I disagree paid ads were a tiny part of the problem. Cambridge Analytica used massive amounts of data to profile people that were susceptible to being influenced and created specific propaganda to target them at the individual level. Thanks, Facebook.
This was largely disproven.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-12-08/no-big-data-didn-t-win-the-u-s-election
I don’t see any more proof in that article that they didn’t than there is in this one that they did.
You act as if newspaper or cable news are any better.
All of these are for profit companies and most are owned by mega corporations which dictate what they report to varying degrees. Sinclair might be the worst and most obvious, but even CNN is not immune to it. With politicians being bought and paid for, resulting in fewer people controlling the news for large areas of the country, this is only getting worse.
I just think that we, and by we i mean mostly the politicians doing it, look like idiots when we froth at the mouth about this while fighting for the right of our own politicians to outright lie in political ads and on the news. Speaking of which, every single day it seems we have provable lies coming directly from the white house. Yet we want to criticize Russians for lying to us when we can’t even trust what comes out of the white house briefing room.
I have even less respect for republicans doing this because when twitter actually blocked lying ads, they went crazy over it.
Well, my local newspaper know gives news pretty much 2 days late. If it happens on Friday it will be in the paper on Sunday.
As for TV…TV “News” networks suffer from the same thing most cell phone users do, they find they must attempt to disseminate the news instantly, often without checking accuracy. They are part of the text generation, rather than giving the in-depth news a “phone call” could offer.
Eh, maybe my analogy sucks, but I think news and social media now deal with a group that doesn’t talk, they text. They want info now, not explained to them in detail. And they look for their friends who feel the same way about things as they do.
Keep in mind, when the article or the ad is on TV or in print, anyone could read it. When it’s on facebook, only those targeted by it see it.
Makes them hard to fact check or refute.
Twitter went to 280 characters or something and people who don’t like to read are freaking out about it.
Awesome, now tweetstorms can be condensed down into 14 consecutive tweets instead of 28!
That tweet is
Here’s a giant fuck you to social media, broken down by service.
Someday I’ll understand why “Spam” as a report on Twitter doesn’t let you pick more than one Tweet.
Someone says something racist, pick 5. Someone spams, you only get one. Even though by definition spam means there are more than one.
I actually found a dude who literally his entire feed was a racist picture posted… like a hundred times. The same exact Tweet.
https://www.axios.com/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-2508036343.html
Parker’s I-was-there account provides priceless perspective in the rising debate about the power and effects of the social networks, which now have scale and reach unknown in human history. He’s worried enough that he’s sounding the alarm.
Parker, 38, now founder and chair of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, spoke yesterday at an Axios event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, about accelerating cancer innovation. In the green room, Parker mentioned that he has become “something of a conscientious objector” on social media.
By the time he left the stage, he jokingly said Mark Zuckerberg will probably block his account after reading this:
“When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’ And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be.’ And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say, … ‘We’ll get you eventually.’”
“I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
“The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”
“And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.”
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”
“The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
And I would say, … ‘We’ll get you eventually.’”
I vowed never to have a Facebook account, until my death at least. And I aim to keep that promise.
I dunno, does Tupac have a Facebook account? Probably.
Still Facebook-free here! I do have a Twitter account that I use as a gaming news feed for about 10 developers I follow, though.
Also Facebook free. I’ve seen what it does to people, and I want no effing part of that. The only social media platform on which I am really active is LinkedIn, as it’s critical for work in my industry.