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Social Media - The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly ...
- Thread starter Michael Scally MD
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This ...
From reading this thread one might get the impression FB invented fake news and the means of distribution, but it's just the latest player with a little more automation. Earlier methods are still around, though, and still quite competitive.
The scrutiny of Facebook’s collection and use of consumer data in recent years has prompted the tech giant to repeatedly defend its efforts around transparency and privacy.
But about three-fourths of Facebook users were unaware that the company lists their personal traits and interests for advertisers on its site, according to a study published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday. Half of the users who looked at the Facebook page with that data — known as their “Ad Preferences” — said they were not comfortable with the company’s compiling that information. Pew conducted a nationally representative survey of 963 American adults with Facebook accounts between Sept. 4 and Oct. 1 of last year.
While consumers have learned more in recent years about how they are targeted for online ads, the study suggests that many still do not know how much of their behavior is tracked, where it is compiled or even that Facebook has a page that lists all of that information. Pew focused on Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, because it “plays an incredibly important role in the media ecosystem of the world,” said Lee Rainie, Pew’s director of internet and technology research.
“Privacy matters to Americans — it’s a classic American value — yet when they’re online and doing other things, they act as if their personal information is O.K. to harvest and analyze,” Mr. Rainie said in an interview. “One of the theories on this inconsistency is that Americans don’t really know what’s going on. The fact that 74 percent of Facebook users didn’t know that these lists were maintained on them cuts to the heart of that question of where Americans are, or are not, with these systems.”
ZUCKED - Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe By Roger McNamee
The dystopia George Orwell conjured up in “1984” wasn’t a prediction. It was, instead, a reflection. Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, the Inner Party, the Outer Party — that novel sampled and remixed a reality that Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism had already made apparent. Scary stuff, certainly, but maybe the more frightening dystopia is the one no one warned you about, the one you wake up one morning to realize you’re living inside.
Roger McNamee, an esteemed venture capitalist, would appear to agree. “A dystopian technology future overran our lives before we were ready,” he writes in “Zucked.”
Think that sounds like overstatement? Let’s examine the evidence.
At its peak the planet’s fourth most valuable company, and arguably its most influential, is controlled almost entirely by a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A. The totality of this man’s professional life has been running this company, which calls itself “a platform.” Company, platform — whatever it is, it provides a curious service wherein billions of people fill it with content: baby photos, birthday wishes, concert promotions, psychotic premonitions of Jewish lizard-men.
No one is paid by the company for this labor; on the contrary, users are rewarded by being tracked across the web, even when logged out, and consequently strip-mined by a complicated artificial intelligence trained to sort surveilled information into approximately 29,000 predictive data points, which are then made available to advertisers and other third parties, who now know everything that can be known about a person without trepanning her skull. Amazingly, none of this is secret, despite the company’s best efforts to keep it so. Somehow, people still use and love this platform.
...
McNamee’s book is not merely the cri de coeur of a forsworn tech optimist zinged by moral conscience. It’s also a robust and helpful itemization of the ways Facebook could be brought to heel. McNamee clearly believes the company can be made into something more benign, and perhaps even socially beneficial. That may or may not be true, but the damage it has already done is not precisely containable. Considering the high likelihood that Russian activity on Facebook may have tipped the 2016 election to Donald Trump, the damage is already of generational measure.
But here’s the bizarre quirk of the Facebook dystopia, whose sheer perversity would have likely pleased Orwell: It’s all Big and no Brother. Our time and lives are the company’s only currency. Without our continued attention, Facebook quite literally has nothing, and its empire could be brought down with a feather. Now, blow.
Swiper
Banned
social media also exploits the mentally ill, especially people with TDS.
Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike of Donald Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason.
Symptoms for this condition can be very diverse, ranging from hysterical outbursts to a complete mental break. TDS can also often result in the sufferer exhibiting violent, homicidal, or even genocidal desires.
Sufferers have also been known to wish direct self harm on themselves (such as increased taxes, a desire for an economic recession, and even nuclear war), provided that a action might in some way hurt Donald Trump.
Paranoia is also a common symptom of TDS. Sufferers have been known to believe that they are in some way being persecuted, and in some cases believe they are about to be a victim of genocide. The paranoia does however not seem to be bad enough to make TDS sufferers act on their beliefs to the extent of attempting to actually leave the united states.
If properly treated, suffers of TDS can make a full recovery. Many suffers have been known to grow out of TDS, yet many can only be treated by having their condition directly treated through the application of logical reasoning. It is also known that products containing soy can exasperate the condition.
Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike of Donald Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason.
Symptoms for this condition can be very diverse, ranging from hysterical outbursts to a complete mental break. TDS can also often result in the sufferer exhibiting violent, homicidal, or even genocidal desires.
Sufferers have also been known to wish direct self harm on themselves (such as increased taxes, a desire for an economic recession, and even nuclear war), provided that a action might in some way hurt Donald Trump.
Paranoia is also a common symptom of TDS. Sufferers have been known to believe that they are in some way being persecuted, and in some cases believe they are about to be a victim of genocide. The paranoia does however not seem to be bad enough to make TDS sufferers act on their beliefs to the extent of attempting to actually leave the united states.
If properly treated, suffers of TDS can make a full recovery. Many suffers have been known to grow out of TDS, yet many can only be treated by having their condition directly treated through the application of logical reasoning. It is also known that products containing soy can exasperate the condition.
Allcott, Hunt and Braghieri, Luca and Eichmeyer, Sarah and Gentzkow, Matthew, The Welfare Effects of Social Media (January 27, 2019). Available at SSRN: The Welfare Effects of Social Media by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Matthew Gentzkow :: SSRN or The Welfare Effects of Social Media by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Matthew Gentzkow :: SSRN
The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization.
We present a randomized evaluation of the welfare effects of Facebook, focusing on US users in the run-up to the 2018 midterm election.
We measured the willingness-to-accept of 2,844 Facebook users to deactivate their Facebook accounts for four weeks, then randomly assigned a subset to actually do so in a way that we verified.
Using a suite of outcomes from both surveys and direct measurement, we show that Facebook deactivation
(i) reduced online activity, including other social media, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends;
(ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization;
(iii) increased subjective well-being; and
(iv) caused a large persistent reduction in Facebook use after the experiment.
We use participants' pre-experiment and post-experiment Facebook valuations to quantify the extent to which factors such as projection bias might cause people to overvalue Facebook, finding that the magnitude of any such biases is likely minor relative to the large consumer surplus that Facebook generates.
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