It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts?
Besides, Facebook is an appalling, festering wound. It's not just politics, but of course a lot of money and talk floats around politics and a lot of noise as a result. Facebook is a case of a minority using the service to keep in touch with some people, and a vast majority engaged in a bizarre and self-destructive series of narcissistic behaviors.
The evidence keeps mounting that using Facebook and unhappiness are strongly correlated, and I keep seeing people who aren't remotely surprised by that.
So, depends on what you consider recent.
the problem I think is that many inside the beltway don't understand this or want to. look at all the complaints against non traditional media sources being shown preference in the WH. Yes some of it is politically oriented but their real fear is that it cements in the minds of many they the press doesn't is not just certain big papers and television sources, it is anyone who can create an audience and deliver the story.
that is beneficial to all. the more voices the better and less likely the message will be controlled, manipulated, or simply one sided.
That's in interesting interpretation of what goes on to determine what Facebook shows to users.
I have an eclectic combination of very conservative, liberal, statist, centrist and libertarian friends. So I see it all over the map. Other friends don't.
This isn't some selfish ploy to protect power by the NYT. Maybe their view of the importance of journalism is tainted by being the subject as well, but there are any number of non-journalists agreeing with the idea.
The political culture has significantly changed over last twenty years, and the changes in the media landscape are one of very few causal mechanisms that have been proposed (neo-capitalism destroying the middle class being among the others).
Looking at these changes, it's really hard to argue that the media of the past (or, actually, present) failed the people – at least in comparison to whatever instagram feed is supposed to replace it.I'm hoping there'll be a few powerful institutions left when the slaughter is over, but they all disappear, today's democratic societies will devolve into some bizarre pre-democratic dystopias.
Lets assume that NYT is indeed complaining. How does this make it ok for Facebook to control? This is a classic ad hominem fallacy.
Except that Facebook is very much like minitrue, a large machine with people as its cogs that outputs information that may or may not be correlated with facts. Not to mention that it's also targeted at each prole, so the proles always get an echo chamber that will quell the rebellion.
The 1984 analogies go both ways.
the facebook algorithms are a black box
Well, there have always been different sources of media contending for the narrative. My grandpa used to read both the Washington Times, which he saw as basically true news; he also read the Washington Post (affectionately: "the com-Post") because he wanted to keep an eye on the other team's plans.
What is novel here is that there are now random teenagers in Macedonia just totally making stuff up, and this is competing for reader attention with the same amount of weight as all the other stuff which we traditionally called "news" (https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/).
As recently as 2009 it seemed totally crazy that, like, teenagers on the Internet could just make stuff up and it would affect world affairs -- see https://xkcd.com/635/ , Randall Munroe's September 2009 mockery of the Orson Scott Card "Ender's Game" future where blogger kids make stuff up to change national discourse.
Munroe was wrong, Card was right (?!), and it totally happened. The 2016 US elections went to /b/, /pol/, and /int/ -- congrats, folks! Interesting times.
The "old media" people who bewail this stuff may be complaining that they're losing influence, yes, but some of them actually believed the story that they were doing a public service, and those people are upset about something else, too.
A friend who spent some time in the old media told me that what worries them about this shift is that people are "no longer following a single newsgathering organization they can hold accountable" and instead use "contextless random shares via their Facebook feed (which produce a sort of race to the bottom)". He added that "the passive nature of the Facebook News Feed is one of many forces causing people to take less responsibility for their information intake and lose information literacy skills. I guess that's probably bad."
Those are reasonable things to be worried about whether you favor the Washington Times or the Washington Post or Breitbart or the Huffington Post or Coast to Coast AM.
... complains the former king.
What happens when Breitbart or HuffPo or various YouTubers and bloggers get caught in a lie? Nothing. Nobody's head is put in the noose.
News aggregators are to journalism what AliExpress is to shopping - they'll give you what you wanted at the price you wanted, but piled high with lies and crappy quality, and you'll never find the same company twice so their reputation doesn't matter.
You switch to a different information provider.
Edit: Yeah. Just downvote, cowards.
What do you offer here to counter this that doesn't rely on me blindly taking your word for it?
However, in this new thing, reputation free news, right and left, the baseline of facts is gone.
As for the topic: Traditional media is losing its distribution to social networks, so it's fighting back with what it sees as its market advantage: The Truth. However, the new distribution methods allow users to find the truth in a different way from before. Instead of Dan Rather telling you the one true news, people collect their news from multiple sources and make their minds up. As with distribution, the mainstream media is set to lose this next part of the battle.
we should be worried the last three presidents were all elected by the team with the best data operation.
it has infiltrated the communication you have with your family members - never before in human history was your interaction with your own family and friends mediated through a for profit corporation whose interest it was to make you share memes.
i dont know if i am ahead of things but as someone who was on the internet since 1996... i deleted my facebook account years ago. i deleted my twitter this past year. i am close to deleting google.
i pay money to certain sites that i value, and patreon creators. my money goes to people who make stuff, and they make stuff i like without trying to manipulate me with some kind of weaponized big data political campaign. the free internet is almost become an unusable pile of shit.
i feel like there is this nugget of people leaving behind the 'standard internet' for these new little bubble enclaves where we cannot be assaulted with never ending streams of .... garbage. i dont know the name for it...
we need a name for it. its something like a drug, but crossed with a meme. it is a virus but one that you voluntarily re-infect yourself with every time you log on to some platform like facebook.
its like addiction but without the physical component. its a dysfunctional manipulative relationship but one side is a data center and a bunch of algorithms.
its like a toxic person but that person is a platform that you log in to every day to try to connect with people who are not toxic. its like you cannot get away from the toxicity anymore
its like if there was ubiquitous angry talk radio that you could never escape. its there in your pocket all the time waiting to get you angry about something or other.
its almost like the internet is turning people into psychotics... except they really do hear little voices in their heads all day long telling them how terrible the world is. because that is what is really actually happening.
its like renting your brain out to a corporation, for free, so that you can plug into some pseudo community that exists only to generate profit.
these things all come through some kind of 'feed', which is designed to trigger the release of brain chemicals that in a feedback loop cause you to consume more of the feed.
the feed is designed by an algorithm and big data. you are like the squirrel in the psychology experiment, except of pushing the lever to get more nuts, you push the lever to get another hit of the chemicals that are released when you have a nother righteous anger story in your feed.
they used to call blackberry 'crackberry'.
maybe they are more like drug dealers. anger dealers.
or virus spreaders. they spread the viruses and re-infect people even as they try to get away.
maybe they are the reservoirs of the virus....
their only purpose is to grow. using your brain. your mind that is.
maybe they are , essentially,
mind cancer.
[1] http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/this-video-will-make-you-angry
Legacy media is a one-way street: they talk to you. In social media, it's a conversation. Even by clicking 'like' or 'dislike' you feel like you are part of the conversation, even if it is in some small, non-zero way. You get to be heard. This is what makes it so addictive.
On the net a bit before you. Effectively left the net around 2003-2004 due to a dangerous rise in vigilante-ism specific to a community I was involved in. Saw the darkness coming, a prelude to the Twitterite-Trumpian shit. Net was no longer about amazing technologies connecting people. Became a power that could be used against people.
Never had any social media accounts. Surprises me people could not see where it was going. People who never touched HTML didn't see what they were giving up by raising their flag on corporate PHP. The ecosystem of private web has almost entirely disappeared. Today you're either corporate or silenced.
Don't have any permanent accounts anywhere. Imo, accounts are surveillance / advertising delivery mechanisms. The longer you ride an account, the more info "they" have on you. And one day somebody is going to want to f__k with you. And it'll all be there, on a plate.
(This is not a theory. I saw it happen, more than once. Including to myself.)
Gave up email around 2005 as the worst offender. All your account information, all your personal business, all your draft-grade ideas, all in one place, waiting for some a__h__e to hack in or get a warrant? No thanks. And nobody has any discretion in email. Nobody has figured out how to use PGP in 25 years. Hopeless.
People who use social media, imo, are like Neanderthals waiting for their extinction event. Intelligent people, engineers, and evil corporate and political people are basically cooking up crack and handing it out so they can get rich and grab power. Zuckerberg sitting beside world leaders at the G8 a decade ago kind of cemented this perception imo. And the Neanderthals keep signing up as if all of this was neutral, like clean air or fresh water.
(My favorite Neanderthals are the political activists claiming the high ground of human rights to conduct their political campaigns via Facebook without the threat of surveillance!)
And, yes, I live in a cave. I'm almost not joking.
Tried recently to get an email to register for a throwaway account somewhere. Could not figure it out via Tor. Tor services permanently or temporarily out of service. Or require non-anonymous bitcoin. No way to get emails without leaving trail. No way to be anonymous. Internet = surveillance. No more privacy. Everybody is a social media idiot. America is crumbling. Not a coincidence, imo.
When I get nostalgic for the good old days of cyber revolutionaries and tech manifestos, I think of the failure of the front page of Reddit to provide any solutions to the very serious long term problems we are facing as a species. It's all astroturfed joke gifs and one or two rage-news story of the moment. The comments have gone from bad to impenetrably terrible in the past 5 years. There's no wisdom in this crowd.
(Hackernews is an interesting exception, but the narrowness that keeps it sane is also its shortfall. Not every problem can be solved from the command prompt by start-up engineering visionaries. The principle virtue here is respect for craft, and it shows everyday in the careful comments.)
The internet has turned into something worse than television. The people are more passive as ever in their hyper-personalized info-holes, zoned into whatever gives them that dopamine hit, as you put it.
Reading used to be an alternative to television. We used to leave the boob tube and go read a newspaper, or a book. Reading was good. The internet has transformed reading into the problem. Where is the escape? The people who wrote, who called themselves intellectuals, used to occupy a social and technological space separate from television. They had their own world. Now writers, um, bloggers, newspapermen, scholars, and the rest, are all shoulder to shoulder in a disorderly cue, all mobbed together trying to get a golden ticket on the train to success. And the train station is called Facebook, or Twitter. Writers have always been poor, but never until today have they been beggars.
(My favorite omen is Twitter, where all the formerly important pillars of the political aristocracy, like Bill Kristol for example, go to flash their underwear. Trump is just the best example. Hardly the worst. Imagine Hemmingway ruined by Twitter.)
The internet destroyed the BBS scene. First came the information superhighway through that hometown feel. Then came the skyscraper social media conglomerates. Now we're getting the double tap psychological bombing campaigns that shake the ruins we are huddling in. And we are supposed to be amused.
I don't know how people manage all this disaster. Maybe like most people they buy junk cookies and pies and forget that grandma used to make this stuff at home much better, and that's why we used to love her. Life in America has become worse and worse. Emptier and emptier. More abstractly equal, more invasively political. And in the past 20 years, America has been transformed by surveillance properties of the internet.
Nobody has a handle on this. Including the great political parties, including the technologists, including the intelligence services. Great winds are sweeping through.
I think America is reaching its late Soviet period. The machine is creaking. Everybody is looking at each other wondering what part of the machine is breaking. The ship is full of leaks (and not only Wikileaks).
The plan is to rearrange the deck chairs. Just a little more Uber. A few more sprinkles of Netflix. Just one more cloud service. Fix Facebook. If we can get one more round of funding. If I can cash this pay check (with no healthcare no dental no retirement fund). One more Walmart shopping binge. One more lid of meth. One more line of code.
The internet revolution has become nothing other than the digital exploitation of the masses. Every attempt to right the ship has failed. There is no decentralized post-surveillance internet coming. Trump is the past present and future.
/rant
why would Facebook care about your sharing memes? Facebook cares about you spending time on the site (so you look at ads)
The question is whether that is the purpose of Facebook. I don't think it is; I think the purpose of Facebook is to become a social media giant, as coffeymug said. Technology for Facebook is just a means to that end.
///// Littlepage is also a recent convert. During the primaries, he was a Cruz supporter, and he even tried making some left-wing pages on Facebook but discovered that they just didn’t make him as much money. /////
Now with Trump in charge, will this flip? With angry leftists flocking to Occupy Democrats, Young Turks, etc?
We'll see.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/rubycramer/democrats-confront-lefty... http://mashable.com/2017/02/01/left-wing-conspiracy-theory-v...
None of the 300-500 people i deal with each week ever talk about "stuff" in this article. Hardly ever does the word Facebook ever come up (except my spouse who uses FB to voyeur friends &family )
<centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way.
Nope. Not to those I know. Just because it's on a screen does not mean it an engrain.
People aren't stupid. Really. Whether it's Walter Cronkite or National Enquirer or Readers Digest. Or now Facebook or fox news or npr or blogs. We get it.
Just because the vehicle to spread BS has moved does not mean we don't realize that.
Chill out American press.
I think there is a difference between reciting BS on the internet and believing it.
Just for kicks i am going to ask my acquaintances if they use FB, why and how often. Could be a good conversation starter.
So I think the icons seen in the graphic would qualify as emoji.
They mentioned that some post had gotten big enough that it had merited commentary by Snopes. When the vast majority of political discussion takes place over a distributed mess of memes the nature of fact-checking changes tremendously. On top of that, a lot of these pages are building up the ideological armor to rebuff attempts by the platforms themselves to provide more rigorous filters (e.g. "corrupt Twitter / Reddit algorithms"). Maybe this is just the way the world works now, but if so that's kind of depressing.
Their end can't come soon enough. Judith Miller 2003. Never forget.
