Slashdot Mirror
Evidence is Piling Up That Facebook Can Incite Racial Violence (technologyreview.com)
Higher use of the world's dominant social network has now been strongly linked with more attacks on refugees in Germany. From a report: Greater use, greater violence: Specifically, in towns where "per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average," attacks on refugees "increased by about 50 percent," the New York Times reported today, citing a University of Warwick study. Researchers there carried out a detailed analysis of more than 3,000 incidents in Germany over a two-year period. Crucially, the link held true regardless of the city's size, political leanings, or economic status -- and didn't correlate with general patterns of internet use. Those findings strengthen the case that using Facebook in particular can be a driving mechanism of greater violence.
Greater scrutiny: That's more bad news for the embattled social network, which has long portrayed itself as a benevolent company driven by a mission to draw the world closer together. But researchers recently found that coordinated hate speech and propaganda on the site helped fuel violence in Myanmar. And last year, Facebook itself eventually acknowledged that Russian agents had posted tens of thousands of inflammatory posts -- which reached tens of millions of people -- before and after the 2016 presidential election, in a massive campaign to deepen divisions in the United States.
Greater scrutiny: That's more bad news for the embattled social network, which has long portrayed itself as a benevolent company driven by a mission to draw the world closer together. But researchers recently found that coordinated hate speech and propaganda on the site helped fuel violence in Myanmar. And last year, Facebook itself eventually acknowledged that Russian agents had posted tens of thousands of inflammatory posts -- which reached tens of millions of people -- before and after the 2016 presidential election, in a massive campaign to deepen divisions in the United States.
Facebook is designed to promote content that grabs people's attention, because that is what generates revenue for them. It turns out that what grabs people's attention best are not thoughtful and reasonable opinions but OMG emotional stuff that triggers people to respond immediately, so that is what Facebook's algorithms emphasize and effectively amplify.
Facebook may be neutral on what people get emotional about, and they may not care that emotions happen to be what is best for generating pageviews, but the effect is that they amplify heated stuff and easily turn it into overheated stuff. In that respect they are not neutral at all.
Facebook VP: "The Majority Of Russian Ad Spend Happened AFTER The Election" https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2...
"many of these ads did not violate our content policies. That means that for most of them, if they had been run by authentic individuals, anywhere, they could have remained on the platform."
Shouldn't you stop foreigners from meddling in US social issues?
The right to speak out on global issues that cross borders is an important principle. Organizations such as UNICEF, Oxfam or religious organizations depend on the ability to communicate - and advertise - their views in a wide range of countries. While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so - just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries.
So, after all the investigations and debunked conspiracy theories, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all.
Putting it into perspective: Total election spending: $2.4 billion. Total Clinton/Trump Facebook ad buys: $81 million.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Complete and utter bullshit.
Facebook is not inciting violence.
Facebook is not inciting violence intentionnally, per-se.
Facebook is just optimizing for profits, and due to their specific market (advertising, data mining, etc.) they need, as the above poster stated, they need to increase engagement (i.e.: keep more eyeballs focused on facebook, for further reselling)
And old studies done in the era of TV have already shown, the thing that increases the most engagement is emotions, more likely negative emotion, thus fear and violence.
Thus even if Facebook hasn't in a "james bond vilain-style" decided to promote violence for pure evil intents, just by having machine learning algorithms that try to feed whatever attract the most user attention, they'll eventually start to automatically promote violence.
What you are seeing is an unintended side effect of people having, for the first time in human history, the ability to instantly communicate with millions of other people, allowing then to speak out against things going on in the world that they are unhappy about,
It's not the "instant communication" part that is main culprit (though it contributes a bit).
It's the filtering going on.
We're not in the beginning of the age of internet anymore.
You're not suddenly exposed directly to the speech of the other millions of people, anymore. That's long past ago (you can't download the whole web on a DVD anymore :-P )
You're not even exposed to a random / representative of the speech of some of that other million of people, neither. Specially not since commercial companies jumped in and they need to profit from their business
You're specifically exposed to that tiny fraction (tiny enough so that it can fit within the limited attention span of our monkey-brains) of the speech of that other million of people, that the companies' machine learning algorithms have determined to be the most likely to attract your attention and provoke you into staying around (further speaking your own idea).
Yes, the increase of content has (somewhat) had some influence on the way we communicate. (We've reached the point where we can't follow everything).
The current data tech giant (Facebook, Google, etc.) are extremely strongly shaping the kind of communication that is going between people. But they need profit, so they focus on whats the most profitable to them even if that fucks everything up.
Basically, the "information highways" have slowly transmorphed into the "kingdom of the few most attention-grabbing filthy tabloids".
such as civilized countries being overrun with third world filth.
Yeah, thank your for this nice demonstration of your opinions.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
BBC tells an interesting story.
But to say that President Trump was the first politician to deploy the term would itself be, well, "fake news".
On 8 December 2016, Hillary Clinton made a speech in which she mentioned "the epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year."