[kwlug-disc] Trust in Musk.. or go to NextCloud

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2022 at 11:11 AM Doug Moen <doug at moens.org> wrote:

> I have a different view of "what's wrong with twitter". The problem isn't
> specifically and only "Musk", Twitter has been criticized for years.
>

Not only Twitter, but social media in general.


> There's been an unfortunate trend to increasing political polarization. In
> the extreme form, it's the idea that objective reality doesn't exist, there
> are no facts, only politicized opinions. This is being driven by people on
> the far left and the far right. It's not just right wing people who need to
> be fact checked. Extreme ideologies have been around for thousands of
> years, nothing new here. What seems to make it worse is the magnifying
> effect of social media like facebook and twitter. These are funded by
> advertising, so to increase ad revenues you use an algorithmic feed that
> increases engagement by preferentially showing people extremist content,
> because that content gets more clicks.
>

To add to the above ....

Social media (not just Twitter) has used algorithms to maximize
"engagement", which basically means re-tribalizing society into "us vs.
them", and stoking our most basal instincts (fear and anger). See this
article
<https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/friction/201807/why-social-media-makes-us-angrier-and-more-extreme>
from 2018 for example.
It is only a matter of time, before this spills over into violence (January
6th for example).

Social media has allowed those who embrace conspiracy theories and refuse
any facts to gather and amplify their voices.
A significant portion of the population is immune to facts, and will not
change their opinion if you present them with facts.

And this is not only January 6th or the Freedom Convoy. Social media has
caused actual killings in places such as Myanmar, Srilanka and India.
If you want links, I can provide look in my bookmarks and provide them.

What is worse is that bad actors (special interest groups, corporate
lobbyists, and even foreign adversaries) have realized that they can
manipulate significant segments of society without having agent
provocateurs, printing pamphlets, and so on. It is now all accessible over
the internet. They just need to widen the gap between factions in a society
and let them turn against each other, as we are seeing on a regular basis.

Here is one such government run operation for just that: Russia's Internet
Research Agency
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/russia-troll-farm/553616/>.
, and a report on its influence
<https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1906420116> from 2017.
Other totalitarian governments run similar operations (UAE, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, ...)
Citizen Labs out of U of Toronto studies these operations and issue report
on them.

So it is not only Twitter, and not only Elon Musk.
But Musk did dive before thinking it over, and we are seeing the results on
Twitter ...
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