
Facebook accused of introducing extremists to one another via suggested friends - ahiknsr
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/05/facebook-accused-introducing-extremists-one-another-suggested/
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bdcravens
Doesn't the government do this on a regular basis via incarceration?

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untog
"well yes officer, I was stealing from the store. But did you see the other
guy who stole from the store five minutes before me? It seems unfair to single
me out"

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borplk
Garbage outrage bait.

For more than a decade these same people cheered and clapped for every benefit
of the web and algorithms and software and automation and social media and all
of that.

Now it's becoming fashionable to turn around and point fingers at completely
obvious and trivial consequences of it and act as if the citizens are helpless
infants and the corporations are the babysitters responsible for anything and
everything.

"OMG lies found on the internet" "Facebook accused of allowing people to lie"
"children allowed to view slightly creepy animations on YouTube ... oh wont
somebody think of the children" "Public information shared on the internet was
scraped and sold to 10 companies ... everybody go nuts"

I'm happy that these concerns have finally reached the mainstream but there's
an alarming "brain dead" theme to these waves of news articles.

Like just a particular flavor of news articles becomes fashionable and then
every journalist pushes out every possible variation of that topic at all cost
just to stay relevant?

How do you go for more than a decade not caring at all about any of these
concerns and being so dismissive to suddenly turning around in such extreme
way?

If it was more of a balanced transition from not caring to caring I'd
understand better.

But this pendulum swing makes me think that not many people are thinking for
themselves anymore.

They just go with the group-think mindset of the year.

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perl4ever
I get the feeling there's been a persistent campaign to attack whatever is
deemed the current symbol of American hegemony, for quite a while, but every
now and then people move on in a coordinated way. I distinctly remember when
there was a constant focus on fracking for a while. Fracking is still around
and the US is still one of the top oil producers in the world, but it's as if
someone decided attacking it wasn't fruitful, and everybody moved on in more
or less unison. This is conspiratorial thinking, but I can't seem to shake it.

It was recently reported that the Jade Helm conspiracy theories of a few years
ago were encouraged, if not originated, by a Russian disinformation campaign:

[http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/cia/386156-ex-
ci...](http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/cia/386156-ex-cia-chief-
says-russian-bots-fueled-jade-helm-conspiracy)

That's not the same thing as the majority of the media being controlled by a
single entity though, so I still have no idea what is happening. But it
doesn't feel natural or spontaneous.

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burfog
It's partly because news feeds on itself. Something is news because it is
news. The "news cycle" is a thing. Remember the "pink slime" issue that was a
big story until one day it wasn't. See also: Kardashians

It's also because lobbying is directed toward the media. Fracking in the USA
is a huge threat to Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others. These nations will
naturally find ways to push the story that fracking is bad. It is a weird sort
of attack on the US economy, done to prevent the US from getting an advantage.

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cscotti
Restaurant accused of feeding criminals?

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abenedic
Yeah, in some sense this is the system working as expected.

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pjc50
As intended? Because intentionally introducing terrorists to each other is a
serious criminal offence in a lot of places.

I can see how this kind of thing comes about; it's very silicon valley to
assume that 'murder' and, say 'gardening' are just rows in a database and it
would be inappropriate bias to declare one to be better than the other.

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sitepodmatt
More interesting is how Facebook classifies these traits automatically? I can
see someone specifying gardening as an interest but even one of those asswipes
presumably have enough intelligence not to specify terrorism as a hobby

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pjc50
It'll be like the Netflix tens of thousands of micro-genres. A statistical
clustering of words and liked pages.

(Also, if it's anything like western rightwing extremism, it's surprising how
little euphemism a page needs to evade banning)

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quotemstr
Don't feed the trolls. This article is outrage bait. As someone said below,
it's hyperventilating because a restaurant served a criminal.

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pjc50
Facebook is not a restaurant, it's a news and ideology aggregator.

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whatshisface
So are restaurants, actually, if you count bars.

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perl4ever
Or old-fashioned diners. I was in one and some old guys at the counter were
talking about the conspiracies that control everything.

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saudioger
“Over a period of six months the [US based user] went from having no clear
religion to becoming a radicalised Muslim supporting Isil.”

That certainly escalated quickly.

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TheSpiceIsLife
So, if it's possible to be a Facebook user _and_ a supporter of a known
terrorist organisation ... Should the rest of us really be worried about what
we reveal to Facebook?

