Obama warns against irresponsible social media use

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42491638

by gerbilly • 9 years ago

31 52 9 years ago

bbc.com

nugi• 9 years ago

If anyone has truly warned us against irresponsible social media use, it was not this particular president.

neeleshs2• 9 years ago

I'm reminded of a Black Mirror episode!

russh• 9 years ago

Hey, lets leave race out of it.

neeleshs2• 9 years ago

Race? What are you talking about? Black mirror is a TV series.

dang2• 9 years ago

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? They're not what this site is for, and we eventually ban accounts that do it.

gallerdude2• 9 years ago

Social media is really paradoxical and interesting. I can tell the entire internet something, with just the click of a button. On the other hand, echo chambers are being created, and there's no easy solution to it.

craftyguy2• 9 years ago

You're right, there is no easy solution to it. It will require cultural changes to 'solve' the problem. People will have to be somewhat receptive of differing opinions and to question their own. Maybe I'm just ridiculously cynical, but I don't see that ever happening at the scale required address the echo chamber problem.

adrianratnapala2• 9 years ago

What is the current state of empirical evidence about echo chambers and filter bubbles?

The last time I read about it, the 3rd hand reports I was getting said that they were less of a problem than you might imagine, because political junkie types actually did read stuff from the other side. Perhaps becaue, they were so into politics that they did some kind of "opposition research".

gt_2• 9 years ago

I think that’s an extreme minority, and the benefit would be limited.

The notion of sides in political media deteriorates the conversation into an argument, which at some point undermines an audience’s fundamental awareness and understanding of issues.

bornonline1• 9 years ago

Sorry not sorry, echo chambers were created by suggestion algorithms and marketing. Algorithms prioritise same content on assumption that consumer want the same content (infuriating). And so many links nowadays are affiliated links. So the only way you can escape the echo, is to put a lot of effort, and no substantial majority will do it to affect the larger picture.

gallerdude2• 9 years ago

I don't think they were created intentionally. The algorithms give people what they want, and it turns out that people don't want to be challenged on their opinions. It'd be like how if an algorithm was trained to optimize for deliciousness, it would probably create something super unhealthy.

coolso2• 9 years ago

Wondering if he'd feel the same way had the opposition candidate not used the internet and social media to help overcome the biases of the establishment mainstream media and defeat the candidate Obama endorsed and campaigned for?

Suddenly now, probably not coincidentally because of that result, the trend seems to be "social media is really bad guys" among people in the establishment - both government and the media. It's kind of ironic.

I find his statements somewhat hypocritical given that the media, and government, has had the monopoly on irresponsibility, bias, putting forth alternative realities, and the Balkanisation of society, until just recently now that people are able to combat it and freely spread information among tens of millions of people instantly and so easily, instead of only getting their information from approved sources without citizens being able to freely discuss, disprove, etc. - e.g., directly from the White House, and a couple of privileged mainstream media organizations that are very in-bed with the government.

craftyguy2• 9 years ago

Meh. Social media has always been a dangerous tool, it's only until relatively recently that the contrast has been turned way up and the danger made very obviously clear.

mozumder• 9 years ago

The media is the responsible party here. The public are the irresponsible ones. The public's voice should always be silenced in favor of professional media's voice.

Remember, the public doesn't have social media editorial guidelines. Professional media does. Professional media reporters confirm facts with multiple sources, which is why they are more trustworthy. The public is simply allowed to lie on social media.

This is why you should trust professional media over the public, since the public is irresponsible.

Why would anyone trust a social media person that simply lies instead of a professional media organization that confirms facts with multiple sources?

lbotos2• 9 years ago

Why would anyone trust a social media person that simply lies instead of a professional media organization that confirms facts with multiple sources?

Because they are "local" or because they confirm their biases. The other day on FB a friend shared a photoshopped Nancy Pelosi tweet (For international folks, she's a US Congress Person). Their comment on the shared photo "Did she really say that?".

We live in the age of primary sources, we can easily go to their twitter to confirm. (Wasn't there)

We also have great tools that help keep our American Politicians accountable: https://projects.propublica.org/politwoops/ (Wasn't deleted either)

In the time it took me to confirm that (~15 minutes) 3 people commented agreeing that she was insane for saying it.

crusso• 9 years ago

Honestly, I had a hard time telling whether or not you were being sarcastic.

I find the notion that the media can be trusted as being responsible to be inconsistent with my observations. The media is made up of people. They fall along a spectrum of responsible and irresponsible.

chmln2• 9 years ago

Yeah, but factual reporting isn't necessarily fair reporting. Professional media also had an agenda, and the same set of facts can be presented in many different ways.

Facts can be simply omitted, emphasized or underplayed, interpreted in both a positive or a negative way. Not to mention facts are only as good as the sources.

gt_2• 9 years ago

The answer is fairly simple. Media companies compete in ‘access capital’, which they earn through cooperation and partnership with entities they report on, such as government and private interests. Anyone who has worked in media will assure you these relationships make or break a media organization’s survival and success. And these relationships also harbor bias.

RickJWag• 9 years ago

I disagree. The media (left and right) is forever trying to twist things to their narrative.

Social media democratizes this. But if I post crazy things all the time, I'll lose balanced followers and will probably pick up biased followers.

The national media has little other governance. CNN ran amok for years-- it's time some balance was imposed.

jjtheblunt• 9 years ago

Absolutely agree. Not sure why your comment is faded/grey when it's kind of observing something unpopular but obvious.

bitwize• 9 years ago

Because Hackernews users are fond of shooting the messenger. If someone posts a truth that Hackernews wishes were not true, they'll be downmodded to oblivion.

dang2• 9 years ago

Please don't take threads into this extremely repetitive territory. It breaks the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

One reason we have such a guideline is that usually the vote totals don't stay the way they were. Then we end up with a tedious subthread which is garbage in the additional sense that it's no longer connected to the thing it was referring to.

chmln2• 9 years ago

I think there's definitely something in your comment.

Similarly, I wonder whether there would be so much activism directed towards fake news, had the "right" candidate won.

bovermyer• 9 years ago

Generally speaking, the public are uninformed or misinformed. Rarely does the average person bother to fact-check, investigate sources, or otherwise test and validate information. Even rarer still does someone actually offer up proof that they did in fact do their due diligence. Ergo, the public (vis a vis social media) cannot be trusted.

Professional media, on the other hand, is crucified whenever it fails to fact-check, investigate sources, or otherwise test and validate information. This is because their entire reason for existing is to provide those services.

Just because sometimes professional media sources fail in their mission doesn't mean that their mission is flawed, or that they should give up and let the public handle dissemination of information.

collyw• 9 years ago

"Professional media, on the other hand, is crucified whenever it fails to fact-check"

Not in my experience.

bomb1992• 9 years ago

" to help overcome the biases of the establishment mainstream media "

Trump won BECAUSE of the biases of the establishment media. https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2016/11/04/study-top-n...

Can find tons of studies on this, it's an interesting topic.

"I find his statements somewhat hypocritical given that the media, and government, has had the monopoly on irresponsibility, bias, putting forth alternative realities, and the Balkanisation of society, until just recently now that people are able to combat it and freely spread information among tens of millions of people instantly and so easily, instead of only getting their information from approved sources without citizens being able to freely discuss, disprove, etc. - e.g., directly from the White House, and a couple of privileged mainstream media organizations that are very in-bed with the government."

Look no further than the President on what social media is doing for understanding issues. Somewhere around 90% of his tweets are straight-up lies that people take as truth because he's the President.

astrodust2• 9 years ago

Some people take it as the "truth" because he has power, nothing more. They're used to taking their talking points from their superiors, be those the ones in their religious hierarchy, their social circles, or their corporate environment.

If the President said gravity didn't exist you can be certain Fox News would be explaining why to its viewers.

bassman90002• 9 years ago

It's worth mentioning

https://www.mediamatters.org/about

Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

Can find tons of studies on this, it's an interesting topic.

Please post. Edit: spelling.

booleandilemma• 9 years ago

Flashback to 2008:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html

meritt• 9 years ago

Your 7-day-old account is being almost exclusively used to push pro-GOP messaging and anti-Obama rhetoric.

bassman90002• 9 years ago

Nothing on the contents of the comment itself? Appeal to authority, or lack of, in this case.

coolso2• 9 years ago

7-day-old

How many days should I wait until I'm allowed to post here? I didn't realize that the age of an account was relevant here, unless the account was clearly a puppet account used for spamming or posting highly inflammatory comments. Mentioning the age of my account reminds me of the old days of internet forums when posters with thousands of posts (the post count and account age being displayed under their avatar) would throw their high post counts and high account ages around in an attempt to stifle viewpoints they disagreed with.

pro-GOP

I despise the GOP.

anti-Obama rhetoric

Literally one other "anti-Obama" comment aside from this one, neither of which had much "rhetoric" in my opinion, and both of which were received positively in the form of upvotes. Also you failed to mention my negative comments towards W and McCain.

almost exclusively

I could probably look through your comments and find something you almost exclusively use your account for but I'd rather just respond to your comment on its merits/lack of merits alone.

mark_l_watson• 9 years ago

As a life long democrat, I agree with you. President Obama and the Democratic Party machine stole the nomination from Senator Sanders, in my opinion: Chris Mathews in MSNBC did a one hour a night attack on Sanders while the Clinton machine gave Mathew’s wife a ton of money to run for Congress. Vile corruption, in my opinion. I stopped watching any NBC altogether after that. Chris Mathews helped elect Trump and he still has a job. NBC nope.

notadoc• 9 years ago

I remain thoroughly convinced that social media is bad for society, and for the self. It is optimized to bring out the worst in people, and rarely offers anything of value.

ashleyn• 9 years ago

"The question has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn't lead to a Balkanisation of society and allows ways of finding common ground," he said.

From a libertarian point of view: given his background and beliefs, I think Obama is missing a crucial element that allows and enables the reconciliation of those with different beliefs: liberty. The way you have a "multiplicity of voices" and a "diversity of views" is through tolerance: the tacit acknowledgement that while you may find what someone is doing odious and reprehensible, if all parties are consenting and voluntary, they ultimately have the legal right to engage in what they are doing free of interference.

The sticking point is that "tolerance" also means tolerating the liberty of those commonly perceived as religiously conservative. This comes even to my own reluctant consternation as a transgender individual. The example that comes to mind immediately is the gay wedding cake cases. I think it's heinous to deny service to someone simply because they are gay. But is taking government's hands off private business a lesser evil than fighting over the apparatus used to do so every four years? One government administration violates the rights of Christians in order to protect gays, then the inverse occurs under the next administration, gays losing fundamental liberties and the right to self-determination. All while nobody ever seems to ask why either should be forced to live a certain way in the first place, why the government is involving itself in private matters ranging from business to who you choose to marry.

Social media has little to do with this; it's merely a purifier for the underlying contention. Instead of keeping to ourselves and those who agree to associate with us, we've become preoccupied with adjusting an oversized commons to fit the whims of a winning team every four to eight years, hammering in all those who don't fit under the new order. Part and parcel of living in a plural society, is that not everyone will agree to the level where you can ever have such a commons.

The "common ground" that Obama is seeking, effectively, is a consistent application of "leave me alone".

Clubber2• 9 years ago

The problem with blaming bubbles is that it's not new to social media. I would image it goes as far back as tribal evolution, but I digress.

Currently, if someone like conservative politics, they read conservative newspapers and magazines, watch conservative news, listen to conservative radio and go to conservative websites, because they like it. There are liberal versions of these and also middle-of-the-road versions. Social media is just another way of consuming information that you like.

Another dimension is wether said information is accurate or not. This has also been a historical problem in this country and the world, probably since we, as a species, have been writing stuff down and even before in oral histories.

Information in social media is consumed from friends and acquaintances. People tend to give more authority to the validity of information from friends and acquaintances, again throughout history.

Social media isn't inherently bad for society, I think politics is bad for society and social media is just another way of sharing ideas, good and bad. Again, most of this is nothing new, including the content.

Look up Andrew Jackson's 1828 campaign against his wife:

According to Ann Toplovich, executive director of the Tennessee Historical Society, John Quincy Adams' presidential campaigns targeted Jackson's "passion and lack of self-control" in both 1824 and 1828, "making it central to the argument that he would devastate the integrity of the Republic and its institutions."[6] One newspaper ran an article asking, “‘Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?’”

slumberlust• 9 years ago

Is your quote in support of bubbles being around for a while, or simply that politics are bad?

Clubber2• 9 years ago

It's more an observation of society and politics in the US throughout it's history.

divbit• 9 years ago

I hesitate to post a slight disagreement here because I think, for the most part, Obama is right on the money.

However, I would hesitate to just put the problem on 'just' social media itself - if person A posts a message that says in a supposedly limited setting and person B uses a datacenter of big data AI / neural net / blockchain / VR or whatever fancy technology you want to put this in a much larger setting than the original statement, it is just a slightly clever (one could alternatively say unscrupulous) way for a person B to say what person A is saying, many many times over, and try to hide being behind it.

The same thing happens in real-life (maybe I should say 3-d) discussions, in albeit, a much more nuanced manner, but still with just as great potential effect.

unethical_ban2• 9 years ago

A post on an ex-leader of the United States regarding technology should not be flagged.

gnicholas3• 9 years ago

Yeah not sure what's going on today. There have been a couple top posts that have been flagged. Does anyone know the procedure for posts becoming un-flagged?

It seems like there is an easy way to flag things, but the only recourse to un-flag is for mods to get involved. I'm curious to know if this impression is correct, and if so what the thinking is behind this set of procedures.

AnimalMuppet• 9 years ago

I think that you use "vouch" to say that the post shouldn't have been flagged. I suspect (but I am not certain) that a post will be automatically killed after a certain number of flags (and I suspect that the number is more than one). I suspect that it takes manual intervention by a mod to undo the flag kill, and that vouch is the way you bring it to the mods' attention.

Obama warns against irresponsible social media use

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