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

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.