I re-read the post. I must be missing something. What specially was the problem then? That ads influence people? That people had paid ads and unpaid shares of political content? While it is more targeted and not as prevalent, it is the same as the old media with TV ads and pundits talking on the news channels. What specific actions should they have done differently.
I assume they knew the Russian ads were from Russia at the time, which they shouldn’t have run. But if they didn’t know where it was coming from, that is an additional issue - how do you combat that?
How do you moderate this? No political ads at all? Ads only from known entities? Curation of ads based on “truthfulness”? Even if you block say Brietbart from pay for posts, can you block users from sharing?
Yep. It could just as easily have been articles from Breitbart or other shady domestic or foreign right-wing dezinformatsiya operations that paid for placement. The real problem is that the FB system promoted whatever the highest bidder paid for, and that the highest bidder knew (through targetting operations like Cambridge Analytica and through the use of bots) how to game the system to spend as little as possible while getting the most bang for their buck (or ruble).
Live staff moderation, even computer-aided, will never happen on FB on the scale that’s needed – their labour costs would shoot through the roof. Same with the feckless Twitter.
I’m not sure if FB placed non-staff superusers above the law of the platform. What seems to have happened is that those superusers (in the sense of technically skilled professional social media manipulators) twisted the broken laws of the platform to their own advantage.
What is needed if FB is going to continue with this business model is a trust-level system similar to the one in Discourse, not to give special privileges above the law of the platform but to work within and help preserve the law.
Getting a significant portion of the users to do most of the work of otherwise expensive staff moderators would be right in line with FB’s approach to making the user not only the unpaid product but also an unpaid employee. Not that it will happen: on a lowest-common-denominator platform like FB there would be too many butthurt people complaining about not being as trusted as they “deserve” and too many uppity people with high trust levels questioning the Mighty Will of Zuckerberg.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook was up to some shit in skirting FEC disclosure requirements in the name of “disruption”, but the press itself bears the bulk of responsibility for the decisions it made the lead up to the 2016 election. For instance, multiple outlets knew of Stormy Daniels’ NDA payoff, but decided not to run the stories prior to the election. The prevailing theory is that Trump’s campaign was determined DOA before the election, which then justified shifting the bulk of the coverage and criticism to Clinton–but the coverage wouldn’t actually be about her policies, because who wants to read that snooze-fest, amirite? So instead, you get wall-to-wall coverage over a fake scandal, which is enabled by James Comey being a complete dumbass and throwing congressional Republicans one last bone before the inevitable HRC presidency.
jesus. you bernie bros just wont quit. i am saying that i am happy to hear that someone is addressing these ads on instagram, because i dont think they were organic in nature. it needs to be investigated as part of the wider investigation into russian meddling.
i saw plenty of coverage of bernie. i know what he stood for and what platform he was running on. i also know he is a socialist, not a democrat, and i actually dont know why the democrats owe him anything. he did not belong in the democratic primary IMO.
trump sells airtime and newspapers because he is outrageous… it is not really a conspiracy.
Hmm, I checked but no one seems to have done a simple pod setup for the Raspberry Pi yet. (i.e. SD card image.) That’s surprising. I might take a poke at that.
ETA:
It is possible to run a pod on a Raspberry Pi >= 2. However, this will be very slow and is not recommended for multi-user pods.
I wonder at that. With a hard drive and configured ram and swap, the Pi is quite a different beastie. (I mean, how much more load could this be than a Mediawiki?)
This notion–a certainty among many–that “Russia used its evil propaganda to help Trump win!” is, until proven, simply propaganda itself, put forth by the Democrats to absolve themselves of blame for their loss. They put forth a thoroughly terrible and unlikable candidate for President, a candidate who made no convincing appeal to the working Americans who feel, correctly, that the Dems don’t listen to them or care about their concerns any more than do the Republicans. Look at the Dems’ most recent dismaying perfidy: while exuding self-righteous indignation at the horrid Trump–and he is horrid, to be sure–they simply hand him a renewal of virtually limitless surveillance powers over Americans! It’s time to quit being cry-babies and demand that the Dems actually perform up to what they only pretend to be: servants of and advocates for the people. Better, it’s time to abandon the always disappointing and craven Dems and form third parties that can actually challenge the status quo that the Dems protect as much as the Republicans. Wallowing in outrage and fantasies of our democracy undone by evil Russians–rather than undone by our own political parties–will serve only the ruling elites and will not serve the people.
Great idea. If you can get it working a Raspberry Pi would make for an excellent and inexpensive persistent single- or multiple-user pod, especially in a nifty customisable or 3-D printed housing. I’m picturing a little Internet-connected sculpture of a family containing an instance of your Pi Pod with their accounts/profiles (“seeds”?).
The larger problem of getting a critical mass of people onboard still remains. I think mobile phones, despite the fact that they’re not persistent server platforms, might be a good vector. Perhaps a dev shop that produces popular (500K+ user) game apps could incorporate a Diaspora-based social network into its products. Once a user signs up he has a profile in a perhaps (game-branded) Diaspora pod that can connect with every other pod. It would still be a slog to reach Google+ levels of users, let alone FB, but at a certain point Metcalfe’s Law could kick in.
From Corey Robin:
"According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, here are Bernie Sanders’s favorable/unfavorables…
Women: Favorable: 50%; Unfavorable: 34%
Men: Favorable: 46%; Unfavorable: 42%
Blacks: Favorable: 70%; Unfavorable: 10%
Latino/as: Favorable: 55%; Unfavorable: 21%
Whites: Favorable: 43%; Unfavorable: 45%
So Sanders has higher favorables and lower unfavorables among blacks and Latino/as than among whites. And higher favorables and lower unfavorables among women than among men. Either you have a very robust theory of false consciousness to explain this or maybe you should reconsider the idea that Bernie speaks only to and for white bros.
Oh, and his favorability among Democrats is 76%. Higher than Gillibrand (25%) and higher than Oprah (69%).
But “just” bolstering opinions is more than enough, given the nature of elections, in which hundreds of millions of distinct individual viewpoints collapse themselves into just two, and then one.
Third parties, like the UK’s Liberal Democrats, are always saying “if everyone who said they would vote for us, if they thought we could win, had actually voted for us, we would have won”. That’s a good point, and it applies to any outsider party or candidate, from Bernie to Turmp.
What decides elections, ahead of policy or personalities or anything else, is who looks like they will win – which depends on how you perceive your fellow voters.
So there’s a big difference between having 100 million racist shitbags among the population, and having a team of 100 million racist shitbags. And Facebook has been pretty vigorous in helping that change happen.
I don’t know if it’s entirely fair to blame them, but I do know that, if throwing Facebook into a volcano could cure the Turmp/Brexit disease, nothing I’ve seen would make me feel even slightly bad about that.
Because he had caucused with them for years and their rules didn’t forbid him from running to be the Democratic candidate?
Before Bernie ran in the primaries there were thousands of self identified socialists who felt that the Democrats acted as if they were entitled to their votes without offering anything back (being better than the alternative isn’t a reason to vote for a candidate, it’s a reason to vote against one). After Bernie’s run that number has gone up to millions. Please bear that in mind these next few years. None of us want another four years of Trump/Pence and there will be another campaign of divide and conquer, how about we don’t make it easy for them by only acknowledging the right wing Democrats.
The reason Sanders did not take the nomination was that the grifting Clintons, and their core of grifter hangers-on, treated the Democratic party apparatus in pretty much the same way a parasitic wasp treats a caterpillar.
Absent that factor in 2020, a non-neoliberal candidate should have a much better chance. Of course, that candidate will need to be well supplied with melanin -----
There is a simple reason for that. For any kind of communication network people are attracted to the network allowing to communicate with the most users. This alone insures that one of the networks will be a quasi monopoly.
That problem was recognised at the birth of the telephone. Early phone companies in America only allowed customers to communicate within their network. Legislation was edicted to force an interchange system upon them. It still created a monopoly in the USA (mainly because the legislation was poorly designed), but not necessarily in other countries and not forever.
Nowadays, legislation to regulate monopolies has gone out of fashion. The result is that many activities evolve to be controlled by monopolies, particularly in software where economies of scale are massive. And that is actually a direct consequence of the way capitalism and the market work, as was acknowledged as early as the 19th century.
These bits are the feedback loop that will kill us all if we don’t break the cycle. Just started watching Electric Dreams, and the Autofac feels like an inevitability.
Thanks Rosa, I wish we had paid more attention to you sooner… (ok VIL deserves some credit too, but men have received enough of that)
