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Facebook Users Cry 'Censorship' After Being Told Which Russian Troll Pages They Liked (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: As the FBI's investigation into Russian election interference reaches a fever pitch, Facebook rolled out a new News Feed alert Monday night. The bulletin told users who followed pages created by Russian trolls that those pages have been removed. And some of the affected users did not like this. A brief search revealed that numerous people believe that this is an act of censorship by Facebook. Some users argued that they should be allowed to decide what's "true, fake, or otherwise," a challenge that's bound to be a slippery slope in this era of algorithm-based confirmation bias. Others took on a more conspiratorial tone, claiming that Facebook failed to reveal which pages were removed (despite the alert containing a link listing the pages in question). Facebook first released the information in December, creating a help page that showed users if they liked or followed pages and accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, Russia's notorious troll farm, but today's alert seems to have inspired newfound alarm. The fact that Facebook explicitly stated which pages were deleted seems to have done little to reduce the anger over the allegedly clandestine silencing.
come from an outfit called "The Internet Research Agency", which you can read about on Wikipedia.
TL;DR: The Internet Research Agency is a St. Petersburg based company which has among its customers the government of Russia. The company specializes in astroturfing -- not just in the US but in Russia as well. In Eastern Europe they're focused on Ukraine but in the US they post on both sides of issues (e.g. posting as socially conservative groups or as radical LGBT groups) in order to stir up division, e.g. posing as American Muslims or gays or as American evangelical Christians.
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Oh puh-lease. These accounts and ads got canned because they violated Facebook's TOS, which forbid pretending impersonating other people or deceptively misidentifying yourself.
The Russians were free to say whatever they wanted to say about American politics, as long as they didn't pretend to be Americans.
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The real problem is that Facebook is actually an Internet entertainment site and should not be taken literally, or seriously.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Republicans whine and cry when you point out that Moscow Donald has been caught red handed committing treason, and that the republican party is committing obstruction of justice to cover for Russia's attack on America.
Source? Because from what I read only the DNC and Hillary herself are working with the Russians https://www.wsj.com/articles/d...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
"Stocks are up what, 7,000 since the election? 18,000 to 25,000+? Unemployment is down, number of people on welfare is down, number of illegal aliens sneaking in is down."
Too bad you don't understand that our economy and country literally runs 8 years behind the times. What you're seeing NOW is a direct result of Obama from YEARS AGO.
So no, Trump doesn't get any fucking credit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Everyone processes information that way. It's a shortcut our brains take to reduce the amount of processing necessary to interpret what's going on in the world. When you're driving, you don't look at every tree you pass in detail, examine the leaves, branches, and trunk, and decide "yup that's a tree, better steer clear of it." That would take way too much time and we wouldn't be able to drive faster than 5 MPH if we processed information that way. Instead, you see something that looks vaguely tree-like out of the corner of your eye, and decide better safe than sorry and immediately classify it as a tree. And when it turns out not to be a tree, but is a kid with a patterned shirt standing next to a telephone poll with a bush behind him who unexpectedly jumps into the street in front of you, you have an accident.
By attributing the problem to "these people" instead of "we", you are excluding yourself as if you're somehow immune to this. Yes, some of us are better at avoiding jumping to conclusions like this, but all of us do it. It's just our brains handle situations that would otherwise require making hundreds or thousands of decisions every second. Pretending you're immune to it just makes yourself blind to when you do it.
Stereotyping and discrimination have the same cause. Rather than take the time to categorize every individual chair we encounter, we develop a mental model of a generic "chair" and the attributes it should possess. Then we assume all chairs we encounter have those attributes. That way we can treat a chair correctly 98% of the time at a much reduced mental workload. The problems caused by the 2% when our mental model is wrong is preferable to the additional workload that would be needed to process the other 98% of chairs. The problem comes about when we take attributes that are true of, say, 70% of a race or gender, and assume they apply to all members of that race or gender. You have to be cognizant of the times when such over-generalization will fail safe, vs fail dangerously.
I know this is a mental shortcut my brain takes, and I still catch myself doing it several times every day. If you somehow think they're above making these mistakes, you're just blissfully ignorant of the times when you do. Just like the people you're criticizing.
Here's the real problem though: people say they want to decide for themselves what is true, but in the past when presented with obviously fake stories, these same people did not do the research to actually determine if it's true.
These are people who think that they can establish what's true based on faith and feelings, not research and facts. To them, preponderance of evidence means "what does your gut tell you". Trying to sway their opinion with mere facts is an exercise in futility. They believe they have the right to choose what the facts are.
I really wish I lived in their world.
In addition, there is evidence the more someone is presented with facts counter to their beliefs they tend to become even more firm in their beliefs rather than being swayed or even reconsider what they believe in light of the facts.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.