They talk as if they’re protecting our privacy when it’s really a global surveillance net. The spin doctoring is insane.

Why does this have to be a two sides thing? Is this underpinned by the culture war bullshit? I can’t tell and I can’t be assed to deep dive into every spat to untangle all the reading between the lines.

I’m surprised they found that there is no evidence that using these platforms is “rewiring” children’s brains. Wasn’t it shown that social media companies base pretty much their entire technical decision making on psychologically conditioning not just children’s brains but everyone who uses it? So the evidence now shows that these are benign after all? Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Huffman never had us trapped in infinite scroll fine tuning the knobs to keep us teetering on the brink? There’s some discrepancy here.

I don’t see what the divide is anyways. Social media is all about things like violence, structural discrimination, sexual abuse, substance abuse. It’s odd the book author is saying these are non-issues. Seems like he is taking a rather shallow view.

Also teenagers have been using the broader definition of social media for decades.

Google hasn’t been dogfooding in a long time have they? I wonder what products Googlers use.

The calamity of another great war may not be nuclear weapons but weaponized ad tech. Maybe then will the average person comprehend the gravity of the situation we live in right now. Maybe it will be so horrifying that no conventional weapon of mass destruction would be needed to cause a digital dark age as people throw away these privacy nightmare devices.

That isn’t unpopular opinion unfortunately. Otherwise the world wouldn’t the way that it is right now. We live in a surveillance apparatus that shapes our behavior. Nobody really cares except for the fringes of society.

If you poll people if they care about their privacy of course they will say yes. That is a rather superficial question. When you start polling in meaningful manner such as the uses of personal data the more the opinions become mixed. Some people really do think tracking and ads can provide them useful services. Such a rapacious form of capitalism is the prevailing mode of our time.

I think to some people the concepts of behavioral modification is too sci-fi to be believable. The topic sounds too much like ramblings of a conspiracy nutter about mind control. For others probably they think they’re smarter than psychological conditioning.

One the biggest problems with the internet today is bad actors know how to manipulate or dodge the content moderation to avoid punitive consequences. The big social platforms are moderated by the most naive people in the world. It’s either that or willful negligence. Has to be. There’s just no way these tech bros who spent their lives deep in internet culture are so clueless about how to content moderate.

You would think adversarial actors would find this problematic in their own way. Does no one remember anymore way back when reddit was exposed as being an American state apparatus? Reddit owners its earlier more naive era used to share site metrics. They inadvertently revealed that large amounts of activity comes from a US military base. Then they wiped evidence and disavowed all knowledge that any of that ever happened. And now the narrative on there is that other state actors are the ones in control of that platform. How convenient.

White hat actors could be using such open access to data to reveal whats in the data. That’s what the big social platforms are so scared of themselves. Not only is it their financial bread and butter. Contained within is who know how many skeletons piled up over the years.

Everyones privacy these days is basically long gone. There’s illusion that internet platforms are in any way shape or form fair or balanced because of the paper thin concept of internet votes == democracy or something. Yet a lot of people stubbornly persist. It’s past due time to shine a light on the adversarial actors run amok. Show us the anomalies in data that reveal how the typical real human user is powerless against adversarial actors.

I’d like to think it would be the last straw for the whole concept of social platforms at least the way that it is now. Who knows though. It’s also shown us how dumb people are. They could very well just “meh” and go back to mindlessly infinite scrolling.

Bloatware has spiraled out of control. It’s a consequence of coding becoming easy and accessible. Programming is no longer the domain of idealistic nerds. It is possible for anyone to make garbage tech wares.

Popular tech (a la pop sci or pop psych). Brave uses the right techy sounding buzzwords to appeal to the pseudo power user.

I vaguely remember some snapdragon exploit a couple years ago that was supposed render a whole bunch of devices unlockable but as far as I can tell nothing ever came of that.