I hope they even take that away so all that’s left is a cardboard box and a corner to stand on. If that.
Good thread explaining DJT campaign’s horseshit social media strategy and attacks.
Chris Hughes co-founded Facebook. He just wrote an op-ed in the NYT calling for it to be broken up.
Breaking up facebook isn’t the answer. And I say this as someone who hates facebook.
The problem isn’t facebook.
The problem is that so many American voters are FUCKING IMBECILES.
And really, you’re not gonna fix that. Probably, the best bet would be to just do some kind of counter ops on them, where we just lie to them in the other direction, using the same kind of charlatan’s tricks.
The idea that if you broke up Facebook, you’d somehow get better policing of bullshit fake news from russian bots? That idea is founded in nothing. There’s no reason at all to believe that would be the case.
I think the theory is you’d remove an easy tool for widely and easily disseminating propaganda. I’m not convinced the theory is correct, especially since Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Youtube, etc. etc. also exist.
I agree somewhat, in that Americans are stupid and there’s plenty of media networks to spread bullshit in. But Facebook is the #1 attack vector, and it has the widest reach. I think if Facebook were gone tomorrow a lot of old people and morons would be too lazy or stupid to figure out where to go next. Or, they’d fragment into different networks making reaching them cost many times more in terms of cost and effort.
There’s also the fact that Facebook sells demographic data to hostile foreign powers making it easy for them to target highly specific propaganda and fake news to individuals. That’s the entire Cambridge Analytica scandal. Without Facebook, that doesn’t happen.
Foreign adversaries were eager to go to the trouble to infiltrate the election systems, election boards, and voter databases of every individual state as separate operations, and many down to the county level. I don’t think having to setup operations for a dozen newer social networks is going to be a discouraging task.
Why don’t we just keep all our nukes in one base then?
It is harder to hit multiple targets. That won’t stop enemies from trying, but it does require more effort and resources. The Russians hit like every state’s election system and succeeded in penetrating what, like 2 counties?
Also these other networks presumably won’t have the massive data repository that Facebook has that they freely sell to hostile states.
AMEN.
isn’t this what Edward Bernays wanted the government to do?
Blowing up a physical location requires physical materiel.
Doubling a virtual attack that involves little more than posting garbage news links using bots and crap requires less additional investment.
Wait, so the suggestion is to break Facebook into smaller social networks? That’s… incredibly dumb. The whole point of a social network, it’s only benefit (if it has any benefit) is the network effect. Breaking Facebook up into smaller networks makes a thing that is much less than the sum of its parts.
I originally assumed the suggestion was to break up, say, the advertising arm out of the social networking arm (although how the social networking part of the company would make money I couldn’t say). Still dumb, but at least it might help solve the problem.
Really, a better solution would just be to legislate that Facebook is responsible for all content on their platform. If their choices are: eliminate all hate speech, false advertising, and terrorist propaganda; shut down; or the executives go to jail, then maybe we’ll see some change. Hopefully they’ll just shut down!
Well, the electoral college was supposed to be a buffer against that.
Being old media still sux
This is awful.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/17/health/suicide-rates-young-girls-study/index.html
“Compared with boys, girls use social media more frequently and are more likely to experience cyberbullying,” Luby and Kertz wrote.
Girls who are depressed also elicit more negative responses from their friends on social media than boys, they added.
Combined, they say, these findings suggest that the negative effects of social media may be stronger on girls and may provide one explanation for why young girls are more vulnerable to suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
I really worry about my two granddaughters and how getting a phone will affect them. Teens spend so much time wrapped up in them, and there can be so much drama.
I suspect the girls will start asking for a phone by third grade. I’m sure my son will say no at first, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a phone by sixth grade.
One thing I will suggest to him is a hard and fast rule that the phones do no go in the bedroom at night and they should keep it that way through high school.
Ugh. I dislike the phones. Of course I’m a very casual user so they don’t mean much to me. I forgot to bring mine to work today, that’s how little they mean to me. I bet teens never forget their phones.
Coddling of the American Mind has a lot of good data on this. There’s a pretty big jump in suicide, depression and social ills for younger people with the introduction of the iPhone. I would not be surprised that at some pt if there are stronger attempts at regulating social media like tobacco products. It’s fairly unhealthy, especially for people in their formative years.
The flip side is that not having access to some form of social media/chatting apps means kids miss out of social activities and becomes very hard to plan. But social media is poisonous for community/culture.
It’s more than that. Now in a lot of schools you see teachers recommending apps for some school application. I remember that’s when the GF broke down and got her daughter a smartphone. One of her teachers told kids to download a certain app and of course the daughter came home in tears because she didn’t have an iPhone.
Her daughter has amazed me that she hasn’t lost or broken her phone. She doesn’t like to carry a purse and women’s clothes don’t always have pockets. If that’s the case she just walks around with it in her hand.
So by their math the suicide rate “might” maybe be equal in 30 years and that’s a cause for great concern?
Frankly, I’m amazed at the amount of mental gymnastics people go through to not care about their sons.