8 ms·

The Real Problem with Facebook and the News

36 points by shawndumas 10y ago

morninj 10y ago
For those interested in breaking free from the Facebook trending news headlines, I wrote an open source extension to replace them with stories from real news sources (or any RSS feed): http://www.fluffblocker.com/ http://www.fluffblocker.com/
- devishard 10y ago
  For those interested in breaking free from Facebook trending news headlines, why not quit Facebook?
  - morninj 10y ago
    I like to use Facebook for several reasons, but I want to hide the silly headlines--hence this project.
  - beamatronic 10y ago
    Because food pictures
- mikekchar 10y ago
  Not trying to take away from your extension, which I'm sure is very useful for people who are interested in that kind of thing. I just find it a bit interesting that the article seemed (from my point of view) to imply that the problem with the Facebook trending news headlines is that it is exactly the same as the news headlines from traditional news outlets: it is curated content that is consciously or unconsciously organized to appeal to a particular mindset. My take-away from the article (which I admit was also my pre-existing bias, so perhaps I injected it) is that the news is essentially a propaganda machine. It reflects the conscious and unconscious biases of the curators and attempts to present a consistent world view. The sad part is how unaware the readership is. From one of the quotes the the author included, people become more extreme in their views when surrounded by others who have the same views. This leads to polarization on every topic -- an us vs. them attitude. With such an attitude no substantial changes can happen. For example, if Trump wins the nomination, how many liberal thinking people would vote for an independent, risking splitting the vote and handing the country to Trump? If Clinton wins the nomination, how many conservative thinking people will allow the Clinton dynasty (the spouse of a former president!) to win the day? In the end the status quo prevails. So it just seems a bit ironic that your extension, which allows you to dial in your bias even further, is mentioned here. Possibly (if you don't already have it) you can add an option to turn off the trending news headlines altogether :-)
thrownaway2424 10y ago
This article is among many recently that have been citing Pew's ongoing research into political polarization. That's starting to bug me because although Pew puts out a nuanced 100-page interpretation of their data, most news outlets can't be bothered with nuance. Of particular interest to me are underlying long-term trends that must necessarily be interpreted by Pew's method as "polarization". One of their ten questions to classify respondents into liberal or conservative bins is whether homosexuality should be accepted or discouraged. This question probably made as much sense in 1994 as a question about interracial marriage would have made in 1950. At that time interracial marriage was universally opposed by white people (96% opposed in a poll), but today it is universally accepted (87% not opposed in 2010). Acceptance of homosexuality is on a similar long-term trend. Many people were opposed to acceptance of homosexuality in 1994 for the same reason that 1950's white people were opposed to interracial marriage: those people were bigoted assholes. As those bigots get old and die the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever. If you doubt this just look at the trends by respondent age. Practically all Americans under 30 years old are accepting of homosexuality. So, given that long-term trend, it seems quite silly to say that liberals are now more consistently liberal, and that amounts to polarization. In the past there were people who were liberal on the environment or racial equality or other issues but were against gays, or were liberal on the environment and were against both racial and sexual equality. Those people are now dead. To call this polarization is to treat with moral equanimity the positions of tolerance and of hate, which isn't useful. There are not equally valid positions.
- paavokoya 10y ago
  >the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever Although one could make parallels about Roman culture and homosexuality.. Once an empire fails, the religious vultures prey on the weak-willed and once again spread bigotry and hate (much like certain political candidates) as scapegoats for the failure of the empire.
  - beamatronic 10y ago
    Can you turn this around and say that as long as the bigoted political candidates don't succeed, the empire hasn't fallen yet?
lloyddobbler 10y ago
Indeed, one could make the argument that an authoritative news module from Facebook would actually be a civil benefit: at least we would all be starting from a common set of facts. What is far more damaging — and far more engaging, and thus lucrative for Facebook — is all of us in our own virtual neighborhoods of our own making, liking opinions that tell us we’re right instead of engaging with viewpoints that make us question our assumptions. Agreed. It follows, though, that attempting to inject a balanced view in the Trending News is necessary (i.e., not suppressing content of one perspective through careful curation). Otherwise, only one side will be "engaging with viewpoints that make them question their assumptions." Proposed solution: eliminate human curation from the mix altogether, and let the algorithms fight it out.
- thrownaway2424 10y ago
  "The algorithm" is easy to game and not fundamentally neutral. Ask Rick Santorum for his thoughts on this.
  - beamatronic 10y ago
    Wait isn't that the guy named after... uh, nevermind
multinglets 10y ago
The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is using human curators to assert, without challenge, what is "trending" with the other humans and then denying it. i.e. The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is fucking blatantly spreading propaganda by misrepresenting consensus and then lying about it.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  Serious question. When it comes to "Top Stories" or "News" or anything on Facebook, did anyone actually believe for real that it was purely the output of an algorithm and that no provisions were made to have a human in the loop? I doubt anyone ever thought that, so I'm not sure how anyone is surprised by any of this.
  - dba7dba 10y ago
    You are way overestimating the ability of average FB (or American ?) users to think logically or judge something rationally. I'm not saying they are dumb. I'm saying not that many would stop and seriously think if 'trending' news section on FB was possibly being used for spreading propaganda.
  - DanAndersen 10y ago
    Consider how often the 24-hour news networks would fill their time by talking about "what's trending" on Twitter or Facebook or the like. The implication is obviously that the fact that they are trending is a newsworthy thing in and of itself, that it's some sign of "people making something go viral." I don't think people necessarily thought that it was a purely automatic algorithmic creation (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case -- remember that most people are not nearly as tech-savvy as the HN crowd in knowing what is or isn't likely to be the result of "pure algorithms"). But the fact that it's called "trending" inherently implies that it's a representative snapshot of what the current attention ecosystem is -- that it's a passive record into what "is trending." By manually inserting or removing things from the "trending" list, that creates a false impression that certain things are or aren't popular.
  - 10y ago
ps4fanboy 10y ago
Silicon Valley darlings (twitter, fb) really need to stay out of politics, attempting to curate what people say and see at the very least.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  FB's entire business model is provided a UX that is curated for stickiness, comfort, and convenience with a veneer of organic feeling so as to make it a comfortable platform for multiple different kinds of ads, which are what they make money from.
  - ps4fanboy 10y ago
    I find it hard to believe that attempting to marginalize half your users to match the political outlook of your employees is driven by profit. If it was I wouldn't criticize it.
lisper 10y ago
I don't get it. Facebook is a private company. If they want to present biased news they have the right to do that. If they want to withhold information about their editorial process, or even lie about it, they have the right to do that too. Fox News does it, why can't Facebook?
- DanAndersen 10y ago
  I don't think people are saying it's illegal -- people are saying it's a bad thing. Those don't necessarily equal each other. Concepts like "censorship" or "freedom of speech" can exist and be talked about independently of the United States First Amendment; there may not be legal grounds for prosecution but from a social/philosophical angle these are still things that can be legitimately debated. My main concern is that, as more and more of the average Internet user's communications becomes funneled through a small number of big private companies, the typical media ecosystem that we're accustomed to is changing. For some people, Facebook and their feed basically is the Internet. I don't know what the solution is or if there is one, but I find it unsettling to imagine a future where more and more of everyday life becomes dependent on private forces that pride themselves on not having to provide the protections that people grew up assuming they could rely on.
  - lisper 10y ago
    > people are saying it's a bad thing I understand that. But why is it a bad thing? We have freedom of the press in the U.S. That means that the press is free to be biased.
    - DanAndersen 10y ago
      If people go to a media source with the assumption that they're going to be receiving useful information about the world, then I'd consider it a self-evident bad thing for the media source to lie to them and give them information that isn't representative of reality. To put it into machine learning terms, giving people a bunch of training data that is biased (i.e. isn't sampled from the same distribution as reality) is going to train people's judgment to be less in tune with reality. I don't think I need to argue the laws of the US to make this point, but the press is free to be biased (up to a limit, remember that!) because excessive legal attempts to curtail media bias can tend toward making things worse -- simply putting the people in power in charge of doing the biasing.
Frozenlock 10y ago
I like that you accept to evaluate someone else's position before instantly putting them into the little "bigot" box. It's much better to leave traces of your thinking process, instead of simply declaring that your conclusions are the only ones that are acceptable and others are idiots. Let's take me for example. It just so happens that I'm rethinking my position on interracial marriage (yes, really). I haven't reached any solid conclusion yet, but I'm not as sure of my position as I once was. My current uncertainty is based on a few things I learned in the past few years. First, Sapolky's excellent "Human Behavioral Biology" did show me how incredibly susceptible we are to hormones; how a tiny little change can have huge impacts in our daily life. The part on delaying gratification was also eye opening for me. Some people are wired in a way that makes it very difficult for them to refuse a cookie now in exchange for two cookies later. So it's not necessarily that you are making a greater effort; you might be born in a way that makes it easier for you for delay gratification. I would recommend the complete playlist to anyone here. It is simply fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C... Second, the psychology professor Jordan B Peterson (https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos) teaches how an amazing predictor of success IQ is. You can see a little of what he has to say here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-life-a-high-EQ-or-IQ https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-life-a-high... Then I learned how IQ is highly correlated to genetics (from 0.75 to 0.8). By the way, for you parents, this means that you might not be as good tutors as you think you are; you might just have given your child better genes. :-p And finally, I read about the IQ differences between races. This forced me to look at other biological differences (life expectancy, height, prevalence of diseases, hormones levels, etc.) ---- Okay, now let's see how this influences my thought process. Say I want to have a child. I want to give my child the best chances in life. This means making sure the mom doesn't drink alcohol or smoke while pregnant, making sure the child is fed, entertained, surrounded with the best environment... I also have Spinal muscular atrophy. This would influence if I'm willing to have a child with someone who is a carrier of the faulty gene. While it's possible to live with SMA(3-4) without major impact on life expectancy, it kinda sucks. Same thing with a low IQ. You can certainly have a full life if you are less intelligent, but it's not something that I would wish for my child. Not only because it would probably make his life harder, but it would also limit the type of conversation I can have with him. This brings us to the meat of the matter: I don't think that I would personally want to have a child with someone of another race if I know that it would push down his expected average IQ from 100 to 92 or lower, in addition to potentially increasing his testosterone levels. And then, on a national level, mean IQ has a much more pronounced impact (law of big numbers). Averaging down the intelligence of your population is an irreversible process. Once you mixed it down, the only way (for now) to bring it back up would be to be actively reproduce smart people for it. Even if you are not smart yourself, having high IQ people is needed to maintain and improve your surroundings. If I remember correctly, the US Army doesn't accept people with an IQ lower than ~85 because it's counterproductive to have them around. ---- So that's my current thought process. I realize that even questioning that "interracial marriage is good" clearly falls into the "bigot" category for many of you, but I hope that some might want to chip in one way or another. Like I said, I haven't reached a solid conclusion yet, but I'm much less certain than I once was.

36 points by shawndumas 10y ago

For those interested in breaking free from the Facebook trending news headlines, I wrote an open source extension to replace them with stories from real news sources (or any RSS feed): http://www.fluffblocker.com/ http://www.fluffblocker.com/

devishard 10y ago
For those interested in breaking free from Facebook trending news headlines, why not quit Facebook?
- morninj 10y ago
  I like to use Facebook for several reasons, but I want to hide the silly headlines--hence this project.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  Because food pictures
mikekchar 10y ago
Not trying to take away from your extension, which I'm sure is very useful for people who are interested in that kind of thing. I just find it a bit interesting that the article seemed (from my point of view) to imply that the problem with the Facebook trending news headlines is that it is exactly the same as the news headlines from traditional news outlets: it is curated content that is consciously or unconsciously organized to appeal to a particular mindset. My take-away from the article (which I admit was also my pre-existing bias, so perhaps I injected it) is that the news is essentially a propaganda machine. It reflects the conscious and unconscious biases of the curators and attempts to present a consistent world view. The sad part is how unaware the readership is. From one of the quotes the the author included, people become more extreme in their views when surrounded by others who have the same views. This leads to polarization on every topic -- an us vs. them attitude. With such an attitude no substantial changes can happen. For example, if Trump wins the nomination, how many liberal thinking people would vote for an independent, risking splitting the vote and handing the country to Trump? If Clinton wins the nomination, how many conservative thinking people will allow the Clinton dynasty (the spouse of a former president!) to win the day? In the end the status quo prevails. So it just seems a bit ironic that your extension, which allows you to dial in your bias even further, is mentioned here. Possibly (if you don't already have it) you can add an option to turn off the trending news headlines altogether :-)

thrownaway2424 10y ago

This article is among many recently that have been citing Pew's ongoing research into political polarization. That's starting to bug me because although Pew puts out a nuanced 100-page interpretation of their data, most news outlets can't be bothered with nuance. Of particular interest to me are underlying long-term trends that must necessarily be interpreted by Pew's method as "polarization". One of their ten questions to classify respondents into liberal or conservative bins is whether homosexuality should be accepted or discouraged. This question probably made as much sense in 1994 as a question about interracial marriage would have made in 1950. At that time interracial marriage was universally opposed by white people (96% opposed in a poll), but today it is universally accepted (87% not opposed in 2010). Acceptance of homosexuality is on a similar long-term trend. Many people were opposed to acceptance of homosexuality in 1994 for the same reason that 1950's white people were opposed to interracial marriage: those people were bigoted assholes. As those bigots get old and die the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever. If you doubt this just look at the trends by respondent age. Practically all Americans under 30 years old are accepting of homosexuality. So, given that long-term trend, it seems quite silly to say that liberals are now more consistently liberal, and that amounts to polarization. In the past there were people who were liberal on the environment or racial equality or other issues but were against gays, or were liberal on the environment and were against both racial and sexual equality. Those people are now dead. To call this polarization is to treat with moral equanimity the positions of tolerance and of hate, which isn't useful. There are not equally valid positions.

paavokoya 10y ago
>the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever Although one could make parallels about Roman culture and homosexuality.. Once an empire fails, the religious vultures prey on the weak-willed and once again spread bigotry and hate (much like certain political candidates) as scapegoats for the failure of the empire.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  Can you turn this around and say that as long as the bigoted political candidates don't succeed, the empire hasn't fallen yet?

lloyddobbler 10y ago

Indeed, one could make the argument that an authoritative news module from Facebook would actually be a civil benefit: at least we would all be starting from a common set of facts. What is far more damaging — and far more engaging, and thus lucrative for Facebook — is all of us in our own virtual neighborhoods of our own making, liking opinions that tell us we’re right instead of engaging with viewpoints that make us question our assumptions. Agreed. It follows, though, that attempting to inject a balanced view in the Trending News is necessary (i.e., not suppressing content of one perspective through careful curation). Otherwise, only one side will be "engaging with viewpoints that make them question their assumptions." Proposed solution: eliminate human curation from the mix altogether, and let the algorithms fight it out.

thrownaway2424 10y ago
"The algorithm" is easy to game and not fundamentally neutral. Ask Rick Santorum for his thoughts on this.
- beamatronic 10y ago
  Wait isn't that the guy named after... uh, nevermind

multinglets 10y ago

The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is using human curators to assert, without challenge, what is "trending" with the other humans and then denying it. i.e. The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is fucking blatantly spreading propaganda by misrepresenting consensus and then lying about it.

beamatronic 10y ago
Serious question. When it comes to "Top Stories" or "News" or anything on Facebook, did anyone actually believe for real that it was purely the output of an algorithm and that no provisions were made to have a human in the loop? I doubt anyone ever thought that, so I'm not sure how anyone is surprised by any of this.
- dba7dba 10y ago
  You are way overestimating the ability of average FB (or American ?) users to think logically or judge something rationally. I'm not saying they are dumb. I'm saying not that many would stop and seriously think if 'trending' news section on FB was possibly being used for spreading propaganda.
- DanAndersen 10y ago
  Consider how often the 24-hour news networks would fill their time by talking about "what's trending" on Twitter or Facebook or the like. The implication is obviously that the fact that they are trending is a newsworthy thing in and of itself, that it's some sign of "people making something go viral." I don't think people necessarily thought that it was a purely automatic algorithmic creation (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case -- remember that most people are not nearly as tech-savvy as the HN crowd in knowing what is or isn't likely to be the result of "pure algorithms"). But the fact that it's called "trending" inherently implies that it's a representative snapshot of what the current attention ecosystem is -- that it's a passive record into what "is trending." By manually inserting or removing things from the "trending" list, that creates a false impression that certain things are or aren't popular.
- 10y ago

ps4fanboy 10y ago

Silicon Valley darlings (twitter, fb) really need to stay out of politics, attempting to curate what people say and see at the very least.

dragonwriter 10y ago
FB's entire business model is provided a UX that is curated for stickiness, comfort, and convenience with a veneer of organic feeling so as to make it a comfortable platform for multiple different kinds of ads, which are what they make money from.
- ps4fanboy 10y ago
  I find it hard to believe that attempting to marginalize half your users to match the political outlook of your employees is driven by profit. If it was I wouldn't criticize it.

lisper 10y ago

I don't get it. Facebook is a private company. If they want to present biased news they have the right to do that. If they want to withhold information about their editorial process, or even lie about it, they have the right to do that too. Fox News does it, why can't Facebook?

DanAndersen 10y ago
I don't think people are saying it's illegal -- people are saying it's a bad thing. Those don't necessarily equal each other. Concepts like "censorship" or "freedom of speech" can exist and be talked about independently of the United States First Amendment; there may not be legal grounds for prosecution but from a social/philosophical angle these are still things that can be legitimately debated. My main concern is that, as more and more of the average Internet user's communications becomes funneled through a small number of big private companies, the typical media ecosystem that we're accustomed to is changing. For some people, Facebook and their feed basically is the Internet. I don't know what the solution is or if there is one, but I find it unsettling to imagine a future where more and more of everyday life becomes dependent on private forces that pride themselves on not having to provide the protections that people grew up assuming they could rely on.
- lisper 10y ago
  > people are saying it's a bad thing I understand that. But why is it a bad thing? We have freedom of the press in the U.S. That means that the press is free to be biased.
  - DanAndersen 10y ago
    If people go to a media source with the assumption that they're going to be receiving useful information about the world, then I'd consider it a self-evident bad thing for the media source to lie to them and give them information that isn't representative of reality. To put it into machine learning terms, giving people a bunch of training data that is biased (i.e. isn't sampled from the same distribution as reality) is going to train people's judgment to be less in tune with reality. I don't think I need to argue the laws of the US to make this point, but the press is free to be biased (up to a limit, remember that!) because excessive legal attempts to curtail media bias can tend toward making things worse -- simply putting the people in power in charge of doing the biasing.

Frozenlock 10y ago

I like that you accept to evaluate someone else's position before instantly putting them into the little "bigot" box. It's much better to leave traces of your thinking process, instead of simply declaring that your conclusions are the only ones that are acceptable and others are idiots. Let's take me for example. It just so happens that I'm rethinking my position on interracial marriage (yes, really). I haven't reached any solid conclusion yet, but I'm not as sure of my position as I once was. My current uncertainty is based on a few things I learned in the past few years. First, Sapolky's excellent "Human Behavioral Biology" did show me how incredibly susceptible we are to hormones; how a tiny little change can have huge impacts in our daily life. The part on delaying gratification was also eye opening for me. Some people are wired in a way that makes it very difficult for them to refuse a cookie now in exchange for two cookies later. So it's not necessarily that you are making a greater effort; you might be born in a way that makes it easier for you for delay gratification. I would recommend the complete playlist to anyone here. It is simply fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C... Second, the psychology professor Jordan B Peterson (https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos https://www.youtube.com/user/JordanPetersonVideos) teaches how an amazing predictor of success IQ is. You can see a little of what he has to say here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-life-a-high-EQ-or-IQ https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-life-a-high... Then I learned how IQ is highly correlated to genetics (from 0.75 to 0.8). By the way, for you parents, this means that you might not be as good tutors as you think you are; you might just have given your child better genes. :-p And finally, I read about the IQ differences between races. This forced me to look at other biological differences (life expectancy, height, prevalence of diseases, hormones levels, etc.) ---- Okay, now let's see how this influences my thought process. Say I want to have a child. I want to give my child the best chances in life. This means making sure the mom doesn't drink alcohol or smoke while pregnant, making sure the child is fed, entertained, surrounded with the best environment... I also have Spinal muscular atrophy. This would influence if I'm willing to have a child with someone who is a carrier of the faulty gene. While it's possible to live with SMA(3-4) without major impact on life expectancy, it kinda sucks. Same thing with a low IQ. You can certainly have a full life if you are less intelligent, but it's not something that I would wish for my child. Not only because it would probably make his life harder, but it would also limit the type of conversation I can have with him. This brings us to the meat of the matter: I don't think that I would personally want to have a child with someone of another race if I know that it would push down his expected average IQ from 100 to 92 or lower, in addition to potentially increasing his testosterone levels. And then, on a national level, mean IQ has a much more pronounced impact (law of big numbers). Averaging down the intelligence of your population is an irreversible process. Once you mixed it down, the only way (for now) to bring it back up would be to be actively reproduce smart people for it. Even if you are not smart yourself, having high IQ people is needed to maintain and improve your surroundings. If I remember correctly, the US Army doesn't accept people with an IQ lower than ~85 because it's counterproductive to have them around. ---- So that's my current thought process. I realize that even questioning that "interracial marriage is good" clearly falls into the "bigot" category for many of you, but I hope that some might want to chip in one way or another. Like I said, I haven't reached a solid conclusion yet, but I'm much less certain than I once was.