Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censorship

Re:Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censo... by galaxyLogic on Sunday July 18, 2021 @03:46PM (#27875994)

That is no doubt true (about how the algorithms work). At the same time what we see is that there is a market, demand, for misinformation. And some people are making money from that.

Why is there so much misinformation about Covid vaccines and vaccines in general? Because people want to believe in such misinformation and because that allows websites to make money from their readership. Therefore the peddling of misinformation continues.

It is not so different from what publications like National Inquirer and Weekly World News have been doing for a long time. But instead of paying for National Inquirer you can now get such misinformation for free on the web, because you are paying for that by spending your time seeing the advertisements. Information wants to be "free" whatever that means, but people want misinformation, to give them the feeling they are right about their prejudices.

SEE: https://fortune.com/2021/05/14/disinformation-media-vaccine-...

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Re:Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censo... by Applejinx on Sunday July 18, 2021 @04:05PM (#27876172)

Because there are sociopolitical actors who can extract direct benefit from OTHER people believing misinformation to their detriment. You are omitting this motivation, and it's a significant factor, worth spending money and energy on if your motivation is to harm a population that you see as your enemy.

This assumes a global marketplace of information propagation. That's the new factor here: the actual motivation isn't all that new.

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Re:Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censo... by galaxyLogic on Sunday July 18, 2021 @10:17PM (#27878591)

I wonder how prevalent the will to "harm a population" is. I think it's more about benefitting oneself financially than trying to harm others. Politically speaking yes politicians try to harm (the popularity of) their opponents. But politicians are a very small slice of the population.

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Re:Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censo... by heavyset_go on Sunday July 18, 2021 @05:01PM (#27876634)

> Weekly World News

This has always been obvious satire.

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Re:Right or left, you should be worried about big tech censo... by rcurry on Sunday July 18, 2021 @10:05PM (#27878523)

Yeah, well the Chupacabra still keeps me up at night.

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