Social Media's Effects On Our Minds & Lives

[prdctvsm]

[Alcofribas]

me: hey, watcha reading

goth girl: osama bin laden’s letter to America on tik tok

[decibal cooper]

2 hours ago, neurone said:

no I don't , and I can't read your link because it pops up cookies management and 'please unlock your ad block' or stuff , so have not time to deal with it right now,

but thank you for the link, will dig it a bit more after writing.

yep, well those browsing/reporting side-jobs I was talking about, was all set-up to help china government to do their propaganda banning content that could be ambarrasing for them (for the chinese government I mean)

so not shure what's your point, ( I'm pretty shure we are on the same wavelenght about all this - andi if not, that's what discussion and arguing is made for - I mean it's ok I just wanna be shure to understand what you mean )

If someone will use tiktok as a backfire to fight agaisnt US gov propaganda, farewell,, but by doing this they'll also help integrist terrorist or chinese dictatorship to  legitimise their shit on the other side. I mean, well, this is all about propaganda right ? this, on both sides. don't wanna fall in the "it's all black or all white " manichean view of things but I assume thinking that facebook could be a US watching / propaganda tool as tikitok is a chinese propaganda tool. dunno, I'm pretty lost about this tbh.

It's really hard to sum-up in a few worlds but if I come back to my first point, kids being sticked on those kind of apps just tilt-up something wrong to me somehow.

I never had a facebook, twitter, intagram, tiktok account or whatsoever, ( shoul I ?)but I'm totally okay with people using those apps, I'm not a fucking regressive man or stupid boomer, it's just that I don't need it, I don't ever have a smartphone, but due to that siuation, it's hard to keep in touch and understand what's going on,in all this and that's why I keep on reading this thread and try to understand what's going on.

Yeah we are definitely on the same wavelength, and even if we do disagree, I definitely promote dialogue and responding to ask questions and help clarify our viewpoints.

I thought that in your original post, you were saying that those French students were hired to moderate content, but I did not realize that you meant these students were working for the Chinese government. Like they were contracted by the CCP to moderate content and then, based on guidelines provided by Tik Tok and the Chinese government, that they would flag any content that should be removed or banned, basically any content that undermined the Chinese people's trust in their own government OR any content that made the Chinese government look unfavorable in other countries throughout the globe. Is that what you were saying?

What I was saying went in the other direction (and I should be clear that this is pure speculation on my part). My claim is that the most powerful countries, the ones that have the capability to execute large scale 'cyber warfare' and who allocate some of their capability to do this by using published or broadcasted information (posts on social media in this case and accounts that have large followings), that they will surveil, moderate, and tamper with the information that is published in rival or adversarial governments.

So for instance: let's say that there are Chinese government officials who focus on this, and they partner with content moderators at Tik Tok. They notice that a few accounts that have very little followers are making videos about Osama Bin Laden's 'Letter to the West', where he offers his rationalization for terrorist attacks in America and also talks about how Israel's occupation of Palestine, and America's support for it, was one of the reasons why he attacked. So those moderators and the government put together a plan to give those accounts and those videos greater visibility. They have accounts with large followings repost them, say. Or they begin to use tags or other such tracking mechanisms to start flooding people's feed with the videos. Maybe they use the information that each user has voluntarily provided to Tik Tok by agreeing to their terms of service (any demographic information). There are probably also algorithms that are used to profile every user based on all kinds of online behavior: the pace with which they scroll on their feed, which posts cause them to slow down that scrolling, which posts make them stop completely and bestow a like or a repost, which posts they comment on, and lots of other things. They feed the Osama video to individual users and aggregate users, basically 'homogenizing the userbase' like the BOC guy said, just treating them more or less as a commodity or something to be manipulated and used in an information war. The content goes viral and now a bunch of young Americans begin to doubt their government. America no doubt tries to do this with their own citizens, but I do not think that they are too sophisticated with web-based platforms. Our government could not even build a functional website for people to register for healthcare when Obamacare first rolled out. I suspect they have for a long time focused their media-manipulation more on print media and television, which no young people (or very few) even engage with.

Again, this is just speculation, and it is probably very biased because I am a somewhat paranoid person and already have a somewhat negative view of America without any help from the Chinese. Still love lots of things about it, though.

Anyway, sorry for the long rambling post. As a last point, I read that you do not have a smartphone. I do have one, but I often wish that I did not. Not having a smartphone is probably one of the smartest things to do these days, especially for young people. It is a super powerful and convenient device, no doubt, but the negatives I think are beginning to outweigh the positives, and I think that social media has a lot to do with that.

Edited February 15 by decibal cooper

[Squee]

I may have mentioned this before, but having hidden pretty much everyone's updates on Facebook and having spent a dumb amount of time reporting and blocking ads and suggestions, my feed has finally unraveled the absolute best of Facebook.

 

 

 

 

[prdctvsm]

^ tabloidization™ of the social©

[ignatius]

edit: i guess this could go in the Ai thread.

edit edit: haven't paid attention to cory doctorow in years but this came up today.. it's from sept. 2023. interesting speech. sort of dovetails w/some of the stuff in this thread.  

 

Edited February 23 by ignatius

[Squee]

Keeps getting better and better.

 

 

 

[Walter Ostanek]

On 2/15/2024 at 6:09 PM, decibal cooper said:

Again, this is just speculation, and it is probably very biased because I am a somewhat paranoid person and already have a somewhat negative view of America without any help from the Chinese

 

It's not speculation at all, the actions of troll farms have been reported on, and you can even watch this stuff happen in real time - two very recent mask-off moments were the "Wagner Gap" when all sorts of pro-RU troll activities suddenly went dark while they waited to see what happened to their boss, and the almost comically inept pro-Indian trolling on Canadian subreddits in the wake of the Hardeep Singh Najjar hit job (they were still clearly learning the ropes at the time). 

The other big tactic you didn't touch on is reputation laundering, where some made-up gobshite will get referenced through a handful of opinion blogs in order to mask a lie as part of a factual narrative

I agree that the yanks are utter amateurs at this, they're being massively outgunned in the information realm (ditto cyberwarfare) - at least, the democrats and/or liberal establishment are. They had it down in the TV era, as anyone who even skimmed a US news channel will have noticed during the war on islamterror, but they never adapted to new media. Unsure if the (now ascendant) fascist wing of the GOP have a good handle on it, or if they mostly benefit from russian efforts

[Walter Ostanek]

9 minutes ago, Walter Ostanek said:

It's not speculation at all, the actions of troll farms have been reported on, and you can even watch this stuff happen in real time - two very recent mask-off moments were the "Wagner Gap" when all sorts of pro-RU troll activities suddenly went dark while they waited to see what happened to their boss, and the almost comically inept pro-Indian trolling on Canadian subreddits in the wake of the Hardeep Singh Najjar hit job (they were still clearly learning the ropes at the time). 

And linking those two things, if you ever wonder why the Indian media/online community is so pro-RU, and why India is now home to so many troll farms, look at who in India profits from Putin's war: Ambani, Adani, the Birla clan: all of the Modi oligarch groupies, getting very rich off of cheap russian oil.

You could possibly make a coherent argument that this internet-borne fascist revival is being conducted by and for the oil industry specifically

[decibal cooper]

saw some news stories saying all major social media was down (excluding X) worldwide for mobile users? One of my groupchat buddies works at Meta and said that for all of the apps down the diagnosis says 'unknown' and that this his first time seeing that.

Spoiler

 

[auxien]

20 minutes ago, decibal cooper said:

saw some news stories saying all major social media was down (excluding X) worldwide for mobile users? One of my groupchat buddies works at Meta and said that for all of the apps down the diagnosis says 'unknown' and that this his first time seeing that.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

i’m sure Meta stuff will be back up quickly. currently Mastodon is up & kicking, much nicer than Insta/etc. too…

 

[o00o]

all these boomers (or bots)  falling for very obviously GPT generated images:

 

Edited March 11 by o00o

[decibal cooper]

[Walter Ostanek]

35 minutes ago, decibal cooper said:

ask yourself: who benefits from [engineering] this state of affairs

[decibal cooper]

58 minutes ago, Walter Ostanek said:

ask yourself: who benefits from [engineering] this state of affairs

corporations and people/organizations who wield political power would be my guess - realize it is a cliche at this point, but the goal seems to be preventing a majority of citizens from having solidarity and building consensus at a national level, keep them bickering about inane bullshit or keep them mired in mindless pleasures/entertainment and (in America anyway) prevent them from asking the right questions and pushing for reform against a bloodthirsty & inept-on-the-world-stage single-party system that disguises itself as red versus blue. These animals do not care about whether or not we like pineapple on our pizza ! ! !

[o00o]

Social Networks work best when everyone is a bit angry 

[usagi]

Reddit goes public and makes a fuckload of money for itself and all the other slimebags around it

 

[ignatius]

7 minutes ago, usagi said:

Reddit goes public and makes a fuckload of money for itself and all the other slimebags around it

 

they sent out stock offers/notifications to every user with an opportunity to buy at the offer price. i wonder which random redditors went all in and made some cash from the frenzy? probably many. 

[usagi]

can we trick Elon into buying it?

[ignatius]

 

 

 

Edited April 6 by ignatius

[iococoi]

Quote

This is the state of the modern internet — ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a "service" or a "portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/

[ignatius]

On 3/21/2024 at 8:41 AM, o00o said:

Social Networks work best when everyone is a bit angry 

just like sex!

9 hours ago, iococoi said:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/

this is a crazy read. fckn instagram is a beast. 

Edited April 16 by ignatius

[o00o]

58 minutes ago, ignatius said:

just like sex!

This would make a good T-shirt. I should think about a design 

[Squee]

Not really a social media thing, but in continuation of amazing things the internet suggests me...

[zkom]

On 3/11/2024 at 4:51 PM, o00o said:

all these boomers (or bots)  falling for very obviously GPT generated images:

 

Bots responding to AI generated content on internet is some weird cyberpunk shit. I find it somehow hilarious.

Is the era of social media going to finally end when there's nothing left except AIs talking to each other?