8 ms·

What It’s Like to Report on Facebook

mijoharas 6y ago
This page took upwards of 20 seconds to allow me to scroll (or do anything) on the page. Shockingly bad performance. (just checked again in an incognito window, and counted 33 seconds). I checked the network tab and weirdly it was downloading the same image over and over again. Very strange...
- mijoharas 6y ago
  just realised the redownloading images was to do with resizing the window. no idea what was stopping the page from allowing scrolling. (this was on desktop on a solid internet connection for context).
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  Came here for this. How did computing evolve to the point where in 2020 it takes half a minute to display some text & images and be able to scroll on the page?!
- kebman 6y ago
  Ahaha, oh! At first I thought it was some artsy web page brick wall statement or something. Now that I clicked back, there's actually content too! Thank you revealing it for me. Weren't it for you, it'd probably just kept scrolling HN lol!
- minerjoe 6y ago
  I've recently swiched to using Links on the linux framebuffer as my primary browser. No javascript and a very fast HTML parser and graphics driver and I've been blown away at how much time I now save never waiting on a page load. The page in question took less than a half a second to fetch and completely render. On a circa 2006 ThinkPad (Core 2 1.85GHz).
- bzb3 6y ago
  It loaded immediately here. Is your ad blocker properly configured?
  - mijoharas 6y ago
    Yep, both uBlock origin and privacy badger. Btw, loading the page finished after a couple of seconds, but scrolling wasn't possible for over 30s. I checked the performance metrics in chrome out of interest but couldn't figure out why.
blinding-streak 6y ago
Basically it boils down to this Zuck quote from a chat he had with a friend in 2004. Things haven't changed much since then. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks We're all still "dumb fucks" to Zuckerberg. https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  Completely unfair summary of a complex article. You are misled if you think that's what the article is about.
  - gumbo 6y ago
    What is misleading. I just read the article again and these 3 messages captures the gist of the conversation quite well.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      "What is misleading" Tons of stuff. First, the article starts with a misleading report on a Facebook drone. There's nothing in the above summary about that. Second, much of the article is about the eagerness of journalists to cover Facebook. Again, the above summary says absolutely nothing about that. Third, the article talks about Facebook cultivating relationships with journalists or writing articles itself. Surprise, surprise, the above summary says nothing about that either. Then there's a large part of the article on Facebook security measures to track down leaks. Once again, the summary doesn't even hint at that. Yet another example is discussion of Facebook's reactive strategy, in which Facebook responds to bad press but does not proactively do anything to address issues before they come to light in the media. And, once again, the summary says nothing about that. Saying that Zuckerberg is contemptuous of Facebook's users and that even he thinks they shouldn't trust him is actually not a summary of the article at all. It might be related, but touches on NONE of the concrete points the article makes.
  - user00012-ab 6y ago
KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world. Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When his article was published, it reported that Aquila “was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.” Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn’t gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing. Interesting episode! It would be interesting to know if this was intentional deception or incompetent ignorance on Zuck's part.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- analyte123 6y ago
  Neither, it's just PR speak: the plane landed "safely" in the sense that no one was injured and only some property damage occurred.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    No, that's deceptive and projects weakness and insecurity. You can put a turd in a gold box, but it's still a turd. If a man needs to stretch the language to conceal a trivial event that is publicly known, what else is he hiding? It's weird on many levels, as yakking about the disappointment of a pet/vanity project's stumble on it's ascent to greatness is a great distraction from the substance of Facebook.
    - naringas 6y ago
      what's worse, this is a systemic issue not at all unique to facebook. it all started when every pizzeria became the best pizza in the city; and just goes off from there.
CroccetyZukKk 6y ago
Hello I am mark the Zuck. I love using asian women as a ploy just so the dumbest bastard don't realize I'm full on gay, and, yeah, I'm a jew, obviously, and obviously CIA runs the whole operation. I am mark the Zuck. CIA operated. Married just for show, just so they don't know i'm gay, and, welcome to the show. CIA operation. Facebook is a CIA front.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
http://archive.is/NYrtV http://archive.is/NYrtV
Pr0ducer 6y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169 Case in point, here's a HackerNews link to an article by Nick Clegg, the former British Lib-Dem party leader now FB VP of Global Affairs and Communications, using AdAge to impart some semblance of legitimacy. The article's headline is complete BS: "Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate" my ass. They benefit from hate speech every damn day that shit's on their site, because eyeballs == $$. The article ends with the ridiculous notion that "We may never be able to prevent hate from appearing on Facebook entirely, but we are getting better at stopping it all the time." A company with the resources of Facebook can do practically anything it wants. If hate speech was look at with the same level of disgust as child porn, would the above statement still hold true? And getting better all the time? By what measure?
- jfengel 6y ago
  Oh, it was that Nick Clegg. The one who destroyed the Lib-Dem party by voting the Tory party into power, without getting anything meaningful in return. I thought perhaps the name was a coincidence.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Yeah, he should have insisted on a different voting system as a condition of coalition, instead of the referendum.
    - jfengel 6y ago
      Given that the referendum failed by a 2:1 margin, I don't think he'd have been any more popular even if they had gotten their alternative voting system. Maybe it's one of those things that voters would have liked once they had experience with it, but if Clegg thought it was something voters were clamoring for, he was very wrong.
      - jen20 6y ago
        Clegg's mistake was agreeing to "alternative vote" being an option instead of a proper system of proportional representation which would have made a victory like Johnson's in late 2019 near impossible (though not impossible, as the Scottish system _designed_ to keep the SNP out of power showed). In terms of moderating an otherwise horrific bunch of people (see every action since 2015), Clegg and the Liberal Democrats did a reasonable job. Do not read this as a defence of his employment at Facebook, where he has shown himself to be for sale to the highest bidder at any available opportunity.
rewindtheclock 6y ago
"Several reporters told me that Facebook, like other large tech companies, makes aggressive use of off-the-record sourcing to obstruct the reporting process. “It’s pretty standard for a tech comms person to give you an on-record statement, they’ll talk about the story with you on background, and then when it’s published, they’ll come back to you and try to undermine it off the record,” says Biddle." I must say, I never thought of it this way till today. Big Tech and Donald Trump are basically two peas from the same pod.
- smsm42 6y ago
  Journalists are lazy and PR people are sneaky. Whose fault is that? Why, of course, Donald Trump's!
rewindtheclock 6y ago
"A similar tactic was employed in 2018, after George Soros criticized Facebook as a “menace” against which society needed to be defended in a public speech in Davos. The company hired a firm to produce incendiary pro-Facebook research that contained anti-Semitic tropes about Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, as the shadowy funder of anti-Facebook groups. The documents were then passed around to journalists with the urging that they look into Soros’s financial interests. In the ensuing controversy, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of comms and policy and already on the way out, was blamed, while Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg stated they had no knowledge of the affair." How does Facebook get away with this kind of stuff?
- Uhhrrr 6y ago
  Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish, and Soros really is a billionaire who funds all sorts of NGO's and has financial interests in all kinds of things, so I think it would be pretty hard to make something stick.
  - inopinatus 6y ago
    Someone’s membership of <identifiable tribe or social grouping> does not confer a specific additional moral obligation to defend a fellow member of their tribe/group more than they might deserve otherwise. Indeed this myth is actively invoked by bigots & bullies in conjunction with a counterexample as a twisted justification for ongoing persecution.
    - Uhhrrr 6y ago
      I was not saying it does - I'm saying it's harder to go after someone for anti-Semitism when they're Semitic. Although now that I've seen the document in question, I must say there's really nothing there anyway.
annadane 6y ago
I see a bunch of downvotes here. Hello, Facebook employees.
- annadane 6y ago
  And there it is. Grow a conscience. Find another place of employ, you're on the wrong side of history.
- dang 6y ago
  This comment breaks more than one of the site guidelines. That's no doubt why users downvoted and flagged it, correctly. Would you mind taking a look and sticking to the rules when posting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
wyldfire 6y ago
> The Aquila drone was soon grounded and, within two years, the entire program scrapped Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test flight, right? Presumably it was scrapped because they decided that it wouldn't be profitable, not because they couldn't fix whatever made it crash.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test flight, right? That depends entirely on the nature of the problem revealed during the test. Some tests may reveal that an idea won't work and the whole project is unsalvageable. Facebook were trying to build a very large (43m wingspan) very light (400kg) aircraft, with the intention of using it for ultra-long endurance missions (90 days) in remote areas. For remote endurance in the field you need durability. Evidently more durability than was possible given the lightweight construction, since it was destroyed by the wind. I can easily see that sort of failure damning the whole project.
mola 6y ago
What kind of a journalist publish a story without corraborating it? Facebook is scum. But on the flip side these so called journalists are a sham.
Animats 6y ago
"The company controls the communications and informational intake of more than two and a half billion people." That's scary. Facebook used to be useful as a way to keep track of what my friends were doing. But the front page filled with more and more off-topic junk. Now I don't use Facebook at all.
- jcadam 6y ago
  Yep, deactivated my account just the other day and deleted the facebook app from my phone. I don't need a constant stream of advertising and political propaganda. I can seek those things out on my own if I want them.
- smsm42 6y ago
  There are tools to handle that - like FB Purity. Of course, not using it is always an option.
intended 6y ago
I wish there was a way for tech to handle the underlying problem. Facebook is the big massive cherry on top of everything, but we’ve been optimizing and hacking society ever since the 24 hour news channel became a thing. Once we crossed a few critical milestones - 24 hour news, concentration of news agencies, buyouts by large firms - the templates for the current predicament was writ. Human minds are hackable. Violence, sex, and bias sells. “News”, “truth” are too slippery and malleable as concepts to hold corporations to. This will always create a race to the bottom, of the same nature as willful pollution of the environment. Facebook is the obvious target, but so is YouTube, Twitter, Reddit. What’s horrifically worse is that this is America talking about excesses with social media it identifies. There’s no space in most of the discussions on HN which consider the global scope of this problem - and it is a global issue. The model of captive news channel spraying crazy fodder to build up stories and tilted facts so that crops of confused and opinionated voters can be harvested is a global phenomenon. This isn’t a problem as easy to solve as techno utopists thought. The internet doesn’t route around censorship (as well as it did). But it’s still a problem to solve. There has to be a way to break the attention economy while also doing justice to newsworthy content - not simply censoring Mexican gang violence news because American/UK friends of Facebook Employees come online and tell them to remove it (Custodians of the internet.) Edit: Sure - the internet is a (Many) step changes away from the cable news era. It’s a whole different beast. But the more I spend time looking at the problem, the more it seems to be a function of tools/ecosystems with a faster rate of revolution than our native ability to process. It’s still the Fight for attention span and ad dollars driving the race to the bottom. Anyway, this is one of those useless rants that describes a problem (hopefully fairly) without any solution. I guess getting the problem definition right (or separated) would be a good enough start.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  I think part of the problem is that people lack the imagination, or the cynicism, to see that their tools will be turned against them in due time. Activists get a huge rush from influencing social media platforms by dishonest means, and the people operating those platforms are all too happy to oblige, because of the precedent it sets, and in part because they agree. Media companies got too used to manipulating this phenomenon when the ad money was there, now they're just left there holding the gun, with an itchy trigger finger and a target-rich environment.
mrxd 6y ago
There's no question that Facebook attempts to shape the media narrative. But there's no need for any careful journalistic exposés to show that. The fact that there's a corporate PR department is enough. But Facebook is not just another company that's being objectively scrutinized by journalists who are acting in the public interest. Among other effects, Facebook threatens the practice of journalism itself, and much of the reporting is intended to craft that narrative. That's indicated at the bottom of the article: > What Facebook has become is the press’s assignment editor, its distribution network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and, through corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism’s core mission of democratic accountability. The problem I have is with this claim that the press is a democratic institution that acts in the public interest. In reality, the press is owned by billionaires. Influential journalists and editors come from a particular class of society through elite universities. No mechanisms for democratic accountability exist and the public has no real input into the agenda or topics that are covered. At the same time, journalists maximize their own power by relentlessly promoting the idea that (at least nominally) democratic institutions like government and politics are always untrustworthy and corrupt.
specialist 6y ago
"[Casey] Newton’s professional arc, from enthusiastic tech beat reporter to skeptical industry investigator, matches the trajectories of a number of journalists in recent years." This is the natural progression. And the bigger story. I'm barely interested in Facebook or their antics. Maybe because I had already lived this story a few times. Like most geeks in my cohort, I started as a technophile, which is Neal Postman's pejorative, steeped in libertarian and transhumanism ideology. Then I started to notice the ledgers kept not adding up, promised advances failed to materialize, people of poor constitution repeatedly gobbled up all the resources. At some point I read Technopoly and Design of Everyday Things. Those and many other skeptics gave voice to my misgivings. Then I learned about prior technological waves causing mass social upheaval and what kind of people ended up on top. (The French have a cliche for this...) The hero worship and suspension of disbelief was the problem. People are still just people. I'm glad the Teflon coatings are starting to wear off. So we can resume talking about this stuff like adults.
- thundergolfer 6y ago
  Technopoly ought to be considered in that group of books held as 'mandatory reading', alongside 'Mythical Man Month', 'Clean Code', and 'The Soul of a New Machine'.

This page took upwards of 20 seconds to allow me to scroll (or do anything) on the page. Shockingly bad performance. (just checked again in an incognito window, and counted 33 seconds). I checked the network tab and weirdly it was downloading the same image over and over again. Very strange...

mijoharas 6y ago
just realised the redownloading images was to do with resizing the window. no idea what was stopping the page from allowing scrolling. (this was on desktop on a solid internet connection for context).
black_puppydog 6y ago
Came here for this. How did computing evolve to the point where in 2020 it takes half a minute to display some text & images and be able to scroll on the page?!
kebman 6y ago
Ahaha, oh! At first I thought it was some artsy web page brick wall statement or something. Now that I clicked back, there's actually content too! Thank you revealing it for me. Weren't it for you, it'd probably just kept scrolling HN lol!
minerjoe 6y ago
I've recently swiched to using Links on the linux framebuffer as my primary browser. No javascript and a very fast HTML parser and graphics driver and I've been blown away at how much time I now save never waiting on a page load. The page in question took less than a half a second to fetch and completely render. On a circa 2006 ThinkPad (Core 2 1.85GHz).
bzb3 6y ago
It loaded immediately here. Is your ad blocker properly configured?
- mijoharas 6y ago
  Yep, both uBlock origin and privacy badger. Btw, loading the page finished after a couple of seconds, but scrolling wasn't possible for over 30s. I checked the performance metrics in chrome out of interest but couldn't figure out why.

blinding-streak 6y ago

Basically it boils down to this Zuck quote from a chat he had with a friend in 2004. Things haven't changed much since then. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks We're all still "dumb fucks" to Zuckerberg. https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

pmoriarty 6y ago
Completely unfair summary of a complex article. You are misled if you think that's what the article is about.
- gumbo 6y ago
  What is misleading. I just read the article again and these 3 messages captures the gist of the conversation quite well.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    "What is misleading" Tons of stuff. First, the article starts with a misleading report on a Facebook drone. There's nothing in the above summary about that. Second, much of the article is about the eagerness of journalists to cover Facebook. Again, the above summary says absolutely nothing about that. Third, the article talks about Facebook cultivating relationships with journalists or writing articles itself. Surprise, surprise, the above summary says nothing about that either. Then there's a large part of the article on Facebook security measures to track down leaks. Once again, the summary doesn't even hint at that. Yet another example is discussion of Facebook's reactive strategy, in which Facebook responds to bad press but does not proactively do anything to address issues before they come to light in the media. And, once again, the summary says nothing about that. Saying that Zuckerberg is contemptuous of Facebook's users and that even he thinks they shouldn't trust him is actually not a summary of the article at all. It might be related, but touches on NONE of the concrete points the article makes.
- user00012-ab 6y ago

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago

With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world. Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When his article was published, it reported that Aquila “was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.” Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn’t gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing. Interesting episode! It would be interesting to know if this was intentional deception or incompetent ignorance on Zuck's part.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
analyte123 6y ago
Neither, it's just PR speak: the plane landed "safely" in the sense that no one was injured and only some property damage occurred.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  No, that's deceptive and projects weakness and insecurity. You can put a turd in a gold box, but it's still a turd. If a man needs to stretch the language to conceal a trivial event that is publicly known, what else is he hiding? It's weird on many levels, as yakking about the disappointment of a pet/vanity project's stumble on it's ascent to greatness is a great distraction from the substance of Facebook.
  - naringas 6y ago
    what's worse, this is a systemic issue not at all unique to facebook. it all started when every pizzeria became the best pizza in the city; and just goes off from there.

CroccetyZukKk 6y ago

Hello I am mark the Zuck. I love using asian women as a ploy just so the dumbest bastard don't realize I'm full on gay, and, yeah, I'm a jew, obviously, and obviously CIA runs the whole operation. I am mark the Zuck. CIA operated. Married just for show, just so they don't know i'm gay, and, welcome to the show. CIA operation. Facebook is a CIA front.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

http://archive.is/NYrtV http://archive.is/NYrtV

Pr0ducer 6y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23702169 Case in point, here's a HackerNews link to an article by Nick Clegg, the former British Lib-Dem party leader now FB VP of Global Affairs and Communications, using AdAge to impart some semblance of legitimacy. The article's headline is complete BS: "Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate" my ass. They benefit from hate speech every damn day that shit's on their site, because eyeballs == $$. The article ends with the ridiculous notion that "We may never be able to prevent hate from appearing on Facebook entirely, but we are getting better at stopping it all the time." A company with the resources of Facebook can do practically anything it wants. If hate speech was look at with the same level of disgust as child porn, would the above statement still hold true? And getting better all the time? By what measure?

jfengel 6y ago
Oh, it was that Nick Clegg. The one who destroyed the Lib-Dem party by voting the Tory party into power, without getting anything meaningful in return. I thought perhaps the name was a coincidence.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  Yeah, he should have insisted on a different voting system as a condition of coalition, instead of the referendum.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    Given that the referendum failed by a 2:1 margin, I don't think he'd have been any more popular even if they had gotten their alternative voting system. Maybe it's one of those things that voters would have liked once they had experience with it, but if Clegg thought it was something voters were clamoring for, he was very wrong.
    - jen20 6y ago
      Clegg's mistake was agreeing to "alternative vote" being an option instead of a proper system of proportional representation which would have made a victory like Johnson's in late 2019 near impossible (though not impossible, as the Scottish system _designed_ to keep the SNP out of power showed). In terms of moderating an otherwise horrific bunch of people (see every action since 2015), Clegg and the Liberal Democrats did a reasonable job. Do not read this as a defence of his employment at Facebook, where he has shown himself to be for sale to the highest bidder at any available opportunity.

rewindtheclock 6y ago

"Several reporters told me that Facebook, like other large tech companies, makes aggressive use of off-the-record sourcing to obstruct the reporting process. “It’s pretty standard for a tech comms person to give you an on-record statement, they’ll talk about the story with you on background, and then when it’s published, they’ll come back to you and try to undermine it off the record,” says Biddle." I must say, I never thought of it this way till today. Big Tech and Donald Trump are basically two peas from the same pod.

smsm42 6y ago
Journalists are lazy and PR people are sneaky. Whose fault is that? Why, of course, Donald Trump's!

rewindtheclock 6y ago

"A similar tactic was employed in 2018, after George Soros criticized Facebook as a “menace” against which society needed to be defended in a public speech in Davos. The company hired a firm to produce incendiary pro-Facebook research that contained anti-Semitic tropes about Soros, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, as the shadowy funder of anti-Facebook groups. The documents were then passed around to journalists with the urging that they look into Soros’s financial interests. In the ensuing controversy, Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s head of comms and policy and already on the way out, was blamed, while Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg stated they had no knowledge of the affair." How does Facebook get away with this kind of stuff?

Uhhrrr 6y ago
Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish, and Soros really is a billionaire who funds all sorts of NGO's and has financial interests in all kinds of things, so I think it would be pretty hard to make something stick.
- inopinatus 6y ago
  Someone’s membership of <identifiable tribe or social grouping> does not confer a specific additional moral obligation to defend a fellow member of their tribe/group more than they might deserve otherwise. Indeed this myth is actively invoked by bigots & bullies in conjunction with a counterexample as a twisted justification for ongoing persecution.
  - Uhhrrr 6y ago
    I was not saying it does - I'm saying it's harder to go after someone for anti-Semitism when they're Semitic. Although now that I've seen the document in question, I must say there's really nothing there anyway.

annadane 6y ago

I see a bunch of downvotes here. Hello, Facebook employees.

annadane 6y ago
And there it is. Grow a conscience. Find another place of employ, you're on the wrong side of history.
dang 6y ago
This comment breaks more than one of the site guidelines. That's no doubt why users downvoted and flagged it, correctly. Would you mind taking a look and sticking to the rules when posting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

wyldfire 6y ago

> The Aquila drone was soon grounded and, within two years, the entire program scrapped Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test flight, right? Presumably it was scrapped because they decided that it wouldn't be profitable, not because they couldn't fix whatever made it crash.

catalogia 6y ago
> Gee, it seems bonkers to scrap it just because it had a problem on a test flight, right? That depends entirely on the nature of the problem revealed during the test. Some tests may reveal that an idea won't work and the whole project is unsalvageable. Facebook were trying to build a very large (43m wingspan) very light (400kg) aircraft, with the intention of using it for ultra-long endurance missions (90 days) in remote areas. For remote endurance in the field you need durability. Evidently more durability than was possible given the lightweight construction, since it was destroyed by the wind. I can easily see that sort of failure damning the whole project.

mola 6y ago

What kind of a journalist publish a story without corraborating it? Facebook is scum. But on the flip side these so called journalists are a sham.

Animats 6y ago

"The company controls the communications and informational intake of more than two and a half billion people." That's scary. Facebook used to be useful as a way to keep track of what my friends were doing. But the front page filled with more and more off-topic junk. Now I don't use Facebook at all.

jcadam 6y ago
Yep, deactivated my account just the other day and deleted the facebook app from my phone. I don't need a constant stream of advertising and political propaganda. I can seek those things out on my own if I want them.
smsm42 6y ago
There are tools to handle that - like FB Purity. Of course, not using it is always an option.

intended 6y ago

I wish there was a way for tech to handle the underlying problem. Facebook is the big massive cherry on top of everything, but we’ve been optimizing and hacking society ever since the 24 hour news channel became a thing. Once we crossed a few critical milestones - 24 hour news, concentration of news agencies, buyouts by large firms - the templates for the current predicament was writ. Human minds are hackable. Violence, sex, and bias sells. “News”, “truth” are too slippery and malleable as concepts to hold corporations to. This will always create a race to the bottom, of the same nature as willful pollution of the environment. Facebook is the obvious target, but so is YouTube, Twitter, Reddit. What’s horrifically worse is that this is America talking about excesses with social media it identifies. There’s no space in most of the discussions on HN which consider the global scope of this problem - and it is a global issue. The model of captive news channel spraying crazy fodder to build up stories and tilted facts so that crops of confused and opinionated voters can be harvested is a global phenomenon. This isn’t a problem as easy to solve as techno utopists thought. The internet doesn’t route around censorship (as well as it did). But it’s still a problem to solve. There has to be a way to break the attention economy while also doing justice to newsworthy content - not simply censoring Mexican gang violence news because American/UK friends of Facebook Employees come online and tell them to remove it (Custodians of the internet.) Edit: Sure - the internet is a (Many) step changes away from the cable news era. It’s a whole different beast. But the more I spend time looking at the problem, the more it seems to be a function of tools/ecosystems with a faster rate of revolution than our native ability to process. It’s still the Fight for attention span and ad dollars driving the race to the bottom. Anyway, this is one of those useless rants that describes a problem (hopefully fairly) without any solution. I guess getting the problem definition right (or separated) would be a good enough start.

microcolonel 6y ago
I think part of the problem is that people lack the imagination, or the cynicism, to see that their tools will be turned against them in due time. Activists get a huge rush from influencing social media platforms by dishonest means, and the people operating those platforms are all too happy to oblige, because of the precedent it sets, and in part because they agree. Media companies got too used to manipulating this phenomenon when the ad money was there, now they're just left there holding the gun, with an itchy trigger finger and a target-rich environment.

mrxd 6y ago

There's no question that Facebook attempts to shape the media narrative. But there's no need for any careful journalistic exposés to show that. The fact that there's a corporate PR department is enough. But Facebook is not just another company that's being objectively scrutinized by journalists who are acting in the public interest. Among other effects, Facebook threatens the practice of journalism itself, and much of the reporting is intended to craft that narrative. That's indicated at the bottom of the article: > What Facebook has become is the press’s assignment editor, its distribution network, its great antagonist, devourer of its ad revenue, and, through corporate secrecy, a massive block to journalism’s core mission of democratic accountability. The problem I have is with this claim that the press is a democratic institution that acts in the public interest. In reality, the press is owned by billionaires. Influential journalists and editors come from a particular class of society through elite universities. No mechanisms for democratic accountability exist and the public has no real input into the agenda or topics that are covered. At the same time, journalists maximize their own power by relentlessly promoting the idea that (at least nominally) democratic institutions like government and politics are always untrustworthy and corrupt.

specialist 6y ago

"[Casey] Newton’s professional arc, from enthusiastic tech beat reporter to skeptical industry investigator, matches the trajectories of a number of journalists in recent years." This is the natural progression. And the bigger story. I'm barely interested in Facebook or their antics. Maybe because I had already lived this story a few times. Like most geeks in my cohort, I started as a technophile, which is Neal Postman's pejorative, steeped in libertarian and transhumanism ideology. Then I started to notice the ledgers kept not adding up, promised advances failed to materialize, people of poor constitution repeatedly gobbled up all the resources. At some point I read Technopoly and Design of Everyday Things. Those and many other skeptics gave voice to my misgivings. Then I learned about prior technological waves causing mass social upheaval and what kind of people ended up on top. (The French have a cliche for this...) The hero worship and suspension of disbelief was the problem. People are still just people. I'm glad the Teflon coatings are starting to wear off. So we can resume talking about this stuff like adults.

thundergolfer 6y ago
Technopoly ought to be considered in that group of books held as 'mandatory reading', alongside 'Mythical Man Month', 'Clean Code', and 'The Soul of a New Machine'.