
QAnon and Pinterest Is Just the Beginning - smacktoward
https://hapgood.us/2018/08/15/qanon-and-pinterest-is-a-completely-predictable-disaster/
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dddddaviddddd
The way Pinterest presents images with very little context can also discourage
users from connecting images to their source websites (which they may never
visit). It's like a social Google Image search with recommendations.

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smacktoward
I believe this is a big part of the "fake news" problem on Facebook and
Twitter as well -- both of them present stories from all different kinds of
sources as visually identical "cards," with the only included indication of
where it came from being the domain name the story is posted on. And that
domain name is typically presented in tiny, light gray type, making it super
easy to miss. The result is that a headline from, say, the _Wall Street
Journal_ is presented with the exact same visual weight as a story from
BobsConspiracyBunker dot biz. The casual reader scanning through his feed has
no quick way to distinguish which stories are actual journalism and which are
not. Doing that takes work, and work is something we know people are not going
to go out of their way to do.

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sthgrau
Part of this seems founded on serving content based on what people do versus
what they say. In the case of the video shown, they said they were interested
in recipes, yet didn't bother to pin anything for recipes. From the standpoint
of the algorithm, they must not be very interested in recipes, no matter what
they claim.

Good or bad, this 'actions speak louder than words' approach isn't merely a
social media thing. "Oh, the politician says they are for good thing, but they
voted against the Bill for Good Thing." That is regardless of context, too.

I don't know whether they have this feature, but it seems to me this could be
mostly addressed with a 'Less of this' button.

With a feedback mechanism, even if someone manages to inject an unrelated meme
into a given demographic profile, those memes could be weeded out by a subset
of those people who are just trying to keep their view the way they want it.

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kinsho
Honestly scary stuff. I can see a good number of middle-aged women be very
receptive to the fake information being disseminated on Pinterest, so long as
they think that such information just "organically" appeared in their home
feeds.

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komali2
Clicked for me. The Democratic party should absolutely be looking into it,
because for the life of them they can't seem to explain why they aren't
reaching white suburban women (I've seen a slide literally titled "where are
the white suburban women?") they assumed they had locked down with Clinton.

Either way I hope some organization with a lot of resources delves further, my
"spreadsheet of Twitter bots" doesn't exactly constitute research and I'd love
to see something bigger/better/more effective.

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faizshah
So what are some strategies in terms of recommendation systems to avoid overly
personalizing your user's recommendations? Any literature on mitigating this
issue?

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eponeponepon
Let them do it themselves.

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creaghpatr
>I don’t know how compromised Pinterest is at this point. But everything I’ve
seen indicates its structure makes it uniquely vulnerable to manipulation. I’d
beg journalists to start including it in their beat, and researchers to throw
more resources into its study.

If we've learned anything from recent doxxing culture, he's dogwhistling
journalists to harass tech platforms into purging users he views as
problematic, only this time, with a patriarchal flavor:

>So why don’t we talk about it? My guess is that its perceived as a woman’s
platform, which means the legions of men in tech reporting ignore it. And the
Silicon Valley philosopher-king class doesn’t bring it up either. It just
sounds a bit girly, you know? Housewife-ish.

Indeed, Mike, it's time for the MEN to step in. /s

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komali2
You don't view qanon memes as problematic? Or does your /s tag apply to your
whole post?

Have you ever seen much reporting on Pinterest? I buy his theory - nobody in
tech reporting takes it seriously because few in tech reporting falls into
Pinterest's audience.

Maybe we're both missing some articles on the subject though?

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eponeponepon
I'm unsure about this class of problem. On the one hand, it most definitely
_is_ a problem (the quote about 'engines of personalisation' being engines of
radicalisation was particularly resonant here).

But on the other hand, I don't know that it's a problem to be fixed in-
platform. Society has dealt with unsourced or decontextualised information in
the form of gossip for millennia, and it's done that by building up an immune
system of sorts, in that people (mostly) grow up knowing to take stories they
hear in the pub (or wherever) with a healthy pinch of salt.

What we haven't done is start giving people chatting in pubs "citation needed"
tickets. Maybe that's a bad thing - I don't know - but it seems like the real
solutions to these problems all involve instilling healthy scepticism in the
populace at large, and a habit of treating online interactions just the same
as offline, rather than altering the medium.

