What is Happening With Face Book?: Part Two the Platform

In my last post I was heavily into speculation about the motivations behind the people engaged in the whole Face Book "whackadoodle" world---primarily with a focus on the local Yellow Vest page. In this post I hope I'll be on somewhat firmer ground because of the research I've been doing. 

The first thing that struck me when I looked at the Yellow Vest page was the number of people on the local page. According to the front page, it has 507 members---which seems like a lot. Funny thing, however, is that when I did a check of the Administrators and Moderators, I found that not a single one identified themselves as someone who lives in Guelph. This got me thinking about exactly how many ordinary members live here, so I started working through the list of members to see if I could identify their place of residence. 

This isn't an easy thing to do, as a lot of them haven't filled out much info about themselves that is available to the "non-friend" viewer. What I did was separate the members into three columns. The first was those that didn't say where they lived, or, who seemed to be obviously lying (for example, one fellow with a very English name said that he lived in St. Petersburg Russia and was born in Mongolia.) I was quite strict about this as a great many of them said they went to school in another province or even country, and, most of their friends were in another province or country too---yet I still put them in the "don't know" column. 

I did check the names of people through other social media systems such as "Linked In". Once in a while I'd find the same name at the same place of business---sometimes even with a photo of the obviously same person. If a location was mentioned in this other account, I'd use that address to assign them a place of residence.

Doing this methodology I worked through 72 names (ie: I went until I found someone who said she lived in Guelph) and came up with the following:

• 40 members who successfully hid where they lived
• 31 members who admitted that they live outside of Guelph or I found evidence that they did
• 1 person who said that they live in Guelph

I decided that it would be a waste of time to do this for the entire 507 members, so I'll extrapolate from the sample to suggest that this might mean that as as little as 1.4% of the group actually live in Guelph, or, 7 actual people. 

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Of course, this raises the obvious question "Why would someone go to the trouble of organizing all this nonsense on Face Book---even in towns where they don't actually live?" I did some research and found out some interesting things. 

First off, you can actually make money off Face Book groups. There are several ways of doing this, but mostly it comes down to advertising, asking for donations, or, selling people's information. 

• sell adverts on the top header of the page
• make the group "closed" and charge a fee to join
• ask for donations
• sell a product
• direct viewers to a web page with a form to fill out and then sell the data
• sell adverts that you then "pin" towards the top of the page for a given period of time
• direct viewers to a web page that then tries to sell you something or asks for a donation

Here's an example of a local Face Book page that sells adverts in it's header.

Big Face Book pages can be worth a fair amount of money. I asked on line and one fellow said that he knew a person who paid $10,000 for a site devoted to stupid jokes and that she was able to make a significant regular income off it through selling advertising. I don't think that the Yellow Vests are in that ball park, but I do think that there is something of a pay off for some of them.  

I'm not saying that the actual administrators of this group are trying to make money. I have no doubt at all that these folks actually believe in what they are doing. What I'm referring to are the people who generate the content that keeps getting promoted through the Face Book. Let me illustrate with a couple examples.

If you've been following this issue you might know that Alex Jones and InfoWars has been bounced off You Tube. What you might not know is that his program never left the Web. That's because it now gets posted on "banned.video" and "BitChute". These are two streaming video services that don't have anywhere the popularity of You Tube. So no casual viewer is going to get sent to them by an AI anymore, right? Yes and no. Because Face Book hasn't banned links to these streaming services, this means that the Face Book AI is now directing people to pages (like Guelph Yellow Vests), which are in turn directing people to banned.video and BitChute. And when people get to these streaming services, you can see that they are monetized. Again, it's true that Pay Pal has banned several of these groups off their service, but there are plenty of other ways that people can easily send money to these businesses---who are quite happy to create the media content that people can then share on Face Book groups like the Yellow Vests. 

(To be totally up front, I should point out that I monetize my blog using other people's groups whenever I announce that I've published another story. I build my readership, increase my Face Book followers, and, eventually pick up the odd subscriber this way.)

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It's a lot of work putting out these articles. If you like them, why not consider subscribing through Patreon or Pay Pal? It will give you a warm, fuzzy feeling. 

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Why should anyone be upset about this? After all, we live in a country with free speech, don't we? If this was just a question of speech, there would be no real problem. The problem is the behaviour of the people who take this speech to heart and then act on it. For both better and worse, we happen to live in a modern, complex society with a lot of technology that amplifies an individual's ability to do harm. Consider the examples of the modern semi-auto rifle and the face mask. 

Kyle Rittenhouse. Image original provenance unknown.
Taken from The Mercury News, used under Fair Dealing provision.

The above is a picture of a 17 year old boy who killed two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha Wisconsin. He doesn't look terribly fit and I doubt if he has had much experience fighting. If it was just a question of fisticuffs, he probably wouldn't be much of a threat to anyone but himself. But the gun in his hands makes that irrelevant. With it (and a modicum of training), he becomes a bad ass killing machine---as long as no one else has a similar weapon. 

Unfortunately, because of ideology it is now legal for children like Rittenhouse to walk down the street of a protest in Wisconsin with rifle slung over his shoulder. (Fortunately, this would still catch the eye of the police in Guelph and result in it being taken away ASAP.) Unfortunately, because of technology certain words and ideas have been spread over social media that encouraged him to be prepared to use violence against strangers. Primarily, I'm talking about the meme that humanity can be split into three distinct fractions: sheep, wolves, and, sheep dogs. 

To a certain extent, I tend to agree with this sentiment. There are a lot of people who just live personal lives and don't really put much thought into the problems that people create for others. There are also people who have zero concern for the well-being of others and want to take whatever they want from the first group. And, the job of police officers and the military---and maybe even "woke" citizens---is to protect the former from the latter. But there are several subtleties to the situation that need to be understood and I suspect that the people who promote this meme rarely do. 

First off, we need to understand exactly what people are talking about when they talk about the violence that "wolves" do to "sheep". If someone hits you over the head with a lead pipe and takes your wallet, well that's obvious. What if they wear a suit and tie, and, steal the money from your bank account? What if they sell you some shoddy merchandise? Or pollute your drinking water? These last few examples can harm a lot more people than the mugger. But should "vigilant armed citizens" be protecting the citizenry from them? 

Secondly, I think it's important to understand just how violent society really is. I've had lots and lots of arguments with people over this, but my understanding is that if you actually look at the statistics (instead of listening to commentators harping on about anecdotal evidence) society has become less and less violent throughout human history. This includes my lifetime. Take a look at the following graphs from the Pew research centre that cover the last 25 years. 

Click on the image for a clearer picture. Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision.

This reduction in both violence and property crime would suggest to me that if there ever really was a reason for armed vigilantes, it no longer exists. But, I would argue, the facts aren't really what's important here. Instead, I'd say that for one reason or another some people are promoting the idea that America needs armed citizens to stand on guard and keep the antifa hordes at bay.  Moreover, I think that while the vast majority of the population can tell that this is total nonsense, there is a small percentage of the population who are so naive that they believe it. And when they act on that belief they become extremely dangerous.

Rittenhouse clearly wanted to be a police officer. So having been taught that he was a "sheep dog"---he naturally took his rifle and headed off to protect property from the Black Lives Matter "wolves". He was probably encouraged to do this because of stories on the Web that said that hordes of antifa "terrorists" were being bused into various protests in order to create mayhem. The technology embodied in the rifle and the rules that govern their use in modern day America mean that "sticks and stones may break our bones---but words can get us shot!" This dramatically complicates the situation regarding free speech on the Web, no matter what absolutists might say.

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Similarly, the extreme mobility (ie: jets, trains, buses, cars) that we now take for granted as part of life mean that epidemics can spread really fast. This means that when a dangerous one comes along---like COVID-19---we need to all follow the advice of the health authorities. And it also means that it only takes a small fraction of the public acting foolishly to undo the precautions of the vast majority. And that will kill people just as surely as pumping slugs into them with an AR-15.

The important idea I'm trying to point out in this blog post is that what is happening isn't just a question of free speech, but one of marketing violence. And in this day-and-age we need to ask ourselves whether society has a right to limit the ability of citizens and businesses to market violence. For my part, I think it does. 

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A group with the name "Avaaz" recently published a detailed report about the role of Face Book in promoting disinformation about COVID-19 titled Facebook's Algorithm: A Major Threat to Public Health and it makes for fascinating reading.  

This study just looked at the role of Facebook in spreading false narratives about COVID-19. One of the key roles that it plays as a way of directing people towards websites that then went on to propagandize people into disregarding directives by official health agencies. Here's a list of the top ten, who were responsible for 1.5 billion views last year. 

1. Realfarmacy.com, 253,618,426 views
2. globalresearch.ca, 235,638,637
3. collective-evolution.com, 170,563,539
4. jedanews.com, 166,154,587
5. ripostelaique.com, 140,179,475
6. mercola.com, 133,536,826
7. lesmoutonsrebelles.com, 111,483,871
8. sonsoflibertymedia.com, 99,185,021
9. wakingtimes.com, 93,342,708
10. nowtheendbegins.com, 82,322,883

It's important to understand the impact of these sorts of websites on public discourse. According to the Avaaz study,

We then compared this with the views generated on Facebook for the websites of 10 leading health institutes in the UK, the United States, France, Italy, and Germany, as well as with the WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), over the same period. We found that on Facebook, the content from the top 10 websites spreading health misinformation generated almost four times as many views as equivalent content from the top 10 websites of leading health institutions.

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At this point, it's interesting to ask the two questions "who is it that's spreading this misinformation?" and "why are they doing it?" Again, the Avaaz report attempts to answer.

The first answer to "who" is to ask if there is any obvious political orientation. 

The first thing to understand is that the majority of sites have no discernible political message at all (61%). So it's important to understand that most of this seems to be being posted for some other reason. But at the same time, it's important to realize that a sizable fraction is being posted by people who do seem to have a right-wing axe to grind (35.4%). That's still quite significant. Finally, it's important to "put to rest" the lazy idea that "they all do it". That's because only a tiny minority of these sites appear to have some sort of left wing agenda (3.6%). 

I've gone through and glanced at the top ten COVID-19 disinformation sites that the Avaaz report identifies, and it's not immediately clear where all of them get their money. Many of them do have products for sale and ways that you can donate money to them. I didn't see these things on some other sites, but there were calls to 
"sign up for a newsletter" on some of these. It's important to realize that these are "entry portals", though, and their job isn't to immediately get money into the hands of the people running them so much as to let people get "engaged" with the site on an on-going basis so they can make a financial pitch at some future time. 

Reading through the Avaaz report, however, it appears that most of these sites are designed to raise money more than anything else. I suspect that at least one person is making some money off all of them. But I don't think that they are anywhere near as lucrative as many other businesses---I don't think that they are being run by James Bond style super-villains. 

Moreover, I think it's just an accident of ideology that so many of them espouse right-wing politics. Right wing types just tend to be paradoxically more skeptical about experts and more gullible towards snake oil salesmen. Every business person knows that the "customer is always right". If the majority of the people who want to buy what you have to sell believe in a vast left wing conspiracy, then you will start acting like you believe it too. That's just good sales practice.

The problem is, however, that just like it doesn't take a lot of losers like Kyle Rittenhouse to create a violent mess on our streets, it doesn't take a lot of anti-maskers to spread a pandemic. It raises the question, therefore, about whether our society believes in a radical version of freedom of speech so much that it wants to continue to allow a small number of con artists to keep undermining the public education campaigns of our health authorities. Is the ill-gotten livelihood of a dozen or so sleazebags more important than the lives of all the people their misinformation campaign kills?   

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I recently received the following message on my personal Face Book feed:

Effective October 1, 2020, section 3.2 of our Terms of Service will be updated to include: “We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook".

I don't really know, but I hope that it means that the company is stepping back from the sort of freedom of speech absolutism that Mark Zuckerberg (the CEO) was known for in the past.  

I've had a lot of arguments over the years about free speech. There are a lot of different elements at play here, but with regard to what I've been discussing here I want readers to walk away with the following points:

• if Face Book decides to turn off the taps of these fountains of disinformation we need to remember that what's happening isn't about individuals having the freedom to speak, but rather the freedom of a company to not publish stuff that they don't agree with
• this issue cannot be solved through the "back and forth" of honest debate. That's because this isn't about what the majority of people think. Instead the problem is that a very small minority of people who believe the nonsense can create havoc for the majority
• the media have always had 'gate keepers' who exert editorial control over the content of what they publish. People used to send in letters to the editor of newspapers. They had to be signed by the authors, who included their phone numbers, and, the papers called those numbers to ensure that what was being said actually came from the individual identified. If the editor thought that the letter contained lies or libel (or were just not worth reading) they didn't get published.   

We've been living through a short period of time where the technology got ahead of the regulations. And it is also a time when young people who are good at computer coding---but lack any real understanding of the complexities of the social issues they are dealing with---are making all the decisions. The time of "trial and error" is coming to an end, and I hope that the tech sector is realizing that the sort of easy libertarian solutions suggested in university coffee shops often don't work in the real world. 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!