jwtadvice2

Lastly, I don't think it's extraordinary at all to claim that Russian intelligence managed hundreds of sock puppet accounts across Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, Twitter, and other platforms. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that the opposite was true. In fact, none of the claims in the report are extraordinary; it's all extremely plausible.

Perfectly agreed. The United States and China also have these sock puppets, as do other countries. I think this is one of the reasons why people get into a tiffy whenever I insist on working with the facts and not US propaganda and rumors. Get accused of being a shill for Greece, Turkey, Russia, China, etc all the time.

Social media is swarming with sockpuppets, and now the game has escalated more, with H.R. 5181 passing in NDAA 2017, the Center for Global Engagement will be empowered to experiment with the techniques for social media propaganda developed by DARPA's SMISC program.

Don't know if the clock is moving toward midnight, or if just reddit is going to choke on itself.

Can you share what you thought was the sum of the information about manipulation of US social media platforms? I read most of the report (stopped halfway through the irrelevant RT section), and missed social media.

And spied, infiltrated and disrupted emerging political groups (Tea Party, Occupy, BLM, etc) around the country with Federal Surveillance programs.

The comparison of Facebook to a disease is entertaining (if because it has a little bit of truth from a certain perspective). But I'm not sure that the model they chose is the right one to use to make predictions. So I think immediately the predictions have to be in question.

That said, I would like Facebook to go, and not only because of its repugnant behavior with regard to its partnership with the US and foreign governments for propaganda, censorship and surveillance.

About a decade ago developers tried exhaustively to make every app "social". The reason for doing so is that, after a certain threshold, having a community locked into your platform raises barriers to competition.

When it comes to large social media sites - Facebook now and Myspace before it - there can 'only be one'. There's only one place where large numbers of users can go. They don't want to post everything they think ten times to ten different communities.

This makes the kind of large scale social media network Facebook represents a "natural monopoly". It can not have competition, except in the form of potential successors to market capture.

This makes the "market" of social media look more like king-of-the-hill than it does efficient laissez faire competition.

The better solution for social media would be a distributed platform with no central ownership. This solves privacy, censorship, and surveillance concerns and limits propaganda to a certain degree as well.

It also creates an environment where there can be competition. Now companies are free to create different client software with different feature sets at different costs. So distributing the infrastructure for social media addresses the enormous problem of market failure as well.