Tag: Facebook

Far-right Misinformation is Facebook’s most engaging content – Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech

Facebook, for its part, seems to be increasingly interested in limiting the rampant political polarization of its platform. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was launching an experiment to limit the amount of political news in some users’ news feeds. “One of the top pieces of feedback we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Zuckerberg said.

Source: Far-right Misinformation is Facebook’s most engaging content – Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech

Interpreting for the gallery: “This is starting to impact revenues, so you bet your sweet bippie that we’re going to do something about it, but we operate our Almighty Algorithm in total secrecy, so you’ll just have to trust us that we’re fixing it. We have top. men. working on it. So you can calm down now. We’ve totally averted the impending declaration of ‘Marshall’ law you’ve been hearing about.”

Relatedly:

Videos of the convention, which was held for the Nation of Islam’s annual Saviours’ Day, are posted on the group’s Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pages, despite the social media companies’ policies against vaccine-related misinformation.

Source: ‘Vial Of Death’: Louis Farrakhan Pushes Vaccine Conspiracy Theories In Videos Posted On Facebook, Twitter | The Daily Caller

So is Farrakan considered right or left in the American political spectrum? Would the researchers involved in the NYU study quoted in the first article consider his “misinformation” on vaccine to be right- or left-wing? As long as we’re considering censorship, these kinds of categorizations seem important while wielding the ban hammer.

My snarky point is that Farrakan is obviously considered hard, hard left in American politics, and it’s immediately clear to anyone paying attention that pseudo-scientific nonsense is rampant on both sides of the political isle, so a “study” like the one quoted in the original article only serves to disingenuously inflame the tensions of precisely the people it targets, and everyone knows that.

People are rightly waking up to the fact that ALL foreign nations are running disinformation campaigns on social media. All they’re doing is finally getting a seat at the table in America, alongside our own, esteemed media.

Facebook “Supreme Court” overrules company in 4 of its first 5 decisions | Ars Technica

As you can see, Facebook has to make decisions on a wide range of topics, from ethnic conflict to health information. Often, Facebook is forced to choose sides between deeply antagonistic groups—Democrats and Republicans, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, public health advocates and anti-vaxxers. One benefit of creating the Oversight Board is to give Facebook an external scapegoat for controversial decisions. Facebook likely referred its suspension of Donald Trump to the Oversight Board for exactly this reason.

Source: Facebook “Supreme Court” overrules company in 4 of its first 5 decisions | Ars Technica

This paints a picture of Facebook being very involved in picking what people can and cannot say about politics, and that’s a very disturbing picture to me. Before this article, I would have thought that they only stepped in on really egregious problems. I’m just not clear why Facebook should get involved in any of the censorings listed here. Let the software automatically block the boobs, and then let people say whatever they want about politics.

The boobs thing really shows why they’re always complaining about needing moderators, and they couldn’t possibly staff up to handle the load. Software has been able to effectively identify nudity for many years now. There’s only a problem because they want to allow some nudity. On a platform shared by, effectively, everyone with internet access, there really doesn’t need to be any. Lord knows there’s enough elsewhere. So I don’t think this isn’t something that they need to waste time and energy on.

The problem extrapolates. They don’t want people to quote Nazis, but they want people to be able to criticize Donald Trump, which oftentimes warrants parallels of speech. They won’t want people to post videos of animal cruelty, but they want PETA to be able to post their sensational, graphical protests, which look real. Facebook hires thousands of people in impoverished countries to filter out the gore and the porn, but none of that needs to happen if you just let it all go. The software can do that automatically. The problem is trying to find some happy mid-point, as if that needed to happen. And there are countless stories about how degrading and depressing the job of being one of Facebook’s moderators is, and I won’t rehash them here.

Things get real simple if you just pick one point of view. Instead, they’re playing the middle, and selecting what speech is “free,” what nudity is “tasteful,” and what gore is “fake.” So, yeah, if you’re going to employ people to censor things things, you’re going to need a lot of people. I have trouble finding sympathy.

As if on cue:

Source: Content Moderation Case Study: Twitter Removes Account Of Human Rights Activist (2018) | Techdirt

Manzoor Ahmed Pashteen is a human rights activist in Pakistan, calling attention to unfair treatment of the Pashtun ethnic group, of which he is a member. In 2018, days after he led a rally in support of the Pashtun people in front of the Mochi Gate in Lahore, his Twitter account was suspended.

Decisions to be made by Twitter:

  • How do you distinguish human rights activists organizing protests from users trying to foment violence?
  • How do you weigh reports from governments against activists who criticize the governments making the reports?
  • How responsive should you be to users calling out suspensions they feel were unfair or mistaken?

We’re constantly being told that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the one, gold standard by which all speech on the internet is “allowed,” and how we can’t ever touch it. It says that companies cannot be held liable for the things that people post to their platforms. So why are Facebook and Twitter bothering to pick and choose what people can say at all? They are legally shielded from any problems. Just let people say whatever they way to say! If it turns out to be illegal, or slanderous, the people who posted those things can be sued by the affected parties. If people don’t like what’s being said, they be ignored and routed around.

I find the whole thing completely disingenuous. Either you have protection, and are for “free speech,” or you don’t, and need to police your platforms. Facebook and Twitter are acting like they need to kick people off their platforms to avoid being sued, but they are not at risk of that. They’re throwing people off their platforms because enough people make noise about them. It’s become a popularity contest, and mob rule. There’s nothing genuine, legally-binding, or ethical about it. That’s it. If some topic or person becomes untenable, they’re going to get the boot.

In the old days, the mob would boycott advertisers, like, say, the ones on Rush Limbaugh’s show. But you can’t do that on a platform like Facebook or Twitter, which use giant, shadowy advertising exchanges and closely-guarded algorithms to show ads to people, and everyone gets a different view, according to their profile. Even the advertisers have a hard time knowing how their ads are served or working! The people who would protest an advertiser would never know what is showing up most often on people’s pages whom they don’t like, and Facebook and Twitter sure isn’t going to tell them. That’s the secret sauce, baby. They can’t know who to go after.

So these platforms are proactively de-platforming people, but I can’t see why. They have legal protection. They can’t be blackmailed by boycotts of advertisers. What’s the mechanism here? What’s the feedback loop? I suspect the answer would make me even more cynical than I already am.

Social justice groups warn Biden against throwing out Section 230 – The Verge

“Section 230 is a foundational law for free expression and human rights when it comes to digital speech,” the letter says. The law protects websites and apps from being sued over user-generated content — making it safer to operate social networks, comment sections, or hosting services. “Overly broad changes to Section 230 could disproportionately harm and silence marginalized people, whose voices have been historically ignored by mainstream press outlets.”

Source: Social justice groups warn Biden against throwing out Section 230 – The Verge

First of all, no it isn’t. It’s a “foundational” law protecting corporations and their precious profits. Don’t pretend that it’s about anything other than the almighty dollar, and Capitalism. Any benefit to people and free speech is accidental. In fact, I recently read that many people argued exactly the opposite of this when it was being debated.

You can only be sued (credibly) for saying something illegal. Why should removing section 230 “disproportionally harm and silence marginalized people?” Are marginalized people more prone to saying illegal things? If so, is that why they’re being marginalized?

Do the people writing this accept that the most-prominent example of people being marginalized, cancelled, and deplatformed are QAnon right-wing nut jobs? Are they advocating that they should NOT be banned on social media platforms? Are they standing up for their rights? No, of course not. We all know this kind of language, and what terms it’s being used as a proxy for.

As I’ve been saying, I want Section 230 revoked. You can play what-ifs about this all day long, but we, as a society, need social media platforms to be accountable — under threat of a lawsuit — for the things they allow on their services. They’d get serious about throwing the child porn and direct threats of violence off their sites in a New York minute.

Will they have to hire more people to do it? No, not even that. They’d have to buy a bunch more servers, and run them to block that junk. I have people tell me all the time that this is beyond current computer science. Bologna. If YouTube and Facebook can scan all uploads in real time for any copyrighted music, social networks can scan for nudes and threatening language in realtime, and at least winnow down the posts that need further review. They’d have to spend a bunch of money on servers instead of throwing a pittance at a bunch of contractors in impoverished nations. Cry me a river. Spend some of those billions you’re making a year already.

Worry that it will affect you? Don’t say or post anything illegal. It’s that simple. What’s illegal? That’s up to the government, not Zuckerberg or Dorsey, or the boards of Facebook or Twitter.

I have literally no sympathy on this point. We’ve tried the internet for 25 years with Section 230, and Facebook and Twitter are literal existential threats to society which have been allowed to develop. Let’s get rid of it, make corporations finally take responsibility for these monsters they’ve created, be accountable for their algorithms and funding sources, spend some of their hoarded blood money, and just see what happens. I find it impossible to believe that this could make the situation any worse for society.

Dopamine Thirst Trap – Pirate Wires

As with almost everything on the internet, misleading headlines are not a new phenomenon. What’s new, and notable, is the scale of our exposure to the phenomenon. Today, on Twitter, many of us now spend a significant portion of our lives inside a virtual world of headlines.

Source: Dopamine Thirst Trap – Pirate Wires

Well, not me. I deactivated my Twitter account again. I can’t, in good conscience, continue to be manipulated by the platform. That being said, I’ve been fighting the urge to reactivate it, because I enjoy the thrill of seeing all the drama unfold in real time. That’s the problem, and why “the only winning move is not to play.”

This guy points out that Twitter’s censorship has not been fair, so they’re going to crowdsource it, and then, rightly, makes fun of the idea:

Anyway, Twitter said “fuck it” this week and decided they could crowd source the truth.

I publicly critiqued Birdwatch for what I believed the obvious danger inherent of determining “truth” by popular vote. Like, from science to civil rights literally when has this ever worked out? A handful of commenters expressed frustration with the point, and asked what I would do about the problem of misinformation were I in charge. But misinformation is as old as human civilization. What’s new is the phenomenon of instantaneous information virality, and this is where we should focus.

Where does someone go to defend themselves from cancellation if hosting providers follow suit, and won’t let them back on the internet? You can say that Parler had other alternatives besides AWS to host their site, but I venture to say, given prevailing public sentiment, that Microsoft and Oracle wouldn’t have let them use their clouds either, for fear of being labeled “Nazi sympathizers.”

You can say — as I have — that they could buy some servers and rent space in a co-lo facility, but who’s to say that public pressure wouldn’t cause the hosting company to give them boot, or their ISP’s to cut off network access, or their WAN providers to remove their BGP routes, or their DNS registrar to delete their entries? We are all dependent on access to the internet at this point, and there are many gatekeepers involved. The mob can apply pressure at any one of these points.

My approach to the news has been to read alternating reports about controversial stories until they “converge” on a consistent set of most-likely facts. Not coincidentally, I cribbed this approach from how I go about implementing a new programming technique. I read a lot of documentation, Q&A’s, and blog posts about it, until I see a consistent, reliable, and understandable implementation emerge. How will I be able to read original sources and make my own informed opinion about some of the most important, yet controversial, issues of the day, when platforms acting as de facto common carriers eject people from their services when the mob gangs up on them?

Either we’re a county that believes in freedom of speech, or we’re not. You can say that we shouldn’t allow speech calling for violence. We don’t. There are all sorts of legal remedies for this already. You can say that the speed by which this particular form of speech makes it impossible to react quickly enough to avail ourselves of our existing legal tools. That’s why “Pirate Wires” here is advocating slowing everything on Twitter down, and admitting up front that this idea runs in stark contrast to all the profit motives driving the company.

I think banning people you don’t like because they said something which might be legally actionable is the wrong approach. For every single example you can show me where some “conservative” said something legally objectionable, you can find some “liberal” who said exactly the same thing. The “liberals” I’ve traded comments with about this say “it’s not the same thing” because you have to consider the size of the audience of followers. Fine. Put that into the algorithm then, and then do it. It’s just popular, right now, to go after the conservatives. What happens when the same rules get applied to the next big Antifa or BLM protest, and “leaders” of those movements suddenly find themselves without the platform on which they’ve relied? I suspect we’re going to find out, and pretty quickly.

Take the Profit Out of Political Violence – BIG by Matt Stoller

Repealing Section 230 or reforming it so platforms who profit via advertising are not covered, would reduce the incentive for social media to enable illegal behavior. If we did so, a whole range of legal claims, from incitement to intentional infliction of emotional distress to harassment to defamation to fraud to negligence, would hit the court system, and platforms would have to alter their products to make them less harmful. There are other paths to taking on targeted advertising, like barring it through privacy legislation, a law for a real Do Not Track List, or using unfair methods of competition authority of the Federal Trade Commission. But the point is, we need to stop immunizing platforms who enable illegal behavior from offloading the costs of what they inflict.

Source: Take the Profit Out of Political Violence – BIG by Matt Stoller

These “platforms” driving all discussion and conversation today are, by definition, common carriers. The phone company was a common carrier. They couldn’t discriminate against anyone. They had to provide service to everyone, because they were 1) essential to modern society, and 2) had a monopoly on the service. In the same way, Twitter and Facebook are essential, and monopolies in their respective spaces. Like the phone company, they should be required to just carry everything that’s not clearly and always illegal, and let the court system sort out behavior that requires any sort of legal interpretation.

I could see making exception for blocking groups or people identified by the government as terrorists or criminals, but that’s the point. The government — i.e., our system of laws — would be making that determination, not a bunch of un-elected modern day kings and princes of our neo-feudalistic capitalism.

I don’t trust them. Their influence over our country, news cycle, and opinions is too great to leave to profit motive. It’s already been credibly demonstrated that Russia (at least) interfered in the 2016 election through these two platforms, because it aligned with this profit-seeking motivation. What guarantee do we have that this is not ongoing? There’s no accountability, and no visibility into their systems, hidden behind trade secrets for the banal purpose of making obscene profits.

Facebook is making $20 billion dollars a year, and paying about 8% tax. The older I get, the more liberal I get, and the more I resent the squandered opportunity cost of another round of tens-of-millions-of-dollars bonuses for a bunch of execs, while human beings pile up on the sidewalks in the city which hosts the company’s headquarters. It’s immoral. I don’t know when the line was crossed, but the whole thing is simply immoral, at this point.

Twitter doesn’t make nearly the money that Facebook does, but they are arguably more directly important. It seems that half the news articles I read these days are about a tweet, or reference tweets as part of the story. Their influence is overarching all news organizations now. That’s a dangerous situation for a democracy. These companies are ruining the world by — dare I say it: “inciting violence” — through driving everyone crazy with anger and division about every issue, no matter how big or small, evading meaningful oversight, and not giving back commensurately. I tire of it.

UPDATE: Right after posting this, I read Continuations by Albert Wenger : Welcome to the Government-IT Infrastructure…

I believe there is a high likelihood that we are witnessing the visible emergence of the government-IT infrastructure complex. Government will be even less inclined to try and generate competition in this space. It is so much more convenient to have just a few large entities that an executive agency can influence behind the scenes rather than having to bother with the rule of law. We have already had this in the payments space for a while where instead of targeted interventions against actual abuses payment providers withdraw wholesale support for companies in certain categories (most prominently anything related to sexwork).

Matt Stoller thinks that there’s a shot at doing some serious anti-monopoly regulation under a Biden administration, but Albert Wenger makes me realize that Facebook and Twitter don’t just have government “cover” because of campaign contributions. They also are manipulating their systems in subtle ways for the government’s benefit (besides giving them access to all the personal data they want, of course). I realize now that the relationship goes deeper than I have previously, cynically concluded. There’s not going to be some sort of noble, united urge from Congress to reign these companies in and hold them accountable for their influence on our democracy. A few of the “radicals” may make some noise, but only because they haven’t been briefed on the whole dynamic. And they won’t be. Their political theater is useful to those actually in power. Or, cynically, maybe they do know the real situation, and they just volunteer to be the token voices against these companies, to string along the public’s desire that they do “something” about them.

My Friends the Complot Theory Believers · Jacques Mattheij

But I just can’t deal with the degree to which they have slid off into the abyss, it is too hard to watch, remembering them as they were seems to be the easy way out. For those two there are probably 100’s of thousands if not millions (more?) of others who are equally detached from reality.

Source: My Friends the Complot Theory Believers · Jacques Mattheij

This essay is a nice summary of why I say #SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety. Before the informational overload days, before the internet and the rise of social media, people generally didn’t have access to fringe ideas: sparse “facts” strung together to form specious narratives. You had to really go out of your way to get to them.

Probably the biggest conspiracy theory before the internet was the assassination of JFK, right? But even that whole phenomenon arose because of the availability of facts. The real-time TV and radio coverage of the event led to a lot of speculation of what had happened, and people rushed to fill in holes with their own interpretation of events. Because of the public view of the event, and all the bizarre things that happened (uh, umbrella man, anyone?), and the doubt turned up by the plot-hole-riddled narrative the government was trying to peddle, the government was publicly forced to do an inquiry, which turned out to contain even bigger whoppers than the previous explanations.

Now, literally everything of importance that happens can be dissected and analyzed like a huge government conspiracy. Take any big news story, like the recent invasion of the Capitol building. There are a couple articles about it on every major news site, but the thing is just exploding on social media. Social media has become more important than the news.

Social media. Really? Where everyone is supposedly equal, but which is quietly a gigantic popularity contest? We’re going to let the prevailing sentiment and direction of our country be decided by blue-checkmark “influencer” celebrities? Is this appropriate? Is this desirable? Social media. Where every timeline and information stream is being manipulated by whoever is writing the biggest checks. Did Trump’s election teach us nothing? In one sense, it did. They “fixed” the algorithm, and preventing Trump from abusing the platform this time. In another sense, the 2016 election taught us nothing, because we’re still allowing Twitter and Facebook to invisibly program society, and manufacture public consent. But, hey, as long as it’s working in your side’s favor, it’s cool, right?

And “social media” is not just Twitter and Facebook. Imgur is about 70% reposted Twitter hot takes at the time of this writing. I can only imagine what Reddit looks like. (I stopped going there, if I can avoid it, a long time ago.) I’m morbidly curious to see what my wife’s Facebook looks like.

Twitter and Facebook are throwing Trump off their platforms, along with identified people who took part. It might look like something substantive, but this is just cover for their own exposed culpability in this mess. They’re trying to prevent legislative blowback on their revenue and influence.

For decades, I’ve watched people on the internet complain about censorship on various platforms, and the answer is always, “It’s a private company. If you don’t like it, go start your own platform.” So people did. They went and started Parler. But now that the MAGA crowd has a place to go, people are calling on Apple and Google to deplatform the Parler app. Those poor MAGA people just can’t win! 🙁

A lot of people have been crowing that rescinding the FCC’s Section 230 would cause an undue burden on social media, and essentially force them out of business. Aww, poor babies. I say good! Remove that law, force platforms to take accountability for illegal speech on their services, and let it all shake out. Inciting a riot is illegal, but claiming that the election was stolen is not. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to be hypocritically trying to use the law against speech they just don’t like.

Another thing that people like to point out is that the First Amendment only restricts government, and private companies can do whatever they like. That’s fine, but it shows just how dangerous the outsized influence of Twitter and Facebook have become when we’re arguing about whether the President of the Unites States is allowed to have an account. They have become a de facto governing body now, and I just don’t think that should be allowed. I have a hard enough time with how disconnected I am with my government as it is, and how little influence my one vote has on our process. When I think about the influence my government has on FAANG companies, it makes me despair to be so far removed from something that has become so vital to the national infrastructure.

When Standard Oil started basically running the entire country, the government jacked up the income tax to take NINETY PERCENT of Rockefeller’s income, and he is STILL the richest person to have ever lived, accounting for inflation, beating Bezos or Musk by a factor of over two times. They did this to at least float the country on his success. It is said that his income taxes funded 25% of the government by himself.

Social media companies want it both ways. They get to control the political discourse of the country, while raking in unprecedented profits, but pay essentially zero corporate tax, and their executives probably pay less, on a marginal basis, than I do. They’re breaking how democracy works, and we don’t even get a “kickback” to help, say, fund a proper social safety net during a global pandemic which has caused the highest unemployment since the Great Depression. There’s something seriously wrong with this picture.

Dunbar’s Number – Wikipedia

Dunbar’s Number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Dunbar explained it informally as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”

Source: Dunbar’s number – Wikipedia

I have finally run across the term for my problem with Facebook: Dunbar’s Number. Old relationships from decades ago should be allowed to die off as you make new relationships. 150 people feels about right. Having 1,000-2,000 “friends” on Facebook makes literally no sense. Similarly, following 4,000 people on Twitter makes literally no sense. People require context to make sense of comments and pictures, and when you have that many people on a feed of any kind, context becomes impossible to distinguish.

My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

The black market for Amazon reviews makes some sense if you consider how valuable positive reviews can be to sellers on the platform. With more than 2.5 million sellers on the platform, getting seen by customers who might make a purchase is no easy feat. As one friend who has been selling on Amazon Marketplace since 2016 explained to me, on Amazon, “the more reviews you have on an item, the more likely for the item to come up in an algorithmic search. The more customers like the item, with reviews, the more Amazon likes it.”

Source: My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

For many years, I’ve been complaining that you cannot trust ANY system of review on the internet. Always to deaf ears, of course.

Why The Internet is Terrible, Part 1

Josh Topolsky, writing at Input:

But thank god for the internet. What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained? For all of its failings and flops, all of its breeches and blunders, the internet has become the digital town square that we always believed it could and should be.

So true. Feeling isolated? Cooped up? Me too. But imagine what this would’ve been like 30 years ago. This sort of crisis is what the internet was designed for, and it’s working.

Source: Daring Fireball: ‘Thank God for the Internet’

I’m dubious about the quoted article’s opinion of the net value of the internet to society at large, and it’s Gruber’s take that precisely highlights my problem with it. The underlying assumption is that we’re all going stir crazy, and the Internet is saving us from the worst of it.

It’s the information bandwidth created by the internet that is driving us crazy, forcing us all to live at breakneck speed to keep up with it. Thirty years ago, you simply didn’t know the social activities of every one of your acquaintances. Because of that, you couldn’t feel compelled to try to fit them all into your schedule, and participate, in some capacity, or, at the very least, acknowledge them, lest you offend someone, and then suffer their displeasure in the form of them pressuring other parts of your social life in negative ways.

Thirty years ago, you had a small circle of friends, because that’s all your “information bandwidth” would allow for. And you were happy. You made things work. You made phone calls. You went to church. You went over to someone’s place, and talked, or played a game. The internet ruined that. The internet is the reason that families run 24×7 to keep up with every thing and every one. It started with an assumption that, hey, you and I are friends, and if you only knew *this thing* was happening, you would, of course, want to show up for it. And now, every single person you know is trying to get *their thing* onto your schedule. The problem is that we feel socially guilty about saying no, for fear that we will lose standing in someone else’s eyes, and perhaps not be invited to the next thing that we actually do want to be involved with.

The internet is the reason that you know what people you wouldn’t have even called friends in high school are up to, thirty years on, and you kinda-sorta feel compelled to congratulate them for it. The internet is why you know that that one guy at work is doing this charity thing next month, and you don’t really know him, and don’t really care about his cause, but the event is pulling in a couple of people you want to like you, and you really don’t have anything better to do in that 2-hour block of time, so, fine, you’ll go.

So, yeah, “the internet” is the only thing that can help you refill that emptiness created by “the internet,” which keeps you binging on it. And all the “Web 2.0” companies laugh all the way to the bank for preying on your need for human connectivity and relevance, manipulating your opinion for their benefactors, and “monetizing” your “eyeballs.”

And that’s just the social networks. What about the actual facts of science relating to the virus, and the government’s response to it, and the media coverage of it all? It’s a frightening mess of clashing opinion, creating warring tribal factions about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s literally tearing society apart, fractioning us into camps which can never be reconciled.

The absolute worst part of this is the United States’ two-party system, and the non-overlapping dichotomy of ideology it forcibly implies. So, given any statement, people feel license to derive an entire worldview for the other person, down to their income level, geographic location, intelligence level, and what they surely must think about every other topic. Twitter, for instance, is almost literally made of strawman arguments. Sometimes, it feels as though, if you used machine learning to delete strawmen from the platform, more than half the content would be gone, and it would definitely be the half that generates all the ad revenue.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t that way before. Respectable journalists digested the facts, wrote articles, and news editors gave us a well-formed narrative. Were there oversights? Was there propaganda? Sure, but people found ways to get the story out. Now, any crank with a computer can spew his or her unsound opinion on any particular topic, and entire communities spring up around it, to support it and keep it alive. I’m not talking about flat-earth or faked-moon-landing stuff here; I’m talking about anti-vax, climate change, human rights, and terrorism. Stuff that really matters, now, and to our children’s children.

Right now, the total effect is hardly distinguishable from everyone just stepping out of their homes, into the street, and screaming at the top of their lungs. In the same way as with America’s broken health insurance system, the people who are the fans of the status quo are, predictably, the winners of the current system: the blue checkmarks. You might find it to be great, because you’ve got a really loud voice, but that just makes other people even more upset with you.

“The internet” is perverting just about every element of human relations. Facebook and Twitter are the arch-villains here, but every other online forum isn’t far behind. At this point, I could probably write a book about what I’m seeing, but I’m sure that there are already several out there, and I’m just waking up. So, no, I don’t buy the argument that the internet is vastly more good than bad. To me, it’s marginally better, at best. In another 30 years, I think we will look back this time of the internet, and weep for the damage it caused, and the opportunity for good which was lost.