Thread by @BelievnTheDream

As QAnon grew, Facebook and Twitter missed years of warning signs about the conspiracy theory’s violent nature

msn.com/en-us/money/co…

More than 70 Republican candidates have promoted or voiced support for at least some elements of the conspiracy theory this year, according to tracking by liberal research group Media Matters, and one open adherent,

Marjorie Taylor Greene, is virtually guaranteed to win a seat in Congress in November’s election. Trump has praised Greene, defended QAnon supporters and retweeted content from QAnon accounts.

The list of violence inspired by QAnon is long, and the serious incidents date back to 2018, when an armed man touting the conspiracy theory was arrested after a standoff at the Hoover Dam. Another man fixated on QAnon fatally shot a New York crime family figure in 2019.

And this past April, police arrested a woman armed with more than a dozen knives after she announced on Facebook that Clinton and former vice president Joe Biden “need to be taken out.”

How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook

Researchers at Graphika, a network analysis firm that works with Facebook and other social media companies, found that QAnon and Trump’s online support overlapped to such an extent in 2018

that the two online communities were almost inextricable for the purposes of mapping relationships among accounts. Camille François, the company’s chief innovation officer, called the resulting network maps of interactions “a hairball” of overlapping accounts.

Full article of how social media platforms:

Facebook and Twitter missed years of warning signs about the conspiracy theory’s violent nature

msn.com/en-us/money/co…

Hours after an FBI warning about QAnon is published, a QAnon slogan turns up at Trump’s rally

August, 2019
washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/…

🎯We need to rethink social media before it's too late. We've accepted a Faustian bargain

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1310187819231518721?s=20

Social media is also derailing productive public discourse. A largely ignored internal memo to senior executives at Facebook in 2018 explained: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.”

Left unchecked, the algorithms will feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform”.

In The Social Dilemma, Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, points out that far before technology overpowers human strengths, it will overwhelm human weaknesses.

Sophisticated algorithms learn our emotional vulnerabilities and exploit them for profit in insidious ways.

By surveilling nearly all of our online activity, social media platforms can now predict our emotions and behaviors.

They leverage these insights and auction us to the highest advertising bidder, and they have consequently become some of the richest companies in the history of the world.

The targeting capabilities of these platforms give anyone with a motive the power and precision to influence us cheaply and with phenomenal ease. Disinformation campaigns have been cited in more than 70 countries, and doubled from 2017 to 2019.

Full article: We need to rethink social media before it's too late. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…