>"Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce substantial traffic."<p>It seems to me that the New York Times is just complaining that they can't control the political narrative anymore because the proles can now decide for themselves what news they will read. Thoughts?
Here's what I keep coming back to: when Dan Rather was hoodwinked into pushing a fake story about GWB's minimal military service, he was fired. When Keith Olbermann was similarly caught pushing a story he found and liked that turned out to be false, he was fired. When Brian Williams made up a BS story about an RPG firing at his chopper, be was suspended for 6 months.<p>What happens when Breitbart or HuffPo or various YouTubers and bloggers get caught in a lie? Nothing. Nobody's head is put in the noose.<p>News aggregators are to journalism what AliExpress is to shopping - they'll give you what you wanted at the price you wanted, but piled high with lies and crappy quality, and you'll never find the same company twice so their reputation doesn't matter.
It's cool how articles like this are able to take a vague feeling that probably a lot of people have and put it in more concrete terms. It is well-written.<p>They mentioned that some post had gotten big enough that it had merited commentary by Snopes. When the vast majority of political discussion takes place over a distributed mess of memes the nature of fact-checking changes tremendously. On top of that, a lot of these pages are building up the ideological armor to rebuff attempts by the platforms themselves to provide more rigorous filters (e.g. "corrupt Twitter / Reddit algorithms"). Maybe this is just the way the world works now, but if so that's kind of depressing.
Thought this was interesting:<p>/////
Littlepage is also a recent convert. During the primaries, he was a Cruz supporter, and he even tried making some left-wing pages on Facebook but discovered that they just didn’t make him as much money.
/////<p>Now with Trump in charge, will this flip? With angry leftists flocking to Occupy Democrats, Young Turks, etc?<p>We'll see.
To me, the media always believes the rest of the non-media world is interested. We are not.<p>None of the 300-500 people i deal with each week ever talk about "stuff" in this article. Hardly ever does the word Facebook ever come up (except my spouse who uses FB to voyeur friends &family )<p><centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way.<p>Nope. Not to those I know. Just because it's on a screen does not mean it an engrain.<p>People aren't stupid. Really. Whether it's Walter Cronkite or National Enquirer or Readers Digest. Or now Facebook or fox news or npr or blogs. We get it.<p>Just because the vehicle to spread BS has moved does not mean we don't realize that.<p>Chill out American press.
The big issue not mentioned is how much influence Facebook exerts by feeding users what each user likes. Facebook is by its nature a filter bubble. That's inherently divisive.
This seems like a good time to link to this prescient 2002 TED talk from Daniel Dennett on "dangerous memes":<p><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_dangerous_memes" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_dangerous_memes</a>
Fucking LOL. The NYT. Purveyors of bullshit extraordinaire. Telling us about the media machine.<p>Their end can't come soon enough. Judith Miller 2003. Never forget.
we need to realize that social media experts have basically discovered a new form of addictive drug that is based on ideas instead of on a physical substance. "if it bleeds, it leads", but industrialized and backed by big data, in the way that cocaine was an industrial-revolution optimization of relatively benign coca leaves. there are people who literally cannot take their eyes of this stuff, constantly looking for the next 'high' of outrage. righteous anger in meme form has some kind of addictive force beyond what we have seen before on a scale that can manipulate mass audiences in a way that propagandists of the old times would never have been able to dream of.<p>we should be worried the last three presidents were all elected by the team with the best data operation.<p>it has infiltrated the communication you have with your family members - never before in human history was your interaction with your own family and friends mediated through a for profit corporation whose interest it was to make you share memes.<p>i dont know if i am ahead of things but as someone who was on the internet since 1996... i deleted my facebook account years ago. i deleted my twitter this past year. i am close to deleting google.<p>i pay money to certain sites that i value, and patreon creators. my money goes to people who make stuff, and they make stuff i like without trying to manipulate me with some kind of weaponized big data political campaign. the free internet is almost become an unusable pile of shit.<p>i feel like there is this nugget of people leaving behind the 'standard internet' for these new little bubble enclaves where we cannot be assaulted with never ending streams of .... garbage. i dont know the name for it...<p>we need a name for it. its something like a drug, but crossed with a meme. it is a virus but one that you voluntarily re-infect yourself with every time you log on to some platform like facebook.<p>its like addiction but without the physical component.
its a dysfunctional manipulative relationship but one side
is a data center and a bunch of algorithms.<p>its like a toxic person but that person is a platform that
you log in to every day to try to connect with people
who are not toxic. its like you cannot get away from the toxicity anymore<p>its like if there was ubiquitous angry talk radio that you could never escape. its there in your pocket all the time
waiting to get you angry about something or other.<p>its almost like the internet is turning people into psychotics... except they really do hear little voices in their heads all day long telling them how terrible the world is. because that is what is really actually happening.<p>its like renting your brain out to a corporation, for free, so that you can plug into some pseudo community that exists only to generate profit.<p>these things all come through some kind of 'feed', which is designed to trigger the release of brain chemicals that in a feedback loop cause you to consume more of the feed.<p>the feed is designed by an algorithm and big data. you are like the squirrel in the psychology experiment, except of pushing the lever to get more nuts, you push the lever to get another hit of the chemicals that are released when you have a nother righteous anger story in your feed.<p>they used to call blackberry 'crackberry'.<p>maybe they are more like drug dealers. anger dealers.<p>or virus spreaders. they spread the viruses and re-infect people even as they try to get away.<p>maybe they are the reservoirs of the virus....<p>their only purpose is to grow.
using your brain. your mind that is.<p>maybe they are , essentially,<p>mind cancer.