The Antisocial Network

[Büge]

Parler-voos Frankais?

[mharr]

There's a situation on reddit with the Parler crowd, they've annexed r/conservative and turned it into a safe echo chamber (explicitly, users have to pass an interview to earn posting rights) but it's still a default sub, which means single viewpoint 'discussions' like "Trump laying groundwork for full US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan before leaving office" can hit the front page while meta discussion of this problem is buried where only social media wonks will find it.

The site is currently a perfect recruiting tool to catch any naive centrists assuming 'conservative' means simply that.

[Mongrel]

I cannot figure which thread to put this in for the life of me. But wherever it belongs, I can't stop laughing at it.

[Mongrel]

The joke about Twitter trying to sell Twitter Premium gated for-pay tweets is real. Which also led to this comedy:



So yeah. BWAHAHAHA

[Thad]

Leaked documents reveal the special rules Facebook uses for 5.8M VIPs

“For a select few members of our community, we are not enforcing our policies and standards,” reads an internal Facebook report published as part of a Wall Street Journal investigation. “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”

“Few” must be a relative term at Facebook, as at least 5.8 million people were enrolled in the program as of last year, many of them with significant followings. That means a large number of influential people are allowed to post largely unchecked on Facebook and Instagram.

[Brantly B.]

There is a nobility and Mark Zuckerberg decides who's in it.

[Thad]

Facebook forced troll farm content on over 40% of all Americans each month

In the wake of the 2016 election, Facebook knew it had a problem. Pages and fake accounts created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency had spread through the social network and drawn massive engagement from real users. Facebook knew it had to get things under control.

But years later, Facebook’s own internal research teams revealed that troll farms were still reaching massive audiences, even if they didn’t have large direct followings. The company’s own algorithms pushed the troll content onto users who had not expressed interest in the pages, expanding the trolls’ reach exponentially. A report detailing the research was leaked to MIT Technology Review by a former employee.

When the report was published in 2019, troll farms were reaching 100 million Americans and 360 million people worldwide every week. In any given month, Facebook was showing troll farm posts to 140 million Americans. Most of the users never followed any of the pages. Rather, Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms had forced the content on over 100 million Americans weekly. “A big majority of their ability to reach our users comes from the structure of our platform and our ranking algorithms rather than user choice,” the report said.

The troll farms appeared to single out users in the US. While globally more people saw the content by raw numbers—360 million every week by Facebook’s own accounting—troll farms were reaching over 40 percent of all Americans.

[Yoji]

On top of that, I caught a bit from the Wall Street Journal before hitting the paywall that their algorithm intentionally prioritized more combative and controversial posts, I guess because Likes Are Life in this business. To borrow from Wonkette's summary, the engineers said "hey, this new algorithm is making people angry and/or assholes," to which Zuckerberg responded "cool! :D"

I know it's not exactly news; Twitter's been doing the same thing for about as long. But to have it laid out so plainly really feels like it should mean or do something.

[Brantly B.]

Explain to me the difference between troll farming and advertising.

[Mongrel]

There's definitely some sort of terrifying watershed change in the fact that the biggest money pushermen have realized that anger sells even better then sex does.

[Thad]

There's definitely some sort of terrifying watershed change in the fact that the biggest money pushermen have realized that anger sells even better then sex does.

Frinkiac doesn't seem to go as late as the episode where Homer's flipping back and forth between the T&A on Fox and the rage-stoking on Fox News, but pretend I posted a GIF of that.

*slobber* -- liberals! -- *slobber* -- liberals!

[Thad]

Bad couple of weeks for Facebook, with whistleblower Frances Haugen talking to the WSJ and 60 Minutes about, well, a bunch of shit that's not going to be any surprise to any of us but which it's nice to have receipts for.

Here's Ars Technica's take: Facebook “is tearing our societies apart,” whistleblower says in interview

In possibly-related news, I heard Facebook is currently down?

[mharr]

Facebook isn't just down, the entire Zuckerberg empire has vanished entirely from DNS, worldwide. This is a fixed point in internet time.

I reckon the Bastard Sysadmin Cabal just decided they'd had enough of him.

[Thad]

It'll be interesting to hear what the explanation is for how it happened, once they get it sorted.

Whois says they updated their registration on the 22nd. I can see a scenario in which someone makes a mistake during that process and takes the registry down, but not one that takes 12 days to propagate.

Given the other shit in the news these past few days, I won't rule out deliberate sabotage. But I've been in IT long enough that my default assumption is always "somebody made a stupid mistake somewhere."

[Mongrel]

It'll be interesting to hear what the explanation is for how it happened, once they get it sorted.

Whois says they updated their registration on the 22nd. I can see a scenario in which someone makes a mistake during that process and takes the registry down, but not one that takes 12 days to propagate.

Given the other shit in the news these past few days, I won't rule out deliberate sabotage. But I've been in IT long enough that my default assumption is always "somebody made a stupid mistake somewhere."

What I figure is someone made a stupid mistake while doing some form of unprecedented emergency damage control.

EDIT: Another possibility is that they deliberately want to get *everything* completely and totally offline because they're doing the digital equivalent of the 2 AM shredding machine party, and are terrified that someone, somehow, might break in to secure copies of presumably-incriminating stuff before they finish.

[KingRoyal]

Twitter is starting to report outages, as well, though my experience is that it's mostly reply threads that have been affected. This could be another DNS attack

[Thad]

This is making the rounds:



Take this with the appropriate grain of salt for "Reddit post by some guy named ramenporn". But I cannot stress just how plausible "somebody accidentally pushed an update with a typo in it that blew everything up and now nobody can get in to fix it" is as an explanation.

Also, this is a screenshot because ramenporn has since deleted their account. Which is the sort of thing that would happen if the post were legit, but also the sort of thing that could happen after any "whoops, I just made my Reddit account famous" post.

[Mazian]

Perhaps more of an inadvertent DNS attack: aggressive retries that are constantly failing are slowing down third party DNS servers.

[Mongrel]

The beast of many heads is back up, but a new wrinkle's popped up:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/23/2268 ... cide-trial

A District of Columbia judge ordered Facebook to let the Gambia government access deleted posts where Myanmar officials promoted hate against the Rohingya people. The order comes more than a year after Facebook rejected a request for the data — which Gambia seeks to use in a genocide case before the International Court of Justice.
...
Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui found that the relevant Facebook posts weren’t meant as private communications that might get extra legal protection. “Although some of the pages were nominally private, the Myanmar officials intended their reach to be public, and in fact they reached an audience of nearly 12 million followers,” the order says. “Making their accounts and pages private would have defeated their goal of inflaming hate in the widest possible audience.”

[Büge]