> Lastly, I don't think it's extraordinary at all to claim that Russian intelligence managed hundreds of sock puppet accounts across Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, Twitter, and other platforms. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that the opposite was true. In fact, none of the claims in the report are extraordinary; it's all extremely plausible.
Perfectly agreed. The United States and China also have these sock puppets, as do other countries. I think this is one of the reasons why people get into a tiffy whenever I insist on working with the facts and not US propaganda and rumors. Get accused of being a shill for Greece, Turkey, Russia, China, etc all the time.
Social media is swarming with sockpuppets, and now the game has escalated more, with H.R. 5181 passing in NDAA 2017, the Center for Global Engagement will be empowered to experiment with the techniques for social media propaganda developed by DARPA's SMISC program.
Don't know if the clock is moving toward midnight, or if just reddit is going to choke on itself.
Can you share what you thought was the sum of the information about manipulation of US social media platforms? I read most of the report (stopped halfway through the irrelevant RT section), and missed social media.
> Russia used trolls as well as RT as part of its influence efforts to denigrate Secretary Clinton. This effort amplified stories on scandals about Secretary Clinton and the role of WikiLeaks in the election campaign.
> some social media accounts that appear to be tied to Russia’s professional trolls—because they previously were devoted to supporting Russian actions in Ukraine—started to advocate for President-elect Trump as early as December 2015
The comparison of Facebook to a disease is entertaining (if because it has a little bit of truth from a certain perspective). But I'm not sure that the model they chose is the right one to use to make predictions. So I think immediately the predictions have to be in question.
That said, I would like Facebook to go, and not only because of its repugnant behavior with regard to its partnership with the US and foreign governments for propaganda, censorship and surveillance.
About a decade ago developers tried exhaustively to make every app "social". The reason for doing so is that, after a certain threshold, having a community locked into your platform raises barriers to competition.
When it comes to large social media sites - Facebook now and Myspace before it - there can 'only be one'. There's only one place where large numbers of users can go. They don't want to post everything they think ten times to ten different communities.
This makes the kind of large scale social media network Facebook represents a "natural monopoly". It can not have competition, except in the form of potential successors to market capture.
This makes the "market" of social media look more like king-of-the-hill than it does efficient laissez faire competition.
The better solution for social media would be a distributed platform with no central ownership. This solves privacy, censorship, and surveillance concerns and limits propaganda to a certain degree as well.
It also creates an environment where there can be competition. Now companies are free to create different client software with different feature sets at different costs. So distributing the infrastructure for social media addresses the enormous problem of market failure as well.
This makes no sense. Natural monopolies arise when there are extremely high fixed costs of distribution, like Utilities, Railways, things that are difficult to build. That is not what social media is at all, and there is absolutely nothing guaranteeing that what those Princeton researches predicted will not become true, precisely because software on servers is so easy to replicate, and distribution is inherently word of mouth. Facebook had to purchase Instagram because they couldn't figure out that type of social media. They may not be able to do that for the next Instagram. Facebook has started to suck hard because they inherently live based upon outrage and fake news. If they can't figure out ways to constantly reverse various trends that come up over time, they could get caught in a crap information spiral and fail.
I think you might find that the fixed cost of distributing pictures and video to 1+ billion users who check their FB hourly to be rather expensive. I think you would also find that storing all those pictures and video might be expensive. Additionally, the database requirements to search through those billions and billions of posts are not going to be small and on top of that, FB's database returns the results very quickly.
Sure, distributing the software to new servers is free. Procuring the software that needs to be on the server is another matter. This isn't a slap a load balancer on top of a few servers and a Postgres instance sort of problem.
It's not just, "I think you might find," but rather, that is precisely correct - server costs for 1 billion users is expensive. However, do you need to set up for 1 billion users in year one? Which is more expensive to start up: a railway or an internet-based software application with a very high growth rate based upon word-of-mouth?
Facebook started in small social groups (Universities) and grew from there. I'm sure that if someone comes up with a better social network, it will quickly be adapted. Snapchat shows that you can become extremely popular with a simple idea that people like.
But Facebook is at the moment really good at capturing what users want. So they have this monopoly for a reason. But I'm very sure that at some point people will leave Facebook for something else, just because that's how it has always been. The question is just how long it takes until that happens.
> But I'm very sure that at some point people will leave Facebook for something else, just because that's how it has always been. The question is just how long it takes until that happens.
Though I'd wish for this to be true, I'm not sure it'd happen anytime soon. Gmail, though not a social platform by itself, stands as an example of an entrenched email provider on the consumer side because of its features (and originally a promise of larger and increasing storage quota). Similarly, Facebook is not sitting on its monthly average users and will keep improving, acquiring and absorbing things from other platforms to keep its stronghold. Sure, it will face challenges (like Snapchat), but it will not be dethroned soon.
I don't think many people saw the decline of Yahoo or MySpace coming.
Companies can very quickly become unpopular. They will exist for another decade or so before being bought for a cheap price. I'm very certain it will happen to Google and Facebook just because so few companies dominate a market for more than 20 years or so, especially if there are no large start up costs.
However, that doesn't mean one company will take over what Google or Facebook do. It could as well be companies doing something else, but taking away the main revenue streams.
Perfectly agreed. The United States and China also have these sock puppets, as do other countries. I think this is one of the reasons why people get into a tiffy whenever I insist on working with the facts and not US propaganda and rumors. Get accused of being a shill for Greece, Turkey, Russia, China, etc all the time.
Social media is swarming with sockpuppets, and now the game has escalated more, with H.R. 5181 passing in NDAA 2017, the Center for Global Engagement will be empowered to experiment with the techniques for social media propaganda developed by DARPA's SMISC program.
Don't know if the clock is moving toward midnight, or if just reddit is going to choke on itself.