- actively recommending new groups for me to join
- actively trying to acquire my attention
- actively trying to get me to consume incendiary content
Instead they're trying to help me communicate with people This removes the "attractor function" of the really bad content and protects average people who aren't aware of or equipped to deal with misinformation. I dont have the correct stat in front of me by a large percentage of people that join QAnon groups on facebook do so b/c facebook recommended the group to them.
Most people are not going out of their way to find this content, its being shoved at them by algorithms.
“We know that when they’re on big, mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, extremists don’t just talk among themselves. They recruit. They join totally unrelated groups and try to seed conspiracy theories there. In some ways, I’d rather have 1,000 hardened neo-Nazis doing bad stuff together on an encrypted chat app than have them infiltrating 1,000 different local Dogspotting groups or whatever.”
Obviously that can still happen now, e.g., finding other like minded people on FB and connecting on Signal. But that added friction is not insignificant
"Should laypeople even be allowed to talk to each other? Perhaps we, media pundits who purvey only valid informattion (like WMDs or the Steele dossier) should only be allowed to do the talking"
That's one reason I still consider Bush II to have been a worse president than Trump and probably the worst president of the last 100 years (at least). Trump was far more of a clown, but Bush II did more damage. Trump also would never have happened were it not for Bush II.
Bush set fire to America in order to set fire to a trillion dollars in Iraq and accomplish nothing (except indirectly creating ISIS). It's just staggeringly awful, and it's embarrassing that nobody is in prison.
There's no doubt Bush's actions were utterly disastrous for America and many other countries, as well as their people, but it becomes a very different debate when you consider the two scenarios of Bush lying and Bush believing the intel, and then sub-scenarios like if Bush was primarily misled or mistakenly misinformed.
Hypothetically, there could have been no lying anywhere in the chain (even among the lowest-level intelligence analysts and informants), or some scattered lying, or a ton of it from bottom to top. Until that question is satisfactorily answered, it's hard to know who, if anyone, should belong in prison over the matter.
One of the most impactful consequences is that in most debates I now see, very few people believe the intelligence community when they make any claims about anything, including almost two decades later. For example, claims of election interference and espionage by the Russian government can be and frequently are easily dismissed by citing the WMD incident.
That alone has driven a lot of the civil tension over the past 4 years. (And of course this will remain the case no matter how one considers the deceit vs. mistake argument, since either way it means the IC is much harder to trust.)
This is such a pointless and uninsightful article.
How about fuck you, BRIAN?
