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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the hello-operator dept.

Memory is notoriously fallible, but some experts worry that a new phenomenon is emerging. "Memories are shared among groups in novel ways through sites such as Facebook and Instagram, blurring the line between individual and collective memories," says psychologist Daniel Schacter, who studies memory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The development of Internet-based misinformation, such as recently well-publicized fake news sites, has the potential to distort individual and collective memories in disturbing ways."

How Facebook, Fake News and Friends Are Warping Your Memory


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @10:48AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @10:48AM (#481097)

    Where's the fundamental difference?

    These days propaganda is personalized. The big spying machines of our time, facebook and google, know exactly what you like and dislike, your fears and hopes, basically anything at all that is worth knowing about you, and more. Using this incredible trove of highly intimate information they can and do hand craft your personal propaganda dose as they are sadly increasingly used to read news. This will dramatically increase its virulence.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:23PM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Sunday March 19 2017, @04:23PM (#481187) Journal

    Where's the fundamental difference?

    These days propaganda is personalized.

    Propaganda was always personalized. GP mentions things like newspapers and face-to-face conversations with friends and letters from them. But in a town of any size, you CHOSE which newspaper to buy, often based on the kind of "news" it sold you. You CHOSE who you friends were, based at least partly on their views. How many people a century or two ago do you seriously think made friends with people who kept trying to tell them stuff contrary to their fundamental views?

    People always clustered according to beliefs, and those beliefs were reinforced by communities of friends, by the preacher at their church, by the newspapers distributed within their community (it's always interesting to read, for example, about the history of immigrant newspapers/newsletters that emerged in the U.S. in the past, which frequently had their own spin on current events), and even by nationalist politics (in many parts of the world, people used to be charged with things like sedition somewhat regularly).

    And long before Facebook, Google, et al. started tailoring search results and newsfeeds so much, people on the internet were able to seek out highly personalized perspectives that accorded with their worldview. "Back in the day" that required you to perhaps subscribe to an extremist newsletter or something, but on the internet you could easily make contact with a community of like-minded folks for just about any crazy viewpoint.

    No, Facebook and Google may be different slightly in the degree of tailoring information, but what's different isn't the personalization. What's different is that the personalization is NOT transparent to the user. In the past, if you bought the Washington Post vs. the Washington Times, you KNEW you were likely getting a different perspective on the news. Maybe you still believed your side was "right" and the other was "wrong," but there was some sort of personal choice in the matter. Similarly, you could choose your friends -- if one of them was known for spouting nonsense occasionally, you could simply discount the source... and if it continued, maybe you wouldn't listen to or write letters to him anymore.

    The biggest difference with the new "filter bubble" reality isn't that your experience of the world is personalized -- it's that you have little control over HOW it's personalized and are often completely unaware of it. Of course, it would be antithetical to Facebook's business model to offer you such choices -- because it would make their algorithms clearer and make it easier to "game their system." They don't WANT you to know exactly how your feed is personalized, because they want to be able to give you ads based on what their stats tell them is best (and will make them the most money), not based on what you actively want to see.

    Personalization can be dangerous, but it's the growing lack of transparency around it that's the real shift. People are generally amenable to propaganda that accords with beliefs they already have, but the filter bubble removes any sense you may have about how your news may be filtered. For most folks who don't interrogate their news anyway, this change may not seem that significant -- but the danger of Facebook, etc. is that it makes propaganda much more effective even against skeptical people, who might be inclined at some point to seek out alternative viewpoints... but now they can't configure by choice or often even see the boundaries of their bubble.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @06:20PM (#481217)

      Welcome to history repeating itself. Sure, you get news and information from sources that reflect your beliefs, but what this ultimately comes down to is someone (company, etc) exploiting this for their own gain.
      http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/01/weaponized-narrative-new-battlespace/134284/ [defenseone.com]