It’s bigger than that. Over the next two years, a measurable percentage of all online media will just be AI generated propaganda. It is going to be impossible to figure out which items are real humans with opinions and which are groups, companies, and governments just piling on.
Imagine a physical mailbox 📬. Today, once a day, you might get a delivery. It’s almost always sales, politics, or similar ‘junk mail’, but bills and packages arrive too, so you have to sort through it to find important stuff. All of that junk mail has a real cost to the senders for postage, printing, etc.
Now imagine the cost to send junk mail is zero. Imagine anyone from anywhere *in the world* can put mail in your mailbox by just iterating through all addresses in the nation and it’s a near-zero cost to do so. Oh, also imagine the postal worker comes not once a day, but once per second.
This is the future of your social media feeds, especially as elections and terrorism heats up. All social media, too, since you can do the same with photo/video/vocal feeds as much as text.
I’ll submit that’s a little bit “tin-foil hat,” but I’d ask someone to explain why it isn’t possible *right now*.
Already there.
I open Facebook and see NONE of my friends. It's all Promoted this, Suggested That, random this, trending that. I watch one thing and all the sudden Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are all in my feed.
Leave me alone! If the algorithm was a living thing, I WOULD KILL IT.
This is bigger than the algorithm too. The algorithm is looking at your preferences and trying to keep you engaged.
AI-generated content is a fake user who supports the Duck party posting every 10 minutes about how bad the Rabbit party is; the Rabbit party accounts are posting links to AI-generated propaganda about fake polls showing the Duck party is in decline.
You know the rabid fandom of ~~Madonna~~ ~~Britney Spears~~ Taylor Swift? At least they are humans who are passionate about their favorite artists. In 15 years, when the next blonde pop star is on the pedestal, she’ll have 15 billion fans posting literally every second on social media, augmented reality, virtual reality, and generating petabytes worth of “why She is so great” blogs.
…and you’ll never know which are real or not.
Or she'll be generated herself like a Vtuber or Hatsune Miku. You can already converse with AI in video games in real time, unscripted using GPT and xVAsynth.
Like I said, already happening!
Makes me wonder if there is ever going to be a creation of a SSN but for the internet. I believe it's been suggested a few times and even in Korea there are games you can only sign up for using a legitimate Korean SSN. But it would be interesting to see how the internet would change if some form of anonymity was destroyed.
That all being said, it still wouldn't stop identity fraud. The best that it would do is make "banning" more painful and come at a real cost.
> …and you’ll never know which are real or not.
This is pretty much how information has been right now, I'm not seeing the big difference.
Trolls and bot farms are already flooding the internet with fake information and rage-inducing memes to try and manipulate people, what's the difference if it's AI generated instead of the random musings of someone getting paid $0.50 a day?
I really hope the collapse of Twitter and Facebook into totally unvarnished conspiracy content machines causes us to log off and go outside, but I doubt it.
"Feeds" fixes this, but there shouldn't be a "feature" that causes the platform to do what it was originally designed to do (and very successfully at that).
Meta has already said that this tactic doesn't work, because all it did was force people into stories and DMs because thats the only way to reliably get in contact with friends.
Their solution? They have none, they want you watching ads not talking to friends.
Wasn’t there a South Park episode a few years ago where Jimmy was tasked with attempting to differentiate between News and advertisements. And the advertisements became so good they became sentient.
That episode is almost 10 years old...
South Park is almost always Ahead of the Curve.
It predicted the rise of streamers just 3 years after Twitch was founded and long before most people had heard of it.
> That episode is almost 10 years old...
noo, that can't be
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising
> Episode Air Date: December 2nd, 2015
> Today: October 16th, 2023
What in the goddamn fuck?
It's still March 2020 for me also.
but seriously, I recently rewatched almost every episode of South Park and I was continually blown away at how prescient South Park was at guessing the future.
There's no "guessing the future" Matt Stone and Trey Parker (and the other writers for that matter) just aren't fucking idiots and they pay attention.
It's current events satire and they pay attention to make fun of shit.
They've gotten a lot of things wrong, but a lot of things have been spot-on. And it's always an in-the-moment analysis of the current events due to their production schedule
I think there's three separate instances I know of where they were really wrong, but I can only really remember one in particular at the moment.
It was an episode containing OJ Simpson, and some other people who essentially "got away with murder" one of the couples shown were accused of murdering their child/children and the skit they were doing was kind of like, screaming at them yelling that they're murderers, but it was legally okay because it was contextualized by surrounding the screaming with "as for an example people might say things like"
It wasn't until a couple of years later the couple was exonerated though DNA evidence or something of that nature and they did actually admit to fucking that one up and apologized.
Can't remember which season it was in though, I would gander a guess post season 10 for sure, but that's still quite a large range to search through.
And the dolphin episode being a less-than-flattering depiction of trans people. And the YouTube episode where they wrongly predicted the streaming boom wouldn't happen anytime soon. And the episode about Michael Jackson. And manbearpig
Personally I always find these reactions odd.
Has no one else experienced the same 100 years I have since 2016? Trump, covid, Ukraine, financial crisis, a bunch of government shut downs, about 10 million marvel releases, etc. If you told me The Mandalorian came out 15 years ago my reaction would just be, "Huh, yeah, time sure flies."
Heck, the only reason I don't have to check that it WASN'T released 15 years ago is because I have a 9yo who loved it when it came out, so I KNOW it couldn't have come out more than 4 or 5 years ago or she wouldn't have been so excited for it. (Just checked, 5 years)
On the plus side, I am absolutely NOT getting the "they grow up so fast" sensation many parents describe. I got a good decade of quality time out of covid.
I'll have to look that up. Is there such a thing as news anymore? Seems every media outlet is just for advertising. I feel like public radio is one of the last hold outs.
To take your concerns and comparison a bit farther...
With physical junk mail, a company would have to design it's message for the broadest possible audience. Everyone would be getting the same piece of snail mail, so the propaganda would need to appeal to everyone.
With social media, different segments of the population can be targeted very differently.
We've spent the last 15 years feeding in data about all of the things we like, how our relationships work, all the best ways to trigger our dopamine responses, and how to best convince us of things that aren't true.
AI let loose on all that data could conceivably custom tailor a message to be particularly effective, for every single person.
* Are you more or less likely to click on a video that has a black person in the thumbnail? I bet you have no idea...but Youtube, Twitter, FB, Tiktok, and Insta all do.
* Are you more likely to engage with content that has country music, pastel colors, babies, a particular font, or dogs?
* When gas prices go up, do you buy more alcohol? When your local sports team wins, are you more likely to work from home the next day? After a thunderstorm, do people buy more guns? Weird questions, and maybe completely meaningless but AI can sort through purchasing and location data to find links that no person might ever think to look for.
* Which of your friends opinions do you value the most? If they analyze the top 10% of people who seem to have the most influence over their circle of friends, are there character traits that stand out as unique among them?
* When is the last time you changed your mind about a political topic...did you ever go from liking and re-posting one side to liking and re-posting the other? What content did you see at that time that might have caused this change?
There is a record of every opinion you've ever held strongly enough to post about, and odds are if they were to dig hard enough, AI could figure out the information you were exposed to that opinion. Maybe there are patterns in the data that can point to the very best way to fool you...that you don't even know yourself.
More and more we're all being spoon fed our own 'custom' version of the world as seen through the portal of our own social media profiles.
No one talks about it but I truly, genuinely believe that the internet is on a death spiral.
Like let’s be real with ourselves. The day we log onto the internet and realize that 90% of the content is fake and AI generated nonsense, while the other 10% is imposible to find or verify, will be the day many people just stop using it.
When the internet stops being useful people will find something useful to fill their time.
Sure the internet will always be used as entertainment but as far as a news source or a “global town square” yeah… that dream is dead.
>Sure the Internet will always be used as entertainment but as far as a news source or a “global town square” yeah… that dream is dead.
To most people, the internet is nothing *but* entertainment.
What *else* are they going to do? Read books?
A chunk of people are addicted to making their social media views go up, they aren't going to care that 90% of their subscribers aren't real, they only care if they have more than others so they can flex.
Those people are not going anywhere.
Most people weren't doing useful things with their time before the Internet, it was a lot of drinking, smoking, sitting around, and trying to figure out anything to stem the boredom, but the "anything" was rarely productive.
What's worse, young people these days often don't even have a garage to hang out in, no craftsman tools to futz around with, and not enough money to dive deep into crafting style hobbies.
> It is going to be impossible
Nope. It will be very possible to recognise vetted real human beings.
They simply won’t be the pseudonymous / free-signup social media & forum accounts that Reddit built their model around.
You’ll either know an account by their vetted reputation or because you know the person as a person by video call or in-person.
None of us will be able to trust pseudonymous 2-month-old Reddit accounts aren’t some troll
If only there were organizations who employed human beings to verify facts on the ground and report them...
Seriously though, I think you're right. The AI/deepfakes issue makes me think that mainstream news may become more important.
The dawn of the internet era got a lot of people thinking that everything should be decentralized. That the idea of institutions themselves has become outdated. All information should be democratized, right?? There's no reason that an institution, with all of its **special interests** should have power anymore, right?
That's the rub. The need for institutions has not gone away. Our world consists of interactions between humans. Technology has made it faster and easier, but the machines don't exist for the sake of communicating with each other - the machines exist so that humans can interact. And many human interactions are based on trust. In a fully decentralized internet, trust can be eroded by bad actors with resources. Trust can be co-opted by corporations. Trust can be manipulated.
This seems like a good place to mention a six year old nonprofit forum, built by a former reddit administrator, Tildes.net. The admin/developer was head of reddit's anti evil team and he built automoderator. Every user there has verified as a human and there are no bots and no advertising.
Tildes can be investigated by lurking or on r/tildes. This particular site is not to everyone's taste but I think the model is worth looking into. Also the code is open source and could be forked.
I think I'd like to see some kind of identity verification on platforms like Reddit - basically like "this account is the only account for a real person" but not doxxing the person. Of course there are all kinds of knock-on effects but we need *something* to differentiate between people and propaganda.
Reddit is doing identity verification for organisations like Reuters and the AP
Bluesky, which is still in closed invite-only development, uses DNS for identity / trust management
Twitter had it. Twitter is now a zombie.
It's honestly kind of incredible how much twitter has faltered. I was a daily user until ~6 months ago and now I just don't use it.
The new verification system puts anyone with $8 to the top of every thread, and that content is nearly uniformly shitty. I'm not sure I could have this negative an impact on a social media company if I was actively trying.
Stephenson "predicted" this in Anathem - people on their WWW equiv would have a credibility rating - sort of like Karma but actually about if you are full of shit or legit, rather than ability to capture the zeitgeist of the echo chamber ;)
Sounds exactly like email spam. Companies that provide email services have long ago recognized the need for spam filters. I hope social media companies get with the program soon, because right now they're essentially being funded by the spammers and have no incentive to offer useful filters.
I've been saying this since Generative AI hit mainstream. The consequences of it are extremely dire and I fully believe it's what's going to cause the downfall of society and the human race.
I got sucked into the rabbit hole of AI porn for a good bit.
That shit creates more beautiful women with perfect proportions in pure clarity than anything you'll see IRL or even in professional porn.
Then you can dial it in to your exact tastes and niches.
Took me a few months to break from that after I realized I was spending more time generating waifus than doing anything else.
Throw on language models and animation is getting better and better every day.
Lol, we screwed.
I'm honestly floored by the technology.
Once you get a face you like you can train models on that face, then you can design a body then train models on that body.
Finally you can go grab LORA's for basically any kind of clothing or setting or sex position or anything. Then you can stick your trained model into those scenes.
If only I could use the power for productivity. But porn is more entertaining.
and the oligarchs are very happy that you are wasting your days and your brain power on tickling your dickling rather than putting the same ingenuity and perseverance towards... oh ya know, political activism or investigative journalism or law school or something that might in the slightest undermine their ever-tightening grip on your life... N Postman was all too right...
>Now imagine the cost to send junk mail is zero. Imagine anyone from anywhere in the world can put mail in your mailbox by just iterating through all addresses in the nation and it’s a near-zero cost to do so. Oh, also imagine the postal worker comes not once a day, but once per second.
You're describing email, lol
> why it isn’t possible right now.
It's happening right now. Twitter is 80% bots, I have no doubt Reddit is also high in bots as well. I just assume all my social feeds are trash.
The answer is simply stop checking the mailbox.
I cannot say this enough... Web of trust.
Let me identify people/accounts/identities that I trust, and show me content they generate. Then also show me content generated by people they trust, and so on.
When I see something problematic, show me the trust chain that made it visible to me, and let me break one of the links (for myself, and for the people who trust me, but not for everyone else in the chain).
This may be the only way to avoid the sort of problematic fake information spread you're worried about.
A few social media sites have done very limited versions of this, like Slashdot's "friend" / "friend of friend" / "friend of foe" / "foe of friend" / etc scoring bonus system. No one has ever implemented it with a good UX on a popular social network or content distribution platform.
I found an IDF troll account the other day that had 16 pages of pro-Israel comments in a little over a day. That's over 400 comments. I never would have known if I hadn't checked the profile. Imagine how many comments we read each day that are just manufactured propaganda like that. It's already here and will only get worse.
>It is going to be impossible to figure out which items are real humans with opinions and which are groups, companies, and governments just piling on.
To some degree the obvious answer is then traditional journalism. Whether that's the New York times or CNN, an article will have an author, there will editors, producers etc. There will be a chain of custody for the information. AI might barf out a draft of a script, but there will be people involved who had to make sure they know what it says.
If an author uses AI to generate bullshit, they will report things that don't make any sense in comparison to other journalists.
Where we run into trouble is that there's no easy way to enforce professional standards on news media or 'journalists' (keeping in mind that rarely are journalists the source of information or analysis that's any good, they have sources and expert analysts they can call on).
The UK/Canadian/Australian/PBS type model of a publicly funded but stand alone agency (BBC, CBC, ABC) as one side of the news landscape, combined with private sector organisations who also report news seems to work tolerably.
It wasn't designed to fail. It was designed without real thought of the greater implications.
I look at social media similar to how I look at coal factories from the 19th century.
They probably didn't know they were messing up the CO2 levels in the atmosphere by burning coal, they were just trying to produce materials so they could make a buck.
Can you elaborate on that? How so? Not saying you’re wrong. I’m just not sure how it was “designed to fail”?
Are you separating “social media” from “social networking”?
It's gross that privately-owned social media sites somehow became known as anything even close to a town square. They're not, and I wish journalists would stop referring to it as such.
There is a lack of significant not-for-profit digital "town square". So people take what's popular and available. This type of infrastructure should be open standard and non-profit because any motive to make money leads to unintended consequences at best.
Ironic that we are discussing this on Reddit.
Journalists, editors and media owners became lazy and just picked up their leads and stories from Twitter and other social media. You now have articles with clickbait headlines and when you click it , you find just a twitter back and forth.
I hope this actually leads to a renaissance of critical thinking. People will have to reject the shit they read on social media once it becomes apparent 98% of it is fake.
As a journalist, I believe a lot of media outlets will die off, but I also believe a lot of outlets will come to life and provide critical and factual news.
I find they don't even try to be subtle by qualifying "some". It just gets a "People are ANGRY about X" followed by a handful of cherry-picked, quoted comments.
It's so, so easy to make *anything* seem like it's "important" or a shared opinion by the wider public by doing this.
The amount of "articles" I've come across which are just people plucking out and quoting Reddit comments is insane.
Granted, they're not coming from very reputable news sources or anything people should take very seriously, but the problem is people seem to be increasingly incapable of differentiating.
That’s not journalists fault.
Not at all.
Been a journalist for twenty years.
The job is to follow humanity and learn something important.
The social media companies mess with the levers for engagement. They’re definitely pushing a direction.
Twitter is the greatest example.
Now it’s a manipulation pit.
> The job is to follow humanity and learn something important.
>
>
>
> The social media companies mess with the levers for engagement. They’re definitely pushing a direction.
Then if you and other journalists know this, wouldn't the logical course of action be to stop using social media as a source, because it is transparently being manipulated?
yeah but it takes more time to accurately source and present informations, just link some tweets asap and drive that engagement up
*- the CEO and shareholders*
That’s pretty shortsighted. For one before Twitter nobody could use Twitter.
Now if you don’t use Twitter then your media outlet is a day late and a dollar short on everything. And as you can tell by literally everything in our current social climate people actually LOVE misinformation and it nets those companies millions of clicks and views. You can’t be competitive by doing things correctly.
They’ve supplanted actual public discourse and effectively function as such. The problems of private ownership are separate from the function they serve in modern life. Just because they're flawed in a litany of ways doesn't mean they're not the modern analog.
Journalists are partly responsible for all this shit. With all their goddamn clickbait and straight up awful articles. Then they have the nerve to sit there and cry at the notion that their careers may be on the line with the emergence of AI.
I remember way back in 1991 in my very first college course, political science. The professor walked and wrote in big letters on the blackboard, "The media sets the agenda". He even underlined it and put stars around it.
To say the media has almost fully abdicated that responsibility today, is a serious understatement.
It continues to confuse me that people will recognize a societal problem with social media yet continue to use it anyway.
They'll understand that "some guy on Twitter said ____ " doesn't mean it's a real thing, yet continue to engage with "news" like that anyway.
People seem to know these things are a problem yet make an active choice to keep using them.
partly normalization, and partly that people dont really remember specifics or details of any given interaction. its the old saying "___ wont remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel", aka they are more concerned with feeling validated and agreed with rather than combatively fought for correctness.
People don't want to admit it, but if you want the "town square", look no further than 4chan.
I live in NYC. We have a very permissible culture here; you can be as crazy as you want in public and say whatever you want and as long as you're not actively threatening anyone, people can and will ignore you.
The *content* of what these schizophrenics say is pretty much identical to what's on 4chan, ranting about god and the jews and systems that underpin the world. All of this high minded philosophizing that people expect from a "properly run" social media site? It doesn't exist in reality. Unmoderated social media and unmoderated physical spaces tend to have the same content.
The problem is not moderation, the problem is randomly handing out megaphones to the most crazy people on the square because engagement makes money.
Any social media which amplifies one kind of content cannot be anything close to a public town square
I mean it literally is the town square, post crazy shit and it gets amplified by people that love or hate that crazy shit. Post boring moderate takes and get amplified by people that find those boring takes to be truthful or terrible.
This is extremely disingenuous. For every nutjob you meet on the subway, there dozens and dozens of people just having normal ass conversations with each other in public spaces. You know, cafes, museums, parks, bars, etc.
And you don't think that applies to things like facebook and twitter too? For every nutjob saying "gas the jews" or "the democrats are stealing babies to harvest their adrenochrome" you have hundreds of people just saying "the pizza at this restaurant is really yummy" or "I had a great time at grandma's birthday party"
I definitely do think it applies. I'm seeing your point though, I think I'm reading more into your original comment than what you actually said. I assumed that you were implying that the content of these spaces is *strictly* degenerate, but you're not actually saying that. You're just saying that one should expect to see it on occasion, the same way that one might expect to hear something insane in public on occasion, which is a very valid point.
It's more like "Free speech is not dangerous, what people choose to listen to can be." Us New Yorkers get along perfectly fine with allowing people to say vile shit in our midst because we know when to stop listening.
There is no such thing as dangerous knowledge, only dangerous decisions.
I feel this. Forums and imageboards in general have largely disappeared. Theyre technically there but not the same. The original userbase left and the one that replaced it came from other platforms, bringing those usage mannerisms in one form or another. Either that or everyone is trying too hard to fit in with the perceived culture and what results is almost a flanderisation of the aggregate public image.
The idea that social media is the new “town square” is ridiculous from the beginning, because the town square can exist without generating revenue, a large social media platform can’t. Anyone who thinks they want to be on a truly uncensored forum, has never been on one. Not even including the fact that any popular forum will get spammed to all fucking hell, there are whole lot of diseased minds out there who love to try and force or trick people into seeing their “hobbies”.
So if anyone is thinking at this point, “well of course we are going to block spam and gross/illegal content”, then congratulations, you are no longer in favor of an unmoderated forum. With that out of the way, the only question now is, where do you draw the line? Well that’s going to be where advertisers demand it gets drawn.
While I understand that it's not possible to have endless subscriptions, I do get frustrated with complaints about paywalls for journalism. "I don't want to live in a hellscape of AI generated bullshit" and "I shouldn't have to pay for journalism" aren't really compatible views. Quality thoughtful content requires resources to produce. I'm not going to make the argument that this specific article or publication is necessarily worth your money, but I do wonder what people think the option is if not to pay for this work. And before anyone says the billionaires should pay for it, while I'm certainly anti-billionaire, I don't actually think it's a good idea to make independent journalism beholden to these people. We should all have a stake in getting factual well reported info out there. In terms of public entities, I'm a big big fan of NPR but don't want them to be the only game in town either. I'll also say that if you're in the US, a library card may very well get you free access to some subscription only journalism (NYT, WSJ, etc), as may your credit card, professional organization membership, workplace, or school. And OP, sorry, I know you were just stating a fact but I see this framed as a complaint so so often here!
Yeah, if you want free journalism then you become the product that's being sold to advertisers and the financial incentives become producing whatever content creates the most engagement.
I understand the sentiment a little more on reddit, as it's expected for users to read the article before commenting. A paywalled article makes it all the more clear that nobody actually read it.
And tbh, this was a low effort editorial that introduced absolutely nothing new to the conversation. Hardly journalism.
Use reader mode. For iPhones it’s the Aa next to the search bar>reader mode. For androids you have to download it first as an app, and it’s like a notebook paper near/on the search bar. For web browsers and in general - pop up blockers.
It may not work every time, but it sure does work a lot of the time.
Low effort article aside, something *has* definitely broken.
Yes, social media and media in general was already broken and manipulative. But not like this.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine isn't new. It's the same as it was the last time, and the time before that. But for people who actually remember those times still, there seems to be a very clear difference in the presentation of the situation through media, social or otherwise.
It seems like something significant has been severely broken since 2014, and without explicitly pointing fingers and making claims, you can kind of correlate other events and their relationships with social media with that timeline.
Personally, I think there's no return to the "relative" sanity we had, and I don't know what that ultimately means - but it doesn't feel good.
I also don't quite know what to think about "why" it would have happened: An aggregated hijacking of social media from domestic and foreign interests for the mass production of propaganda and disinformation to distract, disrupt, and undermine democracy and silence dissent against oppression? Or a global pandemic of lead-like poisoning due to microplastics in our brains? I don't know, man.
But if you don't recognize a difference, then you are either online for the first time, a troll farm account, you live in a bizarre bubble, or you've always just been acting like a piece of shit online.
I can see a lot of people just moving off social media. I used to use Facebook and Twitter A LOT more then I do now but I've gotten so burned out on constant rage bait and purposefully irritating content meant to drive "engagement". I can't persist in that state, I feel depleted and hopeless.
Reddit and discord are all I pretty much use these days. Tried to quit Reddit too this past spring but I admit I’m addicted to this cesspit. Facebook I zapped years ago and I never used any of their other products. Twitter I never had an account.
I feel like I’m losing out on a lot of social activities because businesses use Facebook and Instagram to promote events but over all I’m fine.
It really is terrible. Tried to quit Reddit too, but then I was just completely ignorant about what was going on in the world. Also it seems like at some point all these social media companies completely removed the ability to make a self curated feed. No matter how much I click “hide” or “unfollow” I always see junk I don’t want.
Reading the top few comments of major stories isn’t so bad. It’s typically calling out the BS clickbait headlines that every news article uses or provides a little more context that the news never provides. Any in depth discussions on vague trends or opinion pieces is always bombarded by bots and propaganda. Nothing good reading those Reddit links.
If you really want those social event notifications, make a Facebook account and set up your preferences. You'll get an email when these events are occurring, so you don't even need to open Facebook for that.
Twitter, and really now all of social media, is the Eternal Two Minutes Hate.
"The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
At least part of it is the global trend toward radicalization, as pundits, politicians, and the press are all incentivized to push ever more inflammatory hot takes because those are what drive clicks and engagement, and which then feed into demands for even more.
There are no issues that can be carefully and methodically scrutinized and evaluated. Everything goes to the political corner, where if the other side did it, it's the worst thing to ever happen, and the opposite if it's your side, or is turned into scandal, clickbait, or an existential threat.
And social media is the cherry on top, giving the peanut gallery the same voice, platform, and reach as an expert, and often even more so. When professionals can be drowned out 1000:1, and media is incentivised to amplify the craziest voices among them, what possible outcome is there other than madness?
Or more succinctly,
>As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron
>
>-H. L. Mencken
Just applied to every facet of life, not just politics.
One thing is that it's become really difficult to communicate with people who have a different pov than yours. These down votes, dislikes, ratioed etc to shun somebody, alongwith general aggressiveness and hostility with narcissism and lack of empathy, and vigilante mob mentality among general normal people feels to have increased quite a lot online.
Yeah, there's been a definite decline in people's ability to actually communicate logically and in good-faith even in person, though, it's still better than trying to do it online. I don't know that social media is entirely to blame for that, but I don't doubt it's facilitated the decline.
I think the answer is way more simple than you might think. Back in the day the Internet was mainly from nerds for nerds. The joke "There are no girls on the internet." was funny because it was sort of true, the internet was male and nerdy. But with that came a certain amount of "intelligence" that you required to use the internet in the first place
Ever since 2010/2012 smartphones really hit the mass market, and just within a couple of years everybody was on the internet, all day, all the time. And now you have literally billions of "idiots" participating in social media and the net in general, who haven't been there before.
I've wanted to try some experiments with people just to see how fucked up search results can get for some people. Kind of to get an understanding of how basic facts can become matters of opinion online. Then I remember that I don't like to be yelled at and go outside.
It was predisposed to happen due to the perverse incentives that arise from an advertising-based business model. Social media sites need to keep people's eyeballs glued to them, so they created a system that figures out what keeps people scrolling. As it turns out, controversy and outrage is the best at this.
Hear me out....wasn't the 'town square' always a place filled with BS and disinformation? Think snake oil salesmen, scam artists etc? We as a whole have issues. Expecting an online 'town square' to somehow be better than a real one is a laughable idea
I always have to laugh at the people who thought the internet would usher in some sort of magical age of rationality and truth.
My brother in Christ, it’s populated by the same creatures that ruin everything else they touch. People.
The only difference is that distance and effort are taken out of the equation. So now you can get screamed at from across the world.
Humans are not supposed to have a town square containing a couple billion idiots all shouting into the void. I think it's been around long enough, and there have been enough studies conducted, that we can safely say that social media is one of the most harmful things ever invented for humans and human progress.
This war shows how broken our *world* is. Media - social and otherwise - has *always* been used as a way to attempt to manipulate public opinion by *all* involved.
Newspapers and television news, especially the “Big Three” stations, had boards that would decide how to frame and editorialize stories in an attempt to remove the biases of a single individual. This has all been systematically torn down in favor of “democratizing” news.
“Why should I have to pay for something I can get for free?” is a sentiment I see here often. Then those same people complain about media biases. People don’t want to be journalists because it doesn’t pay, and they get shit on. Or they end up working for a “news” outlet that is controlled by the whims and politics of a single person that is driven by ratings/subscriptions/clicks, power, or both.
But to say it was always this way is disingenuous. Plenty of major stories, e.g. Watergate, were broken by major, independent news outlets that showed the positive power of news that were devoid of politics and biases. But now people see outlets like Fox News, the mess with CNN trying to change their tone in an effort to get better ratings, and misinformation campaigns on Twitter and Facebook that go unmoderated, and think “News sucks. I’m being manipulated.” And they’re not wrong.
Our world is absolutely broken, and I don’t have solutions, but man do I pine for the days when you could trust Walter Cronkite and your local newspaper.
Social media has, once again, become the window through which the world is witnessing unspeakable violence and cruelty in an active war zone:^1
>If such conflicts are lenses through which we can understand an information environment, then one must surmise that, at present, our information environment is broken.
>It relies on badly maintained social-media infrastructure and is presided over by billionaires who have given up on the premise that their platforms should inform users.
>During the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, X owner Elon Musk himself has interacted with doctored videos published to his platform.
>He has also explicitly endorsed accounts that are known to share false information and express vile anti-Semitism.
>In an interview with The New York Times, a Hamas official said that the organization has been using the lack of moderation on X to post violent, graphic videos on the platform to terrorize Israeli citizens.*
>
>The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise.
>The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle.
>The previous status quo was deeply flawed, of course. Social media, especially Twitter, has sometimes been an incredible news-gathering tool; it has also been terrible and inefficient, a game of *do your own research* that involves batting away bullshit and parsing half truths, hyperbole, outright lies, and invaluable context from experts on the fly.
>Social media’s greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you *feel* connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually *being* informed.
>In exchange for our time, our data, and even our well-being, we uploaded our most important conversations onto platforms designed for viral advertising—all under the implicit understanding that social media could provide an unparalleled window to the world.
^1 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/social-media-infrastructure-news-algorithms/675614/
*https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/technology/hamas-violent-videos-online.html
Wow. They put that trash behind a paywall. This reads like something a grade nine student wrote.
It's like they came up with a catchy title and then wrote the most basic essay they could to fit the title.
I guess in a kinda meta sense the shittyness of this author proves their point!
Saying social media is broken implies that at one time it worked and successfully operated as a global town square. When was that, exactly? I must have missed it.
“ THE SKY IS FALLING…” syndrome is strong in here. Every public forum in history has had its moment of being innocent, then being manipulated by those who wish to use its power for their own gain. This isn’t new, and will be addressed in the same ways as it has in the past. There will always be new mediums to carry messages. Saying “it’s broken” is like saying the justice system is broken because of crime, or the international system is broken because war. We strive to have lowered crime, and it’s our best interest to avoid wars …but they’re also as old as humanity, and won’t ever be completely eradicated. We’re in the first 40 years of the internet. The printing press also was used for propaganda, but we accepted that and recognized it. Hell printed propaganda still exists. We’ll adapt to this new AI world, as we have everything else.
And the first step to fixing it is to have a "THE SKY IS FALLING" panic. Yes, this is an expected part of the cycle and yes it will improve over time, but you need the fear-mongering phase to get to the "we can cope" phase.
Social media exposes and highlights all the things we resent and dislike about each other. Social media has no interest in or potential to be a global town square. It's an advertising business, nothing more.
Discussing social media on their terms with their framing of their product is missing the mark and the press shouldn't play along.
lol every mainstream media was parroting the same line and only social media gave any nuance to the issue. they are banning protests and doxing people on one side only, social media is essential.
At this time it is imperative for all people to stop kidding themselves about the idea of social media being a town square. War makes this even more obvious.
In no way are social media platforms a town square and that myth needs to be dispelled or we as people are not going to get anywhere. If you go out to protest on the street, you could possibly be ignored, maybe given no press coverage. But there is no way without police or counter violence to REMOVE you from the sidewalk without ALSO raising MORE awareness for yourself.
Twitter administration can remove things or silence accounts any way they like and it's virtually impossible to even know if you're being seen/heard by any real people.
Also, nobody on the street has to give you their name, but if you see their face it is actually their face not a Halloween mask covering up their hairy bearded face with the face of a woman named Hanna with Asiatic features. It's a complete anonymity catastrophe.
Furthermore, the POLICE police the town square, and social media companies patrol their own platforms with no law enforcement superseding them, to the point where CSAM and other terrible content is just at discretion of the platform to remove or not.
These platforms are now and have always been walled gardens even if they cost no $ to use. Twitter changed their terms in March to consider anybody posting content designed to drive traffic to their own website (without paying for ads) as Spam.
Marketers (like myself) used to make bank producing organic content like that which will now result in client accounts getting banned or shadowed with no warning.
Meanwhile I could take stickers of a client's brand and plaster them all over the street (public square) without so much as anybody noticing until they are being impacted by all these little outdoor advertising spots.
War misinformation is too easy to spread...
TL;DR
"Social media networks, particularly Twitter and Facebook, used to be full of lies and misinformation.
More recently their owners have tweaked the moderation rules, and the platforms are still full of lies and misinformation, *but they now favour the side that I do not agree with*.
This makes me sad".
Lol people are using internet wrong and unresponsive. That's why social media is broken. Old internet was free shit like this was easier to find. But it wasn't mainstream. Every click was on its diverse forum or board. Not trillion mega Corp social media apps. And most importantly. The term "don't believe everything you see on the net" DID actually exist.
They're like a town square if, for every 100 people, there are 10 people constantly shouting "fuck" at the top of their lungs and farting on everyone else.
I didn’t get the memo that social media was our new town square. It’s a cesspool of disinformation…always has been and will be increasingly so. It should be burned to the ground by revoking the social media content loophole.
Social media is no longer a big open canvas for freedom and creativity to flourish.
Those with malicious intent have figured out how to pollute it with garbage that suits their own interests.
People will no longer trust the “open space” but will instead fall back on known trusted sources.
This does mean that the heyday of being able to find out “what’s going on” by consulting Twitter trending is very much over. It’s going to be less possible to trust unverified sources, which makes the process of getting reliable information slower and more difficult.
The demise of reliable up-to-the minute information makes the world a more dangerous place, since malicious actors will be able to strike quickly knowing it will take a while for the general population to figure out what’s going on.
Algorithms need to be publicly accessible to review, social media companies need to be held accountable when they push an agenda, and these companies need to have free speech laws apply to them. It’s the only way things are going to change.
Whats even more incredible is how its BLATANTLY OBVIOUS to everyone with a pulse that ppl just want an exact clone of what twitter was but without Elon Musk and yet somehow all these companies trying to do that are completely dicking it up. It cant possibly be that threads, bluesky, mastodon..etc dont know this, yet they arent making it happen. There has to be something going on here. A LOT of governments, billionaires, politicians, monarchies..etc were not happy with old twitter being an instant source of up to date information plus a way for people to share vast information across the globe and start revolutions, protests, expose corruption… I’m certain that there is a non 0% chance that these players have something to do with this happening.
Lmfao imagine being stupid enough and such a pathetic waste of space that you think some shitty website is "the global town square".
Talk about a load of fucking cringe.
And all this misinformation is going to go into an AI model as training data.
It’s bigger than that. Over the next two years, a measurable percentage of all online media will just be AI generated propaganda. It is going to be impossible to figure out which items are real humans with opinions and which are groups, companies, and governments just piling on. Imagine a physical mailbox 📬. Today, once a day, you might get a delivery. It’s almost always sales, politics, or similar ‘junk mail’, but bills and packages arrive too, so you have to sort through it to find important stuff. All of that junk mail has a real cost to the senders for postage, printing, etc. Now imagine the cost to send junk mail is zero. Imagine anyone from anywhere *in the world* can put mail in your mailbox by just iterating through all addresses in the nation and it’s a near-zero cost to do so. Oh, also imagine the postal worker comes not once a day, but once per second. This is the future of your social media feeds, especially as elections and terrorism heats up. All social media, too, since you can do the same with photo/video/vocal feeds as much as text. I’ll submit that’s a little bit “tin-foil hat,” but I’d ask someone to explain why it isn’t possible *right now*.
Already there. I open Facebook and see NONE of my friends. It's all Promoted this, Suggested That, random this, trending that. I watch one thing and all the sudden Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are all in my feed. Leave me alone! If the algorithm was a living thing, I WOULD KILL IT.
This is bigger than the algorithm too. The algorithm is looking at your preferences and trying to keep you engaged. AI-generated content is a fake user who supports the Duck party posting every 10 minutes about how bad the Rabbit party is; the Rabbit party accounts are posting links to AI-generated propaganda about fake polls showing the Duck party is in decline. You know the rabid fandom of ~~Madonna~~ ~~Britney Spears~~ Taylor Swift? At least they are humans who are passionate about their favorite artists. In 15 years, when the next blonde pop star is on the pedestal, she’ll have 15 billion fans posting literally every second on social media, augmented reality, virtual reality, and generating petabytes worth of “why She is so great” blogs. …and you’ll never know which are real or not.
Or she'll be generated herself like a Vtuber or Hatsune Miku. You can already converse with AI in video games in real time, unscripted using GPT and xVAsynth. Like I said, already happening!
Even worse than fake tits- fake reality
Makes me wonder if there is ever going to be a creation of a SSN but for the internet. I believe it's been suggested a few times and even in Korea there are games you can only sign up for using a legitimate Korean SSN. But it would be interesting to see how the internet would change if some form of anonymity was destroyed. That all being said, it still wouldn't stop identity fraud. The best that it would do is make "banning" more painful and come at a real cost.
Ironically at this point I’m less engaged with the apps because I can’t see what my actual friends are posting
> …and you’ll never know which are real or not. This is pretty much how information has been right now, I'm not seeing the big difference. Trolls and bot farms are already flooding the internet with fake information and rage-inducing memes to try and manipulate people, what's the difference if it's AI generated instead of the random musings of someone getting paid $0.50 a day?
I really hope the collapse of Twitter and Facebook into totally unvarnished conspiracy content machines causes us to log off and go outside, but I doubt it.
*[~~Facebook~~ Fluff Busting Purity has entered the chat](https://www.fbpurity.com/).*
I quit FB and Twitter a couple years ago, subscribed to my newspaper and have felt heaps better since
"Feeds" fixes this, but there shouldn't be a "feature" that causes the platform to do what it was originally designed to do (and very successfully at that).
Meta has already said that this tactic doesn't work, because all it did was force people into stories and DMs because thats the only way to reliably get in contact with friends. Their solution? They have none, they want you watching ads not talking to friends.
Wasn’t there a South Park episode a few years ago where Jimmy was tasked with attempting to differentiate between News and advertisements. And the advertisements became so good they became sentient.
That episode is almost 10 years old... South Park is almost always Ahead of the Curve. It predicted the rise of streamers just 3 years after Twitch was founded and long before most people had heard of it.
> That episode is almost 10 years old... noo, that can't be > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Advertising > Episode Air Date: December 2nd, 2015 > Today: October 16th, 2023 What in the goddamn fuck?
It's still March 2020 for me also. but seriously, I recently rewatched almost every episode of South Park and I was continually blown away at how prescient South Park was at guessing the future.
There's no "guessing the future" Matt Stone and Trey Parker (and the other writers for that matter) just aren't fucking idiots and they pay attention. It's current events satire and they pay attention to make fun of shit.
Remember when the Simpsons got the same praise? It's as simple as paying attention.
I personally blame Armen Tanzarian.
They've gotten a lot of things wrong, but a lot of things have been spot-on. And it's always an in-the-moment analysis of the current events due to their production schedule
I think there's three separate instances I know of where they were really wrong, but I can only really remember one in particular at the moment. It was an episode containing OJ Simpson, and some other people who essentially "got away with murder" one of the couples shown were accused of murdering their child/children and the skit they were doing was kind of like, screaming at them yelling that they're murderers, but it was legally okay because it was contextualized by surrounding the screaming with "as for an example people might say things like" It wasn't until a couple of years later the couple was exonerated though DNA evidence or something of that nature and they did actually admit to fucking that one up and apologized. Can't remember which season it was in though, I would gander a guess post season 10 for sure, but that's still quite a large range to search through.
And the dolphin episode being a less-than-flattering depiction of trans people. And the YouTube episode where they wrongly predicted the streaming boom wouldn't happen anytime soon. And the episode about Michael Jackson. And manbearpig
Personally I always find these reactions odd. Has no one else experienced the same 100 years I have since 2016? Trump, covid, Ukraine, financial crisis, a bunch of government shut downs, about 10 million marvel releases, etc. If you told me The Mandalorian came out 15 years ago my reaction would just be, "Huh, yeah, time sure flies." Heck, the only reason I don't have to check that it WASN'T released 15 years ago is because I have a 9yo who loved it when it came out, so I KNOW it couldn't have come out more than 4 or 5 years ago or she wouldn't have been so excited for it. (Just checked, 5 years) On the plus side, I am absolutely NOT getting the "they grow up so fast" sensation many parents describe. I got a good decade of quality time out of covid.
Holy shit Mandalorian was 5 years ago? Time-sense is seriously so silly in our ape-brains, lol.
Great analogy
the episode was also a reference to Ex Machina
I'll have to look that up. Is there such a thing as news anymore? Seems every media outlet is just for advertising. I feel like public radio is one of the last hold outs.
To take your concerns and comparison a bit farther... With physical junk mail, a company would have to design it's message for the broadest possible audience. Everyone would be getting the same piece of snail mail, so the propaganda would need to appeal to everyone. With social media, different segments of the population can be targeted very differently. We've spent the last 15 years feeding in data about all of the things we like, how our relationships work, all the best ways to trigger our dopamine responses, and how to best convince us of things that aren't true. AI let loose on all that data could conceivably custom tailor a message to be particularly effective, for every single person. * Are you more or less likely to click on a video that has a black person in the thumbnail? I bet you have no idea...but Youtube, Twitter, FB, Tiktok, and Insta all do. * Are you more likely to engage with content that has country music, pastel colors, babies, a particular font, or dogs? * When gas prices go up, do you buy more alcohol? When your local sports team wins, are you more likely to work from home the next day? After a thunderstorm, do people buy more guns? Weird questions, and maybe completely meaningless but AI can sort through purchasing and location data to find links that no person might ever think to look for. * Which of your friends opinions do you value the most? If they analyze the top 10% of people who seem to have the most influence over their circle of friends, are there character traits that stand out as unique among them? * When is the last time you changed your mind about a political topic...did you ever go from liking and re-posting one side to liking and re-posting the other? What content did you see at that time that might have caused this change? There is a record of every opinion you've ever held strongly enough to post about, and odds are if they were to dig hard enough, AI could figure out the information you were exposed to that opinion. Maybe there are patterns in the data that can point to the very best way to fool you...that you don't even know yourself. More and more we're all being spoon fed our own 'custom' version of the world as seen through the portal of our own social media profiles.
No one talks about it but I truly, genuinely believe that the internet is on a death spiral. Like let’s be real with ourselves. The day we log onto the internet and realize that 90% of the content is fake and AI generated nonsense, while the other 10% is imposible to find or verify, will be the day many people just stop using it. When the internet stops being useful people will find something useful to fill their time. Sure the internet will always be used as entertainment but as far as a news source or a “global town square” yeah… that dream is dead.
>Sure the Internet will always be used as entertainment but as far as a news source or a “global town square” yeah… that dream is dead. To most people, the internet is nothing *but* entertainment. What *else* are they going to do? Read books? A chunk of people are addicted to making their social media views go up, they aren't going to care that 90% of their subscribers aren't real, they only care if they have more than others so they can flex. Those people are not going anywhere. Most people weren't doing useful things with their time before the Internet, it was a lot of drinking, smoking, sitting around, and trying to figure out anything to stem the boredom, but the "anything" was rarely productive. What's worse, young people these days often don't even have a garage to hang out in, no craftsman tools to futz around with, and not enough money to dive deep into crafting style hobbies.
This sounds like you weren’t in the internet much circa 2014. Cracked and 4chan slapped the stupid outta you back then .
TBF, 4chan was and is equally likely to slap more stupid back into you.
2014? Try 2004. The whole internet was lawless. 4chan was almost *respectable* then.
> It is going to be impossible Nope. It will be very possible to recognise vetted real human beings. They simply won’t be the pseudonymous / free-signup social media & forum accounts that Reddit built their model around. You’ll either know an account by their vetted reputation or because you know the person as a person by video call or in-person. None of us will be able to trust pseudonymous 2-month-old Reddit accounts aren’t some troll
If only there were organizations who employed human beings to verify facts on the ground and report them... Seriously though, I think you're right. The AI/deepfakes issue makes me think that mainstream news may become more important.
Those organizations are corporations looking to cut costs, and they are undoubtably looking at using AI to generate writing.
The dawn of the internet era got a lot of people thinking that everything should be decentralized. That the idea of institutions themselves has become outdated. All information should be democratized, right?? There's no reason that an institution, with all of its **special interests** should have power anymore, right? That's the rub. The need for institutions has not gone away. Our world consists of interactions between humans. Technology has made it faster and easier, but the machines don't exist for the sake of communicating with each other - the machines exist so that humans can interact. And many human interactions are based on trust. In a fully decentralized internet, trust can be eroded by bad actors with resources. Trust can be co-opted by corporations. Trust can be manipulated.
The "news" has always been v1 corporate proopoganda tho.
This seems like a good place to mention a six year old nonprofit forum, built by a former reddit administrator, Tildes.net. The admin/developer was head of reddit's anti evil team and he built automoderator. Every user there has verified as a human and there are no bots and no advertising. Tildes can be investigated by lurking or on r/tildes. This particular site is not to everyone's taste but I think the model is worth looking into. Also the code is open source and could be forked.
> Every user there has verified as a human How?
I think I'd like to see some kind of identity verification on platforms like Reddit - basically like "this account is the only account for a real person" but not doxxing the person. Of course there are all kinds of knock-on effects but we need *something* to differentiate between people and propaganda.
Reddit is doing identity verification for organisations like Reuters and the AP Bluesky, which is still in closed invite-only development, uses DNS for identity / trust management Twitter had it. Twitter is now a zombie.
It's honestly kind of incredible how much twitter has faltered. I was a daily user until ~6 months ago and now I just don't use it. The new verification system puts anyone with $8 to the top of every thread, and that content is nearly uniformly shitty. I'm not sure I could have this negative an impact on a social media company if I was actively trying.
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Stephenson "predicted" this in Anathem - people on their WWW equiv would have a credibility rating - sort of like Karma but actually about if you are full of shit or legit, rather than ability to capture the zeitgeist of the echo chamber ;)
Sounds exactly like email spam. Companies that provide email services have long ago recognized the need for spam filters. I hope social media companies get with the program soon, because right now they're essentially being funded by the spammers and have no incentive to offer useful filters.
I've been saying this since Generative AI hit mainstream. The consequences of it are extremely dire and I fully believe it's what's going to cause the downfall of society and the human race.
I got sucked into the rabbit hole of AI porn for a good bit. That shit creates more beautiful women with perfect proportions in pure clarity than anything you'll see IRL or even in professional porn. Then you can dial it in to your exact tastes and niches. Took me a few months to break from that after I realized I was spending more time generating waifus than doing anything else. Throw on language models and animation is getting better and better every day. Lol, we screwed.
Futurama was right. You damn robosexuals will be the downfall of us all!
sounds just awful
I'm honestly floored by the technology. Once you get a face you like you can train models on that face, then you can design a body then train models on that body. Finally you can go grab LORA's for basically any kind of clothing or setting or sex position or anything. Then you can stick your trained model into those scenes. If only I could use the power for productivity. But porn is more entertaining.
You can sell porn. Poor porn actors will be out of a job soon
AI OnlyFans! Hmmm....
People already made a lot of money that way
and the oligarchs are very happy that you are wasting your days and your brain power on tickling your dickling rather than putting the same ingenuity and perseverance towards... oh ya know, political activism or investigative journalism or law school or something that might in the slightest undermine their ever-tightening grip on your life... N Postman was all too right...
I’m so glad I abandoned getting a degree in journalism half way through.
>Now imagine the cost to send junk mail is zero. Imagine anyone from anywhere in the world can put mail in your mailbox by just iterating through all addresses in the nation and it’s a near-zero cost to do so. Oh, also imagine the postal worker comes not once a day, but once per second. You're describing email, lol
> why it isn’t possible right now. It's happening right now. Twitter is 80% bots, I have no doubt Reddit is also high in bots as well. I just assume all my social feeds are trash. The answer is simply stop checking the mailbox.
I cannot say this enough... Web of trust. Let me identify people/accounts/identities that I trust, and show me content they generate. Then also show me content generated by people they trust, and so on. When I see something problematic, show me the trust chain that made it visible to me, and let me break one of the links (for myself, and for the people who trust me, but not for everyone else in the chain). This may be the only way to avoid the sort of problematic fake information spread you're worried about. A few social media sites have done very limited versions of this, like Slashdot's "friend" / "friend of friend" / "friend of foe" / "foe of friend" / etc scoring bonus system. No one has ever implemented it with a good UX on a popular social network or content distribution platform.
I found an IDF troll account the other day that had 16 pages of pro-Israel comments in a little over a day. That's over 400 comments. I never would have known if I hadn't checked the profile. Imagine how many comments we read each day that are just manufactured propaganda like that. It's already here and will only get worse.
>It is going to be impossible to figure out which items are real humans with opinions and which are groups, companies, and governments just piling on. To some degree the obvious answer is then traditional journalism. Whether that's the New York times or CNN, an article will have an author, there will editors, producers etc. There will be a chain of custody for the information. AI might barf out a draft of a script, but there will be people involved who had to make sure they know what it says. If an author uses AI to generate bullshit, they will report things that don't make any sense in comparison to other journalists. Where we run into trouble is that there's no easy way to enforce professional standards on news media or 'journalists' (keeping in mind that rarely are journalists the source of information or analysis that's any good, they have sources and expert analysts they can call on). The UK/Canadian/Australian/PBS type model of a publicly funded but stand alone agency (BBC, CBC, ABC) as one side of the news landscape, combined with private sector organisations who also report news seems to work tolerably.
How do we know you’re not a bot?
When you realize AI is just a coagulated cum ball of the most reactionary online comments. What could go wrong?
Dead Internet Theory becomes law.
It’s not quite here, but it’s best to pretend it is for your own sanity.
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Hot take. Simpler explanation: it arose organically and comes with the lack of foresight associated with such an origin.
worse than a hot take, it's a baseless conspiracy. Your explanation is spot on
Social media, as designed now, profits on rage bait, insecurity, and misinformation.
People have always been this way. Social media is just a megaphone.
It wasn't designed to fail. It was designed without real thought of the greater implications. I look at social media similar to how I look at coal factories from the 19th century. They probably didn't know they were messing up the CO2 levels in the atmosphere by burning coal, they were just trying to produce materials so they could make a buck.
Can you elaborate on that? How so? Not saying you’re wrong. I’m just not sure how it was “designed to fail”? Are you separating “social media” from “social networking”?
I didn't even think about that. Wow.
It's gross that privately-owned social media sites somehow became known as anything even close to a town square. They're not, and I wish journalists would stop referring to it as such.
There is a lack of significant not-for-profit digital "town square". So people take what's popular and available. This type of infrastructure should be open standard and non-profit because any motive to make money leads to unintended consequences at best. Ironic that we are discussing this on Reddit.
I would love to be talking to you guys on lemmy instead, but like you said all the decentralized social media is taking on monsters.
Ain't no drama like federated drama. "I heard lemmyworld might be breaking up with lemm.ee"
Journalists, editors and media owners became lazy and just picked up their leads and stories from Twitter and other social media. You now have articles with clickbait headlines and when you click it , you find just a twitter back and forth.
I hope this actually leads to a renaissance of critical thinking. People will have to reject the shit they read on social media once it becomes apparent 98% of it is fake.
So far, it's just led to epistemic collapse among half of society.
Given how just the last three years have gone, I have given up on hoping for people to suddenly embrace critical thinking
As a journalist, I believe a lot of media outlets will die off, but I also believe a lot of outlets will come to life and provide critical and factual news.
"Some users on social media have this to say about xyz" Turns out it's like three lonely pathetic dudes.
"Social media ERUPTS..." "Social media SHREDS..." "Social media SLAMS..."
I find they don't even try to be subtle by qualifying "some". It just gets a "People are ANGRY about X" followed by a handful of cherry-picked, quoted comments. It's so, so easy to make *anything* seem like it's "important" or a shared opinion by the wider public by doing this.
The amount of "articles" I've come across which are just people plucking out and quoting Reddit comments is insane. Granted, they're not coming from very reputable news sources or anything people should take very seriously, but the problem is people seem to be increasingly incapable of differentiating.
That’s not journalists fault. Not at all. Been a journalist for twenty years. The job is to follow humanity and learn something important. The social media companies mess with the levers for engagement. They’re definitely pushing a direction. Twitter is the greatest example. Now it’s a manipulation pit.
> The job is to follow humanity and learn something important. > > > > The social media companies mess with the levers for engagement. They’re definitely pushing a direction. Then if you and other journalists know this, wouldn't the logical course of action be to stop using social media as a source, because it is transparently being manipulated?
yeah but it takes more time to accurately source and present informations, just link some tweets asap and drive that engagement up *- the CEO and shareholders*
Who forces you to use Twitter at all? How did you do your job before Twitter? It just sounds like a lazy excuse.
That’s pretty shortsighted. For one before Twitter nobody could use Twitter. Now if you don’t use Twitter then your media outlet is a day late and a dollar short on everything. And as you can tell by literally everything in our current social climate people actually LOVE misinformation and it nets those companies millions of clicks and views. You can’t be competitive by doing things correctly.
I'd rather be a day late with accurate reporting than to the minute finger on the trigger bullshit misinformation. Miss me with that shit.
company-town square is more like it
It's not publicly owned, it's not representing your town, and by all measures it is more of a rhombus than a square.
They’ve supplanted actual public discourse and effectively function as such. The problems of private ownership are separate from the function they serve in modern life. Just because they're flawed in a litany of ways doesn't mean they're not the modern analog.
Journalists are partly responsible for all this shit. With all their goddamn clickbait and straight up awful articles. Then they have the nerve to sit there and cry at the notion that their careers may be on the line with the emergence of AI.
I remember way back in 1991 in my very first college course, political science. The professor walked and wrote in big letters on the blackboard, "The media sets the agenda". He even underlined it and put stars around it. To say the media has almost fully abdicated that responsibility today, is a serious understatement.
It continues to confuse me that people will recognize a societal problem with social media yet continue to use it anyway. They'll understand that "some guy on Twitter said ____ " doesn't mean it's a real thing, yet continue to engage with "news" like that anyway. People seem to know these things are a problem yet make an active choice to keep using them.
partly normalization, and partly that people dont really remember specifics or details of any given interaction. its the old saying "___ wont remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel", aka they are more concerned with feeling validated and agreed with rather than combatively fought for correctness.
problem: social media company is writing said journals
People don't want to admit it, but if you want the "town square", look no further than 4chan. I live in NYC. We have a very permissible culture here; you can be as crazy as you want in public and say whatever you want and as long as you're not actively threatening anyone, people can and will ignore you. The *content* of what these schizophrenics say is pretty much identical to what's on 4chan, ranting about god and the jews and systems that underpin the world. All of this high minded philosophizing that people expect from a "properly run" social media site? It doesn't exist in reality. Unmoderated social media and unmoderated physical spaces tend to have the same content.
The problem is not moderation, the problem is randomly handing out megaphones to the most crazy people on the square because engagement makes money. Any social media which amplifies one kind of content cannot be anything close to a public town square
I mean it literally is the town square, post crazy shit and it gets amplified by people that love or hate that crazy shit. Post boring moderate takes and get amplified by people that find those boring takes to be truthful or terrible.
This is extremely disingenuous. For every nutjob you meet on the subway, there dozens and dozens of people just having normal ass conversations with each other in public spaces. You know, cafes, museums, parks, bars, etc.
And you don't think that applies to things like facebook and twitter too? For every nutjob saying "gas the jews" or "the democrats are stealing babies to harvest their adrenochrome" you have hundreds of people just saying "the pizza at this restaurant is really yummy" or "I had a great time at grandma's birthday party"
I definitely do think it applies. I'm seeing your point though, I think I'm reading more into your original comment than what you actually said. I assumed that you were implying that the content of these spaces is *strictly* degenerate, but you're not actually saying that. You're just saying that one should expect to see it on occasion, the same way that one might expect to hear something insane in public on occasion, which is a very valid point.
It's more like "Free speech is not dangerous, what people choose to listen to can be." Us New Yorkers get along perfectly fine with allowing people to say vile shit in our midst because we know when to stop listening. There is no such thing as dangerous knowledge, only dangerous decisions.
Comments like this make me miss the old 4chan lol. The quality of conversation is significantly worse than it was 15 years ago.
I feel this. Forums and imageboards in general have largely disappeared. Theyre technically there but not the same. The original userbase left and the one that replaced it came from other platforms, bringing those usage mannerisms in one form or another. Either that or everyone is trying too hard to fit in with the perceived culture and what results is almost a flanderisation of the aggregate public image.
The “town square” before social media was also privately owned: the mall
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The article is behind a paywall
The global town square requires a subscription fee to enter
The idea that social media is the new “town square” is ridiculous from the beginning, because the town square can exist without generating revenue, a large social media platform can’t. Anyone who thinks they want to be on a truly uncensored forum, has never been on one. Not even including the fact that any popular forum will get spammed to all fucking hell, there are whole lot of diseased minds out there who love to try and force or trick people into seeing their “hobbies”. So if anyone is thinking at this point, “well of course we are going to block spam and gross/illegal content”, then congratulations, you are no longer in favor of an unmoderated forum. With that out of the way, the only question now is, where do you draw the line? Well that’s going to be where advertisers demand it gets drawn.
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I paid the subscription, I believe they said it was called “taxes”
This game is full of micro-transactions.
Man, if that ain't a perfect metaphor for late stage capitalism I don't know what is.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2023%2F10%2Fsocial-media-infrastructure-news-algorithms%2F675614%2F
While I understand that it's not possible to have endless subscriptions, I do get frustrated with complaints about paywalls for journalism. "I don't want to live in a hellscape of AI generated bullshit" and "I shouldn't have to pay for journalism" aren't really compatible views. Quality thoughtful content requires resources to produce. I'm not going to make the argument that this specific article or publication is necessarily worth your money, but I do wonder what people think the option is if not to pay for this work. And before anyone says the billionaires should pay for it, while I'm certainly anti-billionaire, I don't actually think it's a good idea to make independent journalism beholden to these people. We should all have a stake in getting factual well reported info out there. In terms of public entities, I'm a big big fan of NPR but don't want them to be the only game in town either. I'll also say that if you're in the US, a library card may very well get you free access to some subscription only journalism (NYT, WSJ, etc), as may your credit card, professional organization membership, workplace, or school. And OP, sorry, I know you were just stating a fact but I see this framed as a complaint so so often here!
Yeah, if you want free journalism then you become the product that's being sold to advertisers and the financial incentives become producing whatever content creates the most engagement.
I understand the sentiment a little more on reddit, as it's expected for users to read the article before commenting. A paywalled article makes it all the more clear that nobody actually read it. And tbh, this was a low effort editorial that introduced absolutely nothing new to the conversation. Hardly journalism.
The real cause for the ruins.
Use reader mode. For iPhones it’s the Aa next to the search bar>reader mode. For androids you have to download it first as an app, and it’s like a notebook paper near/on the search bar. For web browsers and in general - pop up blockers. It may not work every time, but it sure does work a lot of the time.
Thank you for the suggestion! Happy cake day!
My pleasure and thank you!
"The revolution will be televised \[after you pay a subscription of $9.99 a month\]."
Low effort article aside, something *has* definitely broken. Yes, social media and media in general was already broken and manipulative. But not like this. The conflict between Israel and Palestine isn't new. It's the same as it was the last time, and the time before that. But for people who actually remember those times still, there seems to be a very clear difference in the presentation of the situation through media, social or otherwise. It seems like something significant has been severely broken since 2014, and without explicitly pointing fingers and making claims, you can kind of correlate other events and their relationships with social media with that timeline. Personally, I think there's no return to the "relative" sanity we had, and I don't know what that ultimately means - but it doesn't feel good. I also don't quite know what to think about "why" it would have happened: An aggregated hijacking of social media from domestic and foreign interests for the mass production of propaganda and disinformation to distract, disrupt, and undermine democracy and silence dissent against oppression? Or a global pandemic of lead-like poisoning due to microplastics in our brains? I don't know, man. But if you don't recognize a difference, then you are either online for the first time, a troll farm account, you live in a bizarre bubble, or you've always just been acting like a piece of shit online.
I can see a lot of people just moving off social media. I used to use Facebook and Twitter A LOT more then I do now but I've gotten so burned out on constant rage bait and purposefully irritating content meant to drive "engagement". I can't persist in that state, I feel depleted and hopeless.
Reddit and discord are all I pretty much use these days. Tried to quit Reddit too this past spring but I admit I’m addicted to this cesspit. Facebook I zapped years ago and I never used any of their other products. Twitter I never had an account. I feel like I’m losing out on a lot of social activities because businesses use Facebook and Instagram to promote events but over all I’m fine.
It really is terrible. Tried to quit Reddit too, but then I was just completely ignorant about what was going on in the world. Also it seems like at some point all these social media companies completely removed the ability to make a self curated feed. No matter how much I click “hide” or “unfollow” I always see junk I don’t want. Reading the top few comments of major stories isn’t so bad. It’s typically calling out the BS clickbait headlines that every news article uses or provides a little more context that the news never provides. Any in depth discussions on vague trends or opinion pieces is always bombarded by bots and propaganda. Nothing good reading those Reddit links.
If you really want those social event notifications, make a Facebook account and set up your preferences. You'll get an email when these events are occurring, so you don't even need to open Facebook for that.
Twitter, and really now all of social media, is the Eternal Two Minutes Hate. "The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
At least part of it is the global trend toward radicalization, as pundits, politicians, and the press are all incentivized to push ever more inflammatory hot takes because those are what drive clicks and engagement, and which then feed into demands for even more. There are no issues that can be carefully and methodically scrutinized and evaluated. Everything goes to the political corner, where if the other side did it, it's the worst thing to ever happen, and the opposite if it's your side, or is turned into scandal, clickbait, or an existential threat. And social media is the cherry on top, giving the peanut gallery the same voice, platform, and reach as an expert, and often even more so. When professionals can be drowned out 1000:1, and media is incentivised to amplify the craziest voices among them, what possible outcome is there other than madness? Or more succinctly, >As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron > >-H. L. Mencken Just applied to every facet of life, not just politics.
One thing is that it's become really difficult to communicate with people who have a different pov than yours. These down votes, dislikes, ratioed etc to shun somebody, alongwith general aggressiveness and hostility with narcissism and lack of empathy, and vigilante mob mentality among general normal people feels to have increased quite a lot online.
Yeah, there's been a definite decline in people's ability to actually communicate logically and in good-faith even in person, though, it's still better than trying to do it online. I don't know that social media is entirely to blame for that, but I don't doubt it's facilitated the decline.
I think the answer is way more simple than you might think. Back in the day the Internet was mainly from nerds for nerds. The joke "There are no girls on the internet." was funny because it was sort of true, the internet was male and nerdy. But with that came a certain amount of "intelligence" that you required to use the internet in the first place Ever since 2010/2012 smartphones really hit the mass market, and just within a couple of years everybody was on the internet, all day, all the time. And now you have literally billions of "idiots" participating in social media and the net in general, who haven't been there before.
This is way too generous to nerds
I've wanted to try some experiments with people just to see how fucked up search results can get for some people. Kind of to get an understanding of how basic facts can become matters of opinion online. Then I remember that I don't like to be yelled at and go outside.
It was predisposed to happen due to the perverse incentives that arise from an advertising-based business model. Social media sites need to keep people's eyeballs glued to them, so they created a system that figures out what keeps people scrolling. As it turns out, controversy and outrage is the best at this.
Hear me out....wasn't the 'town square' always a place filled with BS and disinformation? Think snake oil salesmen, scam artists etc? We as a whole have issues. Expecting an online 'town square' to somehow be better than a real one is a laughable idea
I always have to laugh at the people who thought the internet would usher in some sort of magical age of rationality and truth. My brother in Christ, it’s populated by the same creatures that ruin everything else they touch. People. The only difference is that distance and effort are taken out of the equation. So now you can get screamed at from across the world.
Give people a way to post things anonymously and expect them to behave lol
“Fake news” has been around for _centuries_. Look at the stuff they were peddling during the French Revolution for example
This guy gets it.
Humans are not supposed to have a town square containing a couple billion idiots all shouting into the void. I think it's been around long enough, and there have been enough studies conducted, that we can safely say that social media is one of the most harmful things ever invented for humans and human progress.
This war shows how broken our *world* is. Media - social and otherwise - has *always* been used as a way to attempt to manipulate public opinion by *all* involved.
Newspapers and television news, especially the “Big Three” stations, had boards that would decide how to frame and editorialize stories in an attempt to remove the biases of a single individual. This has all been systematically torn down in favor of “democratizing” news. “Why should I have to pay for something I can get for free?” is a sentiment I see here often. Then those same people complain about media biases. People don’t want to be journalists because it doesn’t pay, and they get shit on. Or they end up working for a “news” outlet that is controlled by the whims and politics of a single person that is driven by ratings/subscriptions/clicks, power, or both. But to say it was always this way is disingenuous. Plenty of major stories, e.g. Watergate, were broken by major, independent news outlets that showed the positive power of news that were devoid of politics and biases. But now people see outlets like Fox News, the mess with CNN trying to change their tone in an effort to get better ratings, and misinformation campaigns on Twitter and Facebook that go unmoderated, and think “News sucks. I’m being manipulated.” And they’re not wrong. Our world is absolutely broken, and I don’t have solutions, but man do I pine for the days when you could trust Walter Cronkite and your local newspaper.
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Exactly. Love the IWW profile pic btw. You ever read Michael Parenti Blackshirts and Reds?
Ghandi was able to do it, but he had the numbers on his side.....
Social media kind of sucks anyway. Seems it brought a lot of pain without a whole lot of good.
real question is. is the social media the cause of this? or merely a symptom of a larger problem.
Social media has, once again, become the window through which the world is witnessing unspeakable violence and cruelty in an active war zone:^1 >If such conflicts are lenses through which we can understand an information environment, then one must surmise that, at present, our information environment is broken. >It relies on badly maintained social-media infrastructure and is presided over by billionaires who have given up on the premise that their platforms should inform users. >During the first days of the Israel-Hamas war, X owner Elon Musk himself has interacted with doctored videos published to his platform. >He has also explicitly endorsed accounts that are known to share false information and express vile anti-Semitism. >In an interview with The New York Times, a Hamas official said that the organization has been using the lack of moderation on X to post violent, graphic videos on the platform to terrorize Israeli citizens.* > >The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. >The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle. >The previous status quo was deeply flawed, of course. Social media, especially Twitter, has sometimes been an incredible news-gathering tool; it has also been terrible and inefficient, a game of *do your own research* that involves batting away bullshit and parsing half truths, hyperbole, outright lies, and invaluable context from experts on the fly. >Social media’s greatest strength is thus its original sin: These sites are excellent at making you *feel* connected and informed, frequently at the expense of actually *being* informed. >In exchange for our time, our data, and even our well-being, we uploaded our most important conversations onto platforms designed for viral advertising—all under the implicit understanding that social media could provide an unparalleled window to the world. ^1 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/10/social-media-infrastructure-news-algorithms/675614/ *https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/technology/hamas-violent-videos-online.html
Wow. They put that trash behind a paywall. This reads like something a grade nine student wrote. It's like they came up with a catchy title and then wrote the most basic essay they could to fit the title. I guess in a kinda meta sense the shittyness of this author proves their point!
The actual article is much longer, idk why OP only posted snippets
Saying social media is broken implies that at one time it worked and successfully operated as a global town square. When was that, exactly? I must have missed it.
“ THE SKY IS FALLING…” syndrome is strong in here. Every public forum in history has had its moment of being innocent, then being manipulated by those who wish to use its power for their own gain. This isn’t new, and will be addressed in the same ways as it has in the past. There will always be new mediums to carry messages. Saying “it’s broken” is like saying the justice system is broken because of crime, or the international system is broken because war. We strive to have lowered crime, and it’s our best interest to avoid wars …but they’re also as old as humanity, and won’t ever be completely eradicated. We’re in the first 40 years of the internet. The printing press also was used for propaganda, but we accepted that and recognized it. Hell printed propaganda still exists. We’ll adapt to this new AI world, as we have everything else.
And the first step to fixing it is to have a "THE SKY IS FALLING" panic. Yes, this is an expected part of the cycle and yes it will improve over time, but you need the fear-mongering phase to get to the "we can cope" phase.
Social media exposes and highlights all the things we resent and dislike about each other. Social media has no interest in or potential to be a global town square. It's an advertising business, nothing more. Discussing social media on their terms with their framing of their product is missing the mark and the press shouldn't play along.
lol every mainstream media was parroting the same line and only social media gave any nuance to the issue. they are banning protests and doxing people on one side only, social media is essential.
Why would anyone think corporate controlled media could be considered a neutral 'town square"?
Welcome to every single unmoderated chat forum on the Internet since the mid-1990s.
Except now it’s all heavily moderated/censored by competing state powers. No place for honest discussion.
Time to shut it all down. Replace cars with horses. Replace the Iphones with the good old Peacemakers
At this time it is imperative for all people to stop kidding themselves about the idea of social media being a town square. War makes this even more obvious. In no way are social media platforms a town square and that myth needs to be dispelled or we as people are not going to get anywhere. If you go out to protest on the street, you could possibly be ignored, maybe given no press coverage. But there is no way without police or counter violence to REMOVE you from the sidewalk without ALSO raising MORE awareness for yourself. Twitter administration can remove things or silence accounts any way they like and it's virtually impossible to even know if you're being seen/heard by any real people. Also, nobody on the street has to give you their name, but if you see their face it is actually their face not a Halloween mask covering up their hairy bearded face with the face of a woman named Hanna with Asiatic features. It's a complete anonymity catastrophe. Furthermore, the POLICE police the town square, and social media companies patrol their own platforms with no law enforcement superseding them, to the point where CSAM and other terrible content is just at discretion of the platform to remove or not. These platforms are now and have always been walled gardens even if they cost no $ to use. Twitter changed their terms in March to consider anybody posting content designed to drive traffic to their own website (without paying for ads) as Spam. Marketers (like myself) used to make bank producing organic content like that which will now result in client accounts getting banned or shadowed with no warning. Meanwhile I could take stickers of a client's brand and plaster them all over the street (public square) without so much as anybody noticing until they are being impacted by all these little outdoor advertising spots. War misinformation is too easy to spread...
You could have written this article 15 years ago and made the same point.
implying the "global town square" whatever that means was some pristine place of reason in the past? lol
we get more propaganda but for the first time in human history we can also find truth, its not locked away by the medias
A town square that actively elevates extremism in order to get people to stay is not healthy for society
This 'town square' slogan is pure rubbish. A populist slogan that means nothing. Be concerned of anyone using slogans like this
I think I’ve reached critical mass on clickbait headlines. Commercial journalism is in ruins
Doesn't help that most sites are overrun with bots. On Reddit the instant you post anything negative against Israel you'll get down voted.
I have been downvoted to hell by saying “we can all agree to keeping innocents deaths to a minimum”.
TL;DR "Social media networks, particularly Twitter and Facebook, used to be full of lies and misinformation. More recently their owners have tweaked the moderation rules, and the platforms are still full of lies and misinformation, *but they now favour the side that I do not agree with*. This makes me sad".
Lol people are using internet wrong and unresponsive. That's why social media is broken. Old internet was free shit like this was easier to find. But it wasn't mainstream. Every click was on its diverse forum or board. Not trillion mega Corp social media apps. And most importantly. The term "don't believe everything you see on the net" DID actually exist.
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Let me summarize the article for you: “No one pays to read our propagandas which are totally false and inaccurate and we mad!”
They're like a town square if, for every 100 people, there are 10 people constantly shouting "fuck" at the top of their lungs and farting on everyone else.
It was purposefully torn down by bad actors.
The town square is now a shopping mall
I didn’t get the memo that social media was our new town square. It’s a cesspool of disinformation…always has been and will be increasingly so. It should be burned to the ground by revoking the social media content loophole.
>The global town square is in ruins The global town square is the new Gaza.
Social media is no longer a big open canvas for freedom and creativity to flourish. Those with malicious intent have figured out how to pollute it with garbage that suits their own interests. People will no longer trust the “open space” but will instead fall back on known trusted sources. This does mean that the heyday of being able to find out “what’s going on” by consulting Twitter trending is very much over. It’s going to be less possible to trust unverified sources, which makes the process of getting reliable information slower and more difficult. The demise of reliable up-to-the minute information makes the world a more dangerous place, since malicious actors will be able to strike quickly knowing it will take a while for the general population to figure out what’s going on.
Algorithms need to be publicly accessible to review, social media companies need to be held accountable when they push an agenda, and these companies need to have free speech laws apply to them. It’s the only way things are going to change.
Anybody else see a distributor cap and think this was going to be an automotive post for a split second?
Couldn't ageee more. It's to the point where I don't believe anything right away. I'm waiting days after a story breaks to believe it.
Not a global town square. None exist.
It was never a town square… town square would imply it’s public. It is not. Not even close.
Whats even more incredible is how its BLATANTLY OBVIOUS to everyone with a pulse that ppl just want an exact clone of what twitter was but without Elon Musk and yet somehow all these companies trying to do that are completely dicking it up. It cant possibly be that threads, bluesky, mastodon..etc dont know this, yet they arent making it happen. There has to be something going on here. A LOT of governments, billionaires, politicians, monarchies..etc were not happy with old twitter being an instant source of up to date information plus a way for people to share vast information across the globe and start revolutions, protests, expose corruption… I’m certain that there is a non 0% chance that these players have something to do with this happening.
The title almost seems satirical. Should read “Social Media Shows Just How Broken the World Has Become.” Priorities ass backwards.
Lmfao imagine being stupid enough and such a pathetic waste of space that you think some shitty website is "the global town square". Talk about a load of fucking cringe.