Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

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plodder
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Tue Jul 14, 2020 6:06 am

facebook owns instagram and whatsapp. google owns youtube. start by breaking these up and getting them to compete with each other. the whole point of breaking monopolies up is to remove barriers to entry.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by lpm » Tue Jul 14, 2020 7:03 am

On another forum I did a long complicated metaphor imagining the real world as a computer simulation where the controlling AI gives us more of what we appear to want.

When it generates red kites, few people take the time to look at them. When it generates graffiti, loads of people gather round, some shouting in outrage, some delighted that the other side has been owned. So the AI responds to the demand by generating fewer nice things that we ignore and creates more and more graffiti.

Competition isn't always healthy. It can lead to lowest common denominator. The Sun competed by putting tits on page 3. YouTube wins millions of addicted customers by generating more and more conspiracy theory videos. Twitter gets a global audience by amplifying noisy controversial voices.

I'm not convinced driving more competition into the ecosystem is the answer.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Wed Jul 15, 2020 7:17 am

social media is just as influenced as The Sun

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Woodchopper » Tue Aug 25, 2020 6:42 am

A notorious anti-vaccine group spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filed suit today in federal court in California alleging that Facebook's fact-checking program for false scientific or medical misinformation violates its constitutional rights.

Children's Health Defense claims in its suit (PDF) that Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and the organizations Science Feedback, Poynter, and PolitiFact acted "jointly or in concert with federal government agencies" to infringe on CHD's First and Fifth Amendment rights. The suit also alleges Facebook and the fact-checking organizations colluded to commit wire fraud by "clearing the field" of anti-vaccine ads.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/202 ... ensorship/

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Sun Sep 26, 2021 10:45 pm

plodder wrote:
Tue Jul 14, 2020 6:06 am
facebook owns instagram and whatsapp. google owns youtube. start by breaking these up and getting them to compete with each other. the whole point of breaking monopolies up is to remove barriers to entry.
You're right about this.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:26 pm

plodder wrote:
Wed Jul 15, 2020 7:17 am
social media is just as influenced as The Sun
Social media can influence its audience in much more insidious ways, too. It's not the ads especially (people know what ads are and tend to have conscious filters), it's the ranking algorithms that decide which of your friends posts to show you, or which search results come on the first page. They don't signal 'I am paid by Rupert Murdoch and I want you to think X', the view of the world they present just look.. natural, or what the algorithm wants you to believe your friends and family 'all' think. This stuff slips right under those filters.
Last edited by sheldrake on Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Sun Sep 26, 2021 11:30 pm

We have no idea how many of the comical memes mocking certain groups of people were professionally produced. But it's your friends sharing them with you, right? And perhaps the algorithm didn't put some of the other memes your friends thought were funny in your newsfeed...

You get the picture. This stuff is Edward Bernays' wet dream, with a cherry on top.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Sep 27, 2021 11:33 pm

I also wonder how much of this algorithm malarkey happens without any conscious oversight.

It's all based on engagement. Some people love to engage with people that make them angry, as the 10,000 posts following anything written by sheldrake confirm with depressing regularity. So the algorithm is entrenching people in their silos and only showing them the most outrageous things from their opponents, just to sell adverts at £0.00001 a go.

It's a pretty embarrassing way to corrode a society. Just robots nobody understands selling things nobody needs to morons who can't figure out how to use an adblocker.

And of course, these divisions serve the lizard people anyway. Instead of getting angry that while 99% of us have been slaving away, suffering in lockdown and dying (often alone), billionaires have been making record profits and going to space, people are all cross at each other about vaccinations and wearing a mask on the bus. People have collectively lost the ability to see the big picture, because their attention has been hijacked by a carefully optimised but ultimately worthless bit of code, drip-feeding just enough dopamine to engender perpetual anxiety about nothing of any consequence.

My guess is that targetting is a pretty rough science based on crude demographic information, plus social media engagement. But by optimising for engagement the lizard dweebs are serving us all up on a platter to cleverer bastards, who know just the words and images to use to pull peoples' levers.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Sep 27, 2021 11:36 pm

And I'm pretty sure that loads of memes have corporate origins.

To take TV/film based memes, there's always loads based on some old film right before a sequel is announced. Memes about some weird Netflix show like Tiger King will coincide with its catapulting to the top of the Netflix algorithm (where they recommend whatever they want to you watch).

OTOH, most political memes I've seen are in favour of progressives, and against conservatives, so they're clearly not very effective at achieving electoral outcomes (especially if you're Michael Bloomberg).
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Millennie Al » Tue Sep 28, 2021 1:32 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Mon Sep 27, 2021 11:33 pm
I also wonder how much of this algorithm malarkey happens without any conscious oversight.
If you don't like being subject to an algorithm, you're *really* not going to like natural selection.
It's all based on engagement. Some people love to engage with people that make them angry, as the 10,000 posts following anything written by sheldrake confirm with depressing regularity.
There's no reason to get angry with people who disagree with you.
So the algorithm is entrenching people in their silos and only showing them the most outrageous things from their opponents, just to sell adverts at £0.00001 a go.
There's a bit of a contradiction there - if they're in silos, they can't see people who disagree with them.
My guess is that targetting is a pretty rough science based on crude demographic information, plus social media engagement. But by optimising for engagement the lizard dweebs are serving us all up on a platter to cleverer bastards, who know just the words and images to use to pull peoples' levers.
People can choose what they engage with. They have minds of their own.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Tue Sep 28, 2021 8:07 am

It’s not purely based on engagement. The topics which facebook management want smothered are downranked so they dont appear as often (or at all) in your newsfeed. Theres deliberate news management that isnt transparent to you, and which appears as if it’s simply the consensus of your friends’ opinions.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Stephanie » Tue Sep 28, 2021 8:44 am

Facebook have been tweaking their algorithm a fair bit as they face criticism for one thing or another. They use a variety of signals to decide what content to show you, and prioritise "Meaningful Social Interactions" (The Wall Street Journal dug into some of it recently https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-a ... 1631654215). The signals are things like: how long you looked at a post, whether the link has been shared in Messenger, what type of content it is, when it was created, whether your friends are talking about it, plus all the other interests they've inferred from you based on pages and groups you like, content you've reacted to or shared before... etc.

You can also get an idea of the most popular content according to Facebook https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/18/faceb ... t-reports/ which probably differs from what most of you likely see in your feed. Facebook only released this though, because they were pissed about the attention Kevin Roose was getting with the data he was pulling from CrowdTangle https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/tech ... -data.html And they are also trying to do things like reduce posts deemed "political" in the feed... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 11909.html
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Tue Sep 28, 2021 10:24 am

They also tweak newsfeed with things like this https://www.projectveritas.com/news/bre ... iling-new/ and this https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... ter-biden/ constantly.

Those are just two examples that leaked, and I accept that many people here would want those stories or views suppressed (remaining gripes with the modern left; unsupportive of free speech for people they disagree with), but it's happening all the time and not just to viewpoints or news stories you'd be opposed to.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by plodder » Tue Sep 28, 2021 10:29 am

wow. powerful people use the media to change how people think. wow. I might have to have a sit down.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Tue Sep 28, 2021 11:27 am

They do indeed. This is a new technique that's potentially more powerful, and definitely more insidious though.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Stephanie » Tue Sep 28, 2021 12:06 pm

sheldrake wrote:
Tue Sep 28, 2021 10:24 am
They also tweak newsfeed with things like this https://www.projectveritas.com/news/bre ... iling-new/ and this https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... ter-biden/ constantly.

Those are just two examples that leaked, and I accept that many people here would want those stories or views suppressed (remaining gripes with the modern left; unsupportive of free speech for people they disagree with), but it's happening all the time and not just to viewpoints or news stories you'd be opposed to.
The vaccine stuff they were pretty open about - and overall I think right wing content has a better time of it than left wing content by and large. The bigger issue with Facebook moderation is that the rules that apply to people like you and me, don't apply to much larger and more powerful accounts - in ways they were open with (newsworthiness exemption) and ways they were not (a vip list of people who got hands off moderation because they wanted to avoid PR fall out). There were also reports of Zuckerberg and other execs intervening in moderation decisions because they didn't want to piss off Trump and other republicans. That's only changed now because the Democrats are in the White House, and that's not even touching on some of the other sh.t that happens outside of the West.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Tue Sep 28, 2021 12:11 pm

This wasn't moderation or 'fact checking' that the public are told about though, this was algorithmic suppression they were trying to keep private (e.g. quietly stopping a story from spreading rather than openly blocking it so users notice their posts disappear, or fact check labels). This is being done constantly on topics you don't hear about except for the occasional leak (like the ones I posted). It's done to the left and the right.

Internally, the bias tends to be 'California liberal' which means they bias towards the things you'd expect a wealthy Democrat voter to agree with. Sometimes this presents in decisions that might seem 'right wing' from the UK, or from a Sanders/Green party voter perspective.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Pishwish » Tue Sep 28, 2021 1:50 pm

Why on earth would I click on anything written by project veritas?

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Stephanie » Tue Sep 28, 2021 1:58 pm

The vaccines? I mean I tend to be fairly critical of Facebook's approach on vaccination, but while they didn't go into specifics, they did say on their blogs.

From Feb this year: https://about.fb.com/news/2020/04/covid ... lse-claims
Finally, we are continuing to improve Search results on our platforms. When people search for vaccine or COVID-19 related content on Facebook, we promote relevant, authoritative results and provide third-party resources to connect people to expert information about vaccines. On Instagram, in addition to surfacing authoritative results in Search, in the coming weeks we’re making it harder to find accounts in search that discourage people from getting vaccinated.
From March this year: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/03/mark- ... -covid-19/
Building on our goal to promote authoritative information about COVID-19 vaccines, we have implemented several temporary measures to further limit the spread of potentially harmful COVID-19 and vaccine information during the pandemic. Some of these measures include:
  • Reducing the distribution of
    • content from users that have violated our policies on COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation or that have repeatedly shared content debunked as False or Altered by our third-party fact-checking partners, and of
    • any COVID-19 or vaccine content that fact-checking partners have rated as “Missing Context.”
  • Requiring admins for groups with admins or members who have violated our COVID-19 policies to temporarily approve all posts within their group.
  • Continuing to further elevate information from authoritative sources when people seek information about COVID-19 or vaccines.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:11 pm

They immediately fired the leakers, and theres a lot of other material you’re not informed about

These declarations, when they are made, serve a simillar purpose to the privacy settings hidden deep in menus most people never touch.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Stephanie » Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:15 pm

With regards to bias, that was part of the problem - Zuckerberg and others worried that they were too California liberal, and would therefore upset Trump and others, as per this https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ry ... alex-jones
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Stephanie » Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:17 pm

I don't doubt that there is vast amounts of content about Facebook that we don't know. It's a huge organisation, and there's a lot of sh.t going on. I read stuff every day and there are probably loads of pieces I don't see, and still more things that the company are secretive about
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:27 pm

Stephanie wrote:
Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:15 pm
With regards to bias, that was part of the problem - Zuckerberg and others worried that they were too California liberal, and would therefore upset Trump and others, as per this https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ry ... alex-jones
They did a few years ago. As recently as 2016 zuck was avowedly pro-free speech and thought it was a bad idea for facebook to try an arbitrate what was true, but they’ve gone on a journey and have let themselves turn into a full-on ‘ministry of truth’ now.

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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by Stephanie » Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:45 pm

sheldrake wrote:
Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:27 pm
Stephanie wrote:
Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:15 pm
With regards to bias, that was part of the problem - Zuckerberg and others worried that they were too California liberal, and would therefore upset Trump and others, as per this https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ry ... alex-jones
They did a few years ago. As recently as 2016 zuck was avowedly pro-free speech and thought it was a bad idea for facebook to try an arbitrate what was true, but they’ve gone on a journey and have let themselves turn into a full-on ‘ministry of truth’ now.
Possibly the insurrection that might have changed their mind there.

ETA: covid hasn't helped either, mind.
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Re: Nick Catone sues Facebook, and freedom of speech...

Post by sheldrake » Tue Sep 28, 2021 3:01 pm

Stephanie wrote:
Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:45 pm
sheldrake wrote:
Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:27 pm
Stephanie wrote:
Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:15 pm
With regards to bias, that was part of the problem - Zuckerberg and others worried that they were too California liberal, and would therefore upset Trump and others, as per this https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ry ... alex-jones
They did a few years ago. As recently as 2016 zuck was avowedly pro-free speech and thought it was a bad idea for facebook to try an arbitrate what was true, but they’ve gone on a journey and have let themselves turn into a full-on ‘ministry of truth’ now.
Possibly the insurrection that might have changed their mind there.

ETA: covid hasn't helped either, mind.
The change happened before January 2020. Heavy censorship of anti-Biden news in run up to the election. No action against people excusing/inciting antifa rioting in the US (e.g. Maxine Waters). They just censor things ls according to political biases of the senior staff now.

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