4 ms·

Are you saying that Facebook should decide which news is false or that you're just done with using social media to find news in general?

yyyymmddhhmmss 8y ago
The Corporate Authoritarian Solution terrifies me so much. American society is still in toddler years in terms of political consciousness, but the worst damage happened in the years before the internet, not after. 2016 was a madhouse because that was us coming out of denial, thanks to the internet.
wil421 8y ago
Facebook isn’t a news platform to me and that was never my use case. I’m tired of both the political ads and the political crap people share as “truth”. If you consider HN or Reddit as social media, then I guess I’m not done with news and social media. I like link aggregator sites over sites were I share my personal photos/comments with news mixed in.
DavidHm 8y ago
I find myself somewhat unimpressed by arguments like "Facebook / Google" should not be deciding what is false. They already are - or rather, they are deciding what is visible and prominent, and what isn't. When you share a post, Facebook's algorithm determine what visible it has for each of your friends - whether it's on top of their feed, lower, or completely invisible. At this point it seems more and more likely (though probably not proven) that those algorithms are skewed to promote content that gets high chances of engagement - and that means content that provokes outrage or rage is more likely to be visible than a long-form, balanced conversations. So in short - Facebook is not (and should not) be the arbiter of truth. But surely it's not unreasonable to ask that they don't actively promote incivility and (literally, uncontroversially) blatantly fake news?
- moosey 8y ago
  I imagine that, at some point, any specialized management of a 'social feed' will be considered human experimentation that generally leaves the people consuming it to be worse off mentally and emotionally. We already know that Facebook has done what are considered experiments against the wellbeing of users, but there is no real gap between that and trying to adjust the behavior of users in order to keep them on the site. Once that adjustment has been made, then a closed-source curated social feed becomes illegal, as it should be, IMO. I think that the only way to manage a social feed is for it to be really dumb: blocks, maybe best friends, etc. Of course, once you do that you've basically returned to email.

yyyymmddhhmmss 8y ago

The Corporate Authoritarian Solution terrifies me so much. American society is still in toddler years in terms of political consciousness, but the worst damage happened in the years before the internet, not after. 2016 was a madhouse because that was us coming out of denial, thanks to the internet.

wil421 8y ago

Facebook isn’t a news platform to me and that was never my use case. I’m tired of both the political ads and the political crap people share as “truth”. If you consider HN or Reddit as social media, then I guess I’m not done with news and social media. I like link aggregator sites over sites were I share my personal photos/comments with news mixed in.

DavidHm 8y ago

I find myself somewhat unimpressed by arguments like "Facebook / Google" should not be deciding what is false. They already are - or rather, they are deciding what is visible and prominent, and what isn't. When you share a post, Facebook's algorithm determine what visible it has for each of your friends - whether it's on top of their feed, lower, or completely invisible. At this point it seems more and more likely (though probably not proven) that those algorithms are skewed to promote content that gets high chances of engagement - and that means content that provokes outrage or rage is more likely to be visible than a long-form, balanced conversations. So in short - Facebook is not (and should not) be the arbiter of truth. But surely it's not unreasonable to ask that they don't actively promote incivility and (literally, uncontroversially) blatantly fake news?

moosey 8y ago
I imagine that, at some point, any specialized management of a 'social feed' will be considered human experimentation that generally leaves the people consuming it to be worse off mentally and emotionally. We already know that Facebook has done what are considered experiments against the wellbeing of users, but there is no real gap between that and trying to adjust the behavior of users in order to keep them on the site. Once that adjustment has been made, then a closed-source curated social feed becomes illegal, as it should be, IMO. I think that the only way to manage a social feed is for it to be really dumb: blocks, maybe best friends, etc. Of course, once you do that you've basically returned to email.