• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • In a recent series of experiments, we paid people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups. In fact, their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow those hostile accounts after the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity a full 11 months after the study.

    Twitter got a lot better when I unfollowed the peeps whose tweets I hated. But it also got boring, so I stopped using it (this was loooong before Trump, Elon, etc).

    There’s probably a lesson there.




  • Let’s fucking go

    The Facebook Files made – and provided evidence for – multiple allegations, including that Facebook was well aware of how toxic Instagram was for many teen girls; that Facebook has a “secret elite” list of people for whom Facebook’s rules don’t apply; that Facebook knew its revised algorithm was fueling rage; and that Facebook didn’t do enough to stop anti-vax propaganda during Covid-19. Most damningly of all, The Facebook Files reported that all of these things were well known to senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg.

    It’s clear which side Sorkin is taking. “I blame Facebook for January 6,” he said last year. “Facebook has been, among other things, tuning its algorithm to promote the most divisive material possible. Because that is what will increase engagement … There’s supposed to be a constant tension at Facebook between growth and integrity. There isn’t. It’s just growth.”









  • Hanlon’s Razor is all well and good as a heuristic, but tends to lead to people discounting malice much too often.

    There’s definitely scenarios where that is the case.

    Also, I really didn’t say we were “under attack”

    I would describe a massive influx of spambots as an attack on a social media platform. It’s my characterization. I didn’t mean to imply that you said it.



  • Lemmy is a federated system and these stats are self-reported by user maintained systems. Rather than a sudden influx of users (bots or otherwise), a misconfigured system or hiccup in stats collection seems more likely.

    Generally, Hanlon’s Razor, add applied to computing: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity user error.

    There’s a lot of malicious systems out there, but there is little corroborating evidence indicating that we’re under attack.



  • I guess that’s why you pay your soldiers.

    In the early summer of 2024, months before the opposition launched Operation Deterrence of Aggression, a mobile application began circulating among a group of Syrian army officers. It carried an innocuous name: STFD-686, a string of letters standing for Syria Trust for Development.

    The STFD-686 app operated with disarming simplicity. It offered the promise of financial aid, requiring only that the victim fill out a few personal details. It asked innocent questions: “What kind of assistance are you expecting?” and “Tell us more about your financial situation.”

    Determining officers’ ranks made it possible for the app’s operators to identify those in sensitive positions, such as battalion commanders and communications officers, while knowing their exact place of service allowed for the construction of live maps of force deployments. It gave the operators behind the app and the website the ability to chart both strongholds and gaps in the Syrian army’s defensive lines. The most crucial point was the combination of the two pieces of information: Disclosing that “officer X” was stationed at “location Y” was tantamount to handing the enemy the army’s entire operating manual, especially on fluid fronts like those in Idlib and Sweida.