It just hit me how much Facebook/Reddit/Twitter fucked up everything

[chaobreaker]

I was listening to this podcast called Reply All and this week they had an episode on Pizzagate and the absurdity of it. Halfway into the show they talked about how the subreddit the_donald contributed to the spread of this bullshit conspiracy and managed to have the current CEO on reddit, Steve Huffman, on the show. They also had a t_d mod who went on a minute long rant society is too PC and shit. I can talk about how this guy sucks but that's not what this thread is about.

So after sleeping on my thoughts, I realized what really fucked me up was how these social media platforms allowed these shitheads to thrive and spread their bullshit in the first place.

Steve Huffman had this laissez faire attitude throughout the interview. He acknowledges that his site was responsible for how Pizzagate eventually reached the point where nutcases were shooting up the damn restaurant accused of having child sex dungeons but that's pretty much the extent of responsibility he was willing to take. Remember how his solution to months of bridging, vote gaming, and harrassment from the_donald was just removing them from the front page of reddit and banning some users? He thinks that's the best thing the reddit administration could do. He feels that there's some inherent value to allowing subs like the_donald to have a platform on his website.

Think about how much fake news and conspiracy bullshit was propagated on Facebook throughout the election. Mark Zuckerberg just threw up his hands and blamed his website's algorithm and the complexities of giving people a voice. What kind of mealy mouth bullshit is that? This guy thinks bullshits made up by Macedonian teenagers should share the same space as articles by credible news publications.

How many years did Twitter sit on its hands while mobs of alt-right manchildren used their platform to attack people for daring to talk about social issues or how maybe some video games and comic books need to diversify their depiction of human beings? How many people got ran off the site so that shitheads with eggs and anime avatars could continue talking about the anti-white bias in Ghostbusters remakes and Star Wars? It's only when Twitter went public and companies like Google decided their site is too toxic to buy that the Twitter CEO started talking about fixing their harrassment problems.

These social media company higher know how much sway they have on public opinion but because their heads are so far up in their own asses they'll never take responsibility when others use their platforms to spread straight up lies, FUD, and Russian propaganda that will help a orange goblin win the presidency.

TL;DR Fuck the people behind Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.

 

[Deleted member 126221]

MGS2 warned us 15 years ago.

 

[BocoDragon]

It's kind of been the theme recently.

During the run up to the election, I watched people I thought I respected get radicalized by the fake news crap on FB. Just an endless stream of pro-Trump anti-Hillary anti-mainstream media garbage leading them into complete la la land. It was maddening. I didn't know whether blocking them or arguing with them was more productive.

 

[R10Neymarfan]

Twitter has let ISIS run their shit without any consequence as well

 

[Mariolee]

These sites should be moderated like NeoGAF.

Spoiler

Only half joking.

 

[Wanda/Wander]

Facebook has no financial incentive to stop the spread of fake news.

 

[Nether!]

These sites should be moderated like NeoGAF.

Spoiler

Only half joking.

They should be.
The good parts of Reddit are the ones with strict moderation.

 

[The Technomancer]

The ideal dream of the internet as a space of open ideas and free communication without curation or moderation, a "marketplace of ideas" in which people browse information like they're researching at a library to come to informed conclusions, has not only revealed itself to not actually work in the slightest but to in fact provide a bed for toxic and destructive patterns of information interaction that are increasingly harming our societies

 

[KingV]

These sites should be moderated like NeoGAF.

Spoiler

Only half joking.

To be honest, GAF is basically the flip side of that echo chamber.

Conversation here is not particularly balanced. One just has to look at the cognitive dissonance of about 1.5 months ago to see that.

 

[The Technomancer]

These sites should be moderated like NeoGAF.

Spoiler

Only half joking.

There is a reason this is the only place I seriously post about fucking anything. The moderation staff here isn't perfect, but they're fucking great at dropping the hammer on bullshit

 

[Squalor]

To be honest, GAF is basically the flip side of that echo chamber.

Conversation here is not particularly balanced. One just has to look at the cognitive dissonance of about 1.5 months ago to see that.

You spent the better part of another thread today denying white privilege, so you're just proof moderation doesn't always work.

 

[Herr Schwarz]

This would require great firewall of China levels of control over the Internet to prevent properly.


You'd have to have the govt monitoring certain news sites and then fact checking, then shutting them down and fining the site for spreading misinformation.

After a few warnings etc.

What it requires is real leadership and actual courage from the guys at the top. So yeah, good luck with that.

 

[RinsFury]

These sites should be moderated like NeoGAF.

Spoiler

Only half joking.

This is true. Gaf-like moderation is key, otherwise the trolls and racists will run rampant.

 

[Nafai1123]

To be honest, GAF is basically the flip side of that echo chamber.

Conversation here is not particularly balanced. One just has to look at the cognitive dissonance of about 1.5 months ago to see that.

Conversation here is not "balanced" because hate speech is not tolerated. That's a big difference from the_Donald where nothing except undying loyalty is tolerated.

 

[Pie and Beans]

Most people single out Facebook as the true evil because of the filtering, but the real end of human conversation was Twitter.

Twitter forced people to speak in short sharp word bullets for years so that now every even slightly heated conversation is just gunfire with no nuance and fleshed out thoughts. What we're doing here now is regarded as dinosaur shit. Forums? Pffssshhhtt.

And for WHAT? The age of sms txt character limits is fucking over. Almost every tweet is double sized because it has an image attached. Want twice as many words and no image? Fuck you brainiac/it will take us 5 years to create such a software breakthrough.

Don't even get me started on Snapchat. People are going to have drones constantly flying at waste level to take dick pics on voice command by 2018. "Lacerated thighs bro? Betcha sent plenty of those dickos out tonight! GET IT WET."

 

[Frozenprince]

Social Media will be what ends humanity.

It's insane what we've turned out culture into.

 

[SourBear]

Its not just social networks though.
Apple's very own "News" app has Breitbart on it.

Sorry, if a so called news app has Breitbart. It isn't a news app. It is a pay me what I ask and I will allow you to have a voice app.

 

[clemenx]

I feel assigning the majority of blame to those outlets is missing a big part of the picture.

Those people existed, before social media, will continue to exist regardless.

 

[Frozenprince]

Sites SHOULD be moderated.

The news used to be moderated, you used to HAVE to print fact checked articles and editorials because if you didn't people would just go to someone that did. The Enquirer was a joke.

Now shit like The Enquirer is "mainstream media" and taken SERIOUSLY. Because they read it online, and nobody put things that weren't at least somewhat true in the news back in my day so obviously this is true now.

It's insane.

 

[Squalor]

Sites SHOULD be moderated.

The news used to be moderated, you used to HAVE to print fact checked articles and editorials because if you didn't people would just go to someone that did. The Enquirer was a joke.

Now shit like The Enquirer is "mainstream media" and taken SERIOUSLY. Because they read it online, and nobody put things that weren't at least somewhat true in the news back in my day so obviously this is true now.

It's insane.

We can "thank" another Republican for that, actually.

No excuse for anyone's supporting that trash-tier party.

 

[TheSpoiler]

I feel assigning the majority of blame to those outlets is missing a big part of the picture.

Those people existed, before social media, will continue to exist regardless.

And they exist because people listen to them. They wouldn't last if people didn't visit them. Same with geocities sites that populated the net. None of this stuff is that new, only more visible than before.

 

[paskowitz]

MGS2 warned us 15 years ago.

Seriously, I remember when I played this game as a teenager and thought it was complete craziness. How wrong and naive I was....

When everyone is screaming, nobody is heard, nobody is helped.

 

[kirblar]

Sites SHOULD be moderated.

The news used to be moderated, you used to HAVE to print fact checked articles and editorials because if you didn't people would just go to someone that did. The Enquirer was a joke.

Now shit like The Enquirer is "mainstream media" and taken SERIOUSLY. Because they read it online, and nobody put things that weren't at least somewhat true in the news back in my day so obviously this is true now.

It's insane.

The Enquirer is taken seriously re: political stuff because they singlehandedly ended John Edwards' political career with a legitimate story. It was their mini-watergate.

 

[Syder]

It usually takes 30 seconds to a minute of browsing one of those 3 websites before I see something that makes me close the page.

Not necessarily offensive stuff but just vapid or derivative content.

 

[The Technomancer]

I feel assigning the majority of blame to those outlets is missing a big part of the picture.

Those people existed, before social media, will continue to exist regardless.

And they exist because people listen to them. They wouldn't last if people didn't visit them. Same with geocities sites that populated the net. None of this stuff is that new, only more visible than before.

Its not quite this simple. The structures of the internet create feedback loops that can alter our perceptions of information. I'm not even saying that in an intrinsically bad way, its certainly happened to me. But I don't think that people used to think like this. I don't think I used to think like this

 

[A Fish Aficionado]

Blame our poor quality of educational standards. Steven Novella wrote about this.

The students have some elements of critical analysis, but most did not fully recognize the roll of political bias and less than half the students clicked the link to go to the original source (remember, they were specifically asked to evaluate the credibility of the source).

Overall I agree with the authors, the results are “bleak.”

When reading the actual student responses, I was often struck by how familiar their reasoning was to what I witnessed in my daughters as they are progressing through school. I could see that the student was reverting to responses that they were probably taught in school – doing the task they thought they were supposed to do, and not truly understanding the task or thinking clearly about it.

Civic Online Reasoning

 

[NoblesseOblige]

To be honest, GAF is basically the flip side of that echo chamber.

Conversation here is not particularly balanced. One just has to look at the cognitive dissonance of about 1.5 months ago to see that.

So which thread made you salty about having a stupid ideology/opinion?

 

[Goro Majima]

This would require great firewall of China levels of control over the Internet to prevent properly.


You'd have to have the govt monitoring certain news sites and then fact checking, then shutting them down and fining the site for spreading misinformation.

After a few warnings etc.

What it requires is real leadership and actual courage from the guys at the top. So yeah, good luck with that.

Yeah it's a failure of private corporations to moderate the discussion on their platforms. Typically advertisers would apply pressure to encourage control of their forums of discussion...but that hasn't happened en masse as quick as it should. Breitbart is bleeding advertisers but that's just one part.

I'm not at all comfortable with the government stepping in to restrict speech however. It's still on private citizens and corporations to rectify the problem.

 

[Squalor]

So which thread made you salty about having a stupid ideology/opinion?

I already called it out.

He was mad people gave him shit for denying Jennifer Lawrence's white privilege regarding her ass-scratching cultural insensitivity in Hawaii.

 

[Frozenprince]

Its not quite this simple. The structures of the internet create feedback loops that can alter our perceptions of information. I'm not even saying that in an intrinsically bad way, its certainly happened to me. But I don't think that people used to think like this. I don't think I used to think like this

We didn't. Yes, intrinsic biases always existed, evidenced by the fact that racists, well, are still around and going strong.

But what has happened is a self contained feedback loop of sites that funnel you from one to the other, all with the pretense of legitimacy. They use big words, they look very clean and professional, they tweet and follow (and in some cases are followed by) major players. So obviously you denote some level of propriety where there is none. But by the time that's evident, it's too late, because they've got so many people wrapped into the loop of instant feedback and gratification of self that nobody can even handle being challenged at all anymore.

It's a core reason why people have taken "calling someone a racist" to be as bad as BEING a racist. We're conditioned to no longer think in a critical manner.

We've doomed ourselves in our endless race to the bottom to destroy our critical thinking and privacy.

 

[DragonGirl]

I have been saying for quite some time now that there is no such thing as an unmoderated forum. A lack of official moderation simply leaves a power vacuum that will be filled. It simply invites the bullies to run the playground. Any forum needs a code of ethics and strong mods to enforce said code, and membership can't be completely open. When you kick somebody out the door, the door has to remain shut or they'll just come right back in under another guise. The other problem is volume. The more members any forum has, the harder it is to keep under control.

 

[norm9]

Sure social media sucks, but your mom and grandma have something to do now

 

[Forkball]

"Whatever gets us clicks!"
*November 8th happens*
"Uh oh..."

Social media has completely changed the way we consume news and basically lets us cherry pick what we want to believe. People have no desire or perceived need to challenge their already instilled beliefs because they can easily find something to back it up, factual or not. You have people supporting their ideas with Info Wars links because it backs their ideology. Do people seriously not see the difference in Info Wars/Brietbart and something like BBC or CNN? HAS THE WORLD GONE MAD?

 

[DevilDog]

There is a reason this is the only place I seriously post about fucking anything. The moderation staff here isn't perfect, but they're fucking great at dropping the hammer on bullshit

Yeah, NeoGAF is good at what it does. Not perfect, but frankly, what system is better?

 

[mbpm1]

These companies won't change until people give them a reason to

 

[ghst]

i wish twitter would just fuck off. everyone is worse for its existence.

nothing specific to the alt-right aswell. turns everyone into a tabloid headline churning nuance evaporating numpty regardless of their persuasion.

stay off twitter. it's bad for your brain.

 

[norm9]

Yeah, NeoGAF is good at what it does. Not perfect, but frankly, what system is better?

Might be good to have a little right leaning Washington Post in your life though, to mix things up and see where other pepople are coming from. Does no one any good to hear only things you agree with, as right leaners seem to get banned a bunch on here.

I watch the occasional fox news to see what sort of nonsense they're up in arms about.

 

[Frozenprince]

Of course GAF doesn't have terribly many people posting about the other side of the political and social spectrum.

Because those people always say something profoundly hateful and insulting and stop posting here.

I for one am grateful for this atmosphere that has prevented things that popped up on other places I used to go such as, but not limited too, holocaust deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, literal nazi's, impromptu discussions on the merits of the aryan brotherhood, what is acceptable to say and what is a "slur", and on and on.

I'm immensely grateful for that.

 

[Joyful]

neogaf reminds me of canada

 

[oreomunsta]

These sites should be moderated like NeoGAF.

Spoiler

Only half joking.

EviLore for 2020!

Believe

 

[Renekton]

These sites should be moderated like NeoGAF.

Spoiler

Only half joking.

Really? The most popular topics start with hyperbole and cringey superlatives

"PS4's design is a complete humiliating mess"
"DmC Dante is a slap in the face of fans who paid $60 of hard earned cash"
"FFXV is a dumpster fire"

 

[broncobuster]

Might be good to have a little right leaning Washington Post in your life though, to mix things up and see where other pepople are coming from. Does no one any good to hear only things you agree with, as right leaners seem to get banned a bunch on here.

I watch the occasional fox news to see what sort of nonsense they're up in arms about.

Conservative posters who don't revel in bigotry stick around. There's a joke about why one would side with the right if not for the ugliness. But I've heard compelling reasons in the past, and even this election from those who voted against Trump.

 

[Qvoth]

until the lawsuits start coming to fight back, i don't see this stopping anytime soon

 

[old]

These sites should be moderated like NeoGAF.

Spoiler

Only half joking.

Oh god no.

I like having sites with real discussion and diversity of opinions on controversial matters.

 

[BobLoblaw]

I would just be happy if every site that posted news, "news," or video clips disabled comments permanently. I fucking hate humanity even more every time I have to see that shit.

 

[NoblesseOblige]

Oh god no.

I like having sites with real discussion and diversity of opinions on controversial matters.

And you think Facebook/Reddit/Twitter are such places? Oh, poor poor you.

 

[Squalor]

Oh god no.

I like having sites with real discussion and diversity of opinions on controversial matters.

Yeah, because we really need to hear the flip side of "We need equality for all."

 

[Arozay]

I will tweet and share this thread

 

[RinsFury]

Oh god no.

I like having sites with real discussion and diversity of opinions on controversial matters.

Not every opinion deserves to be heard.

 

[BlastProcessing]

Oh god no.

I like having sites with real discussion and diversity of opinions on controversial matters.

Real discussions and a diversity of opinions doesn't amount to much when it's allowed to coincide with hate speech and a diversity of facts on controversial matters.

Gaf's very good moderation is why I post here. There is a reason it was one of the only sites not to lose it's goddamned mind during Gamergate.