All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.
Interpretation
Social media can blur the lines between what is true and what is simply popular.
In this quote, Chamath Palihapitiya highlights a critical issue in today's digital landscape, where social media platforms may prioritize popularity over factual accuracy. He argues that this not only misleads users but also undermines the foundation of informed citizenship, as people deserve clarity about what is genuinely true versus what is merely propagated for gain by various actors on these platforms.
In practice
In a discussion on misinformation in a town hall meeting.
We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short term signals: Hearts, likes, thumbs up. We conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that's short term and leaves you even more vacant and empty before you did it.
If the Net becomes the center of the universe, which is what seems to be happening, then the dizzying array of machines that will be plugged into it will virtually guarantee that the specifics of which chip and which operating system you've got will be irrelevant.
And every now and then people find the bugs, and they interpret those as cool failures in the Sims terms. For them it's like a treasure hunt, you know.
If you take a print magazine with a million person circulation, and a blog with a devout readership of 1 million, for the purpose of selling anything that can be sold online, the blog is infinitely more powerful, because it's only a click away.
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
People who say they don't see the acceleration of innovation is a wilful blindness. We are innovation at a wonderful speed for the basic things we think everyone should get.
Most of the value of deep learning today is in narrow domains where you can get a lot of data. Here's one example of something it cannot do: have a meaningful conversation.
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