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Yes - Facebook is a cathedral, not a bazaar. The contents of your news feed can be easily (automatically) manipulated to fit any agenda that Facebook wants you

Yes - Facebook is a cathedral, not a bazaar. The contents of your news feed can be easily (automatically) manipulated to fit any agenda that Facebook wants you to receive [0]. Regardless of your gun politics, one web site operated by a self-interested third party is never completely trustworthy as a public forum. I wish more non-tech people would understand this. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinker...

gravypod 11y ago
The problem is that there is little push from the people for companies to be open about this sort of thing. People just expect that since they don't see it happen, that it does not.
- chrismartin 11y ago
  Even if there were such a push, and even if these companies claimed to be open and impartial, we could never be certain. It's incompatible with the imperative of a publicly owned corporation (to maximize shareholder value), and more broadly, with any institution's first goal (to preserve itself). Imagine that someone wanted to share information which was detrimental to a social media corporation, and he/she published it on that same corporation's social media platform. (This could be an investigative report exposing some unsavory practice, or merely promotion of a competitor's product.) Completely suppressing the story would be counterproductive for the corporation (Streisand Effect), but they would certainly pull various levers to limit the story's exposure on their site, insofar as they expected such intervention to go unnoticed. This problem is solved by things like federated social networking, where everyone's updates are published by independently controlled sites. You (as a content consumer) would subscribe directly to these sources, and you'd directly control the algorithms that determine which stories float to the top of your news feed, or some user-friendlier version of same.

gravypod 11y ago

The problem is that there is little push from the people for companies to be open about this sort of thing. People just expect that since they don't see it happen, that it does not.

chrismartin 11y ago
Even if there were such a push, and even if these companies claimed to be open and impartial, we could never be certain. It's incompatible with the imperative of a publicly owned corporation (to maximize shareholder value), and more broadly, with any institution's first goal (to preserve itself). Imagine that someone wanted to share information which was detrimental to a social media corporation, and he/she published it on that same corporation's social media platform. (This could be an investigative report exposing some unsavory practice, or merely promotion of a competitor's product.) Completely suppressing the story would be counterproductive for the corporation (Streisand Effect), but they would certainly pull various levers to limit the story's exposure on their site, insofar as they expected such intervention to go unnoticed. This problem is solved by things like federated social networking, where everyone's updates are published by independently controlled sites. You (as a content consumer) would subscribe directly to these sources, and you'd directly control the algorithms that determine which stories float to the top of your news feed, or some user-friendlier version of same.