I felt like this whole thing is extremely inorganic. Funded by a WalMart heiress, website went up hours before a massive NYT ad buy, and (in my opinion) what felt like lot of coordinated / paid / botted engagement.
Idk, I don't want the internet to be dictated by followers/engagement that can be easily botted via a SMM panel for pennies.
Gambling companies literally pay people to post on twitter?
You can go to an SMM panel right now and get a bot farm to rebrand tens of thousands of accounts on any platform to align with your messaging and spam the fuck out of replies to manufacture consensus. There is a very high chance this exact playbook worked on you lol.
Bs. The facts are clear and independently verifiable. The Dutch government saw Jared k laundering money in real time. Trump is literally bribing voters from the stump. We literally invaded Venezuela took their oil and gold and transferred it to an a foreign bank account controlled by the executive rather than congress. There is an actual active market for bribery to buy pardons and get insider information about presidential policy for trading activities. I can go on and on.
People def do and that's totally fine. You don't feel like the fact that this "movement" is funded by a WalMart heiress is fishy? Full page NYT ads trying to mobilize people into protest?
Organic protests of any sort is fine. Between this shit and the "ChaoticGood" marketing operation ran for Geese, you cannot begin to understand how much of the interaction you see on the web is bought and paid for.
Elon is the largest individual political donor ever. I think a billionaire funding counter-protests is not that fishy in contrast.
I don't think a movement having a bit of funding for the organizers is that big of a deal though. The actual protesters are there because they want to be.
The call to protest at some specific location and time might be "artificial", but people have to want to protest. Trump has simply managed to inspire millions to do so.
Remember when zuck considered a presidential run when he saw how Facebook could sway voters and elections? And then Elon bought twitter for the same reason? We are fortunate for their awkward detestable personalities, otherwise they would have had a shot.
Meta can act like they don't know what's happening, but they do. As do all the other tech giants. They've been censoring and curating people feeds for a long time. This story is amusing since it's one instance where a "Team Blue" was affected. In general, it's usually "Team Red" channels are the ones getting censored.
There is an interesting project America's Digital Shield that studies these practices (https://americasdigitalshield.com/). They capture "ephemeral" content from search results and social feeds from volunteers, with a balanced distribution of the political spectrum.
Basically, the idea is that none of the content we get fed from tech giants is unbiased, even search results are manipulated to affect people one way or the other, especially when it comes to politics and elections. It's pretty upsetting once you understand what's happening.
the 'team red is being silenced' nonsense was, and is, a transparently synthetic attempt to promote right-wing discourse no matter how ridiculous it was. You may remember that Elon "free speech absolutist" Musk was the champion of this meme, claiming that Twitter was suppressing right wing views, and that every single one of his and Matt Taibbi's claims turned out to have been false or overblown.
The only major tech platform that leans red is Twitter after musk bought it, unsurprisingly.
Mind you, I’m not taking sides here. I gave up on both teams at least a decade ago. I just don’t think this is behavior we should allow from tech companies either direction.
I'm not a Meta fan or anything, but this does seem kind of tricky to deal with. Specifically that pages/topics which get sudden influx of activity at once can look similar to a coordinated spam campaign. Especially if combined with being flagged opponents who don't want to see that content. It seems like it could be hard to tell the two apart, or at least the false positives seem hard to control.
Can anyone with more experience on these kinds of spam/fraud detection systems could chime in?
After the crap they pulled in the latest Brazilian election, there is no reason to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt. They are obviously and intentionally trying to use their extreme influence over online communities to influence elections.
Watch for more fuckery during the current US election season.
People give away our planet and our souls to Facebook since decades now. Everyone knew someone who was uncomfortable with that and who asked whether a little less Facebook wouldn't be more healthy. These ones got ignored.
So, well, I don't like fascists. But if Facebook now makes use of the fact that you gave our world to them, it's hard to blame them for that.
People failed in that regard. Not Facebook. They succeeded. People failed.
Congress is largely impotent. Even if Democrats take both houses, it won't be by a veto-proof majority. Congress was designed to be "deliberative", so it has ceded more and more power to the executive branch just so anything actually gets done.
Zuckerberg knows that the power is on Pennsylvania Avenue, not 1st St. Maybe he'll change his mind in a couple of years, but he's going to spend those years doing his best to ensure that he doesn't have to.
Step 1 take Congress. Step 2 in 2028 take the White House. Step 3 start fixing all the damage of the last 2 Trump administrations. I’m long the US. We will get there.
Of course he knows where his bread is buttered. And he will cozy up to the new powers too. He has no spine. No moral code. It’s all power and money and meta. Fine. Good for shareholders. Bad for young men everywhere trying to pattern themselves after these barrons of industry.
I have to agree. The man has always been accused of stealing from others going back to the Winklevosses. He'll take any side is expedient regardless of what you (general 'you') think politically
Welcome to the party. Remember during covid if you even questioned the lockdowns, mask effectiveness, vaccines you were shadow blocked or even banned. This is why Elon buying Twitter was such a big deal.
https://newrepublic.com/post/217281/meta-suspend-democratic-...