it's actually hard to overstate how significant the effort of the epoch times is. they gathered billions of views on facebook, more than any other news organisation.
"In April, at the height of its ad spending, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and digital video outlet New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher, according to data from the social media analytics company Tubular."
It's ironic that as we move into a world where anyone can be a "journalist" and anyone can have a voice, we need professional journalists more than ever.
Now a journalist will not only need training in writing well, conveying a story with facts, and investigating, but they will also need to become experts in identifying fake source material.
In a world where anyone can make a video or photo of anyone doing anything, we'll need to rely on reputable journalists to vet that material for us.
Saw a video on YouTube of the President saying something bad? No idea if it's real anymore.
Sure, a lot of this technology has existed for a while, but it was usually in the fringes (see The National Enquirer). Now it's going mainstream.
And the worst part is, there are a whole group of people who will not trust a professional journalist (sometimes with good reason) but will trust anyone online who happens to provide evidence that boosters their existing opinions.
Every day the NYT sends me a summary email. Every day there is a status on impeachment. They dont even call him president, its Mr Trump. The bias is obvious. They would like me to pay for more!
I agree, I will happily pay for news, but most of these "news" outlets are just a bunch of opinions and usually they are all one way or the other depending on the editor.
I know it's easy (and tempting) to put the blame on social media alone, but there's more than that. The rise of social media certainly accelerated the evisceration, gutting, and - as some might say, annihilation - of journalism but the tailspin trajectory has been in the making for quite a bit longer.
If my memory serves me right, that thread was on the HN front page at the time. Essentially the expense of quality journalism was seen as frivolous in the 80's, got nixed, and by the mid-90's newspapers relied on their established captive audience to churn out reliable profits with little appetite for innovation. Who was going to compete with them, anyway?
Internet changed the landscape, and social media has been instrumental in hammering nails in the coffin. But the decline of journalism and destruction of quality newsrooms has been going on since before there was public internet.
People don’t want to pay for good journalism, nevermind spending time to read and evaluate if it is or isn’t good journalism. Maybe it’s not even realistic for everyone to do that.
People also don't want to pay for good government.
As a rule, people don't want to pay for anything that benefits them in a second-order way with non-immediate consequences - even if objectively the benefits are real.
It's a classic economic monkey trap. Holding onto something now is "better" than letting go and getting a bigger benefit later.
Which suggests that perhaps we should be doing more to eliminate monkey traps from our economic and political systems.
>People also don't want to pay for good government.
Maybe because it’s already a paid service and its quality still has to be observed. But if you take their government from them, returning that substantial income cut, they instantly want it back.
This doesn’t have to invalidate your point, but this particular comparison seems pretty shaky. (Or it’s not and I’m missing something.)
My stance is that it's anti-your_country not to want to pay for good government. All of it, tax breaks for high earners, shelters, financial engineering to reduce taxes paid...all of it is treasonous to your fellow citizens.
Given the bundled nature of mass news media, it's impossible for customers to send a signal for example that CNN news specifically isn't up to their standard. They can cut the cord on a whole set of products or keep their cable bundle neither of which sends signal to CNN about the quality of their journalism.
More niche publications don't have that problem, but I think a big question is how we systemically increase the quality of mass journalism.
At the end of the day, they are all individuals with their own biases, ambitions or plain irrationality. You just have to take that into account in all you read and hear.
I can see this being a naïve but realistic take given what we knew in ~2008. In 2012 it should have been clear that this model could be gamed. And it's on Facebook that their culture wouldn't allow them to see that.
You’re assuming they didn’t see that. Given it’s now nearly 2020 and we’ve had years of reports of election meddling yet Facebook are only calming down on suggestive emoji - stating that they have no interest in policing “free speech” when it comes to political ads - I’m inclined to believe they’re not unaware their network is being games but rather don’t care because it’s still money in their pocket.
I don't think you're right @nemild, it's not a scary quote and it's also true. Sure, people can be duped temporarily but the best quality ideas last. Information is best distributed when it can be distributed freely. What alternative would you propose, censorship, regulation?
Facebook solved a problem (connecting) but it also created one (fake content, bot farms).
Either Facebook will fix it, or if they don't, new products will pop up to solve the problem to try to provide more reliable content.
Recently, might have seen it on here (I forget where) someone trained an AI to try to detect fake news. Sure the first attempts will be crappy prototypes, but the point is that people are trying to figure the problem out.
It's sophomoric at best even in 2008. The quote itself and the fact that the book itself is called the "Little Red Book". It's almost a straight up comic irony.
Spam and Sybil attacks were well known problems a decade earlier. It is basically what killed the vision of the semantic web in its infancy, several years before Facebook took off. It's certain everybody knew gaming data was a thing in 2008.
It might not be quite that simple - people can game the system of course - but it has been my experience that the Internet is generally very good at highlighting the best ideas and best content to the fore. The most upvoted comments and most upvoted posts are usually those which are thought out and reasonable, interesting, etc. In other words, of high quality. The best podcasts and the best music, along with the most entertaining YouTube personalities are generally those which get the most attention. At least, I have almost never "discovered" content which was really good without an already sizeable following.
A good tautology can be helpful in revealing errors in reasoning. Like here, the sentence "ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to" sounds reasonable; the equivalent statement "best reasoning is the most persuasive" is clearly wrong.
The ideas that survive are the ones that reproduce themselves by being copied from one mind or other storage facility to another.
Where it all goes wrong is that it is very expensive to test an idea and determine whether it is good, whereas an idea that is very attractive to repeat and copy without testing is much fitter and the more it resists testing the better it is.
This is why the whole framework for protecting IP is broken as well - we incentivize coming up with ideas, but ideas are worthless - it's evaluating and testing ideas that is valuable.
It’s more like “When everyone has a printing press, the ideas people listen to are the ones that have been pushed relentlessly by a millions-strong AI generated bot army.”
The issue isn't who is the most persuasive. The problem is confirm bias and echo chambers. People aren't persuaded any more. Now they make emotional trigger snap assumptions and then only consume that which fits the narrative of the assumption.
I think almost everyone agrees that echo chambers at massive scale are really bad for society... and yet it's still as, if not more, prevalent as ever.
We're letting the world burn for the sake of online advertising revenue and broken business models.
In the 1850's it was widely believed that the invention of the telegraph would bring about world peace.
The problem is language itself. We trust it way too much to convey meaning, and truth. But it's just a delusion, or a mirage, in much the same way that the search for artificial intelligence is. In fact, I would say that language itself is the first AI invented.
Some of the ancient Greeks were aware of the limitations and drawbacks of language. Rumor is some of the Spartans took it so far as to refuse to read or write, and even speak as spartan (heh) as possible.
Not only some Spartans. Socrates did not write anything down (Plato did that for him), thinking that writing was a poor way at finding out about the world e.g.
Is it your "thinking" Plato's ? Or Socartes? It's probably is better to QUESTION rather than form your own INTERPRETATION. At least a dialog is formed. Maybe the acients were more informed then we are.
Interestingly some people see novels and plays as vital tools for creating better decision makers. By entering into another persons imagination we can experience events and lessons that we would never have access to in real life or by observing real events in our communities. So - yes, Artificial Intelligence on the page.
He was also more willing than most to abuse the trust of his fellow students at Harvard.
I imagine it is only a small fraction of people who would be so brash as to ask fellow students for their email passwords, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that someone who asks for that information probably wants to do something nasty with it.
In the century that the printing press was invented, one of the most popular books to be printed was the Malleus Maleficarum, which systematized the practice of witch burning in the following centuries. Better dissemination of ideas does not necessarily mean better ideas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malleus_Maleficarum
If you’re referring to the Bible verse Leviticus 20:13, well, I’m sorry to say that the excerpt from “The God Delusion” or wherever you learned this simplistic piece of misinformation is, in fact, incorrect. Shocker.
In fact, there is no account of capital punishment, in regards to this law (killing homosexual men), in Jewish history.
As for Judaism, Rabbinic tradition understands the Torah's system of capital punishment to not be in effect for the past approximately 2,000 years, in the absence of a Sanhedrin and Temple.
And as for Christianity, Leviticus and indeed the entirety of the Law of Moses was fulfilled by Jesus Christ.
And so no, neither Jews nor Christians practice this at all.
Did not know about it, so just checked +20 different versions/translations[1] of the said verse in the bible, and scripture could not have been sharper and clearer on several points;
- men who had sex with another men
- should be killed
- they deserve it
Would you point me to a source/insight maybe?
Else I will believe, that this is too, as I have witnessed countless times personally, nothing but an apologetic approach to horrors religious scripture in modern age.
Right... the argument that “that isn’t the original Hebrew” is moot. People read their versions of the Bible and most versions are explicit in their aversion to gays.
I think you have misinterpreted the parent comment. I'm pretty sure they're saying "if all these translations unanimously agreed that's what the original Hebrew said, then that really is what it said", but you seem to have interpreted it as "look at how many translations are wrong!".
Is that right, or did I misunderstand you? If that is what you're saying, do you have a reason to disagree with all of those translations? Can you offer your own for that passage?
3 Galatians is largely a deprecation notice for all the Old Testament laws (at least in the context of Christianity). But yeah, some people like to ignore that and use Leviticus to bolster their twisted political views, and if you take it in isolation, it does come across as pretty clear-cut.
(edit: and if you accept their four-degrees-of-game-of-telephone translation at face value, as sibling comment points out)
As a professing Christian, I would say your reading is correct, but this verse (like the rest of the ceremonial and judicial laws) is a command given specifically to Israel, not to all readers. Capital punishment is very common in this code of law, as it was in other civilizations from this time period. There are many laws that have to do with keeping sin and impurity/health risks out of the camp, and this is, by biblical standards, both of those. By modern standards it's a terrible law, but it was never intended for modern use.
Why is it part of the Christian Canon? Because it provides important context for later material, e.g., Acts 15. The controversy in the early Christian Community over the application of the Jewish ritual law to gentile Christians is hard to understand without the Jewish ritual law.
Maybe this is a dumb question (having had no religious instruction) but do all modern Christians (except, I guess, some fundamentalists) understand that the Old Testament doesn't apply to them? If that's so, it seems like that stuff should be flagged somehow, to avoid misunderstandings.
Or do some modern gentile Christians perhaps go further, and believe that the old Jewish ritual law was a misunderstanding, and not an accurate statement of God's will? And if so, who are they?
Also, who are the modern non-gentile Christians?
I found a site that explains some of this,[0] but have no clue about its reliability. The root is here.[1]
> Maybe this is a dumb question (having had no religious instruction) but do all modern Christians (except, I guess, some fundamentalists) understand that the Old Testament doesn't apply to them?
I know of no modern Christian group that doesn't have a general understanding that the applicability of the OT law to Christians is, at a minimum, limited by the explicit terms of Acts 15. OTOH, there's obviously quite a bit of variation in what particular bits of the OT law modern Christian groups think actually still applies.
> If that's so, it seems like that stuff should be flagged somehow, to avoid misunderstandings
It's kind of (in general, not necessarily the specific passage in particular) the reason that the Catholic Church spent a very long time not being particularly happy with people without specific training reading the Bible themselves rather than going through tainted clergy as gatekeepers.
> Or do some modern gentile Christians perhaps go further, and believe that the old Jewish ritual law was a misunderstanding, and not an accurate statement of God's will? And if so, who are they?
Without getting into boundary disputes about where "Christian" ends, sure, there are probably groups that identify as Christian that believe that.
> Also, who are the modern non-gentile Christians?
One interpretation is that anyone who has ever been a Jew remains one and boundy the law even if they become Christian. (Of course, even the Jewish understanding of Jewish law seems to have h
evolved—and become quite diverse—considerably since Christianity split off, and I'm not sure how much that influences theology as to what precepts, precisely, apply to modern Jews who become Christians.)
> It's kind of (in general, not necessarily the specific passage in particular) the reason that the Catholic Church spent a very long time not being particularly happy with people without specific training reading the Bible themselves rather than going through tainted clergy as gatekeepers.
OK, that makes sense. There's some of that perspective in the sciences about misunderstanding of the literature.
FWIW, I've met a Dominionist family that practiced the entirety of OT, including all the ritual purity laws. I never really clarified it, but it sounded like it was a thing in their local denomination in general.
They also did believe that the government should be structured according to those same OT provisions, and enforce them as laws.
It says the same thing about men who have sex with their wives during the latter’s menstrual cycle, in the same chapter.
OTOH, like virtually of the rest of the old testament statutes applicable to the Jewish people, these and most of the other prohibitions in that chapter and the surrounding ones is voided as to non-Jewish Christians (though one might infer from it a continuing prohibition on same sex marriage from it), see Acts 15:28-29, where the apostles, addressing the acts of some in the early Christian community attempting to apply the Mosaic law in its entirety to gentile Christians, declared: “It is the decision of the holy Spirit and of us not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities, namely, to abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meats of strangled animals, and from unlawful marriage. If you keep free of these, you will be doing what is right. Farewell.”
Now, it's true that some modern Christians do exactly (or, rather more often, a cherry-picked subset of it) what the council in Acts 15—directed, as Scripture says, by the Holy Spirit—reacted against and declared invalid.
Ask yourself (and your bible) "what did Jesus say"? And "what would Jesus do"?
I believe that Jesus did not speak at all about homosexuality. There is no indication that he attacked or held any anger towards homosexuals.
Conversely Jesus was strongly anti-capitalist! No money changing or animal selling in temples folks!
But fundamentally - when reading the bible your question must be "am I a Christian - or not?" what is the purpose of Jesus's ministry and passion if he did not bring a message and a purpose beyond and more significant than the messages revealed to prophets and his servants? If you are a Christian surely your preoccupation must be his word - and more importantly his meaning; interpreted in the context of his explicitly stated principles and lived actions.
It’s fine that you interpret the bible that way. Certainly I’ve seen Christian pro-gay-rights memes that say Jesus never mentioned homosexuality.
Unfortunately, this whole thread seems to be on the topic of “It’s a shame that mass-dissemination of information demonstrably fails to make the best ideas into the most popular ideas [0]” — and although you interpret the bible that way, I’ve witnessed many profess Christianity while also condemning gay men.
[0] Well, unless you take the memetic evolution attitude that “best” isn’t a moral statement but shorthand for “best at reproducing”, but if anyone on this thread has said that, I’ve missed it.
To paraphrase someone else "to the extent that their beliefs and actions differ from the words and deeds of Christ they are not Christians".
Remember there have been 1000's of people practicing grotesque child abuse while professing Christianity, and yet one of the most frank and flat statements of Christ is "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
Ick factor aside, that sounds like a “No True Scotsman” argument to me.
Be aware that if I, as a lapsed neopagan, am asked to judge which Christians are acting in accordance with the deeds and words of an entity that I regard as fictional as my own pantheon, there might not be any “True Christians” left.
To focus on the point, how about a biblical example: Parable of the Sower, specifically that sown on the path and in the thorns.
If that approach is followed consistently, we'd likely have to conclude that "real Christians" were largely wiped out in the early persecutions. The modern Christian tradition is firmly rooted in the government-mandated imperial cult that was established by the Edict of Thessalonica.
The christian bible was independently written by multiple authors over hundreds of years.
If you are going to treat these writings as a single cohesive narrative, you still have to keep in mind the context.
One of the most interesting aspects of the writings Jesus, is that he only ever taught Jews. Jesus in fact never really laid out a formal theology of what to do after his death, he simply stresses that the second coming would be very soon.
The only person to discuss the applicability of the Torah to non jewish followers of Jesus is Paul. Paul is extremely clear that the Jewish law does not apply to non Jews.
It's also interesting that Paul never met Jesus, that Paul persecuted christians until a burning bush talked to Paul in a moment of divine inspiration, and afterwards Paul largely relied on his excellent knowledge of jewish scripture to explain why the jewish scripture no longer applied anymore.
I think this point could use more commentary and context.
There are many verses which deal with “what now if the law?”, and I think a fuller understanding requires reading more than one of them.
For example, there is, of course, the parts about the dietary restrictions part of the law.
But that isn’t all. Male converts to Judaism were required to be circumcised, but NT verses say that this is not required to convert to Christianity (though, not phrased like that of course), and in talking about this, it also talks about what the law succeeds in, and what it, well, not fails in, but,
it’s insufficiency in the face of human failure?
I’m saying this not to say that the NT condones sex between two cisgender men (indeed, I believe that at one point after the resurrection, some apostles are on an island, and are telling the people there about Christ, and the text describes the homosexual sexual practices practiced by those native to the island as (in at least one common translation. This is by memory.) as “unnatural”, which seems to me to indicate disapproval, though I haven’t looked at commentary on how this was worded in the original Greek.)
My apologies for not including links and citations; I haven’t gotten out of bed yet this morning, and am typing this on my phone.
I think that's still true, it's just that the internet + social media let a lot of people become publishers at once, and we haven't yet decided to whom we should listen.
There are a lot of mistakes being made for which consequences have not yet occurred. Journalists of previous generations on whom we could rely had built up lifetimes-worth of reputation. On whom can you rely today? It's an open problem which I think is solvable in spite of today's difficulties.
Professional journalists have abdicated that role, and can no longer said to be "reputable". Plausible deniability that they were working in good faith was irrevocably lost when they failed to adapt in response to the valid criticisms they were receiving on social media, not because "fake news" trolls took over. Twitter did indeed kill the newspaper star, just not in the way they think.
This is a very common stance now - because one person said one thing, or a person said something once, or did something once then all people associated with that person (in the mind of the commentator) are a "thing".
The reasoning is "a rightwing person once said a racist thing, therefore anyone who is rightwing is definitely racist" it is clearly nonsense, and is extremely corrosive to debate.
That's nothing new. Journalists have always needed to identify fake source material. Dan Rather wrecked his career by reporting a story about George W. Bush based on fake documents.
It's interesting in the current world, prior in our "move into the world.. where anyone can make a video or photo of anyone doing anything" we're already struggling pretty badly with identifying fake news and what is considered fact vs fiction.
I don't see this as a move into a new world, but rather the increase level of hopelessness we're dealing with when it comes to good journalism. It may be time to pause and rethink our current approach to journalism since the current model is not working very well now and certainly won't be in the future.
Arguably, in a long term, it might be better that the appearance of the person would not matter as much. It actually might be harder to establish a cult of personality and really bad dictatorships, if there are humorous fakes and parodies flying around. But it also might make it more difficult to keep track of real events.
The cynical side of me: accurate reporting isn’t profitable because there is very little demand for accurate reporting from the general public.
People want to read/watch news they want to believe or agree with, and instinctively they shun away from facts that causes cognitive dissonance with them. What they want is to believe their preferred news sources are objective, but they will do everything they can to avoid doing actual due diligence to verify that objectivity.
That’s why if we leave it to purely market economy, completely objective, facts based journalism will never be as profitable as sensationalism based stuff you see these days.
But does it make sense to frame this as a statement about human beings, rather than a statement about what is logically required by the evolutionary-style process of information multiplying? Regardless of where society's starting point was, when it's really easy to transmit information, the information that gets transmitted the most is the kind that doesn't demand analysis first.
Even more meta, but one of the really big questions is: How to give people what they need instead of what they want?
I think it was pg who said "make something people want". If the plan is to get rich that is the way to go. If you want to improve the world, you should build something people need. Unfortunately, they often don't want it or don't want it enough to pay for it which makes the endeavor unsustainable.
Journalists were lied to and have very little means of independent investigation. The "fake news" here was actually the lie pandered by the White House. The fact that the House and Senate went a long with it is concerning but I imagine you only have to get the House and Senate intelligence committees onboard to get the rest of them to tag along.
> Journalists were lied to and have very little means of independent investigation
Plenty of foreign journalists didn't buy what the US government was saying and refuted its claims with facts, the whole idea that Saddam Hussein had nukes or WMD was completely preposterous, it's just that US journalists were afraid of being labelled traitors if they didn't go along with the Irak war. Journalists are people after all. So they "chose" to listen to Rumsfeld instead of Hans Blix.
Journalists aren't trusted anymore and their work isn't valued by the public because things like the Covington school incident happens, where Journalists just keep using tweets as a meaningful source of information, with no serious investigative work.
Journalists don't like Facebook, Google and co because they are direct competitors to them in terms of attention and ad revenue. Ironically they somehow like Twitter and are all on Twitter even when Twitter is actually competition to them, way more than Facebook or Google. Why bother visiting the nyt when all the drama is already on Twitter?
I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This was a fact during the Iraq invasion. Anyone who got the story right got fired. Everyone who parroted the administration line, even when it was blindingly obvious it was a lie, got promotions.
>Soon after the show's cancellation, an internal MSNBC memo was leaked to the press stating that Donahue should be fired because he opposed the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq and that he would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war"
Verifying sources has always been important. I recently learned about Stanislov Petrov - he helped prevent a nuclear war in 1983 by ignoring a false alarm reported by Russia's early warning system [0]. The system reported that the USA launched up to six missiles. Fortunately, Russia's stance was that nuclear retaliation requires multiple sources to confirm an attack. Stanislov went against his orders, and declared the attack a false alarm.
As was true before the internet, we need to make sure we have reliable sources to trust the news.
The signing could very well be completely optional/pseudonymous. Don't fall into the trap of false dilemmas BigTech loves to impose on its users: the wonderful thing about technology is how malleable, and thus user-empowering it can be.
I had the thought a day or so ago that a system could be created to tie images to their respective cameras with a private key stored inside of a chip that self-destructs when you attempt to read the key from outside of it, along with a trust hierarchy of certs from various camera manufacturers. A little like hardware auth tokens mixed with PKI.
Does that sound like something that would be feasible to produce/practical in the real world?
Feasible? Sure, to the limits of what we can do with secure enclaves today.
Desirable? Well, you've created a system that authenticates a camera as being at a place at a time. It's a good way to authenticate photos, but a bad way to stay anonymous.
How do you feel about photographers and journalists becoming even larger targets for anyone who wants to keep a secret?
In the past the actual image authenticated that the camera was at a place at a time, and anonymity was preserved.
The issue is : does it authenticate that a particular camera that belongs to a particular person is/was at a place at a time and produced an image - because if so then if the device is found in a search the owner/user/keeper is in hot water.
So the camera must be anonymous - but it must be impossible for a lie about the place and time to be encoded into the image.
If you assume that "Anyone could have been using that camera!" is a defense, you're absolutely correct.
It's perhaps worth considering that an authoritarian government might not trouble itself with such legal niceties. All they have to do is mandate that journalists with cameras register their keys, make possession of a camera with an unregistered key criminal, and track sales / border entries. China springs to mind as a country that might do such a thing.
Again, you're absolutely correct in asserting that anonymity of camera-user is important! It's just perhaps worth considering how linking hardware to images might undermine that in dangerous ways.
something similar was done a number of years ago but cracked later. I think it was Nikon who had it and the proof of the crack was someone signed the Beatles crossing the road with a Nikon camera key.
Meanwhile secure enclaves are now possibly a lot safer, but as Kalium mentioned it might not be very attractive for everyone.
For forensics experts however it could become very useful I believe.
Well, it's not like the professional journalists don't lie at all for profit and self-preservation. Lol.
Facebook does a lot of disageeable things but making everyone a journalist isn't one of them. This just decentralised journalism and actually empowered freespeech. There are issues with it, but that's a better problem we can work on to mitigate than giving a few channels a monopoly over truth.
Facebook provides a medium where most people can disseminate their message, with little restriction or cost, to a potentially large audience. It doesn't make everybody a journalist.
> Saw a video on YouTube of the President saying something bad? No idea if it's real anymore.
I've lived through enough presidencies to assure you that it never mattered if it was real or not. Supporters ignored or excused it, opposition treated it like the end of the world. Sane people stopped paying attention long ago to keep their sanity.
And so it appears that the inevitable has 'finally happened'.
Mark Zuckerberg's website is now a place not to be trusted as a source of news, finding friends and meeting others if there's a possibility of AI generated profiles being proliferated on the website.
I've heard that meeting real humans outdoors makes it less likely to be deceived. Their authenticity is vouched via word of mouth and experience by other humans, rather than robots on the internet.
Require manual profile validation for new Facebook accounts?
Probably would get downvoted if I said SSN + a credit check.
Phone number required + needs to be validated + can not be reused + can not be Twilio.
Prove your address? Prove your ISP cable bill? I don't know. Everything I guess, people here are going to tell me it's an invasion of privacy and they don't trust Facebook to do it.
But they'll let CreditKarma have every bit of financial information related to them possible.
People will apply for a credit card online (employer, address, social, income)... make a universal login process for that.
Maybe like blue Twitter verified checkmarks next to all profile names. "Verified human"
The problem is that a lot of people can't even fathom the idea of automating something like account generation. It takes them two support calls and an 1 1/2 hour to log into their email. They don't even understand what's possible, and a blue checkmark won't/doesn't solve that.
You then run the risk of excluding developing economies. Unless you adjust the payment to be region specific, in which case you’d just get foreign powers (be that corporations or state sponsored) using their wealth to fund hordes of new registrations from said developing economies; thus negating the benefit of a sign up fee.
a low single-digit dollar amount of money isn't really prohibitive any more in almost all regions on the planet for a one-off payment (networked regions, at least). That's an argument facebook itself likes to make but if you look at the WhatsApp growth which used to have a model of 1$/year it seems completely fabricated.
And arguably a small payment amplifies anti-abuse measures because you have a hard financial trail. If a foreign entity buys thousands or more of accounts, not only are you putting a cost on it, it should be trivial to see the anomaly in the system.
and a single digit isn't really prohibitive for making fake accounts either. I'd gladly pay $250 for 50 fake fbook accounts spewing the commercial and propaganda crap that makes me profit.. or just feel good about skewering another side I don't care for.
As someone who grew up in a developing economy, I find this view extremely patronizing. Usually, what happens is that a local company fills that demand gap.
Also, I think it is good for all parties concerned, because most developing economies will have a big problem becoming developed economies if their people are under constant surveillance from entities who may benefit from their continuation as developing economies.
Case in point: the US dollar is a horrible currency if looked at in isolation - after all, why the heck should the rest of the world pay American kids lots of money to have a great time at college and then turn around and default on their debt? Student loan forgiveness is almost a certainty over the next few years. But people still flock to the US dollar because it is far better than the other places money could go. There may be a hint of conspiracy theory in this, for sure, but it does not require a wild stretch of imagination to expect that the country where Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram is headquartered actually has a real incentive to foment violence in other countries and make their own economy and thus currency look better in comparison.
> As someone who grew up in a developing economy, I find this view extremely patronizing. Usually, what happens is that a local company fills that demand gap.
...which means if a western subscription services wants to compete with a cheaper local equivalent, they need to charge a comparable local rate. That’s not patronising, this literally how all businesses work when having to compete with regional price differences.
As for the rest of your post: it sounds like you have a proverbial axe to grind. I’d be the first to agree that there are some serious issues with some of America’s domestic and foreign policies but none of your points are even remotely relevant to the conversation (and some weren’t even remotely based on reality)
So Facebook provided free internet to Myanmar, and it was better than the "cheaper local equivalent" because it was actually free. Soon all the ISPs in Myanmar were out of business. Facebook was now synonymous with the internet in Myanmar, and suddenly it became a lot easier to influence people into doing pogroms. Now clearly a "western subscription service" successfully competed, and unfortunately, the pogrom did not affect the "western subscription service" in any way while millions of real humans became refugees.
Generally, people's answer to this is something like "yeah, it is too bad the people were such idiots to be provoked into such violence" or in some way blaming the naivete of the local population. But imagine if Facebook was actually asked to pay compensation for every affected person, or to stop business operations in Myanmar altogether. See, you can actually do that with a local company because they have some real skin in the game.
To complete my point, I don't actually give a damn if a "western subscription service" can compete for my business unless I have a way to drag Zuckerberg (figuratively speaking of course, a minion of Zuckerberg will do) to my country for trial and then send him to the local prison if found guilty of some local law. Think of it as "terms of providing service".
>>it sounds like you have a proverbial axe to grind
Indeed I do. It is called "stop patronizing the people of my country".
>>none of your points are even remotely relevant to the conversation
If you feel so, that's OK, although I would obviously like to see a more specific refutation.
Facebook is an edge case because that’s a problem in every country and frankly that whole “free internet” mission was clearly a bullshit move from the outset (even people in the west weren’t the slightest bit convinced by Zuckerburgs motives). However that still doesn’t prove your claim that every western company exists in developing counties specifically to further your economic strife (which is the accusation you’re levelling against the west).
If you want to argue that American corporate culture is a toxic breed of short-sighted greed or that developing economies are better served with local businesses then at least try to do so without all the conspiracy theories and personal attacks. It’s not exactly a hard topic to argue rationally after all.
> Indeed I do. It is called "stop patronizing the people of my country".
It’s not “patronising“ to say that companies need to offer regional rates to compete in regional economies.
You might argue that its unfair to put local companies out of business or that western corporations deserve no claim in developing nations; but that’s categorically not what “patronising” means (and also a very different point to the one I was making).
Don’t just take my word for it though, look the word up in any of the numerous online dictionaries :)
>> none of your points are even remotely relevant to the conversation.
> If you feel so, that's OK, although I would obviously like to see a more specific refutation.
I wasn’t trying to refute your claims (mainly because most of them were far fetched - even by your own admission). I was saying they’re a complete tangent to the topic of conversation.
Look, if you want to bleat on about the evils of western influence on developing economies then fine. But at least acknowledge it’s a largely unrelated rant to the conversation that precedes it.....and also don’t make accusations about other HN posters when you don’t understand the terms you’re accusing them of.
>>Don’t just take my word for it though, look the word up in any of the numerous online dictionaries :)
>>You then run the risk of excluding developing economies
"Patronizing: apparently kind or helpful but betraying a feeling of superiority; condescending"
I see. So, let us back up a little to your first statement. Why is the risk of excluding developing economies a problem (for the developing economy), again? I will be very happy to take back my assumption about what you implied there, provided you can give me an explanation for why it is a "risk" and who actually bears the risk.
>>Facebook is an edge case because that’s a problem in every country
It is not an edge case if it leads to making assumptions which are clearly bad for our future. Because Facebook isn't getting any real punishment, people are only going to say "Nothing happened to Facebook. Why should the other companies worry about lying to governments/ lying to customers/ privacy issues/ data collection / retargeting / lookalike audience" etc.
>>However that still doesn’t prove your claim that every western company exists in developing counties specifically to further your economic strife (which is the accusation you’re levelling against the west)
I am not sure why you feel that way. Specifically, what I am saying is that I don't like people starting off with statements such as "you then run the risk of excluding developing economies" as if that is automatically a bad thing for the developing economies.
> I see. So, let us back up a little to your first statement. Why is the risk of excluding developing economies a problem (for the developing economy), again?
This is the question you should have opened with :)
I never said it was a problem for the developing country. I was talking purely about the economics of Facebook. If they (Facebook) want to expend their demographic then they would need be affordable in each economic environment. Whether you (the respective county) want them there or not is another matter entirely.
Frankly I’d be happier if Facebook failed in my own country rather than expanded their global presence into yours as well; but that wasn’t the topic being discussed at that time.
> It is not an edge case if it leads to making assumptions which are clearly bad for our future.
Technically it still would be when using the correct definition of edge case ;)
> Because Facebook isn't getting any real punishment, people are only going to say "Nothing happened to Facebook. Why should the other companies worry about lying to governments/ lying to customers/ privacy issues/ data collection / retargeting / lookalike audience" etc.
I agree that’s a problem but, once again, you’re arguing a completely different topic.
> I am not sure why you feel that way.
Frankly put: because I’m not biased. You feel like you’ve had an injustice so you’re lashing out at everyone. I totally get that. I’ve been really privileged to grow up in the U.K. but I’ve also spent a lot of time in developing countries so I’ve seen both sides of the argument.
> Specifically, what I am saying is that I don't like people starting off with statements such as "you then run the risk of excluding developing economies" as if that is automatically a bad thing for the developing economies.
That literally wasn’t what was said though. The context was never about what was good or bad for those counties; economically, socially, not by any other metric. The context of my original post and the entire chain of conversation that preceded it was a theoretic one about how Facebook might counter abuse on its platform. The context was always about Facebook specifically. This is why I have repeatedly said you’ve gone waaaaaay off topic.
If you want to change the conversation to the evils of western corporations then please bare in mind that HN is ostensibly a tech and business forum so people will often talk about things from the perspective of tech giants even if they don’t actually support the operations of those corporations. Thus it would benefit everyone if you didn’t jump to conclusions, making personal accusations about the opinions of HN posters on entirely different subject matters just because they happen to make an impartial point on a company you have a personal vendetta against.
When it comes to account creation, whatever method you come up with will be solved with hordes of call centre workers in a lesser affluent county.
The only solution is to police the content and that then brings up questions about whether Facebook are an “ISP”, how start ups then follow precedence, etc.
By now, people have the gaming of Real Name policies and Verified Accounts down to a science.
Indeed it's harder to use false accounts anymore, that much is true.
However, it becomes much easier to Dox people. This allows you to put pressure on work+family+neighbors. Or alternately, if you're one of the more violent groups: you can outright go after your opponents in physical space.
This may be important and may be not. Numerous governments already do that: require everyone to disclose their [e-]life and punish for what they had to say. But if you do that in US or EU, will they turn into such oppressing states? Is total control a cause or an effect, or both?
To make the problem trickier, even if you do have a "Verified human" today, they are likely to download virus.exe tomorrow and become part of the next bot net
The problem is it's not directly in their interest.
Fake accounts are just as billable for boosting reach as real accounts. It will only be when companies stop advertising that they will be forced fix it. In the meantime they take the money and run. (or invest into business streams with actual long term value)
I don't think social media should ever be trusted as a source of news (by itself) – and frankly, I don't know many people who have seen Facebook as such.
I look forward to this block of fake accounts registering to vote and voting by mail. Will any accounts go rogue and defy their creators? How does a candidate appeal to this influential group?
For many use cases it would be great to have a real/verified oauth service. Dutch government does something like that with digid. Imagine how much fraud could be prevented if there was something like that in the US.
The cynic in me thinks Facebook let this slide to hide the anemic "growth" of their userbase and activity. Bot accounts will still click on ads, like pages, and fake interactions that generate revenue for Facebook.
Aka the usual problem these social media services have; bad behaviour from bots and users likely looks great on the stats spreadsheet, even if it's at the expense of the quality of the site/community.
The most fascinating thing to watch is the democratization of propaganda. Now you no longer need the printing press. You can speak with a million voices without being a Getty or Rockefeller.
The NYT no longer has a monopoly on convincing lies.
These are interesting times. I think we're close to the emergence of trustworthy celebrity journalists.
If anyone's interested in neural networks and how they work, you should check out victoR. VictoR is a powerful tool which utilizes file storage size to modify specific neuron mapping components and optimize processing power. It's still quite experimental, but here is a download link for an installation wizard if you want to check it out: https://bit.ly/35mtZZj
Good article, but for the sake of argument: Don't you think any technical "solutions" to this issue will also eliminate the possibility to use these tools for ethical goals (let's say the roles were reversed or whatever) – in addition to all the other gray-area, and inevitable arms-race of detection/avoidance?
I mean I think e.g. you could have incredible art projects and experiences created out e.g. of giant undetectable fake crowds. There are real tradeoffs in terms of what we value or need in a society.
I think technical limitations like this are the worst possible solution. The genie can't be put back in the bottle with any particular technology, and the lack of widespread access and awareness means the damage from any particular deepfake that _does_ get released can be that much higher. There is zero chance this tech won't be in the hands of every government-sponsored group on the planet, not to mention all the other independent bad guys out there online.
Why doesn't Facebook have an identity verification process? They literally allow anyone to sign up as any person. There is a show on MTV called Catfish that is dedicated to people who create fake profiles to trick people into relationships.
This is just using GANs to generate fake profiles. It does scale better than making up fake people by hand, but to what end? I'm not sure if there's a direct relationship between the ease of creating fake accounts and their cultural influence. And it seems like facebook doesn't have trouble detecting them.
Convince me that this isn't just "add AI to the headline" clickbait
There's been fake generated profiles on Facebook for over a decade. I know this because I had some, I was targeted by some, and I had "security friends" who generated some. Over the years I've seen several campaigns of groups of fake profiles trying to collect access (by "friending into" friend circles).
At university my security club had a member who gave a presentation on algorithms for detecting and generating fake profile posts for Facebook, through which he created sock puppets and also found a ton of others belonging to "who knows which group". That was around 10 years ago.
People are faking their profile pictures for sometime using filters or AI cameras, bamby eyes. Already a digital ego fairytale now deepfakers would open new positions as ’ghost busters’
A fascinating thought on this for me is the basic American belief that "bigger is better". What I mean here is that the companies generating these fake ids will generate lots of the fake ids, under the belief that the more they have the more influence they have. At some point, the fake ids will reach a tipping point and outnumber the real ids thus making Facebook itself irrelevant. Sort of a "DOS" using fake ids, in this case a denial of relevance. There are some interesting paths that this could take, but I don't see any incentive in Facebook really doing much about this because their power actually lies in also "Bigger is better". So, generation of fake ids could be a blessing by overloading Facebook and making it irrelevant.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadPeople have been talking about this group for months and Facebook hemmed and hawed and delayed and delayed
"In April, at the height of its ad spending, videos from the Epoch Media Group, which includes The Epoch Times and digital video outlet New Tang Dynasty, or NTD, combined for around 3 billion views on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, ranking 11th among all video creators across platforms and outranking every other traditional news publisher, according to data from the social media analytics company Tubular."
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/trump-qanon-impending...
Now a journalist will not only need training in writing well, conveying a story with facts, and investigating, but they will also need to become experts in identifying fake source material.
In a world where anyone can make a video or photo of anyone doing anything, we'll need to rely on reputable journalists to vet that material for us.
Saw a video on YouTube of the President saying something bad? No idea if it's real anymore.
Sure, a lot of this technology has existed for a while, but it was usually in the fringes (see The National Enquirer). Now it's going mainstream.
And the worst part is, there are a whole group of people who will not trust a professional journalist (sometimes with good reason) but will trust anyone online who happens to provide evidence that boosters their existing opinions.
And more historical, "Another Interview with Mr. Lincoln; His Opinion of Compromises" (1861) https://www.nytimes.com/1861/01/14/archives/anotherinterview...
There are some great stats about just how much the number of professional journalists has shrunk in the social media era.
In this context I think it should be termed "now that there are no classified ads."
Here's a thread from January this year, where a journalism professor lays bare the facts about the decline of his domain: https://twitter.com/jeremylittau/status/1088503510184927233?...
If my memory serves me right, that thread was on the HN front page at the time. Essentially the expense of quality journalism was seen as frivolous in the 80's, got nixed, and by the mid-90's newspapers relied on their established captive audience to churn out reliable profits with little appetite for innovation. Who was going to compete with them, anyway?
Internet changed the landscape, and social media has been instrumental in hammering nails in the coffin. But the decline of journalism and destruction of quality newsrooms has been going on since before there was public internet.
As a rule, people don't want to pay for anything that benefits them in a second-order way with non-immediate consequences - even if objectively the benefits are real.
It's a classic economic monkey trap. Holding onto something now is "better" than letting go and getting a bigger benefit later.
Which suggests that perhaps we should be doing more to eliminate monkey traps from our economic and political systems.
Maybe because it’s already a paid service and its quality still has to be observed. But if you take their government from them, returning that substantial income cut, they instantly want it back.
This doesn’t have to invalidate your point, but this particular comparison seems pretty shaky. (Or it’s not and I’m missing something.)
More niche publications don't have that problem, but I think a big question is how we systemically increase the quality of mass journalism.
> "When everyone has a printing press [i.e., Facebook], the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to."
In retrospect, it gives a ton of insight into the flawed beliefs within the company.
https://twitter.com/nemild/status/1006533287378968576
https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-facebooks-little-red-...
Facebook solved a problem (connecting) but it also created one (fake content, bot farms).
Either Facebook will fix it, or if they don't, new products will pop up to solve the problem to try to provide more reliable content.
Recently, might have seen it on here (I forget where) someone trained an AI to try to detect fake news. Sure the first attempts will be crappy prototypes, but the point is that people are trying to figure the problem out.
While this may be inevitable on a long timescale, the cost in human lives and dignity may be monstrous before this naturally occurs.
Do you believe that “more reliable content” will have a financial edge over “more popular content”, and if so, why?
Should be:
"When everyone has a printing press, the most persuasive ones are the ones people listen to"
And a good tautology like this one can at least help people realize the difficulties in distinguishing merit from success.
Which puts it up a step from overconfident generalizations.
Where it all goes wrong is that it is very expensive to test an idea and determine whether it is good, whereas an idea that is very attractive to repeat and copy without testing is much fitter and the more it resists testing the better it is.
This is why the whole framework for protecting IP is broken as well - we incentivize coming up with ideas, but ideas are worthless - it's evaluating and testing ideas that is valuable.
We're letting the world burn for the sake of online advertising revenue and broken business models.
The problem is language itself. We trust it way too much to convey meaning, and truth. But it's just a delusion, or a mirage, in much the same way that the search for artificial intelligence is. In fact, I would say that language itself is the first AI invented.
Do you have any source or pointer to learn more about this ?
https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-...
A more humble view might include that he was raised in relative privilege, a lot of doors were open to him, and there was a lot of good luck involved.
I imagine it is only a small fraction of people who would be so brash as to ask fellow students for their email passwords, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that someone who asks for that information probably wants to do something nasty with it.
In fact, there is no account of capital punishment, in regards to this law (killing homosexual men), in Jewish history.
As for Judaism, Rabbinic tradition understands the Torah's system of capital punishment to not be in effect for the past approximately 2,000 years, in the absence of a Sanhedrin and Temple.
And as for Christianity, Leviticus and indeed the entirety of the Law of Moses was fulfilled by Jesus Christ.
And so no, neither Jews nor Christians practice this at all.
- men who had sex with another men
- should be killed
- they deserve it
Would you point me to a source/insight maybe?
Else I will believe, that this is too, as I have witnessed countless times personally, nothing but an apologetic approach to horrors religious scripture in modern age.
1: https://biblehub.com/leviticus/20-13.htm
Is that right, or did I misunderstand you? If that is what you're saying, do you have a reason to disagree with all of those translations? Can you offer your own for that passage?
(edit: and if you accept their four-degrees-of-game-of-telephone translation at face value, as sibling comment points out)
I'm sure that at least some Abrahamic writings didn't get included in the Christian Bible. Or even in the Tanakh.
Why is it part of the Christian Canon? Because it provides important context for later material, e.g., Acts 15. The controversy in the early Christian Community over the application of the Jewish ritual law to gentile Christians is hard to understand without the Jewish ritual law.
Also, not all Christians are gentile Christians.
Maybe this is a dumb question (having had no religious instruction) but do all modern Christians (except, I guess, some fundamentalists) understand that the Old Testament doesn't apply to them? If that's so, it seems like that stuff should be flagged somehow, to avoid misunderstandings.
Or do some modern gentile Christians perhaps go further, and believe that the old Jewish ritual law was a misunderstanding, and not an accurate statement of God's will? And if so, who are they?
Also, who are the modern non-gentile Christians?
I found a site that explains some of this,[0] but have no clue about its reliability. The root is here.[1]
0) http://www.winternet.com/~swezeyt/bible/origins/jwGn.htm
1) http://www.winternet.com/~swezeyt/bible/origins/originsMain....
I know of no modern Christian group that doesn't have a general understanding that the applicability of the OT law to Christians is, at a minimum, limited by the explicit terms of Acts 15. OTOH, there's obviously quite a bit of variation in what particular bits of the OT law modern Christian groups think actually still applies.
> If that's so, it seems like that stuff should be flagged somehow, to avoid misunderstandings
It's kind of (in general, not necessarily the specific passage in particular) the reason that the Catholic Church spent a very long time not being particularly happy with people without specific training reading the Bible themselves rather than going through tainted clergy as gatekeepers.
> Or do some modern gentile Christians perhaps go further, and believe that the old Jewish ritual law was a misunderstanding, and not an accurate statement of God's will? And if so, who are they?
Without getting into boundary disputes about where "Christian" ends, sure, there are probably groups that identify as Christian that believe that.
> Also, who are the modern non-gentile Christians?
One interpretation is that anyone who has ever been a Jew remains one and boundy the law even if they become Christian. (Of course, even the Jewish understanding of Jewish law seems to have h evolved—and become quite diverse—considerably since Christianity split off, and I'm not sure how much that influences theology as to what precepts, precisely, apply to modern Jews who become Christians.)
> It's kind of (in general, not necessarily the specific passage in particular) the reason that the Catholic Church spent a very long time not being particularly happy with people without specific training reading the Bible themselves rather than going through tainted clergy as gatekeepers.
OK, that makes sense. There's some of that perspective in the sciences about misunderstanding of the literature.
“trained” rather than “tainted” was the intent here.
But from the Protestants' perspective, "tainted" arguably works too.
They also did believe that the government should be structured according to those same OT provisions, and enforce them as laws.
That sounds like Messianic Judaism.
OTOH, like virtually of the rest of the old testament statutes applicable to the Jewish people, these and most of the other prohibitions in that chapter and the surrounding ones is voided as to non-Jewish Christians (though one might infer from it a continuing prohibition on same sex marriage from it), see Acts 15:28-29, where the apostles, addressing the acts of some in the early Christian community attempting to apply the Mosaic law in its entirety to gentile Christians, declared: “It is the decision of the holy Spirit and of us not to place on you any burden beyond these necessities, namely, to abstain from meat sacrificed to idols, from blood, from meats of strangled animals, and from unlawful marriage. If you keep free of these, you will be doing what is right. Farewell.”
Now, it's true that some modern Christians do exactly (or, rather more often, a cherry-picked subset of it) what the council in Acts 15—directed, as Scripture says, by the Holy Spirit—reacted against and declared invalid.
I believe that Jesus did not speak at all about homosexuality. There is no indication that he attacked or held any anger towards homosexuals.
Conversely Jesus was strongly anti-capitalist! No money changing or animal selling in temples folks!
But fundamentally - when reading the bible your question must be "am I a Christian - or not?" what is the purpose of Jesus's ministry and passion if he did not bring a message and a purpose beyond and more significant than the messages revealed to prophets and his servants? If you are a Christian surely your preoccupation must be his word - and more importantly his meaning; interpreted in the context of his explicitly stated principles and lived actions.
Unfortunately, this whole thread seems to be on the topic of “It’s a shame that mass-dissemination of information demonstrably fails to make the best ideas into the most popular ideas [0]” — and although you interpret the bible that way, I’ve witnessed many profess Christianity while also condemning gay men.
[0] Well, unless you take the memetic evolution attitude that “best” isn’t a moral statement but shorthand for “best at reproducing”, but if anyone on this thread has said that, I’ve missed it.
Remember there have been 1000's of people practicing grotesque child abuse while professing Christianity, and yet one of the most frank and flat statements of Christ is "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
Be aware that if I, as a lapsed neopagan, am asked to judge which Christians are acting in accordance with the deeds and words of an entity that I regard as fictional as my own pantheon, there might not be any “True Christians” left.
To focus on the point, how about a biblical example: Parable of the Sower, specifically that sown on the path and in the thorns.
'If a man lies with a man as with a woman, they have both committed an abomination. They must surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.'
If you are going to treat these writings as a single cohesive narrative, you still have to keep in mind the context.
One of the most interesting aspects of the writings Jesus, is that he only ever taught Jews. Jesus in fact never really laid out a formal theology of what to do after his death, he simply stresses that the second coming would be very soon.
The only person to discuss the applicability of the Torah to non jewish followers of Jesus is Paul. Paul is extremely clear that the Jewish law does not apply to non Jews.
It's also interesting that Paul never met Jesus, that Paul persecuted christians until a burning bush talked to Paul in a moment of divine inspiration, and afterwards Paul largely relied on his excellent knowledge of jewish scripture to explain why the jewish scripture no longer applied anymore.
There are many verses which deal with “what now if the law?”, and I think a fuller understanding requires reading more than one of them.
For example, there is, of course, the parts about the dietary restrictions part of the law.
But that isn’t all. Male converts to Judaism were required to be circumcised, but NT verses say that this is not required to convert to Christianity (though, not phrased like that of course), and in talking about this, it also talks about what the law succeeds in, and what it, well, not fails in, but, it’s insufficiency in the face of human failure?
I’m saying this not to say that the NT condones sex between two cisgender men (indeed, I believe that at one point after the resurrection, some apostles are on an island, and are telling the people there about Christ, and the text describes the homosexual sexual practices practiced by those native to the island as (in at least one common translation. This is by memory.) as “unnatural”, which seems to me to indicate disapproval, though I haven’t looked at commentary on how this was worded in the original Greek.)
My apologies for not including links and citations; I haven’t gotten out of bed yet this morning, and am typing this on my phone.
There are a lot of mistakes being made for which consequences have not yet occurred. Journalists of previous generations on whom we could rely had built up lifetimes-worth of reputation. On whom can you rely today? It's an open problem which I think is solvable in spite of today's difficulties.
And there were some valid criticisms.
This is a very common stance now - because one person said one thing, or a person said something once, or did something once then all people associated with that person (in the mind of the commentator) are a "thing".
The reasoning is "a rightwing person once said a racist thing, therefore anyone who is rightwing is definitely racist" it is clearly nonsense, and is extremely corrosive to debate.
I don't see this as a move into a new world, but rather the increase level of hopelessness we're dealing with when it comes to good journalism. It may be time to pause and rethink our current approach to journalism since the current model is not working very well now and certainly won't be in the future.
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/10/11/pro-trump-outlet-link...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/11/12/bl-fake-profiles/
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/12/13/facebook-bl-cib/
https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/12/20/facebook-removes-the-...
We don't need real journalists, we need a way to pay for news that makes accurate reporting profitable.
People want to read/watch news they want to believe or agree with, and instinctively they shun away from facts that causes cognitive dissonance with them. What they want is to believe their preferred news sources are objective, but they will do everything they can to avoid doing actual due diligence to verify that objectivity.
That’s why if we leave it to purely market economy, completely objective, facts based journalism will never be as profitable as sensationalism based stuff you see these days.
I think it was pg who said "make something people want". If the plan is to get rich that is the way to go. If you want to improve the world, you should build something people need. Unfortunately, they often don't want it or don't want it enough to pay for it which makes the endeavor unsustainable.
Plenty of foreign journalists didn't buy what the US government was saying and refuted its claims with facts, the whole idea that Saddam Hussein had nukes or WMD was completely preposterous, it's just that US journalists were afraid of being labelled traitors if they didn't go along with the Irak war. Journalists are people after all. So they "chose" to listen to Rumsfeld instead of Hans Blix.
Journalists aren't trusted anymore and their work isn't valued by the public because things like the Covington school incident happens, where Journalists just keep using tweets as a meaningful source of information, with no serious investigative work.
Journalists don't like Facebook, Google and co because they are direct competitors to them in terms of attention and ad revenue. Ironically they somehow like Twitter and are all on Twitter even when Twitter is actually competition to them, way more than Facebook or Google. Why bother visiting the nyt when all the drama is already on Twitter?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program
As was true before the internet, we need to make sure we have reliable sources to trust the news.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
signed media is going to become FAR more important in the future.
We're going to have cameras shipping with crypto so that news agencies can sign their video.
Does that sound like something that would be feasible to produce/practical in the real world?
Desirable? Well, you've created a system that authenticates a camera as being at a place at a time. It's a good way to authenticate photos, but a bad way to stay anonymous.
How do you feel about photographers and journalists becoming even larger targets for anyone who wants to keep a secret?
The issue is : does it authenticate that a particular camera that belongs to a particular person is/was at a place at a time and produced an image - because if so then if the device is found in a search the owner/user/keeper is in hot water.
So the camera must be anonymous - but it must be impossible for a lie about the place and time to be encoded into the image.
It's perhaps worth considering that an authoritarian government might not trouble itself with such legal niceties. All they have to do is mandate that journalists with cameras register their keys, make possession of a camera with an unregistered key criminal, and track sales / border entries. China springs to mind as a country that might do such a thing.
Again, you're absolutely correct in asserting that anonymity of camera-user is important! It's just perhaps worth considering how linking hardware to images might undermine that in dangerous ways.
Meanwhile secure enclaves are now possibly a lot safer, but as Kalium mentioned it might not be very attractive for everyone.
For forensics experts however it could become very useful I believe.
Facebook does a lot of disageeable things but making everyone a journalist isn't one of them. This just decentralised journalism and actually empowered freespeech. There are issues with it, but that's a better problem we can work on to mitigate than giving a few channels a monopoly over truth.
I've lived through enough presidencies to assure you that it never mattered if it was real or not. Supporters ignored or excused it, opposition treated it like the end of the world. Sane people stopped paying attention long ago to keep their sanity.
Mark Zuckerberg's website is now a place not to be trusted as a source of news, finding friends and meeting others if there's a possibility of AI generated profiles being proliferated on the website.
I've heard that meeting real humans outdoors makes it less likely to be deceived. Their authenticity is vouched via word of mouth and experience by other humans, rather than robots on the internet.
Probably would get downvoted if I said SSN + a credit check.
Phone number required + needs to be validated + can not be reused + can not be Twilio.
Prove your address? Prove your ISP cable bill? I don't know. Everything I guess, people here are going to tell me it's an invasion of privacy and they don't trust Facebook to do it.
But they'll let CreditKarma have every bit of financial information related to them possible.
People will apply for a credit card online (employer, address, social, income)... make a universal login process for that.
Maybe like blue Twitter verified checkmarks next to all profile names. "Verified human"
And arguably a small payment amplifies anti-abuse measures because you have a hard financial trail. If a foreign entity buys thousands or more of accounts, not only are you putting a cost on it, it should be trivial to see the anomaly in the system.
Also, I think it is good for all parties concerned, because most developing economies will have a big problem becoming developed economies if their people are under constant surveillance from entities who may benefit from their continuation as developing economies.
Case in point: the US dollar is a horrible currency if looked at in isolation - after all, why the heck should the rest of the world pay American kids lots of money to have a great time at college and then turn around and default on their debt? Student loan forgiveness is almost a certainty over the next few years. But people still flock to the US dollar because it is far better than the other places money could go. There may be a hint of conspiracy theory in this, for sure, but it does not require a wild stretch of imagination to expect that the country where Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram is headquartered actually has a real incentive to foment violence in other countries and make their own economy and thus currency look better in comparison.
...which means if a western subscription services wants to compete with a cheaper local equivalent, they need to charge a comparable local rate. That’s not patronising, this literally how all businesses work when having to compete with regional price differences.
As for the rest of your post: it sounds like you have a proverbial axe to grind. I’d be the first to agree that there are some serious issues with some of America’s domestic and foreign policies but none of your points are even remotely relevant to the conversation (and some weren’t even remotely based on reality)
Interesting comparison. Let us discuss that a little further.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
So Facebook provided free internet to Myanmar, and it was better than the "cheaper local equivalent" because it was actually free. Soon all the ISPs in Myanmar were out of business. Facebook was now synonymous with the internet in Myanmar, and suddenly it became a lot easier to influence people into doing pogroms. Now clearly a "western subscription service" successfully competed, and unfortunately, the pogrom did not affect the "western subscription service" in any way while millions of real humans became refugees.
Generally, people's answer to this is something like "yeah, it is too bad the people were such idiots to be provoked into such violence" or in some way blaming the naivete of the local population. But imagine if Facebook was actually asked to pay compensation for every affected person, or to stop business operations in Myanmar altogether. See, you can actually do that with a local company because they have some real skin in the game.
To complete my point, I don't actually give a damn if a "western subscription service" can compete for my business unless I have a way to drag Zuckerberg (figuratively speaking of course, a minion of Zuckerberg will do) to my country for trial and then send him to the local prison if found guilty of some local law. Think of it as "terms of providing service".
>>it sounds like you have a proverbial axe to grind
Indeed I do. It is called "stop patronizing the people of my country".
>>none of your points are even remotely relevant to the conversation
If you feel so, that's OK, although I would obviously like to see a more specific refutation.
If you want to argue that American corporate culture is a toxic breed of short-sighted greed or that developing economies are better served with local businesses then at least try to do so without all the conspiracy theories and personal attacks. It’s not exactly a hard topic to argue rationally after all.
> Indeed I do. It is called "stop patronizing the people of my country".
It’s not “patronising“ to say that companies need to offer regional rates to compete in regional economies.
You might argue that its unfair to put local companies out of business or that western corporations deserve no claim in developing nations; but that’s categorically not what “patronising” means (and also a very different point to the one I was making).
Don’t just take my word for it though, look the word up in any of the numerous online dictionaries :)
>> none of your points are even remotely relevant to the conversation.
> If you feel so, that's OK, although I would obviously like to see a more specific refutation.
I wasn’t trying to refute your claims (mainly because most of them were far fetched - even by your own admission). I was saying they’re a complete tangent to the topic of conversation.
Look, if you want to bleat on about the evils of western influence on developing economies then fine. But at least acknowledge it’s a largely unrelated rant to the conversation that precedes it.....and also don’t make accusations about other HN posters when you don’t understand the terms you’re accusing them of.
>>You then run the risk of excluding developing economies
"Patronizing: apparently kind or helpful but betraying a feeling of superiority; condescending"
I see. So, let us back up a little to your first statement. Why is the risk of excluding developing economies a problem (for the developing economy), again? I will be very happy to take back my assumption about what you implied there, provided you can give me an explanation for why it is a "risk" and who actually bears the risk.
>>Facebook is an edge case because that’s a problem in every country
It is not an edge case if it leads to making assumptions which are clearly bad for our future. Because Facebook isn't getting any real punishment, people are only going to say "Nothing happened to Facebook. Why should the other companies worry about lying to governments/ lying to customers/ privacy issues/ data collection / retargeting / lookalike audience" etc.
>>However that still doesn’t prove your claim that every western company exists in developing counties specifically to further your economic strife (which is the accusation you’re levelling against the west)
I am not sure why you feel that way. Specifically, what I am saying is that I don't like people starting off with statements such as "you then run the risk of excluding developing economies" as if that is automatically a bad thing for the developing economies.
This is the question you should have opened with :)
I never said it was a problem for the developing country. I was talking purely about the economics of Facebook. If they (Facebook) want to expend their demographic then they would need be affordable in each economic environment. Whether you (the respective county) want them there or not is another matter entirely.
Frankly I’d be happier if Facebook failed in my own country rather than expanded their global presence into yours as well; but that wasn’t the topic being discussed at that time.
> It is not an edge case if it leads to making assumptions which are clearly bad for our future.
Technically it still would be when using the correct definition of edge case ;)
> Because Facebook isn't getting any real punishment, people are only going to say "Nothing happened to Facebook. Why should the other companies worry about lying to governments/ lying to customers/ privacy issues/ data collection / retargeting / lookalike audience" etc.
I agree that’s a problem but, once again, you’re arguing a completely different topic.
> I am not sure why you feel that way.
Frankly put: because I’m not biased. You feel like you’ve had an injustice so you’re lashing out at everyone. I totally get that. I’ve been really privileged to grow up in the U.K. but I’ve also spent a lot of time in developing countries so I’ve seen both sides of the argument.
> Specifically, what I am saying is that I don't like people starting off with statements such as "you then run the risk of excluding developing economies" as if that is automatically a bad thing for the developing economies.
That literally wasn’t what was said though. The context was never about what was good or bad for those counties; economically, socially, not by any other metric. The context of my original post and the entire chain of conversation that preceded it was a theoretic one about how Facebook might counter abuse on its platform. The context was always about Facebook specifically. This is why I have repeatedly said you’ve gone waaaaaay off topic.
If you want to change the conversation to the evils of western corporations then please bare in mind that HN is ostensibly a tech and business forum so people will often talk about things from the perspective of tech giants even if they don’t actually support the operations of those corporations. Thus it would benefit everyone if you didn’t jump to conclusions, making personal accusations about the opinions of HN posters on entirely different subject matters just because they happen to make an impartial point on a company you have a personal vendetta against.
The only solution is to police the content and that then brings up questions about whether Facebook are an “ISP”, how start ups then follow precedence, etc.
However, it becomes much easier to Dox people. This allows you to put pressure on work+family+neighbors. Or alternately, if you're one of the more violent groups: you can outright go after your opponents in physical space.
Which would be a pretty glorious downfall.
I'm sure Facebook can work it out too. Though they have some very game-able elements.
Fake accounts are just as billable for boosting reach as real accounts. It will only be when companies stop advertising that they will be forced fix it. In the meantime they take the money and run. (or invest into business streams with actual long term value)
Sounds like Usenet in the 90’s. The more things change...
We will see in our lifetimes how droves of spureous personas flood the internet forever
Wait, that sounds circular. Bottom line is profit overrides truth most times now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card#Cryptog...
The NYT no longer has a monopoly on convincing lies.
These are interesting times. I think we're close to the emergence of trustworthy celebrity journalists.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847583
Interesting that the eyes on every TPDNE image have a specific position that could (for now) be used to detect them.
(Also at /newest; 3rd page now, and the other submission. Ideally those topics at least would be merged?)
Summary of mitigations:
# Limiting users or use cases
- User Vetting: Carefully vet those who can use a tool (Example: Synthesia only working with vetted enterprise clients.)
- Usage Constraints: Limit the synthesis possibilities. (Example: Humen is providing only a limited set of movements for generated videos.)
# Discouraging malicious use of flexible and public tools
- Clear disclosure: Ensuring and requiring that manipulated outputs are clearly labeled (including via metadata).
- Consent protection: Requiring the consent of those being impersonated.
- Detection friendliness: Supporting those working on detection and not seeking to fool detection systems.
- Hidden watermarks: Embedding data through robust watermarks.
- Usage logs: Storing information about usage and media outputs.
- Use restrictions: Enforcing contracts that prohibit forms of violative or malicious use.
Not all apply to every system of course. The article has more detail!
I mean I think e.g. you could have incredible art projects and experiences created out e.g. of giant undetectable fake crowds. There are real tradeoffs in terms of what we value or need in a society.
Convince me that this isn't just "add AI to the headline" clickbait
At university my security club had a member who gave a presentation on algorithms for detecting and generating fake profile posts for Facebook, through which he created sock puppets and also found a ton of others belonging to "who knows which group". That was around 10 years ago.