Meta Leaks Part 2: How to Kill a Social Movement

https://archive.org/details/meta_leaks_part_2

by icw_nru • 11 months ago

84 16 11 months ago

archive.org

codyb2• 11 months ago

Social media's poison. Delete your accounts. Life is better without it.

sunrunner• 11 months ago

Does Hacker News count? ;)

christianqchung• 11 months ago

Not in the same way doomscrolling Instagram Reels, Tiktok, and Youtube shorts, no.

tojumpship2• 11 months ago

You will find many, arguing they abandoned all online presence. Urging people to leave social media for a better life like they have. Yet they have accounts on these pseudo-social sites - Reddit, HN ... - actively participating. I don' think restricting your own access to a swath of information is a good idea, no matter what that info is. Moving your monthly online discussion habit to Reddit of all places... Humans are social, and with the internet's presence in every facet of life, it will be harder to run from it.

I don't think simply being absent is logical. Sensing ideological currents, bias and being primarily a lurker rather than participating will have the same mental benefits without limiting your knowledge.

monsieurgaufre• 11 months ago

Yes.

msgodel2• 11 months ago

Yes but it can be valuable enough that it's worth using anyway so you might consider timeboxing it with something like ScreenTime or the extension I wrote if you're on Linux.

dileeparanawake2• 11 months ago

Amazed social media engineering society isn’t getting more press. They are all doing it.

I noticed this first on X - during the FarageRiots where an Asian woman asked how many people felt safe. The volume of violently racist replies was insane. As an Asian man - it made me feel, very scared about society. I felt outnumbered. It wasn’t reflective of society - as it turned out it was a mass demonstration of racial unity, by the vast majority of Britain. But not on X

On YouTube I noticed it silent deleting my comments. Nothing violent - literally a comment saying I was concerned about NHS privatisation and takeover by the US finance. Noticed the same comment get removed. No notice. No reason. No appeal. Take down. Invisible. Quick google shows lots of people experiencing same thing.

And it got me thinking - wow - imagine shaping public sentiment at mass. Making opinions that weren’t convenient to people owning social media disappear. That creates helplessness. Shapes elections.

The rage bait we see now pulls in attention, shapes conversations and defines the Overton window.

Noticed a post from Theo T3 an hour or so ago that was critical, on X, about OpenAi and the first comment was calling him an OpenAI shill. Certainly seems plausible incentives on X to fuel anti competitor sentiment and amplify useful sentiment.

This article on meta is validating the patterns I’ve seen. It’s deeply concerning. We are in an era where society is micro shaped by social media owners and their agenda.

This issue needs to be addressed. We need regulation and transparent recommendation algorithms and clear limit in targeting users.

And then there is the toxic nature of social media engineered addiction. Side bar I know but has to be said.

We need much more regulation and we need more decentralised ownership for social media companies to protect democracy.

zingababba• 11 months ago

It's pretty bad. I've also been very interested in the non-organic way certain topics get introduced. It's often chains of non-organic posts/replies that will seed topics in a way that makes it seem like opinion 1 is proposed then someone else will come in and make some obvious fallacy in a counter-argument, then another post will respond calling them out in some inflammatory way. This kicks off a cycle of user engagement either defending or attacking one of the participants. However the entire initial chain of 3-4 back and forth is all bots just subtly guiding topics.

dileeparanawake2• 11 months ago

Wow that’s insane - didn’t realise that was happening re non-organic posts.

From a behavioural POV it seems like an obvious play. These companies and there owners have huge gains via social engineering.

There is very little transparency, accountability or regulation.

The thing that worries me is the unobvious… most people know about instagram and ++ suicide rates. What shocked me was finding out that instagram used things like waiting for people to remove photos of themselves, identify insecurity behaviour, use that to position beauty products to young girls. It seems so so unethical and predatory. Not to mention the impact on public MH when applied at scale.

Another crazy stat was something like screen time av was 4hrs/ day and av attention spans dropped from ~180s to something like ~90s.

The impact in so many areas is so bad. Blows my mind there is such a lack of regulation.

Thinking AI has the potential, at scale to social engineer without the need to bother creating content / making bots.

tojumpship2• 11 months ago

I wholly agree with your point on X. The comeback of racism is one of the most dangerous social phenomenons in today's world. Besides sowing unsurmountable amounts of hatred, it also brings along xenophobia, misogyny/misandry and the whole likes along with it as the forerunning discriminatory practice in our world.

dinfinity• 11 months ago

The 'comeback' of racism? Really?

It never left. Anywhere in the world.

msgodel2• 11 months ago

It was a big deal when Google started doing it 15 years ago on YouTube. They were explicitly changing weights for recommendations wrt middle eastern videos. At the time it was considered a moral thing because it was done to prevent ISIS from radicalizing people.

I remember warning people at the time they'd do it for domestic political videos, it was really frustrating how no one believed me. It's a little more frustrating that after experiencing people continue to use sites with artificial cybernetics.

morkalork• 11 months ago

So the premise is that bad actors co-opt the target's hashtags, mass upload ban-able content with those tags, then mass-report that same content and as a casualty the tag gets caught up the next time content moderation models are trained? If the sources aren't just making this up, then it's pretty damning on Facebook's part. Any intern-level data scientist could inspect the training results and see the innocent tags being negatively weighted and flagged.

icw_nru• 11 months ago

Hello, some things I want to talk about.

HN discussion of part 1 leaks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864419

Ironically, after posting the part 1 leaks, I ran into several censorship efforts directed towards me (both direct and indirect).

I had my Reddit account shadow banned (still in effect) and my hackernews account on a "filtered mode" (they think my posts are too promotional and repetitive).

This story was immediately filtered after I initially posted it this morning.

Another thing to mention, is that for the first couple of hours after posting the part 1 story, I had the post locked several times, and have had several newly created HN accounts making some not so nice comments directed towards us as opposed to focusing on the story at hand.

Also my post was down ranked to the third page of HN, despite having way more engagement (comments and upvotes) then 95% of the posts on the first page of HN.

So if anyone knows a better way to make these posts without getting banned/filtered, or knows another place that would be interested let me know. I would like to continue posting on HackerNews, but if I have to message the mods every time I make the post, it would be extremely painful. Thanks to Dan, for once again coming to save the day.

Part 3 leaks will probably be either next week or the week after. We are currently collaborating with a news organization to get the story out there first.

Finally, I can answer any questions anyone has about this story.

tstrimple• 11 months ago

So if anyone knows a better way to make these posts without getting banned/filtered

The problem seems to be that HN has the very same incentives to manipulate social discourse as these other platforms do and by all accounts seems to be doing it or explicitly allowing it to happen "organically" via flagging.

Meta Leaks Part 2: How to Kill a Social Movement

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