<story><title>Catastrophic effects of working as a Facebook moderator</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/revealed-catastrophic-effects-working-facebook-moderator</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheOperator</author><text>&amp;gt;They also said others were pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s something wrong with mainstream reporting if mere exposure to social media turns people far right.  It really strikes me that people are trapped in some pretty strong filter bubbles to the point mere exposure is enough to change political belief.&lt;p&gt;Spend a week on a far right community and you&amp;#x27;ll be shown more stats that point to a far-right conclusion than you can critically evaluate.  In any internet discussion of police racism for instance FBI crime stats will be mentioned in a heartbeat but I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;ve seen a mainstream journo bring them up once.  Social media and mainstream media fundamentally follows different schemas of information simply because even bringing up certain data can cause a mainstream journo reputational damage.&lt;p&gt;This is also causing an inverse filter bubble where hateful ideas which actually have refutations don&amp;#x27;t get refuted because people refuse to discuss the ideas on principle.  Much of the data cited is crap and much of the interpretations are crap but they&amp;#x27;re not meaningfully contested.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>caconym_</author><text>&amp;gt; There&amp;#x27;s something wrong with mainstream reporting if mere exposure to social media turns people far right. It really strikes me that people are trapped in some pretty strong filter bubbles to the point mere exposure is enough to change political belief.&lt;p&gt;A different conclusion to draw from this is that far-right interests are responsible for the majority of the objectionable content on social media. One might further suggest that said content is deliberate propaganda, designed to push people to the right, and that this is a central pillar of their strategy that isn&amp;#x27;t shared to the same degree or extreme by other political factions.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;mere exposure&amp;quot;. I haven&amp;#x27;t read the article so please correct me if I&amp;#x27;m wrong but this is a job, a place they go to sit every day to be bombarded with this crap. To some extent they &lt;i&gt;have&lt;/i&gt; to sit and let it wash over them—I don&amp;#x27;t imagine the people doing these jobs have much career mobility. IMO it&amp;#x27;s not realistic to suggest that if they were just better-informed, they wouldn&amp;#x27;t suffer these effects. The mind is not an inviolable fortress—no matter how strong you think your defenses are, they can be worn down.</text></comment>
<story><title>Catastrophic effects of working as a Facebook moderator</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/revealed-catastrophic-effects-working-facebook-moderator</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheOperator</author><text>&amp;gt;They also said others were pushed towards the far right by the amount of hate speech and fake news they read every day.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s something wrong with mainstream reporting if mere exposure to social media turns people far right.  It really strikes me that people are trapped in some pretty strong filter bubbles to the point mere exposure is enough to change political belief.&lt;p&gt;Spend a week on a far right community and you&amp;#x27;ll be shown more stats that point to a far-right conclusion than you can critically evaluate.  In any internet discussion of police racism for instance FBI crime stats will be mentioned in a heartbeat but I don&amp;#x27;t think I&amp;#x27;ve seen a mainstream journo bring them up once.  Social media and mainstream media fundamentally follows different schemas of information simply because even bringing up certain data can cause a mainstream journo reputational damage.&lt;p&gt;This is also causing an inverse filter bubble where hateful ideas which actually have refutations don&amp;#x27;t get refuted because people refuse to discuss the ideas on principle.  Much of the data cited is crap and much of the interpretations are crap but they&amp;#x27;re not meaningfully contested.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Timshel</author><text>I took it more as an extrem application of : &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Illusory_truth_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Illusory_truth_effect&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; In a 2015 study, researchers discovered that familiarity can overpower rationality and that repetitively hearing that a certain fact is wrong can affect the hearer&amp;#x27;s beliefs.</text></comment>