[Closed] The Social Dilemma

Use FB in a browser
Install FB Purity - block all ads, suggested posts etc
Don't follow any organisations or join groups
Delete/unfollow anyone who posts pish

Sit back and look at pictures and get invited to (virtual) birthday parties

Facebook is a bitch, but you can be its pimp

This is not new, folk have known this for years now but the general masses are only just waking up to it.
The leaders of social media companies do not let their children use social media. That should tell you everything you need to know.

The polarising of our society is mostly to do with both of our mainstream parties moving out towards their extremes. This has been driven by the last 20 years of pushing social experiments on us like political correctness, leading to identity politics leading to people feeling like they cannot openly and freely express opinions without being personally attacked and demonised by some body somewhere (happens on STW all the time for example) and called names and even sacked from their jobs. This has caused many people to not engage with the normal political process and feel disenfranchised and feel like they are being ignored and marginalised. So the result is everybody moves to the more extreme ends of what they think. This then gives space for extremist organisations to grow and feed that underlying sentiment. It happens on both the left and right.

And regarding social medial...you might think you're in control but control is an illusion and you really are not. If you engage with social media, they know a hell of alot about you and sell that intelligence and data to anyone they feel. I've no issue with this fundamentally...it is us that are freely giving away our personal data for nothing (forget your security settings) so we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

i DO feel that i’m in control of social media, and make it work for me

We all feel that.

We're wrong... and we can't see it from our own positions.

Even knowing that... I still 'feel' that I'm in control, and that I make it work for me.

It's a bugger.

Facebook, no chance it's bad enough with all the idiots on here. 😁

FB in the UK/USA/western etc as used by the majority of ordinary folk probably has no real "social harm" There's a very clear link from social media activity and manipulation from various bad actors/states that many folk are keenly aware of, and can either switch off from, or alter their behaviours. The numbers of folk that are swallowed whole by the feeds of various bots are probably fewer than you think. The Russians/Cambridge Analytica examples are well publicised.

The real danger of FB etc etc is the very obvious and massively poor understanding that they have when their product is unleashed; unchecked and unregulated onto countries that they barely understand and quite frankly couldn't give a shit about. Political parties/regimes in countries with marginal or fragile democracies like Honduras, The Philippines, Ethiopia etc, are using FB as a tool to incite hatred, influence elections, and target opposition politicians, in many cases FB has figuratively speaking, much blood on it's hands. Interesting article here regarding one FB employee's experiences

Sophie Zhang's experience

I watched it at the weekend and it wasn't a huge surprise that the are doing everything they can to stay in their app for longer and also producing an echo chamber to re-enforce whatever views and interests you hold.

If you found TSD interesting, I'd recommend 'The Great Hack' which shows what can be done with all that data to help control / guide / influence a population.

I got bored of it half way through. Agree with a lot of the OPs points mind. I still don’t care what ‘they’ do with my data in the slightest.

I watched it and it just told me that unscrupulous people use the unregulated world of social media to peddle glaringly untrue cobblers to halfwits.

The scary thing is that said halfwits rely on Facebook as their exclusive source of news.

They then go on to take a 'quiz' which tells them 'what type of bread are you?'. This involves only 3 questions. What is your address, your account number and your mothers maiden name?

Gary! Gary! Ha haaaaa...Look... I'm a Warburtons Toastie loaf!..

Eh? .... What do you mean, someones just emptied our bank account?!!

Very interesting but a bit overstated, IMO.

If Facebook's sinister algorhythm is so effective, why do I repeatedly see the same kind of crap I'm not interested in?

I mean, I have my suspicions why - and I think it's because FB is a bit crap at content curation.

wife deleted her facebook account straight after watching that....which was a result.
mine is just for keeping on top of kids clubs, i cant stand the bloody thing

This has been driven by the last 20 years of pushing social experiments on us like political correctness

ISWYDT. No mention of the fact that a great deal of the ‘scare’ and (and open propaganda) of ‘PC gawn mad’ has been 40 years of tabloidism designed to create division and create/appeal to fear and suspicion.

In the UK an atheist can say Merry Christmas or Seasons Greetings and hardly anyone gives a flying fart.

In the US if you say ‘happy holidays’ a good chunk of the country will feel like they are being ‘marginalised’ and ‘oppressed’ by Marxulist Atheistic Feminazis. 1000s of right-leaning channels/stations/ will happily step up to sell that take. And aggressively. It’s gobbled up. The ‘debate’ is so often created by bad actors looking for profit from conflict.

https://www.history.com/news/the-war-of-words-behind-happy-holidays

I must be doing Facebook right as all my feed is ever full of is friend's crap posts and the odd one from a few sports people I follow. The odd advert but it's always something I've just looked at or bought so either useful or irrelevant. If something I don't want to see pops up I will flag it up as 'Irrelevant', they must have me down as a poor marketing target.

Interesting p7eaven ... I've found the opposite... the USA has long had a winter holiday period... mixing in thanksgiving and celebrations of multiple faiths (most notably Hanukkah)... it's when councils, shops or brands try to do similar here that things seem to kick off with "Christians" claiming their world is falling down around them. See also Easter.

Not had an fb account in about 15 years. Stopped twitter 3 years ago.
I do insta. Seems when you stop people talking so much they are more bearable.

Kelvin, I do find it interesting. Depressing. But interesting. Do you have any examples of reports British holiday-wrecking by the loony left?? I may have missed it but no doubt we are doing it too. Always a few steps after the US. I can think of a few Stateside:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/us/war-on-christmas-controversy.html

https://youtu.be/ToLdVCb1ezI

(Not that facts tend to matter very much if at all these days, the narrative is what carries. The story is what motivates? See again Jonathan Swift’s patient on the table. Ready to be ‘healed’)

Remember when ‘they’ banned baa baa black sheep? Back in the 1980s? Except they didn’t? Older British people that I know still swear blind that black and white people aren’t to ‘mix’ because it’s PC gone mad! You ‘don’t see black lambs playing with white lambs, it’s just nature!’

Shepherding taught me differently, but that’s another story...

The point I’m maybe failing to make is that the ‘story’ has been tabloidism for so long now and the internet has accelerated this polarisation/dumbing-down/post-truth-media business model to new levels. There is a cultural crisis of not just widespread disinformation but of history itself being re-written by bad actors looking to cash in on this new ‘war’ that is, IMO, tabloidism gone mad. (for the largest part)

The real danger of FB etc etc is the very obvious and massively poor understanding that they have when their product is unleashed; unchecked and unregulated onto countries that they barely understand and quite frankly couldn’t give a shit about.

Like the UK then?

I see social media as an extension of newspaper journalism and some other media - it's being used to influence opinion, as papers have been for 200 years. It's just much quicker, more pernicious and putting everyone into deeper silos.

You can see the knock on effect in real life, and in people on here. Brexit and now Covid have become so divisive that once rational, pragmatic people seem to have got more blinkered and extreme in their view on whatever the issue is, and less tolerant of anyone who doesn't agree with every point they make. I understand their anger and frustration, but not sure digging trenches and throwing grenades is the solution to all the problems.

Remember when ‘they’ banned baa baa black sheep

Did The Sun announce that with a photo of an imperial pound of bendy bananas, an actual pint in an actual pint glass, and a headline along the lines of "It's PC Madness Gone Mad!" ?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/600470.stm

I see social media as an extension of newspaper journalism and some other media – it’s being used to influence opinion, as papers have been for 200 years. It’s just much quicker, more pernicious and putting everyone into deeper silos.

Not only quicker, it's unregulated, held up to no standards whatsoever, with no integrity.

The lie can actually be all the way around the world before the truth even wakes up.

I must be doing Facebook right as all my feed is ever full of is friend’s crap posts and the odd one from a few sports people I follow. The odd advert but it’s always something I’ve just looked at or bought so either useful or irrelevant

You and I are obviously on the "good" Facebook, Gawd knows what version these other folk are suffering.

I love FB, it acts as my NewsFeed, I follow half a dozen papers and get to see a selections of artciles which I often go off and read.

I then have a load of cycling groups / pages (eg STW, Rouleur, Cyclist, Flow). I get to see what ex-STW Towers Will is up to and what bike he's riding etc, he seems to run Flow pretty much in his own down under..

I follow a load of Physio, S&C pages which show me lots of interesting articles / papers on the latest sports science etc.

I then have a load of charities / organisation eg local wildlife groups I keep up with via FB.

Finally a bunch of friends, although they seem to post less and less these days.

90% of my ads are cycling based, but then I follow Road.cc, STW, Cyclist, Rouleur, Flow, and probably 10 other cycling related pages.....

I can't remember when I last saw anything vaguely offensive / troubling.

I can’t remember when I last saw anything vagely offensive / troubling.

Stay in that bunker 😎 I’m much the same. I only use FB for marketplace and a few cycling groups/real life friends. FB and Google obviously use me for far more than I’ll ever be aware of (don’t watch the documentary!)

The only bit of Facebook I use is the messenger function, and occasionally specialised content groups related to hobbies. Have done for a while. If I want to know about someone's life I'll ask them directly.

And don’t watch the documentary.

I get the impression they have a valid point which could probably make a 500 word article. I find those sorts of expose / documentary films quite tedious, normally about 3x longer than they need to be.

watched it three weeks ago and deleted my Facebook account minutes later, this has been positive step for me. i still enjoy instagram as that's just happy pictures of friends and cool shit pro moto/mtb riders are getting up, facebook can be toxic.

The groups are what keep me reluctantly stuck to facebook. The ease that people can set up a group means it's become the default for niche interest stuff, which is a shame as open formats of websites, forums, newsgroups and the like are at least searchable for outsiders.

Have a couple for the cars I own that are a trove of useful info, my local MTB group, local board game groups, etc - it all goes on in those closed little spaces. It's a shame because almost all of it would be fine for public (indexable, searchable) viewing but most group owners keep things private to avoid trolls and spam, so it all gets locked away and you have to join half a dozen groups to try to find the info you wanted.

I get all of this, that FB etc are "controlling" what you see & influencing you etc (even if you feel they aren't) but - that is exactly how everything else works isn't it? Newspapers, TV shows, books/magazines etc, governments, religions, even when you chat with your mates in the pub? If you want to be immune to being influenced you'd have to live totally isolated from anyone & everyone.

I get the impression they have a valid point which could probably make a 500 word article

And yet I found it to be the most critically pertinent documentary I’ve seen in decades. Possibly ever (discounting climate change)

At least as far as where we are going as a species. This isn’t going back in the box. It’s fundamentally changing our lives, who we are, who governs us, what we do, and how we consider ourselves and each other. Gen X was the last ever generation to remember adulthood without it. It’s arguably the biggest shift in human intellectual life (culture and trajectory) since the in ention of a movable type printing press.

MoreCashThanDash nails it perfectly.

Social manipulation and tribalism aside, I think whats happening on an individual level as a direct result of social media is much more obvious and possibly frightening.
Teenage and even pre teen self harm and suicide figures have gone through the roof since social media emerged.

Never had facebook nor instagram which is owned by facebook and collect same data, don’t use google yet i browse twitter for news (go figure?). Read mindfu*k-cambridge analytica and the plot to break America by Christopher Wylie

Mindfu*k by Christopher wylie on goodreads

Not only quicker, it’s unregulated, held up to no standards whatsoever, with no integrity.

Have you looked at the Mail online? Or pretty much any tabloid paper.

We've not had any integrity in (tabloid) journalism for decades, if not longer...

Murdoch and co can phone up a few editors / TV producers and have all their media outlets slag off / support a political candidate / party on a whim, has been like that for decades.

Or Tucker Carlson on Fox News (which is an oxymoron as there is no 'news' on Fox).

Have you looked at the Mail online? Or pretty much any tabloid paper.

But these are (at least) regulated. Imagine what they'd be like, if instead of seeming like they print whatever bolloxs  they want right up the law but not a step over it, were actually allowed to print whatever they felt like.

Not only quicker, it’s unregulated, held up to no standards whatsoever, with no integrity.

Been beaten to it, but the regulation is practically non-existent and the punishments for breaking the rules tiny. Blatant lies as front page headlines for decades is what led to the Brexit vote rather than Russian bots on FB.

that is exactly how everything else works isn’t it? Newspapers, TV shows, books/magazines etc, governments, religions, even when you chat with your mates in the pub?

The big difference is that no-one knows what paper you buy, and nor do they know what articles you read, pictures you look at and for how long. They do not use this to tailor the paper specifically to you in order to feed your interests, and do the same for each individual , so no one sees the same articles, or even when they do they are different versions of the same article. As an example look at the preview pictures on netflix with an account that is a white person, versus a black person or a gay one. The pictures you see for the same film will be different.

This isn't bad per se - the posts above talking about extreme harms from social media are just a part of it. Most people's feeds are indeed harmless and having more of the stuff you like is generally good. What is does mean hoever is that dissenting views, differnt opinions and novel ideas are harder to stumbe across - whether that is about big issues such as politics and global warming, or simply new hobbies etc.

The big difference is that no-one knows what paper you buy, and nor do they know what articles you read, pictures you look at and for how long. They do not use this to tailor the paper specifically to you in order to feed your interests, and do the same for each individual , so no one sees the same articles, or even when they do they are different versions of the same article.

I think you're wrong here, the paper have their demographics who typically buy them and thus they would sell the equivalent advertisements and run stories or write these stories in a way for their target audience. Equally when printing the papers and distributing them they need to know how many to send to each end of the country showing them where this demographic live.

I think you’re wrong here, the paper have their demographics who typically buy them and thus they would sell the equivalent advertisements and run stories or write these stories in a way for their target audience.

+1

Eg The Guardian / The Times - two very different perspectives on the world (well UK certainly).

rather than Russian bots on FB.

Or just Gammons posting, very hard to tell the difference. The comments section on any newspaper (left or right leaning) is best left alone, 90% of the posters are barking mad. Plus there's always some weird Nigerian who posts about his doctor who has a cure for genital herpies, just send FX to this email address and you too can be cured...

The leaders of social media companies do not let their children use social media. That should tell you everything you need to know.

Well... Mark Zuckerberg's oldest is 5. I think his biggest motivating factor in that respect is not wanting jam smeared over his keyboard. Are you referring to any specific leaders of social media companies or specific children? That would tell me more of what I need to know 🙂

I think you’re wrong here, the paper have their demographics who typically buy them and thus they would sell the equivalent advertisements and run stories or write these stories in a way for their target audience.

As an example look at the preview pictures on netflix with an account that is a white person, versus a black person or a gay one. The pictures you see for the same film will be different.

They could be, or they could be the same, the pictures change for any individual film or series regularly on mine and I am always logged in as me.

What is does mean hoever is that dissenting views, differnt opinions and novel ideas are harder to stumbe across

Well… Mark Zuckerberg’s oldest is 5. I think his biggest motivating factor in that respect is not wanting jam smeared over his keyboard. Are you referring to any specific leaders of social media companies or specific children? That would tell me more of what I need to know 🙂

Ummmm pretty much all of the ones interviewed in the documentary "The Social Dilemma"

Ummmm pretty much all of the ones interviewed in the documentary “The Social Dilemma”

Hardly the strongest argument.....

They might just want their kids to study hard and not waste their lives away watching videos of cats falling off chairs.....

TSD pretty much articulated some of what I’ve been thinking for a few years now i.e: social media is seeding division and intolerance and the only likely outcome is public unrest.

I haven’t posted anything on social media for quite some time now but I’m still wavering on deleting my profile completely.

If I analyse why that is, my conclusion is that I’d feel a sense of loss losing contact with people that in some cases I haven’t even seen this century. Which now I’ve written that is probably a good enough reason to crack on and delete my Facebook account.