Are a Few People Ruining the Internet For the Rest of Us?
- Reference: 0178376318
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/07/14/1844246/are-a-few-people-ruining-the-internet-for-the-rest-of-us
- Source link:
Twelve accounts known as the "disinformation dozen" created most vaccine misinformation on Facebook during the pandemic, the research found. In experiments, researchers paid participants to unfollow divisive political accounts on X. After one month, participants reported 23% less animosity toward other political groups. Nearly half declined to refollow hostile accounts after the study ended, and those maintaining healthier newsfeeds reported reduced animosity 11 months later. The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/13/are-a-few-people-ruining-the-internet-for-the-rest-of-us
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X24001313
This isn't really a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
And it's also about 95% certain that most or all of those source accounts are information / social warfare efforts run by nation state actors.
Re: This isn't really a surprise (Score:2)
Said the state-sponsored anonymous poster.
Old news (Score:2)
Yes, thank you we already knew this. It also implies that there are at least as few, very likely fewer, actual people perpetrating all of the toxicity and divisiveness.
Now, dealing with the problem brings to mind a quote from the TV series Person of Interest:
> Kill 100 people at random, nothing much changes. But kill the right 100 people...
Re: Old news (Score:2)
Anonymous cowards?
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
And these sociopathic assholes have names: Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Shou Zi Chew (CEO of TikTok), Steve Huffman, etc...
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that a social network is a natural evolution of hyperconnected personal devices that are everywhere across the planet. It's something that is going to occur at some point. You can't unsqueeze that toothpaste.
The more pressing issue is that kind of network is the perfect weapon for a closed society to use against an open society, and we have a couple of toxic, authoritarian closed societies whose existence we've tolerated for way too long. They're the source of this problem on those networks.
T
Re: (Score:2)
In the meantime, there's Mastodon. [1]https://mastodon.social/ [mastodon.social]
[1] https://mastodon.social/
Re: (Score:2)
You sound as bad as the leaders of those nations. Maybe you should enlist.
Re: Yes (Score:2)
Even ignoring these countries, there is a shift towards authorianism happening in the US right now.
The system of checks and balances built in to the constitution is unfortunately failing.
Propaganda, online or in traditional broadcast media, has played a huge role in how we got to this point.
You just did not have it to the same extent 30 years ago, before Fox news was created in 1996, toxic AM talk shows, or social media algorithms that prioritize engagement over anything else, and contribute to radicalizing
Re: Yes (Score:2)
I think you need to add Sundar Pichai to the list. Youtube algorithms are also out of control.
Solution (Score:4, Informative)
Solution: don't use that shit!
I don't use that shit.
What gets posted there doesn't matter a fuck all to me.
Re: (Score:3)
Could not agree more. Anything of value that is posted on social media is better accessed by almost any other method. If I want to read the news, I'll go to a news website. If I want to chat with my friends, I'll text them. If I want to know what some person I met 12 years ago at an event thinks about mercury in retrograde... well I'll just have to remain blissfully ignorant on that account.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't use that shit either, but it matters to me. That's what empathy is, ask your mom.
Re: (Score:2)
I have empathy. I feel sorry for people that use that shit.
Here's the rub. (Score:5, Insightful)
> The research describes social media as a "funhouse mirror" that amplifies extreme voices while muting moderate perspectives.
Yes, the algorithms favor toxicity, and amplify it because it tends to drive further engagement. This is the problem that emerges when the only metric you care about is further engagement, more eyeballs, and more controversy. The algorithms have been put in charge of society, because our "news" such as it is, tends to grab the most viral social media posts, which tend to be the most controversial and the most engaging, which are almost always the most toxic.
And people tend to stick with this toxicity once embroiled in it.
Re: (Score:3)
It's been going on before social media, too. Toxicity and sensationalism drive eyeballs to the news.
"Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know the boys in the newsroom
got a running bet.
Get the weirdo on the set.
Give us dirty laundry."
(from "Dirty Laundry" by Don Henley)
However, I believe it works best on viewers that are not actually suffering.
Re: (Score:2)
> It's been going on before social media, too. Toxicity and sensationalism drive eyeballs to the news.
"If it bleeds, it leads!"
Re: (Score:2)
I would expect that it would work even better on viewers who are in fact, suffering.
Just remember, Fauci was granted a pardon by President Biden. What crimes did he have to commit in order to deserve that pardon?
Re: Here's the rub. (Score:2)
He made Trump mad somehow. Biden preemptively pardoned a bunch of people Trump explicitly said he'd be targeting.
Re: (Score:2)
"What crimes did he have to commit in order to deserve that pardon?"
None. If fact, committing crimes never results in deserving a pardon. No one deserves a pardon more than an innocent man.
Re: (Score:2)
> What crimes did he have to commit in order to deserve that pardon?
The question you should be asking is what crimes he had to commit in order to need one, and the answer is none, because Cheeto Benito was returning to office and promising to attack him on specious bases.
Re: (Score:2)
> Yes, the algorithms favor toxicity, and amplify it because it tends to drive further engagement.
This is the standard explanation, but I am somewhat skeptical that this is the real one, at least for Xitter. Its utilization has been dropping and its owner does not care because the content the likes had taken over, by design (he is not trying to hide it). The "favor toxicity" because "engagement" is neutral as to the type of toxicity, but clearly the result is driving in one direction only. Xitter is toxic because its owner wants it to be, engagement be damned.
The Zuckerbot is more subtle but favors the
Re: (Score:2)
Facebook just wants to get paid, Twitter wants power for its owner.
ruined long before social media (Score:3)
"The Internet" is not just social media. Back when it was people helping each other, sharing info on how to do things, without multi-media it was pretty cool. When corporate marketing departments grabbed on, things went down hill. Social Media and "data is the new oil" were just the final nails on the coffin.
Who decides what is fake? (Score:1, Troll)
Who is the supreme arbiter of what is fact and not? I was staunchly pro vaccine until the pandemic. Then all there was, was pro-vaccine arguments. The people against the covid vaccine were suppressed. Informed decisions were not possible, because people in authority positions were pre screening the information before people ever got to see it for themselves. Everyone has bias, but many over the last few years are trying to take a higher than tho that they know best and can make decisions for people. Anythin
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Free speech is a contract between rational people of a common society who have agreed to resolve their debates peacefully.
Right now we have Russian, Chicom, and Iranian botnets spewing deliberate lies and disinfo ops into our discourse with the sole and specific aim of creating strife and chaos, to harm our society. Their ultimate goal is quite literally to crash our nation so that we are no longer in the way of their goals - goals which we work to stop them from accomplishing because those goals are vile t
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is due to statements like this folks like yourself either don't know the difference or purposely conflate the difference between the two of those.
The conspiracy theorists think all of academia and and all of government are activists who can't be trusted, leaving you with either
a> actual corporate activists pretending to be academia with crazy perverse incentives
b> alternative media who have even worse perverse incentives to perpetuate this idea
So we are left in a world where nobody can be
Re: (Score:2)
> Withholding both sides of an argument has morality issues
Oh, the irony! Watch as the troll buck-yar, downvotes the other side of the argument.
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
The people against the covid vaccine were suppressed.
There was a metric fuckton of anti-vax shit. There were plenty of people here advocating chowing down of horse pills, presumably in the hope that a dose designed for a half ton herbivore wouldn't blow some part of their anatomy.
The rejection of debate
Dissenting views are not the same as a debate. Some people just want to be contrarian.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
I was around during the pandemic too, and I remember encountering an overwhelming amount of anti-vaccine arguments. Not just here on slashdot, but in popular media too. What I saw didn't look like suppression at all, it looked like a desperate attempt at presenting facts in a way that ordinary people (non-scientists, non-staticians) could understand it, to counter all the lies that were being spread by malicious actors (and the innocently mislead).
I remember some of the utter nonsense that was proffered a
Re:Who decides what is fake? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Who is the supreme arbiter of what is fact and not?
A statement of fact (rather than of opinion) is true if the statement aligns with reality and false if it does not. It is merely the state of the universe that determines what is fact and what is fiction. So who can be trusted to verify the state of the universe on any particular statement of fact? Typically, that should be selected based on the fact in question. No one person could possibly verify everything. That's why as a society we have experts. While any one expert can be fallible, it is typically considered good critical thinking to prefer the statements of a body of experts on a subject of their expertise than it is to prefer the statements of Joe Blow, Keyboard Warrior.
Re: (Score:2)
And OF COURSE this post is immediately modded Troll because slashdot refuses to do a damn thing about the "0.1%" of the jerks who have ruined the moderation system by downvoting content they disagree with.
And utterly without any sense of irony.
Re: (Score:2)
Buck-yar the op of this little thread is one of those toxic trolls. He/Them is the minority ruining the internet.
Not just social media (Score:4, Interesting)
My dad knew someone who was on a few medications and regularly watched the Fox tabloid. The guy seemed always upset/concerned/whatever. My dad told him to stop watching the tabloid.
A few months later the two were talking and the guy had stopped taking most of his meds (except the one or two he needed) and he felt much more relax. Less stressed.
When your goal is to "engage" people, whatever it takes is the rule. Stir the pot. Get people riled up.
Articles like this are important (Score:2)
Social media is relatively new, and many people haven't develop[ed immunity
As the extent of lying and manipulation becomes more and more obvious, hopefully people will develop a bit more skepticism
Limit their screen time. (Score:2)
It'll be healthy for everyone.
I tire of people thinking they should be listened to or they are of more worth because they have 15,000 followers on X.
Like wow go tell your mom.
In fact what's happening is very normal. Some hyperactive semi-sane social media addicts just keep having beef with everyone and everything and the rest of us just so something else.
If you spend hours on social media every day doom scrolling then your brain may have fallen for algorithms feeding you crap nonstop.
Time to go for
No. (Score:2)
No, they aren't.
First, it's not ruined. There's lots of cesspools, but there's lots of good out there too. Also, while we all get a bunch of shit presented to us, you also attract what you put out, and what you go looking for. The algorithms make sure of that. You get more of what you interact with.
Second, it's not a few people. It's the majority of people ruining the internet. Eternal September proves this. The masses of dumbshits have a multiplying effect on scum content. They interact with it, making sur
It's piloted (Score:2)
most of the fake-news stuff is pushed by people who are paid to do it. The 50 cent army has gone global.
Sigh (Score:2)
One man's meat is another man's poison ...
Yes, I totally trust our respectable betters to determine what is "toxic" and forbid it, lol.
Yep! (Score:2)
Since 1991.
News for nerds, stuff that matters.
Internet, films, publishing, libraries, schools... (Score:1)
Loudmouths who insist the earth is flat...
Loudmouths who think doctors just guess about babies' gender...
Loudmouths who think accusations are just as good as evidence...
Loudmouths who think modern medicine is a scam...
Loudmouths who think modern medicine is unquestionably correct about everything any of its practioners say at the moment... ...and insist you humor their delusions.
Yes, mods here (Score:2)
Any mod here who mods down a post because they disagree with it is helping further ruin slashdot.
These people should be identified and banned.
In a related headline (Score:2)
Are a Few People Responsible For Driving Traffic to Social Media Sites or, how about Are a Few People Responsible For Creating the Content That Generates the Profit of Social Media Companies. This is why this type of content will not go away
Busy (Score:4)
Yup, normal people are too boring to put time in this. They are too busy doing normal stuff. Oh well... time for me to do some boring stuff. Watch TV or something.
Delusions of solutions (in 3D!) (Score:2)
I bet I don't get the Funny and the FP was too empty, so I'm sure it will be moderated deeply insightful.
Actually my joke is that three is far too few dimensions. Does anyone know of a website with deep moderation? Many dimensions and reactions to comments will reflect back to the poster along the corresponding dimensions. Imagine a virtual circle of good behavior?
Then look at the Web and despair.
There's a perverse advantage in collapsing things to a single dimension. Whatever the decision, it can be made b