I recently discovered the real problem with social media - particularly Facebook. I found this out the hard way. It's not what you think.
There are innumerable security concerns already being reported. We all take it for granted that there will be data collection and the resulting leaks. Sometimes those leaks will go to hackers who are trying to engage in activities like identity theft. But we know that even though there are identity thieves, there are mechanisms in place to stop them, and there are mechanisms for redressing the problems they cause.
They aren't the real problem.
There are innumerable people waving flags of government surveillance, 1984, panopticon. The whole gamut, from the people who don't think Facebook should be de-platforming valid political candidates, all the way up to concerns about facial recognition data being harvested by police organizations. But many people, like me, typed on, content with a few ideas in pocket: first, that no police state has lasted very long, second, that if a police state is coming there's no way to stop it apart from using the platforms themselves to talk about it, and third, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen... there's a sort of fatalism to it.
So that, too, isn't the real problem.
The real problem is that, ultimately, Facebook and similar sites are intentionally facilitating the extreme polarization and meltdown we're witnessing today. I know this because I am in the process, personally, of experiencing it in microcosm.
Flashback to about 1999. I have been thinking a lot recently about an event that happened in my father-in-law's house. I was working on his desktop computer, probably doing something like defragmenting, removing toolbars, cleaning the registry, or any of the other traditional first-steps one does when in control of a boomer's computer. To that end, I had to disable Norton AntiPerformance, which was his solution for securing his computer.
And within 60 seconds after I disabled it, I got treated to a pop-up ad, not a browser ad but some sort of adware pop-up - depicting a man pulling a string of tangerine-sized ben-wa balls out of another man's anus.
Now I need to divulge that my father-in-law is a clean man. You will not find anything on him. He has had top secret clearances in the Defense Department. There is no way he was responsible for that ad-pushing application being installed, at least not knowingly. And whatever its multitude of faults, the Norton software actually was keeping it at bay.
Those of us who grew up with or spent our young adult lives with web 1.0 were conditioned, from the very beginning, to the idea that the screen is incessantly going to try to show you things you don't want to see, and that you need to take pretty consistent action to stop it. But this was always impersonal. The people writing useless toolbars and adware programs were faceless scammers somewhere overseas, and it was easy to pigeonhole them and vilify them. And, frankly, they deserved it.
But think on this for a minute. If you are at all "good at computers", you have had to do this periodically. You've had to suffer complaints from your parents about "it's not working anymore", turn it on (because they shut it off, they always shut it off when there's a problem), wait 18 minutes for it to boot, and then spend three hours removing programs, defragmenting, running CCleaner, and making drive space, before you even get to analyzing what the complaint actually is. Most of that stuff gets installed through complacency. Through not vigilantly saying "No, I don't want that". And between those people and you, the repairman, there is a whole spectrum of what people semi-voluntarily allow on their computers.
It's also important here to note that I am one of those people who is not content to simply leave this situation as-is. If I have a computer that repeatedly gets into that situation, and I know that Mac OSX and Linux just don't have those problems, then I'm jumping ship. I banned Windows from my personal computers 16 years ago.... and as a consequence, I completely stopped PC gaming. I loved PC gaming, but when the choice was between having the games and having a low-maintenance computer, I made the leap.
At that same time, during web 1.0, a lot of us, like me, spent a lot of time on forums. And we got completely accustomed to seeing things like people replying with "The plural is 'fora', you grammatical $#@!wit." If that's all you see, you get an immediate impression of the person typing it which is hard to shake. But on fora, we had a couple things going on which we have completely lost on Facebook.
For one thing, forums are all moderated. They have to be, because a forum that isn't moderated turns into a hardcore porn ad space within a month. I've watched that happen. What happens on your computer, with people with ill intent trying to take it over, happens on forums, too. And with the moderation comes rules of behavior, and with that comes pressure to conform to a standard.
It doesn't always work strictly - for instance, the moderators may know both the person posting the word "forums", and the person posting the nasty response. They may all be regulars and old friends for many years, and they may feel like they are in (as much as I hate to use this phrase) a "safe space" for those involved, where the reply may be coming from a friend who is not-so-goodnaturedly ribbing another friend in return for previous grammar corrections. As another example, the reply may be nasty because it is retaliation for a previous nastiness, and moderators may be letting it go for some reason, or ignorant that it's happening. But largely, moderators are there judging what is going on and curbing behavior the group has agreed is unacceptable. They are all people, and so the forum takes on a personality.
For another thing, and this is an important distinction, forums always involve linear discussions. There may be a sub-thread feature involved, but a lot of us using fora generally consider sub-threads a bad feature. In a regular, linear discussion, one always starts at the top, and starts reading the discussion in chronological order. And it's understood that if the discussion needs to fracture, the moderators may fracture it involuntarily, or the users may create another thread which references the old one. So if nastiness does show up, it's contextualized to the reader. It's not happening in a vacuum.
The last feature I'd mention about forums is that while not perfect, there is still a sense of history. The people there know each other. There are people reading this on this forum where I'm typing this and thinking "Oh hey, I haven't seen him around, I like his stuff", and others thinking "Oh that's that douche who thinks X about Y". And even though none of us have actually met, we still "know" each other. Moreover, and more importantly, the thing that differentiates forums from Facebook is that on forums there is an immediate accessibility of everything that has been typed there in the past.
Enter Facebook.
I have never liked Facebook. It has nothing to do with the data collection, privacy concerns, or anything anyone is writing about it. The primary thing I have never liked about Facebook is that it is not a forum, and those last two points (linear discussion and history) were never features.
The thing I have had to learn the hard way recently about Facebook, that I already knew but didn't process, is this:
Everyone sees everything, and there is no way to stop it from your end.
Some of you are calling me monumentally stupid for not fully processing that. And I own that: I was stupid. But for those who don't know, or don't know why that is the primary problem, I am attempting to help get the word out.
Facebook is pretty well known for regularly upsetting the cart on privacy and view settings. There was a time, I think about two years ago, where I suddenly started seeing posts in my feed that start with "Joe blogs likes this post" and it turned out that the post was about someone I never met having cancer. And Facebook, unbelievably, gave me the option of replying to someone's personal post about their dad dying.
I thought to myself, wow, what a monumental invasion of privacy... and then I immediately went into my default mode for when the screen shows me something I don't want. I started to figure out how not to see this sort of thing. And I found a config somewhere that said something like "Only see likes and comments on friend's posts", which I haven't been able to find again, presumably because Facebook tossed the cart again.
And then I forgot it happened and went about my business.
The thing I didn't process is that the vast majority of Facebook users fall somewhere lower on the spectrum I mentioned. A lot of them are the type of people whose computers I have to clean. But a lot MORE of them are people who simply don't default to "get this unwanted content off my screen".
So there is already a percentage of Facebook users who don't even think to try to filter their feeds. They simply assume "this is what the computer wants", and go with it. And there is another percentage of users who don't even know it's possible. I'm not going to get into the state of search engines these days (it is pretty much worse today than it was 20 years ago) but if you search on "stop seeing friends likes on facebook" or any similar phrase, you're going to find out that there are basically three options: unfriend, unfollow, or deal with it. Unfollowing is a popular option that comes up, but if there are multiple external tutorials about how to unfollow someone, that indicates Facebook is certainly not making it easy to figure out how to do it.
However, there is probably a much larger percentage of users who do some filtering and know how to do it... but every time they do, they ask themselves "Do I really want to do this? I mean I love Kathy but I don't want to see this stuff about the keto diet she's always replying to, and if I unfollow her then I won't get updates on her kittens." And because Facebook has no sense of history - and you need to see those kittens the moment they come out or the pics are effectively gone from Facebook forever - the feed stays followed.
There is no feature in Facebook to otherwise prevent seeing friends' comments and likes on random pages. If you want to see some grade-A invective, do some research on "How to prevent my friends from seeing my comments and likes in their feeds". It's not possible, and a lot of people are pretty fuming pissed about it. (Plus one, as of four days ago.) You literally cannot like or comment on something without the potential for people you are friends with getting it served up on their feed.
It's an easy decision for me, and it goes the same as it did for getting rid of Windows: if there is a greater benefit to dumping it, even though I'm losing something significant, then dumped it must be. But I am finding out just how small a minority I belong to there. But in order for filtering to work, everyone on Facebook has to do it. And they're not.
So, recall the hypothetical conversation earlier, and how there is a lot of potential context to the statement "The plural is 'fora', you grammatical $#@!wit". Now remove all that context, and phrase it as
"Joey Bloggs replied to a comment on CNN: 'Yeah, that's what I expect from a MAGA retard.'"
Still possible to explain context, right? It's CNN. It's huge. It's relevant to everyone. It's polarizing. The comments sections are completely unmanageable by traditional moderation, so it's basically thunderdome.
And whatever you like or comment on is pushed to your grandmother's feed every day. All your friends who don't unfollow you are getting a constant stream of this sort of thing. Facebook might also be pushing the 17-paragraph, well-thought-out response to a Fox News article, but you already knew nobody's reading that. They're getting the one-liners, the "toxicity", fed to them. It goes by in blips, day after day, for all the time you've been on Facebook. That's what people see, without much context at all. They're not seeing the discussions because as we already pointed out, it's just not meant for that. They're getting inundated with your worst behavior, even if it only represents a fraction of what you're doing on the internet. And if you don't use Facebook for much beyond reading news stories shared by political activists, it gets distilled even further.
So I am a Facebook troll. That is how I came to be a Facebook troll.
I say troll because they're not seeing what is going on in closed groups I'm a member of. They're not seeing what I'm doing on other sites. They're not seeing how political discourse goes with me where there isn't a preexisting breakdown. They're getting distilled negativity.
I say "am" despite the fact that immediately upon learning this, and I mean immediately, I modified my behavior and started scrubbing. But scrubbing takes time... a LOT of time. In addition to showing everything you do to everyone you know with no control by you, Facebook also very much doesn't want you to delete it.
But even after I delete the history, I will continue to be a Facebook troll, in some minds, forever.
This has very real ramifications. People I know for real have been conditioned over a period of years to see me as nothing more than a Facebook troll. It can't be addressed by the traditional response of "Hey, first day on the internet, I guess". It has gone way beyond that.
I know this because there was an incident three months ago where very dear friends of mine mishandled me and my family... and I literally could not get them to process what I was writing (on Facebook) in protest. They had been conditioned to simply disregard anything I was saying. And when I started to get through to them that there was even a problem, the response I got was "I would have thought you would be more thick-skinned", followed by some further conversations that pretty much spelled out I would be expected simply to get over it. I simply had no idea I was "the Facebook Troll" to them, at least on Facebook. And working in this complete ignorance of my status as Facebook Troll, and seething on this for months, the only option I could think of to try to get them to listen was to hurt them.
The response I got to this was not immediate. But it was drastic. I still only fully found out about the "Facebook Troll" status obliquely, buried in an effort to hurt me back.
And since then, other words have entered the discussion. "Therapy". "Mental state". And even "radicalized".
And with that last one, it occurred to me that this is also how polarization happens. It doesn't happen because people have opinions. It doesn't happen because people express those opinions.
It happens because if you regularly do anything political online, and particularly if that's the bulk of what you do on a particular site, people you know are fed a constant stream of "This friend of yours stands against what you believe in". And if you're also already a "troll", then whatever you're standing for has also been de-legitimized by virtue of the fact there is probably going to be little attempt to process what you're actually saying. There is an us vs. them mentality being fostered simply by the effort to tune out things that your social network platforms refuse to allow you easily to tune out.
It looks like I have permanently lost some good friends this way.
And it looks like the police state is going to win.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Anti Federalist
Site Information
About Us
- RonPaulForums.com is an independent grassroots outfit not officially connected to Ron Paul but dedicated to his mission. For more information see our Mission Statement.
Connect With Us