Social Media: The God That Failed

[BurtReynolds]

"disinformation"

[BurtReynolds]

I prefer the conspiracy theory that Twitter did it to themselves to further suppress the news, deflect from the uproar, and maybe dump some files while they are at it.

[simple schoolboy]

Facebook is cautioning that users must be in good standing in order to purchase and use their VR equipment. I look forward to a low social credit score locking me out of my devices.

[Bi_3]

Facebook is cautioning that users must be in good standing in order to purchase and use their VR equipment. I look forward to a low social credit score locking me out of my devices.

Maybe lay off the Armenia stuff a bit

[simple schoolboy]

Facebook is cautioning that users must be in good standing in order to purchase and use their VR equipment. I look forward to a low social credit score locking me out of my devices.

Maybe lay off the Armenia stuff a bit

Nah, thats a public service.

[BurtReynolds]

Facebook is cautioning that users must be in good standing in order to purchase and use their VR equipment. I look forward to a low social credit score locking me out of my devices.

Maybe lay off the Armenia stuff a bit

Nah, thats a public service.

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[BurtReynolds]

Anybody ever heard of Casey Neistat before? I'd never heard of him until today. One of my students wrote a paper on him. I've just watched a few videos. Seems like pretty vapid stuff to me, though I do appreciate the energy of his videos. But maybe I'm missing something, and he's as brilliant and groundbreaking as my student would have me believe?

All I know about him is that he is so aggressively unattractive that I have a hard time looking at him, but good for him for making a lot of money on morons or whatever he does.

[BurtReynolds]

[BurtReynolds]

Twitter caved and finally let nypost back on, in that typically corporate way that satisfies precisely no one.

[BurtReynolds]

[washing machine]

The biggest threat social media poses to our lives is how easily it distracts us from being present. The rest is probably just a lot of noise.

https://www.hoover.org/research/no-fair-trial-big-tech

The bad actors in the movie’s narrative are advertisers and the wealthy social media firms. At one point in the movie, Parakilas states, “It’s not like they’re [the social media companies] trying to benefit us. Right? We’re just zombies and they want us to look at more ads so they can make more money.” What’s the problem with that? You might think in a standard-length movie, the critics would try to say why. Here’s the amazing thing: they don’t.

So let’s fill in the missing reasoning. Think about why companies would pay social media firms to advertise. It’s to get people to buy their products. If advertising on social media were seen as completely ineffective, companies would pay precisely zero for advertising. The fact that they keep paying and that social media companies get rich by selling advertising, month in, month out, means that advertising is effective.

Wouldn’t you want the critics in the movie to then point to how advertising manipulates our tastes for products, causing us to buy things we don’t “really” want? Amazingly, they don’t.

The closest the movie comes to making a case is near the end of the movie, when Rosenstein states:

Corporations are using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention to what they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.

But why would they do that? Isn’t it easier to sell us things that are consistent with our goals, our values, and our lives?

[BurtReynolds]

I'm not too worried about them using algorithms to get people to buy things. I wonder if it's even that effective. It's the censorship and echo chambers that are the really worry. I don't know how you solve the problem of echo chambers, but they don't seem interested in trying.

[Jorge]

Anybody ever heard of Casey Neistat before? I'd never heard of him until today. One of my students wrote a paper on him. I've just watched a few videos. Seems like pretty vapid stuff to me, though I do appreciate the energy of his videos. But maybe I'm missing something, and he's as brilliant and groundbreaking as my student would have me believe?

Yeah a massively successful Youtuber but I don't really get it

He was in that Netflix movie with Joseph Gordon Levitt a few months ago

[washing machine]

I'm not too worried about them using algorithms to get people to buy things. I wonder if it's even that effective. It's the censorship and echo chambers that are the really worry. I don't know how you solve the problem of echo chambers, but they don't seem interested in trying.

If Parler is any indication, the solution seems to be to double down on the echo. Not ideal, but at least the grackle brains are yelling into the wind now. censorship and less regulation is probably the best solution. Let the wheat and chaff of free speech live and die by natural selection.

[Jorge]

Anybody ever heard of Casey Neistat before? I'd never heard of him until today. One of my students wrote a paper on him. I've just watched a few videos. Seems like pretty vapid stuff to me, though I do appreciate the energy of his videos. But maybe I'm missing something, and he's as brilliant and groundbreaking as my student would have me believe?

Yeah a massively successful Youtuber but I don't really get it

He was in that Netflix movie with Joseph Gordon Levitt a few months ago

Oh that's from October

[BurtReynolds]

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[BurtReynolds]

[Bi_3]

Now where will my uncle be able to expose the super secret plans of the Deep State?