'The OAG found that millions of fake comments were submitted through a secret campaign, funded by the country's largest broadband co's, to manufacture support for repeal of net neutrality rules... millions more were submitted by a 19yo college student using made-up identities...'
Another reason this is concerning- given the research I do on computational propaganda I am fairly certain this particular campaign is a harbinger of similar and much more automated attacks to come.
US joins Christchurch Call to Action to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online techpolicy.press/us-joins-chris…
Despite mass shootings in the United States motivated by the New Zealand mosque massacres, the Trump administration declined dozens of other nations and American tech companies to join the Call to Action in 2019, citing concerns over free speech. techpolicy.press/us-joins-chris…
When the US did not join under Trump, "it came as a surprise to many of us who study this stuff, because it was kind of a no-brainer to sign, and was only really encouraging an industry-wide set of good practices,” said @AmarAmarasingam: techpolicy.press/us-joins-chris…
I'm going to share this once more, because I don't think enough people in my life have engaged with this story, and the stunning, terrifying photography it contains.
1/ Senator @ChrisCoonsforDE refers to @_KarenHao@techreview reporting around how incentives work at Facebook with regard to growth metrics, asks platforms whether they provide such pay incentives. Bickert say they are "not simply" incentivized for engagement.
2/ Culbertson says they have no incentive to drive unhealthy engagement. Veitch says responsibility is YouTube's primary concern (?!?).
3/ @BenSasse says the statements from the platforms about incentives is irreconcilable with their business model. Bickert: "For us, the focus is always on the long term." Refers to decision on 'meaningful social interactions' that did reduce amount of time spent on Facebook.
1/ This is very good and I wish I had written it. key bit: "Without any independent access to internal data, outsiders can’t know how much of a difference Facebook’s break-glass measures make, or where its dials usually sit. But Facebook has a reason for announcing these steps."
2/ Bickert's statement suggests not just a turning of knobs and dials but also a surge of human attention. This begs the question- why not, as Evelyn says, keep the dials tuned for disaster all the time- but also, why not scale up the human effort much more substantially?
3/ Facebook does not want to acknowledge that it has to employ nearly as many people to deal with the toxic sludge and externalities of its platform as it does to run its core business- it keeps them on contract. ~58k employees vs ~35k outsourced mods.
Why Political Sectarianism Is a Growing Threat to American Democracy: The country is increasingly split into camps that don’t just disagree on policy and politics — they see the other as alien, immoral, a threat, says @Nate_Cohn: nytimes.com/2021/04/19/us/…