A simple research study demonstrated how FB’s algorithm readily amplify extremist political viewpoints on the left and right. The root cause is that FB optimizes for time spent engaged with FB – and does not optimize for what you may wish to see. The result is FB optimizes to keep you perpetually outraged.
I have a post appearing in my news feed right now, asking: “You have 30 minutes to spend $10,000 in one store. Where are you going?” Or, “What was your first car?” On the surface, these are boring questions, yet FB indicates it has had 1.8 million comments added. Why are these posts occurring and who is behind them? Someone appears to be pouring enormous energy and effort into a data collection project aimed at building personality profiles from social…
The ACLU rewrote the words of the co-founder of their very own [Person’s] Rights Project and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg in an unusual way that erases women from historical quotes.
Scientific American reports on how government agencies use “media embargoes” to control reporting.
Facebook’s own internal research, secret until now, found that Instagram and it’s addicting nature, and how it promotes certain types of posts to youth actively causes mental health problems among the young.
Facebook completely controls public discourse in a totalitarian fashion. The WSJ reveals internal FB documents showing that FB “white lists” up to 6 million accounts world wide to get exemptions or special treatment from content moderation. The FB system applies to both FB and Instagram, and tends to include politicians (even down to the local city council level), actors, news media, sports personalities, academics – even those with very large followings on social media.
Because the FB content moderation system makes frequent errors, FB wanted to avoid the publicity that happens when a prominent person was censored by FB – thus, they excluded elite people from the system.
Through this system, Facebook controls public discourse – everyone can speak equally except some can speak “more equally than others” (to paraphrase Animal Farm).
The company has lied to the public about this system in the past, claiming that everyone was treated equally. But they are not. When public speech is censored by Facebook, Facebook becomes the arbiter of all information. In this case, FB has decided that elite members of society are more important than you or I and are given special speech privileges. Imagine the impact this has when some can promote (propagandize) their views but others are denied that option.
Facebook is a true menace to society.
Science communications is performed precisely as a propaganda function: “The first is what science communicators call “the deficit model,” which assumes the public is deficient in their understanding of science and need scientists as the learned elites to help the benighted masses.” and “The second limitation is that the goal of health communication is not to inform others, but to change their behavior.”
Seriously. Facebook plans to begin regulating satire posts on its social media platform.
WASHINGTON — USA TODAY is fighting a subpoena from the FBI demanding records that would identify readers of a February story about a southern Florida shooting that killed two agents and wounded three others. Source: USA TODAY fights FBI subpoena demanding records that would identify readers of Florida shooting story
Facebook, Twitter and Google outrageously censored scientists and doctors for asking questions about challenging issues in the pandemic. Today, we are recognizing that these discussions were important – but silenced by the unethical billionaires of social media.