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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 a

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 8y 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)

panarky 8y 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)