[Andy McDandy]

Well, the tabloids have decided it was all Facebook's fault.

[Boiler]

Final comment today:

Pew Die Pie is not the victim here.
Even Brendan O'Neill would struggle to submit 300 words along those lines.

http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/03 ... d.html?m=1

[Boiler]

Well, the tabloids have decided it was all Facebook's fault.

Worth looking at the responses to Javid's tweet on the matter.

[Andy McDandy]

Not be8ng on Twitter, can I ask you to paste/summarise here?

[Big Arnold]

On the same day it happened? How much more 'out of the closet' facist can you get to publish this on the same bloody day? And written by a Muslim too apparently!

Islamist
/ˈnoun
1.
an advocate or supporter of Islamic militancy or fundamentalism.
"radical Islamists"

As it's about a hopefully small subset of Muslims, I don't think he's wrong. Fanatics on both sides will exploit it.

[Boiler]

Not be8ng on Twitter, can I ask you to paste/summarise here?

Neither am I (or Facebook, or Instagram, or...)

I'll give you the link, dear boy:

[Bones McCoy]

To me it's like blaming BT or Vodafone for receiving malicious or threatening phone calls.

BT doesn't choose which unsolicited calls to push at you. Facebook does. It has algorithms designed to control what you see.

We covered this elsewhere, stuff I hate or something, around the theme of "Where did all this Jordan Peterson bullshit come from".

Last night I followed a link I'd been sent about Circular Imperial Russian Ships.
I've suddenly got 3 recommends for some Noel Edmonds cosplayer who styles himself "Sargon of Akkad".
He wants us to "fugeddaboudit" - he can do one.

[Biggus Robbus]

I would like to point out to Sajid that those are American companies that abide by American rules. If you want to police them in your own country, then do as the Chinese government does by limiting access, then explain to your population why you are limiting access to those platforms.

Take responsibility for your shit Sajid.

Shit the Google and Apple stores already do not allow applications that allow hate speech (hence Gab being removed).

[spoonman]

But Facebook even with an algorithm that filters what is personally published to you is still behaving as a neutral actor because the filter is built up from the the information the user has supplied as well as its interaction on the platform.

As we've seen with Brexit and Trump, frankly that's just bollocks.

It's not really. With all the hearings in various countries and reports that have came out surrounding content on social media in those cases, there is nothing to suggest that Facebook (or Google) were themselves actively manipulating their own personalisation algorithms to unwittingly push fake news and other crap on to unwitting people. Personally I find the idea of Mark Zuckerberg getting involved to deliberately have neo-Nazi material pushed to millions of Facebook users ridiculous. What they can be accused of at best is that they were not quick enough to remove pages and material that broke ToS, and that they were slow to react to an industrial scale attempt to game their system the same way YouTube is still being gamed by the alt-right to offer suggestions for videos that have tedious links to your viewing history.

The idea of gaming systems in place to get around blocks that people opt for to not want undesirable content given to them isn't exactly new. The trouble in dealing with spam e-mail is a good one where these days getting spam into your inbox if your service has a competent spam filter means next to no spam should reach it, but that took quite a few years to make it as strong as it is, isn't 100% perfect and I doubt it ever will be. The ways those leaving c.o.m.m.e.n.t.s. on the D***y M**l website to try and ¨get around the auto filters is another. In the offline world you have unscrupulous scammers and con artists attempt to get around blocks put in place to stop junk mail and cold calling etc. The likes of BT & Royal Mail have options available for its customers to have filters in place to help stop much of this reaching them, but the more cunning can get around it with varying levels of difficulty. It's a constant game of cat and mouse.

As I see it, the reaction comes from authorities and self-appointed moral guardians slowly losing grip of the controls they've been used to in the past where the available material lies in a semi anarchical site based more on where the content is hosted rather than the location of the consumer. Once technological progress has been made, it's impossible to put it back in its box. Unless you're planning on going full Great Firewall of China, or what the Russians want to do with the ability to isolate the country from foreign hosted content, then ideas have to be tried and tested. Once it became possible for people to communicate a message to millions of those well beyond its national borders without needing the receiving country's permission for distribution in the form of radio waves the governments and other authorities have been looking at to how to deal with it while at the same time engage in such disruption themselves.

[The Weeping Angel]

But Facebook even with an algorithm that filters what is personally published to you is still behaving as a neutral actor because the filter is built up from the the information the user has supplied as well as its interaction on the platform.

As we've seen with Brexit and Trump, frankly that's just bollocks.

It's not really. With all the hearings in various countries and reports that have came out surrounding content on social media in those cases, there is nothing to suggest that Facebook (or Google) were themselves actively manipulating their own personalisation algorithms to unwittingly push fake news and other crap on to unwitting people. Personally I find the idea of Mark Zuckerberg getting involved to deliberately have neo-Nazi material pushed to millions of Facebook users ridiculous. What they can be accused of at best is that they were not quick enough to remove pages and material that broke ToS, and that they were slow to react to an industrial scale attempt to game their system the same way YouTube is still being gamed by the alt-right to offer suggestions for videos that have tedious links to your viewing history.

The idea of gaming systems in place to get around blocks that people opt for to not want undesirable content given to them isn't exactly new. The trouble in dealing with spam e-mail is a good one where these days getting spam into your inbox if your service has a competent spam filter means next to no spam should reach it, but that took quite a few years to make it as strong as it is, isn't 100% perfect and I doubt it ever will be. The ways those leaving c.o.m.m.e.n.t.s. on the D***y M**l website to try and ¨get around the auto filters is another. In the offline world you have unscrupulous scammers and con artists attempt to get around blocks put in place to stop junk mail and cold calling etc. The likes of BT & Royal Mail have options available for its customers to have filters in place to help stop much of this reaching them, but the more cunning can get around it with varying levels of difficulty. It's a constant game of cat and mouse.

As I see it, the reaction comes from authorities and self-appointed moral guardians slowly losing grip of the controls they've been used to in the past where the available material lies in a semi anarchical site based more on where the content is hosted rather than the location of the consumer. Once technological progress has been made, it's impossible to put it back in its box. Unless you're planning on going full Great Firewall of China, or what the Russians want to do with the ability to isolate the country from foreign hosted content, then ideas have to be tried and tested. Once it became possible for people to communicate a message to millions of those well beyond its national borders without needing the receiving country's permission for distribution in the form of radio waves the governments and other authorities have been looking at to how to deal with it while at the same time engage in such disruption themselves.

Big Tech isn't your friend, Facebook, Google and YouTube have a lot to answer for.

[spoonman]

Not be8ng on Twitter, can I ask you to paste/summarise here?

Neither am I (or Facebook, or Instagram, or...)

I'll give you the link, dear boy:

Javid (and others) telling the likes of FB, Twitter & Google to simply "do something" is remarkably similar to the Brexit dunderheads who have insisted that the problems surrounding the NI/RoI border can simply be solved by "technology". And when pressed about this technology, they simply claim that someone else can come out with the respective hashtags or something that gets the job done flawlessly which doesn't actually exist for now. It's simple buck passing - Javid and the government he is a part of could do something themselves about it, but it would almost certain be unpopular and damage the image of the country abroad even more than it already is. There will probably be a point in the future if quantum computing becomes an affordable reality where national borders could be secured without a human presence or where websites allowing video uploads openly can pretty much stamp its foot down on any undesirable content within seconds of being uploaded with a >99.999% accuracy success. But it isn't there today.

P.S. To borrow from the alt-right lexicon, Javid is "virtue signalling". But you won't see DM columnists or S*n editorials accuse him of it while happing labelling others they don't like with it.

[spoonman]

Big Tech isn't your friend, Facebook, Google and YouTube have a lot to answer for.

And where have I implied that it is? Technology and its ongoing advances are inherently neutral. Wherever it becomes good or bad is in the hands of its operators and that applies to "Small Tech" as much as "Big Tech".

I'd also be interested in what you think firms like Facebook & Google (YouTube is owned by Google) have to explicitly answer for, what you think they could be doing and what should be done if they don't. I'll admit that there doesn't seem to be an awful lot they could do feasibly right now, leaving the only practical solution being strong draconian government regulation - that might fly in countries that have authoritarian heads of government but I doubt it would in pretty much any country in Western Europe.

[Andy McDandy]

One reason for the collapse of the NF in the late 70s and early 80s was the Tories co-opting their language. That's why they'll never bring themselves to fully condemn the far right. Also, MacKenzie's observation about Sun readers is, I think, rather true.

[Biggus Robbus]

The radicalisation starts at sites like 8chan and 4chan.

I see gab.ai is still there too.

Big tech sees the end result of that. At the end of the day what the UK and other non US governments can ask for is limited versions of social media for their own respective countries. Otherwise their only other option is to block social media.

It is hard to stop someone livestreaming to the internet these days without a government taking authoritarian steps.

Maybe non US countries could block the likes of 4chan and 8chan?

[Biggus Robbus]

What is 8chan, and why did the New Zealand shooter use it to announce himself to the world?

Big tech is not the problem.

This is the problem