This is quite concerning
What is CrowdTangle
nobody reads the headline because the headline is often just wrong, or flat out lying to you.
Nobody reads the contents of the article because 90% of the time it’s just blabbering on about how social media was in 2009, or how their grand mother used to make cookies, or how printing is so annoying because the ink ALWAYS seems to be running out.
Rather than actually fucking talking about the topic on hand. Not to mention all the ads and placements that are put over this shit, the ad block blocker pop ups, the paid services like the NYT forcing you into not reading it at all “because you’ve used your reading quota for the month” The sheer amount of fucking time it takes to load what is basically just HTML text on a background, but it isn’t because it uses JS because fuck you i guess.
The internet is incredibly hostile these days. It’s impossible to do something on it without a door to door salesman pestering you every fucking step of the way.
CrowdTangle is Meta’s tool for election integrity, they’re shutting it down without a replacement.
Don’t encourage the behaviour. As the saying goes… Give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day… Teach a man to fish and you’ve fed him for life.
This a huge step back for transparency with Meta (shocker). Access to this data is important for a variety of reasons, and using the recent EU laws as an excuse is deplorable (again, shocker from Meta).
It’s clear the data companies were left alone for too long to rule the schoolyard. It’s going to take some time to treat them and others what decorum looks like without throwing an absolute hissy fit.
Here’s hoping the EU, which seems to be the only teacher on the playground willing to discipline anyone, will set them straight.
Tear the government down, start from scratch.
As a bonus; we also solve the problem with having police.
Walmart can’t do shit without the cops.
And do you realize how much they’re subsidized by the state? When has the state ever stopped Walmart from doing anything?
We should outlaw political advertisement on social media? Kind of like how cigarette advertisement was eliminated from movie theater ads.
The fines should be stacked as factors - unmitigated offenses will build up and incur exponentially growing fines. Very large incentive to shut that shit down.
Politics should be advertised by performance review, not marketing.
Mozilla is just Google’s way of casting shade on competitors now
No Mozilla is Googles free pass to act as a monopoly in the browser market.
We should teach critical thinking and logic skill from month one. There will be so much propaganda and misinformation from this point on, being able to spot it, most of the time with common sense, would nip most of this crap in the butt.
And still it would not be enough. You need to trust some core institutions and delegate on some people who know more than you, you can’t be an expert on everything. Even smart people can be deeply wrong if they trust the wrong people or if they think their expertise makes them an expert on everything. You also need a little intellectual humility.
This is why the position I take is that when there is any room for doubt, lean into whichever belief would lead to the most compassionate outcome.
There will always be uncertainty, always facts that you can’t know, but the compassionate choice is pretty much never wrong, at worst it might be inefficient, but that’s okay. Anyone who’s trying to convince you that something that harms or dehumanizes anyone is necessary probably has an ulterior motive and is profiting somehow off of the harm and dehumanization.
In before 5 yo
Mommy, “because I say so” is an appeal to authority, I will not abide by such logical fallacy. Please provide me with a systematic review of relevant double blind studies to convince me that I should eat my greens."
I try to use “because I said so” as little as possible. It’s a lot more work, but they know why they’re doing most of what they need to do, and they know why they’re avoiding what they should not do.
Edit: I’ve noticed that making an effort to avoid “because I said so” has built up a habit of thinking about why I’m telling them to do something before I say it out loud. Often times, this changes what I’m about to tell them to do.
That would be the ideal world. There is plentiful research to show that eating vegetables is good for you. If you can’t figure that little out, why are you a parent?
I think the issue is more that people like propaganda and misinformation as long as they agree with it.
There just seems to be something about seeing your own opinions coming out of a man in a tie or printed in a large serif font that gives people the same feeling as a cat having its neck scratched.
And of course, once you hear one of your opinions come out of them, it’s easier to agree with the other ones as well.
You do know that this comment could be posted word for word on a right wing post and everybody would agree with it just as well? The term “critical thinking” alone is so worthless, not to mention “common sense”. Some people justify ancient aliens with that phrasing. I don’t mean to criticize you, I just have this thought so often when scrolling through this polarized world… And I really don’t know what to do about it. Everything feels so lost.
Critical thinking and common sense are not even close to being the same. Perhaps finding the definition of critical thinking would be a prudent thing before dismissing it as a buzz word.
I have this thought a lot too when people discuss things like teaching “media literacy”. I dunno. I’ve seen enough people completely abuse logical fallacies that I really wonder whether or not we’re all logically consistent conscious beings, or if we’re all just kind of flying by the emotionally charged pants seats, and making shit up later to retroactively justify it. People cry strawman, red herring, goalpost moving, when realistically people are just changing the subject to something that they think they know more on, because things aren’t formalized into a rigorous debate where everything is organized and structured and we all actually know what the definitions of things are supposed to be. It’s hard enough to get people to even agree on a definition, because people are so insulated to their little bubbles. Getting past that semantic difference and into the actual debate seems more to me like a structural problem, where people are arguing with the wrong people, than like, a problem you could solve with just raw education. Seems like a structural problem related to the death of the monoculture, and the rapid propagation of regional cultures, even regional cultures online.
