The current Technocratic idealization of efficiency by those in powerful positions is missing the second order consequences of financializing everything, and it appears to me that we are sacrificing societal necessities like trustworthiness and collective responsbility in favor of more efficient markets. If no corrective action is taken, we can expect increasing issues.
Markets create unfairness by systematically disadvantaging the poor when money becomes necessary to obtain certain goods or quality of goods. Market values corrupt non-market spheres by changing the meaning and value of goods being exchanged (e.g., paying for grades undermines intrinsic desire to learn). Monetary incentives crowd out altruistic motivations and civic duty (e.g., fines becoming fees people willingly pay rather than norms to uphold). Commodification degrades human dignity (e.g., treating drug-addicted women as "baby-making machines" in sterilization-for-cash programs). Markets increase wealth inequality and create segregation in previously egalitarian spaces (e.g., luxury skyboxes in sports stadiums). Market exchanges under severe inequality or economic necessity become coercive, not truly voluntary. Purchased tokens of friendship and personal expressions (apologies, wedding toasts) lose their authenticity and dilute social bonds. Wealthy individuals and countries can pay their way out of moral obligations (e.g., carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions). Markets have infiltrated areas traditionally governed by ethical considerations - medicine, education, personal relationships - without public debate about whether this is desirable. The economic approach treats everything in an ethical vacuum, ignoring morality in favor of purely analyzing incentives.
You absolutely get to the core of why and how 'leaving it to the market' and money-oriented choices remove social cohesion, trust, and fairness.
You see all the same evil dishonest shit behavior in contexts where the $$ is negligible, fixed or not a KPI individuals are really scored on. Organized religion, academia, Internet comments, etc, etc.
The first is government regulation. We saw lots of deregulation of oversight over the ten years before the 2008 financial crisis. None of the ethically compromised C-suite folks went to jail for their behavior because it was suddenly not a crime. Sometimes you have regulation, but you don't have enforcement of the regulations. This is what we get when the government is comprised of or controlled by capitalists. It's called fascism.
The second is public boycott or revolt. Could the new Target CEO be the result of the recent boycott? Same with Starbucks? Has anyone actually bought a Tesla in the past year? The big tech folks are bending over backwards to hide the fact that they have no real AI business model, making it a gigantic bubble that is about to burst. There is a national frenzy that no one is reporting on people ditching their subscriptions. We are going to see affordability get worse very quickly. It will be interesting to see what happens as more and more people start tightening their purse strings, whether by choice or necessity.
Indeed. Let us quote the Dune books (since they're trending, and for good reason!):
"Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders. -Law and Governance (The Spacing Guild)"
And if you would let me indulge one more:
"Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class: whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy. -Politics as Repeat Phenomenon (Bene Gesserit Training Manual)"
People need money to survive. The wealthy class have made it such that it's harder and harder to earn enough money the normal way. Often it doesn't even pay enough to survive. This is what creative people come up with in order to make a living. And it's obviously not in the wealthy class' interest to make any changes to that.
"Journalistic integrity" was a marketing concept designed to sell newspapers at a time when there were hundreds and most were inaccurate. It was extremely profitable to have ethics. (A good reminder that noble minded Benjamin Franklin ran his own periodical that he regularly and intentionally slandered others in.)
Now we have an entrenched media (with their own ethics problems) and there is opportunity to start pumping out garbage again.
As Voltaire said, "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." In other words, progress has to be fought for from hard lessons, but once that progress is taken for granted, people let it slip not knowing the value of what they have.
We've made a society where "number goes up" is the only measure of success. We don't care whether what makes the number go up is good, and that leads to exploiting the irrationality of consumers.
People know they aren't supposed to eat chips all day. They know they aren't likely to win their bet. They know it's not a good idea to watch the most exciting news.
But they can't help themselves, so they get exploited, and the exploiters are wealthy enough to write it into law that they aren't responsible.
Point this out, and inevitably someone says "who are you to decide what's good for other people", and yes, I used to think this way. Well, one thing is that I'm straight up taking it from the people who are being used. Who wants to be fat? Virtually everyone is eating more than they should. Are we supposed to think this is the revealed, rational preference of everyone? The other thing that changed is that I'm a parent. I have to make choices for my kids, and doing that makes me recognize that people their age aren't the only children. Paternalistic much? Sure. Eat your vegetables!
Who wants to be uninformed? Yet we are. People can just look up the crime statistics in London and see which way it has been going the past couple of decades.
I don't have a solution, I'm afraid, just a diagnosis. We're living in a society that is being abused under the pretense of personal freedom.
Someone better read than me has probably written an essay or two about this, please link. I don't know the best keywords for such a search.
It reveals that the emotional relationship to the consequences take priority over the consequences themselves. Whether it's justifying domestic violence or justifying the consequences of an obesity epidemic, or the consequences of a sizeable fraction of people living in a false reality.
Those problems still exist, nothing is solved except if we apply the salve of personal choice, we can avoid meaningful change. It's a nilhistic, defeatist defense mechanism that says much more about the person employing it and their inability to withstand emotional discomfort than the facts of each case - that people regularly take actions that are objectively against their best interest.
Our failure to provide aid and cling to the that really the world is just by hiding behind the idea of rational choice is childishly naive.
We're all so worried about the effects of AI generated video (with good reason), but the truth is that DIP (Deceptive imagery persuasion) is unbelievably easy and cheap to do anywhere. You can take an innocuous video of a tank from anywhere, and then add a fake caption that says "this is a Venezuela drug cartel" and an average person has almost no defense mechanisms against it.
It's also not something platforms could even police. If anything, nation state actors are already taking this to their advantage.
I've watched it happening again and again. Deceptive image that people want to believe, they won't listen when contradictions are pointed out. And they forget that anyone even pointed out the problem. Few people seem to get it that when there's a thousand bad proofs of something it's probably false--and, for those that do, there's the opposite: present a thousand bad proofs of something true.
> His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.”
I’m not familiar with TikTok’s payout rate. Is it really so high that an account with 24K followers can start getting checks that large?
It can range from $0.40 to $1.00 per 1000 views depending on the video. So, 1 Million Views can pay around $400-$1000.
Hate videos are advertiser poison so payouts are lower. I'd assume $0.4 per 1000 viewers or even lower. So, $1000 will require ~2.5 million views.
I can see that happening. Right Wingers are dedicated viewers and if a channels fulfills their narrow viewpoint they will watch every video.
That said, YT handles this better than Tiktok. People can be sent to demonization hole if they keep posting stuff like this on YT.
A worldwide social network is subject to the worldwide political pressures, like any other media would be.
In a time of rising anti-immigration and anti-foreigner sentiment across the world, you are shocked by anti-india comments?
> I wonder if this is some kinda state sponsored campaign for objectives that are not clear to me
Or musk got rid of the censors on twitter ( many of whom were of indian origin ) and now people are free to express themselves?
Another example are conspiracy theory content, and some far right channels - like the case of Tenet Media being funded by Russia.
This is the reality we're dealing with, a constant undermining flow of lies and hate to destabilize western democracies.
The result is in sight, and will only get worse because one of the consequences is that these account gradually give permission to be racist, xenophobic, etc. And LLMs are making this worse.
Of course that there's a sentiment that comes with migrants for example, but it's the disinformation that turns up a notch and blows it out of proportion.
At some point comments on social media will have to be disabled.
I feel like there is a range that might be described:
I don't care very much about you one way or another. (Small/no signal on social media, very unlikely to be boosted)
I care enough to fight for you. (Big Signal on social media, likely to be boosted)
I care enough to calmly discuss the problem. (Small signal on social media, unlikely to be boosted, likely to be trolled, unsatisfying in the face of active fighting words)
"How do I show that I care about you?" might also be called "virtue signaling". Unfortunately "virtue signaling" has taken on such a negative meaning that it is no longer useful for communication.
I personally believe that many of these "influencers" do not believe any of the stuff they spew into the public space.
I always love the response from TikTok: “It’s only ever one person, guys! It’s never our cackhanded (lack of) moderation!”
Strong emotions drive engagement. There are rather few of them; simple joy / laughter (think cat videos) is one that's relatively easy to evoke, but hate is equally easy to evoke, and it's much stronger.
The "Internet Hate Machine" is real and it was created that way by design by anti social deeply narcissistic nerds. Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/Ef7bqgeHenU
I hear this a LOT. It seems Tik Tok sets itself up to let a new person's first video go completely viral, not sure what the "trick" is, but I read it often enough it makes me believe that if your first videos good enough you really can hit over a million. Of course who knows if that million is inflated or what.
As for the rest of the article, this person seems to just not care about the consequences of their actions, its pretty disgusting.
Then I think to the persistent, malevolent, destructive lies that people spread with complete impunity and with faked video and photo evidence. This is not what the first amendment was designed to protect.
Wary of making government the arbiter of truth, I don't know what society should do to combat this evil. In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
TikTok had their information! Voluntarily, too.
Forcing everyone to ID themselves to companies would not have changed anything about this story
> In a fantasy world where I were king, the person who ran this tiktok would be in jail.
Now take this thought one step further and imagine if the king was someone you disagreed with, putting people in jail for posting things they didn’t like. Imagine if the king disagreed with you. Straight to jail?
There is such a thing as objective truth and objective lies, though, don't deny that.
Obviously this is just wishful thinking about governance that people have been saying for milennia. Socrates said philosophers should of course be kings / the ruling class.
There's no simple solution to creating a harmonious society, which of course leads people today and from thousands of years ago to say "Gee, wouldn't it just be nice if everyone listened to me about how to act and what to do when people get out line?". It's a fantasy, and a reminder that anyone wanting a benevolent dictator or to give up their responsibility of being a good citizen shouldn't be taken seriously.
But I do pinky promise I would be a good king if everyone wanted to give me a try.
Which is why if we passed laws against this kind of thing they shouldn't make posting what the king doesn't like illegal. They should explicitly make it illegal to post disinformation harmful to others. It should work similarly to defamation laws where it makes no difference if you publish something someone else (king or not) doesn't like, as long as it's actually true.
What if you create all this infrastructure for regulating speech, and then the political winds shift and a strongman president ends up using it to suppress speech they don't like?
The same people who decide truth in a defamation case. Let's not pretend that truth doesn't exist or that it's impossible to determine. Anybody can make a factual error, or make a well-meaning post that turns out to be wrong, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're discussing accounts whose entire purpose is to spread harmful disinformation.
> What if you create all this infrastructure for regulating speech, and then the political winds shift and a strongman president ends up using it to suppress speech they don't like?
Again, if the law banning this practice is well written it will be impossible to do that within the context of the law. The fact that some hypothetical strongman president might be able to get away with suppressing speech by acting outside of the law, or might be able to pass other laws that allow for it, is irrelevant. They could theoretically do anything at anytime to anyone regardless.
I don't think there is a good answer without limiting freedoms in either direction, and I don't envy the people in government that are earnestly trying to do good for their constituents but are struggling with a solution.
There is no codified constitution in the United Kingdom.
In a lot of places this is required by KYC regulations anyway.
It isn't necessary for anyone to be the arbiter of truth, but some body should be the arbiter of good taste. That someone doesn't need to be the government; it can be the community. Since good taste is subjective, it should be defined democratically.
At this point in history, it seems that unless social media has a mechanism to promote civilised behaviour, society will lose the ability to advance and improve.
But there are now people who purposefully make a bunch of accounts to spread lies.
> that unless social media has a mechanism to promote civilised behaviour
We need more Dangs.
He is maybe the major reason this forum is still decent. Tasteful moderation is really hard, I'd say the vast majority of Reddit subs don't have good moderation.
You and I agree the moderation here on HN is fantastic. There is a minority of people who would prefer HN allow spam, bigotry, calls to violence, revenge porn, snuff content, etc. A large community - a nation, for example - should have the ability to 'tyrannize' an antisocial minority into enforcing some base level of standards. For example, at a minimum, to prevent a site operator from showing those types of content to users who do not specifically request them.
Personally I think it would be easier to just ban anything that is political altogether. Bluesky for example is 90% politics. Just because something can be allowed in some spaces on the Internet that doesn't mean it should be allowed on every single space. No reason for the "funny short video" platform to become a news/opinion essay platform.
Yea, I've also watched mainstream news. Remember that time ABC showed "war footage" that turned out to be footage from some Kentucky gun range?
>combat this evil
Teach media literacy. I know this is utopian even as I say it, because you can't even teach people to close the door behind them, but I sure as hell don't want the government or anyone else to tell me what I'm allowed to read. That right is worth any cost. Any.
The devil's bargain for those on this site: a pleasant work environment and paycheck deriing from engagementmaxxing and the resultant surveillance this provides.
This is not sustainable.
The "London has fallen" trope that has been prevalent on social media recently stank of some kind of deliberate manipulation. But increasingly—in part due to stories like this—I wonder if it is actually just all "for the views".
Even people with children who live in the city are somehow able to tolerate the cognitive dissonance of hearing their children talk about the lives they lead while also believing the city is crime-ridden and dangerous.
Both in it for the money.
It's certainly something a lot of people find entertaining but I would not say there have been "extraordinary benefits" to society or individuals from the average UK adult spending 1h 37m a day[1] of their lives on social media platforms.
"While smoking cigarettes has come with extraordinary benefits, we've seen a surge in people misusing these products and getting sick due to a lack of guardrails, tobacco companies need to do much more to make their product healthy and discourage bad faith actors from developing cancer..."/s
Probably you have either more money, or more forgiving/powerful people on the right? Some grift to the center, but it's very rare, when libs are as powerful and rich as conservative, so I've no idea.
The left has been traditionally anti-capitalist and in favor of improving rights and living conditions. Who on the left is gaining financially from distorting the truth to the level of someone like Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Koch Brothers, or Jeff Bezos?
When communism had claims to being more productive growth was the most important thing in the world and why we should adopt their ideology. Now look at the 'degrowth' people what a coincidence and they are literally arguing for worsening living conditions....
In a lot of country political ecology used to be liberal/capitalist (save a few radical feminist like D'Eaubonne who linked environment with feminism, but it's less than a minority). Basically Blair's 'third way' but with less nuclear (for some reason, although I think this position is loosing ground in ecologist), and more electric cars.
The degrowth movement is an offshot of that ideology. Degrowth is to political ecologism what anarchism is to communism, based a very Idealist and hopeful view of humanity.
Communists and ecologists are broadly on the 'left', but rarely allied until maybe a decade ago, and again, on minor things (Communists love nuclear,as it is typically something you don't want a capitalist with 'limited liability' to take care of), and while degrowth might be close to anarchists in some way, it is very, very dishonest to put them in the same basket.
he started as a lame re-poster
>His head was turned by the substantial sum of money: “I told my wife, wow, it’s £1,000.” >Then, to his annoyance, TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them.
and dove straight into fabricating hate, and worst of all after directly confronted seems to literally have no concept of what he was doing or that it was in any way wrong or distasteful.
>The man appears confused by the fuss his actions have caused. He gives the impression that he considered TikTok’s algorithm and the site’s content regulation policies to be the ultimate arbiter of whether a video crossed a line.
>It wasn’t racist,” the man says of his account. He argues that if the videos had really been racist, TikTok’s algorithm would have downgraded the content.
Seems to lack any internal moral compass, basically if the website lets him slander or lie it must be ok because he has no capacity to assess that value for himself.
Flippin scary people like that are out there.
Or lacking better alternatives for a decent life aggravated by having zero positive role models and a media/political culture whose only positive value is mo' money.
> I would say about 20% of people are like that.
That depends on region, language and the conditions described above. Placing a numeric value collectively on all of humanity conveys zero useful information.
Instagram serves me antisemetic content consistently with no way for me to downvote it. Likewise when it tries to rage bait me with islamophobic shit.
I do not engage or upvote other than taking screenshots and reporting. At this point I just don't open Instagram except for messages from friends
It is incredible that they literally fund selfish assholes to do this. What worse is that they will not reap the vile harvest.