Facebook Goes Easy on Right-Wing Misinformation

[Jimmy Higgins]

I'd say Zuckerberg is way over his head when it came to Facebook and sociology and lacked the empathy required to want to do something when it became apparent this was a problem, because that'd cut into profits.

America tends to be reactive instead of proactive when it comes to regulation and social media passed by at light speed. Humanity definitely is the underlying flaw with social media. However, we don't see Facebook really trying to deal with it because they created such a muddled system, it is virtually impossible to police. And any attempt to reduce Facebook to true identities would be met with fervor of the people, which only goes further to protect the puppets handlers.

 

[RVonse]

In my opinion, Facebook is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Mark Zuckerberg is the most evil man on the planet.

this is a derail and just an aside, but i find this kind of fascinating - you see this sort of opinion a lot and i just have a hard time fathoming this, if taken at face value.
"random guy gets lucky enough to stumble into something that makes him obscenely wealthy. the thing itself is fairly innocuous, but since humans are pants-on-head retarded as a species they utilize it in a horribly stupid way that makes their lives and society worse. therefor, the random guy is the most evil person on the planet."

i just don't really get it... everything evil about facebook is 100% the fault of humanity being a shitty cesspool of dumb fucks. all facebook does is show the truth behind the lie that humans are fundamentally decent and smart... is that why you and others hate it so much? is this some kind of knee-jerk rejection of a reality that you don't like?
if not, what is that all about? i really just don't understand it.

I wouldn't call him evil or satan but I wouldn't call him Elon Musk either. Look at the difference. Musk has invested his life and savings toward saving humanity and then there is Zuckerberg giving people a platform so people can brag to each other about how great they are.

 

[prideandfall]

wouldn't call him evil or satan but I wouldn't call him Elon Musk either. Look at the difference. Musk has invested his life and savings toward saving humanity and then there is Zuckerberg giving people a platform so people can brag to each other about how great they are.

i mean... musk has invested his life and savings towards being rich and famous, and hair plugs.
he hasn't done fuck-all to save humanity, so i'm not sure how that claim works.

but regardless, they're just two dipshits who lucked into businesses that made them rich, but neither of them are really public figures the way a politician or social activist would be.
if nothing else it makes for a potentially interesting discussion about the ethical obligation of someone who is 'famous' to behave a certain way in order to assuage the demands of random people on the internet.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

In my opinion, Facebook is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Mark Zuckerberg is the most evil man on the planet.

this is a derail and just an aside, but i find this kind of fascinating - you see this sort of opinion a lot and i just have a hard time fathoming this, if taken at face value.
"random guy gets lucky enough to stumble into something that makes him obscenely wealthy. the thing itself is fairly innocuous, but since humans are pants-on-head retarded as a species they utilize it in a horribly stupid way that makes their lives and society worse. therefor, the random guy is the most evil person on the planet."

i just don't really get it... everything evil about facebook is 100% the fault of humanity being a shitty cesspool of dumb fucks. all facebook does is show the truth behind the lie that humans are fundamentally decent and smart... is that why you and others hate it so much? is this some kind of knee-jerk rejection of a reality that you don't like?
if not, what is that all about? i really just don't understand it.

I wouldn't call him evil or satan but I wouldn't call him Elon Musk either. Look at the difference. Musk has invested his life and savings toward saving humanity and then there is Zuckerberg giving people a platform so people can brag to each other about how great they are.

Musk is a bipolar lunatic, who appears to be able to amass the right amount of talent. The existence of Tesla is nothing short of a miracle. Car companies are the hardest business to start from scratch.

Zuckerburg kind of stumbled onto something huge, something much bigger than he could ever get a grasp of mentally.

 

[Swammerdami]

In my opinion, Facebook is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Mark Zuckerberg is the most evil man on the planet.

this is a derail and just an aside, but i find this kind of fascinating - you see this sort of opinion a lot and i just have a hard time fathoming this, if taken at face value.
"random guy gets lucky enough to stumble into something that makes him obscenely wealthy. the thing itself is fairly innocuous, but since humans are pants-on-head retarded as a species they utilize it in a horribly stupid way that makes their lives and society worse. therefor, the random guy is the most evil person on the planet."

i just don't really get it... everything evil about facebook is 100% the fault of humanity being a shitty cesspool of dumb fucks. all facebook does is show the truth behind the lie that humans are fundamentally decent and smart... is that why you and others hate it so much? is this some kind of knee-jerk rejection of a reality that you don't like?
if not, what is that all about? i really just don't understand it.

"Most evil man on the planet" is an exaggeration, depending on how one defines evil, but I stand by the general claim.

There are many experts in info-tech or sociology who believe that today's social media has severely deleterious consequences and is literally leading to the demise of progressive democracy. You blame "humanity being a shitty cesspool of dumb fucks" but I don't think IQ or education is worse now than it was during the 19th and 20th centuries — a time when America's democracy gradually improved. It is wrong to blame our increasing social and political problems entirely on a single cause, but woes due to electronic connectivity must be very high on the list of causes.

If one admits that social media is a problem in general, it isn't hard to see that Facebook is particularly pernicious. In many countries, Facebook and Internet are essentially synonyms for millions of people. The Facebook interface is designed deliberately to employ "customers" as unpaid servants. Like slot machines, Facebook's interface is designed to provide only intermittent gratification, and in response to directed user actions. (Forced to use Facebook due to family pressure, I have seen messages from Facebook informing me that I need to participate more to get access to my entire newsfeed!)

Calling Zuckerberg a "random guy" is confused. Whatever his IQ he is driven by ruthless ambition. Top FB executives have revealed that some of his public answers in Congressional testimony were lies. Here is a chat by Zuckerberg early in FB's development:

Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses,
[Friend wrote "What? How'd you manage that one?"]
People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me" Dumb f***s.

Some apologists for social media say something along the lines of "Newspapers, liars and gossiping have been around for centuries. FB is the same just scaled up." These reductionists ignore that SCALE can be very important in the real world.

Hope this helps..

 

[prideandfall]

"Most evil man on the planet" is an exaggeration, depending on how one defines evil, but I stand by the general claim.

fair enough.

There are many experts in info-tech or sociology who believe that today's social media has severely deleterious consequences and is literally leading to the demise of progressive democracy. You blame "humanity being a shitty cesspool of dumb fucks" but I don't think IQ or education is worse now than it was during the 19th and 20th centuries — a time when America's democracy gradually improved. It is wrong to blame our increasing social and political problems entirely on a single cause, but woes due to electronic connectivity must be very high on the list of causes.

i agree with you that since social media became prolific there has been a notable and quantifiable decline in the general state of humanity, but i disagree with you that "social media" is at fault here.
the issue is that humans are fucktards, and what the internet did is let all of the fucktards out.
blaming the medium by which humanity destroys itself is like blaming the water for being full of pee after 7.9 billion toddlers sat in it for 20 years.

If one admits that social media is a problem in general, it isn't hard to see that Facebook is particularly pernicious.

i guess that's the issue here then, i admit that social media is a problem for humanity in general, because humanity is too fucking stupid to use it without shitting themselves to death over it.
but i blame that on humanity, not on a single webpage.

In many countries, Facebook and Internet are essentially synonyms for millions of people. The Facebook interface is designed deliberately to employ "customers" as unpaid servants. Like slot machines, Facebook's interface is designed to provide only intermittent gratification, and in response to directed user actions. (Forced to use Facebook due to family pressure, I have seen messages from Facebook informing me that I need to participate more to get access to my entire newsfeed!)

see this where "you know what? fuck you, facebook" is the universal solution to every problem, and in my hyperbolic anecdotal experience only about 17 people alive on the planet today were clever enough to figure that out.

now i'll concede there's some pretty serious issues where access to technology is limited - i'm aware of the reality of 'facebook' and 'the internet' being the same thing in some countries, and that should definitely by addressed by expanding access in those areas.

Calling Zuckerberg a "random guy" is confused. Whatever his IQ he is driven by ruthless ambition. Top FB executives have revealed that some of his public answers in Congressional testimony were lies.

yeah see, you keep quoting that, and that seems like a completely reasonable exchange to be had by an early 20-something in that situation.
that's just... humanity in action.
an exceedingly rare portion of the human population might have their entire community's personal information and trust dropped into their lap and be genuinely ethical with it and take it as a grave responsibility, or perhaps even go the heroic sacrifice route and shut the whole thing down for fear of where it might lead.
MOST people would go "holy shit this is awesome" and laugh about it.
so yes he's just a random guy.

do you remember "hotornot"? it was a website launched in 2000 where people uploaded their own photos so that anyone visiting the sight could rate how hot they were, and was probably one of the biggest influences on how facebook and youtube would approach user interaction, in terms of lessons for corporations about how people use social media.
within a couple weeks of launching it was one of the most visited urls in existence. however, there were about a dozen sites that did the exact same thing that launched in the year previous, so why did this one website take off when the others didn't?
myspace already existed when facebook launched, as did at least a dozen other social media sites. why did facebook become what it is and the others are all dead?
a combination of random chance and 'right place right time' exploitation, but there's no quantifiable reason that facebook took off, and its success sure as shit had nothing to do with zuckerberg or anything he ever did.

Some apologists for social media say something along the lines of "Newspapers, liars and gossiping have been around for centuries. FB is the same just scaled up." These reductionists ignore that SCALE can be very important in the real world.

Hope this helps..

i mean it's just the same thing over again - you blaming something inanimate for the behaviors of something with volition.
it's watching the human race run full tilt head first into a wall and then blaming the wall for all the head injuries.

 

[Swammerdami]

It is mistaken to blame society's problems on human faults (e.g. stupidity). Intrinsic human nature hasn't changed much in thousands of years. I don't think we can change it easily, nor should we try. If society is failing humanity, society should be reformed. It is wrong to use human stupidity as a scapegoat. And to me it seems confused to think human nature needs to change rather than social formulae.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In many countries, Facebook and Internet are essentially synonyms for millions of people. ...

... now i'll concede there's some pretty serious issues where access to technology is limited - i'm aware of the reality of 'facebook' and 'the internet' being the same thing in some countries, and that should definitely by addressed by expanding access in those areas.

It's a very minor point in the overall scheme, but I see that I need to clarify my comment.

I live in rural Thailand so my comment is partly based on personal observation. Young savvy kids use TikTok, YouTube, Instagram (a FB property!) and other sites, but I think many users here click only on Facebook or Messenger, never on Google or Chrome! MANY businesses, large or small, have only a Facebook page as their "website;" and have no interest in any non-Facebook web presence. Given my feelings about FB, I find this unfortunate. Obviously the business's potential customers need to be logged into FB to access the pages.

 

[prideandfall]

It is mistaken to blame society's problems on human faults (e.g. stupidity).

er, why? society is a construct of humans, therefor everything at fault with society is necessarily to be blamed on humans.

Intrinsic human nature hasn't changed much in thousands of years. I don't think we can change it easily, nor should we try. If society is failing humanity, society should be reformed. It is wrong to use human stupidity as a scapegoat. And to me it seems confused to think human nature needs to change rather than social formulae.

i'm not using it as a scapegoat, i'm using it as an explanation.
yes, there is an issue where humans clearly can't handle social media - i'm not saying human nature should change in order to protect social media, i'm just pointing out that human nature itself is the problem, and so i don't think 'reforming' social media will fix the inherent issue.

you have 3 basic things functioning here:
1. people telling untruths about the nature of physical reality.
2. people believing the untruths about the nature of physical reality.
3. the medium by which group 1 communicates to group 2.

i think that the real problems lie with 1 and 2 above, and that long term the solution must ultimately come from doing something about one of those two groups.
(by "doing something" there's a lot of options here... expanding education so people aren't so credulous, expanding welfare and improving quality of life so people don't have the time and inclination to fuck with other people for fun or profit, some kind of humanity wide culling... i'm not espousing a specific solution, i'm not big-brained enough to see the path for the entire human race).

blaming the problem on 3 and focusing efforts on changing or regulating it won't fix the underlying problem, it just poorly mitigates it somewhat for that particular platform for a short time until that platform is no longer the medium by which group 1 communicates to group 2.

i have a bold philosophical assertion here: that nobody WANTS to fix 1 or 2, because doing so would undermine a lot of traditional cultural values that people want to cling to more than they want a functioning society.
if you stop people telling untruths about reality you have to stop people making religious claims.
if you stop people believing untruths about reality you have to stop people believing religious claims.

and this is very uncomfortable for basically everyone who isn't me, because they think the 'freedom' to buy into religious hoobajooba is more important than a functioning society.

aaahhhhh but if you just go "facebook! that's the problem! the problem isn't that humans are evil manipulative bastards, or that they're gullible rubes, the problem is facebook acting as a place where all the bastards can trick all the rubes! stupid facebook!" then you can cling to the idea of having a solution to the problem that doesn't involve having to confront any unpleasant realities about the human condition.

It's a very minor point in the overall scheme, but I see that I need to clarify my comment.

I live in rural Thailand so my comment is partly based on personal observation. Young savvy kids use TikTok, YouTube, Instagram (a FB property!) and other sites, but I think many users here click only on Facebook or Messenger, never on Google or Chrome! MANY businesses, large or small, have only a Facebook page as their "website;" and have no interest in any non-Facebook web presence. Given my feelings about FB, I find this unfortunate. Obviously the business's potential customers need to be logged into FB to access the pages.

ah see i was referring to the fact that there are parts of the world where the government doesn't have the capacity or inclination to make the internet accessible and so companies have been coming in and setting up "internet" access that includes only their websites.

 

[Gun Nut]

In my opinion, Facebook is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Mark Zuckerberg is the most evil man on the planet.

this is a derail and just an aside, but i find this kind of fascinating - you see this sort of opinion a lot and i just have a hard time fathoming this, if taken at face value.
"random guy gets lucky enough to stumble into something that makes him obscenely wealthy. the thing itself is fairly innocuous, but since humans are pants-on-head retarded as a species they utilize it in a horribly stupid way that makes their lives and society worse. therefor, the random guy is the most evil person on the planet."

i just don't really get it... everything evil about facebook is 100% the fault of humanity being a shitty cesspool of dumb fucks. all facebook does is show the truth behind the lie that humans are fundamentally decent and smart... is that why you and others hate it so much? is this some kind of knee-jerk rejection of a reality that you don't like?
if not, what is that all about? i really just don't understand it.

"Most evil man on the planet" is an exaggeration, depending on how one defines evil, but I stand by the general claim.

There are many experts in info-tech or sociology who believe that today's social media has severely deleterious consequences and is literally leading to the demise of progressive democracy. You blame "humanity being a shitty cesspool of dumb fucks" but I don't think IQ or education is worse now than it was during the 19th and 20th centuries — a time when America's democracy gradually improved. It is wrong to blame our increasing social and political problems entirely on a single cause, but woes due to electronic connectivity must be very high on the list of causes.

If one admits that social media is a problem in general, it isn't hard to see that Facebook is particularly pernicious. In many countries, Facebook and Internet are essentially synonyms for millions of people. The Facebook interface is designed deliberately to employ "customers" as unpaid servants. Like slot machines, Facebook's interface is designed to provide only intermittent gratification, and in response to directed user actions. (Forced to use Facebook due to family pressure, I have seen messages from Facebook informing me that I need to participate more to get access to my entire newsfeed!)

Calling Zuckerberg a "random guy" is confused. Whatever his IQ he is driven by ruthless ambition. Top FB executives have revealed that some of his public answers in Congressional testimony were lies. Here is a chat by Zuckerberg early in FB's development:

Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses,
[Friend wrote "What? How'd you manage that one?"]
People just submitted it. I don't know why. They "trust me" Dumb f***s.

Some apologists for social media say something along the lines of "Newspapers, liars and gossiping have been around for centuries. FB is the same just scaled up." These reductionists ignore that SCALE can be very important in the real world.

Hope this helps..

And to the apologist that says that, I have a jar of pure acid to splash on their face.... It's just a gentle exfoliant, SCALED UP.