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I think that's a false equivalence for two reasons. 1) The Internet has not existed prior to Facebook in all markets, or even at the same time. Internet.org br

I think that's a false equivalence for two reasons. 1) The Internet has not existed prior to Facebook in all markets, or even at the same time. Internet.org brought Facebook to e.g. India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org Recently there was an HN thread about Internet use in the Phillipines. There were some very interesting observations about zero-rated data policies that subverted net neutrality so that basically Facebook was the one of the only Internet resources that one could access. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19073824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19073824 2) They are completely different things. The Internet is a federated carrier. Its actively disinterested in the content (although there are questions of net neutrality challengin that). Facebook has taken a proactive approach to marketing, expansion, collecting data about its users and ediatorializing.

yters 8y ago
True, but the issues the article discussed could also be directed at the internet in general. No one is curating everything on the internet, and through email fake news can easily become viral. Facebook makes it easier for such things to occur, but the virality of fake news and mob organization is in general due to internet technologies. If not Facebook, maybe it would have been AOL or MySpace, or some other enterprising social network. Picking out Facebook seems to be scapegoating a particular company for the ills of global communication. Before the internet age we had newspapers and pamphleteers and the like which similarly spread fake news and instigated the mobs. On the other hand, Facebook might have a unique opportunity to help educate people on how to think critically about the news they see. I think the real issue is that Facebook has a whole lot of money, so now people can start suing Facebook and get their hands on some of that filthy lucre.

yters 8y ago

True, but the issues the article discussed could also be directed at the internet in general. No one is curating everything on the internet, and through email fake news can easily become viral. Facebook makes it easier for such things to occur, but the virality of fake news and mob organization is in general due to internet technologies. If not Facebook, maybe it would have been AOL or MySpace, or some other enterprising social network. Picking out Facebook seems to be scapegoating a particular company for the ills of global communication. Before the internet age we had newspapers and pamphleteers and the like which similarly spread fake news and instigated the mobs. On the other hand, Facebook might have a unique opportunity to help educate people on how to think critically about the news they see. I think the real issue is that Facebook has a whole lot of money, so now people can start suing Facebook and get their hands on some of that filthy lucre.