was this comment written in the past? social media is already controlled, exploited, and mastered by corrupt businessmen and politicians.

Well, technically ... yes.

Which businessmen and politicians control facebook?

Facebook itself, just like other online media companies, _is_ a political entity. My view is that the risk we in democratic countries face is not from political entities co-opting Facebook, it's from companies like Facebook becoming political entities in their own right. We're all well aware of how America's lobbying system works. What I think is much more insidious is companies who control the flow of information pursuing their own political agendas. Twitter and Facebook can have more influence on the political landscape by altering the algorithms they use to promote information than the equivalent of millions of dollars of lobbying. That should frighten you.

> companies like Facebook becoming political entities in their own right

The worst thing that can happen is having Zuck run for president and win. A pesident with a propaganda tool of his own.

In Ukraine they already have a reality TV actor who played a president as the president. Turns out that he's no worse than any other 'real' politician. Guess it's the Ukrainian way of trolling the vote.

Tells you something about the real politicians I guess...

Republican politicians appealed personally to Zuckerberg over fact checks on right wing disinformation and bans of right wing trolls and they agreed to not hold those people to the ToS.

Whichever are willing to pay the most.

Let's say I have loads of cash to spend. How do I spend it to get control of facebook? Presumably there are limits to that control -- what are they? Is "buying ads on facebook" the same as "controlling facebook"?

This is... Silly.

1) You can look at the 5 eyes alliance's assault on encryption. That's literally forcing their will on the company (and others)

2) The TikTok ban demonstrates not only capacity but an appetite to exert to control over this domain

3) That whole "summon the CEO of the company to directly answer questions from the group of people literally in charge of policies around reform and control"

Or we could sidestep these questions and conflate income with ownership

Buy a newspaper, spend money lobbying politicians. Use these to exert indirect pressure. Buy ads for direct pressure. Setup a charity "social media consumer advocacy" to which you donate money used to spoil the activists you cultivate.

Next synergize all these efforts: Have the newspaper write about the activists, have the lobbyists talk about the newspaper articles with the politicians, and bring up the articles during sales talks regarding your ads.

Buying a massive ad slate on Facebook doesn't give you direct control but does give you a lot of say in their policies because keeping you happy becomes tied to their bottom line.

Compare YouTube policy adjustments in light of P&G announcing they were planning to yank their advertising from the platform because it wouldn't rope in what P&G considered to be its worst content.

If you have functionally unlimited funds, you can just use them to astroturf, which, as we've seen, can be far more effective than advertising.

Controlling the content is awfully close to "controlling Facebook". Facebook can decide to stop serving your content, but they've shown no interest in doing so.

> If you have functionally unlimited funds, you can just use them to astroturf, which, as we've seen, can be far more effective than advertising.

Exactly, the amount of psy-ops via bots and entities like the CCP's Wumao Army are going to be way more effective at steering the narrative in your favour way more than any short-lived 'viral' ad or targeted ad campaign.

Furthermore, it can be sustained for much longer periods of time and can foment and incite way more resentment than any controversial or persuasive ad, because of the associations to other conflict-based facebook groups.

This is all really to say that the underlying surveillance economy is entirely indifferent to labels such as 'communism' or 'capitalism' and seem ephemeral and fleeting when the means/methods and desirable ends are the same as each other: manipulation by discord.

The fact that this takes place is not a surprise as psy-ops, conspiracy and counter-intelligence have been the mainstays of every single Nation-state's intelligence agencies; what is a surprise to me is how widely adopted and how pervasive it has been for so much of the Human population when there is SO MUCH MORE interesting aspects of the Internet. And how readily people are drawn to go for such shallow fodder when presented the opportunity to do so.

It's all so High School, and for those of us that got fed up with it when we were (forced) in it we cannot see the value or appeal to any of it: I got a small chuckle in passing from the whole 'Space Karen' spat with Elon after he supposedly tested positive for COVID and was not able to go to the Cape, but rather than waste my time digging into it or anything else related to that drama that led up to it I just kept the stream from the Crew flight on throughout the entire mission and then stopped listening to anything related to that entirely until I had time to watch the Sentinel launch this morning. Which was pretty rad, and dedicated to an amazing man who devoted much of his life to the pursuit of studying and monitoring Climate Science and Ocean levels and made incredible contributions to the discipline before tragically losing his battle with cancer this year: Michael Freilich [0].

His children's recounting of their father was incredibly touching and it made my day to hear their story and relationship with Micheal.

By contrast, I felt physically ill for several days trying to follow the impact of Anonymous' Blue Leaks on twitter without an account during the riots. I'm not prepared to subject myself to such a degrading sense of mental health for what seems like vapid forms of entertainment, especially with so much more beneficial and fruitful things to be in engaged in, both on and offline.

The concept of 'de-evolution' comes to mind anytime I hear about the latest twitter beef that spills over into real life that often leads to violence: Follow Live: Violent white supremacists (proud boys) clash with Liberal snowflakes (BLM protestors)! Its often feels like we're filling in the missing parts to the prelude of Idiocracy.

0: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/people/432/michael-freilich/

make a large donation to one of mark's favorite charities. at the gala, have a casual discussion about the challenges of moderating a large social media platform.

who is mark?

The Atlantic Council and NATO for a start.

You're going to have to define "control" here and explain how it's exercised, other than Facebook being headquartered in a NATO country.

The Atlantic Council are listed as a "thinktank"?

People will leave certain platforms if they become unpalatable. Look at the amount of outrage generated by the very small level of tampering that facebook and twitter do currently. There is a tremendous amount of scrutiny on these platforms.

It's worth mention that there is also a tremendous amount of effort being made by Facebook to prevent such scrutiny. See:

https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-is-going-after-its-crit...

Which has already happened on on western social media. I wouldn’t be surprised to read FB has a policy of deleting the ‘leaked’ information and subsequent pages because an authoritative source (seeded by the government and/or at the will of some random uninformed employee) claims its fake news or some unsubstantiated claim or it’s some ‘terrorist’ group or something. Since only expert verified news from pet western sources are fully allowed to post anything controversial.

This seems to be the direction we’re moving towards.

Their only saving grace is that it’s in a fringe political system that not enough people care about. Or maybe the opposite, there won’t be enough counter outrage to handle the gov organized information suppression networks set up during some past emotionally volatile times without thinking of how easy it will be to abuse.

FB has been only slightly better in this context, by not being stupid enough to interfere with politics of random countries, which might explain the ban.

The major issue with social media right now is that people put an absurd amount of trust into them. It’s a new medium, like radio or TV, which also were major sources of misinformation.

As time goes on, people will put less and less stock into sources of information that have proven faulty in the past.

However, I think this kind of thing takes way longer than anyone thinks, and will play out over many years or decades.

>It’s a new medium, like radio or TV, which also were major sources of misinformation.

>people will put less and less stock into sources of information that have proven faulty in the past.

Do you have any idea of the number of people who inherently trust a 'fact' because it was on a radio or television program?

I'm not sure that your assessment is correct. I think what we're seeing is what we see with TV, there is just less of a way to track it with those stations. - when I buy cable, I get both left and right news stations. I only watch one, but nobody but me knows that. When I use social media, I can access right and left, but everyone can see what I access, and the people who see it can cater their message to me specifically.

Anyway, I think you're wrong. I don't believe people inherently distrust traditional media. I think they distrust traditional media they don't agree with.

I’m not saying people no longer trust traditional news sources, but there is a difference in degrees that has to be appreciated.

Think about the way that FDR used his “fireside chats” to directly message the American people. By making them feel like he was speaking directly to them, many Americans felt like they were given access to a greater level of transparency of government. 50 years later, Reagan and Clinton both still made regular radio addresses, but failed to control their narratives the same way FDR did. Why? Because by that time the farce was up. Most Americans knew that radio wasn’t some intimate conversation between the president and them. There was a greater cynicism about the medium, everyone knew that lying was just as easy over the radio as compared to written statements.

Now think about how many assumptions people make about social media. Even forums like Hackernews. You’ve engaged with me, so you probably have made several assumptions about me.

1. I’m an actual person and not a bot 2. I am personally commenting my opinion and not the opinions of someone who has compelled my opinion 3. I am arguing in good faith 4. I am a single person, not multiple people with the same account.

I’ve made the same assumptions about you. But the funny thing is that NONE of these things is guaranteed to be true. And in some cases it’s not even likely that all of these things are true.

Eventually people will stop making these assumptions, and learn to mistrust the Internet to the degree that they probably should.

> Do you have any idea of the number of people who inherently trust a 'fact' because it was on a radio or television program?

Back when it was new? More than you'd think: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(1938_...