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I believe the argument being made is more on the user's magnitude of engagement. Users interact with facebook on a very close level - there's a level of emotion
by Tyrek 8y ago
I believe the argument being made is more on the user's magnitude of engagement. Users interact with facebook on a very close level - there's a level of emotional intimacy that users have with facebook the platform that they don't have with the corner bakery. To draw an analogy, imagine if a bank suddenly decided to run an experiment to tell people that they had lost all their money and that there was no recourse. Wouldn't that be a pretty fucked up thing for a bank to do?
- travisoneill1 8y agoThe bank would be lying to you and possibly cause real financial damage e.g. mislead customer sells car to pay rent b/c thought they were now broke. An equivalent to FB would be experimenting with different interior designs to make people less likely to come into the branch vs use ATM's. FB is a content delivery platform and it should be free to experiment with different content delivery algorithms. FB has no duty to show specific things to specific users like a bank has to provide accurate account information. If FB had such a duty, it could never change it's algorithm. That would be ridiculous.
- pm90 8y agoJust because FB doesn't publish the information itself doesn't mean it isn't liable for that information being on its platform. I think your argument would make sense if Facebook was "dumb" content delivery platform and had no advertisements. But it isn't: its a smart one, collecting data on its users constantly, and making that information available to anyone who wants it to push possibly misleading content to its users.