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Comment by Alwayshasbeeb | Hacker News Reader

Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.

As for the evidence, it has been well documented beyond the parent comment's silly examples and it includes shadowbanning popular profiles with certain opinions.

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Shadowbans have a high base rate. You notice when it happens to your side and take it as a sign of bias. You don't notice when it happens to the other side, because that is not your circle and you don't track them as closely.

I guarantee your political opponents also think Meta is trying to shadow ban then.

>Censorship is when you don't leave an information manipulation and mind control tool in the hands of a hostile foreign power. Sure.

That sarcastic comment justifies all Putin's laws about "foreign agents", "undesirable organizations", "extremist organizations" and such.

The perfidy of Putin (and many other authoritarian regimes) is that they can clothe their anti-democratic and anti-human policies in the language of their opponents.

So Putin can justify anything with words - what they say doesnt really matter or reflect reality. The actions and outcomes matter.

Do you really believe that?

And all foreign agents should be allowed to freely operate everywhere simply because Putin has falsely accused at least one person of being a foreign agent? Espionage sure is easy these days.

Do you deny that:

A: social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation, as shown by the cambridge analytica scandal and plenty of other research.

B: the US is a hostile foreign power in relation to South America, as proven by its continuous threats, embargoes, tariff wars, coups and more recently the unashamed declaration of a "Donroe doctrine"

I deny that social media is a mind control tool that can be used for targeted political manipulation. The examples I see people provide for such a phenomenon almost always boil down to “social media let lots of people see bad messages I don’t agree with instead of good messages I do agree with”. Unless you take a very expansive view and consider e.g. catchy chants at a protest to be political manipulation, the effect just isn’t strong enough.

>social media let lots of people see bad messages I don’t agree with instead of good messages I do agree with

If the provider can tamper with the algorithm to filter out information that goes against its political preferences, how is that ineffective or not targeted political manipulation? The idea of democracy presumes that the public can be well informed in order to take decisions.

Because information passes through all kinds of formal and informal filters in the status quo, so adding another one doesn’t move the needle very much. In the US, the antivaxx movement has recently become so influential that it took over the national health authorities, despite most media platforms openly filtering out their information to suppress them.

I remember seeing this in 2017, "The controversial practice allows groups to hone their messages to match the personality types of their targets during political campaigning." !https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/31/facebook-...

Check again, it’s far more than that.

A lot of the examples in the article seem to quite plainly be that. “Lula ladrão” is a big meme, but many people think it shouldn’t be, and therefore it’s unfair that ‘Lula’ is so associated with ‘ladrão’ in the Instagram search index.

The statement you are replying to is not specific at all to this article. There is so much evidence - and so much research - that social media bubbles are polarizing influences that you'd have to be an equity holder not to see it.

I definitely agree they’re polarizing influences, turning polite disagreements between people saying many of the same things into angry disagreements between people living in different worlds. I don’t think that constitutes “mind control”.

Well, think a little deeper about what it means to be polarized. What are the internal beliefs that have to exist to demonstrate that?

Hint: it is not the same beliefs plus anger. Anger is only a proxy, it isn't polarization itself.

I really think it’s the same beliefs plus anger. 20 years ago, I had at least as many disagreements on substantial questions of policy with my political opponents, but I wasn’t as polarized against them, because their slogans and messaging strategies weren’t optimized on social media platforms for maximum ability to go viral by pissing me off.

You misunderstand me. What you are describing is not polarization. Maybe you have not actually experienced it. Polarization is defined as: "the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes."

This is something that has been measured and its growth has correlated with deployment of algorithmic social media in country after country (where it not all deploy at the same time).

No, I don't

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