Tag: SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety

When U.S. blamed Saudi crown prince for role in Khashoggi killing, fake Twitter accounts went to war

Saudi-based Twitter accounts using fake profile pictures, repetitive wording and spammy tactics sought to undermine the conclusion by U.S. intelligence officials, made public Friday, that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “approved” the operation that led to the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

Source: When U.S. blamed Saudi crown prince for role in Khashoggi killing, fake Twitter accounts went to war

More and more of our news cycle is centering on Twitter. The blue-check-mark journalists who enjoy relative stature on the platform get preferential treatment, and there’s hardly a news article today which doesn’t reference at least one Tweet for an official quote. Like Amazon reviews, American society is placing increasingly-serious trust in an inherently untrustworthy system, and the people who run it are doing so in opaque and unaccountable ways.

#SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety

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.

Playstation 5 and Twitter

I have a very tolerate/hate relationship with Twitter. I think I’m literally on my 14th account, and I’ve deactivated my current one, only to reactivate before the 30-day time-out period, about 10 times now. There are many reasons.

One is that it’s just depressing. “Doomscrolling” is very much a thing, especially after something as tumultuous as people storming the Capitol building, or people storming the Portland police station, and attacking the mayor.

Another is the absurdity in the swings of the takes. Back and forth it goes, between hard-left and hard-right, while people always presume to read other people’s minds, in what has become the logical fallacy of the age.

Another is the brevity. You get just enough characters to make one point, without context. This leads directly to the problem above, in forcing people to make a contrary statement on a presumption of the conclusion of the statement they’re responding to.

Another is that ephemeral nature of it. Even if you can find a good exchange, it disappears “like tears in the rain,” and quickly gets lost. If you don’t bookmark it somehow, good luck finding it with Twitter’s “search” feature.

Last, but certainly not least, is the porn. I’m tired of the porn. You can tell Twitter to hide most of it from you, but it still leaks through. I’ll come back to this point.

For about 20 years, I’ve built (or bought) gaming PC’s, but a few years back, I decided to give my rig to my son, and try just using a Playstation 4 Pro for gaming. What I found surprised me. Besides a work computer for the past 6 years or so, I’ve only used Windows for gaming, personally, for about 25 years. Even with just this specific focus, I was always fighting to keep it up to date: BIOS updates, Windows updates, antivirus updates, video driver updates, mouse driver updates, keyboard driver updates, game updates, Steam updates, GoG updates, etc. The weekly maintenance on the thing was a not-so-invisible burden.

When I want to play a game on a console, I hit a button on the controller to turn it on, and within seconds, I am playing right where I left off. Updates are very rare. There are no intermediaries (like Steam) to patch. Occasionally, there will be an update to a game, but the system intelligently notifies me about them, and then waits for me to update them. If there are driver updates, they’re buried in the system updates. (It’s amazing how little code it takes to get input from a mouse, when you don’t need to be able to program a light show inside of it, program its 32 buttons with macros, and track every movement to sell back to the 3rd-party personal data market exchange.)

It’s just a completely different world. Just like when I finally moved from Gentoo Linux to Ubuntu, and realized how much of my time was being spent keeping Gentoo happy, moving to a console was eye-opening about how much time I was spending on Windows for gaming. (Don’t even get me started on the care and feeding of Windows for programming.)

On top of all of that convenience and streamlining, there are no cheaters! Glory hallelujah! When playing a game like Battlefield on PC, I could always safely assume that there would be at least one cheater, and if I wasn’t already, my one and only goal in the game would be to switch to the cheater’s team, so that at least he wouldn’t aggravate me.

The downside, of course, is that you can’t have some super-specced monster running the game at 120 FPS in 4K. But $400 vs $1,500? $2,000? $3,000? And the knuckle-skinning hassle of building the rig and keeping it up to date? You can keep your graphics. Besides, if you tell me I’m missing something, graphically, when I’m playing, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Horizon Zero Dawn, I’m going to laugh in your face. Those games look incredible on a PS4 Pro, no matter what you say.

So, yeah, I’ve been trying to “cop” a Playstation 5. Specifically a digital edition. (I only have one disc. It’s the Arkham bundle that I got for $5 at a second hand shop. I’ve seen it on sale on the Playstation store for $5, and I’ve almost just bought it again so I can throw away the disc. I will probably play through both games again before I die.) Anyway, at this point, the only way to try to get in on a “drop” is to watch some select Twitter accounts which make publicizing when they go on sale their only purpose in life. So I reactivated my account. Again. I installed Tweetbot, added the PS5 drop-tracking accounts to a list, and turned on notifications for that list.

Yesterday, a notification went out that Best Buy was going to do a drop. I don’t know why I was bothering, because I’ve gotten one in my cart twice before, only to be told that none were available within 250 miles of my location. But I saw the notification, and I tried again, and nothing was working for anyone. I commented in the thread the same thing I said here, and several people liked the tweet. I gave up.

About an hour later, another notification came through that it was actually working, and even though I had to take the time to enter a new credit card, I managed to get one on order. So I commented back to the Twitter thread that I had, and an obvious cam girl (from her avatar and name) commented on my comment. This is what I mean about porn just being pervasive on the platform. You can limit it, but it’s everywhere. There are so many porn site come-ons. I’ve seen hard-core clips as comments for this sort of thing, so I was actually thankful it was just an honest comment.

And, yes, for curiosity’s sake, I went ahead and took the gamble with the click. At that point, I just had to laugh. If a girl that average looking can make money on OnlyFans, then good for her, and God Bless America.

Anyway, for all of these reasons, now that I’ve secured a PS5, I’m deleting my Twitter account again. The trash-fire-you-can-see-from-space will just have to burn without my attention again.

It’s not like half of Imgur isn’t Twitter reposts anyway.

Even If It’s ‘Bonkers,’ Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

Misinformation about the election and the coronavirus is also gaining a foothold in American society, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.

Source: Even If It’s ‘Bonkers,’ Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

The poll results add to mounting evidence that misinformation is gaining a foothold in American society and that conspiracy theories are going mainstream, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. This has raised concerns about how to get people to believe in a “baseline reality,” said Chris Jackson, a pollster with Ipsos.

You have to somehow square this with the fact that hundreds of mainstream news organizations, Twitter, Facebook, and Google exist — in the presence of pervasive internet access, and nearly ubiquitous ownership of small, networked computers — and put all information online, in realtime, available to everyone. In other words, this is happening when there is the least amount of friction in getting facts into people’s heads than ever before, and one can scarcely imagine making that process any easier.

“Increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn’t have any basis in reality or fact,” Jackson said.

I don’t think this is particularly new. The desire and the effort to bend the world to one’s own view of it has always been present. It’s the infinite spectrum of information, and the now-essentially-infinite supply of content at any point in that spectrum, that satiates this desire. No matter what you want to believe, you can find enough sources confirming that belief to convince yourself that you have a complete mental picture of the situation. The deluge of cherry-picked information has made it far easier to believe whatever you want to believe, and find support for that, than to try to separate the wheat from the chaff, recognize disinformation, and form an objective opinion based on the most-credible interpretation of the facts.

The term I use is “converge.” You have to keep reading disparate sources until facts converge. And that takes a lot of mental effort. Not only that, but in many examples of high-profile, widely-covered political stories — upon which people will hang their political identities — the stories never converge to form a clear picture of what actually happened. As more and more people report more and more arcane facts and figures about highly-controversial issues, this problem is on-track to get even worse.

#SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety

A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.

The article goes out of its way to highlight absurdity of the question, and disparage anyone who responded “yes” to it. But someone is going to have to help me understand why this question should be considered absurd when someone broke into a highly-secured, solitary-confinement wing of a prison, disabled all of the security cameras, and murdered an extremely well-connected underage-human sex trafficker — to prevent him from naming names at the highest levels of governments all over the world — and then evaded all investigation. If that doesn’t speak to a conspiracy of elites at least indifferent to the running of a child prostitution ring to you, then I don’t know what other events would have to have happened in that chain to flip your opinion on the matter. Those events alone should be enough to substantiate the bulk of the theoretical statement. I mean, is Ipsos’ addition of the “Satan-worshipping” clause supposed to flip the whole statement to the side of absurdity? And right there, we getting into the disinformation and manipulation of the facts that people can point to as the cause of all the societal problems the article is decrying.

UPDATE: I see now, from the Wikipedia article, that the whole “cabal of satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles” thing is the basis of QAnon itself. You’ll have to forgive me if I try to avoid reading too closely on either side of the political divide.

Trump’s “Plan” to Distribute COVID-19 Vaccines Is a Predictable Clusterf–k | Vanity Fair

According to Politico, the Trump administration has basically decided to pass the gargantuan, daunting task of getting vaccines to people to individual states, a strategy it used to address the pandemic this spring that led to disastrous results. While state and federal officials agree that the country’s 21 million health care workers should be the first to get doses, “there is no consensus about how to balance the needs of other high-risk groups, including the 53 million adults aged 65 or older, 87 million essential workers and more than 100 million people with medical conditions that increase their vulnerability to the virus.” Trump and company have told governors they have the ultimate say when deciding who gets vaccinated when; it’s also chosen to “allocate scarce early doses based on states’ total populations,” which will ultimately lead to difficult choices in states with a bigger proportion of residents who are at at risk. (The virus has disproportionately affected Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities when it comes to hospitalizations and deaths.) Experts worry that could undermine confidence in the effort to vaccinate the population, the success of which is dependent on persuading a huge number of Americans to get immunized.

Source: Trump’s “Plan” to Distribute COVID-19 Vaccines Is a Predictable Clusterf–k | Vanity Fair

I’m sorry, but do the erudite writers at Vanity Fair think that there would be consensus on how to distribute the vaccine if Biden was President right now? That the “correct” President would cause everyone to line up in agreement? That everyone would be satisfied with a plan to distribute a limited resource, instantaneously, to at least the article’s-referenced four, huge, non-overlapping, geographically-disparate, highly-at-risk demographics? That if anyone else but Trump wasn’t president, everyone would magically come together, singing Kumbaya? This is the sort of opportunistic trolling that usually passes for a comment on Twitter or Facebook. All media is now becoming cheap shots and pettiness.

What should the President — any President — do about this situation? How could you distribute the vaccine in a way to achieve maximum local effectiveness? Maybe… oh, I don’t know… Maybe we could break the decisions down a little. Maybe we could figure it out on a more-local level. Hey, I know! Maybe we could let the States decide how to do it within their own borders? That way they could adjust the distribution based on what’s happening within a much-smaller area than the entire country. Just a crazy thought I had, and that’s just off the top of my head.

Oh, wait.

This is what passes as journalism at one of the largest print publications still going. I clicked another political article, and it reeks just as badly. The third graph purports to mind-read half of the members of the Catholic Church in the US. At the very, very least: [CITATION NEEDED]. That any of this passes for top-end reporting now is proof we’re doomed as a society. Social media has ruined ALL journalism.

Cruz in heated exchange with Twitter’s Dorsey: ‘Who the hell elected you?’ | TheHill

Dorsey noted that every person or organization that signs up to have an account on Twitter agrees to its terms and services.

Source: Cruz in heated exchange with Twitter’s Dorsey: ‘Who the hell elected you?’ | TheHill

In a world of weasel words, said about so many things, this one has to be in the running for taking the cake.

Alas Imgur

I killed my Twitter account for the umpteenth time a couple days ago, so I tried looking at Imgur for amusement purposes. I didn’t get far. It seemed like a solid chunk of the top posts were screenshots of tweets that perfectly encapsulated the utter insanity that drove me away from the site. I guess there is no escaping it on any sort of social media. War Games had it right, 35 years ago: “The only winning move is… not to play.”

Alas Twitter

I’ve tried to work with Twitter. I’ve tried pruning my follow list. I’ve tried blocking terrible people and muting terrible subjects. I’ve tried turning off retweets for people who, otherwise, had interesting things to say. But all of this is hopeless. Even the people who are left coming through in my feed only want to talk about the people and things I’m specifically trying to prevent coming through my feed.

Look, I get it. I do. The world is pretty messed up. But I don’t want to hear about the terribleness of everything all the time, and I really don’t want to see petty, stupid, ad-hominem attacks, literally non-stop. It may not seem like it, but I really do have better things to do than get dragged down the rabbit hole into yet another stupid and pointless argument that takes 72 tweets to make sense of, which changes nothing, and only leaves everyone more angry than when they started.

Not only will Twitter not give me the tools to prevent this, it feels like they’ve gone out of their way to make it seem like they do, while not actually doing so. The best change they could make is that if someone quotes or retweets someone I’ve blocked, or a keyword I’ve muted, I don’t want to see it. At all. Don’t show me a tweet with a quoted block that says, “This tweet has been hidden…” I don’t care about the tweet, nor do I care what someone else has to say about that tweet. To wit: I don’t want to see what Donald Trump tweets, and I REALLY don’t want to see what people say ABOUT those tweets. To me, that’s kind of the whole point of muting and blocking. And the fact that Twitter continues to shove stuff you’ve specifically said you don’t want to see in your face tells you a lot about their objectives.

<Andy Rooney>And another thing</Andy Rooney>, Twitter is supposed to be the people’s answer to traditional media. Why is it, then, that most of the substantive discussion on the service seems dominated by blue checkmarks from “print” and broadcast media outlets?

The even more-worrisome thing about this generally-acknowledged terrible situation is that these aren’t just little niggling details, or unfortunate side effects. This has all been specifically engineered to exacting standards. Like, hundreds of thousands of man-hours of meetings and coding — not to mention billions of investment capital — has been devoted to making this work precisely as it does. This is exactly what they want. How messed up is that? So, for (I think) the 14th time, I’m out. At least for now. I can’t find a way to live in peace while using the service any more.

For what it’s worth, the Bible predicted the general social trends that are happening right now, 2,000 years ago. Twitter (and Facebook, et. al.) is just another tool which accelerates the degeneration. But saying this on social media would, of course, immediately get me reviled. There was a time where the internet was cool, and interesting and respectful discussion about various topics could be had in many places. All of that is now gone. I know how to get it back, but the mechanics of how to do it will be left for another time.

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.