This is the most disillusioning thing about being a web developer, for me. I remember it was so recently that during the Arab Spring I thought Twitter was a meaningfully democratizing force. Now I just see it as a vehicle for brands, a source for lazy journalists to find poorly worded quotes for any sort of viewpoint they want to write about. And of course we know that Twitter is full of sock puppets, paid trolls and bots. We know that Russia and China will continue to use paid trolls to drive wedge issues right to the heart of the culture warriors.
And honestly we should've seen it coming the whole time. People like Richard Stallman did. I've been a naive apologist. No more.
US based corporations are definitely guilty of astroturfing as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid
HBGary was not awarded that particular contract, but does create its own astroturfing software anyway. I have no doubt it's common among US companies and I find it incredibly grating when Americans call this a Russian or Chinese phenomenon.
From an attachment in an email by then HBGary CEO Aaron Barr:
> "Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
> To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile (satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc). These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts."
> Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas"
The news industry invented the 24 hour news cycle, and the exploiting people's fear and outrage to keep their attention fixed on all of the worst, link-baity events that happen every day. The article talks about Eighth Graders and how 10 hours a week online makes them less happy; what about people who spend that much time watching the news? I'd wager that a lot of the negative feelings people get from spending too much time online come from reading too much news (and social media reactions to news). This creates an unfounded feeling that the world is falling apart compared to how it was 10 or 20 years ago, when by most objective measures the world is getting better.
So I can acknowledge that there are problems, while simultaneously feeling a bit unwilling to be demonized in this way by the New York Times.
This is a good way to only hear opinions you like. Maybe try to work on feeling less personally demonized by people talking about an entire industry and it's effects on society?
Also, we in tech throw stones at literally every other industry all the time. We're out to disrupt everyone else's industries, remember? We can dish it out but can't take it?
To me, disruption is about trying to find better and more efficient ways of doing things. Not disparaging or scapegoating the people already in that industry.
This seems completely disconnected with reality. Disrupting an industry has real effects on peoples lives.
I think "evil" is certainly moralizing but I think it's fair given that companies like Google have made things like "do no evil" their unofficial motto. I invite you to stop taking headlines personally and to instead focus on the content of the article rather than the tone.
You really can't fix this by trying to build a better advert supported service. For the service to be worth running it has to hurt the consumer. If it doesn't the people paying for it will go bust.
The fix is to regulate away advertising supported. It will have to be done gradually or else the disruption will be unbearable. But if the service ain't worth paying for it shouldn't be worth having.
Perhaps agents can save us, if every bit of information you get and every transaction you carry out is mediated through your own decision making software then maybe you'll pay for your own journalism and avoid the traps of brand recognition and so on.
It seems to be the opposite to me. Such massive influence by advertisers means only those with the most money get heard in the media.
Or do you think it's the opposite?
It was enabled by technology. There was channel scarcity with broadcast. Cable, and all of its enabling technologies, added abundance allowing space for some channels to completely dedicated themselves to news.
I said "enabled" but we could even say it was "technologically determined." It's hard to imagine a world with abundant channels where that wouldn't have happened.
Internet is still incredible learning tool. If you want to learn. Much better actually than it was 10 years ago. You have free university-level courses, you have Duolingo where you can learn two dozen languages or so, you have Wikipedia, you have SciHub, you have enormous quantity of scientific and scolarly content available absolutely free... But of course if you insist on going to sites with fake news, nobody can prevent it.
Same for games - which tech industry doesn't design, or careerism - which sure as heck tech industry did not invent, it existed way before Hero of Alexandria invented world's first steam engine.
Of course, the grass was greener, the sky was bluer and the internet was interneter when we're young. Everything was better when we're young. That has also been invented sometime between wheel and fire. But tech companies have nothing to do with all those faults of human nature - they are not free from them, of course, but they did not create them and did not change them in any substantial way. They did, however, make many things cheaper, faster, easier, more accessible and more affordable.
It's more like blaming Ford for the Pinto ("unsafe at any speed"). Deliberate design choices are what made fake news effective.
Think of Fake News as spam email: Gmail (and others) mostly solved spam email because they decided to. Apple made a deliberate decision to manually review apps in the AppStore. Twitter made the deliberate decision not to ban spam bots in its ToS(!). Facebook made a deliberate decision to reward engagement on links.
Spam is simply marketing emails that a user never asked to receive. If you ask users themselves for a definition of spam, you’ll get some variation on the above. If users were asked to mark emails they considered to be spam, they would generally mark the same kind of emails as spam. Some would mark more, some less, but all around a common center. Users and companies are basically in agreement about what spam is.
Compare with fake news. If you asked users to mark stories they considered fake, some would mark info wars and some would mark huff post. And those groups would rarely overlap. Given that users and companies fundamentally disagree on what fake news even is, I can’t see how any piece of technology can solve this.
Next time you hear an attack on "the mainstream media" remember that the attack is targeting organizations that do their own independent verification of stories (or at least try to) instead of regurgitating talking points. The people are angry that those organizations are making it harder to lie to you.
TBH, those are not exactly shining examples of "objective truth". I've repeatedly seen different ratings given to different politicians on essentially the same statement, because in one case the reviewer felt sympathetic to the politician and went out of the way to explain why it could be considered accurate, and in the other case was hostile, and went out of the way to point out why it is not true. Neither was, strictly speaking, incorrect - almost with any statement that is interesting enough to discuss you could find, if you look thoroughly enough, something to confirm and something to reject, especially if you consider not only the bare statement, but the context and implications, as those sites frequently do. It's inherently subjective business.
> the attack is targeting organizations that do their own independent verification of stories (or at least try to)
Or sometimes not :) Yes, the MSM does reporting and verification, but also does irresponsible reporting, exaggeration, conjecture, moral panic, sensationalizing and distortion. And people that are angry at them for that are trying to keep them (a little bit more) honest.
TBH, it doesn't even have to be a different politician - here's Obama saying famous "77 cent on the dollar" and gets "mostly false" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jun/... here is essentially the same getting "mostly true" http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/... Did women pay drop significantly in these two years? Probably not. If you read the conclusion, it's saying practically the same thing - yes, raw statistic is saying that, but it does not mean what people quoting it mean (that women are routinely discriminated in pay - i.e. maybe they are, but that specific statistic does not point to that conclusion and should not be used as an argument). But one time it gets "false", another time it gets "true". Why? Who knows. Certainly very short of "objective truth".
And then there's this: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/oct/... Yes, the famous "if you like you health plan, you can keep it". Rated as True. Or is it "Lie of the Year"? http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/dec/12/... You can read the whole evolution of this "objective truth" here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/12/27/in-200... I think this objective truth is a tad less than objective.
A very quick reading makes it pretty clear. The "True" one was in 2008, and based on the law as it was written. The second was in 2013, and based how it turned out after it met the real world.
The 2013 article outlines this process pretty well - the whole thing is worth reading. But a good pull quote: Yet Obama repeated "if you like your health care plan, you can keep it" when seeking re-election last year. In 2009 and again in 2012, PolitiFact rated Obama’s statement Half True, which means the statement is partially correct and partially wrong.
This is exactly the problem. They made some predictions about the law (which turned to be completely wrong, but that's not even the point) and tried to pass it as "objective fact", not as their private conjecture, implying that those that disagreed with it (and turned out to be right) are just lying.
This is the exact opposite of objective fact. This time they got caught because their predictions didn't come true and their subjective opinion disagreed with the facts so obviously that they were forced to flip. But many other times they do not get caught because there's no such sharp contrast between their private opinion and facts, and you can always muddle the waters and spin the arguments to try and present why your opinion is "objective truth" and anybody who thinks otherwise is just "truth denier".
As a political propaganda, it's fine - everybody tried to prove their opinion is correct and the other guy's opinion is wrong. But it takes special kind of hutzpah to call one's opinion "objective fact" and try to paint all the other opinions as lying. Exactly the kind of hutzpah the "fact checker" sites are swimming in.
My point is not that fake news isn't real. It is that when Gmail marks a weird Nigerian prince style scam email as spam, there is nothing controversial to the user about that. The user and the spam filter share the same opinion of what is spam.
The problem with fake news is that many conservatives disagree with tech companies on what fake news means. So if a user wants to share a BS info wars article, and is told he or she can't because it's a load of crock, they are not going to like that. People don't use social media to be told they are wrong. From the perspective of these kinds of conservative users, the spam equivalent would be Gmail marking an email from your mother as spam.
It's a hard problem because, unlike spam, it requires companies to disagree with their users.
I have met lots of journalists. I have been interviewed for stories (on Bitcoin and blockchain stuff) many times. I have never met, heard of or encountered anyone whose job was to independently check facts or talking points provided by sources.
More likely explanation: people mistake personal bias for "common sense" or some kind of factual information, and then attack what they assume is "fake news" based on these faulty starting points.
It's possible that's the right answer, and that there should be more scepticism of stories from both of those sources.
Fake news didn't start online, though. There have been many paper publications which lie outside of mainstream scientific and ideological orthodoxy, e.g: Fortean Times, Daily Worker, Sunday Sport, which today we might call "fake news". Some of these had quite wide circulations and were available in many shops, and yet didn't precipitate any kind of crisis.
It would seem that fake news is perhaps a symptom of something deeper. It's possible that the mainstream press has lost the authority to suppress the fringes as public figures have learned to control their image in the media more (i.e: spin), presenting at least the appearance of collusion.
EDIT: It would appear that Joseph Pulitzer, creator of the prestigious journalism prize, was deeply involved in the rise of "yellow journalism", the "fake news" of the 1890s. Perhaps in a century from now, journalists will covet the Bannon Prize?
I'm not arguing it is easy, but there are plenty of things which make it worse than it has to be.
The alt-right is already aware that scholars, scientists, and generally educated people believe their news sources to be bunk and that has not changed their opinion. So even if facebook or whoever makes perfect software that blocks crazy info wars articles or other news meeting the definition above, conservatives will cry censorship and find another platform because their chosen platform fundamentally disagrees with them on what is true. People don’t use Facebook to be told they are wrong.
These choices are made by whoever makes the fake news site. They are (ab)users of technology and not its creators. It's like saying encyclopedias are evil because you can take a heavy tome of encyclopedia and hit somebody in the head with it.
I am not saying solving fake news problem (if it exists) would be a bad thing. I am saying just like email is not evil because spammers exist, no technology is evil because fake news exist.
These last 2 sentences seem contradictory.
While they may not have created the exploitation of human psychology, they have definitely amplified it like never before which seems substantial to me.
The internet still has plenty of amazing sites, but compare and contrast these two lists of sites and you'll see what people are talking about - not the whole internet, but the new Internet(tm):
Good Internet:
- Education sites (wikipedia, duolingo, coursera, khan academy, etc)
- Big-box or indie games
- Research sites (SciHub, Examine.com)
Bad Internet:
- Engagement-optimised social media (Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat)
- Bank-account-draining skinner boxes (Pay-to-win games, Mobile F2Ps, lootboxes and microtransactions)
- Fake news and hidden-bias politics (Facebook, Twitter, a growing number of other sites)
- Spying and unethical practices (Google, Amazon, Uber)
That's to say nothing of the Good/Bad SV dichotomy illustrated by some of the shadier companies that are often parodied on the TV show.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
I think it's nothing like that. It's more like blaming cars for decades of pollution. It seem like you are trying to make the "post office" argument, but I don't see the relevance in this case. "Fake news" type problems are nothing new and they have been discussed frequently, especially since the Internet became popular. It's just that it doesn't take much to not be aware or not understand the problem.
"While some may treat the news with certain degrees of skepticism, we as a nation depend on a free press to give us a dose of daily facts. We rely on their filters and verification processes to weed out the dubious (or at least label it as such) and blatantly false. That is why an Internet hoax that is picked up and disseminated as fact by reputable news sources should do more than raise an eyebrow. All media are vulnerable to unverified facts, something Internet users need to keep in mind when they evaluate news reports."
Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet (2002) https://books.google.se/books?id=uS3p9iDooc8C&lpg=PP1&dq=%22...
"The blogosphere resembles an interconnected set of nested circles. Much of the time bloggers on one site only talk with each other. The conversation often resembles an echo chamber with heavily biased information and misinformation simply reinforcing previous biases At times ideas and information spill over from one circle to another, and the audience gets broader and broader. [...]. 'The average blog isn't that widely read, but it is the ripple effect when a blog catches fire in one news outlet and another at a news outlet, and it sort of mushrooms from there'.
Citizen Democracy: Political Activists in a Cynical Age (2008) https://books.google.se/books?id=2Tji-v7u7O4C&lpg=PA73&pg=PA...
"If the web has opened up possibilities for communication and access to information, schools need to do so, too. They need to learn from the examples the internet sets, both good and bad: of the dangers of creating an environment where misinformation can triumph, of providing new venues that can be used for deceit as well as illumination, of allowng reduction of the level of discussion too often instead of enhancing it. they need ot learn that opening access to information does not itself lead to knowledge. The egalitarianism promoted by our new online environments is all well and good but it is not always sufficient."
Beyond the Blogosphere: Information and Its Children (2011) https://books.google.se/books?id=i02cd-CAIbEC&lpg=PA214&pg=P...
"Like open source, blogging is something people do themselves, for free, because they enjoy it. Like open source hackers, bloggers compete with people working for money, and often win. The method of ensuring quality is also the same: Darwinian. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. But you don't need that when the audience can communicate with one another. People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored. And in both cases, feedback from the audience improves the best work."
What Business Can Learn from Open Source (2005) http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html
In my view it isn't the technology that is "evil", it is the monetisation of the technology, or more specifically the people behind the monetisation of it.
I'm sure I'm not alone in saying how disappointed I am with how the internet has turned out, for example. From the initial optimism around things like "information want to be free" and "disintermediation" we have moved to "When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive" and the "reintermediation" of the big internet giants.
And I have a terrible feeling that in a decade or two we'll see something similar with some of the new technologies we're getting excited about now. For example, blockchain and cryptocurrrencies facilitate an "the internet of money" with e.g. frictionless cross border transactions, but could in future end up allowing authorities to track every transaction by every person.
So what can we do about it?
It has become clear to me as well that the web is no longer what it used to be and will probably never return to what it was, because of these monetization practices. I am interested in finding out what the "next" web will be. Maybe it will be built on existing protocols, and maybe something else entirely?
There are also certain web-focused techs and companies I see as being bastions of the "old way," such as Wordpress and Ruby on Rails, and I'd like to get more involved in preserving and promoting those techs in a professional setting.
I'm also interested in walking back some of these misguided monetization tactics you speak of. Programmatic CPM-based ad networks are one of those I'd like to see reversed.
I feel that we as developers often underestimate the collective influence we have as technology experts. We are the creators of tech; our culture is essentially tech culture. Do Google and Facebook have the power they have because we give them that power? If so, what do we get in return?
They have the power precisely because they have the capital. If all of the rich people who don't need to work banded together to work on open source and federated technologies that would be great. But the rest of us need to work and can't challenge our employers politics in any meaningful way.
It seems also that precisely the privacy-destroying centralizing ad-selling machine companies, are the ones that occupy all our mind-space and have the money and technically interesting challenges. (Oh, and there is also fintech!)
I now am doing ok freelancing (mostly for my previous employer and some other small music software companies from Berlin) and doing some open-source on the side. But it is often hard to motivate myself to get out there and network or find stuff to earn money. Sometimes I consider going back to academia, but my feeling is that over the last years the attempts at quantifying academic output have risen competition to completely unhealthy levels (as my academic friend says: if he has to think in 6-month/project/paper timelines, where is the "long-term" in publicly funded research?).
At least it is easy to find a job that pays decent, which is a very good position to be in compared most of my friends of my generation. And I love software engineering itself. Yet I often wish I could just go on UBI and do open-source stuff all day.
I'm now a freelancer because I can't stand the thought of contributing my expertise to an employer who only cares about his bottom line (99% of workplaces, as far as I can tell), but unfortunately it feels more like escapism than activism.
I wish there was a place for retro-techies to band together and try to figure out a way out of this mess. I know there are groups who are trying to create alternatives (for example, scuttlebutt is a nice community), but their interactions are mostly project-driven, and not necessarily pragmatic. I feel like if enough talented developers (and designers, managers, etc.) group together for a good cause, we can make a difference. More difference than just creating a better browser, or a better twitter.
Well, anyway, back to reality..
- Never read local news both online and offline because in my country, Serbia, all newspapers are so bad and just use click baits and target human emotions without real reporting. Fake news everywhere. I only open news when I hear from the social circle about something important and want to read more about it.
- Deleted facebook from the phone, use it once daily on the PC for a few minutes. There is still value in it if used sparingly. My wife also use it to promote her fitness business.
- Be very mindful of what you install on your phone or PC. Every app is potential time waster even if it seems useful at the beginning.
- I call my self just Software Engineer from the day one (have more than 10 years of experience now)
- Related to games, I do not have much time to play them now but when I do I only buy games with good single player story. Never buy games that just require too much grind/time wasting/money sinking. Only multiplayer games that I play are casual in person ones (PES, FIFA).
- I eat unprocessed food as much as I can, me and my wife prepare it. We both train regularly in the gym, go on occasional hike in the nature, party or whatever. Trying to enjoy life on our terms in general.
All in all. I know it is hard and I am far from perfect, just wanted to say that users can vote what they want by their actions. But I really can`t explain to myself why it seems to be so hard for many.
You should always remember that this says nothing about those people and says a lot about you. Your failure to understand them is your failure not theirs.
If you do actually want to understand why it is so hard for so many people, stop thinking of people as logical, rational agents, and instead think of them as complex biological systems.
I am baffled at how much people prefer a good story over an honest one. Gotta have everything simple (good, and evil, and no middle ground) and spectacular. It is compulsive and natural, and only fighting constantly against it slightly reduces your urges, and gives a moderate yet constant gain in my experience. Considering this, there's no shame in not wanting to dedicate ressources to this.
The thing I understand from all of this is that people don't think forward and that lazyness and immediate reward is an easier road.
If someone's genuinely interested in leading an healthier, happier, different life, there are plenty of resources out there now, social plans are a thing in most places plagued by depression and lack of fulfillment.
I have simply no advice for people who fall for it. I don't even know what these people goals in life are, if any (probably the latter). It doesn't matter what they do in the big scheme, it also doesn't prevent above poster or myself to live rather simple fullfilling lives. I just don't care if people fall for stupid things, why should I after all, and why is everyone so worried for them ?
Not like we can share luck or proficiency or logical reasoning and stick to "weaker" minds at all time to help them decide or whatever.
Those products are built to exploit human nature and it takes a lot of effort and mindset to withstand those. Most people don't have the ability or the focus to do that.
I was doing that too, but as soon as I realized that it was bad for me, I stopped. And yes, it was not 100% easy, they do provide dopamine fix or some other fake/empty entertainment for the brain that you need to fill with something else. But it is doable.
Let's talk about those users as well. They could be in poverty. According to contemporary research, poverty creates lower willpower, rather than the other way around. Could it be time poverty? We have people that drive several hours to work and home every day, again lowering willpower. You mention unprocessed food, training in the gym, access to nature. Do you know how lucky you are compared to most of the people who live under the constant stresses of American life? How few of these things are available to everyone?
No, I don't blame the users. When these companies have an army of PhD's working all week to find ways to subvert the willpower of their users, I assure you that many users simply don't have the willpower pool necessary to fight back.
- Companies that flagrantly violate the law while claiming that it's OK because they're offering benefits to users - meanwhile trying to develop a monopoly in a previously regulated space.
My take on this is that the internet users who wish to learn need to learn how to learn, which sources to trust, which claims to discard. I do not have a clear understanding of what "fake news" is (the term is so derogatory and loosely applied), but I would imagine that it is in some respect similar to the infamous Nigerian spam, to which many internet users have been exposed and whom they learned to recognize and ignore (as they did with most of the spam).
You are free to choose or ignore whatever sources of information (or misinformation) that you wish. For me, that's a glorious thing. Complaining about fake news is, to my ear, similar to complaining about religions or mysticism — it may be misinformation but some people like it for some reason.
Gamers will hate me for this, but I actually very much prefer some of the simple "Skinner box" puzzle and collection games that are out now to the shitty, twitchy, time-sink "hardcore" ones that came before that everyone loved so much.
Give me Tsum Tsum, Yokai Watch Wibble Wobble, and Puzzle and Dragons any day over Counterstrike, WoW (though I spent plenty of time on both of those), or any of the FPS crapshows on the market right now that are basically just Counterstrike with better graphics. I'll happily spend my $60 over time while enjoying casual bite-sized gameplay on my schedule, rather than the intensity and practice that "real gamer" games require.
I also fail to see WTF games have to do with the tech industry at all, it's a minuscule portion of the sector.
It's about designing games primarily to empty your wallet with microtransactions rather than providing you with fun. Games that encourage addictive, even compulsive behavior that may seem fun for a while but will quickly turn you into a dopamine rat seeking for your next fix. If you're an addictive nature, which is whom the games industry are targeting with predatory practices. The whales that pay the bills.
You can be smearing green goo over the launch pad in less than 4 minutes and basically everything after that is just an extension to "smear green goo over [thing in space]". Maybe even flying back home too.
Also, minuscule is perhaps not the word to use, with Activision, EA and others reporting revenue figures in the billions.
You lost me there. What about that title is "fake"? To be clear, people pursue titles because they come with raises. Or rather, the title change is used to justify the raise.
What does talking to a user have to do with anything? Is it important that a pharmaceutical chemist talk to prospective patients? Most software businesses have job functions that specifically deal with the user (design, UX, product, support, sales). As an engineer, nobody would oppose me pursuing interviews with users, it's just not a good use of my time when people I rely on (UX, etc.) already are doing it.
1 - Working for and enabling makers of spyware and other privacy-defeating technologies (including companies like Google and Facebook who make it their business to spy on their users).
2 - Working for the military and "defense" contractors or on technology which is intended to kill or enable more efficient killing of people.
3 - Working for advertisers who lie and manipulate people in to buying shit they don't need.
4 - Working for or as spammers, malware purveyors, and various other blackhats.
5 - Exploiting people who work for them by underpaying them, overworking them, manipulating them, or lying to them.
6 - Lack education outside of STEM -- particularly lacking knowledge of history, ethics, literature, and art that makes for a myopic narrow-mindedness.
7 - When the above lack of education is combined with arrogance and a darwinian, survival of the fittest, might makes right, "look out for number one and fuck everybody else" attitude without any sort of social conscience or desire to improve the world beyond making it easier for the rich to get richer.
The problem is the overly complex tax code that allows entities with deep pockets to find loopholes that don't exist for normal citizens. Solving the problem of big companies not paying the taxes you'd expect them to pay has to involve changing the law.
You can't say "it's the law that needs to be changed" while avoiding doing anything to change the law.
The big tech companies should have tax transparency reports explaining what they do and why it's legal.
The biggest "loophole" is employer payed benefits are untaxed while the same benefits payed out of pocket by the employee are taxed. The political prospects for changing the law here seem bleak.
You can see this played out in the current tax reform debate. Most of the added/eliminated taxes fall in the "eliminating loopholes" category. Here on HN, the proposals have been criticized on the whole.
Who did? Name one actual instance where one actual person did claim they're the first to ever do that.
It was not created by the Internet, it will not go away. People communicate mostly gossip and propaganda, the only way out is changing people.
This tech backlash is a projection of people's larger frustrations onto big tech.
- Social Media Addiction: You can passively use Twitter to follow "history in pictures" and "baby kitten of the day" photos. People choose to follow 500 politically charged accounts and then get surprised that the environment turns toxic. Unfriend everyone on Facebook who isn't a close friend, family member and revel in a stream of baby pics and holiday greetings. Or if your family insists on talking politics, create a second account to serve as your primary. Or just don't use it.
- Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem.
- Out-of-Touch Tech Co's: No amount of user research will protect a company from groups who are determined to take offense. Google recently added a calorie counter to its walking maps feature and was presented as an attack on people with eating disorders (https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/16/google-maps-ditches-automa...). They angered others by promoting civil rights pioneer, who happened to have complimented Osama Bin Laden supporter on their homepage (https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11713686/yuri-kochiyama). I don't know if these are examples of Google being out of touch, or just so large that any decision is likely to anger some subset of the user base.
- No-fun Games: Imagine a title from the golden age of gaming and you can probably find a free port on the App Store. There are orders of magnitudes more titles available today.
- Denial: I agree that tech as an industry could do many things better, but in my personal, humble estimation of the world's top problems it doesn't rank in the top 50. I don't think it's among the top ten most evil industries, but it seems I'm increasingly in the minority.
The "evil" part of this is that they encourage you to do exactly this. They'll go out of their way to find entities for you to subscribe to, regardless of how tangential the relationship is. Unlike your bartender or waitress, they never cut you off when you're in too deep-- they just keep shoving more down your throat.
An alcoholic should be able to call it quits after just one drink, too. Like the rhythm method, not everybody has the willpower to just pull out once engaged. This mechanism capitalizes on human frailty to keep users engaged.
> Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem.
Fantastic claims about lizards in politics are on the level with comic books-- recognizable as fiction without even needing to think about it, and diminished by the fact that nobody else but that single tabloid is making such claims. You can safely evaluate it based on number of claims alone. "If this were true, everybody would be reporting on it!"
Well, enter social media. Thanks to the algorithms and the circles you're part of, you're bombarded with variants of this story about lesbian leisure suit lizards from a virtually unlimited number of sources, legit or not. Suddenly, it looks like everybody is reporting on this lizard thing. "You should just know better" doesn't work when the more you're exposed to it, the more you're desensitized, and the more real it becomes. That is the corruptive influence of social media and fake news.
We've all had that one crazy relative who insists some crazy conspiracy is true, but these lies can only achieve this scale of influence because of tech.
I am embarrassed by what has become of some parts of the industry I love. For as much as Silicon Valley professes that it wants to "make the world a better place", you can also find
- social media websites that feed on people's addictions, almost forcing them to post and share as much as they can instead of simply enjoying moments in their lives.
- the proliferation of fake news; this one stings a lot. When I was younger the internet seemed like such an incredible learning tool. Many years later, walled gardens driven by algorithms intent on feeding narcissistic tendencies allow people to fall deeply into their own confirmation bias. This is a kind of 'anti-learning' that has developed out of FUD that is only getting propagated throughout all these social networks.
- big tech companies where employees are sold on "making the world a better place" but instead become completely dependent on attaining fake labels like "senior engineer" - and yet have never actually talked to a single user.
- games that are no longer fun, but are now environments deliberately set up to trap users in their own Skinner Boxes, pulling levers and pushing buttons to open loot boxes that slowly drain out their bank accounts
- the outright denial of many people in the tech industry that any of the above is a problem. Simply read through the comments on this HN page. Identifying that any of these things are problems is the first step in fixing them.