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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   974 thread views

Transnational Thursday for November 28, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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As a case study for negative impacts of technology, apparently the introduction of Facebook groups allowed larger-scale cooperation in Myanmar to a much larger extant than before, and contributed/enabled/made possible the Rohinya genocide.

This isn't really news, I remember Facebook being blamed for enabling the Rohingya genocide several years ago.

This isn't really news

Sure. It was news to me though.

Wouldn't any communication platform work the same way? I mean, you can coordinate on Twitter or good old webforum or even call-in BBS for that matter (yes, I am old enough to have used one). What's so special in Facebook? Yes, maybe this particular group used Facebook. But they could have used any other means with the same result.

Wouldn't any communication platform work the same way?

Any communication platform that's already widely used, has easy to find groups, allows groups of massive size and keeps those groups mostly out of the sight of unwanted people. The list of suitable platforms isn't huge once you account for those.

has easy to find groups

keeps those groups mostly out of the sight of unwanted people

Aren't those two contradictory? If it's easy to find (and, I assume, participate, otherwise what's the point in finding them?) then "unwanted people" could easily pretend to be wanted people and find and participate too?

For the rest of it I don't see any limiting factors. Web forum can do any of these and more very easily, and I've been using web forums over 2 decades ago.

Aren't those two contradictory? If it's easy to find (and, I assume, participate, otherwise what's the point in finding them?) then "unwanted people" could easily pretend to be wanted people and find and participate too?

Not at all. It's enough that the contents of the group not be shown to people who aren't members even if the name of the group is obvious to people who are aware of the terminology / slang.

This is unlikely to work in English but can work much better in other languages when the censor-happy employees (usually not speakers of said language) don't even know what to look for (and having the group be "closed" prevents them from accidentally seeing the messages that use more straightforward language / imagery).

The thing about web forums is that nobody uses those outside nerds / people with some specialty interest while, well, pretty much everyone is on social media. This makes it super easy to both join such group as well as recommend it to people you know (and thus gather critical mass).

It's enough that the contents of the group not be shown to people who aren't members even if the name of the group is obvious to people who are aware of the terminology / slang.

Yes, about all forum software I know about supports this option. Private mailing lists of course predate this by another couple of decades.

In fact, Facebook is about the worst platform for this - if you want to coordinate a genocide, on FB it's enough to have one snitch in the group who would alert the moderators and your group is gone. If you do it on a forum, and the admins of the forum either friendly to your cause or neutral, you'd have to resort to heavy artillery like pressuring their provider or cloudflare or similar providers and you'd have to have much more proof, and likely by the time you pull it off their deed will be done. And even if you succeed they'd just find a more sympathetic provider - see the story of kiwifarms, for example.

The thing about web forums is that nobody uses those outside nerds / people with some specialty interest while, well, pretty much everyone is on social media

That may be true today, because FB is easier, but before FB existed a ton of non-nerd people used forums. If FB becomes less convenient, they can move back. Using forums is not hard at all, it's just a bit less convenient, but if you're planning a secret genocide, you can tolerate a little inconvenience as a price of not being discovered and executed, I think.

What's so special about facebook is that it was the first to offer this at scale in that country, in a way accessible to wide swathes of the population.

That country didn't have access to the web before? Because web forums have been offering that - basically at any scale a country with population less than the US, making 100M+ member forum probably would require some work - since forever.

The real reason is Facebook was being blamed by democrats for the 2016 election loss, so they stuck them with every accusation they could find.

I don't think it's about 2016 specifically or only. Any valuable resource that is not under the control of The Party must be either brought under control or destroyed. It doesn't matter if it's being used by The Enemy currently or not, and what for - anything that is not under control is a threat, and must be dealt with. That of course is true for Facebook too. One of the basic tenets of socialism is centralized control (for the good of the masses, of course!) and in modern informational society, obviously, this means control over the flows of information.

I don't know why Facebook specifically; maybe it was the zero-rate-with-app-garden thing they were also doing in India around the same time.

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