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Facebook Features 9/11 Conspiracy Theory as 'Trending' (slashdot.org)
Facebook is having a tough time with stories that trend on the social network. The company has been accused of gaming what it shows as "trending" on the site, and sometimes favoring things it showed to people. Not long ago, it fired the human editors who took care of it, but then earlier this month, a fake story about Megyn Kelly. It apologized for the slip, but it has happened again. The Hill reports: Facebook is taking heat yet again for its Trending Topics section after featuring a story from a British tabloid pushing a conspiracy theory that the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, because of a "controlled demolition." Facebook users who clicked on the "September 11th Anniversary" trending topic Friday were presented an article titled "September 11: The footage that 'proves bombs were planted in Twin Towers.'"
It says 'Trending' not 'Trending Truthful News Stories'.
It's close...very close
Facebook will go the way of MySpace, AOL, and the rest of the fad social sites.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Either we want them to filter and judge or we want them to put what is actually trending which is a purely algorithmic assessment.
When the story broke about the political bias scandal, I posted here a prediction of what a purely algorithmic news feed would look like. This is pretty close to one of my predictions.
Here's the problem: The internet is full of *lies*. It is very hard for an algorithm to tell what is true and what is not. Often the not-true stories are the most popular, because they can play into what people wish to believe. That's why you need human editors.
Now all we need is some nice clickbait. Something like "This housewife makes $120,000 a year from home, see how she does it!"
So, Slashdot is now on the team of the west's propaganda machine?
So, Facebook is supposed to censor alternative viewpoints now? I'm not exactly convinced by the "controlled demolition" theory, but I see no reason to censor it either.
"You certainly would not expect it to collapse in a tidy heap at the speed of gravity where the entire building becomes... "
And I know a guy who doesn't wear a seatbelt because he thinks his arms can keep his face from going through the windshield in a car accident.
Your intuition about physical processes is meaningless when dealing with materials and processes at these scales.
Without getting into the stupidity, the utter, mindblowing, holy-crap stupidity of the idea that hundreds of people sitting in offices throughout the WTC wouldn't say "HEY, you had a maintinence guy deliver a giant package and install it in the HVAC two months ago? me too! Maybe it was so that when the guberment crashed the jets into the building, it would make sure that the evacuated buildings blooo flat down! As opposd to havign the tops slide off or sides crumble like they were supposed to!"
If I wanted to stop people taking alternative explanations to an event seriously I would find convenient nutters to add their wacky ideas to the list of explanations and get them onto talk shows, lecture circuit, etc. The more outlandlish the better; aliens - even better; new physics - great; the proposer have a checkered past and outlandish hairstyle - just who we want. The result is a couple of dozen of competing ideas for people to read; they will, rightly, dismiss many of them as cranky, and, by association, this reduces the credibility of the more considered explanations.
The ideas become hidden because mainstream media can ignore them by labelling them 'conspiracy theories'.
I'm not saying who/what caused the 3 buildings to fall on 9/11, but the official story has questions in it that it's authors don't answer; some alternative stories seem to have good evidence behind them.
"Trending" means it's popular. People won't watch (and share) something that they don't actually want to watch. Here's the thing though about those WTC and Building 7 videos: a simple analysis of any of the off-the-street real-time videos - of which there were several so it's not like they could all be faked - by using simple equations of motion from O'Level Physics it is undeniably obvious that the tops of all of those buildings are in free-fall, accelerating at 9.8 metres per second squared.
Now, if a building is hit two thirds of the way up and becomes damaged, you would expect that damage to cause the top to fall over. Maybe some of the outer walls would fall off, but there would be a central core at least 1/2 to 1/3 of the height of the building sticking up. Bits would hit other bits, and it would take a long time and there would be rubble strewn out across a wide area, damaging the surrounding buildings and killing or injuring the people in them. You certainly would not expect it to collapse in a tidy heap at the speed of gravity where the entire building becomes a neat pile of rubble without any kind of significant damage to surrounding buildings.
For a quite insightful analysis which goes beyond the above brief invitation to use simple physics equations, logical analysis and reasoning, you might want to read this: https://steemit.com/tyranny/@b...
Bottom line is: not everything that "trends" under automatic algorithms (which would be filtered out by humans too scared of what they're seeing) is bullshit.
You literally have no idea what you are talking about? Have you have seen video of building collapsing? They ALWAYS collapse straight down. There is rarely any overengineered piece that can withstand forces this far outside its design paramenters, so when good chunk in middle collapses, ALL of it collapses straight down.
An "Official Report" is not a Forensic Investigation that conducts various scientific analysis of the crime scene. The very fact that there has been no formal Forensic Investigation with evidence given from structural engineers and scientists on what was the biggest crime scene in U.S is evidence enough of some sort of conspiracy, regardless of how it was achieved.
The laws justified after 9/11 were the very ones that enabled the type of police state monitoring of citizens that not just US, but many other countries like the UK, Canada, Australia and, others all endure today. Before 9/11 western governments had not passed laws to remove our freedoms (that terrorists hated) because adequate laws were already in place to deal with terrprism. Those laws were based on what was learned by the UK government dealing with the IRA's terrorism.
Those two very obvious facts often go unacknowledged by 9/11 theorists and denialists because that allows them to (understandably) ignore the frightening reality that the laws justified by 9/11 moved western societies to an overt surveillance state. These two facts show us how and why, just not who could create such a conspiracy. Since time has revealed these laws to be in-effective at stopping terrorism that shows us who ever wants these laws to monitor us is very powerful indeed.
I don't know the specifics of how the towers were destroyed, but I do know that the laws passed because of 9/11 left us in a police state.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The buildings collapsed exactly how you'd expect a building with strong center and shell supports would collapse, thus there's not much to explain there.
Nope, that is not how anyone who has even ever built a Lego or Meccano model would expect a structure to collapse.
Fuel heats cross-beams, steel loses half its strength at those temperatures and they bend in the center, one floor falls down to the next and cascades. The outer shell and inner shell hold it all together as its going down. Every single thing that happened to all three buildings and the field in PA is easily explained by physics, and doesn't need the conspiracy. Nothing that happened that day is "comforting," and insulting people doesn't help your case.
Bollocks. In a large building like that there is absolutely no reason for the floors below to be affected. Floors do not cascade on to one another either, which is where you do show your ignorance. When one floor collapses on to another it collapses on to the eighty or however many floors below bound together in one whole structure. Tall buildings have to be built that way, otherwise they would be dangerously unstable.
What would happen is you might possibly get a partial building collapse, but the energy and debris would dissipate outwards lessening as the collapse progressed. A full collapse? No chance. There is no reason for every floor right down to the basement to destabilise.
You're simply repeating the tripe of others I'm afraid and the pancake tripe has been pushed every time this comes up. There is absolutely no way this can happen because this is not the way buildings are built, otherwise they would be dangerous...... Another possibility is that the towers were incompetently and scandalously built. Is that possible? Yer, it is, but either way there is a scandal here.