NYT: Lynchings Around the World are Linked To Facebook Posts (bostonglobe.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the New York Times: Riots and lynchings around the world have been linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest -- a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions and histories of social instability. Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.

A reconstruction of Sri Lanka's descent into violence, based on interviews with officials, victims and ordinary users caught up in online anger, found that Facebook's newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumor to killing. Facebook officials, they say, ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact... Sri Lankans say they see little evidence of change. And in other countries, as Facebook expands, analysts and activists worry they, too, may see violence.
A Facebook spokeswoman countered that "we remove such content as soon as we're made aware of it," and said they're now trying to expand those teams and investing in "technology and local language expertise to help us swiftly remove hate content." But one anti-hate group told the Times that Facebook's reporting tools are too slow and ineffective.

"Though they and government officials had repeatedly asked Facebook to establish direct lines, the company had insisted this tool would be sufficient, they said. But nearly every report got the same response: the content did not violate Facebook's standards."

Comments

Who's coordinating this?

[DNS-and-BIND]

I mean, six months ago there weren't these constant drumbeats of anti-facebook stories. Now they're everywhere. Is this tied to the idea that Zuckerberg wants to run for President? The well is being poisoned so he won't pose a threat? After all, he's an outsider with no political experience. Trump was a total outsider, Sanders was a Democrat outsider, and look at all the dirty tricks that were played against them. Personally, I think insiders are the problem as they run our system for the benefit of themselves, not us. Plus, it would be very interesting to have Zuckerberg as America's first Jewish president.

Re:Who's coordinating this?

[quantaman]

I mean, six months ago there weren't these constant drumbeats of anti-facebook stories. Now they're everywhere. Is this tied to the idea that Zuckerberg wants to run for President? The well is being poisoned so he won't pose a threat?

There's no conspiracy, it's just how the media works.

2 years ago everybody knew that organizations were mining FB data to push agendas and the News Feeds were rife with misinformation, but it just looked like some weird geek issue and nothing had happened to demonstrate why that might be a problem.

But now we've seen a major electoral upset, and both data mining and misinformation played a role, so people now understand how these abstract FB problems can have real world effects.

So now the news orgs want to send reporters to look into FB and ordinary people want to read about it, and that's why all these stories are coming out.

History repeats itself

[knorthern knight]

World War I - Germany engages in a multi-front war against British Empire, France, Russian Empire (pre-USSR), and USA. Predicatbly, they lose. Rather than accepting the fact that Germany lost because they were outnumbered, Hitlere convinced Germans that they were "stabbed in the back by the Jews", when victory was within reach. The repercussions of that delusion were ugly.

Election USA 2016 - Democrats put up unpopular candidate, who won primaries only because of an initial surge of support from "super-delgates" that gave her momentum going into the primaries. She's married to a former president who pushed through NAFTA (Bush negotiated it, but couldn't push it through), and was fully supporting TPP, until Sanders and Trump came out against it. She was the one who called blacks "super predators", stood up in a coal-mining state and said that she was going to shut down more coal mines, never bothered to show up and campaign in some of her crucial "Blue Wall States", illegally ran a private email server, deleted several thousand emails with "bit-bleach" when subpeona'd, lied about "coming under fire" at Benghazi, etc, etc, etc. Rather than admitting that they shot themselves in the foot by running the most awful candidate they could, the only one who could conceivably lose to Donald Trump... they claim that they were "stabbed in the back by Facebook".

What will the ugly repercussions of this delusion be?