close cousin to the more ubiquitous mr flip-flop. Or maybe not.
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Rationalising an anti-social media stance
In a way, Marc Z is doing it too well that the overall dominance is getting people scared. Having said that, Google's ubiquitousness(?) should have precipitated the same fears many years ago, and yet it does not and the Incognito mode seems to afford it an additional layer of credibility. However, digital privacy concerns are not going away.
The article points to a different effect of how "filter bubbles" based on algorithms and not "moralistic truth" wreak havoc on social structures. No one seems to care. See all the glazed eyes in MRTs and public spaces in melded extensions to their smartphones as evidence.
When the Quran speaks of your limbs communicating your truest intent seemingly against your very will to keep the truth hidden, it seems that man has found a way to carve it out, very much as what Allah had willed. Let's not get into a discussion of microexpressions yet, or whether gene expressions and DNA can embed the new behaviours into its biological programming.
Is there no doubt that this would have been discovered even before the Akhirah? Is there no doubt of the Truth contained in the God's Word in the Quran?
A former Facebook
executive has said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his work on “tools
that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works”, joining a
growing chorus of critics of the social media giant.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who was vice-president for user growth at
Facebook before he left the company in 2011, said: “The short-term,
dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how
society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation,
mistruth.” The remarks, which were made at a Stanford Business School event in November, were just surfaced by tech website the Verge on Monday.
“This is not about Russian ads,” he added. “This is a global problem
... It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave by and
between each other.”
Palihapitiya’s comments last month were made one day after Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, criticized
the way that the company “exploit[s] a vulnerability in human
psychology” by creating a “social-validation feedback loop” during an
interview at an Axios event.
Parker had said that he was “something of a conscientious objector”
to using social media, a stance echoed by Palihapitaya who said that he
was now hoping to use the money he made at Facebook to do good in the
world.
“I can’t control them,” Palihapitaya said of his former employer. “I
can control my decision, which is that I don’t use that shit. I can
control my kids’ decisions, which is that they’re not allowed to use
that shit.”
He also called on his audience to “soul search” about their own
relationship to social media. “Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but
you are being programmed,” he said. “It was unintentional, but now you
gotta decide how much you’re going to give up, how much of your
intellectual independence.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Lima. The social media
giant has faced increasing criticism for its power to polarize.
Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images
Social media companies have faced increased scrutiny over the past
year as critics increasingly link growing political divisions across the
globe to the handful of platforms that dominate online discourse.
Many observers attributed the unexpected outcomes of the 2016 US
presidential election and Brexit referendum at least in part to the
ideological echo chambers created by Facebook’s algorithms, as well as
the proliferation of fake news, conspiracy mongering, and propaganda
alongside legitimate news sources in Facebook’s news feeds.
The company only recently acknowledged that it sold advertisements to
Russian operatives seeking to sow division among US voters during the
2016 election.
Facebook has also faced significant criticism for its role in amplifying anti-Rohingya propaganda in Myanmar amid suspected ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority.
Palihapitiya referenced a case from the Indian state of Jharkhand
this spring, when false WhatsApp messages warning of a group of
kidnappers led to the lynching of seven people. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook.
“That’s what we’re dealing with,” Palihapitiya said. “Imagine when
you take that to the extreme where bad actors can now manipulate large
swaths of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad
state of affairs.”
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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