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Honestly, this does give me much more confidence in Facebook's internal governance, even if the platform often bows to media demands. Much to the Chagrin of ma

Honestly, this does give me much more confidence in Facebook's internal governance, even if the platform often bows to media demands. Much to the Chagrin of many on HN, Facebook is, and has been a fairly open platform to people of all convictions, backgrounds, and political stripes. Even if it has been unsteady handed at times. This, as well as their sorting algorithm may well be contributing to the collapse of institutional trust and cultural balkanization of the western world. To a progressive liberal or political moderate who directly benefitted from the economic and technological booms we've experience over the last 30 years this is upsetting, because the global order (and its associated stability) from-which they've benefited, which brought us to where we are is disintegrating around us. To me, hand-wringing about Facebook's relatively hands-off approach the political dialogues on their platform is just resentment about the loss of a prescribed cultural narrative and familiar cultural coalitions, the collapse of-which has given every stakeholder in their nation's future an opportunity to speak up for their own convictions and interests, in hopes that theirs will be the dominant narrative of the new political landscape. I wish these dialogues and factional aggregations were occurring on a more federated network. But so far as centralized platforms go, I can't think of any company more fit (that's not a compliment, but a lament) than Facebook to host them.

skosch 6y ago
> political dialogues That sounds lovely. Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.
- crocodiletears 6y ago
  They're indicative of a collapse of consensus on the part of society. It could well be argued that prior to our current political era, especially in the US, that the political domain was largely constrained to a discourse on cultural aesthetics, wherein the Democrats and and Republicans argued over trivialities (on a broader national, not individual respect) such as abortion, marriage, and immigration, while they operated on an implicit consensus concerning foreign policy, and had a functional stalemate in terms of the size of the state, farming out many of their policy decisions to thinktanks, corporate donors, and well-established bureaucrats within our regulatory bodies America's role as international security guarantor, its trade policies, and its government's role in domestic affairs was never really up for debate, and it only really changed stepwise in a stochastic manner, responding to situations and incentives day-by-day with no conscious consideration to the role of America or its state on a broader scale. What we're seeing now, is large portions of the population coming to realize that that existing bipartian components of the political consensus - which I believe to be a legacy of the cold war, no longer serves their cultural or economic interests. This process is naturally fractious, chaotic, sometimes violent, and full of dirty tricks, because politics isn't just about flavor of the month policies anymore. We're in the process of reinventing who we collectively are, and what we want to be. As a result, we're running across real, fundamentally irreconcilable political and moral differences that have been buried for decades, as well as confronting the failures and controversies of our past. Many of those fundamental agreements settle neatly along class, racial, and professional boundaries. Others, not so much. Science denial and anti-intellectualism is the natural result, because much of science communication has become a carrier mechanism for policy prescriptions predicated upon society operating under a specific ideological consensus, when in fact someone of a different political persuasion might objectively consume the scientific data and come to a different policy conclusion based on the same data. For the less educated, who encounter proposals from scientists they consider to be politically unworkable, and which might rightfully be considered manipulatively framed, it is easier to reject entire specialized fields of research out of hand than to investigate further and attempt to conceive of alternative proposals because they lack the tools to engage with the information effectively to begin with. All of this is messy, but it constotutes a real political dialogue on the part of society.
- bhupy 6y ago
  > Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it. I understand the disdain for all of this, but this has been the state of American media for the vast majority of its history. Ben Franklin et al would find the anomalous post-Cold War period of journalistic "neutrality" to be unrecognizable. Fake news, name calling, absurd theorizing have been society's way of communicating about issues since the dawn of the printing press — or in other words, "political dialogue".

skosch 6y ago

> political dialogues That sounds lovely. Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.

crocodiletears 6y ago
They're indicative of a collapse of consensus on the part of society. It could well be argued that prior to our current political era, especially in the US, that the political domain was largely constrained to a discourse on cultural aesthetics, wherein the Democrats and and Republicans argued over trivialities (on a broader national, not individual respect) such as abortion, marriage, and immigration, while they operated on an implicit consensus concerning foreign policy, and had a functional stalemate in terms of the size of the state, farming out many of their policy decisions to thinktanks, corporate donors, and well-established bureaucrats within our regulatory bodies America's role as international security guarantor, its trade policies, and its government's role in domestic affairs was never really up for debate, and it only really changed stepwise in a stochastic manner, responding to situations and incentives day-by-day with no conscious consideration to the role of America or its state on a broader scale. What we're seeing now, is large portions of the population coming to realize that that existing bipartian components of the political consensus - which I believe to be a legacy of the cold war, no longer serves their cultural or economic interests. This process is naturally fractious, chaotic, sometimes violent, and full of dirty tricks, because politics isn't just about flavor of the month policies anymore. We're in the process of reinventing who we collectively are, and what we want to be. As a result, we're running across real, fundamentally irreconcilable political and moral differences that have been buried for decades, as well as confronting the failures and controversies of our past. Many of those fundamental agreements settle neatly along class, racial, and professional boundaries. Others, not so much. Science denial and anti-intellectualism is the natural result, because much of science communication has become a carrier mechanism for policy prescriptions predicated upon society operating under a specific ideological consensus, when in fact someone of a different political persuasion might objectively consume the scientific data and come to a different policy conclusion based on the same data. For the less educated, who encounter proposals from scientists they consider to be politically unworkable, and which might rightfully be considered manipulatively framed, it is easier to reject entire specialized fields of research out of hand than to investigate further and attempt to conceive of alternative proposals because they lack the tools to engage with the information effectively to begin with. All of this is messy, but it constotutes a real political dialogue on the part of society.
bhupy 6y ago
> Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it. I understand the disdain for all of this, but this has been the state of American media for the vast majority of its history. Ben Franklin et al would find the anomalous post-Cold War period of journalistic "neutrality" to be unrecognizable. Fake news, name calling, absurd theorizing have been society's way of communicating about issues since the dawn of the printing press — or in other words, "political dialogue".