Regarding Disqus & Social Well-Being

Zeta Global

Context

Yesterday I discussed my triple. I got blocked on three major radical right, alt-reality and alt-reason websites. I guess that Biden's pick of Kamala Harris set off threat sensors on the radical right.

The complaint

I unleashed a minor blast at Zeta Global earlier today. The response so far is zero, no surprise. Maybe later today a deceptive burp will come forth. Maybe not.

Who is Zeta Global? Glad you asked. It owns Disqus.

What is Disqus? Good question. ZG describes itself like this:

"Zeta Global has continued to double down on data, AI and omnichannel activation capabilities by organically developing and strategically acquiring cutting-edge marketing technology. We are one of the first companies to successfully implement industry-leading innovations in big data and AI to be the recognized leader in the convergence of marketing and advertising technology. 

Today, Zeta Global has offices on four continents, serving over 1000+ enterprise clients such as: Samsung, Toyota and Sprint. Our data-powered marketing technology platform houses the third largest data set in the marketplace (2.4B+ identities) and combines with outcome-driven AI to predict consumer intent, personalize experiences across every channel and power business growth for Fortune 1000 companies."

It sounds really big, but it employs less than 1500 people. What does ZG do? It does what Facebook, Google, Apple and most everyone else who is online seems to do. It collects and sells your data. It sells you and me. On December 5, 2017, Zeta Global acquired Disqus. The news of the acquisition was announced in a blog post by Disqus, apparently signalling a penchant for corporate secrecy.

OK, what were you whining about this time?

Good question. Over the years, I've filed about 3 or 4 complaints, mostly about loss of upvotes. Today's blast was about social damage flowing from the Disqus comment platform.[1] Specifically, the damage was related to two deeply flawed aspects of the Disqus comment system, upvotes and downvotes. Since I have complained twice about the upvote problem, today's blast was mostly related to downvotes. Both contribute to the same serious social problem that is tearing Americans apart today.

What social problem? Belief the problem that belief by millions of Americans in disinformation causes. My rationale is explained in footnote 1 below.

OK, what do you base that crackpot theory on?

Another good question. I do not have solid evidence, but others have come to conclude about the same thing. The blog Shelly and Friends said this about that sometime last year:

"The downvotes do effect the persons Disqus reputation and though it makes the publisher have to whitelist a lot more people due to the false information it adds to Disqus's statistics, it does far more harm to Disqus by making their statistics and using those for literally anything, totally invalid and turns them into garbage statistics that is of zero use to anyone."

In short, both the hackability of people's upvotes to drain them all way and, the abuseability of down votes to pile them on, on the Disqus comment system both contribute to maintenance and strengthening of echo chambers where disinformation can live, grow and thrive and where social damage occurs.

As I have argued here before based on the historical record and a lifetime of personal experience, most (not all) American capitalism is usually not about helping society or average people. It is usually about making as much money as possible, as fast as possible, legal or not. In that cauldron, social well-being, the environment, democracy and honest governance be damned to to hell. But to be fair and balanced, there are many exceptions. Many businesses honestly try to give help their employees and vendors and/or be serious about social concerns. Many are beyond the cynical lip service that most big businesses try to con us into believing they stand for.

Questions: Is that too idealistic to constitute a complaint that an honest, serious person should take seriously? Is there a flaw(s) in the facts and/or reasoning? Too little evidence?


Footnote:
1.  Here is my complaint in it's entirety and here is the link: https://disqus.com/home/discussion/channel-discussdisqus/bug_reports_feedback_downvote_abuse_social_damage/ :

Wednesday, August 12, 2020 

On partisan politics sites, some of the partisans routinely downvote truthful comments that are inconvenient. Some of those partisans follow the person making inconvenient comments and downvote every comment, regardless of what it is. That makes downvotes a powerful tool for ideologically cleansing partisan sites, because the accumulated downvotes leads to honest commenters being blocked. From what I can tell, none of those sites ever whitelist inconvenient commenters. The people who own such partisan sites want ideological purity. They do not want inconvenient truths or reasoning to be present in the comments. 

In essence, what this does is it makes it easy to keep a site ideologically cleansed. The administrators or moderators don't have to do anything to keep inconvenient content from appearing at all. In turn, that fortifies false narratives that some sites routinely promulgate as "news". In turn, that disinformation tends to further polarizes and deceive the audience. What that boils down to is social damage that is caused by downvote abuse. 

Both downvotes and upvotes should be completely eliminated to foster free information flow among people who want knowledge and not divisive ideological or partisan fantasies and disinformation. People who lost their upvotes due to whatever caused that disaster cannot comment on sites that ignore or do not want to whitelist those people. Now, commenters themselves can further limit exposure to inconvenient truth by just downvoting comments they dislike for any reason or no reason. 

Given the abuses and social damage it causes, why downvotes exist in the Disqus system is incomprehensible from a social well-being point of view. Whatever value some people see in downvoting is far outweighed by the social damage that comes from reinforcing partisan disinformation sources. In view of the large size of Disqus, this is a significant social problem.

Of course, the unspoken criticism is this: What arguably is abuse from the social well-being point of view is good from the Zeta Global corporate well-being (profit) point of view. Zeta wants big sites to be able to keep their big political sites ideologically cleansed from reality- and reason-based inconveniences (mostly facts, truth and sound reason) if that is what they want. That freedom to discriminate inconvenient against reality and reason increases Zeta's revenue flow.

Zeta folks - aw, they're nice