The appearance of numerous pieces declaring that, while there's still a way to go, FB has made great strides in handling misinformation, right after a perceived Democratic election victory, is really some impeccable timing.
I don't exactly hear lots of proposed (realistic) solutions coming from anyone. Personally, I think the Gutenberg era of Enlightenment institutions like nation-states, liberal democracy, objective truth, etc. is over. The smartphone is undoing what the printing press created.
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Either we engage in some reactionary Luddism, a real-life Butlerian Jihad, and reject virtualized identity and social media entirely. Or human culture, probably after much violence and turmoil, adapts and enters some new, hard-to-predict age.
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so your position is basically that the journalists in question are right that tech is bad (assuming you like Enlightenment values/dislike violence) but silly for thinking anyone can do anything about it?
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This is about the worst forum for this discussion, but it's what we have (speaking of deleterious social media). Globally, I think we all agree on the impact of social media, whether good/bad. The question is what exactly is wrong with it, and what (if anything) can be done.
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Among many other civilizational headwinds we face--inequality, looming automation, climate change--social media serves to exacerbate underlying problems and serve as megaphone to the worst (and rarely best) among us. Even if FB goes away tomorrow, we're in trouble.
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But leaving that aside and focusing on FB, yes, I think we often obsess over the wrong things re: FB. There have been so many headline topics in this busy FB media cycle, I almost can't keep track. First, supposedly 'micro-targeting' was the horrifying bogeyman.
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Cambridge Analytica could swing an election using provably ineffectual keyword targeting in FB, but hey 'psychometrics'. Well, where'd that story go? Targeting system is the same as before. Now it's not worth worrying about?
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Or privacy as the big deal, and GDPR was the great savior. Well, GDPR didn't do shit, and if anything, solidified FB/GOOG's market position in the EU (which I wrote about extensively, to much jeering). Nobody gives a shit about privacy really, so I guess that's gone.
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Now, it's disinformation, something that's unavoidable in any disintermediated system with free(ish) speech where Joe Tin-Hat can beat the reach of a NYT piece if he's inflammatory enough. But maybe since FB is blocking marginally more than it used to, that story will die.
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This is where I pipe in: A “tangle” of “claims” (like the hash graph) individuals make, and can all refer to each other. It’s totally doable, it just sounds alien to most every day people. It’s crazy powerful though. And we’ll need a censorship-proof place to store them.
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@kialo is a great example of something like this being started.
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yes, yes. I get some of that but there aren't real "solutions" to any of this. it's just culture. things are such a mess now because so much seems in flux and out of control. there are more iterative ways of thinking. if we're going someplace different, it can be teased out
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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