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Agreed. The problem is the users, not the platform. If users propagate misinformation, the users propagate misinformation. The easy solution people often jump
by B-Con 10y ago
Agreed.
The problem is the users, not the platform. If users propagate misinformation, the users propagate misinformation.
The easy solution people often jump to is fighting negatives with negatives, assuming it yields a positive. But often a positive approach is more effective. Offering incentives for good acts, not just disincentives for bad acts, is a fairly popular recent trend backed by research.
In this case I can't help but think that the best solution is to focus on education and the propagation of correct information, not censorship (or at least, something that smells like censorship) of bad information. If "new media" is a problem we should be fighting it closer to the source.
I don't know what Facebook's role in that would be, but ideally, as a platform, it would be minimal.
But ultimately, it's worth remembering that it's hard to build a good system with bad raw materials. If people are interested in falsehoods and echo chambers, their social media will reflect that.
- tdaltonc 10y agoIf the news feed were just a reveres chronological list of everything your friends posted, then I'd agree with you -- facebook would be just a medium. But they filter and sort it. I would actually like to have a knob or a switch I could use to add or remove certain elements from the news feed filter algo. I think it would be great if one of those parameters was a (open source) "factuality score." they're already doing this with click-bate, why not brain-rot? Especially if it's an optional feature.
- mememachine 10y agoI don't see why facebook is attempting to manipulate its users at all nor how anyone thinks this is acceptable. If people spread misinformation, than the way to stop it is to spread correct information. If facebook takes a more active role in shaping peoples' perceptions, i think it would be incredibly immoral and I would hope the company tanks.
- bo1024 10y agoHmm, I mostly agree, but it's important to remember that a bad mechanism can encourage bad behavior as well. Facebook must make choices about design of the feed algorithm that have important effects on incentives and behavior. So even if they take a minimal censorship role, we cannot ignore the effect of the feed algorithm - in fact, we should focus on how to design it! For example, the extent to which one "bubbles" users into their own echo chamber is largely up to the algorithm designer. If you look at "content aggregator" sites like HN, reddit, Facebook, they all have pros and cons. HN and reddit give incentives in the form of karma. They all have different levels of "bubbling" and opting into or out of bubbles. Good design of such sites is an open problem -- even formalizing good goals for such sites is an open problem -- but it is a design problem we should be thinking about and addressing.
- crystalmeph 10y ago>>But ultimately, it's worth remembering that it's hard to build a good system with bad raw materials. If people are interested in falsehoods and echo chambers, their social media will reflect that. I wouldn't phrase it quite so negatively, but I think you're on to something here. If people don't enjoy going on Facebook, they won't go on Facebook. What do people enjoy going to Facebook for? Interacting with their Facebook friends, whom they likely friended in at least some part due to their shared beliefs. "Fixing" Facebook in this regard means forcing people to interact more with entities outside their self-selected social group, when the whole reason they got on Facebook in the first place is to interact with their self-selected social group! Facebook would be foolish to fix this problem, it would drive their users away.