Twitter bots boosted the trending #TrudeauMustGo hashtag

NineConsonants · Jul 20, 2019

samoyed said:
It needs to be regulated, or shut down until people figure out how to regulate it. People already solved some of the problems about how to regulate books, radio, TV, etc, we have tons of laws for this stuff. You don't see it because all this was done years and years before you were born, but pretty much all media has been subjected to regulations of some form or another when people and governments have gauged their effects on society and determined they were harmful. Sometimes they go too far in trying to clamp down on it (Nazi book burnings), sometimes they don't go far enough (Daughters of the Confederacy, the reason "Confederate pride" exists today). Social media, in my view, is a case where "governments aren't doing enough".

Why does that matter? The only question that's important to me is: is the good stuff worth the bad stuff?

If social media is leading to violent attacks on refugees, a society must ask "is it worth keeping Facebook around if it's being used to inflame violence against vulnerable groups?" I feel like you've never considered this question, either because you never asked yourself "is it all worth it" or because you know what the "moral" answer is already and you don't like it.

I don't know what regulations you're talking about when it comes to books, in America at least. I'm against a lot of the FCC regulations on TV and radio because they're largely based on pushing puritanical morals about swearing and sex. Publishers having standards for what they're willing to publish as a book isn't the same thing.

I don't know how you can think the government isn't doing enough with social media unless you also think they aren't doing enough with the internet overall. Should each government in the world be snooping into Resetera too to make sure people aren't spreading the kind of ideas they think shouldn't be spread?

samoyed · Jul 20, 2019

NineConsonants said:
I don't know how you can think the government isn't doing enough with social media unless you also think they aren't doing enough with the internet overall.

I do think this.

Should each government in the world be snooping into Resetera too to make sure people aren't spreading the kind of ideas they think shouldn't be spread?

I'd rather they not. But Resetera isn't Facebook, nor is it Twitter and conflating the two is just being disingenuous. It is an issue of scale.

Facebook basically has the population and wealth of a small country. If a small country was spreading Nazi propaganda across the world, would you go "oh well, they should be left alone".

And they're on the road to setting up their own currency as well: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...pedaling-from-its-ambitious-vision-for-libra/

I notice you haven't given me an answer for the, supposedly, good outcomes of social media that outweigh the bad. If you say "social media shouldn't be touched", this is the same thing as saying "the good parts of it outweigh the bad".

I'm very curious as to what these good parts are.

NineConsonants · Jul 20, 2019

samoyed said:
I do think this.

I'd rather they not. But Resetera isn't Facebook, nor is it Twitter and conflating the two is just being disingenuous.

That's not how regulation works. You're just targeting the hot topics instead of targeting the actual problems. You just said you think governments don't regulate the internet enough. Regulation isn't something you can do effectively if you're not willing to actually search the space that you're trying to regulate. You have to really consider how big the internet is here. Even though Facebook and Twitter are massive, they are not anywhere close to the majority of the internet. The things you're claiming you think are harmful are spreading through many channels through the internet. To say "oh government intervention on just the top social media sites is enough" is nothing but security theater. It's just responding to the stimuli immediately in front of you without actually solving the problem you are talking about.

ChristianH94 · Jul 20, 2019

Ya know something going through my mind every time this happens is if it's really this easy, why don't people I guess in this case do the sort of social media tactics but with content or ideas that aren't in support of something truly awful? I understand there's a lot of psychology in play here that does rally up people who are looking to be angry but there's also plenty of things in our society that are legitimately awful that need addressing that I'd imagine just about everyone would be rightfully angry at.

samoyed · Jul 20, 2019

NineConsonants said:
That's not how regulation works. You're just targeting the hot topics instead of targeting the actual problems.

The actual problems are ideas. Ideas can't be killed without killing the people who have them. They take decades and decdes to fade away. I'm not going to kill people for wrongthink. The only place where it's ethical for government to intervene is in the manner ideas are spread and kept alive... like social media. Education is another sphere government can influence but it takes decades to see the effects of education on a society and people are being hurt right now.

On the other hand we can shut down Facebook and Twitter tomorrow. It is literally a few switches.

To say "oh government intervention on just the top social media sites is enough" is nothing but security theater.

When the hell did I ever say this?

This is a fraction of my thoughts on this issue that I wrote today in another thread.

samoyed said:
Pretty much every country with a history of ethnonationalism needs hate speech laws, usually imposed on them from the outside.

France and Germany has managed to duck the ethnonationalism problem for so long, despite one country being a victim in WW2 and one being an aggressor, and both being majority white Christian countries, because of their robust hate speech laws and their approaches to education and social conditioning and being committed to equality. The countries that just let people do whatever the hell they want easily tip over into fascism, because fascism is extremely virulent and festers where there aren't strong social structures or education.

(Also being wealthy countries also helps but this is a different discussion.)

It's a cultural problem, but you can't directly change culture with laws. You can only try to nudge people in some direction or an other and it takes a long time for nudges to build up into movements.

I have written hundreds and hundreds of words about what I think can be done in various fields and on various topics that I cannot possibly sum up here. This is a topic about social media, I'm going to relay my thoughts on social media. I'm not going to go into my thoughts on educational reform in a topic about Trudeau's latest botnet hashtag, but that doesn't mean I don't think we need educational reform across the world, it's just not relevant to this topic and beyond the scale of it.

subrock · Jul 20, 2019

I find it incredible that there isn't enormous pressure on Twitter to ban bots and prevent bot signups

samoyed · Jul 20, 2019

ChristianH94 said:
why don't people I guess in this case do the sort of social media tactics but with content or ideas that aren't in support of something truly awful?

Bad ideas like "gays are the enemy" are easier to spread than good ideas like "gays are people too".

You can think of one as an addictive drug and the other one as an unpleasant medicine. It's because if you grew up in a culture that says "gays are the enemy", the first idea says "your feelings are right and anyone who tells you you're wrong is lying to you". The second idea, the medicine, says "you're wrong and the things that you were taught are wrong".

People don't like being wrong.

NineConsonants · Jul 20, 2019

samoyed said:
The actual problems are ideas. Ideas can't be killed without killing the people who have them. They take decades and decdes to fade away. I'm not going to kill people for wrongthink. The only place where it's ethical for government to intervene is in the manner ideas are spread and kept alive... like social media. Education is another sphere government can influence but it takes decades to see the effects of education on a society and people are being hurt right now.

On the other hand we can shut down Facebook and Twitter tomorrow. It is literally a few switches.

When the hell did I ever say this?

This is a fraction of my thoughts on this issue that I wrote today in another thread.

I have written hundreds and hundreds of words about what I think can be done in various fields and on various topics that I cannot possibly sum up here. This is a topic about social media, I'm going to relay my thoughts on social media. I'm not going to go into my thoughts on educational reform in a topic about Trudeau's latest botnet hashtag, but that doesn't mean I don't think we need educational reform across the world, it's just not relevant to this topic and beyond the scale of it.

Im saying you think getting rid of social media is enough and not moderating internet sites at a government level. Your argument was that Resetera isnt Facebook and shouldn't have government intervention. But it's clear that users of Resetera can and have been ideologically influences by their time here. Do you not think users that are on here daily posting thousands of messages and reading more aren't pollinating ideas? You cherry pick Resetera as not a problem because you trust it from your experience. But that cannot be discovered without actually monitoring the conversations. There is so much conversations that occur off the top social media sites that are doing what you're worried about, but handling that isn't solvable with a single sentence so you hand-wave it away. Frankly, sites like Resetera are social media for all intents and purposes.

ChristianH94 · Jul 20, 2019

samoyed said:
Bad ideas like "gays are the enemy" are easier to spread than good ideas like "gays are people too".

Riiiiight and I get that but in this instance I'm more at awe at how so far really the only people utilizing these social media tactics are more or less trolls and extremists. Once again, hatred and anger are sadly a lot easier emotions to manipulate and more importantly take advantage of than anything else, but the rate this stuff happens makes it seem like any idiot can cause serious damage in the world by snapping their fingers.

Also unrelated but related, as I'm typing this I'm also hit with the unfortunate realization that there truly is no proper solution to this as even if the US government cracks down on Twitter and forces them to at the very least update their algorithm there's no guarantee that whatever the next big social media application whatever it may be will created in such a way to prevent crap like this from happening.

samoyed · Jul 20, 2019

NineConsonants said:
Im saying you think getting rid of social media is enough and not moderating internet sites at a government level.

And I have never said this. Stop reading things I don't say, please. Once again, it is just a single idea I have, regarding this single topic, because this is a thread about some Twitter bot bullshit and I have spent a lot of time thinking about the Twitter problem.

Your argument was that Resetera isnt Facebook and shouldn't have government intervention. But it's clear that users of Resetera can and have been ideologically influences by their time here. Do you not think users that are on here daily posting thousands of messages and reading more aren't pollinating ideas?

They are. Again, it's a matter of scale. You can read through the front pages of both forums in a day. This is humanly possible. It is not humanly possible to read all Facebook posts in a given day. You can assign a moderator to monitor Resetera (this is literally how the site is run) but you cannot build a moderation team large enough to monitor all of Facebook. And there's a problem with moderating Facebook by hand as well. You were actually in this thread but I don't think you internalized its lesson:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/inside-the-traumatic-life-of-a-facebook-moderator.124272/

There is a human cost associated with moderating Facebook manually. The cost is not worth the results: keeping Facebook around, just relatively clean of the worst of the worst content, but not all the really bad stuff that's still on there.

but handling that isn't solvable with a single sentence

It is. The sentence is "Shut down Facebook" or "Shut down Twitter".

Frankly, sites like Resetera are social media for all intents and purposes.

And I have never stated anything to the contrary. Can you actually read what I'm saying instead of projecting your own ideas on to me?

samoyed said:
But Resetera isn't Facebook, nor is it Twitter and conflating the two is just being disingenuous. It is an issue of scale.

ChristianH94 said:
Riiiiight and I get that but in this instance I'm more at awe at how so far really the only people utilizing these social media tactics are more or less trolls and extremists.

There's people trying to do it in the other direction. It has some moderate success but it's not nearly as successful as the other kind.

Examples:

Leftist Youtube |OT| We Virtue Signal OT

Discussion thread for the bizarre progressive corner of Youtube. Many of these folks produce great content but aren’t large enough to have received their own thread. They're a pretty important group, as for the last many years Youtube has been outright dominated by disingenuous centrists and...

www.resetera.com

https://www.resetera.com/threads/contrapoints-is-de-radicalizing-young-right-wing-men-vice.105595/

NineConsonants · Jul 20, 2019

samoyed said:
And I have never said this. Stop reading things I don't say, please. Once again, it is just a single idea I have, regarding this single topic, because this is a thread about some Twitter bot bullshit and I have spent a lot of time thinking about the Twitter problem.

They are. Again, it's a matter of scale. You can read through the front pages of both forums in a day. This is humanly possible. It is not humanly possible to read all Facebook posts in a given day. You can assign a moderator to monitor Resetera (this is literally how the site is run) but you cannot build a moderation team large enough to monitor all of Facebook. And there's a problem with moderating Facebook by hand as well. You were actually in this thread but I don't think you internalized its lesson:

https://www.resetera.com/threads/inside-the-traumatic-life-of-a-facebook-moderator.124272/
There is a human cost associated with moderating Facebook manually. The cost is not worth the results: keeping Facebook around, just relatively clean of the worst of the worst content, but not all the really bad stuff that's still on there.

It is. The sentence is "Shut down Facebook" or "Shut down Twitter".

And I have never stated anything to the contrary. Can you actually read what I'm saying instead of projecting your own ideas on to me?

There's people trying to do it in the other direction. It has some moderate success but it's not nearly as successful as the other kind.

Examples:

Leftist Youtube |OT| We Virtue Signal OT

Discussion thread for the bizarre progressive corner of Youtube. Many of these folks produce great content but aren’t large enough to have received their own thread. They're a pretty important group, as for the last many years Youtube has been outright dominated by disingenuous centrists and...

www.resetera.com

https://www.resetera.com/threads/contrapoints-is-de-radicalizing-young-right-wing-men-vice.105595/

This discussion was never about manual or automatic moderation. It was about whether there should be government moderation. Government moderation can be manual or automatic or both. Again, you trust Resetera because your first hand experience tells you to trust the moderation. How can a government know that the moderation is fine on Resetera without some sort of monitoring? You do realize there are sites like Resetera that exist that are even more popular that share and propagate the troublesome views you're talking about right? Now how do you figure out which one of these are the troublesome ones or not without actually searching the space?

You can't just know who is and isn't safe. You have to figure it out one way or another. But that's hard so you are looking away from it. You feel like killing off Facebook and Twitter is easy so you push for that. But even if you did that, those people are just going to go to mediums on the internet that aren't moderated.

You simply cannot say your solution works if you're not willing to use similar moderation throughout the internet. Otherwise you're just cherry-picking blaming the biggest social media sites for it all when they aren't even collectively the 50% majority of these harmful conversation.

samoyed · Jul 20, 2019

NineConsonants said:
How can a government know that the moderation is fine on Resetera without some sort of monitoring? You do realize there are sites like Resetera that exist that are even more popular that share and propagate the troublesome views you're talking about right? Now how do you figure out which one of these are the troublesome ones or not without actually searching the space?

I never said Resetera shouldn't be monitored, I said I would prefer it if it wasn't. Hell, it probably is being monitored. All sites using ads sell a bit of their user data to companies who then pass them on to government when the government asks for it. Resetera isn't a special exception here. But just because a site is monitored doesn't mean an authority does something about it. The Reddit admin literally monitors r/the_donald. They know it's a bad place. They have the power and the authority to ban it. They don't, because they want to keep the ad revenue.

You feel like killing off Facebook and Twitter is easy so you push for that.

It is the only solution I consider at all "possible" and up to the task of doing what I want to do: rapidly diminish the spread of violent ideologies. If you have some better but "harder" solutions, by all means, let me know what they are. If you have no solutions, then I don't care at all.

But even if you did that, those people are just going to go to mediums on the internet that aren't moderated.

Then you shut them down again. What, do you think it's one-and-done? The struggle of governments vs violent ideologies is one that lasts for centuries. The struggle against ethnonationalism will outlive both of us here. Shutting down Facebook/Twitter is only one fight in the ideological war against ethnonationalism, a tug-of-war that started hundreds of years before we were born and will probably last hundreds of years after we die.

You simply cannot say your solution works if you're not willing to use similar moderation throughout the internet.

Oh, but I am. The difference between Facebook and Resetera is this. Facebook has more than 1.7 billion users. Twitter has 320 million users. Resetera has 50,000 users. If we shut down Facebook, we immediately halt the spread of ethnonationalism to potentially an audience of a billion people. If we shut down Resetera, we stop the spread of dank gaming memes between 50,000 people.

Which case here do you think is worth the time?

S-Wind · Jul 21, 2019

andymoogle said:
We are having teens in Sweden doing Nazi salutes during amuzement park rides nowadays. And that's 40+ teens so far this year. Where do you think they got that from?

Our racist party keeps getting more and more votes every election. In comparison, our previous racist party in the 90s managed to take some seats once and then kept on failing until they dissolved a few years later.

It's so much easier for white supremacists to share their ideas and manipulate people nowadays. Youtube, Twitter and Facebook are the main culprits for this garbage. This is being fed to people 24/7.

No, that does not mean that racism didn't exist before social media or the Internet. It's just that white supremacists are using it perfectly in order to gain power and brainwash kids (and adults) around the world. It doesn't help that parents let their kids watch whatever on their phones.

Also, there is no way that the antivax movement would have gotten so big globally without social media. That's a perfect example of what kind of effects social media has on a global level.

I agree with everything you've said.

It's very frustrating that some people don't see it.