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The Columbia Journalism Review has some analysis of the problem of disinformation and propaganda being actively spread over social control media. As the situation is studied more, albeit belatedly, the nature of social control's business model gets more daylight.
"That fundamental goal is to get the user to stay as long as possible," Ghosh said in an interview. "Their motivations are different—for platforms, it is to maximize ad space, to collect more information about the individual, and to rake in more dollars; and for the disinformation operator, the motive is the political persuasion of the individual to make a certain decision. But until we change that alignment, we are not going to solve the problem of disinformation on these platforms."
After Mueller released his indictments, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted on Twitter that the indictment "shows [Russia] used social media just like any other advertiser/influencer. They used the platforms as they were designed to be used."
The phrase surveillance capitalism gets more traction as it becomes acknowledged that while social control media do not actively spread disinformation and propaganda it is a side effect of collecting as much personal information as legally (and somtimes illegally) allowed. That information is aggregated from multiple sources both internal and external to social control media itself. As a result it is getting increasingly difficult to distinguish between disinformation and authentic political speech.
Automated attacks make that differentiation that much harder. Faecebook gets the most attention, but the others, including YouTube work the same way and can thus be manipulated just as easily. (Ed: Speaking of YouTube, to single out one topic as an example, as seen recently with FCC comments on Net Neutrality, only 17%of the comments the FCC received were legitimate with the rest filled in by clumsy bots.)
Source : Fake news is part of a bigger problem: automated propaganda
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Saturday February 24 2018, @04:28AM (2 children)
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday February 24 2018, @06:38PM (1 child)
Not knowing what the causal connection is is not itself evidence that there is no causal connection. I will agree that it's often quite useful to know the causal connection, but I will assert that it's often rather indirect, along the lines of:
A is necessary for B to happen.
C is necessary for D to happen.
...
E increases the influence of B on G happening.
B, D, and F are all necessary for G to happen.
...
W, X, and Y are necessary for Z to happen.
You'll have a hard time tracing out why A happening is correlated with Z happening, but there is still a causal connection (some parts of which are hidden). The default presumption should be that correlation is a sign of causation. But you shouldn't be certain of this.
An note that the causal chain I was proposing was a very simple one. Only one of the listed links was a probabilistic one, and that's quite unusual. And I didn't only leave out links to save space, part of the reason is that a lot of the time they aren't known to the observer. (Often someone will know them, which is why a search of the literature becomes important. But also you frequently need to dig them out yourself.)
An example I read about from several decades ago:
One of the European Casinos had a high proportion of, I think it was black, results from one of it's wheels. This was the correlation. You may make some guesses at all the proposed causal chains that were investigated, but it eventually turned out to be due to wear on one of the bearings. The proper conclusions from the original observation was that *some* causal mechanism was involved. The one that was eventually revealed was not even considered in the original round of causal relationships.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @07:20AM
Just no. A thousand times no. People have been misled by this kind of presumption for all of recorded history, and as mentioned, superstition and pseudoscience is driven by it. Yes, correlation can be a sign of causation, but there are four possibilities [thelogicofscience.com] that need to be considered when you have two variables X and Y that have some kind of correlation:
The best way to determine which of these four possibilities is most likely is to perform experiments that control the variables X and Y, control for possible external confounders like Z, and are done many times to reduce the possibility of random chance producing a spurious correlation.