What is the alternative? Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation? "Feed me the libraries worth of bullshit from the Internet, and I will sort through this free market firehose to come to a logical, evidence based conclusion", hm?
Have you ever read spam ads on Craigslist, fake comments on news sites, bots on Tinder, etc? There are patterns, there are foul motives, and with their internal data, there is certainly technical stats to identify related accounts participating in bad faith campaigns.
I understand the gut feeling to be suspicious of any large org to filter information. People on this very thread are screaming "censorship!" as if they were Orwell in the streets warning us the end is nigh.
However, if you look at Twitter or Facebook on any given day, you can see that a lot of bullshit, emanating from every possible angle of the political spectrum, still exists. Much of it organic, much of it bots, I'm sure. Let's stop hitting the panic button every time they remove Iranian bot networks.
> I understand the gut feeling to be suspicious of any large org to filter information. People on this very thread are screaming "censorship!" as if they were Orwell in the streets warning us the end is nigh.
I mean, these companies have a monopoly or near monopoly on communications, and they have openly said they are going to arbitrarily remove information that they don't like, without any kind of transparency or accountability.
Is the fact that congress is not enacting a law supposed to mean that it is not censorship, and that we can't complain about it?
Would you be ok with other private networks doing it?
Besides, if we must have censorship, could we at least have someone more deserving of our trust do it? These policies of removing "fake news" greatly worsened COVID-19. As late as February, they were removing "disinformation" that it was infectious human to human.
Telling someone to mask up in early March could get you banned.
Posting first party evidence of the chaos in China in January could get you banned. It was fake news and disinformation. They were protecting us.
These companies should be begging us for a second chance to filter the truth for us.
Not just are these companies fallible, but they also have a very obvious neoliberal agenda. I've watched every single progressive podcast I liked get shadowbanned or outright removed from every major platform over the last year.
Your first sentence contains the lie, er, problem.
>arbitrarily
What is arbitrary about it? do you assume that because you don't have a list of their rules of engagement, that you don't have the "warrant" for these takedowns yourself, that it is arbitrary and politically biased in motive?
>Telling someone to mask up in early March could get you banned.
I straight up think that's bullshit. I would want evidence of that occurring or evidence that that was ever laid out as policy.
>Would you be ok with other private networks doing it?
"Private networks" do it all the time. Newspapers decide what to print, and whether they print lies or truths, and whether they do so fairly. The best journalists put truth first. These virtual bulletin boards are, as a matter of fact, massive platforms where any small amount of gamesmanship can lead to the very quick spread of information, good-faith or not. To think they should sit and do nothing is folly.
>Posting first party evidence of the chaos in China in January could get you banned. It was fake news and disinformation. They were protecting us.
What
>Not just are these companies fallible, but they also have a very obvious neoliberal agenda. I've watched every single progressive podcast I liked get shadowbanned or outright removed from every major platform over the last year.
What
Your entire post is filled with so much unsubstantiated statement-as-fact I don't know where to begin.
> What is arbitrary about it? do you assume that because you don't have a list of their rules of engagement, that you don't have the "warrant" for these takedowns yourself, that it is arbitrary and politically biased in motive?
I'm sure that they have some internal logic behind the scenes, of course. But it is effectively arbitrary, since their process is completely opaque to us and subject to 'arbitrary' change on their part.
Even if they were completely transparent though, would that even be any better? They exercise absolute control with no accountability, over a platform that is ubiquitous and essential.
> I straight up think that's bullshit. I would want evidence of that occurring or evidence that that was ever laid out as policy.
Their policy is unchanged since then, and is quite explicit. Facebook defers 100% to the WHO. And the WHO defers to China.
Maybe I can't prove to your satisfaction that the WHO is compromised. It is possible that the WHO is just really incompetent. But it doesn't matter, they were deeply ineffective.
And anecdotally, I know people who fled China in December and January. You could leave China if you left via Wuhan airport.
We tried warning people. I tried warning people. I was banned in February for "fake news". There was a preponderance of evidence of what was happening.
Video after video of Chinese solders wearing hazmat suits rounding people up. But according to Facebook, all of it was completely fake, and we should't panic or talk about it.
And I assume you are going to disregard everything I've said, unless I reconstruct timeline of everything I've said, and spoonfeed it to you.
> "Private networks" do it all the time. Newspapers decide what to print, and whether they print lies or truths, and whether they do so fairly. The best journalists put truth first.
Let me be very clear about something: corporations exist at the pleasure of the public. In theory anyway. You have no right to incorporate, and you have to be accountable to the people in exchange the privileges that you enjoy. And most any company their size, especially a provider of infrastructure, is in bed with the government. They did not pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They massively benefit from government subsidy, and they suppress any competitors. They are not a private network.
> These virtual bulletin boards are, as a matter of fact, massive platforms where any small amount of gamesmanship can lead to the very quick spread of information, good-faith or not. To think they should sit and do nothing is folly.
OK, so if disinformation is such a problem, then why should we allow one billionaire creep to be our information policeman?
I should do it. I should be your information police officer. Why not? I've done less creepy things than Mark Zuckerberg.
You're substituting reality for your ideal. Sure, I believe we should have public schooling teach more raw critical thinking, rhetoric and civics. But you're not going to get the existing billion people in the online world, many of whom are some combination of hotheaded or ignorant of the wicked ways of misinformation, to suddenly "improve their informational diet".
The people who are most likely to take that advice are the ones least in need of it.
I am glad Facebook and Twitter are taking what must be very careful, researched actions against clear evidence of powerful forces using social media as a tool against reality.
Because if they deleted 100% of the bullshit on their sites, tweet volume would be much lower.
My point is, they clearly aren't removing the majority of disinformed and disinforming nonsense. And I don't think every human at the two orgs are evil. If they say "Look, we found these patterns, these correlations, this forensic data that points at coordinated disinformation", my intuition is that they have done just that.
Sure, not every person is evil. You just need evil leaders and employees that need paychecks to be in a bad spot.
The core problem is that they have two conflicting incentives. They don’t want to look bad for spreading misinformation so they try to restrict it. But, they are incentivized to make money, and posts spreading disinformation are lucrative because they appeal to eyeballs. I am extremely, extremely skeptical that this is a resolvable problem for them.
As a passer-by: no, I think their original point was that it's ridiculous to depend entirely on individual actions to address misinformation. On that point they've been consistent across all comments.
> Think you're the smartest person on the planet, unaffected by misinformation?
Thank goodness someone is calling this out other than me. Sites like these are filled with people who think they are smart don't need any help, and worse, expect everyone else in the world to be at their level.
I too am glad social media companies are finally waking up and taking action against this stuff.
Can you imagine a world where Google decided they wouldn't filter spam because it was too controversial?
>Can you imagine a world where Google decided they wouldn't filter spam because it was too controversial
Absolutely. Another solution would simply fill in the vacuum. Google—-Alphabet, rather—-is a for-profit corporation. Their initial success was the result of outperforming other services in a field so nascent that no one really knew exactly what it was. Google is no one’s friend; they’re not subject to anything except clear demarcations of legal statue and the court system.
It’s important to realize “this stuff” may, someday, very well become your stuff, my stuff and our stuff.
That’s the threat, in my opinion. Information is not harmful. Information we can each investigate and self-audit within our own brains. Google we cannot investigate, and it will never experience anything close to a public-facing audit.
Don’t capitulate your God given power away. The power to think. To question. To be wrong. To change your mind. To grow.
> Can you imagine a world where Google decided they wouldn't filter spam because it was too controversial?
It would be like email: you can run an email client with a spam filter. If you don't like how it's filtering, you can configure it or even download a different client without abandoning your email address.
How many high profile "misinformation" email campaigns until calls for google to explicitly include political perspective in its indicia of email spam?
And then your "imagine a world..." would make sense as an analogy. And there would be people calling for Google to either return to neutrality or stop filtering spam altogether.
Have you ever read spam ads on Craigslist, fake comments on news sites, bots on Tinder, etc? There are patterns, there are foul motives, and with their internal data, there is certainly technical stats to identify related accounts participating in bad faith campaigns.
I understand the gut feeling to be suspicious of any large org to filter information. People on this very thread are screaming "censorship!" as if they were Orwell in the streets warning us the end is nigh.
However, if you look at Twitter or Facebook on any given day, you can see that a lot of bullshit, emanating from every possible angle of the political spectrum, still exists. Much of it organic, much of it bots, I'm sure. Let's stop hitting the panic button every time they remove Iranian bot networks.