I think making Facebook the villain, while always fun, takes us past the foundational problem here. Why people are so ready to be radicalized, including into some nonsensical directions like flat earthism, is a bigger question than can fit into a scheme of heroes and villains.https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1439440378856448000 …
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Part of the answer lies in a radical distrust of existing institutions, which if not born in 2008 certainly crystallized then. Another part of the answer has to do with how social media gives every subculture global reach. Another is in the architecture of persuasion and virality
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Most of these are questions of human nature—we are a social species whose biology and culture is set up for life in small and gossipy local groups. Taking the "local" and "small" out of that equation has been a great social experiment enabled by the internet. It's not going well
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But to blame Facebook for it also misses the point, because it conflates the company's very real faults with the structural problems of how to live in an interconnected world. This search for villains and scapegoats is a symptom of the very dynamic we're trying to get a handle on
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And the people doing the research on this problem are mostly the elites who are so deeply distrusted by the kind of people who find comfort in belief systems like cryptocurrency or QAnon. This gives the whole project a paternalistic and authoritarian air.
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As people like
@alexstamos have rightly pointed out, this whole cauldron of outrage creates powerful disincentives for the social media giants—the only ones who have the data—to study what is going on. You don't have to worry about subpoenas for research you never conducted.1 reply 6 retweets 33 likesShow this thread -
For people who don't know my work, I've been beating on Facebook like a piñata ever since I was on MySpace. it brings me comfort and happiness. But I also think we need to find a way to step out of the social media thunderdome and find a way to understand and fix this dynamic.
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I also think that whatever approach we take from that can't be limited to academics, lawyers, and the various former tech executives who saw the error of their ways and have become the most prominent voices in this field. We can't NPR or social justice our way out of this problem
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But the direction this project is going now is to create technical, legal and regulatory tools for power elites to suppress public speech that they find ideologically harmful. And at the same time, they express dismay that alienated people continue to flock to alternate realities
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Replying to @Pinboard
How would you define this project, and what makes you think that suppression of speech, rather than a reconsideration of voice, would be its goal? Other than that the WSJ is major media and partially supported by digital advertising, what are the criticisms I should take away?
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This is hard to answer in tweet form, but I've given a bunch of talks that lay out my thinking on such questions more systematically. Hopefully the abstracts give you an idea which ones are worth looking at. https://idlewords.com/talks/
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