- Mar 30, 2007
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- 202,677
That neighbor really deserves a medal..
***Official Political Discussion Thread***
- Thread in 'General' Thread starter Started by rico x hood,
- Start date
- Mar 30, 2007
- 151,241
- 202,677
- Jul 1, 2016
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I mean it's probably toothless but imagine receiving a notarized "Bye Felicia" letter via First Class Mail.
elpablo21
Supporter
- Feb 11, 2008
- 106,458
- 195,943
What else is she supposed to call them. ****ers is putting it lightly anyway
- Feb 23, 2010
- 23,404
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Trump turns on McConnell for calling Biden president-elect
The Senate majority leader had been reluctant to recognize the president’s loss in recent weeks.
www.politico.com
- Aug 11, 2012
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elpablo21
Supporter
- Feb 11, 2008
- 106,458
- 195,943
Flood them ads with stimulus talks man
- May 25, 2004
- 30,345
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Take away their pay until they figure it out
- Feb 25, 2010
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- Mar 30, 2007
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- Dec 8, 1999
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Let's leave your hairline out of this.
Assuming you're reacting to Adrienne LaFrance's piece in The Atlantic, her point is not that the misinformation on Facebook is, itself, unprecedented (The Protocols of Elder Zion was a pamphlet long before its country western remix as an Internet cult), but that Facebook has been propagating toxic misinformation in unprecedented ways.
Facebook has itself flatly resisted - partly out of regulatory/liability concerns - the very equivalence you're implying between them and mainstream media companies. (In the article, it's reported that Zuckerberg literally laughs off the notion.)
You could see social media companies signal boosting intellectual featherweights like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro and regard it as nothing more than the digital analog of Andrew Sullivan hailing The Bell Curve in The New Republic in 1994, but the goal isn't to exempt traditional media through sleight of hand or ignore the broader historical pattern. Treating Facebook and Youtube like any other media outlet would be like an epidemiologist treating an airplane like a barber shop.
Let's at least acknowledge the obvious: Facebook is the Amazon.com of White Supremacy, misogyny, and erstwhile fringe conspiracy theories.
Yes, traditional media outlets, and academic institutions, have pushed similar misinformation - but they've done so at exponentially smaller scales, without personalized algorithmically self-reinforcing filters or voraciously tracking reader behavior to engage in what Dr. Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed "behavioral futures markets."
Let's take, for example, the toxic myths you mentioned in your post about drug use, race, capitalism, and international affairs. You consumed all of that misinformation in your youth, and have discussed your efforts to try and "unlearn" false dogma. Think about the voices that eventually and gradually disabused you of those notions. Among them, I believe you've singled out Tim Wise, of the Washington Post, in the past.
How many of these influential works would you have even been exposed to if Facebook was already dispensing content based on your preferences as a twenty-something Ron Paul fan? If you were on Medium at the time, you'd likely never have seen a single Tim Wise article in your feed.
Even if you might have succeeded in altering the worst of your views by deliberately seeking out and entertaining opposing perspectives after experiencing some catalytic event, likely offline, how many others in a similar position would make the same effort?
It is not the goal of these platforms to inform, but to engage. Right wing outrage mills and Trumpian grievance politics enjoy a distinct topographical advantage in any race to the bottom. (To say nothing of Joel Kaplan's blatant conservative favoritism.)
Like Twitter's racist cropping algorithm or Amazon's Malibu Staceyesque digital assistant struggling to understand women, Facebook demonstrates time and time again that AI trained through biased datasets will be biased by default. (See Algorithms of Oppression and Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.) Don't buy into these companies' claims of "neutrality" relative to the profit-driven slant of the establishment press - or equate the influence-peddling of traditional media with that deployed by Facebook's quicksilver siloes and nonconsensual research on behavioral manipulation.
I can appreciate that you're rightfully skeptical of the oft-unquestioned processes through which knowledge is constructed, validated, and imbued with authority. There's an entire field of post/anti-modernist scholarship dedicated to problematizing the purported objectivity of scientific traditions as particular and, arguably, colonial rather than universal and objective. That said, there's a distinction to be made between the Foucaultian tradition of interrogating the relationship between formalized knowledge and power, anti-intellectualism, and epistemic nihilism. Don't fall for the use of the former to cloak the latter.
Let's not act like Facebook is truly democratizing information, and that placing TruthEagle.gun on par with august, mainstream publications like The Atlantic is cast as a threat only for its hegemonic challenge to moneyed interests and the "global elite."
Facebook wields "free speech" and "support small business" the way casino operators wield "school funding" - as a smokescreen. They may eschew responsibility and ethics, to be sure, but they are not "hands off." Their hate speech policies infamously protected White men but not Black children. They had no problem taking down Elizabeth Warren's provocative political ad claiming that Mark Zuckerberg endorsed Donald Trump. Zuckerberg told an audience at Georgetown University, "I don't think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true," in defense of Facebook's insistence on accepting money to publish demonstrably false political ads, yet, while the company itself is loath to "decide what's true", they have no qualms with deciding who decides. For that purpose, they've chosen the very media outlets you hold in suspicion - a group that, it's worth noting, conspicuously includes The Daily Caller.
If your goal is to decentralize knowledge validation, Facebook's naked ambition to monopolize online communication could hardly be more antipodal to that end.
- Jul 20, 2009
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METH!!!
- Aug 11, 2012
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- Nov 3, 2011
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It ****s with their bottom line. The weirdos who are tricking on those streamer broads are being shamed into stopping, so Twitch is trying to make it a safe space for them.
- Jul 22, 2012
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- Dec 8, 1999
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Sorry, you know I hold you in the highest respect, but that line was pure entrapment.
- Apr 30, 2010
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Like Facebook, embracing and protecting these **** people because of the bottom line. These social media companies are partly responsible for how much more ****** people have gotten.
- Jan 30, 2007
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This gif got me
- Nov 3, 2011
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One of my coworkers showed me a video where this chick was showing off the video game, but "accidentally" dropped the game and over in some tight *** leggings to pick it up. And the goofs were sending her money for that.
- Aug 11, 2012
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Yup. I’m annoyed at the continual co-opting and misuse Of black/aave slang and vernacular tho. That really bugs me. And it happens, ALL the time
Nike Jordan
Supporter
- Jun 27, 2002
- 33,968
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It's like that Paul Mooney line.
dacomeup
Supporter
- Jan 20, 2006
- 26,606
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It’s absurd. THEY steal and ruin everything.
- Jun 9, 2020
- 1,471
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- Jul 20, 2009
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What happened to the term "woke" still pisses me off
Last edited:
- Mar 30, 2007
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