As part of the "consortium" of media outlets releasing embargoed stories about Facebook today, the Atlantic tells us that if you think Facebook is a problem in the United States, you ain't seen nothing. In the rest of the world it's an even bigger cesspool. In particular, it's a cesspool of Hindu nationalist hatred in India.
I have absolutely no problem believing this. The thing is, even as someone who follows Indian politics only casually, I'm keenly aware that Hindu nationalism has been growing for the last two or three decades. The Hindu nationalist BJP party has been gaining strength since the mid-80s, and anti-Muslim hatred metastasized seven years ago when the BJP's hater-in-chief, Narenda Modi, took office as prime minister. In other words, Indian Facebook is a cesspool because Indian politics was a cesspool first.
The obvious question, then, is whether Facebook is merely reflecting Indian society, or if it's actively inciting even more hatred. But how can you test this? Here's a chart for you:
On a wide variety of measures, Indian society became suddenly less democratic the moment Modi took power. This was in 2014, well before Facebook could have had a significant impact.
Still, has Facebook made things even worse since then? I don't know. I don't even know how to go about trying to figure it out. Maybe some kind of fancy difference-in differences natural experiment or something?
More generally, any communications medium is going to reflect the society it's embedded in. If a third of Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen, that's going to show up in newspapers, TV, books, and social media. Some of those mediums might be contributing to this belief, but most are simply reflecting it. And there's really nothing you can do—or should want to do—to prevent a medium from reflecting the reality of your society.
But which is which? I don't know. I just don't know.
Here's an experiment I propose, though it's going to be easier to work out for the US, than for India.
Take some event. Take 1/6. Ask the question: How many of the people actively engaged in the events of 1/6 - not cheering it on, but actually on site, doing things - got there because of something on Facebook. For how many did Facebook play a critical role in organizing them, feeding them falsehoods, not just about stolen elections, but about pardons and how Trump really had their backs but couldn't say it out loud?
I'm guessing the answer is very close to "all of them".
Fox News can't do that. Fox News has no idea who the super energized are, nor who the most susceptible to which exact propaganda and can feed it to them. It's one size fits all. Facebook knows all this stuff. Facebook knows when a bipolar person is about to enter a manic phase, and can offer to sell them stuff that they really shouldn't buy.
But it's an empirical question. We can get a number.
Let’s assume for a moment that indeed all of them came because of Facebook. Does it actually follow they wouldn’t have been there if Facebook didn’t exist?
They also got there thanks to a transportation network. Is that also at fault?
A transportation network organized on Facebook?
I think this is an excellent argument for entirely banning the kind of algorithms that are Facebook's business model, as a general threat to civil society.
Certainly the fire was already there, but the algorithm is gasoline.
Transportation network as in planes, trains, and automobiles.
Do you remember the Arab Spring, and how people used social media (in this case Twitter) to organize. Do you think that would have happened if not for social media?
This is a major challenge for those of us who still believe in liberal democracy.
But the biggest problem with Facebook is lack of transparency. Anybody can find out what Fox News is saying, and there are ways to keep them accountable - billion dollar libel suits come to mind.
We have no way of even knowing what kind of lies are spread on Facebook, much less holding the liars accountable, because we have no way to see them. The lies are routed to exactly the sort or person who believes them.
It is good you bring up Arab Spring. It underscores how there’s no such thing as a free lunch with social media. Double edged swords and such.
Please. Facebook is just a Republican sounding board. So what??? Everybody has sounding boards in the mainstream. Eco-Nationalism is more about destruction than creation. The system must be brought down. But this is the fringe.
By the logic of Texas's new abortion law, any Lyft or Uber driver who ferried a golpista to Lafayette Square or the Capitol is an accessory & should be sued.
Know who is a big, big Modi fan? Tulsi Gabbard.
Surely, it's because Morendra, like Tulsi's other homies Bashir & Viktor & Vladimir, is a staunch small-d democrat.
Regarding "... there's really nothing you can do—or should want to do—to prevent a medium from reflecting the reality of your society", that isn't true. There is always a tension between allowing "too much" freedom of speech and allowing government to suppress speech that it simply doesn't like. But it doesn't follow that the right place to try to draw the line is at the "reality" of society. (For one thing, how exactly can you measure that?)
So if Indian politics is a cesspool, it doesn't follow that India Facebook **should be allowed** be a cesspool. You can block bots, slow down the ballooning of new groups, force Facebook members to at least use euphemisms for hate words, and not hesitate to block individuals and groups that are clearly encouraging violence.
As a metaphor, Facebook has set up for business in different country and language "pools", and the quality of the "water" (content) varies "naturally". If Facebook has the ability to clean one pool (say, the U.S.) to a certain standard, it has the ability to clean other pools to (roughly) the same standard.
The point, of course, is that if a pool is "naturally" very dirty, then it will cost a lot more to clean it up (keep it clean). And Facebook may well make a **business** decision that the company will not make (enough) money if they apply (say) U.S. standards of cleanliness to the Indian Hindi language Facebook community. Or that if they apply such standards, that the government may close them down entirely.
I wonder at times if Kevin needs an editor, or at least a sounding board colleague, to critique his posts before he uploads them. He rails constantly against Fox, which undeniably reflects the reality of a good chunk of America. But I don't remember him shrugging his shoulders and saying nothing can or ought to be done about Fox's lies and bigotry. Quite the contrary.
There's room for endless argument about the role of the media in a liberal democratic society, but concluding it should be nothing but a mirror of society is a novel proposition.
"Novel" doing a lot of covering there, especially considering all the whistle blowing that's been going on about how they operated behind the scenes.. =) I mean, one can just shrug and not look, but that's not really helping.
I'm beginning to understand why he stepped away from MJ.
Still think Mother Jones & Washington Monthly should have engineered a trade to bring Drum home to Political Animal, with Nancy Le Tourneau heading the other way.
Given Bill Scher & Insult Comic Matt Cooper & Chris Matthews at the old place, Kevin would seem more at home there. Meanwhile, Le Tourneau wouldn't be so woke as MoJo, but she obviously aims for inclusion.
I think the reason he keeps the Fox shtick is to not completely lose his liberal cred, but if you have been reading Kevin for the past 2 years or so, and look at the points he argues with zeal, the ones he downplays or where he thinks people exaggerate, and the type of solutions he proposes or opposes(depending on the topic), it seems increasingly clear that Kevin has become a full blown right wing libertarian hoping Government would just go away for most things.
KD has always been an Orange County Republican, just more Rockefeller than Robert Dornan.
It's not that Facebook makes people want to do terrible things, it's that it provides a means of organizing and turning those thoughts into actions.
They say that television was a major force against lynching in the American South since the people who used to sit around the town square or on their porches gossiping were inside watching television instead. It's hard to get a lynching party going when everyone is in their own home watching some entertainment instead of all together discussing who has been getting "uppity".
If you look at the Soviet Union, a lot of people wanted to change their form of government. A lot of them even had guns. What they didn't have was a way to organize. Phones were tapped, informants were everywhere, and typewriters and carbon paper were tightly controlled. Meetings of all sorts without the express blessing of the party were inherently suspicious and monitored.
Look at the anti-union movement in the US. Employers know all the workers, but the workers don't have a directory for contacting each other outside of work. The employer can demand attendance at anti-union meetings but workers can't even post a message to all concerned. Good luck trying to organize, not because people love their jobs, but because it's hard to communicate.
Facebook makes that kind of communication easy. In fact, advertisers pay extra for the "engagement", the passing around of linked material that is associated with griping and organization. You can even use Facebook for good purposes, but Facebook has nothing like the old F**ked Company, and Facebook will censor and suppress anything that its customers, that is, the people paying them money, find awkward or embarrassing.
There is no way that Facebook convinced Indian Muslims and Hindus to hate each other. That was done long ago and by others. On the other hand, Facebook does make it easier to discuss and amplify the rumors about some Muslim who may or, more likely, may not have killed a cow, and to take action with regard to those rumors. The actions feed rumors and the rumors fuel actions, and the organizational engagement is what Facebook feeds on.
I agree with this. Pretty much completely. What Facebook can do is to make a latent hatred of Muslims or Hindus more salient - more present in one's consciousness.
Facebook manufactures bullhorns and is selling them at a discount to bad actors.
"And there's really nothing you can do—or should want to do—to prevent a medium from reflecting the reality of your society."
Well, maybe particular mediums don't belong in certain societies in the first place?
Let's say, for argument's sake, that Facebook bears no responsibility for the fact that its platform merely reflects the (supposed) cesspool of India's (somewhat) fractured society. Fine.
But, Facebook would still seem to bear some responsibility for sticking its reflecting medium into that incredibly volatile society in the first place. Even if the Facebook platform simply reflects India's divisions, why is Facebook's platform there at all? How can they justify their presence there?
I don't think you can decide to hold up a mirror to an angry mob, watch passively as they injure themselves by attacking the people they see in the reflection, and then say that you bear no responsibility for what happened. Sure, the angry crowd reacted to nothing more than a reflection of their own angry crowd, but you still held up the mirror.
My thinking on this is very much in the early stages, but I'm increasingly inclined to think algorithmically recommended content is the crux of the problem. At minimum perhaps we should consider removing the 230 liability shield when the platform in question is actively recommending the user-generated content (obviously more relevant to the US than India). Presumably that would prompt social media to either vet more carefully or refrain from making algorithmic recommendations entirely (or reduce its use).
Just to add: this idea wouldn't stop people from posting harmful stuff online (conspiracy theories, hateful/racist content, calls for violence, medical misinformation, etc). But if tech platforms aren't actively pushing it (which would hopefully be the case if they know they can be sued, or even held criminally liable), presumably it's a lot less likely to go viral, and so the harm would be (hopefully greatly) reduced.
What does this graph look like, for the USA ?
> "The obvious question, then, is whether Facebook is merely reflecting Indian society, or if it's actively inciting even more hatred. "
I don't think that's the question. It seems clear that Facebook creates a feedback loop that increases extremism. It isn't that it merely reflects society, it condenses and amplifies it. eg: "If you like fox news, try OANN"
> "Indian society became suddenly less democratic the moment Modi took power. This was in 2014, well before Facebook could have had a significant impact."
Facebook was founded in 2004. I don't know how much use it was getting in India in 2014, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think it might have been gaining ground by then. However, a strong man taking power certainly overwhelmed any other effect at the time.
Love that India's strongman leader Modi is a dumpy, potbellied softboy just like America's strongman Trump.
"You" can't test it easily. You don't have the data. But Facebook has the data. And they did test it. And they found that they are making people worse, much worse. They even tried to stop, but also to cover it up, and also to keep doing it because it seemed profitable. Because some of them don't want to live in a dystopia, and others don't care as long as they are in top in the dystopia. And the big bosses are mostly in the second of those groups.
Some of the latest information coming out from the the leaks does point to Facebook bending over backwards for some of their more "profitable" malefactors. That, at least, is on Facebook management - their favorable treatment and amplification of Brietbart despite pretty clear and regular violations of Facebook's terms of service has been pointed out in a few of the leaked docs.
"And there's really nothing you can do—or should want to do—to prevent a medium from reflecting the reality of your society."
Once again this is wrong and I am glad more people see it that way.
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