4 ms·

> stop feeding people an endless stream of ad-stuffed trash media selected by an algorithm maximizing for clickbait factor and nothing else. I genuinely believe

> stop feeding people an endless stream of ad-stuffed trash media selected by an algorithm maximizing for clickbait factor and nothing else. I genuinely believe that it's poisoning people's minds and doing significant damage to our society. I've been hearing this from a lot of people lately, but every time I do, I can't help but think we've got it backwards. People aren't becoming worse because of clickbait and fake news. Clickbait and fake news are becoming worse because of people. Long before there was Facebook, plenty of people bought and read magazines and newspapers like the National Enquirer and the Daily Mail. The only difference now is that those people, just like everyone else, have access to much more of that content thanks to the internet. Taking that content away from those people isn't going to make them smarter. It's just going to make them angrier and more determined to seek that stuff out. In my opinion, the only real solution is improving education, but no one wants to talk about that because that's the hard way. It's much easier to demand that certain news sources be censored or that certain news aggregators impose a bias against them, but that's a very dangerous road to travel down. Today, people are talking about sources like banning Breitbart and The Daily Caller, which is well-meaning, but how long will it be before people start talking about banning sources like The Intercept or The Guardian? There are certainly plenty of people in both political parties that would gladly slap the labels of "clickbait" and "fake news" on them as well.

DougWebb 10y ago
I think the situation today is different because the "bad" content can spread much more rapidly and broadly than it could before. Back in the day, you could judge the authority and value of the content you were getting because you knew the source, and sources that produced content which most people judged poorly couldn't spread their content much beyond a small group of core believers. But today this content spreads without clear links back to its source, which makes it hard to judge, and it spreads so widely and rapidly that there's no opportunity to discredit it before the next bit of content comes zooming by. This "bad" content is coming from everywhere, too. Recently, most of the factually-inaccurate content has been coming from, or has been in support of, the alt-right. But in the past a lot came from the far-left as well, and there's always inflammatory agenda-driven propagandist content come from extremist groups of all types. Every group with an agenda to push can easily slide from fact-based content to exaggerated content to outright false content in an attempt to be heard, and that's much easier today than it ever used to be. Education would help, but only if the sources of the content people are seeing can be identified and judged by them. I have an even more difficult solution: integrity, self-control, and professional restraint on the part of the content producers. I think we lost that when news became entertainment, and I have little hope that we'll ever get it back.
- dforrestwilson1 10y ago
  People said the same thing about the printing press. It's a paradigm shift for sure, and will likely lead to all sorts of bad things before humanity adapts and keeps chugging along. Should it be controlled? How would you feel if the current administration could shut down or edit what CNN posts online?
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Oh, no worries then. Move along.
  - DougWebb 10y ago
    Before the printing press, people couldn't really judge sources either, because there was generally only one source. That's quite a bit different than having many sources of wildly different quality hidden behind many layers of social media sharing, all reporting second- and third-hand content. I'm not advocating government control, but that's definitely where Trump is heading with his "FAKE NEWS media... is the enemy of the American People!"[1] He's trying to go down the path of many tyrants, discrediting all sources of information except for those run by or blessed by the state. The way content is distributed today, with so much noise and so little clarity, directly feeds into Trump's agenda that it's all illegitimate except for the sources that he's personally vouching for. I don't really know what the solution might be. Google's been able to develop very good algorithms for identifying spam, mostly in email but also in Google Voice and their web search results. They've also got pretty good classifiers that can automatically tag content. Maybe Facebook, Twitter, and other sharing sites need that kind of algorithm to tag everything that's posted. Fake news would have a much harder time getting distributed if it had a big "FAKE" label applied to it. The devil's in the details though; we already know how Facebook's Like buttons get gamed, and we wouldn't want that for tagging. Tagging should be showing you the information you don't want to know, but need to know. [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/832708293516632065 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/83270829351663206...
ouid 10y ago
improving education is not "the hard way" it is "the intractibly hard way". People cannot possibly be expected to be informed beyond their local concerns, and yet they have been tricked into voting based on issues that they do not understand or do not affect them. We have a representative government, which means that the fundamental evaluation a voter must make is whether or not they trust a candidate. Humans are innately very very good at this, and it doesn't require much education to get right. Mostly what it would require is convincing people to vote for the representative that they trust the most, rather than any particular issues, which are likely to be far too dynamical to really evaluate.
imw 10y ago
The mere fact that people have appealed to the basest human instincts throughout history doesn't, of itself, mean we haven't turned some invisible corner. This seems to be essential to how cybernetic systems work. It is true there has always been an appetite for trash. It's also true that the forces of industrial psychology and sociology have never before been so mobilized to maximize consumer behavior and minimize critical thought. It's not one or the other -- it's both.
smacktoward 10y ago
> Long before there was Facebook, plenty of people bought and read magazines and newspapers like the National Enquirer and the Daily Mail. Yes, but now there's a difference: a zero-cost, near-zero-friction platform for fake news distribution. Today's fake news peddlers don't have to pay for space at supermarket checkout counters and newsstands, or pay for paper and ink. They just have to throw their product onto the platform and from there it literally distributes itself. In other words, Facebook disrupted fake news.

DougWebb 10y ago

I think the situation today is different because the "bad" content can spread much more rapidly and broadly than it could before. Back in the day, you could judge the authority and value of the content you were getting because you knew the source, and sources that produced content which most people judged poorly couldn't spread their content much beyond a small group of core believers. But today this content spreads without clear links back to its source, which makes it hard to judge, and it spreads so widely and rapidly that there's no opportunity to discredit it before the next bit of content comes zooming by. This "bad" content is coming from everywhere, too. Recently, most of the factually-inaccurate content has been coming from, or has been in support of, the alt-right. But in the past a lot came from the far-left as well, and there's always inflammatory agenda-driven propagandist content come from extremist groups of all types. Every group with an agenda to push can easily slide from fact-based content to exaggerated content to outright false content in an attempt to be heard, and that's much easier today than it ever used to be. Education would help, but only if the sources of the content people are seeing can be identified and judged by them. I have an even more difficult solution: integrity, self-control, and professional restraint on the part of the content producers. I think we lost that when news became entertainment, and I have little hope that we'll ever get it back.

dforrestwilson1 10y ago
People said the same thing about the printing press. It's a paradigm shift for sure, and will likely lead to all sorts of bad things before humanity adapts and keeps chugging along. Should it be controlled? How would you feel if the current administration could shut down or edit what CNN posts online?
- jacobush 10y ago
  Oh, no worries then. Move along.
- DougWebb 10y ago
  Before the printing press, people couldn't really judge sources either, because there was generally only one source. That's quite a bit different than having many sources of wildly different quality hidden behind many layers of social media sharing, all reporting second- and third-hand content. I'm not advocating government control, but that's definitely where Trump is heading with his "FAKE NEWS media... is the enemy of the American People!"[1] He's trying to go down the path of many tyrants, discrediting all sources of information except for those run by or blessed by the state. The way content is distributed today, with so much noise and so little clarity, directly feeds into Trump's agenda that it's all illegitimate except for the sources that he's personally vouching for. I don't really know what the solution might be. Google's been able to develop very good algorithms for identifying spam, mostly in email but also in Google Voice and their web search results. They've also got pretty good classifiers that can automatically tag content. Maybe Facebook, Twitter, and other sharing sites need that kind of algorithm to tag everything that's posted. Fake news would have a much harder time getting distributed if it had a big "FAKE" label applied to it. The devil's in the details though; we already know how Facebook's Like buttons get gamed, and we wouldn't want that for tagging. Tagging should be showing you the information you don't want to know, but need to know. [1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/832708293516632065 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/83270829351663206...

ouid 10y ago

improving education is not "the hard way" it is "the intractibly hard way". People cannot possibly be expected to be informed beyond their local concerns, and yet they have been tricked into voting based on issues that they do not understand or do not affect them. We have a representative government, which means that the fundamental evaluation a voter must make is whether or not they trust a candidate. Humans are innately very very good at this, and it doesn't require much education to get right. Mostly what it would require is convincing people to vote for the representative that they trust the most, rather than any particular issues, which are likely to be far too dynamical to really evaluate.

imw 10y ago

The mere fact that people have appealed to the basest human instincts throughout history doesn't, of itself, mean we haven't turned some invisible corner. This seems to be essential to how cybernetic systems work. It is true there has always been an appetite for trash. It's also true that the forces of industrial psychology and sociology have never before been so mobilized to maximize consumer behavior and minimize critical thought. It's not one or the other -- it's both.

smacktoward 10y ago

> Long before there was Facebook, plenty of people bought and read magazines and newspapers like the National Enquirer and the Daily Mail. Yes, but now there's a difference: a zero-cost, near-zero-friction platform for fake news distribution. Today's fake news peddlers don't have to pay for space at supermarket checkout counters and newsstands, or pay for paper and ink. They just have to throw their product onto the platform and from there it literally distributes itself. In other words, Facebook disrupted fake news.