No, it's not at all clear.
The 2016 disinformation campaign clearly favored one candidate, while simultaneously attempting to radicalize his opposition.
Maybe stirring up anti-fascist counter-protests actually helps the right wing by proving that they're fighting evil scary masked guys wearing black.
Maybe the adversaries understand very well the countermeasures Facebook has taken, knew these accounts would be discovered, and the discovery itself is intentionally part of their campaign.
Or maybe they're just indiscriminately pouring gasoline into the fire.
It's not at all clear that all interests are equally compromised.
Foreign intervention with the clear aim of causing political rift doesn’t care about party lines other than the fact that they can be used to manufacture outrage and division.
If Trump was a democratic candidate or if the Dems had a different loon in play while the republicans had someone say like McCain running then the same actors would have been working in the same manner just now in favor of a different party.
These actors will exploit any vulnerability and there is no hidden intention to benefit a single party other than to further their own goals.
During the Cold War the Soviets we’re finding both communist and neo-Nazi groups in west Germany at same time because for them the goal was always to cause as much chaos as possible.
In the US during Vietnam they were funding anti-war groups on campuses again simply because they were seeking to incite as much dissent as possible.
All interests are or at least can be easily compromised it’s just a matter of circumstance and timing.
Putin said in Helsinki that he favoured Trump and directed his officials to help Trump. This was not a non-partisan issue. They wanted Trump, and causing chaos was one of the features which likely attracted them to Trump.
Wait, what? Can I get a cite for that because I have heard a lot of claims about Helsinki but I have never heard that.
That does not make it a partisan issue however, Putin doesn't give two fucks if Trump was republican or democrat and attempting to make it look like a clear partisan issue is actually playing into their hands.
>No, it's not at all clear.
> The 2016 disinformation campaign clearly favored one candidate, while simultaneously attempting to radicalize his opposition.
Per a recent article by FiveThirtyEight.com [0] they labeled 719,087 tweets as "Right Troll" and 427,811 tweets as "Left Troll." When describing the two types they say
"Right Trolls behave like “bread-and-butter MAGA Americans, only all they do is talk about politics all day long,” Linvill said. Left Trolls often adopt the personae of Black Lives Matter activists, typically expressing support for Bernie Sanders and derision for Hillary Clinton, along with “clearly trying to divide the Democratic Party and lower voter turnout.”"
So on one hand, yes they clearly favored Trump. On the other hand, favoring Trump was the most divisive and destabilizing thing they could do.
> Or maybe they're just indiscriminately pouring gasoline into the fire.
I think that is a huge part of the strategy. Was there collusion as well? Probably but Putin is happy to watch the West burn.
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-were-sharing-3-mill...
Or are you trying to argue that evidence of possible Russian influence over one candidate, by its very existence, is evidence that they don't have influence over that candidate?
No. It's possible evidence - some of it is verifiable while other parts are simply allegations.
Can you prove that the part in the dossier about the hotel orgy was not a disinformation campaign used on western intelligence?
Is President Trump the type of dude that would be into golden showers?
This is your logic.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-t...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/veteran-spy-gav...
Politicizing the intelligence apparatus would be highly disturbing, even moreso than when the Obama administration apparently used the IRS to target political opponents [1] like the tea party.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
>links article where "Putins ally" is interviewed
What even is this?
During the actual campaigns this was never brought up with any seriousness. Only war related thing that was brought up was Clinton's eagerness to move troops into Syria which Putin said would lead into war between Russia and US.
That cowardly downvote without response... What else to expect from HN
However there are differences of opinion on the interests of the state, do you mean citizens or those that are controlling and manipulating the elected representatives? These latter folk are known as the 'deep state' although on HN the correct terminology is the 'military industrial complex'. Under normal circumstances the deep pockets of the 'deep state' back both sides of the house with contributions to both the liberal and conservative sides. No matter who gets in they have people in their pocket to further their interests and project their interests as the national interest.
The rest of the world determines who the outside enemy is supposed to be. A resurgent Russia is the current enemy, although first among many with China, axis of evil states Iran and North Korea also at the top of this very long list. In reality nobody wants to be an enemy, the enemy has to be imagined and incited into being the enemy.
With the last election no matter who won the interests of the deep state had put in the groundwork to be able to blame Russia for meddling in the result. The candidate and political party were immaterial, whatever the outcome there would be proof of Russian interference. Had the world situation been different then there would have been proof in this post truth age that China, Iran, North Korea, you name it had been meddling.
Domestically this works well as much squabbling goes on at a belief rather than a fact-based level as to whether or not the Russians did interfere. It all depends whom you get your news from. It is like a wedge strategy all over again.
The wedge strategy was used to get people talking about whether 'Creationism' should be taught in schools, meanwhile vast cuts to science funding were made and nobody talked about that because they had such strong opinions of freedom as applied to schools and 'Creationism'.
As far as I can tell, the main aim was (and still is) to sow division, and the ads targeted the liberal side more simply because their rhetoric was more aggressive. They went as far as organizing BLM and “resist” protests.
Facebook’s disclosure shows that they (whoever “they” are this time — FB was unable to pin this on anybody) are still doing the exact same thing and rallying the radical left, and racial/ethnic minorities.
Is the issue just that the organizers are ostensibly from another country/nation? Maybe the solution is for FB to regionize similar to the DVD industry? Posts in one region can only be seen in the same region?
I mention this because I think content moderation, as a debate, should not be framed as whether or not to do it at all -- but rather as a recognition that deciding to moderate a particular class of content carries a cost-benefit tradeoff.
It may ultimately be the case that we decide that a certain class of content is not worth moderating, because when doing so the costs outstrip the benefits, but let's keep that as a pragmatic discussion rather than a principled one about "all" speech.
Your instinct might be to respond with "of course, spam should be moderated, but besides that..." but I think the knowledge that there could be some series of enumerated exceptions suggests we should stop pretending they're exceptions at all.
Doesn't CAN-SPAM act of 2003 make spam illegal?
Because people don't like to participate in a platform that has gone to crap. It's happened on many sites/forums in the past. If you don't weed, you won't have much of a garden.
Reddit has a simplistic version of this. By default, you will not see anything that has a score of -1 or below.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube et al. should go on outright banfests. There is no free speech argument to be made. None. Zero. These aren't government enterprises and getting banned from these sites for any reason really shouldn't matter. Facebook already enforces some weird moral code where a nipple gets you instantly banned, but when it comes to politics somehow it's a "free speech" argument and they don't want to take sides. It's 100% bullshit.
These companies need to grow up. If people don't like that they have been banned then they can start an alternative site or, you know, use the decentralized Internet the way it was designed. If we were talking about ICANN policing domains that would be a legitimate "slippery slope", but we aren't.
The only thing they really stand to lose by banning blatant conspiracy theory whack jobs and divisive hate speech is some ad revenue associated with that stuff, most of which is predatory anyway. Nipples? Not acceptable, banned. Fair use of media owned by a large company? Copyright strike, banned. Divisive conspiracy theories that promote hate? Free Speech! Selling literally snake oil? Free speech!
Americans LOVE to pretend like they are morally superior, but the moral code and values built into todays companies are completely bonkers. Free speech is constantly invoked when it doesn't even apply, and it's applied so inconsistently it doesn't even make sense.
Mark Zuckerberg should travel to Nidavellir and have the Dwarf King Eitri forge him a ban hammer the likes of which the Facebook has never seen.
The 1700s and 1800s version of Twitter was standing in the street square, handing out pamphlets, and screaming your message. You were protected to say what you wanted to say via free speech. The 2018 version of that is online through tools like Twitter. By refusing to acknowledge this, we're actually experiencing a dramatic practical reduction in free speech rights without ever technically violating the Constitution.
It's really the ultimate loophole to the ultimate problem. Want to limit free speech? Simply remold society so that communication patterns across the entire nation change and become controlled by private corporations. Done.
A particularly dystopian and extreme imagining of this would involve the CEO of a company like Facebook running for President and controlling speech and news to an unprecedented extent in favor of his/her candidacy.
Somewhere between "handing out pamphlets in Hyde Park" and Twitter there were plenty of other shifts in communication patterns as well. There was a good 100 years or so where if you wanted to be heard you had to get your message into a newspaper, and then another 50 years where you also had the alternatives of TV and radio. All of these were controlled by corporate interests, and it's not like there was ever a right to have your Letter To The Editor published.
For instance, newspaper, radio, and TV all reached unprecedented numbers of people, but they didn't bring the same scale to the number of folks contributing content. To use your Letter to the Editor example, a newspaper only has so much space, of which only a certain portion is allocated to displaying such letters. This means the vast majority of the country could never have their letter published just due to space limitations alone.
Modern social media like Twitter is notably different because it has scaled the input just as much as the output. Every consumer can now be a producer as well. The idea that anyone can be a producer is very powerful and is what makes it feel more like a public space than, say, a newspaper.
It's more like talking at a bar, where others can overhear you. Twitter can of course start throwing people out, but then it turns into a clique and will probably be eventually subsumed by the larger society that it ignores.
I can't walk into SirusXMs office and demand that they give me a channel so my voice can be heard. I'm not entitled to my own TV station.
I really wish one of these companies would just do something like ban Trump from Twitter so we can let the courts just put an end to this discussion. Getting banned from Twitter has nothing—nothing—to do with free speech. Nothing. Zero.
What happens when your host and cdn shut you down? (This has already happened.)
What happens when your isp shuts you down? (Only a matter of time.)
Private companies control the Internet. If we decide social media doesn't constitute a commons, the same argument applies to the rest of the Internet.
And so, like the gp said, your practical right are greatly curtailed.
Moreover, you're giving Mark Zuckerberg immense, uncontrolled power over American discourse. Sure, he has to use his power carefully, but as long as he and other tech ceos do so, they've essentially become the gatekeepers of allowable thoughts.
The problem is that Facebook isn't the size of a Starbucks. It isn't even the size of a city. It's the size of a hundred cities. There are more users of Facebook than citizens of the United States.
It's like saying the US Congress can't impose censorship because you can just go to the EU and speak there instead. And if the EU censors the same things then you can just start your own country on a ship in international waters.
And who is going to come to your ship, or even find out about it, if linking to it is prohibited in the places where people actually congregate?
There is no town square equivalent where people have to walk past and can see you on their way to Facebook.
ICANN may be the top-level administrator, but the actual domain registrars are normal private corporations like GoDaddy and Google. What makes Google's domain registration service public infrastructure but not their video sharing service?
The scale point the sibling commenter made also drives to the heart of the issue - we can agree that I should be free to ban whoever I want on my private forum, but Facebook exists at a completely different scale that makes a qualitative difference in their impact on speech and society. The practical effect of banning someone or some type of speech on my forum is negligible. The practical effect of banning someone or some type of speech on Facebook is enormous. By giving Facebook that power (which they technically have, even if they aren't using it much now), you are handing them incredible power, maybe more power than any organization has ever had in history.
That makes it protected under US free speech laws, because the authority to grant/deny a domain ultimately derives from a government mandate.
The ability to post random shit on Facebook does not derive from a government mandate, so therefore isn't covered by free speech laws.
This is, for example, what happened to the contemptible Daily Stormer. There is no practical difference between a major domain registrar like GoDaddy or Google and a social media website like Facebook in terms of speech, except that at least if Google Domains shuts you down you can hypothetically (unless they seize/freeze the domain, which they have done) move to another registrar and the process is "transparent" for your viewers relative to being banned from Facebook...at least until they all run you off, with the most notorious example being The Daily Stormer again.
Using your own malformed analogy: The town square is the internet. Twitter is a private shop above subway station with a bunch of garbage that people like to buy. It's super busy. You can scream whatever you want in there, some people outside can hear you. You'll also probably get kicked out if you become obnoxious.
Legalese and dodgy analogies aside the above poster is focussing on the practical effects of these sites being so big and ‘default’.
I get what you're saying here, but the sheer number of idiots "fired for saying X on facebook" makes me think it's not true. It lowers the barrier for saying something and increases your audience reach... but also lowers the mental barrier for saying the wrong thing or someone hypersensitive hearing it.
Have you ever investigated how speech is regulated in other countries? I'm Australian and we have a number of restrictions that make speech 'unfree' in the American sense. But I think they're appropriate and on the whole balanced well.
As a private commercial enterprise, Facebook itself is, for the people who own it, much like my home; they are free to set whatever policy they like regarding what goes on there, as long as they aren't discriminating against certain specifically protected classes of people. It's shortly tricky, it's not unreasonable to argue that a platform the size of Facebook should be treated more like a public space than a private one. But I personally think the bar for overriding freedom of association should be extremely high, and I don't think Facebook is over it. Those who have been disallowed to associate with Facebook remain free to associate with other very similar platforms.
Facebook has been abusing it's massive size to block access to competitors using their Facebook Zero program : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Zero
From the page :
> In 2015, researchers evaluating how Facebook Zero shapes information and communication technology use in the developing world found that 11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the Internet. 65% of Nigerians, 61% of Indonesians, and 58% of Indians agree with the statement that "Facebook is the Internet".
It is far superior to have bad ideas met with good ideas, than to have bad ideas circulate unopposed within unpopular groups.
HN will ban you if you are unreasonable.
The best subreddits (askhistorians, etc.) will instantly delete low quality posts.
Reddit as a whole banning bad subreddits (fatpeoplehate, coontown) made reddit a better place for everyone, and the trash moved to voat which is barely active now.
Most big sites will now ban you for for threatening or very hateful speech.
Etc.
Your free speech is taken away when something you say lands you in prison. Getting banned from a shitty private website doesn't violate your free speech rights in any way, full stop.
All of the people who are so vocally anti-free speech always fall back to "hate speech", but there is literally no such thing. There is no robust definition of what "hate speech" is, and whenever it is invoked, it invariably turns into "whatever I disagree with". The truth is that "hate speech" is entirely in the eye of the beholder, it is exactly the same as "offensive speech". The listener/reader is the person who decides whether or not they perceive something to be hateful in exactly the same way as they perceive something to be offensive. You can come up with entirely contrived examples that most people will agree is hateful, but that's not what you're trying to stop. Saying that a country should have borders is considered hateful by many, saying that there are only two genders is considered very hateful by many, promoting national sovereignty or pride is considered hateful by many, and this is what you're talking about when you refer to "hate speech".
The other premise that all free speech detractors completely fail to understand, is that free speech is not just a law, it is a foundational value of the nation. You can't dismiss free speech in any situation where the 1A doesn't provide protection, because people are often talking about values, not laws.
Facebook is at or near monopoly status and as such the largest risk to their business is regulation. That's why this is such a sensitive issue for them.
For a while you might have said that they were approaching some kind of weird monopoly status because you had to use FB to login to third party sites/services, but that didn't last long.
But anyway, that's an argument for encouraging competition and computer literacy, not for or against free speech.
This site gives FB 88.11% currently. Interesting that its trending down slightly:
The only country I'm aware of where domestic services are dominant is China, and the statcounter data does reflect that. They are conspicuously missing WeChat and QQ, though (which are messaging applications and probably hard to track for a third party), so maybe there's some local service in Myanmar that similarly falls through the cracks.
Monopoly status for what?
Ads? No.
Online ads? No.
Communication amongst friends? No.
Reading news? No.
They have a monopoly on what?
What? Did Herbalife and Amway went out of business and nobody told me so I could celebrate?
>Americans LOVE to pretend like they are morally superior, but the moral code and values built into todays companies are completely bonkers. Free speech is constantly invoked when it doesn't even apply, and it's applied so inconsistently it doesn't even make sense.
^^this doesn't make sense.
The US constitutional right to Free Speech only applies to government actions, not to private individuals or companies. To use someone else's analogy: if you come into my house and talk shit, I have every right to ask you to leave, and you don't have constitutional protection for that. Yet, "Free Speech" is constantly invoked when people are banned from privately-owned sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It doesn't even apply to these sites.
Free Speech is also applied inconsistently. Pornography is protected Free Speech under the US Constitution. Yet Facebook's Nipple Ban is usually not even mentioned when people talk about Free Speech on Facebook. Their right to remove pornographic content from their site is not questioned, but their right to remove someone's hate-filled rant is. This is clearly inconsistent.
That's not only what social media companies censor, and not what anyone in this thread is advocating for, and you know it. You're spouting insults, trying to claim free speech advocates are racists, as a way to avoid actual discussion. My morals are indeed very different from yours.
> But I expect you to support my right to throw them out of my place too...
Sure, but stop advertising your house as a discussion platform when clearly you don't want that.
That said: please don't contact me again. I'm not interested in your reply, I don't think anyone else on HN would be, and I think you've indicated which direction you want to take this dicussion.
Legally, maybe you're right, but socially I don't think the argument is as clear cut as you make it sound.
When people make the argument of-wrt suppression or censorship of speech "Legally no but socially/in the court of public opinion yes", I often want to fire back "But...are not our laws a distilled and concentrated output of what we value in social publics? If we start allowing exemptions and exceptions to that value system to get an outcome that takes away liberties in social publics, are we unwittingly creating the 'case' to erode those values in (the grander) legal establishment-given enough time?"
(This might be a long winded argument of 'slipper slope', unsure. Someone call me out on this if so)
Maybe it's a question of ethics versus law, or perhaps ethics in the context of buffers between person/individual and state/government?
EDIT: IANAL, but if these platforms start favoring one political group over others, it seems potentially illegal, as it could be considered in-kind political donations.
It's really on a whole different level though. ISPs are access to infrastructure. Should ISPs be able to ban people? I'm not sure. It's a valid question though. I tend to think that they shouldn't, but I'm not sure it would be a violation of free speech if they did. Good question though mate.
It's also worth nothing that they DO ban people. If you don't pay an ISP can ban you, outright, permanently.
That just comes down to the bottom line. People are on Facebook at work, in the grocery checkout line, in the park while their kids play on the jungle gym. People tap Facebook on their phones when they have 30 seconds to kill.
If there were the possibility of nudity popping up on their devices, they wouldn't feel comfortable using it in those settings and would see fewer FB ads.
Not true. These are CA corporations.
The CA supreme court has already stated that businesses that hold themselves open to the public must allow lawful speech.
༼ つ ◕ ◕ ༽つ GIVE BAN ༼ つ ◕ ◕ ༽つ
These are free websites on the internet that cater to the lowest common denominator of media we have today. Being banned is not a big deal.
If Facebook's brand is associated with garbage, and it has already gone quite far in that direction, Facebook won't exist for very long. The only reason to use Facebook is that others use Facebook. It's a matter of survival for them.
This entire problem would be minimized if newsfeed didn't rank posts due to engagement. Its easier for trolls to get engagement on polarizing and harmful posts, because they generate stronger user emotions.
IMO, this criticism of "policing" is a bullshit straw man argument, which neglects how the product actually works, and why we even have this problem in the first place.
Quote: "It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) has in the past. "
Media outlets noticed there is a lot of spam and misinformation happening on social media, and saw not only great headlines to garner clicks, but also an opportunity to make people distrust smaller sources of information in favor or big, established brands and companies. They drove subscriptions up by creating an aura of mistrust and impending doom [2][3] after historical decline due to the internet.
Did the inflammatory posts actually affect the election? It's unclear, and if so it was likely less so than the coverage of traditional media outlets [4]. That being said, there are inflammatory parties on the internet, and since Americans now seem to think the future of their country depends on removing them, Facebook needs to abide for the sake of PR. Note: this actually costs Facebook time and money (they are hiring a lot of people for this effect [5]) but they've been bashed so much on the media they need all the PR stunts they can get.
It is a slippery slope, I agree. But it's the one people in the US want to follow, again, because they are scared. Fearful people take slippery slopes and focus on apparent short-term solutions instead of long-term objectives (fixing the American political system so the population actually votes for who is president would be a good place to start). There's that quote from the Star Wars trilogy (the best line in the prequels, IMO): "So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause." This comes to mind here. People will willfully act against their interests out of fear.
[1]: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/americas-long-histor...
[2]: https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/17/media/nytimes-subscription-...
[3]: https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/26/media/washington-post-digit...
[4]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-in...
[5]: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/31/facebook-senate-testimony-do...
Having recently lived in Russia, people still have not forgotten Yeltsin, and they won't. Luckily at the end of the day however, they mostly separate their frustrations with the American government and the citizens of America.
I don't understand this line of argument. Isn't it clear that the people condemning election interference in the US are also against election interference perpetrated by the US? It's like saying that it's silly for Americans to be upset that they are being bombed by a country, since America bombs other countries.
In Russia there's the government and the people, in US, in theory, the government is the people.
It doesn't really matter if Russians are frustrated with the "government" or American people.
Russians chose more Cold War style conflict.
BTW Putin ia really not as omnipotent as some people think.
Not only did the poster point to source material for his claims, he constructed a sound argument based upon the age-old wisdom of asking the question, "Who benefits?"
I didn't even see one value judgment about the US in the comment.
Let me address some points:
1. Never did I mention Facebook shouldn't rid its platform of bad users-- I'm glad they are (and if this hadn't happened they probably wouldn't have, again, cause it takes time and money).
2. Never did I say Americans were dumb or insult them in any other way that should make someone believe I hate them. Saying a people is scared shouldn't be taken as an insult, many peoples and individuals are scared of different things.
3. I didn't expect this to be read as a research paper haha. I'll add more references next time. In regards to the one you pointed out (wether the Russian meddling had high impact), I'd suggest these other articles by The Verge [1] and the New York Times [2] to form an opinion. I'd also suggest watching Jon Stewart's appearance on CNN Crossfire [3]: he was talking about the loss of civilized discourse and transformation of American Politics into a divisive "me vs. you" game back in 2004, before social media was widespread.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/17138854/cambridge-analyt...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/world/europe/russia-us-el...
Sure you did:
> That being said, there are inflammatory parties on the internet, and since Americans now seem to think the future of their country depends on removing them, Facebook needs to abide for the sake of PR
You're implying that the only reason Facebook would need to get rid of bad actors is "for the sake of PR", and that Americans only want to be rid of bad actors "because they're scared."
> Never did I say Americans were dumb or insult them in any other way
Sure you did, you implied through your tone throughout the comment that the desire to be rid of bad actors on facebook is a knee-jerk reaction that Americans are only making due to fear.
It's the tone of your post that is being critiqued, not explicit words you're using per se.
It directly profits off of the users, and by extension the comments and pictures and whatever else the users post. As such, they are responsible for this product.
I don't see it as censoring or policing so much as quality control.
That's why Facebook is in the "business" of policing content.
There is a long and unpleasant history to show that this idea is never going to work. If Facebook wants to survive as a platform they will need to undertake the unpleasant task of setting a baseline, enforcing it, and telling people who disagree to go find another platform. To be honest, I don't think Facebook as a company or its employees as individuals have the courage to save it -- it is too easy to keep cashing the checks while Rome burns...
It's called Reddit. On Reddit, you give 1 person dictatorial power over a given community, and allow anyone to make their OWN community if they don't like the rules.
There are a multitude of examples of people not liking the rules, and forking off to form their own community.
It is the best way IMO, to give people freedom of choice to live with the rules that they prefer.
The fact that these smaller communities with a narrow focus work while the larger ones fail is proof positive that tools are not the solution.
And Im not talking about the internet. Im talking about groups of people in general.
Different people have different interests and it is perfectly fine for them to segregate themselves by choice into like-minded groups.
I would perhaps argue that this is the entire POINT of a community. To pick and choose who you want to interact with.
Why would mark zuckerberg find himself talking to captains and colonels at the naval warfare school?
Its like an influencing campaign in civ :)
I'd argue it is also one of the primary social battlefields. The silence and inaction from admins and mods has been stunningly absent despite the blatant bot and troll activity there.
Any agency, whether it's a nation state/government, business or political party, would be laughably bad at their job to ignore a website that size, one with the perfect format to spew their propaganda. It even has little score counters so you can keep track of what works, and what doesn't! How handy!
Reddit has been a target for manipulation for years now. I've been a moderator of some of their largest subreddits and the evidence was so overwhelming you can't help but become angry, then apathetic when told by the admins that they wouldn't do anything. "As long as they don't break the global rules, they're free to be here" I saw a moderator get told that by an admin ~3 years ago (few months before the Ellen Pao debacle). Spewing propaganda is fine on reddit, so long as you don't manipulate the votes.
I take issue with the fact that BOTH are inorganic manipulation of reddit. Both should be dealt with swiftly, without prejudiced and without mercy.
Why wouldn't he? I would love to talk to these people given opportunity - not because I'm involved in anything connected to military, but out of simple curiosity and interest in strategy and tactics...
But political and partisan stuff is a slippery slope. For example, I wouldn't touch Alex Jones stuff. Maybe derank his content and posts promoting his content, but banning him all together is a step too far. Like it or not, were in a weird place in American politics where conspiracy theorists not only have influence in political parties, but also get elected President. Facebook banning figures, and to be more specific, conservative figures when conservatives already believe Facebook is biased against them is just a bad idea.
If Congress wants Facebook and Twitter to silence speech, they need to pass a law. That law needs to be clear about what is inbounds and what is out. If not, Facebook is opening itself up to legal challenges from the Right and is only going to erode trust from half the population.
We are in a weird place in American politics and Facebook should tread lightly. Also, Congress should do it's damn job and not rely on companies to use discretion. If Facebook bans something that the left deems is biased against them then Facebook, once again, will be in big trouble with half the country.
Alex.
Jones.
From.
Everything.
He crossed the line from "free speech" into "actively instigating violence" a long time ago.
Mr Jones is the one subject that every single field can study.
From business to political science to marketting to psychology and perhaps psychiatry and journalism.
He is a fountain, sometines a geyser, of never ending supply of data to further advance the sciences.
What they wanted, and got, is mania.
Every day income inequality gets worse, workers are treated like garbage[1], wages are going down[2] with unemployment going down, people can't afford health insurance and even if they can they will probably still be broken as deductibles and out of pocket costs rise, 80% of all people are living paycheck[3], 50% of all people in USA are defined as poor or low income[4], 80% of the country makes under $65k/year while the value of our money becomes less[5], 1/5 of children are in poverty[6].
I really think this is a natural occurrence to the failures of this corrupt capitalist system that provides for the few instead of the many. Things are shifting left, and it's certainly not because Russia spent $50k on advertisements on Facebook. You can also argue that the UK was a far greater influence with Cambridge Analytica, but it's something people like to ignore.
These are absolutely our own policies having this effect.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/30/accidents...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...
[4] https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-...
It's equally possible to look at the same world, and see that business is booming, the stock market is at record highs, employers are hiring and making investments at rates we haven't seen in years. Tension in areas of the world that have been problematic my entire life appear to be on the ebb at the moment. Maybe it's a regional thing... But things are looking pretty fricking awesome over on this side of the fence.
Business is booming for the elite, the stock market is almost entirely owned by the top 10%[1] so nobody is really seeing those gains except people who already have plenty, employers are hiring but nobody has really seen a wage increase since the 90's[2] and wages are actually slightly falling[3]. Where's the bargaining power as we close in on full employment? It's nowhere to be found, and conditions are getting worse for the people who do the work.
[1] http://time.com/money/5054009/stock-ownership-10-percent-ric...
[2] https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/feb...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...
Clearly improvements in the things you mention can't happen overnight. But improving the availability of jobs and having the stock market going up instead of crashing are objectively better than the opposite.
The article you cite explains that the net loss of YoY wages was entirely due to inflation, and in nominal terms wages actually increased YoY, and it also cherry picks the "production and nonsupervisory" group of workers (inflation adjusted wages for all workers actually increased) -- so its somewhat dishonest to not clarify those aspects. Inflation adjustments are also a notoriously tricky business, and without delving into the details of what inflation metric was used, and if it was applied on a region-by-region basis, hair splitting over the effects of inflation on wages to drive a narrative around wage growth (when the direction is generally "upwards") seems wrong.
You seem to be looking for reasons to explain why the trajectory of the US economy is negative, but I'm afraid that the evidence is mounting that wage growth and job opportunities should be expected to improve over time going forward, absent some new financial crisis.
edit: Also worth mentioning: staring at medians around wages is, imho, missing an critical aspect to understanding the actual experience of participants in the economy: income mobility. There's evidence that upward mobility has been stable despite an increase in point-in-time income inequality [1]. The question we should be asking is if income inequality at a point-in-time is necessarily bad if participants in the economy have ample opportunity to move up to higher levels of income. I don't have the answer to this, but any arguments about wage growth or income inequality need to take into account mobility, and they almost never do.
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/23/265356290/study-upward-mobili...
Stock market is entirely irrelevant for most of Americans [2]
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/record-median-household-inco...
[2] http://time.com/money/5054009/stock-ownership-10-percent-ric...
But if you assume that new entrants to the economy develop skills and move up over time as they acquire skills and responsibility, as is likely a closer reflection of reality, then their wages have grown over time. The observation you are making shows that for new entrants to the economy at low income levels, there has not been a net increase in the starting wages those people earn since the 1970s.
I guess the question to ask is: should we expect the real earnings of low level, low skill jobs (not people) to increase over time as the economy does? As you said, these are relatively flat. I have no reason to assume someone performing low-skilled labor in 1970 should be paid more in real terms than someone today doing the same job, in pure economic terms. For that to be true, they'd need to be performing some kind of increased value in their job relative to 40 years ago -- but if they were doing that, they wouldn't be performing a low-skilled job anymore, and hence would be moving up in income level!
80% of the country makes under $65k[1]. They're pretty locked in. This talk of "upward mobility" is not really true. Only a few will move up the chain, but not the majority. Not everyone is moving into management, not everyone is becoming a software engineer. With the costs of college education & textbooks rising exorbitantly, less people are able to afford to get the skills to move up [2].
>I guess the question to ask is: should we expect the real earnings of low level, low skill jobs (not people) to increase over time as the economy does? As you said, these are relatively flat. I have no reason to assume someone performing low-skilled labor in 1970 should be paid more in real terms than someone today doing the same job, in pure economic terms.
The cost of everything necessary is rising[2] while income's have stayed the same since the 70's when adjusted for inflation, so yes I expect "low skill" jobs to keep up. "Low skill" jobs are still a necessary part of the economy and someone hast to do them; who's going to pick up your trash at work, who's going to make your smoothies, who's going to prepare your breakfast sandwiches, who's going to pick up trash at event stadiums, who's going to cut your hair?
[1] https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/netcomp.cgi?year=2016
[2] https://www.abi.org/newsroom/chart-of-the-day/price-changes-...
Do you have a citation to support these claims? A cursory search yielded a study that showed at least from 1995-2005 these claims were completely false, and the majority of people moved up from the lowest quintiles of the economy.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the-vault/spr...
> The cost of everything necessary is rising[2]
If you look at your reference this is also false. Some necessities are flat, some have gone up. And most of the necessities like food and housing that have gone up, at least according to your reference, have tracked inflation so in real terms have not gone up and hence we should not feel like flat wage growth has reduced the availability of these necessities to the people who are economically immobile. And of course, in real terms, clothing and other necessities have gotten cheaper. You also gloss over that non-essential items that improve quality of life like tech have dropped radically, increasing the overall purchasing power of people within those spheres over time.
The remaining items like medical care and college education cited are cause for concern, but if we're being honest both of those areas are effectively in a state of crisis right now due to out of control costs, broken systems, and predatory lending practices. On the education front at least there is cause for hope due to the increasing availability of alternatives.
You paint a particularly bleak picture that is not backed up by your own sources, I'm afraid. That's not to say there isn't room for improvement in income mobility in the US or reducing the costs and waste in systems like healthcare, but like I said there are plenty of reasons for optimism and a belief that the trajectory is a positive one.
It is cheaper in most fields to skill up than it ever has been.
It's just more expensive to get a piece of paper....
> I expect "low skill" jobs to keep up.
Then I hope you are against all low and semi-skilled immigration.
According to your source wages fell, in real terms, between May 2017 and May 2018 by 0.1%. They're up from 5 years ago, up from 10 years ago and way up from 50 years ago. The principal cause of that real decline was gas prices rising unexpectedly.
https://www.businessinsider.com/record-median-household-inco...
Yes. "Without adjusting for inflation, these 'nonsupervisory' workers saw their average hourly earnings jump 2.8 percent from last year. But that was not enough to keep pace with the 2.9 percent increase in inflation, which economists attributed to rising gas prices" [1].
> Most Americans haven't seen any real wage growth when adjusted for inflation since the 70's
This is not true for people employed full time [2]. Real hourly wages for hourly nonfarm workers [3] are up. About the only people I can find who are earning less, in real terms, than they were in the 1970s are manufacturing workers, and even they are up over the last decade.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...
And regardless of the magnitude, we would surely be hypocrites to keep finger-pointing. The US has been implicitly meddling heavily with international elections for decades.
It’s quite sad that Americans are not taught the basic lessons of the 19th century French Revolutions, because learning these lessons the hard way is yet again proving catastrophic.
The “liberals” (known to Americans as the ‘Democratic Party establishment’) forego moral action for moral identity. The “proletariat” (or, working class, Democratic Socialists) must overcome the denial of their self-identity which is, in American culture and media, a battle on all sides.
The average American’s head spins when they try to interpret polical nuances of foreign nations. They are limited to 2 dimensions; every opinion is either good, bad, or moderate; every piece of information is either fact, fake, or partially fact. I cannot tell if the left-leaning American pundits are being sincere when they act surprised at the newish factions in the American left. Are they truly so ignorant of history and political theory? Serious question. It’s one thing that’s American citizens are so simple-minded, but I find it hard to believe the media is not simply playing dumb. It’s truly agregious.
Whether approached through morality, love for one’s neighbor, mathematics, or otherwise, capital precarity has every reason to be the first place to look, and must therefore be proven not the culprit before it can be discounted.
US security agencies have been clear that Russian intelligence interfered in our election to support Trump.
Putin admitted just two weeks ago that he wanted Trump to win.
Generalized unrest was one goal. Electing Trump, however difficult that might have seemed, was another.
And we all know how trustworthy Putin is.
Why would you blindly trust intelligence agencies that have been very untrustworthy throughout US history?
At a certain point you start arguing "why believe anything" and that's literally not a conversation worth having.
We now know that to be a lie.
Again, why would you trust intelligence agencies that haven't been trustworthy throughout US history?
Is everything stated by an intelligence agency true? No. Is everything false? No. So you evaluate the claims they make. This isn't complicated.
You could say the same about the DNC server, which in 2016, the FBI claimed had not been provided to them for forensics.
The one firm who did have direct access was CrowdStrike, whose report had a couple inaccuracies, and whose CTO, Dmitri Alperovitch, isn't impartial either. Firstly, the claim about the APT controlling Ukrainian artillery equipment was disproven. Secondly, they cited an outdated Ukranian Wordpress vulnerability as attribution evidence, which did not hold up under scrutiny. These are the forensics they gave to the FBI.
Naturally, mid-July The Daily Beast, owned by a company chaired by Chelsea Clinton, breaks a story in response to Trump's comments at Helinski, with a piece about the DNC server's virtual image being given to the FBI - something that the FBI did not comment on and also is in contradiction with the FBI's claim from 2016.
'' Providing details Tuesday to the Senate intelligence committee about the bureau’s investigation into Russian hacks targeting the election, Mr. Comey said the FBI made “multiple requests” for access, but ultimately a private company was the one to conduct the forensic review and then shared details about what it found with investigators.
“It’s not the way we would prefer to do the investigation,” Mr. Comey said. '' Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/10/james-comey...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/spy-agencies...
From article:
>The Chilcot report identifies a series of major blunders by the British intelligence services that produced “flawed” information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the basis for going to war.
So again, why trust intelligence agencies that have been untrustworthy throughout US history?
So, again, Is everything stated by an intelligence agency true? No. Is everything false? No. So you evaluate the claims they make. This isn't complicated.
Also, the agenda of discrediting the US intelligence community is a long-standing goal of Russian intelligence, evidenced by their support of Wikileaks and Snowden.
Absolute nonsense. The Mccarthyite "Blame Everything on Russia" bots are now on Hacker News.
Skepticism over US Intel Agencies is not a 'Russian Goal'. It's common sense, and all you have to do is research their history of overthrowing governments and lying to us intentionally to lose any trust in them. You don't need a 'Russia' element to research their dark and dirty past.
>The U.S. Intelligence Community concluded that some of the genuine leaks that Guccifer 2.0 has said were part of a series of cyberattacks on the DNC were committed by two Russian intelligence groups. This conclusion is based on analyses conducted by various private sector cybersecurity individuals and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Fireeye's Mandiant, SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, Trend Micro, and the security editor for Ars Technica.
It's at least plausible that, at least originally, defeating Clinton wasn't a goal, weakening and dividing the US as a whole and the expected next President’s public and Congressional support might have been the whole goal. Actually causing her defeat may be a happy accident from the Russian POV (or a bit of a unhappy one that required escalating efforts to promote disunity, because in the short-term, even if the administration produced was not particularly popular, there was the risk of accidental strength from executive-legislative partisan alignment.)
Well, there is the Steele dossier, which FusionGPS was paid twice for - once by a Republican PAC, then second by Clinton's Perkins & Coie - before providing it to the FBI directly. You could say that it's MI5/MI6 (once a <three letter agency> operative, always a <three letter agency> operative, amirite?) intel, but the unverified parts of it are from Russian sources.
The investigation into Trump's campaign and its Russian contacts was NOT started by the dossier. The FBI was not given the dossier until December of 2016. By this time there was no campaign anymore since Trump was president-elect. In fact the investigation had already started months prior when Papadopolous made suspicious comments to a diplomat about the campaign's knowledge of information related to Hillary's emails. [2]
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/why-trump-wont-stop-talking-abou... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump–Russia_dossier
But October 2016 is still after Page left the Trump campaign, and after the Russian investigation had started.
There is no [citation needed] big enough for this claim, since it flies in the face of all available evidence so far.
You're dead on. It would be nice if Facebook would come out and clearly say that!
There might be a potential wrinkle in that it's not always possible to correctly infer an actor's true intentions from knowing some of their actions. It's also generally impossible to know for certain when you've learned of all of an actor's actions.
It would be really awesome is Facebook were to say that this is clearly just non-partisan shit-stirring! But it also might not be fully true.
What happens to foreign PACs, can they buy ads? Can the UK, Israel, Saudi, Mexico, China, etc, now be barred from trying to influence US politics in ways which were previously allowed? What about political ads in foreign language channels, will those be monitored for foreign influence?
People in person don’t really seem to care as much and are generally somewhat moderate/centrist and are perfectly capable of talking about these issues without reflexively hating the opposition.
The one thing everyone does seem to agree on is that they hate internet mobs and political extremism on both sides.
I don’t know. Regular people still seem pretty damn reasonable to me. I think the problem might be that we’re taking a very narrowly defined demographic (people who argue rudely with strangers on the internet) and extrapolating from that as if their sentiment represents everyone at large.
Media sources do this as a justification to report on population sentiment and create big narratives arcs out of it. Twitter and Facebook’s scale and visibility makes it very convenient for them.
But I really think the “write nasty comments on the internet” demo is too narrow and specific to extrapolate anything meaningful from it at all (unless perhaps you’re a psychiatric researcher...)
Both of these can be true at the same time. Companies donate to both political parties all the time, that doesn't mean they don't have a preference. The Koch brothers have given money to Democrats, but they certainly prefer Republicans in power.
Putin said he wanted Trump to win in Helsinki [1]. We also know the RNC was hacked [2]. That those emails weren't released in the same manner as the DNC's seems like evidence the scales were being tipped.
[1] http://time.com/5339793/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-russia-e...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/comey-republicans-ha...
> The “Resisters” Page also created a Facebook Event for a protest on August 10 to 12 and enlisted support from real people. The Event – “No Unite the Right 2 – DC” – was scheduled to protest an August “Unite the Right” event in Washington. Inauthentic admins of the “Resisters” Page connected with admins from five legitimate Pages to co-host the event. These legitimate Pages unwittingly helped build interest in “No Unite Right 2 – DC” and posted information about transportation, materials, and locations so people could get to the protests.
but they couldn't do it successfully if there weren't real, deep, vicious, and simmering rifts to begin with.
furthermore, the institutions responsible for generating public unity are, to put it lightly, in shreds.
people don't trust the media, and there is little in the way of genuine investigative reporting in any event. people don't trust the government's agencies -- nor are many of those agencies beneficial to the public anyways. local governments are facing unprecedented system failure; many can't provide basic necessities like clean water. territories like puerto rico can't count on federalism any more after being let down in their moments of great need.
putin didn't cause any of these problems by spamming propaganda on facebook.
I'm sure these state actors are thrilled that their plan has gone so well -- not only are their agitations seemingly driving the population apart, but the wider politicization of the issue itself, fueled by the media, where people think the bad guys are acting to tip the scales in the favor of the opposition just plays further into the hands of these actors and does more to fracture our society than any of these stupid Facebook ad campaigns they're concocting ever could.