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Going to reshare a comment I made 3 days ago

Authenticity is dependent on the rules of social-media. You believe the information is authentic if you believe the rules of the game are being followed. These controversies are related to breakdowns in either the rules or in the quality of outcome that the rules are giving us. "Russian bots" are a rules issue, a state actor manipulating the 1-person-1-voice assumption of the system. Individual misinformation by conspiracy theorists, credulous or otherwise, are an outcome issue. They feed into each other and are difficult to disentangle.

I would argue the censorship debate is an indicator of game-rule collapse in social media. The platforms are reaching for top down control because they can't cook up a better way to reduce fraud and misinformation. As you say, this method reduces the overall authenticity of the platforms and counteracts the intent of the censorship, and thus you get game-rule collapse.

If somebody's playing a basketball game and one team is dominating the other, you don't solve it by having the refs take points away from one of the teams. You adjust the rules of the game to keep it competitive.

I never played EVE Online, but a friend of mine told me a fascinating story. When players exploited a "loophole" in the rules, the game didn't change the rules. They introduced new tools.

Mining is an inherently risky operation, because mining ships are poorly armored, and generally defenseless. One risk is that someone can destroy your ship, and steal your hard worked for cargo. However, attacking someone in a civilized system would brand the attacker as a pirate, and NPC police would instantly warp in to execute justice. Even if they were able to escape, it would be difficult to return.

The pirates got clever, though. What if we were to load up a ship with explosive material, fly next to a mining ship, and detonate? The mining vessel would still be destroyed, but since it's an "accident", it won't summon the police. A partner in crime can scoop up the debris, and we can share the profits.

Now, EVE admins could have simply said, this is cheating, and you can report players who do this to our administration. But EVE has a famously hands-off approach to their game, to the extent that when a clan decided to declare war on a high traffic area, the administrators thanked them for the heads up, and promised to allocate additional server resources to handle the load.

Instead, EVE created a new class of ship that would prevent warping within a certain range of your vessel. This would create a buffer zone between you and hostile pirates, giving you equal footing.

I may have some of the details wrong, but hopefully you can see the point I'm illustrating. One strategy is to say, "Trying to circumvent the rules of the platform will result in a ban." However, this requires a moderation team. Furthermore, such decisions are subjective, and even the moderators can be gamed.

And finally, the spammers have an asymmetric advantage that Facebook will simply never be able to beat. Posting something is easy. Identifying things to take down is hard, and requires ten moderators to every one spammer.

Facebook should take a lesson from EVE Online. Instead of setting up censorship rules they can neither enforce or maintain, they should invest their energy into introducing game mechanics that accomplish the goal for them.

So in effect, yes -- I definitely agree!

While you're correct about the general philosophy of EVE, your example is incorrect. Evading police retribution is one of the few exploits explicitly forbidden by game rules, whether through a known or unknown exploit: https://support.eveonline.com/hc/en-us/articles/204873262-Kn...

> It is also considered an exploit to commit a criminal act and prevent ship loss to CONCORD by any means.

It's likely you're thinking of "suicide ganking", where the attacker is destroyed by police but still turns a profit due to the loot their partner can take from the victim.

You also mention ships capable of preventing warping. Those ship can only be used in "null sec" space, where there are no police ships. And even if they could be used in "high sec", preventing warping would not prevent a pirate from moving up to a target using normal engines and destroying them.

Too bad that story isn't quite right, but a few tweaks and it's still a good anecdote.

I disagree about "quite" since almost every game mechanical statement in it is incorrect. I'd suggest focusing on the lack of social rules in the game, which allow for completely unrestricted scams, corporate espionage and treachery.

It might end up illustrating the opposite point though, since players who lose everything to these scams are often surprised and driven away, which is the opposite of what social networks want. In comparison, the possibility of losing a ship to a pirate is pretty clearly advertised.

To complete the analogy, I would think social networks should try to prevent the dogpiling and cancelation effect that shock and destroy people, while allowing them to be occasionally exposed to different opinions. Unfortunately it seems the opposite is more often the case, as in EVE.

The way to handle something like this is to turn the "surprised and driven away" into "prepared and motivated to solve it," which is what the anecdote conveyed^1. You give players tools to counter-act negative outcomes, and, in the case of social media, you do your best to make tools which amplify truth, signal, and positivity.

Suicide-ganking sounds like it needed something like a cooldown timer on picking up loot in high sec.

^1 Trying to move the conversation back into the useful territory - I'll concede the anecdote is likely to be wrong, since you know more about EVE than I do.

> your example is incorrect. Evading police retribution is one of the few exploits explicitly forbidden by game rules

But his example was not about evading police retribution. It was about mechanics related to self-protection from suicide ships.

Solid blogpost material there. It's often said that product designers should learn from economics, but competitive games have just as much to offer. Eugene Wei's "Status as a Service" [1] deserves a mention here; it's some very clear-eyed analysis of how social networks function as competitive games. (I must have re-read this post 5 times, in full.)

In a way, your comment highlights my deepest frustration with Facebook's product philosophy! They froze the premise of what Facebook could be at some point in 2012 and haven't expanded on the tools and mechanics. Thinking of social media as a game with rules and an evolving "meta" would not only have helped them innovate out of their current local maximum, it would have kept the experience fresh and fun. As any gamer can tell you, it's just not fun to see the current meta get gamed to its endpoint and stagnate.

1. https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

There is an interesting field in Game Theory called mechanism design, that exactly studies the things you talk about.

For example, game theorists have tried to find an electoral system that disincentivizes strategic voting. It turns out to be impossible for any system where certain fairness conditions holds. This is called Arrow's theorem.

It would be interesting to see if we can formulate Facebook's problem mathematically.

I really like the Wikipedia introduction to the article on Mechanism Design which describes it as taking:

"an objectives-first approach to designing economic mechanisms or incentives, toward desired objectives, in strategic settings, where players act rationally. Because it starts at the end of the game, then goes backwards, it is also called reverse game theory."

Also, I think you are overstating Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It only applies to voting systems where voters can rank candidates, and where the result of the election is desired to be a consistent community-wide ranking of all the candidates.

That is one part of it, another part is believing the current political state is because of Russians, too much free speech and lacking internet regulation. That is not less bonkers than quite some conspiracy theories I read about.

edit: The wikipedia article on free speech is still pretty good.

Reds under the beds. You'd think that McCarthy 2.0 would be a Republican ploy.

>You'd think that McCarthy 2.0 would be a Republican ploy.

It is. Where do you think the narrative that all mainstream and social media, BLM, Antifa, academia, the CDC, the WHO, the UN and the Democratic Party are all controlled by the same sinister neo-marxist agenda comes from? That "leftists" are engaged in wholesale political suppression and outright violence against white males, conservatives and christians?

I mean, we're even past the point on the fascism timeline where "leftists" are being tossed into unmarked vans and targeted by armed vigilantes, and most people have swallowed the red scare pill hard enough that they just cheer it on.

>That "leftists" are engaged in wholesale political suppression and outright violence against white males, conservatives and christians?

I was going to look for the video of the guy being chased by a mob and being called a murderer for defending himself.

But then I found this gem on the front page of reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/MurderedByWords/comments/iki45f/rea...

> According to the police report, a student pulled up a girl's dress inside of a classroom at Central High School. The victim then grabbed a pair of scissors. She tried multiple times to stab the student before she connected.

https://www.fox13memphis.com/top-stories/teen-stabbed-with-s...

So 100k people think that multiple stabbings and chasing someone is a tempered response to "sexual assault", but shooting at someone while being chased by a mob isn't.

Yes, the "left" are engaged in wholesale political suppression and outright violence against white males, conservatives and christians. And you have to be an idiot or racist not to see it.

>Yes, the "left" are engaged in wholesale political suppression and outright violence against white males, conservatives and christians. And you have to be an idiot or racist not to see it.

Thank you for presenting yourself as an example of the neo-McCarthyist paranoia I was talking about. I rest my case.

Just be sure to check under your bed tonight in case one of those dirty leftists is hiding there.

You need to make a case to rest it first.

Notice that I never said the right isn't doing the same thing. But that would require being able to think, something the left and right brain worms stop their victims from doing.

I hope you get the help you need. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

That's not giving the Russia situation the nuance it deserves. The controversy is about the ability for motivated & funded actors to manufacture consent by exploiting weaknesses in the design of social media. That's a credible weakness in the design. The proposed solutions do merit criticism, because nobody has offered anything better than platform censorship, which destroys the authenticity of free speech.

It doesn't deserve much nuance though. We had years of articles describing election interference and lying to people through that whole time.

I guess you could claim that Putin is even worse and just kills his opposition, but that doesn't justify the blatant lies. Be reminded that it was also used as a justification to defame whistle blowers as Russian assets.

Russian interference covers at least 4 behaviors: manufactured consent online, hacking the dnc/rnc, hacking voting equipment, and the compromise of the president. All of those are serious, all of them are credible, and none of them can be passed off as “lies.”

I think suppression has played a role, but not as great as you're making it out to be. We didn't have the platforms taking action on the conspiracies initially and the audience for them grew like crazy. The ideas grew organically and through recommendation systems.

We now have people in office that believe this nonsense and are making decisions. How do you combat that? They were voted in.

We've always had people in office who believed nonsense. It's not caused by online platforms and won't be solved by regulating them; ultimately, it's a cost of living in a society with a free exchange of views.

> We didn't have the platforms taking action on the conspiracies initially and the audience for them grew like crazy.

I beg to differ. There has been a decade since Facebook has ever not taken action on some content.

The mainstream platforms are not free and impartial communication channels. No single piece of content there gets popular without the platform explicit promotion, and nothing that the platform doesn't want people to see does ever get widespread.

The conspiracy theories spread like crazy because Facebook and Youtube actively promoted them.

Do you think that the various communication platforms that existed during the fast spread of, for example, 9/11 truther conspiracies were actively promoting them? More generally, I'm talking about the various conspiracies that spread like wildfire on line 10-15 years ago.

Note that I'm not directly disagreeing with you, but seeking your thoughts on the early spread of online disinformation.

My own (rather soft) opinion is that in an alternate universe where all of the online platforms somehow were born and grew while not injecting any 'tweaks' or 'promotions', there'd still be a tremendous amount of bullshit, similar to what we see today, though quite possibly to a smaller level.

The platforms definitely have played a direct role, but mostly I think it's people who are doing the heavy lifting. Our species has never had access to these kinds of communication tools, and I believe we are neurologically and psychologically ill-equipped to use them well.

No, 15 years ago the online platforms were based on things like number of links and user reactions. It's recently that they moved into whatever glues people best into the screen. They didn't measure the latter one well enough by then.

The one problem is that what glues people better into the screen is stuff that makes enough people angry, so they look and discuss, and enough people confident on something they think is a non-mainstream opinnion, so they share it. That's an almost perfect filter for conspiracy theories.

Crummy human behavior online has been a thing since before those algorithms. The theft of a gun in the first game online, eternal september, the behavior of people on game forums, 4chan - none of that was impacted by algorithms.

Emotions have been used to manipulate people since time immemorial. The platforms and their ideals were were simply naive. I held them too, so I include myself in that group.

The internet by its very existence was going to help spread conspiracy theories. The algorithms were also simply a natural evolutionary force.

There is a world of difference between humans being humans and a superhuman intelligence with total control of the discourse manipulating it into the most agitating possibility.

It may be that the internet would always finish this way. Nobody really knows, but the evidence we have hints into a much milder and more varied destination.

The Matrix feels more and more prophetic, I never thought I’d live long enough to see that.

It’s not that we are human batteries, but we are human Ad Batteries.

It is definitely the species that is doing the heavy lifting.

I saw what happened on a subreddit with a lassiez faire approach to moderating.

It started out with nice ideals, and as the political discussion began, it went to places no one should see.

Moderation was required, censorship was required.

Reddit is volunteer based, you can see what happens when you let people to their own devices. That experiment has been run ad infinitum at this point.

Secondly - the platforms don't want to be moderating content. They would ideally have Zero negative or law breaking content exist. That would mean that there is never a need for an additional cost center, with ever increasing fractal complexity on legal, human resources, policy and political fronts.

The top comment in this submission discussed the cost to conspiracy theoriests, if they were officially banned.

That is more than an acceptable price to pay, since the alternative is the widespread infection of more people to the virus.

In analogy terms - we have never had such a connected market place of ideas. Thoughts can be created and distributed at scale, in a way our species was never prepared to consider or defend against.

If viral ideas, which are designed to slip past cracks in our mental defenses, are left alone - they will proliferate.

That they will be emboldened is a minor tertiary effect compared to the massive primary damage of conspiracy theories.

>That they will be emboldened is a minor tertiary effect compared to the massive primary damage of conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories like the Earth orbiting the sun. No, a society that is based on keeping people ignorant is a society that's not worth being called one. It's a thought police state that makes citizens into children who believe whatever the powers on high tell them to believe.

This is the old guard idea, I too was a proponent, then I had to deal with figuring out what it meant to moderate content online and this idea just ends.

The market place of ideas is flawed in practice, as much as it may be a great metaphor in discussion.

In practice there are too many weaknesses, asymmetries, and lopsidedness of time and obsession for conversations online to naturally support a market place of rational ideas.

If you want an emotion and superstition filled market place carrying only the most addictive, neuro invasive ideas, then going with the old guard way is a good way of achieving it.

Unless you have a solution for the problem of content, then this idea is only a first draft, and not applicable in its unalloyed form.

Did you consider charging people for signing up and posts they made?

It turns out that when people have to pay for extra posts past the first three a day they get a lot more circumspect in what they say. I set up a mailing list with that feature once upon a time and the quality of posts was astronomical.

The promotion part is exactly what I was saying with the "recommendation systems". I was saying the platforms didn't take action initially AGAINST the conspiracy stuff.

Failing to take action against something implies that your behavior is neutral.

If your content discovery depends on a recommendation system, you always have an active take into your content selection. You can never be neutral.

But yes, technically they failed to take action too.

Honestly I don't care what conspiracy theorists, science illiterates, and racists think. Let them believe the world is against their points of view. It should be! I want to make sure the ignoramuses don't infect others.

I hear what you're saying. It is incredibly difficult and frustrating to hold a discussion with these types of people. But look at the life of Daryl Davis. Instead of socially isolating "those people", he reached out to them. By some counts, he's helped over 200 people leave the KKK. I believe his methods have been far more effective than socially ostracizing people.

Not possible on facebook.

Not possible, or not easy?

Davis' methods require time and work. Granted, his is largely based in meatspace, and I think offline communication is far more effective... but if I didn't think there was some merit to online communication, I wouldn't be trying here. Would you?

I don't think it's not possible, but I don't believe it can be as effective as in person.

Online you have the option to click block/mute/ignore and move on. So if you are trying to convince someone, a specific person to change their point of view, it will be much harder to reach them.

However thinking about this, I'm surprised there aren't any activist groups who patrol around online and focus on individuals to try and persuade them to change. Broad messages are much less effective than 1:1 conversations.

However that also borders on or crosses the line of harassment, depending on view point.

That type of direct action on an individual level is definitely valuable but it is also challenging and difficult to scale.

The issue you originally brought up though concerns mass communication on a different level than those individual actions.

For example: Is the top of my facebook news feed an article about Daryl Davis (how his methods are helping misguided people and how I might apply or examine those in my own life to gain a better understanding of and more useful role in society) or is the top of my facebook feed an article about how there are many fine people on both sides and that maybe the KKK has a point and I should hear what they have to say?

I can't speak for what's at the top of your Facebook feed. (I can hardly speak about what's at the top of my own!) This is something beyond my control. It's easy to sit back and call for Facebook to change the channel for me. It's much more difficult to be the channel of change. (Especially, I might add, when algorithms control what people see. Even so, when I directly respond to my friends, that's hard for them to ignore!)

The only thing I can be in control of, is what comes out of my own mouth. These are the things I believe in and stand for, that I earnestly think have a far better chance of rectifying things like racism, hatred, and our divided nation.

Having Facebook and Twitter do the work for us is alluring. But judging by its results so far, I don't think it's working. As Daryl said, he's a musician. Not a trained psychologist. If he can do it, so can you! Where should we invest our efforts? In what has been proven to reduce hatred, but is difficult -- or what we falsely hope will reduce hatred, and is easy?

That is an example. Not a literal description of my facebook feed.

>It's easy to sit back and call for Facebook to change the channel for me. It's much more difficult to be the channel of change.

The point is that these are two separate things that should both happen and should enable each-other in a positive feedback loop. I wouldn't phrase it in as dismissive a way as calling for facebook to "change the channel for me". Rather, I would say that I don't want facebook picking the channel for me in the first place.

Daryl Davis does good work and makes the world better.

Yet, As much as I have personally argued for following Daryl Davis' footsteps, and have attempted it myself, it simply does not scale in the face of massive action by dedicated firms.

The scale and rate at which misinformation wars are playing out, is beyond that at which an individual's actions can stem the tide.

At this point, our societies artisanal approach to thought, is giving way to the industrial approach to thought. Which is very dystopian, except phrased nicely since it is the early stages.

We are only starting to perceive the frightening outline of the leviathin which has finally stirred.

You're truly a shining example of tolerance, inclusion, and, magnanimity.

It's easy to condemn beliefs which your culture judges as bad, but what about ones which fit your description but your culture endorses so strongly that it excludes anyone who questions them? Do you want to make sure "ignoramuses" aren't infected by them too?

Do I take it from your post that you've never changed your position or accepted correction? Or is that only something you believe is true of everyone else?

Or is this something you're leveling at Facebook, I'd certainly not swallow their opinion on the truth of something; but assuming they were measured and fact based then I'd take it as indicative.

..."accepted correction"? What is this, some perverse elementary school?

I've noticed that whenever my friends talk about certain matters, it sounds like they've turned their brains off. They read some book by a self proclaimed expert, and just accept it on face value. And then they talk about how excited they are to be "learning" and "receiving instruction".

If that's what you mean by "accepting correction", it's far closer to "accepting indoctrination". We're all children at school again, we have no capability to reason, and must be taught with rote memorization.

You crafted a strawman and then avoided answering the question.

I absolutely did, based on personal experiences, and assumptions (which I tried to highlight!) But I'm not trying to make a logical argument, I'm trying to make a rational one.

My assumption could be wrong, this could be an ESOL situation, and just a strange way of phrasing what was actually intended, and I'm happy to revisit if my assumptions were wrong.

But no, my opinions have not changed. If anything, they've been reenforced.

Accepted correction meaning 'realised you were wrong and changed your behaviours/beliefs based on information/instruction you've received'.

You make it sound like you believe you're infallible and the only people who change their minds are the weak willed lead astray by Facebook nonsense.