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The Power Of Big Tech / Social Media Companies

uair01

Antediluvian
Joined
Apr 12, 2005
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5,413
Location
The Netherlands
Let's put this here. How times have changed:

Neal Stephenson’s classic 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash depicts a future United States in which all forms of hierarchical authority have collapsed and each suburban subdivision have become its own burbclave requiring visas and passports to enter. There is a character name Raven who is untouchable for crimes he commits as he rides around on his motorcycle, because he is a sovereign. He’s a sovereign because he has a nuclear weapon strapped to his back that he will detonate if anyone comes to arrest him.

It’s struck me in recent years that Facebook was on its way to becoming a sovereign. Sovereignty means that there’s no one with higher authority to control you, an attribute that is usually reserved for states. Facebook is now so large and powerful that it’s hard to say the government of the United States can control it. Like a state, it has started to accumulate the attributes of sovereignty; it has aspirations to create its own currency, Libra, and created what it called its Supreme Court, the Facebook Oversight Board. That board, filled with eminent persons drawn from academia, law, and international politics announced their decision on Facebook’s de-platforming of Donald Trump last Tuesday.

https://www.americanpurpose.com/blog/fukuyama/facebook-sovereignty/
 
It’s struck me in recent years that Facebook was on its way to becoming a sovereign. Sovereignty means that there’s no one with higher authority to control you, an attribute that is usually reserved for states. Facebook is now so large and powerful that it’s hard to say the government of the United States can control it. Like a state, it has started to accumulate the attributes of sovereignty; it has aspirations to create its own currency, Libra, and created what it called its Supreme Court, the Facebook Oversight Board. That board, filled with eminent persons drawn from academia, law, and international politics announced their decision on Facebook’s de-platforming of Donald Trump last Tuesday.

I agree wholeheartedly.

FAANG - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google.

They are very, very, very powerful and they have only just started.

I do not use any social media whatsoever. I would advise others to do the same. For their sake.
 
I agree wholeheartedly.

FAANG - Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google.

They are very, very, very powerful and they have only just started.

I do not use any social media whatsoever. I would advise others to do the same. For their sake.

I agree, technically this site is social media (I think?) But it predates the MySpace platform (which inspired Facebook). When I joined this forum I was reminded of the early days of the internet when it was fun.

Edit maybe this is a good spot for all the crazy conspiracies that social media have engaged in like FB intentionally sending people depressing news to see how it affected their posts. Social contagion.
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788
. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks
 
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I agree, technically this site is social media (I think?)

I wouldn't class it as such, but I may be wrong. Apart from my email address (which may or may not be real) and my IP address (which may or may not be real) it "knows" nothing about me. Other than information I offer voluntarily, it has no info on me.
 
The definition of "social media" depends on who you ask.

Internet forums (BBS; ListServs; Web-based) such as this one clearly represent an earlier generation of venues in which individuals could remotely interact in social ways. However ... Some narrower definitions of the currently prevalent"social media" platforms (Facebook, etc.) differentiate the newer forms from the earlier forums in terms of the newer ones involving considerably more individual "social projection" (self-promotion; self-focused revelation) rather than group "interaction."

Personally, I approve the drawing of this distinction, insofar as I've found it useful in analyzing and comparing such online venues since before the Web broke the Internet open to the masses.

This sort of individual projection was possible even in the old days of (e.g.) USENET and BBS. Back then its occurrence was the exception rather than the rule. Newer "social media" venues are configured to promote this style of participation at the expense of substantive interactive conversation.
 
A number of raids around the world has been done, based on information provided by the FBI. Around 800 people have been arrested. What is interesting is this information is said to have come from the messaging app ANOM, created by FBI themselves to catch criminals, rather than from them cracking into an existing messaging app.
 
The recent Facebook whistleblower beat him to it, but David Baddiel's documentary on social media was fascinating tonight. Yes, social media makes itself addictive, but the ways it does, by invoking the ancient "fight or flight" response, is very psychologically adept. Basically, if you see something you don't like online, you get paranoid (flight) or angry (fight) and the companies exploit that. Anger is making them billions of dollars.

There were other intriguing points too: finding a social tribe online can be a false validation of your identity which should not be drawn in either/or, such as an anorexia support group that actually promotes the condition to be more inclusive-seeming, when actually it's seriously damaging. You can apply that to politics as well (though I won't here, obviously). This is how the culture wars are not going away any time soon, as long as so many people get angry.

And you can't slip at any time - anyone on Twitter, Facebook, etc is one wrong opinion or joke away from total hell. Baddiel talked to one woman who is hounded by trolls every day who pick apart her every move for criticism, all for the power it gives them, and she's suffered for it.

The programme ended on an optimistic note that it's the quiet people who watch and can be supportive at the right time, and that makes him feel better. But quiet isn't the new loud. The more people yell to be heard, to be validated, the more chaos erupts. Don't ask me what the answer is - the FTMB mods can't take care of everything!
 
Oopsh, FMB mods, I mean. I'll get used to that someday...
 
This YouTube channel has some interesting videos on internet censorship. I found the Reddit one really sad.


 
I can imagine how statements like this lead to conspiracy theories:

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Note: This is benign technology, but I know how some people will interpret it.
(If you're a parent of a young adult with severe schizophrenia, there is utility of family members being able to track if they're taking their anti-psychotic meds. A form of Abilify--used for bipolar and schizophrenia, where medication is vital.)
 
There were other intriguing points too: finding a social tribe online can be a false validation of your identity which should not be drawn in either/or, such as an anorexia support group that actually promotes the condition to be more inclusive-seeming, when actually it's seriously damaging. You can apply that to politics as well (though I won't here, obviously). This is how the culture wars are not going away any time soon, as long as so many people get angry.
Yeah, postive feedback for behaviours that in 'face-to-face' culture would be subject to the opposite.
 
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