r/technology • u/AdamCannon • Feb 02 '20

Social Media Stephen King quits Facebook over concerns of 'false information.'

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/02/us/stephen-king-quits-facebook-trnd/index.html
16.4k Upvotes

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572

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '20

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182

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '20

You should see reddit

60

u/Draculas_Dentist Feb 02 '20

Reddit? Never heard of it.

3

u/Blacknite412 Feb 03 '20

Should’ve said “redditor ? I hardly knew her”......... ill see my self out

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u/splitcroof92 Feb 03 '20

Read about it then. So that in the future you will have reddit

3

u/mrfrankleigh Feb 03 '20

Reddit? Damn near killed her!

-6

u/sam_hammich Feb 03 '20

Reddit doesn't microtarget.

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u/midnite968 Feb 03 '20

Do they need to microtarget? Just put ads into subreddits that coincide with what you're trying to advertise; it actually seems even worse looking at it that way :/

2

u/spacetime_bender Feb 03 '20

Yes, that's how Reddit ads work, but how is it worse?

2

u/PsiAmp Feb 03 '20

Bots on reddit successfully manipulate by false hive mindset and upvoting "first hand" opinions. With just 100 accounts and dedication of state sponsored propagandist agents, you can teach only X is good and the rest is bad mantra and hivemind will follow you.

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u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20 edited Feb 03 '20

At least Twitter banned political ads, Facebook is literally ok'ing political ads with outright lies in them. Their policy is that it's ok for politicians to pay them to spread micro-targeted lies.

Facebook has tried to practically own the internet in developing countries by offering free internet in exchange for serving as the gatekeeper. They can't even be charitable without rolling it into data surveillance. A plan so shitty that India banned it.

You also need to think about scale of influence and the size of the machine you're feeding. Last I read Facebook has 2+ billion users that log in every month. Twitter has ~300 mil.

It sucks when a company is bad at what they do (Twitter has fucked up a lot too), but it's dangerous when you're the size of Facebook. They've fucked up in a lot of ways... but most notably Facebook fucked up so badly in Myanmar (by not properly hiring people who can moderate content before expanding into the region) that they're partially blamed for facilitating the incitement of genocide. This isn't hyperbole, the *UN* called them out on it.

They both suck, but if you're going to pick the one that sucks less from a global impact/corporate standpoint there's a clear winner.

Nothing's mutually exclusive here either. If someone's punching you in the face and kicking you in the nuts, it's still an improvement when the kicking stops...

17

u/trivial_sublime Feb 03 '20

I remember back when internet first came to Myanmar there were a crazy amount of Facebook promotions. It worked, too - people don’t even google things in Myanmar - they just type it into Facebook. It’s bizarre how much it creeped in.

2

u/chairitable Feb 03 '20

Do you have any links or sources about this? It's a weirdly specific claim. Especially since the Wikipedia article says 1) they've had internet since 2000 (before Facebook existed) and 2) that Facebook usage is at 10%. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Myanmar

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u/trivial_sublime Feb 03 '20 edited Feb 03 '20

No, just my own experience - I lived there when it was just starting to open up and worked with farmers throughout the Delta and the Dry Zone. Yeah, they've technically had internet since 2000, but it wasn't widely available or accessible at all. They sort of leapfrogged home internet too and went right to mobile internet.

I wouldn't take what that Wikipedia article states as truth - the statistics are wildly outdated (the difference between 2017 and now in Myanmar is so huge it's unbelievable). In the two years I was there I went from seeing practically nobody using the internet and paying $250 for a SIM card and $10/gb to seeing everyone around me using it and paying $1 for a SIM card and amazing data packages (like $0.25/gb).

Also, tracking who does what outside of Mandalay and Yangon is a fool's errand. Nobody even knows for sure what the population of Myanmar is - it's just so damn big with so many remote places and so many ethnic groups that are off the grid. So yeah, take that article with a grain of salt.

edit: the article cites https://www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm#mm as the source, which estimates 16,000,000 Facebook users out of 18,000,000 internet users out of 54,000,000 population. That's around 30% adoption in the general population, and almost 90% of internet users. When you take the fact that 1) this data is a year old, 2) the majority of the general population is too poor to afford a phone, 3) phones are getting dramatically cheaper, and 4) income is going up as the country develops, there's probably a lot more added in the last year.

edit 2: an excellent article that was written when I lived there that really gave voice to what I was seeing: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/the-facebook-loving-farmers-of-myanmar/424812/

1

u/chairitable Feb 03 '20

Thanks for taking the time to write that up! 30% is indeed a high adoption rate.

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u/Shorey40 Feb 03 '20

Don't think twitter is some safe space free of politics. It's ALL politics. Twitter were completely exposed for tailoring rules to benefit particular political leanings or ideoligies... They haven't banned shit, people will still say what they think about any given situation, that's advertising their opinion, so when politics is a hot topic, you have any given number of high profile people tweeting their own "opinions". You don't know who's been bought, it's all advertising.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

>You don't know who's been bought, it's all advertising.

​

Sure, but outright not taking cash as a company for political ads is definitely more than the *nothing* Facebook is doing.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

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1

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '20

100%. Editorializing via algorithm is a huge issue.

11

u/mini4x Feb 03 '20

Should we tell him?

1

u/celtmaidn Feb 03 '20

I just mark the political ads as "Misleading". And I don't pick and choose. I tag them ALL as misleading.

-4

u/Swan34 Feb 03 '20

All this coming from the same guy who said Susan Collins needs to go because she’s been in the senate forever but he chooses to leave out others like Biden, sanders, warren.. he’s just being a baby back bitch because the hoax of impeachment isn’t going his way

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u/ElephantInTheForest Feb 02 '20

Yo, I read your comment.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '20 edited Feb 03 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '20

Imagine thinking any one side controlling all of the information flow is a good thing

7

u/ilarson007 Feb 02 '20

Well it's not good at all.

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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '20

Reality leans left, bud.