Categories
Make the Nation happy again – switch off social media – politicalbetting.com
Make the Nation happy again – switch off social media – politicalbetting.com
Possibly the worst invention of the last 25 years. How else can we describe social media?
2
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
I laughed, I surely did
Is WhatsApp a social network?
"Local media now saying we may be bracing for a three-way tie between the candidates. We’ll have official comments from presidential secretary Julio Vitobello coming soon."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2023-10-22/argentina-presidential-election
If that really is the case, Bullrich is 32 on Betfair.
https://resultados.gob.ar/elecciones/1/0/1/-1/-1#agrupaciones
76% counted
Massa 35.9
Milei 30.5
Bullrich 23.6
Schiaretti 7.3
Bregman 2.6
(Not the pre blended sauces - although they are not bad. The kits where you mix the ingredients).
After nearly three millennia, have we suddenly learned otherwise ?
I use Twitter mainly as a source of news. I saw a comment yesterday that said if Elon continues to destroy the brand it might be time to start taking a daily newspaper again...
I've recently taken sabbaticals from the News too. I don't expect everyone to follow suit but Reuters have reported a marked drop in people who follow the News since the pandemic:
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/more-people-are-avoiding-news-trusting-it-less-report-says-2022-06-14/
And this was echoed by the bbc: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-65880999
Since the Hamas atrocity I have barely watched or looked at the News. Why fret about things you cannot change? I'm much happier for it.
But back to social media: absolutely!
Life was generally far happier before the internet. Discuss.
The only one I still regularly use is WhatsApp but I'm starting to dislike that too.
Several "groups" have a vibe to them where the posts are all of a type and irritating but the unwritten rule is you go along with it and don't challenge it.
I use Telegram with a handful of people, including my Surrey tory friend. But no groups at all. They seem to be where a lot of the trouble comes.
Oh and never allow these apps access to your contacts, or indeed anything else.
F1: Hamilton disqualified. At the moment, my bet's still showing as green so I'm counting it that way. May update if it changes and I notice.
Almost everything else is toxic.
Anyway, glad to know that being up until 1am, in the face of a 5:30 alarm clock, was worth it. Nearly as bad as staying up half the night to watch the rugby on Saturday, followed by that crap sprinty thing.
Not bad for an obscure blog.
It was not an isolated incident. Across Israel, people are being detained, fired from their jobs, and even attacked for expressing sentiments interpreted by some as showing sympathy for Hamas after the group’s murderous attack on 7 October. The definition of pro-Hamas is often widened to include expressions of sympathy for the plight of Palestinian children trapped in Gaza, or calls for peace, especially if expressed in both Arabic and Hebrew.
Last week, after 15 years of service at a Petah Tikva hospital, its director of the cardiac intensive care unit was suspended from his position. Abed Samara’s apparent offence was his profile picture on social media – a dove carrying an olive twig and a green flag emblazoned with the shahada, the Muslim declaration of faith: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet.” He had adopted the picture last year, long before the Hamas attack, but it was nevertheless seen as somehow voicing support for the outrage.
The crackdown is directed primarily by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Since the attack, police have been given wide discretion to determine what applies as support for terrorism. They no longer have to refer back to the state prosecutors.
Probably an effect of using social media - such as this website.
The problem is, at least in part, due to the rise of feelings as a primary right.
“You hurt my feelings” is taken by some as the equivalent of breaking your nose. Or killing your dog.
Because people kept asking him, ‘WhatsApp, Doc?’
Political economics is so fucked there, that dollarisation is not a completely insane idea.
Sure, it will fuck lots of people. But everyone is getting fucked by inflation and other shit now.
“Silence is violence!”
Yet, to many of the same people, actual physical violence is just fine, so long as it’s the right people doing it in persuit of the right causes. “Punch a TERF” is just fine.
Twitter is, however, the sewer of the Internet and should be uninvented asap.
I only join small groups, of people I actually know, which are about organising and meeting up for specific purposes. No link spamming, random videos etc….
We use it at work for my department, and it is a great way to communicate, for example needing to cover a rota absence. We have a social group too for organising leaving events etc. I also have family ones for the extended family, and another for Mrs Foxy's family.
It is just a matter of appropriate use.
I still am on Twitter, but have created via the lists function groups of interest. The general feed is useless now.
Compared to the latter, the former are paragons of cleanliness, health and hygiene
Can’t we have a thread about pineapple on pizza rather than this guff?
WhatsApp, for example, is entirely innocuous if you turn off notifications. It's then quite useful.
Similarly, even the Musk debased Twitter remains the best single news feed out there (though it's lost a large number of scientists).
Just avoid browsing it randomly.
Sure.
Well I, for one, would miss PB
Overall though, I'm not on much. Ditched Facebook in 2012 and had no regrets. Use Twitter only professionally and WhatsApp just for family and actual friends I see.
I do worry about my children when they get to that age, but fortunately they're still too young to know about any of this.
The joke being that if the character who said that had watched TV…
Though given the trouble WhatsApp is causing the government right now, they may see that as a relief.
(Can't wait to ditch the primary class parents WA myself. It's useful, but all the dark mutterings you get at the school gate always escalate nastily.)
Something that may have been useful once, but now only does damage, wastes enormous amounts of time and money, and is dominated by shrill narcissists who think themselves much superior to everyone on account of whom they!re sleeping with but are actually very stupid and not worth bothering with.
It's an Internet discussion forum, which was there right from the start.
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,”
Just at the moment the Covid enquiry would have eaten him alive for the many crimes he committed during lockdown.
How suspiciously convenient.
I do hope his departure is permanent. He is neither use nor ornament to national life.
Brendan Behan
Beecham, nothing fazed, raises an eyebrow and says 'Gentleman, this horse is not an actor - he is a critic.'
When it's not and unbounded it effectively becomes anti-social.
I've heard my local village one is a shit-show and have never joined it.
WhatsApp gets a mention - that isn't social media, its a messaging app. I can't read random crap from people I don't know.
Hello Fresh/Mindful Chef were onto something here but the expense is too great.
If someone could do a version of that but for the BBC £1 meals in a pan/pot stuff, then that'd have it nailed.
£35 a week for decent meals for a family doesn't seem unreasonable or undoable.
The politest thing I can say about them is they are not quite as useless as the DfE.
The other issue I notice a lot of people bringing up is their "echo chamber" - which I find a bizarre criticism. You wouldn't be friends with someone you actively dislike in the real world, so why should you be forced to be on an online space? Where this leads to people falling down rabbit holes into conspiracism is, again, less about echo chambers and more about algorithmic pushing. Take Youtube - you can watch some pretty innocuous videos and the suggested tab will offer you some relatively extreme typically right wing stuff. Why? Because Youtube promotes based on average view watch, and certain channels (especially right wing content) have very rigid and effective release schedules alongside an audience that will watch videos all the way through. There were times when this benefited longer videos, because it only cared about time watched and so if a video was 1hr long if someone watched 20 minutes that was considered the same as if someone watched a whole 20 minute video start to finish. Now it's based on percentage of video viewed, which benefits short form content over lengthy and (potentially) more explorative content.
Essentially I would say social media is not in and of itself bad - like the telephone or public post system, it allows people to communicate over great distances and has revolutionised human experience. The negative aspects almost solely crop up as part of the profit motive that drives the companies to push for engagement over anything else.
Good morning everybody; strangely, perhaps this thread has been quite useful! Personally, I find social media, quite useful, if only to warn of traffic hazards.
We use FaceTime to communicate with family members. Very useful for those a long distance away.
They combine the intelligence of Burgon, the manners of Rees-Mogg, the administrative ability of Jim Hacker, the financial probity of Enron's auditors and the self awareness of Trump in one truly loathsome package.
I suppose 'yes' would have been shorter.
https://twitter.com/TomJChicago/status/1716137936104599958
Similarly our town has both a Facebook group and a website forum - there’s no great difference other than the infinite supply of yoga teachers from nearby towns don’t spam the website
I asked what this Twitter was. and was told that people choose to follow celebrities for their view of the world? Really? People think that an actor - someone whose claim to fame is being able to pretend to be someone else as long as they can have a script to read - is worthy copying. Pity is my initial reaction. Am I missing something?
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tories-stop-using-hotels-in-election-battlegrounds-for-migrants-kflr0gx7g (£££)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/12/musk-is-wrecking-speech-moderation-twitter-theres-an-alternative/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/23/sergio-massa-wins-first-round-argentina-presidential-election-over-javier-milei
That said, the probable winner is a Peronist, which is as I understand it watered-down populism which avoids dealing with serious economic problems. But I don't know enough about it - are there others here who know the Argentinian scene well?
1) it's free to use
2) that means you are the product and they need you to stay online as long as possible so they can maximize advertising revenue from the numerous adverts you see.
3) the easiest way to keep you online is to keep you interested.
4) the easiest way of keeping you interested is to feed that you items that may annoy you - and strangely annoying people is a great way of getting them to remain online.
It’s the atomisation and distress it’s causing to our children
If I were the head of the EU / POTUS I think I might have enough leverage to do stuff. I think we need to have better technology literacy in government rather than the general deference to tech industry out of ignorance and a hope it will bring economic growth. I think we could start by mandating that content moderation has to be done by human labour, not AI, and that labour needs to be unionised - that would be a great start at dealing with harmful material effectively. I think next steps would be to try and regulate away push algorithms - either via warnings similar to those on cigarette packages, or by straight up saying that companies such as Facebook or X will become liable for the impacts of disinformation, extremism and violence that are fostered on their platforms. That is a rather wide net that lots of politicians wouldn't like (I remember once reading Twitter / X refusing to use AI moderating for extreme right wing content because the content of an extreme right winger who may go shoot up a school is not that different from a typical GOP politician posting).
I think in the end, ideally, these platforms will be recognised as the necessary infrastructure they are and will come under some form of public control. If you remove the profit motive and the push towards conflict and rabbit holes so many of the problems just drop away. It wouldn't make social media perfect, but it would have a noticeable impact almost immediately.
We are not helped that there are clickbait agitators on these platforms who post material they know to be incorrect, misleading or even merely inaccurate. They do so to push the political / moral / social position they are agitating for. How is that any different to being the editorial team at GB News or various newspapers?
You can turn off Microsoft access to your browsing by:-
Define misinformation.