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> Facebook exacerbates poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading hoaxes and inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia,

> Facebook exacerbates poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading hoaxes and inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on The irony is that the media is doing this now, with respect to anything related to Facebook. Facebook is a website with 99.9% benign user generated content. The news media has been spreading outrage and paranoia and trying to get 'engagement' since before Facebook was born.

bshipp 8y ago
That's a little disingenous. No doubt you are correct that 99.9% of the user-generated content is benign, but that 99.9% of user-generated content would likely not represent 99.9% of viewer traffic. If only 0.01% of toxic content by terms of volume is receiving disproportionate attention and focus, not only permissible but actively encouraged by complex opaque algorithms, then it is certainly a much bigger problem then it's meagre character count would otherwise suggest.
- ptero 8y ago
  > If only 0.01% of toxic content ... is receiving disproportionate attention and focus, not only permissible but actively encouraged by complex opaque algorithms, then it is certainly a much bigger problem To me, this needs to be split into two use cases. The fact that .01% of content gets viewed a lot more than average is not a bad thing. Much of user content is junk with a heavy dose of ads for a seasoning. It is perfectly reasonable that original or thoughtful posts, even if unpleasant or provocative, get much higher traffic. The problem is the algorithmic reinforcement that encourages those making short-term sensationalist statements. Let's still allow folks to voice their opinions, whichever they are, and advertise them by the digital age equivalents to "word of mouth". Just keep it human, not algorithm driven. My 2c.
  - bshipp 8y ago
    I agree, that's a very useful and necessary distinction that I neglected to include in my original comment. Without those spontaneous user-composed opinions and anecdotes, the platform would quickly become (or perhaps already has become) plastic and artificial. As anyone having to relate information through a bureaucratic communications department has certainly experienced, even the most unique, interesting and useful story in the world stands little chance against an eager team of copy editors and PR representatives.
  - jtbayly 8y ago
    I don't think that solves anything. "Human driven" is precisely what forwarded messages on WhatsApp are. FB is feeling the need to limit the number of people you can forward something to in order to solve the same problem you're attempting to solve. My presumption is that by far the single biggest signal on whether to display a post on the FB feed to more people is how many people like and share. That's a people problem at the core, not an algorithm problem.
    - CharlesColeman 8y ago
      > My presumption is that by far the single biggest signal on whether to display a post on the FB feed to more people is how many people like and share. That's a people problem at the core, not an algorithm problem. It's still an algorithm problem at its core, because the algorithm is what determines what the "single biggest signal" it will use for amplification is. There's no reason why maximum shareability should be the main factor, it could be something else like some proxy for erudition, for instance.
      - intended 8y ago
        There’s no proxy for content quality. Simply: it’s all content and it’s impact depends on the people who take the information in and then apply their beliefs and understanding to it. Some content is simple - recipes for example. Others are impossible to parse: “they want to reduce hate speech” translates as “they want to remove conservative/right wing speech” (this actually happened in a conversation yesterday. Suggesting that the term hate speech is being transformed/co opted) Engagement in contrast, is simple, reliable and measurable.
        CharlesColeman 8y ago
        > There’s no proxy for content quality. I don't think that's true, it's just that the proxies are imperfect. But the specific alternative metric wasn't that important to my point. > Engagement in contrast, is simple, reliable and measurable. That's the root of the problem: the algorithms have been designed to use "simple, reliable, and [easily] measurable" things as their whole input, and then narrowly A/B tested to maximize some other easily measurable output. Looked at holistically, it's too simple to do an acceptable job. If you took a similar attitude, and applied it to create an algorithm for another discipline, like medicine for instance, it'd be pretty clear it'd be a disaster.
  - Traster 8y ago
    I'm sorry but let's not dress this up. The content with high engagement in facebook is almost exclusively lowest common denominator crap. It's not quotes kant and satre - it's quotes from LadBible and Kim K. I think we can all agree that quantity isn't the right metric for this - whether that's number of posts or amount of traffic on a given post. What we're really trying to do is gauge what the conversation is. Having said that, there are clear distinguishable problems we can point to that have an interesting quantifier. Anonymous 'Campaign' groups run by individuals that have previously been associated with Brexit campaigning are currently spending millions on Brexit advertising. There is no indication of where the money comes from to pay for these (we know it's not from the people who are associated with the page because they're just staffers). In that way I agree with you - the thing to worry about is where the ad dollars are spent, but I don't think that's the only thing we should be worrying about.
    - panarky 7y ago
      Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap [0]. The 1% Rule says that in any online community, 1% of participants create content while 99% lurk [1]. I'll propose Panarky's Corollary that 90% of the crap is produced by 0.1% of the participants and then shared, liked and amplified by 90% of participants. These 0.1% pathological participants are corporations advertising, governments propagandizing, zealots proselytizing, and trolls antagonizing. Facebook can see these patterns better than anyone, and they could eliminate or de-rank the material from the 0.1% if they wanted to. But the 0.1% is disproportionately incendiary and therefore profitable, so Facebook has a very strong incentive to look the other way. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
- learnstats2 8y ago
  > No doubt you are correct that 99.9% That's not my starting assumption. I think Facebook has a problem that its typical so-called "benign" users are creating less and less content, while malignant content-makers are not discouraged.
  - angott 8y ago
    They acquired Instagram and keep acquiring small startups exactly for this reason. Content generation direct to FB is going down because the platform is not innovating anymore, and for now their only way out of it is through acquisitions.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  This is a case of “What you permit, you promote.” People focus on the 0.01% of a platform’s content that’s bad/toxic because that is what defines where the platform draws the line on what’s acceptable.
  - GreenJelloShot 8y ago
    Isn't "What you permit, you promote" literally intolerance? The whole point of tolerance is to say "I don't agree with that, but I respect your right to do your own thing." This is advocating the exact opposite. Under this philosophy I can not longer be tolerant, because anything I "permit" I will be accused of promoting. This seems like a recipe for a horrible, horrible world.
- stickfigure 8y ago
  I'm puzzled why Facebook is getting the blame here. If you are seeing toxic content in your feed, it's because your friends put it there. It's not Facebook's fault that your friends suck.
  - nym 8y ago
    Maybe it's that facebook encourages the content from your friends that is toxic, because that toxic content leads to more clicks, engagement, and ultimately revenue.
  - angott 8y ago
    Yes, but your friends share content that sucks because the Facebook algorithm fills their feeds with click-bait, with the sole purpose of increasing engagement and user retention metrics.
  - pawelk 8y ago
    > If you are seeing toxic content in your feed, it's because your friends put it there. Not really. Facebook put it there for me. Time and again it shows me items like "[Friend] replied to a comment on [toxic thing]", where the thing gets a prominent preview etc. I haven't seen a real update from [Friend] in my feed for months, yet there are plenty when I visit their profile. Even if the friend is fighting the good fight and has commented to correct some misconceptions, it's clear that this particular action was selected for my feed because it's related to a controversial item.
  - smt88 8y ago
    No. The most toxic content is often comments, which are shown to me even when I don't want to see them. If it weren't for comments from non-friends, Facebook would have no toxic content for me at all.
    - gscott 8y ago
      If you go to the persons profile and click unfollow then you won't see their comments on posts that are now yours.
- taneq 8y ago
  > If only 0.01% of toxic content by terms of volume is receiving disproportionate attention and focus You mean like the rumour-mongering, low-effort politics etc. in your standard tabloid?
- colllectorof 8y ago
  Not to mention that it's entirely possible to create very bad effects via benign content. Facebook (and other social media) use has been linked to a significant rise in depression. https://www.thisisinsider.com/social-media-link-depression-loneliness-2018-11 https://www.thisisinsider.com/social-media-link-depression-l... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rise-in-suicide-and-social-media-is-there-a-link/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rise-in-suicide-and-social-medi...
rndgermandude 8y ago
Most books are not "The Little Red Book", yet "The Little Red Book" managed to help cause a lot of harm. It's not just the fraction of "bad" content in your system, it's also the level of propagation. Most of the "99.9% benign" content will not draw a lot of eyes per piece of content, while I'd guess "bad" content will draw a lot more eyes, and ergo have a bigger impact.
- z2 8y ago
  I totally agree with what you are saying, but to nitpick/go on a tangent, the direction of information flow may matter too. From what I understand, the Little Red Book was more of a symbol or product of the cult of personality and hysteria, rather than the _cause_ of subsequent hysteria after its publishing. In other words, there was plenty of dogma to go around that it may not have created more chaos, and had it not existed, some other symbol may have taken its place. It would be interesting to see how much content on Facebook, despite high propagation, is mostly destined for echo chambers, or actually spurring new action and converting others.
- ummonk 8y ago
  Let's start banning books with bad content I guess?
  - rndgermandude 8y ago
    I did not make this argument. I made the opposite argument in the past, actually. I am a proponent of reclassifying facebook etc as common carriers/utilities and forcing them not to censor any content unless it's actually illegal content. Tho, that does not and can not mean they have an obligation to promote such content e.g. through search results. However, words do have impact, and may be used as a weapon to incite the readers to certain actions. This can be actions I like, or actions that I find abhorrent. Then again, the danger that censorship poses to a free society, and the danger of unfettered censorship by private parties controlling major chunks of the "public marketplace of ideas" in particular, outweighs the dangers of bad people publishing legal but reprehensible speech, by a lot. The censorship we allow has to be minimal, and driven by societal consensus or compromise, and right now the state, with a separation of power and checks and balances, while not perfect, is still the far better alternative than letting a Zuckerberg or a Brin or a Dorsey or a Huffman unilaterally decide what's OK and what gets banned.
deleted 8y ago
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yeahitslikethat 8y ago
It's not ironic. It's hypocritical. What they are saying about Facebook is still true. Facebook is disgusting. Zuck is a gross, slimy person. He can't create something good, because HE is bad.
- max76 8y ago
  This is black and white thinking. No one is entirely bad, no one is entirely good. Very bad people are capable of making very good things. Very good people are capable of making very bad things.
  - rndgermandude 8y ago
    Zuckerberg tho seems to me like a very bad person making very bad things most of the time.
    - beering 8y ago
      > very bad person making very bad things most of the time. That's your slanted viewpoint based on what you've been hearing in the news media. Why is he a "very bad" person? Why are most of the things that he makes "very bad"? There's been a spate of bad press about Facebook recently, so that's primarily what's been coloring your view. For people in other bubbles, they might believe that "Democrats are very bad people making very bad policy most of the time", or "Muslims are very bad people doing very bad things most of the time". Gross simplifications are easy to adopt, hard to abandon.
      - rndgermandude 8y ago
        >That's your slanted viewpoint based on what you've been hearing in the news media. Thanks for reading my mind, knowing me better than I could ever know myself. >Why is he a "very bad" person? I based my opinion mostly on the stuff I saw and keep seeing from him directly[1]. >Why are most of the things that he makes "very bad"? Well, I came to the conclusion (and not just me) that his stuff is designed to be as addictive as possible and as invasive as possible. What he creates, deliberately, is the modern equivalent of cigarettes. Bad attributes in my book. His products are, in my humble opinion, a major contributing factor in the polarization of society and the decrease in civility and political culture all around the world (and no, I am not referring to Russians abusing facebook, I mean facebook itself, which attempts to increase addictiveness by highlighting extremes and conflict as a matter of "entertainment"). On top of that, he and his companies are using their power to lobby and push for stuff they full well know is detrimental to society but helpful to facebook, if it is regulation that is designed to strengthen facebook through regulatory capture, or if it is to bring "zero rated" facebook to developing countries in an effort to stomp out local competition before it even exists; Noblesse oblige. And then there is the constant torrent of news about facebook's other indiscretions, e.g. regarding keeping the data they siphoned off secure, e.g. misusing data gathered under false pretenses like 2fa phone numbers, or e.g. how they treat the poor souls who they hired for pennies in Manila to do their content moderation, etc. >There's been a spate of bad press about Facebook recently, so that's primarily what's been coloring your view. I don't give much attention to the attention grabbing op-eds and pundits and sensationalized reporting. E.g. I think the entire Russia stuff when it comes to facebook is overblown, by a lot. But again, thanks for reading my mind. By and large, I find CNN reporting despicable, MSNBC reporting even more so, but the uncrowned king of despise still remains Fox News, when it comes to TV networks. >Democrats are very bad people making very bad policy most of the time Since you bring it up, I believe that Democrats are mostly good people making bad policy most of the time. And that Republicans are, well... kinda split, with some real bad (and loud!) people and some good people with good intensions, and that Republicans make bad policy most of the time. [1] e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu... or e.g. the bullshit stuff he said in front of congress
vkou 8y ago
If you're, say, to get non-political for a moment, and talk about flat-Earthers, the media doesn't put finding like-minded delusional individuals one click away. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit do. That's the fundamental difference. You can get a biased, partisan opinion from whichever tabloid you read... But that tabloid doesn't make it trivial to discover that there's two dozen like-minded lunatics, that you can get together with, to get validation for your crazy ideas. Reading, or having a subscription to the Wall Street Journal doesn't give me membership in the political club it's targeted at, or a hotline to a dozen industrialists. Reading something shared by the Flat Earth Society of Truth on Facebook does, because the link to their Facebook group is right there, and they are looking for members.
- code_duck 8y ago
  Also, social media sites can recommend disturbing content to people based on their history. I think it goes something like: you’re following accounts related to to depression, suicide and moody black and white photos? You might also like… this page glorifying self harm! The automatically generated, opaquely curated pages like Instagrams’s ‘explore’ can present disturbing videos and themes as if they’re normal or appealing (e.g. the case with Molly Russell). Also the choices sites make based on your profile sometimes offend or puzzle people as they can seem personal or even offensive. For instance if someone gets ads or suggested content for acne control or weight loss, it could be seen as hurtful or offensive.
- supernovae 8y ago
  Facebook and social media, in general, has done a lot to bring the "dark web" forward to the masses. What i think sucks the most is that if you silence this nonsense the result isn't that they quietly retreat away but they weaponize the silencing as censorship and it they use that to boost their signal and people see/hear the controversy and instead of letting it fade away like it should that controversy is boosted on social media and it gives them some appearance of validity. same playbook fascists use
- reallydude 8y ago
  > But that tabloid doesn't make it trivial to discover that there's two dozen like-minded lunatics, that you can get together with, to get validation for your crazy ideas. In other contexts, it's understood that security by obscurity is bad.
idrios 8y ago
While I wouldn't call Facebook content benign, I definitely try to be mindful when I see articles like these that news sites like Bloomberg are so eager to attack Facebook because Facebook is the biggest and most direct threat to their business model. There's certainly a lot of irony in this article lambasting Facebook for spreading outrage culture, itself written in such a vitriolic tone
- dhimes 8y ago
  While I wouldn't call Facebook content benign, I definitely try to be mindful when I see articles like these that news sites like Bloomberg are so eager to attack Facebook because Facebook is the biggest and most direct threat to their business model. This is an excellent point, and I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't catch it myself.
- supernovae 8y ago
  Google is the biggest and most direct threat to the publisher model. Publishers don't earn (good) money off social traffic, it's just not what advertisers pay for so if you're an add driven business you want Google or Pinterest (search) traffic.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    The biggest and most direct threat to the publisher model is other publishers. Publishing used to be hugely profitable because you needed a printing press or a big radio tower, which cost a million dollars, which made it rare and therefore valuable. If you wanted to advertise there weren't that many publishers to choose from in a given market, so they got to charge high rates. Then the internet smashed the economics of that to smithereens. The New York Times now has to compete with your blog. And your blog doesn't have that much traffic, but the sum total of all blogs and social media actually does, so the number of ad dollars going to traditional publishers has gone way down. People always point to Google because they sell advertising and get their cut when they do. But the thing Google replaced isn't publishers, it's ad sales reps, and nobody weeps for them. The "loss" isn't the commission going to Google instead of some ad rep, it's the tiny amounts each going to millions of bloggers which used to get summed up and pay the salaries of thousands of reporters. Which is why the publishers are willing to resort to underhanded dirty tricks as they did to get the EU copyright directive -- because their goal is to shut down all of this user generated content which competes with them for lucrative eyeballs.
drhayes9 8y ago
One major difference is "the media" is not a monolithic entity with singular purpose, while Facebook is. I also don't know of any other media property that has Facebook's "circulation"; Facebook has around 2.3 billion "subscribers".
- kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
  > "the media" is not a monolithic entity Nor is FB, in the context of this discussion. Those 2.3 billion people are not 'subscribers', they are content creators and distributors. It's not like Zuck and his staff personally come up with nefarious stories to put on FB and indoctrinate the masses.
  - drhayes9 8y ago
    But the algorithms that decide what content to surface come from one place with one intent. Newspapers can't globally decide to emphasize particular stories and have as great an effect.
    - brycesbeard 8y ago
      I’d say it’s the revealed preferences of FB users that decide which content to surface. Facebooks algorithms are just enabling that. At what point do we accept that polarization (in a tribal sense) is a featurebug in human psychology? Maybe fb is just giving us what we want.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - jerf 8y ago
      "Newspapers can't globally decide to emphasize particular stories and have as great an effect." One way to read the new's industry's issues with Facebook is that, actually, yes they did, and they're trying to protect the turf that Facebook is encroaching on. The media has an incredible power to set the agenda, in both a positive (choosing to cover) and negative (eliminating a story by simply ignoring it to death) sense, and it uses it to an extent that can only be called "routine".
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treis 8y ago
>The irony is that the media is doing this now, with respect to anything related to Facebook. You could have stopped at the comma. How many people out there regularly watch Fox News and MSNBC? Or read The Rolling Stone and the WSJ? We've had partisan bubbles for as long as we've had any sort of mass media.
- nemild 8y ago
  Yes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse, because we each individually get the exact information that is "relevant" to us and therefore feeds our confirmation bias. It's a different form of tribalism from 1950s mass media partisanship. There's actually research (James Hamilton @ Stanford) that shows when capital costs for printing presses were higher, newspapers became less partisan because you had to appeal to everyone to be profitable. The internet, cable news, are helping to unwind that period. As background, I've spent years writing on social media (and used to work in it): My Media literacy guide: http://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.md http://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.m... A piece I did for Quartz on Selective Facts: https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-isnt-fake-news-its-selective-facts/ https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is... And my data analysis of the NY Times (with an example in social media): https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
  - treis 8y ago
    >Yes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse, because we each individually get the exact information that is "relevant" to us and therefore feeds our confirmation bias. It's a different form of tribalism from 1950s mass media partisanship. There's actually research (James Hamilton @ Stanford) that shows when capital costs for printing presses were higher, newspapers became less partisan because you had to appeal to everyone to be profitable. The internet, cable news, are helping to unwind that period. I definitely think it's true that mass media has become more partisan. But, as you note, it's not coming from social media. It's coming from the cost of delivering content being driven to practically zero while simultaneously being able to reach nearly everyone in the world.
  - 8y ago
disqard 8y ago
You bring up an important point. At the same time, the media is in a precarious codependent position, needing to whip up its readers into an emotional frenzy, simply to stay alive. It's as if a sentient cortisol dispenser were plugged into many humans, and its own incentive system measured "how animated are the people recieving my services".
scblock 8y ago
If you've ever used facebook then you'd know that your description "99.9% benign user generated content" is completely wrong.
- reallydude 8y ago
  This is not empirically "wrong". My feed is completely benign, as is my fiancee's and mom's and sister's and best friend's (the number of people who have left their facebook open for me to peruse).
wongarsu 8y ago
> Facebook is a website with 99.9% benign user generated content 99.5% of Boing 737 MAX never crashed. That doesn't mean that 0.5% crashing isn't a systematic problem that is newsworthy and demands action.
Ntrails 8y ago
I am not sure I believe that facebook content is truly anything like 99.9% user generated at this point.
- 2_3_billion 8y ago
  I'd hazard a guess that, considering there's no real bar to clear for generating facebook content (an email address, maybe a prepaid phone number, and a working internet connection), it might be less than one in ten records is not the work of a business or automation outfit. So less than 10%. Consider that algorithmic trading in stock markets is insanely noisy, and each trade comes with a fee. Many trades are executed as pricing probes, or efforts to exploit a minute shift in a given price. Assume facebook traffic has similar motives, just to suck impressions into a viral current for any particular campaign of appeal, or at least convince clientelle that advertising with a PR firm actually works. Gaining available eyeballs results in fractions of a penny in certain "users" pockets.
elamje 8y ago
The percentage of content hardly matters in regards to your point about news being in this business long before Facebook. It's ironic that news sources are pointing fingers here since this has been their CORE product for years, minus the troves of data. News channels make the extremely rare seem common, and the common seem like it doesn't exist. All to drive ad revenue. Now traditional news is rapidly becoming irrelevant and we see pay walls popping up left and right. I would argue that the news media is worse at propagating extreme fear and paranoia, than Facebook. At least a lot of Facebook content is funny/viral videos, whereas the news is 90+% negative
duxup 8y ago
In fairness I'm not sure any given person qualifies as being responsible for being "the media" or all the other stuff. There's a large amount of "media" folks who at worst title an article in a way that catch's eyeballs, compared to those actually pushing straight bullshit. Anyone selling BS to people deserves scorn, that includes Facebook.
aylmao 8y ago
Here's other takes: > Fox News exacerbates poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading hoaxes and inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on ([1]) > CNN exacerbates poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on (removed hoaxes since I couldn't find much in that line, but feel welcome to correct me [2]) > Big media companies with political interests exacerbate poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading hoaxes and inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on ([1], [2]) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies#Persian_Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies#Persian_Gulf...
jlarocco 8y ago
> Facebook is a website with 99.9% benign user generated content. That's speculation, though. There's not enough information publicly available to know for sure.
blueboo 8y ago
We found someone who hasn't logged onto their Facebook since 2011
ck425 8y ago
Even if most UGC on Facebook is benign, the system that uses it most certainly isn't. The data harvesting and addictive user design is actively harmful even if the content itself isn't.
3xblah 8y ago
"Facebook is a website..." That is exactly right. I have no idea what "platform" means, but I know what "website" means. (Or "endpoint".) Facebook was not always in the "news" business. The original website in fact had no "news" feed and initially users complained when they added this "feature". The addition of "news" of the kind produced by journalists was added as part of this "feature" much, much later. Facebook and the news media both sell ad space, but no one stores their personal photos and correspondence with the news media. If Facebook is, as Zuckerberg would claim, not a news organization, then Facebook cannot claim to have made any positive improvement on the quality of journalism. It stands to reason aside from "convenience" there is no benefit to getting news via Facebook's website versus the website of the news organization that produces it. To the extent Facebook manipulates the news that people recieve via the Facebook website, there could be negative effects. AFAIK, the news media do not create online versions of their newspapers that (outside the control of the reader) automatically change what stories are presented based on the reader's identity. Though with the influence of Facebook's methods, it would not surprise me to hear that this was happening. Whatever the case, certainly there must be a journalistic ethical principle that would point away from algorithmically manipulating which news reports are delivered to each reader, even if newspapers know the identity of each reader and what each reader has read in the past. "News", as in "newspapers", is the antithesis of controlled communications where not everyone recieves the same information, e.g., within a corporation. Perhaps an analogy would be a library that knows the identity of its patrons and the items they have checked out in the past. It might be able to make predictions and manipulate which items each patron was exposed to when they visited the library, but it would seem against the fundamental purpose of a library to do such a thing. The question to ask is what place does "news" (as in "newspaper" not updates on others' Facebook pages) have amongst people's personal photos and correspondence, the "99.9% benign user generated content"? Why is it there? Here is some background reading. https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/504/Brain-Hacking-for-Dummies-page01.html https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/504/Brain-Ha... https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-... "January 2018 Facebook begins announcing major changes, aimed to ensure that time on the platform will be "time well spent." In fact, it was in besting just such a rival that Facebook came to dominate how we discover and consume news. Back in 2012, the most exciting social network for distributing news online wasn't Facebook, it was Twitter. The latter's 140-character posts accelerated the speed at which news could spread, allowing its influence in the news industry to grow much faster than Facebook's. "Twitter was this massive, massive threat," says a former Facebook executive heavily involved in the decisionmaking at the time. So Zuckerberg pursued a strategy he has often deployed against competitors he cannot buy: He copied, then crushed. He adjusted Facebook's News Feed to fully incorporate news (despite its name, the feed was originally tilted toward personal news) and adjusted the product so that it showed author bylines and headlines."
daveheq 8y ago
I disagree with your 99% assertion... About 30% of the stuff I've seen on my feed and others through the years of friends, family, and acquaintances has been opinionated/political to the point of dissent generally just causing posters to double-down or become entrenched and more opinionated next time. Maybe this kind of stuff you consider benign?

bshipp 8y ago

That's a little disingenous. No doubt you are correct that 99.9% of the user-generated content is benign, but that 99.9% of user-generated content would likely not represent 99.9% of viewer traffic. If only 0.01% of toxic content by terms of volume is receiving disproportionate attention and focus, not only permissible but actively encouraged by complex opaque algorithms, then it is certainly a much bigger problem then it's meagre character count would otherwise suggest.

ptero 8y ago
> If only 0.01% of toxic content ... is receiving disproportionate attention and focus, not only permissible but actively encouraged by complex opaque algorithms, then it is certainly a much bigger problem To me, this needs to be split into two use cases. The fact that .01% of content gets viewed a lot more than average is not a bad thing. Much of user content is junk with a heavy dose of ads for a seasoning. It is perfectly reasonable that original or thoughtful posts, even if unpleasant or provocative, get much higher traffic. The problem is the algorithmic reinforcement that encourages those making short-term sensationalist statements. Let's still allow folks to voice their opinions, whichever they are, and advertise them by the digital age equivalents to "word of mouth". Just keep it human, not algorithm driven. My 2c.
- bshipp 8y ago
  I agree, that's a very useful and necessary distinction that I neglected to include in my original comment. Without those spontaneous user-composed opinions and anecdotes, the platform would quickly become (or perhaps already has become) plastic and artificial. As anyone having to relate information through a bureaucratic communications department has certainly experienced, even the most unique, interesting and useful story in the world stands little chance against an eager team of copy editors and PR representatives.
- jtbayly 8y ago
  I don't think that solves anything. "Human driven" is precisely what forwarded messages on WhatsApp are. FB is feeling the need to limit the number of people you can forward something to in order to solve the same problem you're attempting to solve. My presumption is that by far the single biggest signal on whether to display a post on the FB feed to more people is how many people like and share. That's a people problem at the core, not an algorithm problem.
  - CharlesColeman 8y ago
    > My presumption is that by far the single biggest signal on whether to display a post on the FB feed to more people is how many people like and share. That's a people problem at the core, not an algorithm problem. It's still an algorithm problem at its core, because the algorithm is what determines what the "single biggest signal" it will use for amplification is. There's no reason why maximum shareability should be the main factor, it could be something else like some proxy for erudition, for instance.
    - intended 8y ago
      There’s no proxy for content quality. Simply: it’s all content and it’s impact depends on the people who take the information in and then apply their beliefs and understanding to it. Some content is simple - recipes for example. Others are impossible to parse: “they want to reduce hate speech” translates as “they want to remove conservative/right wing speech” (this actually happened in a conversation yesterday. Suggesting that the term hate speech is being transformed/co opted) Engagement in contrast, is simple, reliable and measurable.
      - CharlesColeman 8y ago
        > There’s no proxy for content quality. I don't think that's true, it's just that the proxies are imperfect. But the specific alternative metric wasn't that important to my point. > Engagement in contrast, is simple, reliable and measurable. That's the root of the problem: the algorithms have been designed to use "simple, reliable, and [easily] measurable" things as their whole input, and then narrowly A/B tested to maximize some other easily measurable output. Looked at holistically, it's too simple to do an acceptable job. If you took a similar attitude, and applied it to create an algorithm for another discipline, like medicine for instance, it'd be pretty clear it'd be a disaster.
- Traster 8y ago
  I'm sorry but let's not dress this up. The content with high engagement in facebook is almost exclusively lowest common denominator crap. It's not quotes kant and satre - it's quotes from LadBible and Kim K. I think we can all agree that quantity isn't the right metric for this - whether that's number of posts or amount of traffic on a given post. What we're really trying to do is gauge what the conversation is. Having said that, there are clear distinguishable problems we can point to that have an interesting quantifier. Anonymous 'Campaign' groups run by individuals that have previously been associated with Brexit campaigning are currently spending millions on Brexit advertising. There is no indication of where the money comes from to pay for these (we know it's not from the people who are associated with the page because they're just staffers). In that way I agree with you - the thing to worry about is where the ad dollars are spent, but I don't think that's the only thing we should be worrying about.
  - panarky 7y ago
    Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap [0]. The 1% Rule says that in any online community, 1% of participants create content while 99% lurk [1]. I'll propose Panarky's Corollary that 90% of the crap is produced by 0.1% of the participants and then shared, liked and amplified by 90% of participants. These 0.1% pathological participants are corporations advertising, governments propagandizing, zealots proselytizing, and trolls antagonizing. Facebook can see these patterns better than anyone, and they could eliminate or de-rank the material from the 0.1% if they wanted to. But the 0.1% is disproportionately incendiary and therefore profitable, so Facebook has a very strong incentive to look the other way. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
learnstats2 8y ago
> No doubt you are correct that 99.9% That's not my starting assumption. I think Facebook has a problem that its typical so-called "benign" users are creating less and less content, while malignant content-makers are not discouraged.
- angott 8y ago
  They acquired Instagram and keep acquiring small startups exactly for this reason. Content generation direct to FB is going down because the platform is not innovating anymore, and for now their only way out of it is through acquisitions.
ryandrake 8y ago
This is a case of “What you permit, you promote.” People focus on the 0.01% of a platform’s content that’s bad/toxic because that is what defines where the platform draws the line on what’s acceptable.
- GreenJelloShot 8y ago
  Isn't "What you permit, you promote" literally intolerance? The whole point of tolerance is to say "I don't agree with that, but I respect your right to do your own thing." This is advocating the exact opposite. Under this philosophy I can not longer be tolerant, because anything I "permit" I will be accused of promoting. This seems like a recipe for a horrible, horrible world.
stickfigure 8y ago
I'm puzzled why Facebook is getting the blame here. If you are seeing toxic content in your feed, it's because your friends put it there. It's not Facebook's fault that your friends suck.
- nym 8y ago
  Maybe it's that facebook encourages the content from your friends that is toxic, because that toxic content leads to more clicks, engagement, and ultimately revenue.
- angott 8y ago
  Yes, but your friends share content that sucks because the Facebook algorithm fills their feeds with click-bait, with the sole purpose of increasing engagement and user retention metrics.
- pawelk 8y ago
  > If you are seeing toxic content in your feed, it's because your friends put it there. Not really. Facebook put it there for me. Time and again it shows me items like "[Friend] replied to a comment on [toxic thing]", where the thing gets a prominent preview etc. I haven't seen a real update from [Friend] in my feed for months, yet there are plenty when I visit their profile. Even if the friend is fighting the good fight and has commented to correct some misconceptions, it's clear that this particular action was selected for my feed because it's related to a controversial item.
- smt88 8y ago
  No. The most toxic content is often comments, which are shown to me even when I don't want to see them. If it weren't for comments from non-friends, Facebook would have no toxic content for me at all.
  - gscott 8y ago
    If you go to the persons profile and click unfollow then you won't see their comments on posts that are now yours.
taneq 8y ago
> If only 0.01% of toxic content by terms of volume is receiving disproportionate attention and focus You mean like the rumour-mongering, low-effort politics etc. in your standard tabloid?
colllectorof 8y ago
Not to mention that it's entirely possible to create very bad effects via benign content. Facebook (and other social media) use has been linked to a significant rise in depression. https://www.thisisinsider.com/social-media-link-depression-loneliness-2018-11 https://www.thisisinsider.com/social-media-link-depression-l... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rise-in-suicide-and-social-media-is-there-a-link/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rise-in-suicide-and-social-medi...

rndgermandude 8y ago

Most books are not "The Little Red Book", yet "The Little Red Book" managed to help cause a lot of harm. It's not just the fraction of "bad" content in your system, it's also the level of propagation. Most of the "99.9% benign" content will not draw a lot of eyes per piece of content, while I'd guess "bad" content will draw a lot more eyes, and ergo have a bigger impact.

z2 8y ago
I totally agree with what you are saying, but to nitpick/go on a tangent, the direction of information flow may matter too. From what I understand, the Little Red Book was more of a symbol or product of the cult of personality and hysteria, rather than the _cause_ of subsequent hysteria after its publishing. In other words, there was plenty of dogma to go around that it may not have created more chaos, and had it not existed, some other symbol may have taken its place. It would be interesting to see how much content on Facebook, despite high propagation, is mostly destined for echo chambers, or actually spurring new action and converting others.
ummonk 8y ago
Let's start banning books with bad content I guess?
- rndgermandude 8y ago
  I did not make this argument. I made the opposite argument in the past, actually. I am a proponent of reclassifying facebook etc as common carriers/utilities and forcing them not to censor any content unless it's actually illegal content. Tho, that does not and can not mean they have an obligation to promote such content e.g. through search results. However, words do have impact, and may be used as a weapon to incite the readers to certain actions. This can be actions I like, or actions that I find abhorrent. Then again, the danger that censorship poses to a free society, and the danger of unfettered censorship by private parties controlling major chunks of the "public marketplace of ideas" in particular, outweighs the dangers of bad people publishing legal but reprehensible speech, by a lot. The censorship we allow has to be minimal, and driven by societal consensus or compromise, and right now the state, with a separation of power and checks and balances, while not perfect, is still the far better alternative than letting a Zuckerberg or a Brin or a Dorsey or a Huffman unilaterally decide what's OK and what gets banned.

deleted 8y ago

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yeahitslikethat 8y ago

It's not ironic. It's hypocritical. What they are saying about Facebook is still true. Facebook is disgusting. Zuck is a gross, slimy person. He can't create something good, because HE is bad.

max76 8y ago
This is black and white thinking. No one is entirely bad, no one is entirely good. Very bad people are capable of making very good things. Very good people are capable of making very bad things.
- rndgermandude 8y ago
  Zuckerberg tho seems to me like a very bad person making very bad things most of the time.
  - beering 8y ago
    > very bad person making very bad things most of the time. That's your slanted viewpoint based on what you've been hearing in the news media. Why is he a "very bad" person? Why are most of the things that he makes "very bad"? There's been a spate of bad press about Facebook recently, so that's primarily what's been coloring your view. For people in other bubbles, they might believe that "Democrats are very bad people making very bad policy most of the time", or "Muslims are very bad people doing very bad things most of the time". Gross simplifications are easy to adopt, hard to abandon.
    - rndgermandude 8y ago
      >That's your slanted viewpoint based on what you've been hearing in the news media. Thanks for reading my mind, knowing me better than I could ever know myself. >Why is he a "very bad" person? I based my opinion mostly on the stuff I saw and keep seeing from him directly[1]. >Why are most of the things that he makes "very bad"? Well, I came to the conclusion (and not just me) that his stuff is designed to be as addictive as possible and as invasive as possible. What he creates, deliberately, is the modern equivalent of cigarettes. Bad attributes in my book. His products are, in my humble opinion, a major contributing factor in the polarization of society and the decrease in civility and political culture all around the world (and no, I am not referring to Russians abusing facebook, I mean facebook itself, which attempts to increase addictiveness by highlighting extremes and conflict as a matter of "entertainment"). On top of that, he and his companies are using their power to lobby and push for stuff they full well know is detrimental to society but helpful to facebook, if it is regulation that is designed to strengthen facebook through regulatory capture, or if it is to bring "zero rated" facebook to developing countries in an effort to stomp out local competition before it even exists; Noblesse oblige. And then there is the constant torrent of news about facebook's other indiscretions, e.g. regarding keeping the data they siphoned off secure, e.g. misusing data gathered under false pretenses like 2fa phone numbers, or e.g. how they treat the poor souls who they hired for pennies in Manila to do their content moderation, etc. >There's been a spate of bad press about Facebook recently, so that's primarily what's been coloring your view. I don't give much attention to the attention grabbing op-eds and pundits and sensationalized reporting. E.g. I think the entire Russia stuff when it comes to facebook is overblown, by a lot. But again, thanks for reading my mind. By and large, I find CNN reporting despicable, MSNBC reporting even more so, but the uncrowned king of despise still remains Fox News, when it comes to TV networks. >Democrats are very bad people making very bad policy most of the time Since you bring it up, I believe that Democrats are mostly good people making bad policy most of the time. And that Republicans are, well... kinda split, with some real bad (and loud!) people and some good people with good intensions, and that Republicans make bad policy most of the time. [1] e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu... or e.g. the bullshit stuff he said in front of congress

vkou 8y ago

If you're, say, to get non-political for a moment, and talk about flat-Earthers, the media doesn't put finding like-minded delusional individuals one click away. Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit do. That's the fundamental difference. You can get a biased, partisan opinion from whichever tabloid you read... But that tabloid doesn't make it trivial to discover that there's two dozen like-minded lunatics, that you can get together with, to get validation for your crazy ideas. Reading, or having a subscription to the Wall Street Journal doesn't give me membership in the political club it's targeted at, or a hotline to a dozen industrialists. Reading something shared by the Flat Earth Society of Truth on Facebook does, because the link to their Facebook group is right there, and they are looking for members.

code_duck 8y ago
Also, social media sites can recommend disturbing content to people based on their history. I think it goes something like: you’re following accounts related to to depression, suicide and moody black and white photos? You might also like… this page glorifying self harm! The automatically generated, opaquely curated pages like Instagrams’s ‘explore’ can present disturbing videos and themes as if they’re normal or appealing (e.g. the case with Molly Russell). Also the choices sites make based on your profile sometimes offend or puzzle people as they can seem personal or even offensive. For instance if someone gets ads or suggested content for acne control or weight loss, it could be seen as hurtful or offensive.
supernovae 8y ago
Facebook and social media, in general, has done a lot to bring the "dark web" forward to the masses. What i think sucks the most is that if you silence this nonsense the result isn't that they quietly retreat away but they weaponize the silencing as censorship and it they use that to boost their signal and people see/hear the controversy and instead of letting it fade away like it should that controversy is boosted on social media and it gives them some appearance of validity. same playbook fascists use
reallydude 8y ago
> But that tabloid doesn't make it trivial to discover that there's two dozen like-minded lunatics, that you can get together with, to get validation for your crazy ideas. In other contexts, it's understood that security by obscurity is bad.

idrios 8y ago

While I wouldn't call Facebook content benign, I definitely try to be mindful when I see articles like these that news sites like Bloomberg are so eager to attack Facebook because Facebook is the biggest and most direct threat to their business model. There's certainly a lot of irony in this article lambasting Facebook for spreading outrage culture, itself written in such a vitriolic tone

dhimes 8y ago
While I wouldn't call Facebook content benign, I definitely try to be mindful when I see articles like these that news sites like Bloomberg are so eager to attack Facebook because Facebook is the biggest and most direct threat to their business model. This is an excellent point, and I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't catch it myself.
supernovae 8y ago
Google is the biggest and most direct threat to the publisher model. Publishers don't earn (good) money off social traffic, it's just not what advertisers pay for so if you're an add driven business you want Google or Pinterest (search) traffic.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  The biggest and most direct threat to the publisher model is other publishers. Publishing used to be hugely profitable because you needed a printing press or a big radio tower, which cost a million dollars, which made it rare and therefore valuable. If you wanted to advertise there weren't that many publishers to choose from in a given market, so they got to charge high rates. Then the internet smashed the economics of that to smithereens. The New York Times now has to compete with your blog. And your blog doesn't have that much traffic, but the sum total of all blogs and social media actually does, so the number of ad dollars going to traditional publishers has gone way down. People always point to Google because they sell advertising and get their cut when they do. But the thing Google replaced isn't publishers, it's ad sales reps, and nobody weeps for them. The "loss" isn't the commission going to Google instead of some ad rep, it's the tiny amounts each going to millions of bloggers which used to get summed up and pay the salaries of thousands of reporters. Which is why the publishers are willing to resort to underhanded dirty tricks as they did to get the EU copyright directive -- because their goal is to shut down all of this user generated content which competes with them for lucrative eyeballs.

drhayes9 8y ago

One major difference is "the media" is not a monolithic entity with singular purpose, while Facebook is. I also don't know of any other media property that has Facebook's "circulation"; Facebook has around 2.3 billion "subscribers".

kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
> "the media" is not a monolithic entity Nor is FB, in the context of this discussion. Those 2.3 billion people are not 'subscribers', they are content creators and distributors. It's not like Zuck and his staff personally come up with nefarious stories to put on FB and indoctrinate the masses.
- drhayes9 8y ago
  But the algorithms that decide what content to surface come from one place with one intent. Newspapers can't globally decide to emphasize particular stories and have as great an effect.
  - brycesbeard 8y ago
    I’d say it’s the revealed preferences of FB users that decide which content to surface. Facebooks algorithms are just enabling that. At what point do we accept that polarization (in a tribal sense) is a featurebug in human psychology? Maybe fb is just giving us what we want.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - jerf 8y ago
    "Newspapers can't globally decide to emphasize particular stories and have as great an effect." One way to read the new's industry's issues with Facebook is that, actually, yes they did, and they're trying to protect the turf that Facebook is encroaching on. The media has an incredible power to set the agenda, in both a positive (choosing to cover) and negative (eliminating a story by simply ignoring it to death) sense, and it uses it to an extent that can only be called "routine".

deleted 8y ago

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treis 8y ago

>The irony is that the media is doing this now, with respect to anything related to Facebook. You could have stopped at the comma. How many people out there regularly watch Fox News and MSNBC? Or read The Rolling Stone and the WSJ? We've had partisan bubbles for as long as we've had any sort of mass media.

nemild 8y ago
Yes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse, because we each individually get the exact information that is "relevant" to us and therefore feeds our confirmation bias. It's a different form of tribalism from 1950s mass media partisanship. There's actually research (James Hamilton @ Stanford) that shows when capital costs for printing presses were higher, newspapers became less partisan because you had to appeal to everyone to be profitable. The internet, cable news, are helping to unwind that period. As background, I've spent years writing on social media (and used to work in it): My Media literacy guide: http://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.md http://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README.m... A piece I did for Quartz on Selective Facts: https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-isnt-fake-news-its-selective-facts/ https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is... And my data analysis of the NY Times (with an example in social media): https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
- treis 8y ago
  >Yes, but the partisanship is likely getting worse, because we each individually get the exact information that is "relevant" to us and therefore feeds our confirmation bias. It's a different form of tribalism from 1950s mass media partisanship. There's actually research (James Hamilton @ Stanford) that shows when capital costs for printing presses were higher, newspapers became less partisan because you had to appeal to everyone to be profitable. The internet, cable news, are helping to unwind that period. I definitely think it's true that mass media has become more partisan. But, as you note, it's not coming from social media. It's coming from the cost of delivering content being driven to practically zero while simultaneously being able to reach nearly everyone in the world.
- 8y ago

disqard 8y ago

You bring up an important point. At the same time, the media is in a precarious codependent position, needing to whip up its readers into an emotional frenzy, simply to stay alive. It's as if a sentient cortisol dispenser were plugged into many humans, and its own incentive system measured "how animated are the people recieving my services".

scblock 8y ago

If you've ever used facebook then you'd know that your description "99.9% benign user generated content" is completely wrong.

reallydude 8y ago
This is not empirically "wrong". My feed is completely benign, as is my fiancee's and mom's and sister's and best friend's (the number of people who have left their facebook open for me to peruse).

wongarsu 8y ago

> Facebook is a website with 99.9% benign user generated content 99.5% of Boing 737 MAX never crashed. That doesn't mean that 0.5% crashing isn't a systematic problem that is newsworthy and demands action.

Ntrails 8y ago

I am not sure I believe that facebook content is truly anything like 99.9% user generated at this point.

2_3_billion 8y ago
I'd hazard a guess that, considering there's no real bar to clear for generating facebook content (an email address, maybe a prepaid phone number, and a working internet connection), it might be less than one in ten records is not the work of a business or automation outfit. So less than 10%. Consider that algorithmic trading in stock markets is insanely noisy, and each trade comes with a fee. Many trades are executed as pricing probes, or efforts to exploit a minute shift in a given price. Assume facebook traffic has similar motives, just to suck impressions into a viral current for any particular campaign of appeal, or at least convince clientelle that advertising with a PR firm actually works. Gaining available eyeballs results in fractions of a penny in certain "users" pockets.

elamje 8y ago

The percentage of content hardly matters in regards to your point about news being in this business long before Facebook. It's ironic that news sources are pointing fingers here since this has been their CORE product for years, minus the troves of data. News channels make the extremely rare seem common, and the common seem like it doesn't exist. All to drive ad revenue. Now traditional news is rapidly becoming irrelevant and we see pay walls popping up left and right. I would argue that the news media is worse at propagating extreme fear and paranoia, than Facebook. At least a lot of Facebook content is funny/viral videos, whereas the news is 90+% negative

duxup 8y ago

In fairness I'm not sure any given person qualifies as being responsible for being "the media" or all the other stuff. There's a large amount of "media" folks who at worst title an article in a way that catch's eyeballs, compared to those actually pushing straight bullshit. Anyone selling BS to people deserves scorn, that includes Facebook.

aylmao 8y ago

Here's other takes: > Fox News exacerbates poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading hoaxes and inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on ([1]) > CNN exacerbates poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on (removed hoaxes since I couldn't find much in that line, but feel welcome to correct me [2]) > Big media companies with political interests exacerbate poisonous politics by creating filter bubbles of like-minded partisans, spreading hoaxes and inaccuracies, inducing anxiety and paranoia, rewarding clickbait and outrage, and so on ([1], [2]) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_News_controversies [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies#Persian_Gulf_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN_controversies#Persian_Gulf...

jlarocco 8y ago

> Facebook is a website with 99.9% benign user generated content. That's speculation, though. There's not enough information publicly available to know for sure.

blueboo 8y ago

We found someone who hasn't logged onto their Facebook since 2011

ck425 8y ago

Even if most UGC on Facebook is benign, the system that uses it most certainly isn't. The data harvesting and addictive user design is actively harmful even if the content itself isn't.

3xblah 8y ago

"Facebook is a website..." That is exactly right. I have no idea what "platform" means, but I know what "website" means. (Or "endpoint".) Facebook was not always in the "news" business. The original website in fact had no "news" feed and initially users complained when they added this "feature". The addition of "news" of the kind produced by journalists was added as part of this "feature" much, much later. Facebook and the news media both sell ad space, but no one stores their personal photos and correspondence with the news media. If Facebook is, as Zuckerberg would claim, not a news organization, then Facebook cannot claim to have made any positive improvement on the quality of journalism. It stands to reason aside from "convenience" there is no benefit to getting news via Facebook's website versus the website of the news organization that produces it. To the extent Facebook manipulates the news that people recieve via the Facebook website, there could be negative effects. AFAIK, the news media do not create online versions of their newspapers that (outside the control of the reader) automatically change what stories are presented based on the reader's identity. Though with the influence of Facebook's methods, it would not surprise me to hear that this was happening. Whatever the case, certainly there must be a journalistic ethical principle that would point away from algorithmically manipulating which news reports are delivered to each reader, even if newspapers know the identity of each reader and what each reader has read in the past. "News", as in "newspapers", is the antithesis of controlled communications where not everyone recieves the same information, e.g., within a corporation. Perhaps an analogy would be a library that knows the identity of its patrons and the items they have checked out in the past. It might be able to make predictions and manipulate which items each patron was exposed to when they visited the library, but it would seem against the fundamental purpose of a library to do such a thing. The question to ask is what place does "news" (as in "newspaper" not updates on others' Facebook pages) have amongst people's personal photos and correspondence, the "99.9% benign user generated content"? Why is it there? Here is some background reading. https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/504/Brain-Hacking-for-Dummies-page01.html https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/504/Brain-Ha... https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-2-years-of-hell/ https://www.wired.com/story/inside-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-... "January 2018 Facebook begins announcing major changes, aimed to ensure that time on the platform will be "time well spent." In fact, it was in besting just such a rival that Facebook came to dominate how we discover and consume news. Back in 2012, the most exciting social network for distributing news online wasn't Facebook, it was Twitter. The latter's 140-character posts accelerated the speed at which news could spread, allowing its influence in the news industry to grow much faster than Facebook's. "Twitter was this massive, massive threat," says a former Facebook executive heavily involved in the decisionmaking at the time. So Zuckerberg pursued a strategy he has often deployed against competitors he cannot buy: He copied, then crushed. He adjusted Facebook's News Feed to fully incorporate news (despite its name, the feed was originally tilted toward personal news) and adjusted the product so that it showed author bylines and headlines."

daveheq 8y ago

I disagree with your 99% assertion... About 30% of the stuff I've seen on my feed and others through the years of friends, family, and acquaintances has been opinionated/political to the point of dissent generally just causing posters to double-down or become entrenched and more opinionated next time. Maybe this kind of stuff you consider benign?