I have found if you have nothing constructive to do, then twitter sucks you in and is very addictive.
But after a few years or so of constant nonsense, you become adapted to the addiction and just ignore everything on it. Atleast thats what happened to me.
I went from constantly checking twitter to deleting my account and just going to the feed of one or two people once a day to keep informed.
I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play the game.
The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time.
Imagine a person not only new to social media, but new to the internet as a whole with no bs filters built in. He/she would be such a mark.
The real herd immunity is people understanding over time how emotionally manipulative social media is and learning to ignore it like we do 99% of advertisements.
I've mostly avoided the really bad platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but I caved and started going on some of them for the past week.
They are so awful. It feels like they were built from the ground up to discourage thoughtful conversation and to just create outrage. On all of these (and with youtube comments as I recently realized, although they have a placebo downvote) there is no way to downvote trolls (or bad/misinformed/useless opinions) and there is no real moderation. The only way to deal with it is to create your own angry response and then it shows up on peoples feeds as so-and-so vs so-and-so... pick your side. It is terrible.
Like in the article, one of the people tweets "stop retweeting #dcblackout" which promotes it further. These platforms feel like they are designed to profit off of humanities worst impulses and I wish there was something I could do to stop them.
> It feels like they were built from the ground up to discourage thoughtful conversation and to just create outrage.
Indeed, they’re built from the ground up to promote engagement with no regard for positive or negative impact. It so happens that humanity’s worst impulses drive a feedback cycle that’s wonderful for engagement but terrible for humanity.
It’s a classic case of amoral objectives leading to immoral outcomes.
I think one of the ways to stop them is to create a platform that the influencers/posters find more attractive so they jump ship. Apparently only like 1% of users post the majority of content.
What are the main features you'd like to see on a new platform?
I don't think it's fair to lump Twitter in with Facebook. Sure, if your feed isn't curated or you're looking at the replies to a Trump tweet, it's going to be a dumpster fire. But otherwise it can be a tool for keeping people informed without having to rely on the news.
It does require a critical eye, which the majority of people don't have, but I'm not sure what the best way to solve that problem is. Moderation at that scale doesn't seem feasible, and a downvote system to silence people, as you suggested, would be easily abused.
> I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play the game.
Isn't that social media in general? I admit I got sucked in this weekend (I don't have an account) and it was... alarming to say the least as it coincided with an amazing successful mission and milestone by SpaceX and subsequently one of the more darker sides of what people flagrantly toss around as 'Anarchy:' to be clear, wanton violence and looting have nothing to do with the ideals and principals upheld by Anarchism that has spanned millennia.
Instead what we've seen is the failure of all Nation State's to respond adequately to it's populace demands after having been violently disenfranchised, marginalized and subjugated to such a degree that protests rapidly turn to riots when the Police use the violent tactics that have been upheld as the norm to maintain order.
Personally, I thought this weekend was a vastly missed opportunity for the entire Human Species to get some much needed Perspective and come together and realize what we can accomplish when we collaborate. I'm still pretty down because of it, if I'm honest.
I spent the better have of my life studying cultures and how people interact within those cultures. Twitter has been a very interesting petri dish for me to see how people interact with each other when they feel like they can say and behave any way they want.
Its interesting to see how Twitter (and social media in general) transformed from something positive where you could find community within a large subset of people and then all patted each other on the back and it was really cool place to hang out but then it slowly became this cesspool of negativity. Twitter just let it happen and now we're at at a tipping point where you have to decide if you want the government to intervene and regulate, or simply let it slide into oblivion.
The even more interesting thing is all of the people I know and worked with in those early days fled Twitter for Mastondon. Now they're saying the same thing is already happening on that platform as well.
> Twitter has been a very interesting petri dish for me to see how people interact with each other when they feel like they can say and behave any way they want
It is very self selecting though, isn't it? You even acknowledged that mentioning people fleeing Twitter for Mastodon. It seems Twitter (etc.) attracts the people who want to make a lot of noise without repercussions, who then proceed to make the most noise. And studying behavior on Twitter just studying this small subset of Twitter users, who are a even smaller subset of the general population. Or are you able to adjust for all this?
> The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time.
Don't forget YouTube. My mother in law started with YouTube videos on Bible studies in her native language and somehow got spun into some kind of conspiracy theory black hole. We worked to talk her down from the more crazy stuff (apocalypse predictions, Qanon, etc) but it's been years and she still watches her YouTube "news" on the daily so she can keep "informed"
The level of disinformation I'm seeing around this is like nothing I've ever seen before. The thing is: many of these protests have dozens of people livestreaming the entire thing. You can see what is happening in real time, and it makes a lot of the disinformation extremely obvious.
I think a lot of the disinformation is just a function of how twitter (and to a lesser extent facebook) encourage misunderstanding/rage. For instance: there was a report that the majority of arrests after a Minneapolis protest were from out of state. This of course went completely viral, and was also completely false.
But the retraction of course did not go viral (since it will not create as much rage), and people are still repeating this misinformation.
Twitter especially is such a sad thing, and I hope at one point we can look back at the it the way that we look back at drug epidemics. It encourages people to misunderstand one another and get angry, not to seek a greater shared understanding.
It seems like there is some serious disinformation/psych ops working overtime across the internet right now; the tone is weirdly hostile. I would hope people would question the motivation of obviously divisive rhetoric, but it's clear that is a resounding no. As they say, people always buy with their emotions.
I'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing.
That's pretty unusual to be mainstream. This will be used for enacting policy, who knows what it is at this point, but it's not going to be "Oh you're shadow banned, kicked off a platform, or discredited by association". I'm talking about the lines of China; you can't say something against the powers that be, if you do, we'll ensure you are financially ruined or sent to jail kind.
I agree. We are seeing the weaponization of the internet like nothing before. It's becoming more dangerous than nuclear weapons at this point. When people can't come to a consensus on basic reality and are primed to respond with hate and violence when their reality is challenged.
I think one of the main goals of disinformation is to make us dehumanize others. To believe that they are super powerful evil beings or good but weak beings.
So I think one of the best strategies is to remember that we are all humans who ultimately have no idea what we're doing. We are powerful and weak, and mostly hurting other people because we hurt ourselves.
At least believing this seems to help me, maybe it will help some of y'all.
You had an early warning and you brushed it aside as conspiracy theory. None of this is new.
Agent provocateurs are a known thing.
For all his stupid ramblings, long before the days of Twitter and Facebook shitposting, you had Alex Jones running around with a recording crew filming events like the Bilderberg meetings, discussing and laying out all the disinformation and psyops/AP tactics that you're seeing unfold here.
Because this same stuff was used, in the past, to discredit people like him.
So this whole bleeding heart "open internet" thing strikes a rather dull chord with me in light of 1) how long this has been going on for, 2) how effective it remains.
China had an extensive system to delete disinformation. Every IM, UGC website or app are required by law to provide a report button and ICPs are required to response to user complaints immediately. There's also national wide hotline 12377 or website 12377.gov.cn to submit all categories of information you want to disappear. Any bad content esp. those against-govn't ones contained pretty quickly, which means not only the existing ones, but also prevention of future uploads or posts would be blocked. And the original uploader would be backtraced by "cyberpolice", and jailed if found.
I imagine if any technical measures taken to combat disinformation, it would be more or less like what China did here.
It could be done differently. The social networks already track engagement with posts and ads, and already use that to recommend new content (eg. engage with fluffy cat pictures, get more fluffy cat pictures in the feed).
The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content.
Deleting the content means some people think that it's a conspiracy ("they don't want you to know"), whereas giving corrective information allows people to revisit their beliefs.
> The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content.
The difficulty is the latter part. How to make sure the user see the retraction? CTR is hard man.
And China already do that, on Weibo it's a promoted feature. During its course over the years, authorities and private companies are abusing the feature, they provide half-assed debunks without further explanation, or even debunk with blatant lies. Since the retraction is a small text and often read-only, there is no proper way to debunk the debunk. PR firms use this feature to spread even more propaganda and shutdown rival messages. For example company A says ingredient X is bad for your health, company B shut it down by pointing out a tiny non-relevant loophole in the grammar, then says the research by company A is a lie, please continue to buy our product.
I live in Minneapolis, and I'm not a Twitter user, but I've found that following news reporters on Twitter that are on-site has been the best way to get reliable information quickly during the protests. (I use nitter.net to follow them.) I don't even like Twitter, but I can say unequivocally that it's not "trash, bots, and trashy bots all the way down". It's been extremely valuable to me this week.
With the recent protests it's been difficult to find local news coverage. But I found tweets, I found livestreams, but I couldn't find any reporters covering some of the most impactful demonstrations in my city in decades. In that moment, Twitter was critical.
There is a lot of bots and trash, but it has it moments where it is a wonderful tool. This is one of them.
Show me a believable bot that's going to fake a livestream of what's actually happening at the scene. There's far too much contextual information to fake it. I could identify the streets protestors walked down, the landmarks, the actions taken, the way the phone was temporarily thrown on the ground after a confrontation. Far too much nuance to fake all of that.
Faking a <500px low quality everything-is-burning but it's actually street lights picture isn't particularly groundbreaking when it comes to doctored images.
They don’t have to fake it, they can just film (or filter through) 500 scenes and only retweet the ones that fit their narrative while discarding the rest.
I keep hearing this from the mainstream, while at the same time politicians keep going on TV saying things that aren't true, or are misleading. I think the politicians are using tactics from the "how to stop riots" playbook, but they don't work in a world where information flows freely. Probably the best example of this is how the authorities in Minnesota lied about 80% of protestors being from out of state, and when someone went through the arrest records they found this was entirely false, and that in fact the vast majority were from MN, and most were locals[0].
They've been trying to use this tactic elsewhere (I've been hearing it from de Blasio and Cuomo), but I don't think it'll work anymore. Politicians don't want to acknowledge that the riots are the result of angry citizens acting out in the only way they have the power to act, which is through disorderly conduct, because the system doesn't work for them.
As I write this, I can hear concussion grenades going off outside my window (I live in the middle of Manhattan) for the 5th or 6th night in a row. Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way.
I guess my point is that the disinformation is coming from the officials too, so everyone needs to look hard at real evidence before jumping to any conclusions. Please don't fall for the appeal to authority fallacy.
NYC resident saying police is letting people loot without firing tear gas/rubber bullets in SOHO. That the only way the police could have intervened to stop the riots/protests (a crowd of thousands) would have led to it being more violent.
I agree with a lot of what you said and think you did a good job saying it!
> Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way.
I was forwarded an interesting newsletter today from Mark Manson. He talks about holding contradictory ideas in our minds and how uncomfortable that can make us. How much easier is can be to fall back on confirmation bias and fallacies of composition/division.
It’s much easier to think of the protestors as all peaceful and the cops as indiscriminate thugs than to wrestle with the messy middle of some rioting looters causing mayhem and mostly peace loving officers trying to deescalate.
I recommend reading it and I found it thoughtful and basically apolitical until the left learning ending.
I myself have seen fake “tweet screenshots “ that are trying really hard to scare suburban people that antifa is attacking them that night and I am in a liberal circle for the most part. If that is the case I can only imagine how bad the situation is for people in rural areas.
The problem is that people seem to want Facebook and/or the government to decide what is real information or not.
It seems like there are two major hurdles. First people need to be informed about history and reality to really see why having Facebook and the government decide what is true or not is a bad idea.
The second big hurdle is, we actually do need to do _something_ to reduce the amount of wanton spread of disinformation and propaganda by many groups online. It's not as easy as many people think it is, because unfortunately all governments and large companies do it quite a bit, and having those types of institutions simply dictate reality is just as bad as for example, having Amazon have complete control of the product listings on its site when they also market competing products. It's the fox guarding the hen house.
Readit News
But after a few years or so of constant nonsense, you become adapted to the addiction and just ignore everything on it. Atleast thats what happened to me.
I went from constantly checking twitter to deleting my account and just going to the feed of one or two people once a day to keep informed.
I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play the game.
The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time.
Imagine a person not only new to social media, but new to the internet as a whole with no bs filters built in. He/she would be such a mark.
The real herd immunity is people understanding over time how emotionally manipulative social media is and learning to ignore it like we do 99% of advertisements.
They are so awful. It feels like they were built from the ground up to discourage thoughtful conversation and to just create outrage. On all of these (and with youtube comments as I recently realized, although they have a placebo downvote) there is no way to downvote trolls (or bad/misinformed/useless opinions) and there is no real moderation. The only way to deal with it is to create your own angry response and then it shows up on peoples feeds as so-and-so vs so-and-so... pick your side. It is terrible.
Like in the article, one of the people tweets "stop retweeting #dcblackout" which promotes it further. These platforms feel like they are designed to profit off of humanities worst impulses and I wish there was something I could do to stop them.
Indeed, they’re built from the ground up to promote engagement with no regard for positive or negative impact. It so happens that humanity’s worst impulses drive a feedback cycle that’s wonderful for engagement but terrible for humanity.
It’s a classic case of amoral objectives leading to immoral outcomes.
What are the main features you'd like to see on a new platform?
It does require a critical eye, which the majority of people don't have, but I'm not sure what the best way to solve that problem is. Moderation at that scale doesn't seem feasible, and a downvote system to silence people, as you suggested, would be easily abused.
Isn't that social media in general? I admit I got sucked in this weekend (I don't have an account) and it was... alarming to say the least as it coincided with an amazing successful mission and milestone by SpaceX and subsequently one of the more darker sides of what people flagrantly toss around as 'Anarchy:' to be clear, wanton violence and looting have nothing to do with the ideals and principals upheld by Anarchism that has spanned millennia.
Instead what we've seen is the failure of all Nation State's to respond adequately to it's populace demands after having been violently disenfranchised, marginalized and subjugated to such a degree that protests rapidly turn to riots when the Police use the violent tactics that have been upheld as the norm to maintain order.
Personally, I thought this weekend was a vastly missed opportunity for the entire Human Species to get some much needed Perspective and come together and realize what we can accomplish when we collaborate. I'm still pretty down because of it, if I'm honest.
Its interesting to see how Twitter (and social media in general) transformed from something positive where you could find community within a large subset of people and then all patted each other on the back and it was really cool place to hang out but then it slowly became this cesspool of negativity. Twitter just let it happen and now we're at at a tipping point where you have to decide if you want the government to intervene and regulate, or simply let it slide into oblivion.
The even more interesting thing is all of the people I know and worked with in those early days fled Twitter for Mastondon. Now they're saying the same thing is already happening on that platform as well.
It is very self selecting though, isn't it? You even acknowledged that mentioning people fleeing Twitter for Mastodon. It seems Twitter (etc.) attracts the people who want to make a lot of noise without repercussions, who then proceed to make the most noise. And studying behavior on Twitter just studying this small subset of Twitter users, who are a even smaller subset of the general population. Or are you able to adjust for all this?
Don't forget YouTube. My mother in law started with YouTube videos on Bible studies in her native language and somehow got spun into some kind of conspiracy theory black hole. We worked to talk her down from the more crazy stuff (apocalypse predictions, Qanon, etc) but it's been years and she still watches her YouTube "news" on the daily so she can keep "informed"
I think a lot of the disinformation is just a function of how twitter (and to a lesser extent facebook) encourage misunderstanding/rage. For instance: there was a report that the majority of arrests after a Minneapolis protest were from out of state. This of course went completely viral, and was also completely false.
But the retraction of course did not go viral (since it will not create as much rage), and people are still repeating this misinformation.
Twitter especially is such a sad thing, and I hope at one point we can look back at the it the way that we look back at drug epidemics. It encourages people to misunderstand one another and get angry, not to seek a greater shared understanding.
Deleted Comment
I'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing.
As someone who has been online since the late 1980's, this sentence can easily apply increasingly to the Internet since around 2014 onwards.
I'm afraid the days of an open internet are quickly closing.
That ship sailed years ago. You're just not in one of the groups being actively censored or "good as lied about" yet.
That's pretty unusual to be mainstream. This will be used for enacting policy, who knows what it is at this point, but it's not going to be "Oh you're shadow banned, kicked off a platform, or discredited by association". I'm talking about the lines of China; you can't say something against the powers that be, if you do, we'll ensure you are financially ruined or sent to jail kind.
The world is moving quickly into a darker future.
So I think one of the best strategies is to remember that we are all humans who ultimately have no idea what we're doing. We are powerful and weak, and mostly hurting other people because we hurt ourselves.
At least believing this seems to help me, maybe it will help some of y'all.
Agent provocateurs are a known thing.
For all his stupid ramblings, long before the days of Twitter and Facebook shitposting, you had Alex Jones running around with a recording crew filming events like the Bilderberg meetings, discussing and laying out all the disinformation and psyops/AP tactics that you're seeing unfold here.
Because this same stuff was used, in the past, to discredit people like him.
So this whole bleeding heart "open internet" thing strikes a rather dull chord with me in light of 1) how long this has been going on for, 2) how effective it remains.
Dead Comment
I imagine if any technical measures taken to combat disinformation, it would be more or less like what China did here.
China had an extensive system to delete information.
Fixed that for you =)
The only thing they need to do is that if a post that went viral is debunked, they need to show a retraction to users that have engaged with the fake content.
Deleting the content means some people think that it's a conspiracy ("they don't want you to know"), whereas giving corrective information allows people to revisit their beliefs.
The difficulty is the latter part. How to make sure the user see the retraction? CTR is hard man.
And China already do that, on Weibo it's a promoted feature. During its course over the years, authorities and private companies are abusing the feature, they provide half-assed debunks without further explanation, or even debunk with blatant lies. Since the retraction is a small text and often read-only, there is no proper way to debunk the debunk. PR firms use this feature to spread even more propaganda and shutdown rival messages. For example company A says ingredient X is bad for your health, company B shut it down by pointing out a tiny non-relevant loophole in the grammar, then says the research by company A is a lie, please continue to buy our product.
What to do at this point? It's a vicious circle.
There is a lot of bots and trash, but it has it moments where it is a wonderful tool. This is one of them.
Show me a believable bot that's going to fake a livestream of what's actually happening at the scene. There's far too much contextual information to fake it. I could identify the streets protestors walked down, the landmarks, the actions taken, the way the phone was temporarily thrown on the ground after a confrontation. Far too much nuance to fake all of that.
Faking a <500px low quality everything-is-burning but it's actually street lights picture isn't particularly groundbreaking when it comes to doctored images.
They've been trying to use this tactic elsewhere (I've been hearing it from de Blasio and Cuomo), but I don't think it'll work anymore. Politicians don't want to acknowledge that the riots are the result of angry citizens acting out in the only way they have the power to act, which is through disorderly conduct, because the system doesn't work for them.
As I write this, I can hear concussion grenades going off outside my window (I live in the middle of Manhattan) for the 5th or 6th night in a row. Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way.
I guess my point is that the disinformation is coming from the officials too, so everyone needs to look hard at real evidence before jumping to any conclusions. Please don't fall for the appeal to authority fallacy.
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minnesota-officials-say-most-pe...
NYC resident saying police is letting people loot without firing tear gas/rubber bullets in SOHO. That the only way the police could have intervened to stop the riots/protests (a crowd of thousands) would have led to it being more violent.
> Every night I've watched thousands of unarmed peaceful protestors march by, demanding action. Meanwhile the NYPD is out in full military gear firing chemical weapons and rubber bullets indiscriminately at anyone who looks at them the wrong way.
I was forwarded an interesting newsletter today from Mark Manson. He talks about holding contradictory ideas in our minds and how uncomfortable that can make us. How much easier is can be to fall back on confirmation bias and fallacies of composition/division.
It’s much easier to think of the protestors as all peaceful and the cops as indiscriminate thugs than to wrestle with the messy middle of some rioting looters causing mayhem and mostly peace loving officers trying to deescalate.
I recommend reading it and I found it thoughtful and basically apolitical until the left learning ending.
https://markmanson.net/newsletters/mindfck-monday-33
It seems like there are two major hurdles. First people need to be informed about history and reality to really see why having Facebook and the government decide what is true or not is a bad idea.
The second big hurdle is, we actually do need to do _something_ to reduce the amount of wanton spread of disinformation and propaganda by many groups online. It's not as easy as many people think it is, because unfortunately all governments and large companies do it quite a bit, and having those types of institutions simply dictate reality is just as bad as for example, having Amazon have complete control of the product listings on its site when they also market competing products. It's the fox guarding the hen house.