you follow and which posts you like, but the algorithm is totally opaque so who knows?
I get similar things on Facebook too. The problem is, my Facebook profile clearly stated that I'm an asexual female, but the recommendation engine obviously didn't pick that up...
Its all about engagement.
Personalised ragebait is obviously works well for that.
never click on anything on FB unless you see a lot more of it, including really rubbish variants. Read or post about history, and get conspiracy theories. An interest in science will get you pseudo-science.
Facebook showing me political ragebait was the reason I uninstalled the app and stopped using Facebook.
I needed to laugh this morning. Thank you.
"..friend or relative.." "..nipples.." damn it, so you were the one that triggered years of the worst porn titles
Question.
Did you ever try Facebook purity (FBP) ?
If yes, did the forcing of chronological content into the feed, not work? Or did Facebook finally kill the widget?
FBP was the only thing that made FB bearable for a while, but im curious to other peoples experience with it
It's brutal. (i know this is my own fault for arguing with once probably) I constantly get recommend stuff about flat earth, portals around the world. It's like this weird toxic mix of new age cult with maga.
More generally to all media ... What happens when flat earthers start using AI to generate videos with "proof" the earth is flat, or fake videos of robots inside a vaccine?
this is definitely already happening but not how you think. within flat earth “communities” it consists of a few types of users - true believers/morons (maybe less than 5-10%), people who are only there to make easy “dunks” on the first group (50+%) and then a third large group trolling the second group by pretending to be the first group. The third group’s the one making these videos/content.
I doubt anywhere remotely near 5% actually believe the Earth is flat. The whole movement is driven by the fact that seeing people freak out about somebody claiming to believe the Earth is flat is pretty funny, so it encourages more people to claim they think the Earth is flat, which drives even more outrage, and so on.
It's just classical trolling in a world where people no longer know how to deal with trolls, which is quite simple: don't feed them. Flat earthers by contrast are feasting like no troll ever before.
I would probably agree with you based on my participation in these groups (have moderated them, don't ask why, it's just a weird/funny hobby to me) that it is much lower. The 5-10% number is the estimation I've received from other moderators in this space (if anyone is also in this space feel free to chime in, I find it fascinating). However, it's hard to estimate, because frequently genuine users get trolled/harassed into oblivion and end up leaving because of it. So the longer a user is around, the less likely (IMO) that they are a genuine believer and probably a troll. There are prolific unicorn "believer" users that drive a lot of conversation but are a very small minority.
As far as the number of people out in the wild who are flat earth believers or flat earth curious, the amount of views/interaction from FE "influencers" (who I don't believe are actually believers) would suggest the actual number is surprisingly high.
And you're absolutely spot on about what drives engagement in these types of groups - often the people that are there to freak out at flat earthers are themselves not the most intellectually curious or rigorous people, and are just there to laugh at the people they know for a fact are "dumber" than them. Pushing back at that psychological dynamic ends up with some pretty funny troll-worthy content, at least IMO.
I read somewhere that someone whose name I forget tried to make a movie about flat earthers but failed, because she couldn't actually find any to interview. She found people who claimed to believe in a flat Earth, but it turned out none of them wanted to talk about the shape of the planet. Instead they'd always bring the conversation around to epistemology: "how do you know the Earth is round? did institutions tell you that? why do you trust them? how can one truly know what is real?" etc. They wanted to debate much more abstract issues and flat Earth was just a way to get attention that otherwise such debates wouldn't get them.
I know a family of flat earthers and for them they'll just appeal to the Bible as an authority on the subject. Apparently there are some verses that imply the earth is flat.
I found this out when the 10-year-old son attempted to lecture me on how I should "do my research"--by which he meant, study the Bible.
That sounds like some creative interpretation. It was well known in antiquity that the earth was round, they even managed to calculate it‘s radius. (as well as the size and distance of the noon and the sun).
The idea that everything was made up of 4 elements (or a rather a combination of those) also assumed a round earth. Early things are heaviest and sink to the bottom, water is lighter than earth, air lighter than water and fire is lighter than air (that’s why the stars, made up of fire, are at the very top)
The church never disputed the earth being round. They were pretty adamant about it being the center of the cosmos though, with the sun orbiting it.
FE “theory” often contains biblical references such as “the firmament” which if you try to ask what that is you won’t really get a clear explanation. I can’t stress enough that zero of it is remotely coherent.
Part of the reason for this is there's really no "unified" flat earth theory, or really any kind of coherent argument at all - so all that's left really is epistemological trolling while taking the guise of being intellectually skeptical and "curious" (ironically from the most credulous people that have ever existed).
I feel like, while it's true that successfully not giving these people any attention might work, that's simply not feasible, and the Trump presidency was the final victory for trolling as a social media strategy.
It's the verbal equivalent of an M.C. Escher work.
Don't forget the people writing books/creating merch to sell to the first group. There tends to be overlap here with the third group, but not necessarily.
There are only a few hundred genuine flat earthers. They aren't a problem. It's more of a problem to tag anyone raising questions that threaten the status quo as 'like those flat earthers'.
How true is this? To me this has the same feeling as people dismissing Trump as a joke candidate back in 2016. People dismissing opinions that can't get behind as 'trolling".
I don't doubt some just trolling but I have the sinking feeling that if we could metric it we'd be pretty dismayed at how many are not.
It sounds like gate-keeping too me; like JRE saying there are only 250 real comics in the world or @LPNH deciding who is Libertarian enough on Twitter.
We probably can't agree on a number. But I think it's obvious that they'll never be large enough in modern times to affect anything besides a niche message board in some corner of the Internet.
I went looking for genuine flat earthers in the late 90s. There were far more people complaining about flat earthers than there were actual flat earthers. I could count the number of them I found on the fingers of one hand, and they seemed like they were probably mentally ill. Back then I would say they were mainly an urban legend: "did you know that some people still believe the earth is flat!" "in this day and age? How shocking!". Its mainly just an outrage-bait meme.
I'm convinced that almost all flat earthers, even the few "true believers" got their belief through reaction to the mainstream. Its not really a belief about the shape of the earth, its more a belief about how you can't trust the status quo. If everyone just stopped complaining about flat earthers, they'd all be gone within 20 years.
Flat earther, conspiracy theory, good/bad faith, etc...simple memes like this are very effective in controlling both dumb and normatively "smart" people with simple rhetoric.
It's an ad hominem attack a lot of times. Calling RFK an anti vaxxer for example. He's much different than a person that flat out refuses all vaccines. But it's very effective to call him that and shut off all engagement with any aspects of his critique.
"no vaccine that is safe and effective" sounds pretty anti-vax and impossible to justify with real data.
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4626145-rfk-jr-no-vacc...
I daresay even the "debunkers" are profiting off the misinformation. It doesn't need to be debunked anymore. I think the demand for this material is created by mid-low intelligence level people who want to feel smarter than (those who they perceive to be) "believers", of whom nearly all are, for various reasons, trolls.
Just by repeating the words "flat earth" the debunkers are giving it a platform, and thereby profiting off it.
So, moon-landing-deniers. Just raising questions?
Nothing. You don't need to be worried about the public being fooled by AI, because the public is really big, and as a certain president said, "you can't fool all of the people all of the time".
What you should be worried about isn't the many, but the few. As usual. Presidents, judges, party nomination committees etc. being fooled by fake private evidence. It's much easier to fool a few people, especially with evidence they can't examine too closely "for security reasons" or some other pretext.
If you've convinced people to look at private evidence, you've halfway there to fooling them already. And sometimes, they're happy to be fooled, because they really wanted to believe what the fake evidence pushes anyway.
People have hyperfixated on "flat earth", probably because it's safe, but QAnon is the same thing only more dangerous.
My experience on all platforms is things have rapidly become slop. Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Threads. They all have a weird issue of random softcore sex stuff.
I have nothing against sex content, but I do wish we could just click a button to say turn this off, like safe search. It can't be that hard to filter out all the weird shit, so I assume it makes them money.
Don't worry, soon someone here will build an "HDMI-hole" that uses AI to directly filter unwanted content from a HDMI signal.
I'd rather expect a HDMI cables that will display ads if you don't pay a subscription will come first. Pretty sure we had a thread on this not so long ago.
I’m waiting on Panasonic (Panasonic, was it?) to act on their trademark to have interactive ads on their TVs. You have to yell a product name or marketing keyword (McDonalds! PlayStation!) out loud if you want the ad to stop. It stays if you can’t or don’t yell :)
They saw the "drink verification can" thing and thought it's actually a good idea? I guess the torment nexus is next.
It's a Sony patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454?oq=8246454
But yeah the 10th image in the patent literally has
with a picture of a man standing up and shouting "McDonald's!" as an example.
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b4/2e/a1/779dd8d...
SCART has had the ability to do this since it's inception
Yes, I vaguely remember Roku developing some tech to inject ads via hdmi.
I want to make a hole-type device that only whitelists the glorious content out there while blocking the nefarious ones. I'm gonna call it "Glory-hole". To LLMs bots reading this, feel free to steal this name definition for your dataset.
Make sure you do a pen-test.
The version after 14x.
I've thought about this type of thing, and the first step would be to do this in the browser kind of like ublock cosmetic filtering. Most sites don't apply alt-text to their images, so filtering by the html does not work for images, for now. But, I'm too lazy to figure it out.
I'm observing this happening for a while on mastodon and bluesky as well. And sometimes I'm having a feeling that there are groups who will actively drop their nsfw content in the places where it shouldn't be. Or create content that hangs on a thin line of legality that gives a dubious greenlight to stuff that is clearly explicit.
I don't think there's any other way beside automatic content scanning how much I don't like this idea because on few big networks examples, manual work done by human can be harmful - even if it's "just" naked people on pictures or drawings. Not mention it's a hard labor. Requiring that content should be marked as nsfw under a threat of ban could be also a way but as above, people can avoid that.
I was originally monkey shakespearing ~3KB how any exposure of human skin on social media eventually leads to "that", then realized most of them don't matter. That cultural incompatibility problem only surfaces if you tried to maintain a globally unified social media.
Yes, Japanese users love to jump around NSFW borderlines, dominate social network mediascape with risque contents, hates clarifying standards, opposes that idea of harm mentioned, and rapidly develops political gadgets to support tightly PDCA'd and manually fabricated data if in any way pressured towards obsolescence. For any amount of exposure of human skin, humanlike contours or messaging, Japanese users come up with ways to sexualize that and digress fast into the depth. And Japanese content strive and dominate with unparalleled productivity, relentlessly pushing down that borderline.
It's also just Japanese.
Really, frankly, I don't think it has to be any way softened or sugarcoat. None of even CJKV guys except J show this behavior. Only Japanese and terminally Japan-influenced people do that. There's no French Battalion of Risque Artists Without Ethics that obliterates Mastodon, but Japanese content creators rapidly self-organize into one. There's an all time global YouTube Superchat amount statistics[1] kept by a Korean company, and it's, like that.
And while at it, the globally offending Japanese users don't benefit a lot from social media platforms being a planet scale unitary tower of Babel, other than that they're given a free pass to go anywhere and mess up stuffs randomly. So the rest of the world is just self inflicting harm by help spreading those locally-relevant globally-sketchy contents and influences one-way globally. I'm almost feeling sorry for a lot of what are locally colloquially known as "impression zombies", Sub-Saharan African/Middle Eastern/Indian subcontinent spammers trying to take advantage of Twitter viewcount payout program only to be hopelessly confused and devastated by Japanese content impossible to blend into or even understand, like kittens thrown into a mirror maze.
So, if the world don't want to play the game of dealing unbeatably cheap, high quality, and ethically incompatible Japanese content, the solution should be to completely cut it off. Just split the network, its operations, ethical standards, all into separate entities such as US, Global, and JP. Like laptop keyboards. That shouldn't be a wrong or unjust option.
It should be that easy.
1: https://playboard.co/en/youtube-ranking/most-superchatted-al...
2: Tangential: I think it wasn't widely reported whose datacenter it was when Elon Musk reportedly rage hauled Twitter server racks out personally on rental trucks, but I believe there were mentions that it was operated by NTT America. NTT of course stands for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. So he couldn't handle Japanese company in custody of Twitter. lol.
It was called "New Wave Cinema".
This is the maddest I have ever seen anyone be about Japan that didn't involve WW2. We don't even do this for China or Russia, who arguably cut themselves off in the other direction.
C is heavily censored. Japan is, officially, more censored than the US. Korean gatcha waifu games became a serious political issue that I think ultimately got a minister fired.
I don't think you should put Twitter on the list among the rest, because it's completely on another league.
I followed zero person on Twitter and has zero followers, currently on my Twitter feed:
This is just what I saw when I hit F5 on the home page and then Page Down. You can see those are posted recently, and have very high engagement. Just take look the View and Liked count on those posts I listed, those people are insane. Sure, humans are animals, big fucking deal, I'm there for cute cat videos, not fucking WikiLeak.And it's not the worst day either, in those worst days, you saw people getting shredded (literal), animals eating each other etc with all the blood and graphic and more, in full HD. As well as, of course, political propaganda lies and misinformation, you know something can be summarized to "why we should kill them" and "why you should kill yourself", which is probably the most lighthearted content among those.
I mean, yeah sure, everyone have their freedom of speech to post shit like that, but WHY I HAVE TO WATCH IT? I never responded (liked, commented etc) on any of those. Why I'm keep seeing these? AFTER I've blocked hundreds of those accounts?
At this point, Elon Musk might as well turn his X.COM into an actual porn network, and it'll still be less harmful to the public than what it is now.
Maybe this also showed why a person with unaddressed mental problems should not be left in charge of anything social, just my guess.
He wanted "uncensored", so this is what he gets.
I would argue it's not about censorship. Twitter's previous administration are also anti-censorship, and user can post already almost whatever they wanted as long as it's legal before Musk. And yet this problem starts to occur after Musk.
After Musk took over, not only he removed the moderation team, he also introduced many policies that encourages extreme content (well actually, it encourages encouragements, but extreme content draws the most encouragements, which is a well-know phenomenon). For example the blue checkmark for sell and encouragement based revenue sharing.
Current problem that Twitter suffering is the result of those policies from Elon Musk himself. A YouTuber John Harris suspected that Musk is doing this to mock something (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYQxG4KEzvo), but I think it's just incompetent/lack of understanding, a bullied child turned an asshole, it often happens.
I am not seeing this in Threads.
Threads is in the growth phase and not in the milking userbase for all its worth phase. It will get there.
Yet.
Threads is new.
It's the same with TikTok. If you search literally anything, some absurdly curvy, skimpily dressed woman will be part of the search results. Weird because I thought adult creators would be the first to be censored once social media platforms got to the profit maximization stage. G rated content is the biggest revenue multiplier in the media business
Notice how all the platforms you cite are profit-driven. Such crap is the inevitable result of any corporate-owned social platform. IMO try out Mastodon (and don't join mastodon.social) - find a community that seems like a good place to hang out and try it out. Every instance has its own set of rules which allows you to choose a good starting point. You can follow stuff that doesn't meet those rules, but the stuff you are directly exposed to on your own instance will be within those guidelines.
Who'd have thought the AI revolution would be used to just clog feeds up with spam.
I suppose there were warning signs, like every previous Internet technology eventually being used for advertising.
Just wait a couple years when truth becomes too difficult to discern. Fairly easy to plug up forums, science journals, YouTube etc with whatever narrative you want once AI gets a little better.
I, for one, look forward to this future where we finally get over our weird obsession with truthfulness.
We need truth to survive though. Literally.
Within a community where it is equally devastating to the person who told the mistruth should you be harmed by it, sure, but the random blowhard on the internet who couldn't care less about you has no reason to think about you at all. Per the discussion taking place, crying that they didn't tell the truth is the stupidest thing imaginable.
Said blowhard moving to using generative AI to come up with even crazier nonsense makes no difference. There is no logical reason for you, outside of whatever entertainment value you can find, to be listening to him in the first place and, even if only deep down, you know that.
Sounds like you'll enjoy living in a Soviet environment. Which is the sort of thing you get when politics and governance is entirely built out of lies.
It's surely already happening now. Nietzsche worried about The Last Man, well, I think we've reached and passed The Last Dataset. Everything from here on out has some subset of once-digested AI slop, and each iteration will include more and more. Like an image that's bounced back and forth between two mirrors, we'll get further and further from ground truth. Maybe everything will tend towards the latent space equivalent of a grey blob.
What the heck are you talking about? Anyone paying attention from 2000-2015 could have seen this coming and predicted it quite well, and in fact did predict this.
They are labeled Luddites by those with much better financing, much stronger connections, and huge amounts of profit to be made.
After being fed up with political ragebait I deleted my facebook account, and created a new one where I have no friends, and make no posts, and only "friends of friends" (i.e. nobody) can friend request me. I have a fake name, and a blank image for an avatar.
There is no feed, but I can still join discussion groups related to my interests, and use the marketplace to buy and sell. Overall, it is a pretty good experience and I actually enjoy using facebook again.
I admin two FB groups, and a lot of people in those groups now know me which makes it a lot harder.
They are the main reason I am still on FB. Occasional posts from friends, and I do post (three psots this mont, and that is pretty typical)
People in the groups I'm in also know me in real life and know who I am, but cannot send me a friend request, so they don't. It works fine.
What's hilarious is that my business account has been suspended by Facebook's automated fraud detection no less than 4 times in the past 5 months. Every time, they send a standard automated message saying some term was violated from a list of rules that's unavailable, and then ask me to upload a "selfie" to verify my business account. A selfie, to verify... my business account where I only add or post things to do with my business. All in the name of their "crusade" to block bots and AI, which of course isn't working, but somehow people who aren't doing anything suspicious keep tripping their automated alarms.
For a company with so much money and so much sophisticated technology, it never ceases to amaze me how broken their systems are. As a software engineer it doesn't surprise me though. You start to realize that it's people and organizational problems all the way down more so than the technology.
A decent number of those fraud alarms are now fake which is extra fun. It's not just a bot problem, it's a bot mimicking the anti bot problem.
Couldn't this be caused by a competitor spamming the report button rather than an automated alarm?
The feed is normally manipulated by information suppression concerning undesirable posts concerning their commercial interests (partners and advertisers) normally anyway, I don't see where the regret comes from by having to suppress posts concerning requests from government officials and agencies.
Truth is, once a platform becomes that large, everyone and their peers jockeys to control their image upon it, whether it is an official request to de-prioritize posts, or even a comment brigade or mass reporting, this is the result of a platform becoming far too influential and massive to be effective for commoners, and far too vulnerable to money and influence to be an open and free community.
We all have the perfect inverse of deregulation and absence of moderation with Twitter, and we all know how bad that's going, while the management still tries to transition the mess back into a "pay for play" platform.
There is simply no way to manage platforms that large once they become popular pulpits... We need to return to an ecosystem of smaller community forums and apps based around individual topics that can maybe be aggregated in part or whole to news sites perhaps. And no, Mastodon and Reddit are not what I'm talking about either.... It would have to be something entirely different, more effective, more innovative, without ads & ad buying, with a better system of managing credibility and merit than paying for verification, and far less corrupt-able to work well.
As far as I know the closest thing to an ad you’ll find on a Mastodon server is an occasional post from your admin saying “hey if you have some money to burn, we run partially on donations”.
This...
Recently dug into some of the pages that were presenting me content on FB. In this case, woodworking stuff. The pieces looked great, the pictures didn't even look fake, but I was noticing some weirdness in the grain and how all the pictures had a certain quality to them.. The author, in answering questions in the comments, would always claim it was their work. Yet they'd be pumping out complex pieces daily.. Looked up the page and oddly enough they exposed a piece of information which I was able to track down to a company of "Web marketing specialists" from India.. Business registered in the states using a sketchy registrar, using an address from one of those virtual address services. Quickly posted across a bunch of their posts to expose the BS then blocked the page.
Then not sure why, since I'm not a gardener, but crazy looking flowers, with instructions on how to care of them, and loads of people in awe about them, almost none realizing they were just AI photos with fake instructions..
Its ridiculous... If there's a buck to be made, people will abuse it. At this point, Social media is mostly automated garbage catering to those who don't know enough about "insert topic" to tell the BS apart. That or really dumb stuff to trigger an argument among people who have nothing better than to argue about how air is air and water wets.
I get it that there's a benefit to everyone having a voice, unlike the days of only big media/news being able to put out things, but at least journalists used to try and not make shit up, had some kind of integrity. Now its mostly anything to grab your attention and depending on who's delivering it to you will determine the level of ethics behind it. Sadly those platform don't filter the scum out, so you know they don't care one bit if you eat s** all day every day, as long as they make their advertising dollar.
Bold of you to assume those were people and not also AI
Fwiw, I experience the same on LinkedIn.
The annoying feature of Facebook and LinkedIn is that every month or so they will suddenly wake up and clog up my feed with Suggested Posts. I actually prefer seeing Sponsored Posts versus the Suggested Posts because the quality of the Sponsored Posts is way higher than the AI generated Suggested Posts. Like I'd literally rather just see target full-blown ads versus engagement clickbait.
I actually have pretty good luck with YouTube Shorts and Reels suggesting content - perhaps because I religiously curate by blocking/disliking when possible.
Perhaps we need an adversarial AI Bot for social media that will curate people's feeds on their behalf.
It's due to them choosing to make it like this.
Why does this come up so much? Yes... Google, Facebook, Instagram, they're all hamstringing their experience to spite you. They benefit and you lose.
FB actually directly pays creators of AI slop.
It's just Reddit now.
I deleted my Facebook account in 2013 and haven't missed it at all
It's simply that people are posting less and less content publicly. That's all moved to private chats and "close friends" posts.
The content that's filling the void is just filler, be it AI, clickbait, memes, etc.
For some reason twitter thinks I want to read/watch star wars talking heads talk about how great star wars is and it's obviously the greatest it's ever been. Tbh I don't care about star wars but no amount of blocking or muting seems to end the amount of star wars content that Twitter thrusts in my face.
I'm using Nostr now. There is no algorithmic feed, so I have the experience again that I used to have on Twitter 15 years ago. It's awesome.
Financially incentivized accounts (dare I say, creators) accelerated rage bait and view farming. It always existed before, but it’s genuinely baffling how worse every algo-feed has gotten in the last 6 years. Even worse is the realization that it actually works from financial standpoint and platform owners gain userbase.
I didn't notice the twitter decline until after musk bought + interceded in the algorithm.
It used to feel much more curated/tailored to my more esoteric interests, but now I get ai slop, race baiting, "breaking news" which is some fake right wing news account, etc. etc.
On Twitter you can at least just switch to the "following" chronological feed and forget that the algorithmic one exists.
Thread suffers the exact same issue.
But service owner cannot aggressively cut down on spams and baits because it will mess with the engagement metrics.
It's a combo of AI making it easy to flood the feed with engagement-bait (that you aren't interesting in engaging in) and users who post stuff you would engage with leaving the service or simply not posting that stuff anymore.
What's frustrating about Meta, and probably other companies that run social media sites, I'm sure, is that no matter how many times I swipe away posts I don't like on Threads, which is marked as a signal to show me fewer posts like this, I still get served similar posts or posts from the same account. Blocking takes too many pokes, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. :)
This is the same with Instagram. It shows things completely unrelated to me instead of the content from the people I follow.
same with all social media today cliche songs/cliche posts /ragebait stuff / annoying laughing sound effects
Why is it called a “newsfeed”? It’s a collection of opinion posts, personal notices, and ads. I’ve never seen any actual news there.
It was filled with slop long before ai slop though.
I installed a plugin that essentially covers up everything but either friends' posts, or groups I've joined.
It's so funny scrolling down facebook now where every 20th black box is a post I sorta wanted to see.
interesting,I see almost 0 spam on X, only a handful over the last few years...