Now what? The collateral damage of a tech backlash
blog.nillium.comI’d be OK if twitter and Facebook just died out and nothing replaces them. I left FB in 2012 because of its toxicity. Twitter was working great until they started pushing stuff that my connections like. The whole tower needs to come down and we really need to consider what a healthy information network looks like - because this ain’t it.
You have to wonder why what it shows you is toxic. My FB feed is mostly animals and math jokes, a few updates on my friends' kids plus some landscapes from my home country. This is what I want from it and nothing more.
Am I using it wrong? Are you?
Your post is probably why we should regulate the algorithms they use. It's bullshit that they can influence what shows up on your feed, and then they blame you for it. "Oh, you must be the toxic one if all you see is toxicity..."
I think your projecting your own feelings onto the parent comment by adding "you must be toxic" to the beginning of that sentence. The only thing the parent commenter said is that the pattern of one's use can feed into the toxicity of their feed, without any judgment of that pattern per se. Nontoxic patterns that lead to toxicity exposure could be something as simple as "likes to read and post (non-toxically) about politics or social causes".
The takeaway of the parent comment was that there are plenty of ways to use FB, perhaps in constrained ways, that don't lead to toxicity and don't require leaving the platform.
Im not personally a big FB user, but have applied this very successfully to my Reddit and Twitter usage. I follow/subscribe to a very small number of very high-quality accts/subreddits, and am selective about when I read the comments. I'm able to derive a ton of value from this[1] pattern of usage without running into the bottomless pits of stupidity and malice that the average reddit/Twitter experience contains.
[1] including the holy grail: a political discussion forum full of a wide variety of viewpoints and populated solely by mental adults
I think you’re probably right about the intention of the original comment, but that doesn’t change the fact that it puts the responsibility on the user to change their habits to avoid toxic content, instead of on the platform.
These platforms use our conscious actions (what we like, who we follow) and our subconscious actions (how long we linger on particular posts, what kinds of posts keep us on the site longer than others) and produce something that is often toxic. You’re right that if you’re hyper conscious of your own interactions you can curate a peaceful feed, but idle browsing for anyone even slightly political is going to lead you down a rabbit hole.
That’s something the platform can change, and imo is something the platform is responsible for, since they’re the ones who made the ML algorithm that’s amplifying toxic content.
> it puts the responsibility on the user to change their habits to avoid toxic content, instead of on the platform.
Why do you think this is true? Taking action to control what you can of your own welfare is entirely orthogonal to and doesn't diminish at all the responsibility of other actors. It's just wallowing in self-destructive victimhood to pretend that you can't take self-protective action while still advocating just as strongly for actors like Facebook to be held responsible.
Ie, the leap you're describing from "you can use Facebook healthily" to "Facebook bears no responsibility for the unhealthy usage patterns of most of its users" is one that no one but you (and the commenter you're agreeing with) has made.
if your Facebook feed is dominated by math jokes and landscapes then I think it's fair to point out that your connections on the site are not exactly representative of the average citizen, going by Facebook's most popular sites.
So OP isn't using Facebook wrong, they are probably just less socio-economically insulated.
In large I stopped using FB 4-5 years ago but at the time I got alot of videos of people hurting themself in "funny" accidents.
I distaste those kind of videos. I have no clue why the algorithm spammed me with those.
It doesn't matter if your feed is filled with mostly animals and math jokes. Facebook/YouTube or any social media provider will still send you one video that is not based on your profile under certain circumstances. Have you ever stumbled upon a video where you have comments like:
1. I don't know how I got here. I was watching some [insert something innocent here]
2. Thanks [service] for recommending me this video after 10 years of it being uploaded
3. Is [service] trying to tell me something? Am I going to die? Why am I being recommended this [horrible/violent/repugnant video]?
4. I am on the wrong side of [service] again.
And many more.
If you have ever come across such comments on any videos you watch it just is the algorithm deciding to show you something completely unconnected to the profile it built about you. Why? Because these services don't like creating silos of information where users with affinity to that silo flock to. They can't make money that way because the number of advertisers for that niche may be very less. The algorithm then decides that you need to be shown other niches too. Keeps trying until you see multiple videos in a particular niche. Then it builds a new profile about you with that niche added in. This is the rabbit hole which is so hard to avoid. Once you fall into it, it is not easy to come out of.
Now if your feed is filled with only animals and math jokes that is because you fall into a big enough bucket that these services don't bother showing you anything else. Even if you occassionally click on something political, violent or clickbaity. There are enough advertisers in your bucket for them to make their moolah. You are just lucky... For now. But if popularity for animal videos tanks tomorrow don't be surprised if these services recommend videos titled "Shocking accident caught on tape! You won't believe what happened next". That's how the downward spiral begins!
If it wasn't Twitter, YouTube or Facebook, it would have been something else. MySpace could have very easily turned into the same thing. The 2000s and 2010s were a massive worldwide experiment of what happens when you give easy access to amplify voices to everyone.
Unless there's a wholesale rejection of the internet, I just don't think you'll get your wish. Turns out it's a hard problem trying to stop people who want to make a lot of money manufacturing conspiracies to drive clicks.
I don't remember facebook from 2012, but right now, in my feed that I carefully curate, there's very little toxicity. It's definitely an echo chamber but I offset with less biased news. If your feed turned toxic without your curating, shame on Facebook but it's definitely not inevitable or unavoidable.
As much as I criticize Facebook's UI and design patterns, the amount of connecting with both people I know and people with common interests I can do there is pretty amazing.
I don't see a lot of toxicity because whenever I see anything toxic, I unfollow the source. :)
"We’re only allowing trusted journalists to post, blocking disinformation before it has a chance to root itself in our systems."
Sure.
Perhaps that's why Google shut it's RSS Reader down, too expensive to moderate.
No, not Orwellian at all.
I want to theoretically be able to read anything anybody has to say and judge for myself.
So the latest fake news is that everyone is being told to shut off operating system updates permanently on their devices to "block apple and google". ::slams head into desk::
We're already seen that censoring fake news on vaccine safety only has fanned the flames because the perpetrators point out "they wouldn't censor us if it wasn't true!". So yeah, while these platforms have the right to do so, when you have a monopoly, it's probably the worst option for society.
Not only that, but as the conversations disappear from public view, they move underground... and I have no doubts this will be used to justify the next surveillance bill.
It reminds me of how incredibly everyone handled the election fraud claims.
The media's method was apparently to loudly and forcefully deny them as quickly as possible.
So you had Giuliani come out and give his press conference laying out what they were allegedly going to prove. Immediate response is that they have no evidence. But they said explicitly that they were going to provide the evidence soon, once they'd finished preparing to present it.
Then they come out to present all of this witness testimony and the response while it's happening is that they're repeating already debunked claims. Already debunked because they hadn't previously provided anything like witness testimony to support them.
So now even if the claims are bunk, these media outlets have forcefully denied them at a point in time when they clearly couldn't have known that yet. Which destroyed their credibility to deny the claims later, once there had actually been enough time to evaluate them.
Which increased the number of people believing the claims to a degree that tech companies started censoring them. So now you're here:
> "they wouldn't censor us if it wasn't true!"
Impossible for anyone to convincingly deny the claims at this point because you've created the impression among believers that the truth is being suppressed. Because that's what censorship does.
Made a thousand times worse because it was right after notoriously censoring the NY Post over an article that turned out to be true, destroying their ability to claim that they were only censoring things that were false.
Who else thinks this isn't going well?
What a horrible job it must be to work as a journalist for many of these news organizations. The pressure to please their editors and stoke their viewer base with a consistent narrative must be immense.
Surely, these journalists (pundits) must know what they are doing though. The question is why would an individual who sought to be a discoverer of truth allow themselves to end up in this situation.
Are they simply desperate to work in the news industry no matter what they have to do/say? Do they not realize that a large portion of the audience (from all political slants) is befuddled by their biased reporting?
True journalism appears relegated to freelancers sprinkled around the internet who unfortunately are not heard by the people that most need to hear them.
Yes, it isn’t going well.
> because the perpetrators point out "they wouldn't censor us if it wasn't true!"
Where did they point that out, if they were censored? Seems like (and this is not nearly as ironic as it sounds) we need better/smarter censorship, not less.
The fundamental disease here isn't the propagation of incorrect facts, it's the evolution of communities where alternative facts become accepted canon. Once you have everyone's eyeballs on the same stories that they share again and again, then it doesn't really matter whether they're true or not.
So the same people that believe that covid-19 started in a lab believe that masks don't work, and climate science is bunk, and the election was stolen, and that Mueller is secretly working with Q, etc...
And that really does strike me as a cycle that can be broken. But yes, it requires control way up at the platform level to decide what can be shared. Real truth is real. Experts exist. And those experts should, yes, decide what gets published on mass forums. And in the world of just a few decades back that wasn't a controversial idea.
But ultimately it's all about norms. Because if there are entities (like a lot of folks here, sadly) who for cynical reasons really want some of that garbage to be shared, they'll always be able to break this by screaming "censorship". Which is what's happening now.
At the end of the day we have a group of people who came to power based on lies, trying to retain that power by suppressing all attempts to control those lies.
And when the government has those new censorship systems good enough to decide which facts are the incorrect ones, they will act with restraint? The Cia will never inflict a trump on another country, out of their sense of morality? I would rather such things not exist.
I was talking about norms, not government action, FWIW. That's exactly what we used to have. There have been nutjob conspiracy theories throughout history, but what we used to have is expert consensus that told it was wrong. Somewhere along the line the experts (largely, but not exclusively, picked by the media) got neutered by the social media bubbles.
Again, there isn't any actual censorship happening. If you're a conservative you can say whatever you want about any conservative policy you want on any platform you want. The only people having trouble right now are the ones who want to talk about violent overthrow of the government.
I am thinking that social media is inherently bad.
Let's say I subscribe to RSS feeds. Maybe I subscribe to a few dozen sites. With multiple writers, I might exposed to the stupidity of maybe a few hundred people.
With social media, I am in a sense subscribed to the stupidest, or most outrageous posts of tens or millions of people. Stupidity sells. Outrage sells.
I've recently been thinking that the current version of social media is our generation's version of smoking. I think it's going to take another 25 years but eventually I think it will be seen as something detrimental to everyone's (mental) health that people have to work to remove themselves from.
I tend to be pretty disdainful of HN's hysteria towards social media, mainly because it's fairly easy to use each platform in healthy ways.
But I fully agree with this analogy. The average person isn't hyper-analytical about the choices they make, from media consumption to diet to the amount and quality of their online time, and the default usage path of social media is fraught with I'll effects for both the user and society. And that's to say nothing of generation being raised on these services, who have far less of an ability to resist specific usage patterns when they start (similar to teen smoking).
The problem is that even newspapers have clickbait titles now a days - e.g. "I talked continuously for 5 hours. This is what happened."
This two sentence headline style is very jarring to me. Almost like it insults my intelligence.
It is in my opinion.
Social Media in its current state is to show people something emotional to drive engagement. And then drives that idea to the logical conclusion of grouping people with others that will feed off of each other, to further those emotions and engagement. Literally designed to drive each user into finding an abusive relationship to addict themselves to.
This also means that those Social Media sites are the sites responsible for sorting the vulnerable into easy to find groups. So that people who would exploit such groups have easy access to finding their victims.
> With social media, I am in a sense subscribed to the stupidest, or most outrageous posts of tens or millions of people. Stupidity sells. Outrage sells.
I don't follow. Do you pick your following list at random from all existing Twitter ids? I follow maybe twenty people, with a very high bar for intellectual honesty, and I have no exposure to "the stupidest or most outrageous posts" on the network.