Facebook grows a conscience, admits it corroded democracy

Re: Next step

recognition that Facebook's own behaviors,

It is one of the core features in any sociopathic disorder - the sociopaths never perceive themselves as such.

Re: Next step

"In this post, I'll share how we are thinking about confronting the most consequential downsides of social media on democracy, and also discuss how we're working to amplify the positive ways it can strengthen democracy, too," he said."

1) "Can we money out of this?"

2) "Can we make a sh*tload of money out of this?"

3) "Well Mr Investigative Committee into Treason Against America Chairman, you know I ever actually made that statement, it was an intern in our marketing department."

Re: Next step

Agreed.

While Facebook can be deliberately abused by outsiders intent on pushing a particular narrative, there's a worse problem that is by-design. Association with 'friends' and the way Facebook decides what to show you mean everyone on Facebook is in their own little reality bubble.

If you mostly click on liberal news stories from sites like Occupy Democrats, you'll be shown more liberal news stories that other people who clicked on the same Occupy Democrats stuff also read. Ditto for conservatives who mostly click on conservative news stories from sites like Breitbart. I'm not saying it is Facebook's job to expose us to a variety of viewpoints, but they should take some deserved blame for the political polarization we face not only in the US but also other places around the world. The first step to a solution is for those who can change things to accept blame...

Re: Next step

With all that was said, in the final analysis, I see instead of Erich & Hans on this.. it's more like Sgt. Shultz..... "Nothing... I see nothing!!!"

Entire Industry based on insidious lies

Zuk and his entire industry is based on insidious lies. He's just putting a spin on the symptoms not addressing the actual cause.

Examples:

#1. Is Zuk going to delete the behavioral data that was captured during Fake News season?

#2. Is Zuk going to stop using LIKE buttons on every internet site to slurp visitors regardless of whether they're an FB user?

#3. Is Zuk going to say sorry for lying about not being able to slurp WhatsApp data and consequently kill off using that data?

Re: Quick - Act - Regulators are at the door

Jesus is coming, everybody look busy!

Re: Hopey changey

"ingenuity..."

Most likely in the form of some groups laboriously flagging postings with the "looks squirrelly / nutty to us" warnings, funded by someone else of course.

Meanwhile, unfunded, I can volunteer for free: "looks like bullshit to me!"

Reproductive Harm

In other words: reproducing. If I had been present ar the creation, I would have suggested making the process just a little more difficult - something requiring an IQ of about 100. But then I would probably have had to listen to a "Your mama" burn from God.

Re: unforeseen ways?

Which, like Mr. Chakrabarti, apparently is the only type of people Facebook has hired all these years

Well - Facebook over the years has hired 3 types of people:

1. Techies to get the site working and the icky technical stuff. Not given the big picture.

2. Amoral marketing types who would, if they hadn't already, sell their own parents to assist their own career advancement and think that ethics is just a county in England.

3. Wide-eyed dreamer types with minimal connection to reality.

I suspect that the majority of long-term Facebook management fall firmly into type 2.

Re: This is a stupid discussion

Facebook and the internet are two different things.

Re: This is a stupid discussion

"The Internet is an independent territory. It does not exist in a physical place. Nobody has the right (or ability) to control what happens there. The only way to stop it is to turn it all off."

This was a popular notion back in the early 2000s, and I'm surprised that anyone has kept it this long. The reality is that the Internet is not an independent territory, it is like the international telephone system. Bits of it lie in different countries, and those bits fall under those countries' jurisdiction. If they want to filter what happens on their bits of the network then they can.

Re: This is a stupid discussion

I understand what you’re saying i.e. that people should be capable of critical thought and be able to decide for themselves what constitutes “fake news”.

Unfortunately, (and I realise this will sound elitist) there is a large demographic that can’t do this. This is why we have controls on how much of a slice of news organisations should be allowed to be controlled by a single entity - witness the recent Fox News/Rupert Murdoch tie up falling foul of the UK Competion and Markets Authority decision.

Re: But what exactly counts as fake news?

Fake news is when something is real but you want it to be fake for your own benefit. The more fake news you put out there enables you to bury bad news that's actually true leaving the general population scratching their heads uttering things like "what the fudge?"

Re: I must be doing something wrong here

It's mainly cat cartoons to be honest

[Nods approvingly]

(There is more to life than cat cartoon admittedly. Like trying to integrate cat no.7 into the household despite the fact that she's about 7 years younger than the youngest of the previous tranche.. maybe I need to get another 5 month old cat to keep her company..)

Re: I must be doing something wrong here

Exactly: "I have about half-a-dozen that I use for test purposes.". Facebook is good at selling targeted advertising - the fakes were not spread spam-like to world+dogs, they were targeted with specific contents for maximum effect. It's probable fake accounts with little data and very small circles were not targeted at all.

Re: I must be doing something wrong here

Be careful using facebook profiles for your charity.

My rugby club used a profile account for their club page. Somebody ( come on, it was the rival club down the road - I can confidently guess the individual who did it ) reported it to facebook. Now my club has had to rebuild its profile, recreate all the events that were lost in the page getting closed, etc.

Re: I must be doing something wrong here

Although meant in jest, if you think that the "Putin Troll factory" is the only or indeed even the most active set of "media interference" going on, I think you are in for a big shock...

Re: Faux News corroded US democracy

" If you followed the polls it was going to be a slamdunk for Clinton."

Not true. The respected national polls never showed that (there were a number of regional polls and polls from disreputable organizations that did, but they don't count.

If you look at the polling numbers, you'll find that the election results were pretty much within their margins of error.

Re: Faux News corroded US democracy

That's not how I remember it. After the Access Hollywood video was released it looked like a slam dunk for Hillary. Then two weeks (one week?) before the election the FBI revisited Hillary's emails courtesy of Andrew Weiner. The polls tightened up at that point. That and the usual margin of error of the polls themselves indicate that polling itself wasn't that far off the mark.

Re: Democracy - hmmm

"The real problem is not the damage to democracy, which in a rather raw(ish) form went and saddle us with Trump. "

Interestingly, the primary (and most cogent) argument for the existence of the electoral college is that it protects us from the problems of raw democracy -- namely, that a charismatic populist who is unqualified or overtly bad for the nation could be elected.

The results of the last election, though, was just the opposite. Trump lost the democratic vote, but was seated by the electoral college anyway.

I do believe you nailed it, exactly!!

Re: Bit late

Sarcasm or are you part of the problem?

Re: Bit late

Typical comment, wah wah wah, "the people" decided wrong so we have a crisis of democracy. Maybe we need to take Bertold Brechts's advice and elect a better people.

"Fake news" was everywhere and spread by everyone on all sides, and what's more, always has been. The Russians probably are the only ones smiling, because their intent was to stir things up and undermine the legitimacy of Western elections, and because of the self-serving over the top reactions from the losers in the two cases you mention they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Who in their right mind could believe that the Russian campaigns on FB had any measurable effect on the US elections ? They spent it is said $100K, the Clinton campaign alone spent well over $1B on the campaign, over 1,000 times as much.

The real threat to democracy comes from the insiders who conspire against the people making up their own minds. When one's own security services form secret societies to undermine legitimate inquiries and to overturn legitimate election results - that's when there's a threat to democracy.

This says more about the state of the media than anything about Snopes, which is basically about as trustworthy as the internet is.

There was no electoral fraud.

Mueller is part of the fraud ! Appointed by Ron Rosenberg who is part of the DOJ/FBI "secret society", employed both Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, plus Ohr, has spent, what, seven months finding no collusion despite using all the classic abuses of prosecutors (3 am raids, charges unrelated to his investigation to get plea deal, ambush interviews).

Release the memo on the FISA abuses and appoint a special counsel to investigate the "secret society" and its ramifications. Find out just who in the FBI ordered the deletion of the texts between Strzok and Page for the critical six month period. Put them all under oath and under the same pressure that Mueller is using, arrange 3 am raids on Ohr, Strzok, McCabe, Comey, Mueller, subpoena all their communications and confiscate their computers and electronic devices. Get to the bottom of this conspiracy to overturn an election.

That conspiracy for which we now have considerable circumstantial evidence, is a far more serious threat than the concocted "Russian Collusion" narrative cooked up by the Clinton campaign and its cohorts.

Re: Matthew 27:3-5

Then he went back to Jesus and said, “Look - do you think you could give me just one more chance?“

Err. no. He went and killed himself. Jesus was under arrest and sentance of death by that point.

Re: Fake news is fake news

That's the biggest part of the problem, sure, but you're overlooking the multiple layers of obfuscation and laziness involved. It's not (just) Facebook that's misrepresenting stuff as "news": it's also Facebook users, and indeed the news sources themselves.

The economics of news reporting is fundamentally broken. (Basically: there is no plausible way to make money out of reporting facts. People think that facts are valuable, but only opinions can be monetised. Therefore there's a strong structural incentive to present one as the other.)

That's not actually Facebook's fault, although they're certainly not doing anything to improve matters.

Re: Evil Witch

Sigh.

It's that time of day -0 the US crazies are waking up.

A bit like the daily version of the Eternal September.

Re: Evil Witch

Seen from abroad, last elections were quite interesting.

On one side you got a Democratic Nixon-like candidate, obsessed with the idea of becoming president one day at any cost, trying over and over, hoping to succeed one day, despite trying as an ex-president wife (something that you thought happens only in Africa or South America), despite her failures as Secretary of State for lack of real competence, and with a party all bent to the Clintons, unable to offer real alternatives to challenge her. Her attempts to look like a plain simple person were ridiculous as well, you need to be a real con artist like Trump to achieve it.

On the other side you got an elderly, vulgar, ugly Republican Kennedy-like candidate. Women- and sex-obsessed. Beautiful trophy wife, invasive family, very cunning in telling people what they wanted to hear, and in exploiting media. Able to pretend to be a a self-made man (without being) on the common man side, while being a rich man on the richer ones side, and someone who obtained his money in many shady ways, often gaming the system, which is his only real skill.

Only things in common: both married their daughters to someone from the real estate/financial mafia of New York, but the only ones who took them where the sons of people with criminal records... Clinton got her aide married too, that didn't help her at all....

Frankly, both ugly and highly incompetent candidates. It there was someone who could have made Clinton win, he was Trump. Unluckily, if there was someone who could have made Trump win, that was exactly Clinton.

With such two ugly choices available only, and moreover two very polarizing ones, it takes very little to move enough votes in one direction or the other....

If it was a movie script, with those strange, parodistic, reversed roles of 1960 candidates, it would have been a great one. Unfortunately, that was how US elected their very president....

If parties and people had selected better candidates, there would have been far less issues. Not that my country is doing better, though.... and that's becoming the bigger problem, high polarization means ugly candidates.

Re: Evil Witch

If I were you I'd avoid attacks on a person's physical appearance. It makes you sound like a misogynist moron.