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by 0majors
3013 days ago
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Zuckerberg's comments are clear and seemingly accurate as far as the publicly available information goes. The only problem is, they do nothing to address the real elephant question in the room. That question is - what is the state of political campaigns powered by the extremely detailed personal data Facebook holds? Democracy only works when everyone gets an equal vote. What are the consequences when special interest groups, including from abroad, can pay to use the official Facebook APIs and craft targeted messages to shape the public opinion? We have seen the consequences of this approach. Trump won by the smallest margin. Brexit was nudged with 100% false and misleading statements (300m for NHS, showing refugees from Syria etc.) Should we be OK with this much power available on tap? The real questions Zuckerberg needs to answer are: what political campaigns are being run? Who is being targeted with political messages? What are the budgets like? Most importantly, who is ultimately paying for shaping the political opinions in our democracies? This is a question that strikes at the heart of our society. Facebook is not going anywhere. Google is not going anywhere. People will continue to put all their personal data in cloud services without thinking about any Privacy policies whatsoever. We should have an open debate about how much digital opinion shaping is acceptable before we have built a tool that sells the democratic decision making to the highest bidder. There is a reason why political spending is so carefully controlled in Europe. Facebook needs to own up and come clean on the state of political advertising taking place on their platform. |
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Democracy only works with an educated population. Regulating data might act as a short to medium term buffer against this issue; however, as we learn more about how our psychology works, the more often we'll be manipulated. Combined with the interesting argument that being politically uninformed could be rational:
> If the odds that your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time. [1]
... we have an interesting problem on our hands. I personally believe that the long term solution is within education, but instead of teaching people "what to think," we ought to be teaching people "how to think". People typically learn naively about how to think: both how to emotionally cope with struggling and with parsing and understanding information. At the minimum I think schools ought to be teaching kids strategies for both arenas.
I personally really enjoy two approaches around "how to think.":
1. The now out of print "How to Develop Your Thinking Ability," is a super old, easy read loosely based on Korzybski's controversial "Science and Sanity." It taught me how to approach my perception as gambles (i.e. to avoid universal judgment). The principles, all often obvious, as I recall, are roughly:
a. Up to a point e.g. that person is annoying, up to a point.
b. To me. That movie is awesome to me.
c. As far as I know. Warren Buffet is 92 as far as I know.
d. Indexing by time: I like John at this point in time.
e. Indexing by place: I like John when we're at the club, but not when we're at the office.
f. Indexing by subindex: Instead of: Guy_1, Guy_2, Guy_3 are all scum, therefore all men are scum, we use indices to avoid generalization.
2. The Happiness Trap: enumerates Acceptance and committance therapy. ACT roughly uses a variety of defusing techniques, mindfulness, and values oriented behavior to help a person handle their thoughts in constructive manners.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-case-again...