Slashdot Mirror
Zuckerberg Shares Facebook's Plan to Bring Community Together, Edits Out a Questionable Sentence Minutes Later (mashable.com)
Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg wants to bring people closer together. He published a 6,000-word letter on his Facebook page Thursday to outline his vision for the kind of world he thinks Facebook can help create. The free-wielding note included few specifics, but offered a number of broad, ambitious goals for how the tech giant can contribute to a better understanding of everything from terrorism to fake news. Interestingly, minutes after the post was published, Zuckerberg edited out a sentence from the letter. Mashable adds: In the post, Zuckerberg briefly touches on how artificial intelligence can be used to detect terrorist propaganda. "Right now, we're starting to explore ways to use AI to tell the difference between news stories about terrorism and actual terrorist propaganda so we can quickly remove anyone trying to use our services to recruit for a terrorist organization," he wrote in the post published Thursday. That sounds like a straightforward enough application of AI -- one that's in line with what Zuckerberg and other executives have discussed in the past -- but it's different from what the CEO had originally written. In an earlier version of the missive, which was shared with a number of news outlets in advance of its publication on Facebook, Zuckerberg took the idea farther. The "long-term promise of AI," he wrote, is that it can be used used to "identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all, including terrorists planning attacks using private channels." Here's an expanded version of the quote from the Associated Press (emphasis ours). "The long term promise of AI is that in addition to identifying risks more quickly and accurately than would have already happened, it may also identify risks that nobody would have flagged at all "including terrorists planning attacks using private channels, people bullying someone too afraid to report it themselves, and other issues both local and global. It will take many years to develop these systems." That's different from what was described in the final version that was shared Thursday, which made no mention of private communication in relation to AI and terrorism.
The problem is not that people are seeking news through facebook; the problem is that they're seeing what other people post on facebook. That loosens the control of the media, which is a major problem, as they have lost control of the narrative. Scan the front page of the NY Times or CNN's webpage for a week and you'll realize that the narrative is 100% focused on destroying Trump's presidency. Facts be damned, though they'll be included if convenent. Facebook allowing people to post, and worse, to aggregate material that doesn't push the narrative is a major problem and must be stopped.
Unfortunately, the major news organizations can't afford to pay zuckerberg level prices to control what's shown on facebook, so they have to badger him into censoring it.
Speaking as a guy who uses Facebook entirely to push my novels, Facebook seems to be a major contributor in the breakdown of community. I've got hundreds of "friends," know next to nothing about them, have never met them, and have no plans to meet them. We're not building communities; we're building audiences for our inane momentary thoughts and pics of the really cool fish tacos we had last night. As a somewhat shy and asbergery child I had only a few, but really close, friends. My nephew, about as nerdy as I was, has hundreds of Facebook friends, and never leaves his home to actually meet people. I admit, it's emotionally less risky for him to make "friends" through Facebook, but I hope he doesn't mistake them for a community in any real sense.
Sound like high minded excuse to start use the platform for political purposes. All these words "bullying", "fake news", etc. are code words involved in liberal virtue signalling. "Fake news" is something that those evil right wingers do (especially it does not apply to New York Times, et al. or any garbage coming from BLM or other such outlets).
The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one......from Trump's very own press conference yesterday:"Russia is fake news....You know what they said, you saw it and the leaks are absolutely real. The news is fake because so much of the news is fake." So Trump is liberal now and CNN is right-wing?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Sound like high minded excuse to start use the platform for political purposes. All these words "bullying", "fake news", etc. are code words involved in liberal virtue signalling. "Fake news" is something that those evil right wingers do (especially it does not apply to New York Times, et al. or any garbage coming from BLM or other such outlets).
Deception, coercion, half-truths and complete fabrication are not, and have never been, tools used exclusively by people with one particular political leaning or another. They're used by leftists, rightists, centrists, libertarians, conservatives, liberals, democrats, republicans, greens, independents, tea partiers, anarcho-communists, fascists, feminists, masculinists, and everyone in between or beyond.
It might be the case that a certain number of news outlets could be liberally biased enough to use these tactics to undermine right-wing political viewpoints, but this in no way prevents or exonerates those outlets which are right-wing, from using the same tactics.
If your complaint then becomes that there are too many liberal news sources and not enough mainstream conservative news sources, then you're basically saying that you want the news to present you with lies that agree with your personal political dogma, rather than lies that attack or offend your personal political dogma.
If you think that a change of color or movement along a right/left spectrum will in any way affect the frequency and severity of lies, deception and coercion used by the mainstream media, you would be plain wrong in that belief. ANY politically motivated organization, regardless of what agenda they're pushing, is going to distribute deceptive and patently false information, also known as propaganda, that supports the agenda they are being paid to push.
The only way to return news media to reporting on objective truths observable by scientifically rigorous methods, and away from speculation, hearsay, the passing of rumors and fabrications, and opinion-slinging (all of which are inherently biased toward some particular set of beliefs, and in the context of politics, toward some particular set of political beliefs), is to forcibly separate media from financial incentive. Capitalist media is always going to be propaganda for someone.
Sargon of Akkad did a video explaining the Pewdiepie situation very well. Sadly the only people who want to learn are people who don't know him (like me) or get information from the far left who started the petitions, threats, etc... Those people are stuck in confirmation bias, so will simply call Sargon a [insert_ism/obe]. People who knew him already knew this was coming so don't need the lesson.
I "almost" agree that Youtube has become a better source of information than broadcast "news", but probably for different reasons. There are a few people I subscribe to and follow, but most of the time I use that information to find sources. It takes me 5 minutes to read a transcript versus 5 minutes to read someone's analysis of a transcript. When the majority of media ignores information that does not fit a narrative and cherry picks for an agenda, my time is better spent with the actual source making up my own mind.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.