[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Prederick wrote:
Analyzing social media posts from news accounts and politicians (n = 2,730,215), we found that the biggest predictor of "virality" (out of all predictors we measured) was whether a social media post was about one's outgroup.

More here.

Did they cite Don Henley and Danny Kortchmar for their prior work on the subject?

Considering many politicians only go to social media to have a viral takedown, and the overwhelming majority of posts are takedowns or contain slights, I question that analysis. I see a self fulfilling prophecy more than anything insightful.

Prederick wrote:
Think about how you receive information today, compared to fifteen years or twenty years ago.

Social media, internet search, click-based advertising: innovations in information technology and new mechanisms for monetizing information have rewired human communication.

The problem is that this enormous transformation has taken place not as a stewarded effort to improve information quality or to further human well-being, but more or less simply for the purpose of keeping people engaged online in order to sell ads.

A big ol' Tweeter thread, with a link to a paper.

Related: Why some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity One particularly fascinating quote compares the advent of social media with the advent of the printing press, and neither technology comes out looking good:

The printing press came out and upended history. We’re still recovering from the capacity that the printing press gave to Martin Luther. The printing press radically changed the political landscape in Europe. And, you know, depending on whose histories you go by, you had decades if not centuries of war [after it was introduced].

So, did we somehow recover? Sure we did. Would it have been better to do it in a stewarded way? I don’t know. Maybe. These major transitions in information technology often cause collateral damage. We tend to hope that they also bring about a tremendous amount of good as we move toward human knowledge and all of that. But even the fact that you’ve survived doesn’t mean that it’s not worth thinking about how to get through it smoothly.

It reminds me of one of the least intelligent critiques of the [Covid-19] vaccines that we’re using now: “We didn’t have vaccines during the Black Death plague. And we’re still here.” We are, but it took out a third of the population of Europe.

I don't think it wise to ignore developments between the printing press and social media.
I have stated in the past that the crisis with social media is compounded by the fact that we still haven't digested the impact of television. We had 150 years to deal with the impact of radio before television came along. Proto social media like BBSes were developed 20 years after television. I'd also say that each technology is an order of magnitude more impactful than the last while being more accessible on top.

The printing press had massive impact but you had to learn to read and there was no consolidation among the languages. Radio reached anyone who could listen and could even effect people who didn't understand the language some with fx and emotion. Television was even more universal in that you could witness what was happening but there were production costs. Social media can be translated in an instant, can reach billions in that same instant, AND the cost of entry is typing on a keyboard. (so in a sense it seems two orders of magnitude more impactful)

And lots of people on social media don't seem to be able to read, either.

YouTube permanently banned Right Wing Watch, a watchdog group that monitors disinformation, conspiracies, and violent rhetoric from far-right media outlets and personalities.

Essentially the group was banned for archiving all the crazy-ass sh*t conservatives say and do while those same conservatives continue to be allowed to post content to YouTube.

EVERYTHING IS FINE, CONSUMER THE ALGORITHM IS WORKING PROPERLY YOU ARE IN THE CORRECT TIMELINE

OG_slinger wrote:

YouTube permanently banned Right Wing Watch, a watchdog group that monitors disinformation, conspiracies, and violent rhetoric from far-right media outlets and personalities.

Essentially the group was banned for archiving all the crazy-ass sh*t conservatives say and do while those same conservatives continue to be allowed to post content to YouTube.

"Gammy, tell me the one again about the evil liberal media and their fake news!"

OG_slinger wrote:

YouTube permanently banned Right Wing Watch, a watchdog group that monitors disinformation, conspiracies, and violent rhetoric from far-right media outlets and personalities.

Essentially the group was banned for archiving all the crazy-ass sh*t conservatives say and do while those same conservatives continue to be allowed to post content to YouTube.

Article was probably updated since you posted by the channel has been reinstated.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

YouTube permanently banned Right Wing Watch, a watchdog group that monitors disinformation, conspiracies, and violent rhetoric from far-right media outlets and personalities.

Essentially the group was banned for archiving all the crazy-ass sh*t conservatives say and do while those same conservatives continue to be allowed to post content to YouTube.

Article was probably updated since you posted by the channel has been reinstated.

“Right Wing Watch’s YouTube channel was mistakenly suspended, but upon further review, has now been reinstated,” a YouTube spokesperson told The Daily Beast on Monday afternoon."

Not the "further review" of the ban Right Wing Watch appealed that YouTube denied, but the "further, further review" of YouTube getting bad media for banning the people reporting on right wing bull sh*ttery and not the people making the right wing bull sh*ttery.

There’s a possibility that it was just targeted for harassment. Right wing creators love free speech so much that they tend to organize mass-flagging campaigns to get channels they don’t like banned for spurious reasons and youtube just doesn’t seem to care that this happens regularly, only citing that the channels were banned for violating community guidelines. Some left wing channels like The Serfs have went through multiple bans and un-bans because of this.

That Youtube allowed themselves to be manipulated by right wing groups into banning them is not exactly better. Especially since they denied the appeal and only took a closer look at what happened once they started getting bad press about it.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/835zG1a.png)

Prederick wrote:

Me: /watches some Breaking Bad clips.

YouTube: "Huh! Breaking Bad eh? So I assume that, despite literal years of you tuning your recommendations against this, you'd like to see a Jordan Peterson video linked to the subject?"

Okay, we've been over this like 10,000 times, but how in God's name does YouTube think that the 30 Rock clip I'm watching should draw me to a new video from some RW channel's latest "screaming about Hunter Biden" clip?

Like, I'm curious to know how the algorithm does/doesn't work, because exactly how many RW videos do I have to remove before you STOP suggesting them? Is this an issue with the algorithm? Are they gaming the system? Is there literally so much RW content on YT that it's clogging the recommendations?

YouTube Kids is pretty good now but my daughter's use of the main YT site is strictly supervised.

Is there literally so much RW content on YT that it's clogging the recommendations?

Actually, I think this might be it. Flood the medium with so much sh*t that the measures used to produce content/measurement/structure just break and it gives the appearance of RW intellectual dominance.

A lot of right wing creators tend to have multiple channels with multiple videos per day from each channel.

I have to wonder if recommendations and algorithms are region-locked? Most of my recommendations these days usually eventually end up on Little Nas X's Montero video one way or another.

Amoebic wrote:

I have to wonder if recommendations and algorithms are region-locked? Most of my recommendations these days usually eventually end up on Little Nas X's Montero video one way or another.

Canada even has a better Internet than us! I want out.

Piece in The Daily Beast about successful YouTube pundit Tim Pool.

You may have heard of his work previously, if not, you're welcome (I'm sorry).

Ooh I’m looking forward to watching the clips of Pool melting down over that article.

He has super-figured out YT though. He understands what the algorithm wants, and is probably the best right-winger out there doing at doing the "say the thing without saying the thing that gets you demonetized" dance.

Pool has repeatedly said things with little to no consequences that have gotten smaller channels banned. He tends to stay on the dogwhistle-level for a lot of stuff, but over the last year specifically he can’t seem to help himself on certain topics. Explicit calls to violence, covid and vaccine misinformation, election fraud misinformation, etc. Youtube gives it’s larger channels a lot of leeway and Pool has been taking up as much of it as he could lately. I’m crossing my fingers that this generates enough exposure to get Youtube to get off it’s ass, but I doubt it will come to anything.
Still looking forward to seeing clips of him throwing tantrums over the article, though.

Ugh, youtube is so bad!

It thinks it is justified for the 1/10 of content that is productive or heartwarming.
But that really is the gateway for the 9/10 of the stuff that deceptively plays devil advocate or knee jerk erodes support for the productive and ridicules, mocks or lashes out at the heartwarming.

The misleading and the mischaracterization is always massively amplified. But, yes, I know I am preaching to the choir.

I think if youtube were honest, it would replace the "like" button with "aw", "haha" "fu diaf", and [nelson]"hah hah"[/nelson]

Jihadists flood pro-Trump social network with propaganda

Politico wrote:

Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a POLITICO review of online activity on the fledgling platform.

The social network — started a month ago by members of former President Donald Trump’s inner circle — features reams of jihadi-related material, including graphic videos of beheadings, viral memes that promote violence against the West and even memes of a militant executing Trump in an orange jumpsuit similar to those used in Guantanamo Bay.

The rapid proliferation of such material is placing GETTR in the awkward position of providing a safe haven for jihadi extremists online as it attempts to establish itself as a free speech MAGA-alternative to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

It underscores the challenges facing Trump and his followers in the wake of his ban from the mainstream social media platforms following the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riots.

Islamic State “has been very quick to exploit GETTR,” said Moustafa Ayad, executive director for Africa, the Middle East and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism, who first discovered the jihadi accounts and shared his findings with POLITICO.

“On Facebook, there was on one of these accounts that I follow that is known to be Islamic State, which said ‘Oh, Trump announced his new platform. Inshallah, all the mujahideen will exploit that platform,’” he added. “The next day, there were at least 15 accounts on GETTR that were Islamic State.”

While GETTR does not provide access to its data to track the spread, or virality, of such extremist material on its platform, POLITICO found at least 250 accounts that had posted regularly on the platform since early July. Many followed each other, and used hashtags to promote the jihadi material to this burgeoning online community.

OG_slinger wrote:
Politico wrote:

Just weeks after its launch, the pro-Trump social network GETTR is inundated with terrorist propaganda spread by supporters of Islamic State, according to a POLITICO review of online activity on the fledgling platform.

Soooo.... is GETTR done?

Well... that's hilarious. I hope, when they get banned, they kick up a fuss about freedom of speech.

Pretty sure the admins of that site are pro-beheading when it's brown people.

Facebook shuts out NYU academics’ research on political ads

AP News wrote:

Facebook has shut down the personal accounts of a pair of New York University researchers and shuttered their investigation into misinformation spread through political ads on the social network.

Facebook says the researchers violated its terms of service and were involved in unauthorized data collection from its massive network. The academics, however, say the company is attempting to exert control on research that paints it in a negative light.

The NYU researchers with the Ad Observatory Project had for several years been looking into Facebook’s Ad Library, where searches can be done on advertisements running across Facebook’s products.

The access was used to “uncover systemic flaws in the Facebook Ad Library, to identify misinformation in political ads, including many sowing distrust in our election system, and to study Facebook’s apparent amplification of partisan misinformation,” said Laura Edelson, the lead researcher behind NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy, in a statement.

Facebook’s action against the NYU project also cut off other researchers and journalists who got access to Facebook data through the project, Edelson said.

The researchers offered Facebook users a web browser plug-in tool that let them volunteer their data showing how the social network targets political ads.

But Facebook said the browser extension was programmed to evade its detection systems and vacuum up user data, creating privacy concerns.

In a blog post late Tuesday, Facebook said it takes “unauthorized data scraping seriously, and when we find instances of scraping we investigate and take action to protect our platform.”

Facebook sent a cease-and-desist letter to Edelson and another researcher, Damon McCoy, in October but didn’t shut down their accounts until Tuesday, hours after Edelson informed the platform that she and McCoy were studying the spread of disinformation on the platform about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the researchers said.

This is one of the better quotes about online discourse I've read.

NTERVIEWER

So there was that overabundance of noise, as well.

AKBAR

Yes. And between writing the two books I had gotten off of all social media. I don’t mean to speak prescriptively but, for me, it was really insidious how that sh*t colonized my mind and colonized the algorithms of my thinking and hijacked my rage. On social media, the same rhetorical language was being used about the casting of some Marvel movie as about the leveling of a village in Syria. The same exact rhetorical algorithms of outrage were used to talk about one as the other. Our brains haven’t evolved enough to differentiate between the two. Language is language. And so I was just not in command of my compassion, the distribution and focus of my rage, and it took a while to recalibrate. I think I still am recalibrating.

It's an interview with a poet about poetry, but goddamn if that isn't dead-on. It certainly describes the utter, wholesale trash-fire that is "fandom" these days.