“Why The Past 10 Years of American Life have been uniquely Stupid.”

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

This is fascinating.  Discuss:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

[Jaxom 1974]

Interesting.  Not prepared to argue against it. Though it'll require some time to process. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Just now, Jaxom 1974 said:

Interesting.  Not prepared to argue against it. Though it'll require some time to process. 

What is really interesting is his argument that content moderation doesn’t help.  That what is needed is to require the platforms to confirm people are really people… not bots.  And to slow down the process of being able to share a post or article.  To prevent social media “brushfires”.

[Jaxom 1974]

1 minute ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What is really interesting is his argument that content moderation doesn’t help.  That what is needed is to require the platforms to confirm people are really people… not bots.  And to slow down the process of being able to share a post or article.  To prevent social media “brushfires”.

Not prevent. Mitigate. It doesn't seem that he believes there are fixes. Only mitigation. And I can't say he's wrong. Where we're at with social media.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

3 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Not prevent. Mitigate. It doesn't seem that he believes there are fixes. Only mitigation. And I can't say he's wrong. Where we're at with social media.

A fair point.

[Ran]

9 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That what is needed is to require the platforms to confirm people are really people… not bots.

Interestingly, it's one of the points Elon Musk believed was important in the press release today where the Twitter board announced they were accepting his buyout offer.

 

[maarsen]

I refused to adopt social media early on for just the reasons given in the article. Given that Elon Musk has just agreed to buy Twitter, I think this is even more relevant. I have long thought that Gresham's Law has a corollary that applies to information and as such I find social media to be a geometric progression to stupidity. Once you are a wit, twice and you are a halfway and then on down from there.

I do think Musk has  made the biggest mistake of his life in buying Twitter because as Greshham's Law says 'bad money drives out good money'.

Bad speech will drive out good speech, along with advertisers.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

Interestingly, it's one of the points Elon Musk believed was important in the press release today where the Twitter board announced they were accepting his buyout offer.

 

That is interesting.

[Ran]

Just now, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

That is interesting.

To quote the statement in the PR:

Quote

“I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans."

 

[Zorral]

Musk is a massive part of the problem, not a solution.

https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/attack-twitter-right-shows-it-has-institutionalized-trumps-corrupt-use-government

Quote

 

“Nice company you’ve got there; be a shame if something happened to it. Maybe you should save yourself some trouble and sell it to our buddy.” 

That’s the message 18 House Republicans, led by Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan (R-OH), sent on Friday with a letter demanding Twitter’s board of directors preserve all records related to the bid by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to purchase the company. The right’s propagandists had celebrated Musk’s bid as a way to garner political gain by ending the company’s purported political censorship. Then its elected GOP champions, responding to hesitation from and when Twitter’s board, raised the prospect of a costly congressional investigation if his offer wasn’t accepted.

The GOP’s ham-fisted threat reflects the party’s institutionalization of former President Donald Trump’s authoritarian use of government power to impose political retribution on individual companies that defied him -- particularly those that owned news outlets. Now, Republicans are adopting similar strategies in the name of fighting so-called “woke capital,” and right-wing media are cheering them on.

 

For another example, see: deSantis and Disney.  Fall in or be taken out.  

[Kalbear]

4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

What is really interesting is his argument that content moderation doesn’t help.  That what is needed is to require the platforms to confirm people are really people… not bots.  And to slow down the process of being able to share a post or article.  To prevent social media “brushfires”.

That's true only if you're willing to traumatize massive amounts of people who are moderating content. 

The idea of doing that completely without any automated tools is remarkably painful to think about. 

[Wilbur]

4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

This is fascinating.  Discuss:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/

That is very interesting, and it rings very true to experience.

The link to the Hidden Tribes website has a fascinating little quiz to take: The Hidden Tribes of America

[Heartofice]

7 hours ago, Wilbur said:

That is very interesting, and it rings very true to experience.

The link to the Hidden Tribes website has a fascinating little quiz to take: The Hidden Tribes of America

That kind of backs up a lot of what I've seen elsewhere, that so much of the political discourse is being conducted by the two extreme 'wings' on the spectrum, and the majority in the middle are mostly just annoyed about all the disagreement, whilst also not really agreeing especially with either extreme position. It gives everyone a very skewed idea of what is important.

[BigFatCoward]

To be fair though it's given the rest of the world a right laugh. Even we can look down on you. 

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

To be fair though it's given the rest of the world a right laugh. Even we can look down on you. 

We'd be laughing a lot harder if the same issues hadn't somehow affected us too.

[Week]

16 hours ago, Ran said:

Interestingly, it's one of the points Elon Musk believed was important in the press release today where the Twitter board announced they were accepting his buyout offer.

 

Perhaps circumstantial, much of this kicked off after Elon couldn't pay off a kid with a bot tracking private jets with $5k.

Galaxy brain solution: $44B for the platform to ban the bot. 

[Spockydog]

The quality of the people celebrating this tells you all you need to know about Musk, and the type of free speech we will now see on the platform.

 

[Wilbur]

9 hours ago, Heartofice said:

That kind of backs up a lot of what I've seen elsewhere, that so much of the political discourse is being conducted by the two extreme 'wings' on the spectrum, and the majority in the middle are mostly just annoyed about all the disagreement, whilst also not really agreeing especially with either extreme position. It gives everyone a very skewed idea of what is important.

Here in Arizona, the state senate has suddenly (in the last decade) been packed with politicians who never spent any time in "lesser" roles, who weren't particularly active in the Republican party, and who sprang into prominence out of seemingly nowhere.

They don't seem to focus or have much interest in key issues for the citizens of the state:  water rights, Indian sovereignty over land, education, semiconductor industry, relations with Sonora, or the Five C's.  They DO spend all their time on marginal issues that are part of the Culture War.

To say a lot of them are wierdos is an understatement, and this group is the source of the idiocy such as the Election Audit by Cyber Ninjas.  These are the people we got as a result of the sudden arrival of Internet 2.0 and their ability to manipulate social media.

[lacuna]

Cyber ninja? That can't be! Gray Fox was killed in Zanzibar!

[DMC]

Well Scot if you just mentioned it was a Jonathan Haidt article you coulda saved me the click!  Couldn't make it more than a few paragraphs, but I did wanna comment on this:

17 hours ago, Wilbur said:

The link to the Hidden Tribes website has a fascinating little quiz to take: The Hidden Tribes of America

These typologies are really old hat.  Plenty of researchers have constructed similar frameworks - often based on values - and reported similar findings.  Hell, I constructed one myself about a decade ago.  They don't tell us anything useful.  They do not change the fact affective polarization continues to increase, which means about 90% of the electorate (at least) dislikes the other party -- and yes, they are just about evenly divided 45/45.  That many are ideologically in the "center" and can find common ground on many policy areas does not matter.  Ideology does not matter.  I don't know how the rise of Trumpism could make that any more clear.

I mean, even the examples emphasized in that writeup are old hat.  Yes, 3/4s of Americans support DACA/a pathway to citizenship and have for at least the last 20 years.*  Hasn't stopped the Republican party from becoming full-blown nativist.  If you ask me, we should have learned our lesson sometime around the Dubya administration.  Popular sentiment was plainly against the GOP on immigration and guns, and their response was not only "we don't give a shit," but "let's get more polarized" in the opposite direction on those issues.  Now that attitude has permeated to everything from the minimum wage to criminalizing abortion to attempting fucking coups.

It is well..well past time that "centrists" like Haidt and Morris Fiorina recognize that just because most respondents are going to favor compromise (in a completely abstract manner) and express disdain for the polarized political environment, that doesn't mean those respondents themselves aren't part of the polarization.  And more importantly, a return to "good faith" discussions about "genuine disagreements" while "respecting the values that animate our beliefs" is not a useful suggestion. 

*The most ridiculous example was that they emphasized - in their conclusion/summary of findings - that 81% of Americans agree that racism continues to be at least a somewhat serious problem.  Who the fuck cares?!?  Widespread agreement on that item isn't going to help anything!