I felt like this whole thing is extremely inorganic. Funded by a WalMart heiress, website went up hours before a massive NYT ad buy, and (in my opinion) what felt like lot of coordinated / paid / botted engagement.
Idk, I don't want the internet to be dictated by followers/engagement that can be easily botted via a SMM panel for pennies.
jfengel 50 minutes ago [-]
How do I get in on that gig? I showed up because I thought I was protecting democracy from a felon who is taking billions in bribes. Like a chump!
kaldev 36 minutes ago [-]
Gambling companies literally pay people to post on twitter?
You can go to an SMM panel right now and get a bot farm to rebrand tens of thousands of accounts on any platform to align with your messaging and spam the fuck out of replies to manufacture consensus. There is a very high chance this exact playbook worked on you lol.
digitaltrees 19 minutes ago [-]
Bs. The facts are clear and independently verifiable. The Dutch government saw Jared k laundering money in real time. Trump is literally bribing voters from the stump. We literally invaded Venezuela took their oil and gold and transferred it to an a foreign bank account controlled by the executive rather than congress. There is an actual active market for bribery to buy pardons and get insider information about presidential policy for trading activities. I can go on and on.
nitwit005 16 minutes ago [-]
The call to protest at some specific location and time might be "artificial", but people have to want to protest. Trump has simply managed to inspire millions to do so.
jeremyjh 43 minutes ago [-]
It’s really hard to believe how much people hate that dumb motherfucker?
kaldev 34 minutes ago [-]
People def do and that's totally fine. You don't feel like the fact that this "movement" is funded by a WalMart heiress is fishy? Full page NYT ads trying to mobilize people into protest?
Organic protests of any sort is fine. Between this shit and the "ChaoticGood" marketing operation ran for Geese, you cannot begin to understand how much of the interaction you see on the web is bought and paid for.
digitaltrees 17 minutes ago [-]
This is an ad hominem attack. It doesn’t matter what the origin of a fact is if it is verifiable and accurate.
delecti 11 minutes ago [-]
Elon is the largest individual political donor ever. I think a billionaire funding counter-protests is not that fishy in contrast.
I don't think a movement having a bit of funding for the organizers is that big of a deal though. The actual protesters are there because they want to be.
stickfigure 16 minutes ago [-]
How does it feel to be part of Putin's disinformation campaign?
What, you don't enjoy having your opinions dismissed because someone famous shares them?
40four 1 hours ago [-]
Meta can act like they don't know what's happening, but they do. As do all the other tech giants. They've been censoring and curating people feeds for a long time. This story is amusing since it's one instance where a "Team Blue" was affected. In general, it's usually "Team Red" channels are the ones getting censored.
There is an interesting project America's Digital Shield that studies these practices (https://americasdigitalshield.com/). They capture "ephemeral" content from search results and social feeds from volunteers, with a balanced distribution of the political spectrum.
Basically, the idea is that none of the content we get fed from tech giants is unbiased, even search results are manipulated to affect people one way or the other, especially when it comes to politics and elections. It's pretty upsetting once you understand what's happening.
digitaltrees 25 minutes ago [-]
Except the team red messages were demonstrably false and related to factual claims. No kings is pure opinion.
felixgallo 36 minutes ago [-]
the 'team red is being silenced' nonsense was, and is, a transparently synthetic attempt to promote right-wing discourse no matter how ridiculous it was. You may remember that Elon "free speech absolutist" Musk was the champion of this meme, claiming that Twitter was suppressing right wing views, and that every single one of his and Matt Taibbi's claims turned out to have been false or overblown.
Its honestly one of the biggest problems with this site. Some large post, 400 comments in, gets flagged cause of a few snowflakes got their feelings hurt.
And instead of the article just not being shown to them, their whim is forced on everybody.
And even if it is an incendiary news article, the discussions are usually still better than average. But no, a few whinys kill it for everyone.
fhdkweig 7 minutes ago [-]
> gets flagged cause of a few snowflakes got their feelings hurt
correction: some guy got his wallet hurt.
It is clear to me that monied/political interests are on every platform, including this one.
slowin 24 minutes ago [-]
Indeed, flagging should be disabled for any post with more than like 50 upvotes.
cowlevel 1 minutes ago [-]
Then you'd see the opposite - you'd see brand new attack posts with 51 upvotes and no comments.
slim 3 hours ago [-]
Some king with flagging power flagged it
digitaltrees 12 minutes ago [-]
Remember when zuck considered a presidential run when he saw how Facebook could sway voters and elections? And then Elon bought twitter for the same reason? We are fortunate for their awkward detestable personalities, otherwise they would have had a shot.
jey 42 minutes ago [-]
I'm not a Meta fan or anything, but this does seem kind of tricky to deal with. Specifically that pages/topics which get sudden influx of activity at once can look similar to a coordinated spam campaign. Especially if combined with being flagged opponents who don't want to see that content. It seems like it could be hard to tell the two apart, or at least the false positives seem hard to control.
Can anyone with more experience on these kinds of spam/fraud detection systems could chime in?
2 hours ago [-]
yodsanklai 5 minutes ago [-]
"Never attribute to evil that which is adequately explained by incompetence"
cosmicgadget 3 hours ago [-]
The headline is old news but the shifting explanations is entertaining.
"Claude's fault."
Kalanos 47 minutes ago [-]
such hypocrisy because free speech is always their excuse not in intervene in algorithms
solid_fuel 1 hours ago [-]
After the crap they pulled in the latest Brazilian election, there is no reason to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt. They are obviously and intentionally trying to use their extreme influence over online communities to influence elections.
Watch for more fuckery during the current US election season.
pino83 1 hours ago [-]
People give away our planet and our souls to Facebook since decades now. Everyone knew someone who was uncomfortable with that and who asked whether a little less Facebook wouldn't be more healthy. These ones got ignored.
So, well, I don't like fascists. But if Facebook now makes use of the fact that you gave our world to them, it's hard to blame them for that.
People failed in that regard. Not Facebook. They succeeded. People failed.
freejazz 52 minutes ago [-]
Oh yeah, no murderers, just a system that makes them...
gigatexal 53 minutes ago [-]
When the Dems take Congress good ol’ Zuck will be woke again. The man has no spine. And because he doesn’t his share price has skyrocketed.
jfengel 46 minutes ago [-]
Congress is largely impotent. Even if Democrats take both houses, it won't be by a veto-proof majority. Congress was designed to be "deliberative", so it has ceded more and more power to the executive branch just so anything actually gets done.
Zuckerberg knows that the power is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1st St. Maybe he'll change his mind in a couple of years, but he's going to spend those years doing his best to ensure that he doesn't have to.
gigatexal 43 minutes ago [-]
Step 1 take Congress. Step 2 in 2028 take the White House. Step 3 start fixing all the damage of the last 2 Trump administrations. I’m long the US. We will get there.
Of course he knows where his bread is buttered. And he will cozy up to the new powers too. He has no spine. No moral code. It’s all power and money and meta. Fine. Good for shareholders. Bad for young men everywhere trying to pattern themselves after these barrons of industry.
alex1138 14 minutes ago [-]
I have to agree. The man has always been accused of stealing from others going back to the Winklevosses. He'll take any side is expedient regardless of what you (general 'you') think politically
SNAZZYSILVEr 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 22:26:29 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://newrepublic.com/post/217281/meta-suspend-democratic-...
I aggressively block/hide anything right-wing, and yet somehow "the algorithm" thought I'd be really into that...
0 - provocative title of a blog post I wrote on this: https://decodingvibes.com/blog/no-kings-just-a-few-techno-lo...
Idk, I don't want the internet to be dictated by followers/engagement that can be easily botted via a SMM panel for pennies.
You can go to an SMM panel right now and get a bot farm to rebrand tens of thousands of accounts on any platform to align with your messaging and spam the fuck out of replies to manufacture consensus. There is a very high chance this exact playbook worked on you lol.
Organic protests of any sort is fine. Between this shit and the "ChaoticGood" marketing operation ran for Geese, you cannot begin to understand how much of the interaction you see on the web is bought and paid for.
I don't think a movement having a bit of funding for the organizers is that big of a deal though. The actual protesters are there because they want to be.
What, you don't enjoy having your opinions dismissed because someone famous shares them?
There is an interesting project America's Digital Shield that studies these practices (https://americasdigitalshield.com/). They capture "ephemeral" content from search results and social feeds from volunteers, with a balanced distribution of the political spectrum.
Basically, the idea is that none of the content we get fed from tech giants is unbiased, even search results are manipulated to affect people one way or the other, especially when it comes to politics and elections. It's pretty upsetting once you understand what's happening.
And instead of the article just not being shown to them, their whim is forced on everybody.
And even if it is an incendiary news article, the discussions are usually still better than average. But no, a few whinys kill it for everyone.
correction: some guy got his wallet hurt.
It is clear to me that monied/political interests are on every platform, including this one.
Can anyone with more experience on these kinds of spam/fraud detection systems could chime in?
"Claude's fault."
Watch for more fuckery during the current US election season.
So, well, I don't like fascists. But if Facebook now makes use of the fact that you gave our world to them, it's hard to blame them for that.
People failed in that regard. Not Facebook. They succeeded. People failed.
Zuckerberg knows that the power is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1st St. Maybe he'll change his mind in a couple of years, but he's going to spend those years doing his best to ensure that he doesn't have to.
Of course he knows where his bread is buttered. And he will cozy up to the new powers too. He has no spine. No moral code. It’s all power and money and meta. Fine. Good for shareholders. Bad for young men everywhere trying to pattern themselves after these barrons of industry.