imiric
10 days ago
A whistleblower is not required to determine that Meta, and all adtech companies, have been severely damaging not just to the US, but to all governments and societies where these platforms are used. They don't need to collude with any adversarial government for this to be true.
The same tools built to manipulate people into buying things, are used to manipulate them into thinking and acting in ways that could be beneficial to someone. Advertising and propaganda use the same tactics, after all. When these tools are accessible to anyone, including political adversaries, it would be naive to think that they're not being used for information warfare.
The Cambridge Analytica leak was just the tip of the iceberg. These companies and agencies are still operating at a global scale, and business is booming. Why adtech companies weren't heavily investigated and regulated after this became public is beyond me. These are matters of national security, which anyone sane would consider more important than any financial or practical value they might have.
Banning TikTok was a step in the right direction, but that's far from the only service that needs to be heavily regulated. And even that decision is flip-flopped and very controversial, so the idea of going beyond must be unthinkable. Yet not doing so will lead to the eventual downfall of the US, and the current western hegemony. The instability we're seeing now is just the beginning, and my only hope is that it doesn't escalate to a major global conflict.
DrScientist
10 days ago
On the other hand these tools do allow individuals to connect and share.
I see it like politics ( at least the way it's managed in the UK ) - democracy means everyone get's to vote, leaflet door to door, politically organise etc. However there are ( in the non-online space ) strict regulations about money not being able to buy a larger voice - political spending is(was) strictly limited. You can't use broadcast media for political ads, apart from the government allocated slots.....
The regulations haven't kept up with the digital world - but they need to. Looking at what unfettered money has done to US politics is all the incentive you need.
One of the core problems is astroturfing is so easy online - money pretending to be people - in the end, I think the only solution is the loss of anonymity online - anonymity enables sock puppetry and astroturfing.
ie if we want to keep people's freedoms online to say what they want ( but within the law ), but at the same time stop money drowning out all voices, then you have to know what's automated and what's real - and people need to be held accountable for what they say or do - that's how the real world works.
You don't need authoritarian laws regulating content - social peer pressure is quite effective - after all democracy is the tyranny of the majority.
midnightblue
9 days ago
> On the other hand these tools do allow individuals to connect and share.
Ok, Mark. That's enough.
Any coder can build a tool that allows individuals to connect and share. It's not a unique feature of Meta tools.
The unique property of Meta is that they have a hegemony. Which is ok.
They went further than that, though, and built the infrastructure for influencing the decisions of individuals. That's no longer ok.
freehorse
10 days ago
Blogging platforms also allow people to connect and share, but are prob less profitable. A lot of the role of blogs was taken over by social media, this created larger networks but with a lot of downsides. But these downsides are not inherent to all the online platforms where people can connect and share.
Clubber
10 days ago
Blogging is typically unidirectional, like TV or radio. You get to hear what someone says, but unless they turn on comments and actually read them, you don't get to have a conversation.
freehorse
9 days ago
In the blogosphere (at least the part I was in) most used to have comments turned on, and at very least pingbacks were definitely common practice . There used to be communities around blogs with similar theme/views and usually blogs had a sidebar with links to other blogs, linking to the newest articles there. People used to write and refer to what others wrote. I assume there must have been also isolated blogs, as there are practically isolated people in social media, but there were definitely also very vibrant communities.
surge
9 days ago
So did Usenet, no one cares. They simply require you go to 18 different sites to follow what friends are up to. Tumblr would just be the ad tech company instead, or the blog hosting company, for a while it was MySpace.
It's either free and supported by ads, or self hosted or comes with a cost and doesn't gain mass adoption.
When did the comments here get to the point they can't think past 1st order magnitude effects or remember genuinely how things actually were. Your grandma didn't have a blog to follow the grandkids. Yeah, there's a one off exception or two, but nothing at the scale of MySpace and later social media companies.
freehorse
8 days ago
Blogs did not require one to be a technical genius. A lot of non-technical people had blogs. And ads existing per se is not what we discuss here.
Blogs require an effort to post sth because you cannot get away with posting a catchy 2-phrases sentence or a photo (you can, but that's not what they are for mainly). In this sense, yes, social media won because of convenience among other things. But the same convenience is what I find as problem with them.
And where are we now? The role of social media as "grandmothers sharing with grandkids" are long gone, in most places at least (cannot speak of the whole world). Very few from my social circles post in social media any mode. Most of the content is direct or indirect advertising (if it's not meta, it is the next door bar or yoga studio broadcasting posts), (semi-)professional content creators/influencers and, lastly, a lot of AI slop. Most people I know use facebook for events and the like, and which is definitely not what facebook optimises for or profits from. Now, most of the sharing-role has fled in closed group chat platforms (whatsapp, viber, messenger and the like).
The only thing that seems to still hold some livelihood is microblogging platforms (xtwitter and clones) which are also what replaced part of the blogosphere. But a rant about these would be too large to fit in a comment here.
hulitu
8 days ago
> On the other hand these tools do allow individuals to connect and share.
Yes , with the NSA, MI6 and other 3 letter agencies. The best democracy ever.
Hojojo
10 days ago
Honestly, it's crazy that any country allows online media to control the national discourse about politics without having any insight into how the algorithms decide what kind of content is shown to whom and how content is moderated or controlled. Then there's bot/propaganda accounts run by who knows who poisoning any political discussion.
beloch
10 days ago
If you're upset with what Meta does in the U.S., consider that Meta's engagement algorithms played a key roll in driving the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar[1].
"Internal studies dating back to 2012 indicated that Meta knew its algorithms could result in serious real-world harms. In 2016, Meta’s own research clearly acknowledged that “our recommendation systems grow the problem” of extremism."
They knew there was a problem, but refused to act until Myanmar's government shut them down in 2014. After that, their response was half-hearted, inept, and actually made things worse[2].
Governments should not simply be paying attention to what users publish on Facebook, but also how Facebook's algorithms promote material to its users. Meta has demonstrated they will not take preventative action themselves. Meta needs to be carefully and extensively regulated by the government of any jurisdiction Facebook operates in.
It's easy to appreciate concerns that regulating social media could result in state propaganda or censorship. However, regimes likely to do this are probably already using other forms of control anyways. Taking Meta's remorselessly proft-seeking engagement algorithms out of the picture may be the lesser evil by a substantial margin.
[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
[2]https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2022/09/29/rohingya...
imiric
10 days ago
A valid solution is, of course, authoritarian levels of control over all media outlets. This puts countries like China and Russia at an advantage in this case.
Since most western citizens would object to this, surely middle ground solutions can be found that would prevent abuse and foreign (and domestic) manipulation, while preserving democracy, free speech and individual freedoms. I'm inclined to believe that democracy and authoritarianism doesn't have to be zero-sum, and that a balance can exist that allows societies to prosper even among hostile actors.
vasac
10 days ago
And only ten years ago, during the Arab Spring, social networks were praised for their role.
Wondering what has changed in the meantime.
NikkiA
8 days ago
What has changed is who it affected. Meddling in foreign elections/uprising is the US's MO, but when it's reversed it becomes a problem.
throw1222212121
10 days ago
"To save the public from propaganda, we must implement national controls on all political media dissemination"
rcxdude
10 days ago
More like "let's not have national controls on political media dissemination in the hands of large corporations and hidden from view"
euroderf
10 days ago
Or more like "Let's require technical measures to inhibit social media provider lock-in."
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
10 days ago
"everyone is smart enough to not be fooled by a firehose of addictive misinformation"
You can tell how smart everyone is by looking at our excellent voter turnout, especially in local elections
rayiner
10 days ago
It’s amusing that the right used to complain about “information warfare”—Marxist infiltration of universities, newspapers, and Hollywood—while now the left does so.
emchammer
10 days ago
I don't think that it's a left/right thing. There was a link that appeared here yesterday for a book newly released on Project Gutenberg called Masters of Deception. I went to the library to get a hard copy as it was originally published in 1958. I never thought that I would be agreeing with J Edgar Hoover so much. This is no longer just about Communism.
jgalt212
10 days ago
I'm starting to think very few things are left / right. People pick a team or tribe and stick with it regardless of what a dispassionate analysis of their team's positions actual mean to one's own conscience, values, objective function, whathaveyou.
mrguyorama
10 days ago
"""Used to"""
AtlasBarfed
10 days ago
Communism wasn't an authoritarian movement back then, it was anti authoritarian. What is being opposed is authoritarianism.
China isn't really communist, and neither was the ussr. It's just a regressive authoritarian regime with different propaganda.
Authoritarianism is fundamentally right wing. Freedom for the right wing is fundamentally doublespeak for freedom for the oligarchs to gain power and oppress. Secondarily that freedom to acquire and impose power is granted to racists so the oligarchs have their foot soldiers.
surge
9 days ago
>Authoritarianism is fundamentally right wing.
Go look at a political compass. Authoritarianism is when you use force to push your ideals, whether they be radical/liberal (left) or orthodox/conservative)(right) ideals on a populace with extreme authority. Communism is considered left/radical, if you use government force to make people adopt it, that's using authority, hence authoritarianism. Please learn definitions and political axis before making silly arguments.
China isn't really communist because they tried it and people starved, then they had to go back to capitalism or some degree of it, but kept the authoritarianism, and effectively became some hybrid version that leans fascist.
Communism simply never works at scale, socialism can to an extent, assuming its not abused and there's a homogeneous society with shared cultural values and purpose that includes to contribute and to not abuse it. Hence Nordic socialism, which of course breaks down when you bring in those that don't share those values as its doing now. I've heard enough Swedes bitch about Eastern European migrants abusing their social welfare to say nothing of now to see the idealism fall apart when self interested parties without the same cultural values enter en masse.
Human psychology being about protecting and serving the interests of your tribe and things like "Dunbar's number" and the limit of the number of people you can literally care about and prioritize makes it impossible at scale. Families can be communist, even a small group of 10-50 people (more or less a cult or small tribe), massive populations can not. They simply are not going to work for the benefit of others without receiving something in exchange, unless you use a gun to their head, which is why all communist regimes start out authoritarian, but holding a gun to someone's head for 10-50 years won't change 200k years of evolutionary programming. Hence why Marx is good at pointing out capitalism's flaws, but he's naive and even more fundamentally flawed when it comes to prescribing a solution that does way more harm in the end.
Truth is most successful societies adopt a hybrid solution, socialism at the community or local level where everyone works for a shared purpose and contributes to the local community, whether that be through a church, small local government, etc. with capitalism that allows trade and mutually beneficial deals to happen with those outside of that community.
atVelocet
10 days ago
> …Communism wasn't an authoritarian movement back then…
When and where was that?
mrguyorama
10 days ago
Communist philosophy is somewhat anti-authoritarian. It's literally about putting the everyday people in power. It's often anti-democratic though. You have to turn to Nordic socialism if you want to bring democracy in, which was developed basically as a direct result of Stalin insisting that Soviet communism was the only communism, and you could either join their (violent, awful) communism or die.
Except, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, all wrote about how important it was to be self critical, how important it was to stay grounded in reality, to make reality drive your decision making and goals.
And then they all purposely and aggressively built themselves cults of personality with the express purpose of being just garden variety dictators. They surrounded themselves with boring "Yes men" by murdering anyone who pointed out the clear contradiction between their writing/philosophy/"theory" and reality.
There's a grand canyon between what they all wrote about, and what they clearly did. The closest they ever came was Mao being like "Whoops, a lot of people died, maybe it's partially my fault" but that sure didn't dissuade him, or make him change direction.
Meanwhile their hundreds of millions of insane, murderous followers had no qualms about such a contradiction, such a destruction of reality, because they had been so poorly treated for so long in the old system that all they really cared about was tearing it down (gee, sound familiar?).
A Cult of personality is toxic to functionality. It's toxic to any progress. It's toxic to productivity and success. It's toxic to competence. It's toxic to reality.
Supermancho
10 days ago
Answer: Never
Marx aimed to theorize on a worker based authority. Anti dictator or anti oligarchy, sure.
Unfortunatley he outlined inadequate protections against an oligarchy, because he believed a society could self regulate equality (between workers).
Google: Marx on Authority
surge
9 days ago
Marx is like a doctor who diagnoses a disease then offers a cure that is worse than the disease itself. It's a bit like removing a leg to fix a broken toe. I figured this out in college thinking about it for 10 minutes, I don't get anyone whose observed human nature for 25 years not to see the obvious flaws in it and why it always breaks down.
He also fundamentally misunderstands human nature and our ability to care about anything outside a "tribe" or rather put aside our own desires for those not in our immediate tribe. It simply breaks down at scale.
Just because someone can adequately critique and point out the flaws in a system does not make them qualified to architect a working solution. Especially first draft. The problem with communism is will always devolve into authoritarianism, because its the only way to enforce people putting the needs of others over their own, not to mention those in charge will do whats best to serve their own ruling tribe.
It's how we evolved, its human psychology, and at mass population scale you can't escape it. Capitalism or trade at least to some extent incentivizes mutual benefits on a basic level, but Marx tosses out the one thing about it that works, otherwise the same problems that occur in capitalism as it devolves come about the same way they do in every other form of human governance, with groups/organizations with a shared purpose or identity (tribes) jockeying for authority and power to serve their own interests.
rayiner
10 days ago
[flagged]
ryoshoe
10 days ago
There's no shortage of governments where the professed ideology fails to line up with its actual policies, just look at the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.