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DirtEdonE

(1,220 posts)
Fri Feb 1, 2019, 10:23 AM Feb 2019

Two NY Times social media stories juxtaposed

I don't do social media. I am anti-social media.

I read these two stories in the NY Times Business section over breakfast this morning. My wife gets the NY Times. The actual newspaper NY Times print edition. I get the Business section. I don't mind. I find they bury some of their most important stories there.

These two stories create a conundrum for me. In the first, Russia's wildly successful social media disinformation campaign is said to have now gone worldwide - and we all know how effective that campaign was considering its outcome here - the orange shit-stain in the White House.

The second story is on the effects of people going cold turkey off another social media platform, facebook, that was also instrumental in getting this traitor loser unelected to the White House (I refuse to use the "P" word in referencing the traitor).

My problem with these two stories is this; pootin's attack was so successful using twitter and facebook and other social media platforms to spread fake news on social media yet people who left the facebook are decried in the second article as having scored lower in political knowledge afterward.

Yet we now know the "political knowledge" they were getting was largely from fake news planted by pootin as well as "Americans targeting fellow Americans" with disinformation!

It doesn't make sense. One researcher in the second story actually equates facebook with reading The NY Times!

“It’s hard to know what to make of this,” Dr. Gentzkow said. “It may be that seeing a lot of news and politics on Facebook tends to polarize people. But once they’re off Facebook, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re using the extra time to read The New York Times.”

Read the full articles. Social media isn't the free press. Social media is changing the way people perceive reality. Social media isn't a solution. Social media is the problem.

That's why I'm anti-social media.


Russia’s Playbook for Social Media Disinformation Has Gone Global

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/technology/twitter-disinformation-united-states-russia.html

"Russia created a playbook for spreading disinformation on social media. Now the rest of the world is following it.

Twitter said on Thursday that countries including Bangladesh and Venezuela had been using social media to disseminate government talking points, while Facebook detailed a broad Iranian disinformation campaign that touched on everything from the conflict in Syria to conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks.

The campaigns tied to various governments — as well as privately held accounts in the United States — followed a pattern similar to Russian disinformation efforts before and after the 2016 presidential election. Millions of people were targeted by content designed to widen political and social divisions among Americans."

...

"Twitter also described a spike in domestic disinformation, or Americans targeting fellow Americans with false or misleading information."

This Is Your Brain Off Facebook
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/health/facebook-psychology-health.html

"The world’s most common digital habit is not easy to break, even in a fit of moral outrage over the privacy risks and political divisions Facebook has created, or amid concerns about how the habit might affect emotional health."

...

"A cadre of psychologists has argued for years that the use of Facebook and other social media is linked to mental distress, especially in adolescents. Others have likened habitual Facebook use to a mental disorder, comparing it to drug addiction and even publishing magnetic-resonance images of what Facebook addiction “looks like in the brain.”

...

"“The political-knowledge findings suggest that Facebook is an important source of news that people pay attention to,” said David Lazer, a professor of political science and computer and information science at Northeastern University. “This is not a trivial finding. It could have gone either way. You could imagine that the other chatter and information on Facebook was crowding out news consumption.”

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