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The Facebook Dilemma
Last night the 2018 Frontline production The Facebook Dilemma was rebroadcast on our local PBS station. Why play a rerun? Why now?
The documentary outlines the history of Facebook and interviews several of the people associated with its early development and rise to global prominence. Like most Silicon Valley startups, its full of youth and energy, and a focus on popularizing the product. While getting a great buzz on the internet as more and more people signed on to use the product, real riches lay in taking the company public. And to do that you had to demonstrate how the platform could be monetized. That monetizing came in the form of collecting personal information, profiling, and aggregating potential target groups to whom to sell, and then coordinating with marketing companies to provide personalized advertising within Facebook.
The “dilemma” in the Facebook Dilemma then is user privacy, and how to responsibly and fairly administer that data? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that people need to be aware of and control their personal information. And this is not what Facebook did early and routinely. And even now after some years of discussion and debate, effective control of personal information is now beyond individual or even governmental powers given the many platforms that collect and share data in microseconds.
But personal data control was not the important “dilemma” upon which the documentary focused; manipulation was. Specifically, the documentary focused on the 2016 US presidential election and other international events where the filmmakers believed that Facebook’s algorithms were used by savvy actors to amplify messages and influence actions. And there is no doubt that the amplification effect works, that by utilizing the tools that Facebook created messages can be fashioned and targeted to generate emotional appeal and sell products, physical or political.
The documentary producers focused on this aspect of the platform and conflated three things: the Trump campaign’s savvy use of $100 million to promote its message through Facebook, the Macedonian troll farm that is alleged to be a Russian disinformation campaign, and the violence against Muslims in Myanmar allegedly promoted by spreading false stories to the local population about Muslim atrocities via Facebook.
The subtext of the documentary is that Facebook needs to take editorial responsibility for its content, like all other responsible journalists do, to ensure that their platform is not used for disinformation. Problem #1 is that there are few “responsible journalists” in the way that Frontline formulates them. Frontline itself utilizes “narrative” journalism. That is inherent to the documentary process. Neutral, “here are as many related facts as we can find and you make up your own mind” journalism is pretty rare these days.
If you doubt that, just look at the timing of this documentary: It was first broadcast in October 2018. Anything happening then? Just the important mid-term elections. And also before the release of the Mueller Report that undercut the documentary’s insinuations about coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian troll farm. And this rebroadcast? Timed at the start of the traditional political season with the national conventions and adding to the rhetoric regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election results.
The big problem we face, as Scott Adams formulates it, is whether as a nation we are better off having an election which is 100% accurate in the vote count but whose results no one believes, or a fraudulent result that everyone believes? Frontline is adding weight to the voices for “no one believes”. It’s not the Facebook dilemma, it’s the national dilemma.
Published in GeneralWar Is Peace
Freedom Is Slavery
Ignorance Is Strength
I doubt that the re-broadcast was a coincidence. The Left will dig deeply to use everything in its arsenal, direct or indirect, to hurt Trump’s re-election. They’ve been doing it for four years; there’s no reason to change now.
Whenever societies change direction, there are many forces, both seen and unseen, that ultimately pressure the events and shape the final outcome.
More and more, people are getting their news from their social media pages. There are many reasons for that–the social media facilitates conversations in ways that the news media (except for the Wall Street Journal) never fully embraced. However, the weightiest factor is the business model the media organizations are using now.
When the Internet became ubiquitous, the news media, like all of us, found it fun but didn’t take it seriously. Slowly the news outlets began to realize that they could use the Internet to drive potential customers to their websites. In an effort to capitalize on that interest, they started opening up their entire websites to casual nonpaying visitors. The ad revenues they accrued from doing so multiplied wonderfully.
Because there was not enough room on a reader’s desk for the computer, the coffee, and the newspaper, something had to go. That something was the print edition of the paper. Among many other reasons, readers gave up the bulky print edition because they enjoyed reading from a backlit monitor that was also colorful and easy to navigate, both within the newspaper’s own website and to outside original sources. What started out as only supplementing their print edition revenue became their bigger source of revenue. Their Internet ads became their lifeblood rather than their print edition ads. Simultaneously the print edition became more expensive to produce than the Internet edition. So they increased the number of ads, targeted and otherwise, on their websites.
Those third-party ads were produced by outsiders, not the media companies, and they contained and often still do malicious software that the news media refused to assume responsibility for. Consumers got sick of crashing their computers and so installed “aggressive ad blockers,” which effectively cut off that ad revenue stream for the news outlets. The news media responded stupidly by posting pitiful messages to those with ad blockers that gave consumers the choice to “white list” the news outlet to allow the ads or buy a subscription for online access. Intelligent consumers have consistently said no. Now bleeding money at a terrifying rate, the news outlets started trying to use Facebook posts (not ads) to lure people to their websites where they could again post their pitiful choice–“If you want to read further, buy a subscription or white list us”–to which the consumers responded angrily by never clicking to see the whole story.
What has this left us with? At this moment, people are getting their news based on the clickbait headlines flashing before them on their social media–mostly Facebook–and taking those headlines at face value. This is how the false information was spread about covid-19.
I have been watching this Facebook-carried headline news trend, with the Yahoo! home page headlines close behind, with great alarm. It is absolutely shaping public opinion.
What I am really worried about right now, and I am praying that there is someone at the RNC headquarters who is also worried about it, is that twenty-four hours before the election, some news outlet, thinking they are protecting the country from Trump, will post a scary negative headline about Trump that will push the election into a Democrat victory.
In the olden days, print newspapers in Massachusetts and probably elsewhere were not allowed to do that. There had to be a forty-eight-hour window. The news organizations understood and respected the reason why this had to be this way–to give the candidates a chance to respond.
But today, when it comes to Donald Trump, the print media and the Facebook censors think they are doing something noble by disparaging the president. They will censor stories on covid-19 cures or treatments as soon as they hit Facebook, but their bias against Trump is so strong that they don’t even notice the lying negative headlines.
It’s a really bad situation.
I don’t know that I would attribute thinking as part of how they get to that action except insofar as it produces the advantage they seek. I sit here, actually thinking about feelings and thinking, relative and absolute truth, propaganda and information, and I conclude that those operating on the broader spectrum that includes all these things have a natural advantage. Donald Trump does operate there but for some reason I can sift through those parts that have no substance and keep those that are important and that happens to coincide with his policies. At least, I think I am able to do this. Maybe I am a master at self-deception.
The election is rigged. That is a known fact. How rigged is it? That is still up to debate. I suspect that if Biden wins then the election is good, if Trump wins then it is rigged and all bets are off.
So you’re all in on relative truth.
Doesn’t matter what I think. This is just how it is going to go down.
When I was in high school we used to play euchre every day. They were honest games in that we were all cheating. Elections are sort of like that.
You may have a point considering the high percentage of people who do believe in relative truth, include a majority of born-again Christians according to some sources.
Facebook has been the big tech company in the barrel for the left since 2016 because it became one of their demons, in so far as them not being willing to blame themselves and/or the awful campaign Hillary Clinton won as the reason for Trump’s election. This was despite the fact that Facebook itself celebrated giving the Obama campaign similar information in 2012 as what Cambridge Analytics was able to mine out of Facebook in 2016.
The effort here and the original showing in 2018 are simply an effort to fire a warning shot past Mark Zuckerberg and to make sure the woke SJW types on the left remain diligent to blame Facebook for anything they see as aiding Trump. (In contrast, the left has zero concerns about Twitter on Monday taking down the Babylon Bee and several other Twitter sites that focused on conservative comedy, right at the start of one of the mother loads of parody material, the Democratic National Convention. PBS’ effort here is all about trying to keep Facebook in line, to where they also look to cancel users who go against the narrative while having too many followers).
The hardcore left will neither inhale nor exhale without evaluating the political consequences and how they can be manipulated.
There are money in those big tech companies so one must make leverage to pry lose dollars for cronies.
We should stop funding NPR and PBS.
If Facebook fights ‘misinformation’ doesn’t that mean they are no longer protected by section 230 because they are behaving like an editor/publisher and not a ‘neutral’ platform?
Facebook can’t have it both ways.
Brief digression about Peter Thiel: his two most famous investments are Facebook and Palantir. I believe Palantir recently filed to go public, quietly of course.
Facebook and Palantir are in the business of user surveillance.
Peter Thiel, the libertarian, is a large shareholder in companies that violate user privacy.
Sure they can. What is stopping them?
Here is good news from Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has recently again been brought back into Trump’s inner circle of health advisers, now that Trump realizes Fauci was not the way to go:
Kennedy’s Children’s Defense sues Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook and three separate fact checking orgs for government sponsored censorship, false disparagement and wire fraud
RFK Jr strikes again 👏🏽💥 childrenshealthdefense.org
From Kennedy’s public announcement of the lawsuit:
“Yesterday we filed a federal censorship/defamation suit against Facebook and three of its so called “fact-checkers”in the Northern District of California. In blocking, purging and falsely tagging demonstrably accurate stories by CHD, Facebook claims to be protecting its users against “vaccine misinformation”.
Facebook wields this phrase as a euphemism for any statement-whether true or not – that questions the pronouncements by the pharmaceutical industry or its captive government officials. In previous cases,the courts have upheld Facebook’s right to remove posts from its privately owned platform. In this case we argue that Facebook was acting at the direction of and in collusion with government officials and agencies.
The First Amendment protects Americans against government sanctioned censorship. In March 2019,the powerful Democratic Congressman and Defense Committee chair, Adam Schiff, directed Facebook and Zuckerberg to censor any criticism of an entire class of pharmaceutical products: vaccines.
Facebook announced that it is collaborating with CDC and WHO to determine which of our posts to remove. CDC and WHO are the world’s largest vaccine distributors. Facebook uses “fact-checked” companies funded by Bill Gates,the world’s largest vaccine maker. Facebook aggressively censors truthful information about vaccines and agency corruption by public health advocacy groups like CHD while broadcasting and boosting often blatantly fraudulent assertions by government regulators and pharmaceutical companies.
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With Trump no longer ashamed to be close to Kennedy, it is hoped that the President’s own commission on obtaining freedom from censorship will be something that helps pave the way for Kennedy to successfully beat back this scourge of censorship.
I should point out that I have personally pout up a dozen anti-vaccine articles up on FB, and those have been left alone. (The person monitoring me was asleep, or what?) But for a while, any time I broadcast any articles or personal opinions on hydroxychloroquine, the article was usually removed, with a rejoinder written to me that:
1) I was endangering the community of fellow human beings
2) the information I was offering was false. (Any time I offered up decent science on the issue of HCQ, I vetted the material first.)
Interestingly, when I attempt to copy various articles other people are posting about sex trafficking, the ability to copy & paste URL’s suddenly goes away. Nor can I share these posts. This has been true for at least the past 3 weeks.
Mention HCQ, & you are a danger to humankind. Attempt to gather info about sex traffickers, and that’s not possible either.
Just who is Mr Mark Zuckerberg?
No one worthy of the great trust some people place in him.
Frontline and PBS preach to the center-left choir, by and large. They are not changing Trump voter minds.
“The documentary producers focused on this aspect of the platform and conflated three things: the Trump campaign’s savvy use of $100 million to promote its message through Facebook, “ Wait……I recall the Hillary campaign was aided by someone at Google who created special websites for her. In fact, it seemed most of social media, the networks, Soros, and the Obama/Biden team via our own government aided Hilary who was thought to be a shoe-in. With all that help and she lost?
Facebook isn’t going to change – and PBS is promoting more and more liberal, slanted talking points programming than ever. It’s shocking. Read the book if you haven’t called: “Don’t Be Evil – How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles – and All of Us” by Rana Foroohar. It’s excellent. I feel like all of this is a modern Tower of Babel, that will at some point fall in on itself.