Post: #1

Facebook... even more evil than previously thought:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/fa...-perform-a

Quote:According to the study, Facebook manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users to study whether online emotions can be contagious. For a week, some users were shown posts in News Feed containing a higher number of positive words, others were shown posts with more negative sentiments.

Okay... I guess that's not too bad... manipulative, but... wait, then this:

Quote:Influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations. Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states.

Yup... his ugly med student wife got beta zuck to make more people organ donors. Good to know what they see human beings as.

But hey, it's legal:

Quote:While nobody likes being emotionally manipulated, part of the outrage seems to be due to the fact that Facebook is technically in the right, here. When you sign up for Facebook, you are, in fact, offering up your consent to have your data and profiles used in these kinds of experiments. And as the study notes, since Facebook’s data team used machine analysis to surface the positive and negative posts, it didn’t breach Facebook’s privacy policy.

I was considering returning to facebook when I have something to promote, but now I'm not so sure. They get weirder every day.

Post: #2

(06-29-2014 09:16 AM)runsonmagic Wrote:  Facebook... even more evil than previously thought:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/fa...-perform-a

Quote:According to the study, Facebook manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users to study whether online emotions can be contagious. For a week, some users were shown posts in News Feed containing a higher number of positive words, others were shown posts with more negative sentiments.

Okay... I guess that's not too bad... manipulative, but... wait, then this:

Quote:Influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations. Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states.

Yup... his ugly med student wife got beta zuck to make more people organ donors. Good to know what they see human beings as.

But hey, it's legal:

Quote:While nobody likes being emotionally manipulated, part of the outrage seems to be due to the fact that Facebook is technically in the right, here. When you sign up for Facebook, you are, in fact, offering up your consent to have your data and profiles used in these kinds of experiments. And as the study notes, since Facebook’s data team used machine analysis to surface the positive and negative posts, it didn’t breach Facebook’s privacy policy.

I was considering returning to facebook when I have something to promote, but now I'm not so sure. They get weirder every day.

Sorry to digress, but I want to point out where typical liberal hypocrisy leads.

This story says FB can do what it wants "because it's a business." Liberals also defended the firing of the Mozilla CEO who was against gay marriage because business can do what it wants. Same went for anyone expressing any anti-gay opinion who got canned.

Well, the Washington Post just reported SWAT teams who raid houses are immune from open records laws...because they're businesses! So, I guess being a business means you can do whatever you want -- le de dah -- and liberals will be right behind you. Great thinking.

Post: #3

Next step: brainwashing you to give up a kidney NEXT MONTH.

Post: #4

Where is the evil here?

Quote: Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors

Keyword: opportunity.

Quote:which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure,

So if my friend is an organ donor, I get a facebook notification? Whoop dee fucking do. I'd be surprised if I even saw it in between all the damn farmville or flavor of the month game invites idiots send me.

How do you go from sitting behind a computer and seeing a notification to going through the process of enrolling to be a organ donor? Personal action. You have to physically do something. Nothing is forced upon you.

Quote:While nobody likes being emotionally manipulated

A notification isn't emotional manipulation. It's an icon in the corner of a screen.

Quote:part of the outrage seems to be due to the fact that Facebook is technically in the right, here. When you sign up for Facebook, you are, in fact, offering up your consent to have your data and profiles used in these kinds of experiments.

Well no shit? Welcome to the internet folks, its been here for the past decade. Just about every website your registered with has this same type of policy. Read a terms of use agreement one time, they all are pretty much exactly the same.


Facebook isn't evil.

Post: #5

People are sheep. Don't hate the player.

Post: #6

Sounds like the baby steps to Skynet.......

Post: #7

Of all the things that Facebook has done, this is probably the most innocuous. I'd even commend them for the organ donor move.

Getting people to publicly commit to a position to pressure them to do what society deems good is as old as humanity itself. We can disagree on whether that specific position is good or not, but the tactic is very old. And when it comes to organ donations, it is very much a benign use.

Personally, I'd legalize organ sales, but higher organ donation rates are good too. Various countries have made donating organs a procedure you must opt out of - is that evil too in your figuring?

Post: #8

The issue is not specifically that Facebook manipulated people into becoming organ donors, it's that Facebook has demonstrated both the ability and the willingness to manipulate people without their knowledge or consent. The fact that increased organ donation is almost universally seen as a positive is of no consequence. The danger is not what has been done with this power, but what might yet be done. If you came home from work to find a stranger sitting inside your bedroom offering you a $100 bill, would you be pleased that you were $100 richer, or freaked out that some weirdo broke into your house and was sitting in your bedroom? In much the same way, the fact that Facebook used this power for "good" means nothing, because as we have seen, there is no real basis for morality in progressive society as the goalposts are constantly shifting. The simple fact that they can manipulate not only peoples' opinions but their behavior through this process should be profoundly disturbing to us all. It is nothing less than a form of low-grade mind control, something which the elites have been deeply involved and interested in since the advent of mass media in the early 20th century.

The explosion of the internet, a de-centralized worldwide network that allows for the instantaneous distribution of information independent of the controlled media, was something that elites did not anticipate. For a number of years the technology got ahead of them. They were unable to understand how exactly to control the internet in the same way they were able to control newspapers, radio and television. We are currently in the tail end of this "Wild West" era of the internet, when it is largely still independent, private and de-centralized. The elites have begun to take control of the internet through their control of both corporations (large software companies and telecoms) and government (NSA, FBI). Their strategy has been to exert control on a largely covert basis, through forcing private companies to cooperate with the NSA's demands to create backdoors and other special access to their servers and data pipes.

So we now see that Facebook is used by the elites not only for the purposes of data mining the general public, but for directly manipulating their opinions and behavior. This is the same thing elites have done for years with television , but now they've finally started to figure out how to apply the same strategy to the internet. Facebook has literally become something out of an Orwellian/Huxleyian nightmare, and the fact that so few people recognize that fact is exactly the evidence for it.

Post: #9

@Scorpion:

Absolutely well said.

This story is just another entry into the journal of Facebook's increasingly intimate, and relentless, intrusions into its members' privacy. And no one seems to care very much.

Our only hope is that eventually there will be so much information out there about everyone, that it all may become less important over time. But I'm not so sure.

Post: #10

Scorpion, very well said. You are correct in all the particulars - but is it irrelevant that facebook can only manipulate people with their active participation? A libertarian would say as much, while others might view that as a formality when a platform like facebook has say, a majority of the populace on board. True tyrannies never rule with the active consent of the governed. I'm inclined to think Facebook is too ephemeral and voluntary in nature to have any real power. The greater likelihood is that Mark Zuckerberg's fortune used towards progressive ends.

Also, we are used to seeing a social network as this neutral communication platform, but the founders of these networks aren't content with just building a better telephone. They have a greater vision than that - witness Zuckerberg's giant donations to New Jersey public schools. It was only a matter of time until they deployed their inventions towards such ends, and I don't begrudge them for it. Google's 'don't be evil' has come to mean promoting homosexuality around the world.

The real potential problem with such networks is not so much their manipulation as it is their status as an oligopoly, how they maintain such a dominant share of their respective markets. A diffuse, decentralized market or nation makes tyranny difficult to impossible, but proprietary technologies and networks like Google, Apple, Facebook thrive on centralization and top down control. The best antidote to such networks is either withdrawal or their open source, open access alternatives, where platforms are built from the ground up to prevent any one actor from gaining control.

Post: #11

Quote:Influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations. Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states.

Wait, they're claiming that donor enrollment increased by A FACTOR OF 23 as a result of this? This is being claimed with a straight face?

This is obvious nonsense. What is the evidence for this ludicrous and outlandish claim? If it were true it would be one of the most improbably successful campaigns of any kind in recorded history.

I have a feeling that when people see any numbers their eyes just glaze over and they accept the numbers as God given without thinking about what they mean. Take a moment to think about what you read and consider if it makes any sense.

Post: #12

Yes, I don't think the issue is so much Facebook or Google in particular, but that these type of platforms exist and are proven capable of manipulating the public in this manner. A myopic focus on a particular company or technology misses the point. It would be like looking at, say, CBS Evening News in 1970. Would it matter if the U.S. Government was directly feeding Walter Cronkite lines to read on-air? Sure. But the impact of the story wouldn't be that Walter Cronkite and the Evening News were particularly bad, it would be that the practice itself had been uncovered. And the real issue with stories like this is not what you are seeing, what what is left unseen. That is, if we're aware of this, what are they doing that we're NOT aware of at this point?

Which leads us back to Facebook and this story. Who's to say that this type of manipulation hasn't been used already? Could it have something to do with the widespread growth in public approval towards homosexuality over the past few years, much of which has occurred through social networks? Facebook has demonstrated the ability to do such things. Who says they haven't being doing just that, on issues that are much more near and dear to the progressive agenda than organ donation?

The real danger here is not Facebook or Mark Zuckerbeg in particular, it's that Facebook is just the beginning of a new type of progressive thought control exercised invisibly through the manipulation and display of information coursing through social networks.

Post: #13

He flop sweats and stammers when asked about people's privacy.





Don't trust this fucker.

Post: #14

I don't even go on facebook and I don't really give a shit what other people do with their bodies. People need to stop bowing to social pressure.

Post: #15

I would be shocked if Facebook weren't actively manipulating people's social media feeds in promotion of homosexuality.

Post: #16

WHy is this important to people on here? I am sure the people who worship facebook and give a shit enough to click this sort of thing are idiots anyway.

The real kicker here is why is it considered evil or wrong to want more organ donors?

Anyone on here could possibly need a blood or organ donation from someone living or recently deceased in the near future, possibly tomorrow. Dont make this about "evil doctors harvesting organs" when its just facebook exploiting idiots who blindly click and follow.

Post: #17

It's for sure a ruse/bait and switch. It's a good cause to openly data mine for organ donations, but they leave out that they have the ability (and do) data mine all your content to sell to advertisers. That's what the story should say but won't.

Everything you do on Facebook is tracked and used to create detailed patterns on your behavior to shill ads to you. I don't post on Facebook much but even just me clicking on article to read, that gets tracked and gets placed into a data set of material and subjects I like to read on.

It's getting so bad that I don't even think the average person even truly knows they are going into Starbucks haha. The zombie phone crowd just gets a buzz from their phones and start to salivate for a coffee like Pavlov's dog started drooling to the bell.

Post: #18

"The real danger here is not Facebook or Mark Zuckerbeg in particular, it's that Facebook is just the beginning of a new type of progressive thought control exercised invisibly through the manipulation and display of information coursing through social networks."

The real scandal with the NSA revelations was not so much the actual leaks as it was the response of people to them, and to the political establishment's. Presidents and others have been impeached for far less, yet no heads rolled this time around. We're seeing the same thing here.

I'm coming around to your view, I have to say. People like to think that the commercial tech sector is some bastion of free thinking and independence, but it's one of the most uniformly liberal sectors there are, to the point of sheer cowardice. Even in academia, there are a few notable dissenters, or people doing good honest work quietly, eg research on neurological sex differences. While there are some maverick techies I'm sure, they're probably out tinkering on their own or working at small companies.

Still, facebook is icing on the cake in comparison to the vast social distortion wrought by divorce & child support laws, welfare, education subsidies and antidiscrimination law.

Post: #19

(06-29-2014 12:16 PM)scorpion Wrote:  The issue is not specifically that Facebook manipulated people into becoming organ donors, it's that Facebook has demonstrated both the ability and the willingness to manipulate people without their knowledge or consent. The fact that increased organ donation is almost universally seen as a positive is of no consequence. The danger is not what has been done with this power, but what might yet be done. If you came home from work to find a stranger sitting inside your bedroom offering you a $100 bill, would you be pleased that you were $100 richer, or freaked out that some weirdo broke into your house and was sitting in your bedroom? In much the same way, the fact that Facebook used this power for "good" means nothing, because as we have seen, there is no real basis for morality in progressive society as the goalposts are constantly shifting. The simple fact that they can manipulate not only peoples' opinions but their behavior through this process should be profoundly disturbing to us all. It is nothing less than a form of low-grade mind control, something which the elites have been deeply involved and interested in since the advent of mass media in the early 20th century.

The explosion of the internet, a de-centralized worldwide network that allows for the instantaneous distribution of information independent of the controlled media, was something that elites did not anticipate. For a number of years the technology got ahead of them. They were unable to understand how exactly to control the internet in the same way they were able to control newspapers, radio and television. We are currently in the tail end of this "Wild West" era of the internet, when it is largely still independent, private and de-centralized. The elites have begun to take control of the internet through their control of both corporations (large software companies and telecoms) and government (NSA, FBI). Their strategy has been to exert control on a largely covert basis, through forcing private companies to cooperate with the NSA's demands to create backdoors and other special access to their servers and data pipes.

So we now see that Facebook is used by the elites not only for the purposes of data mining the general public, but for directly manipulating their opinions and behavior. This is the same thing elites have done for years with television , but now they've finally started to figure out how to apply the same strategy to the internet. Facebook has literally become something out of an Orwellian/Huxleyian nightmare, and the fact that so few people recognize that fact is exactly the evidence for it.

It's also extremely interesting that the ownership of the giant internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc closely parallels the ownership of the mass media and entertainment industries. It's fuking uncanny.

Post: #20

I will try to look at it from a different angle. Would I feel any symphathy for a white knight beta who gets beaten up and physically hurt by his girlfriend or wife? It is sad and a tragedy, but people get what they deserve. Same with Facebook. I'm glad Facebook figured out a way to control those brainless people with no critical thinking and manipulate them into donating their organs. I hope their brains are not to be donated, for they have no use. So I won't sorry for sheeps being treated as sheeps by Facebook. Facebook's only real fault is to take so much time to realize that people are indeed stupid and there are very easy ways to control the masses. Politicans discovered this long before Facebook did.

Organ donar? It's not the worst thing that you could manipulate people into becoming.

About this manipulation being just the beginning of a dark and dangerous future waiting for us, this is nothing new considering what all the corporations, politicians, progressives and social networks are doing to people. You want proof? wait until Google glass comes up. Then the real party will begin.

To look at it from the bright way, people with actual critical thinking can enjoy this decline and even benefit from it.

Post: #21

Whether it's Solidarity in Poland, or Perestroika in the former USSR...Facebook plays on "groupthink-via-transference" arguably better than any movement in the history of mankind.

Post: #22

Trying to manipulate people into doing something is just marketing. What I see as the potential danger is having everyone's facebook page marking whether or not they're organ donors. This is one of the nastier tendencies of ideological groups: once they're in the majority they start getting people to wear little insignias to demonstrate support for the cause, and pretty soon the great microbrained masses start gleefully attacking anyone they see failing to wear the insignia. Look at how after 9/11 every single politician started wearing those flag lapel pins.

Post: #23

(06-29-2014 02:23 PM)turkishcandy Wrote:  I will try to look at it from a different angle. Would I feel any symphathy for a white knight beta who gets beaten up and physically hurt by his girlfriend or wife? It is sad and a tragedy, but people get what they deserve. Same with Facebook. I'm glad Facebook figured out a way to control those brainless people with no critical thinking and manipulate them into donating their organs. I hope their brains are not to be donated, for they have no use. So I won't sorry for sheeps being treated as sheeps by Facebook. Facebook's only real fault is to take so much time to realize that people are indeed stupid and there are very easy ways to control the masses. Politicans discovered this long before Facebook did.

Organ donar? It's not the worst thing that you could manipulate people into becoming.

About this manipulation being just the beginning of a dark and dangerous future waiting for us, this is nothing new considering what all the corporations, politicians, progressives and social networks are doing to people. You want proof? wait until Google glass comes up. Then the real party will begin.

To look at it from the bright way, people with actual critical thinking can enjoy this decline and even benefit from it.

I used to think this way too. People in general are expendable and it is their individual responsibility to learn about how they are slaves. Look at some of my earlier posts - I used to not feel sorry for men who have suffered misfortune at the hands of an evil system.

But then I realized something - I was lucky to learn about the red pill. Too many intelligent people will go down the rabbit hole once they see it but the vast majority of them never will, thanks to brainwashing by the media, Government & educational system.

Don't deride those who have never read a book for not learning from it. The establishment has hidden the red pill from most of us. We can only help those who have discovered it and sympathize for those who haven't.

Post: #24

Better to stay off FB. You don't want people having access to any of your information. You never know when even the most
harmless photos/info could be used against you.

Post: #25

I look at most of what facebook does from a macro data perspective as a) their targeted advertising goal, which can be looked at as good or bad, i'm mostly ambivalent and b) doing whatever they can to open the Chinese market. Facebook can only really grow from its current valuation by either showing that targeted ads work better than blanket ads or by growing their user base by adding the 1/6th of the global population that can't access them. China won't let facebook and twitter operate there because it fears them being used as a platform for organizing dissent, like in Egypt (Zuck was feverishly downplaying the role of facebook in overthrowing the government in 2011), so facebook uses keyword identifying programs to send certain news articles to certain feeds. If it can show the Chinese government that people psychologically respond to certain key words, news feeds, peer pressure movements, etc it allows the chinese government to "open up" and allow facebook et al in. Theoretically it would then allow the government to covertly manipulate people through innocuous news articles or social groups or what have you.