4 ms·

I agree with all your points, except, as a others have noted, the point of anonymity. I have seen a number of incomprehensibly violent (verbally) threads in my

I agree with all your points, except, as a others have noted, the point of anonymity. I have seen a number of incomprehensibly violent (verbally) threads in my town FB group. These are people who live here, who's kids go to the same schools, shop at the same stores, etc. It's incomprehensible, to be honest. I used to think this had to do more with isolation from the potential for immediate physical violence, and yet even that seems to have been invalidated by what people seem to be willing to do to each other in real life. I don't think the root cause is the internet. It's optimization algorithms. From my perspective we have reached a moment in time when regulatory control might be the only solution. I am definitely a small government guy. That doesn't mean no government, just the judicious application of the massive power government can wield. Over the last several years we have watched two loved family members diverge deeper and deeper into ideological pits of hatred, all fueled 100% by Facebook. One of them on the ideological right and the other on the left. I only use FB to keep in touch with close family. It has been very painful to deal with these two. I've had to snooze them for months at a time in order to not have the walls of hatred they produce pollute my life. What's sad is that we all watched this happen in slow motion over several years. In speaking with other family members from time to time, comments like "Did you notice that uncle Steve..." (made-up name). Once the problem was obvious it was too late, they won't reason with anyone and logical arguments are pointless. This process is a familiar one from another domain: Self radicalization of terrorists. The fact that the FB algorithm (and, to be fair, others) will almost instantly send you full-tilt into a narrow corner of the universe, keep you there and dig deeper and deeper into that hole is the problem. The algorithm has no "return to normal" functionality. Try it. Go to FB and watch a video you would not normally click on. Within a few clicks you are trapped in that general class of videos. I ran a test on this a while back. Getting out of the hole they dig for you takes significant effort. Which means people will tend to continue clicking on the things that drop them deeper into the hole. I understand the utility of this when wanting to learn about how to remodel a bathroom. However, there are a range of topics or areas that should never descend into these gradients and should have a strong automatic reset function. The easy one here is politics. Do not facilitate entry into resonant chambers in any subject related to politics. I know it's hard to define this but it is hard to argue that these algorithms have not caused harm. On your point about communities, news, etc. being mostly local at some point in the past, you hit it right on the nail. Politico did a great article on this that opened my eyes many years ago and helped me understand why things have been so terribly screwed-up. Here it is: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...

DylanBohlender 6y ago
I completely agree with your point about the algorithms. Anecdotally, the point at which Facebook became an unbearable mess for me was when they defaulted the newsfeed to "top stories" in lieu of the chronological feed of posts. Perhaps government regulation could address the big platforms' ability to prioritize the display of user-generated content through algorithms? Forcing chronological sort to be the "default" seems like something that could be advantageous, as the volume of social media posts would naturally prevent posts from gaining momentum in the way they can when they get "prioritized" by a content curation algorithm. The oldschool forum thread organization model of "bumping" seems more prescient by the day.
- robomartin 6y ago
  Yes, something like that. Almost anything would be better than nothing. A simple example from my experiment: I decided to click on TikTok videos on FB. I never watch videos on FB other that those my family might post about our family. In other words, if it isn't about family I don't ever click on videos on FB. I click on one TikTok video and watch it till the end. More TikTok videos surface. I click again and again. I did so about five times in a row. Maybe fifteen minutes total video play time. From that point forward it took a significant effort to go back to less TikTok videos shown to me. I had to click on other stuff, like hate Trump videos. OK, that meant that within a few clicks I was being led into "Trump is the devil" territory. BTW, the TikTok videos didn't disappear from the list either. So now I am in "hate Trump" hell. OK, let's try the other extreme. After much scrolling I found a "hate Democrats/Biden" video, a mild one at that. Once again, within a few clicks I am being offered more and more hateful videos aimed at democrats. So, now my choices became: Hate democrats, hate Trump or watch young girls being stupid on TikTok (what are they thinking?). Because the "hate democrats" was the last category I had more of that than the rest. Yet the point is that FB "fingerprinted" me as wanting to live in those caves. If I touched ANY of them the algorithm instantly flung me deeper into that domain. It quickly becomes a no-win situation. How do you leave any of this? Well, you can't. I can't erase the hate Trump/Democrats stuff from my list, nor am I able to do anything about the dancing TikTok girls. It's hopeless. Well, no, you have to pick something else to obsess over and hope that it buries the other stuff. The problem is that it takes a massive effort once you've told the algo that you want to watch a certain category with just a few clicks. You just can't escape it. I have been clicking on anything I can find that is engineering related. A good source of this are FB groups covering Arduino experiments and other technical hobbies. Even with that, the hateful Trump/Dems caves and TikTok are still there, and they are not there in the noise, they show-up all the time. I did this consciously, and so I knew what I was getting into and, more importantly, I was not using idle time to get sucked into a deep dark hole of hatred without knowing it. In the case of my older family members, well, they had no hope. Once the algorithm grabbed onto them it was over. Of course, it didn't help that they already mildly resonated with their respective corners of the political spectrum. Facebook took that resonance and added enough energy into it to, from my perspective, damage their brains and personalities. I am not kidding when I say that. Nobody in the family wants to talk to either one of them because the minute you get them on the phone they will always go into the most vile hate Trump/Democrats rants. One can only take so much of that crap. No, Facebook needs to be really introspective about this and understand just how much harm they are causing by having shitty algorithms that anyone with a little bit of sense would understand to be wrong. This needs to change. If they don't do it, government will eventually get to them. For all the technical/AI/ML prowess these organizations purport to possess they sure do a shit job of developing technology or algorithms that anyone with one bit of ethics or decency would recognize as counterproductive at best, and maybe even criminal at the extremes. It's only a matter of time until someone who self-radicalized due to FB does something horrible. There is no FB path OUT of self-radicalization, it's a one way trip.

DylanBohlender 6y ago

I completely agree with your point about the algorithms. Anecdotally, the point at which Facebook became an unbearable mess for me was when they defaulted the newsfeed to "top stories" in lieu of the chronological feed of posts. Perhaps government regulation could address the big platforms' ability to prioritize the display of user-generated content through algorithms? Forcing chronological sort to be the "default" seems like something that could be advantageous, as the volume of social media posts would naturally prevent posts from gaining momentum in the way they can when they get "prioritized" by a content curation algorithm. The oldschool forum thread organization model of "bumping" seems more prescient by the day.

robomartin 6y ago
Yes, something like that. Almost anything would be better than nothing. A simple example from my experiment: I decided to click on TikTok videos on FB. I never watch videos on FB other that those my family might post about our family. In other words, if it isn't about family I don't ever click on videos on FB. I click on one TikTok video and watch it till the end. More TikTok videos surface. I click again and again. I did so about five times in a row. Maybe fifteen minutes total video play time. From that point forward it took a significant effort to go back to less TikTok videos shown to me. I had to click on other stuff, like hate Trump videos. OK, that meant that within a few clicks I was being led into "Trump is the devil" territory. BTW, the TikTok videos didn't disappear from the list either. So now I am in "hate Trump" hell. OK, let's try the other extreme. After much scrolling I found a "hate Democrats/Biden" video, a mild one at that. Once again, within a few clicks I am being offered more and more hateful videos aimed at democrats. So, now my choices became: Hate democrats, hate Trump or watch young girls being stupid on TikTok (what are they thinking?). Because the "hate democrats" was the last category I had more of that than the rest. Yet the point is that FB "fingerprinted" me as wanting to live in those caves. If I touched ANY of them the algorithm instantly flung me deeper into that domain. It quickly becomes a no-win situation. How do you leave any of this? Well, you can't. I can't erase the hate Trump/Democrats stuff from my list, nor am I able to do anything about the dancing TikTok girls. It's hopeless. Well, no, you have to pick something else to obsess over and hope that it buries the other stuff. The problem is that it takes a massive effort once you've told the algo that you want to watch a certain category with just a few clicks. You just can't escape it. I have been clicking on anything I can find that is engineering related. A good source of this are FB groups covering Arduino experiments and other technical hobbies. Even with that, the hateful Trump/Dems caves and TikTok are still there, and they are not there in the noise, they show-up all the time. I did this consciously, and so I knew what I was getting into and, more importantly, I was not using idle time to get sucked into a deep dark hole of hatred without knowing it. In the case of my older family members, well, they had no hope. Once the algorithm grabbed onto them it was over. Of course, it didn't help that they already mildly resonated with their respective corners of the political spectrum. Facebook took that resonance and added enough energy into it to, from my perspective, damage their brains and personalities. I am not kidding when I say that. Nobody in the family wants to talk to either one of them because the minute you get them on the phone they will always go into the most vile hate Trump/Democrats rants. One can only take so much of that crap. No, Facebook needs to be really introspective about this and understand just how much harm they are causing by having shitty algorithms that anyone with a little bit of sense would understand to be wrong. This needs to change. If they don't do it, government will eventually get to them. For all the technical/AI/ML prowess these organizations purport to possess they sure do a shit job of developing technology or algorithms that anyone with one bit of ethics or decency would recognize as counterproductive at best, and maybe even criminal at the extremes. It's only a matter of time until someone who self-radicalized due to FB does something horrible. There is no FB path OUT of self-radicalization, it's a one way trip.