Political Extremism in America: Don’t blame Russia, blame Facebook and Twitter | Niall Ferguson скачать в хорошем качестве

Political Extremism in America: Don’t blame Russia, blame Facebook and Twitter | Niall Ferguson

New videos DAILY: https://bigth.ink Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers: https://bigth.ink/Edge ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I think the Facebook and Twitter have been configured to incentivize the expression and sharing of extreme opinions. It isn’t just fake news that we have to worry about, but we do have to worry about that, it’s also extreme views. Both are in fact incentivized by the structure of the network platforms as they existed. And I think looking back on 2016 the correct analysis of that election is not that the Russian network interfered and that’s why Trump won, I don’t think the Russian contribution was nearly big enough for that statement to be valid. What is true is that without the existence of Facebook and Twitter it would’ve been very hard for an outlier outside a candidate like Donald Trump to win." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NIALL FERGUSON Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard, where he served for 12 years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation Distinguished Scholar at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. He is the author of 14 books. His first, Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation 1897-1927, was short-listed for the History Today Book of the Year award, while the collection of essays he edited, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, was a UK bestseller. In 1998 he published to international critical acclaim The Pity of War: Explaining World War One and The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild. The latter won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History and was also short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Literary Award and the American National Jewish Book Award.  His latest book is The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2017).   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRANSCRIPT: NIALL FERGUSON: I don’t think the history of the 2016 election will be correctly written until it is clearly stated 'no Facebook, no Trump.' Anybody who expected a wonderful happy global community to form on the Internet in which everybody would share cat videos has been gravely disappointed. In fact, what’s happened has been an already quite polarized political scene has become even more polarized. Why? Well, remember rule number one of the networks, birds of a feather flock together, homophily operates. So people have naturally gravitated into two rival clusters if you want to put it this way, a liberal cluster, and a conservative cluster. But what’s fascinating is the way that peculiarities of today’s network platforms exacerbate this problem. For example, we now know that a tweet is 20 percent more likely to be read tweeted for every moral or emotional word that it uses. If you want to get retweeted you, therefore, are incentivized to use strong language. We can see that the legislators in the House of Representatives and the Senate who have the most Facebook followers are the most ideologically extreme according to their voting patterns. So I think the Facebook and Twitter have been configured to incentivize the expression and sharing of extreme opinions. It isn’t just fake news that we have to worry about, but we do have to worry about that, it’s also extreme views. Both are in fact incentivized by the structure of the network platforms as they existed. And I think looking back on 2016 the correct analysis of that election is not that the Russian network interfered and that’s why Trump won, I don’t think the Russian contribution was nearly big enough for that statement to be valid. What is true is that without the existence of Facebook and Twitter it would’ve been very hard for an outlier outside a candidate like Donald Trump to win. But those network platforms created opportunities for a populist that really had not existed before and his campaign knew how to use them and continues to know how to use them. Remember the algorithms are designed to give you more of what you engaged with before. You may not even notice it but as you like thing, as you share them you’re signaling two of the network platforms your preferences and it’s set up to give you more of that because the more engaged you are the more advertising they can sell. That’s how they make their money. So I think it’s time to kind o... For the full transcript, check out https://bigthink.com/videos/russia-fa...