At the end of 2020, it seemed hard to imagine a worse year for misinformation on social media, given the intensity of the presidential election and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2021 proved up to the task, starting with the Jan. 6 insurrection and continuing with copious amounts of falsehoods and distortions about COVID-19 vaccines.
Between this topic and the “moderate” one it looks like TPM is just tossing a couple turds in the punch bowl and saying “Happy New Year!” to the commentariat.
Please proceed, everyone! 
“Resistance is futile”
Locutus of Zuckerborg
Metaphysically speaking, is it possible for fake news to become fake fake news?
TFG: Bigly.
I don’t FacePalm, so, as of yet, I have not yet been assimilated.
Yet…
Once you understand that Facebook and other platforms are the battlegrounds on which contemporary political campaigns are fought, you can let go of the idea that all you need are facts to correct people’s misapprehensions.
Fux News and RW talk radio have been fighting to misinform their “base” for decades. Try using facts on someone who has the Fux logo burned into their TV screen.
I am SO stealing this (with attribution, of course)!
In the late 50s early 60s my dad was essentially the “Cheif De-analogizing Officer” of Boeing Comnercial Airplane Division. I call him “Locutus of Boeing”.
Has anyone else seen the new TV ads Facebook is running? I’m seeing them on CNN. It’s partly a defense of how they try to police content, but mostly a plea for government regulation. Passing the buck, basically. I’ve never seen a company beg for government interference like this, it’s weird.
They just want general guidelines, but that won’t fix the misinformation problem because there is no way to determine whether each and every post is accurate information or not.
The actual problem is that the entire system is focused on encouraging “engagement,” and they’ve discovered that anger leads to the highest engagement. So that’s the kind of info the news content algorithm promotes – info that makes people angry. This was revealed by the FB whistleblower recently.
Facebook is never going to consent to the government auditing its algorithms, so what needs to happen is drastic, Draconian regulations about how FB or any other company can use personal data that links people together. Not user opt-out because nobody reads the TOS or can find the settings deep in nested menus. This would kill FB’s entire advertising-based business, but it has to be done.
Very few users understand the mechanics of how FB works, but “personal privacy” as a general issue has high public support. It could be something Dems and R’s in Congress could agree on for regulation.
Think of it like the airlines not making their own masking or vaccination policies, but asking the government to do so.
Pretty much the same thing. If they’re policing what’s allowed or not allowed, someone is going to be upset about what is or isn’t allowed. Much easier for the companies if they can point the finger back at the government as having made the call.
Yeah, the motivation is clear but it’s disingenuous, because what would fix the problem would destroy the company’s economic foundation. They’re gambling that the government will give them an ineffective fig leaf and won’t go that far.
Too deep for me, but mathematically speaking, it’s represented as fake news squared.
Rules wouldn’t hit their algorithms, would be on what content is or isn’t okay.
For example, up until Shittenhouse got acquitted, FB and others had banned certain types of posts about him. Once he was acquitted, they kinda had to lift those. But was it right for them to have banned them in the first place?
I’m not mad at them for saying that it would be much better for these decisions to be in public vice private hands to decide what is or isn’t ok.
. Misinformation is now a social thing*…an entity worthy of scrutiny…resulting in criticism.
Just like BothSider-ism eventually became a social thing…an entity worthy of scrutiny…resulting in criticism.
Before becoming a social thing as described above, it was as normal and taken for granted as natural and uncriticized as the sun rising and setting.
This is a good situation. People are on to this, and, although there is plenty of gloom and doom when one speaks of both of the above, the situation is better than it was, before the attention which now is directed to it
*ETA Social scientists often use the term “phenomena” (pl), which looks fancy
Facebook is never going to consent to the government auditing its algorithms, so what needs to happen is drastic, Draconian regulations about how FB or any other company can use personal data that links people together. Not user opt-out because nobody reads the TOS or can find the settings deep in nested menus. This would kill FB’s entire advertising-based business, but it has to be done.
The solution may lie in civil law. A bunch of us are already investigating and researching suing FarceBook because of the damage they knowingly caused to the yute of this country.
So did he serve by ending misleading analogies?
Or just by developing digital control systems to replace all legacy analog control systems?
(Boeing may have needed both.)
Not sure. He was unpopular at commercial and exiled to military then sent off to DOD and NASA to consult, becoming even less popular and was exiled to RSA in 81 where he made major enemies and ended up teaching IT to ground support teams in Angola and Ethiopia. At least the Marxists liked him and he loved them and especially Africa.
On a flight east in Oct, the stewardess told us during the safety demonstration that “the government has put us in the position of nannies”
United put us in the position of being forced to hear a coded Trumper’s message.
I dunno that I hear that code, seems more like what I heard traveling on the train, with a clearly generally-fed-up conductor explaining on the intercom that masks had to cover both nose and chin, and that just having food in front of you didn’t count as “eating”.
Think a lot of them are getting tired of idiots being idiots.
