The quote is about the information architecture, i.e. the mechanisms behind widespread disinformation: social media platforms that allow users to live in a bubble. Of course they are not literally The Internet, but many non-technical people experience it this way.
Hot take: subtle differences in algorithm choices have huge real-world implications. Facebook prioritizes engagement as their top metric. This means that divisive content which inspires strong emotions bubbles to the top of the feed. This has predictable consequences for discussions and communities.
Reddit prioritizes using user votes, which tends to result in less divisive content. But the way the community is broken down into subreddits can result in clear echo chambers at times as people reinforce each other's behaviors.
> Facebook prioritizes engagement as their top metric.
Slight nitpick, but the top metric is money. If Engagement didn't lead to the most dollars it would not be prioritized. I think this is important to separate because "Engagement → (Ad Impressions + Societal Collapse)" feels so much more fixable to me than just "Engagement → Societal Collapse".
If they down-weighted negative engagement they could easily solve this though. There are pretty trivial content analysis tools that spit out a hostility score for a corpus of text.
Sorry Barack, but I think you mean: “Advertising models on the internet are the biggest threat to our democracy”
The internet, if anything has promoted democratic practice around the world, which is why China wants to shut it out. It has done more for knowledge sharing than any medium in history.
Unfortunately, advertising is one of the the only model big enough to sustain the purchase of massive amounts of hardware which grow the internet, that and movie subscriptions.
But it will die as a model in the next decade I’m sure. When the AI overlords take over, there will be no need for money.
Advertising models didn't drive belief in Pizzagate, Qanon, adrenochrome, Covid-is-fake or Dominion-ate-my-ballot. They just didn't. That was a bunch of people voluntarily sharing a bunch of content created by people who never monetized it in any way.
It's true that it was done on a bunch of ad-supported platforms with elaborate "engagement" metrics who want to keep eyeballs. So I guess in a sideways sense you can argue that "advertising" created viral content. But then "advertising" created the good content too. It's just specious.
No, there's something about the way that completely unmoderated discourse on the internet has evolved that is new and dangerous in ways that we hadn't expected. You aren't going to fix this by forcing people off the ads.
You can't with a straight face say algorithms that drive people to ever more outrageous content so that they view the force fed adverts, aren't a significant part of the problem.
Again, this stuff spread on Fox and 4chan and 8kun just as well or better than it did on Facebook and Twitter. Advertising models and engagement algorithms aren't the issue.
Newspapers, too - see "yellow journalism" a century or more ago. Ultimately, it all comes back to the printing press. The ability to spread information has always been a threat to the powers that be.
Oh, wait, Obama said "democracy", not "powers that be". Well... I will admit that I am concerned that on the internet, the feedback loops are too tight, so that hot takes crowd out reasonable thought. That's a formula for gut reactions, which isn't great for democracy. But the parent has a point, too, that this is said about every medium at some point.
I fear that Obama is right. I also fear that this is the usual "threatening the powers that be/the existing order" complaint, and that any proposed solution will be worse than the problem. Not sure where that leaves me...
See, the problem is that I don't know of a simple way to actively discourage those who spread lies and disinformation, without also actively discouraging those who spread truth that most people don't yet agree with. I'm not really OK with unpopular truths becoming collateral damage in the war against lies and disinformation.
A social network where you rate other people from left to right. You also rank articles with truthyness and quality.
Let the people become the judge of truth, but in a more transparent way.
If i comment on an article in a socialist way, you'd mark me leftist. So my comments then are highlighted in shades of blue depending on how far left my ranking is by other community members. Likewise for Trump supporters.
Articles could also be ranked / flagged as dangerous (inciting hate, violence, etc) and be removed or at least boldened, or as hackernews does greyed out, so it's less prominent without complete dismissal, yet let the person not see the greying or know they've been greyed. Something along those lines, I'm sure other tweaks could be made to make a platform like twitter that's more democratically policed - that keeps as much content as possible, but is very transparent on where that content lie in truth / political slant.
"The point is – imagine a country full of bioweapon labs, where people toil day and night to invent new infectious agents. The existence of these labs, and their right to throw whatever they develop in the water supply is protected by law. And the country is also linked by the world’s most perfect mass transit system that every single person uses every day, so that any new pathogen can spread to the entire country instantaneously. You’d expect things to start going bad for that city pretty quickly.
"Well, we have about a zillion think tanks researching new and better forms of propaganda. And we have constitutionally protected freedom of speech. And we have the Internet. So we’re kind of screwed."
>I'm looking very forward to a Biden presidency, just to see how far people will flip-flop and bend their beliefs to justify whatever he does as president
Of course this happens every time, but you see this being more exaggerated under Biden? In my opinion, this hit a new extremity with Trump.
Of course, you also have to be careful not to fall into the trap of interpreting the entire social internet as two people (us and them). Usually when you see conflicting opinions, it's because they are coming from different people, not because "the enemy" is just so hypocritical.
Let's hear some specific predictions of things that the Trump administration has been behind that you believe those who opposed him will support if the Biden administration does them.
> People will accept anything as long as "their guy" is doing it.
There's probably a heavily nerfed reformulation of this statement that's true, but as stated it's wrong enough I'm tempted to ask for market tips or what domain you consider professional expertise so's to short whatever you're long.
Did I say anything about Trump? It's not a Trump problem. It's just how the politics game works. You campaign on x, get elected, and then when you do y because of some reason, your supporters will bend over to justify it, rather than calling you out for it because that would hurt their team and also their precious ego for voting your ass in.
It doesn't matter if you said anything about Trump; you made a generalization that would include Trump (though of course, Biden was included specifically by name rather than generally).
If your generalization doesn't hold across the Trump -> Biden transition, then there's at least one case that it doesn't handle well.
Since the basic premise is that politics is essentially tribal and supporters will justify any tribal position "at least one case" is being generous, but it's an easy place to start.
>Let's hear some specific predictions of things that the Trump administration has been behind that you believe those who opposed him will support if the Biden administration does them.
This is explicitly making it about Trump, when I did not mention him at all. Perhaps he lives rent-free in your head? Seems to be the case for many people.
What I said, could be said the same of Trump in 2016. His constituents voted him in because x, y, and z reasons. And then he proceeded to backtrack on them because of "reasons". And his supporters then shifted, instead of calling him out for his betrayal of their ideals. I argue that the same will happen again with Biden. Too many people voting against Trump, rather than for someone they actually wanted, who could uphold their ideals. Biden is heavily entrenched within the establishment government. How could anyone expect otherwise? He should know better than anyone what is possible and what isn't possible, yet he'd campaign on those things anyway and people eat it up.
It's picking Trump an explicit case with which to examine the generalization.
> [Trump] constituents voted him in because x, y, and z reasons... his supporters then shifted, instead of calling him out for his betrayal of their ideals. I argue that the same will happen again with Biden.
OK. Which things do you think that Biden voters are expecting him to do that he will backtrack on?
Also, are you laboring under one of the most common misconceptions about politics?
> I'm looking very forward to a Biden presidency, just to see how far people will flip-flop and bend their beliefs to justify whatever he does as president, now that the victory is secured and he no longer has to campaign.
Same here. I've spent the last four years seeing people say that manufacturing jobs are never coming back to the USA, and rural people who believed that Trump would bring them back are naive. Then I look at Biden's campaign website, and he's got a page about bringing back manufacturing jobs to the USA.
Focusing on a negative. Yes the internet can be exploited but the internet means communication between all people in the world.
That has never happened before in history.
I believe that you don't have to bomb a country to free its people. Simply show them that there is a better way and the people will eventually demand change.
This is what the internet is doing. It's showing people women who vote, gays who celebrate their freedom, free health care and education for all, safety, security. Fundamentally that is what all humans want.
But I guess it also becomes harder to oppress one remote culture, and use them for cheap labor, if they can see where their labor is going and what it's worth through their cellphone.
It still puts a sinking feeling in my stomach. In-fact, maybe even moreso. I can't believe how much and how fast things have changed in 12 years.