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Facebook is the 6th most popular website on the planet (behind Google, Youtube, and 3 Chinese sites). That puts them in a position of control over a great deal

Facebook is the 6th most popular website on the planet (behind Google, Youtube, and 3 Chinese sites). That puts them in a position of control over a great deal of the world's information diet. If they say something is false or true, many people will believe it. If they censor something, many people will never see it.

sneak 6y ago
How does that put them in control? Users still read at least five other websites. Their popularity does not give them any ability to censor information widely, unless perhaps they collude with search engines to blacklist certain terms across all popular sites. The fact that many people use Facebook is an indicator that those same huge groups also have access to every other website, which reduces the persuasiveness of the argument that Facebook gets to be the arbiter of truth, so long as all of those Facebook users have internet access that can access sites that are not Facebook. If anything, the real arbiters would be the ISPs, who get to decide which sites you can even access, in real-time.
- dragontamer 6y ago
  > How does that put them in control? Users still read at least five other websites. I can't read Chinese. So discount those sites.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  >Users still read at least five other websites. Three of those are entirely Chinese and can be discounted from this conversation due to government. That leaves two sites run by the same company, all of which are headquartered in the same general area and have similar culture, and both have ongoing censorship/misinformation controversies.
  - sneak 6y ago
    Ok, what about all of the other websites on the internet?
    - Karunamon 6y ago
      The fact that other sites exist does not diminish the impact of the most prominent ones.
hengheng 6y ago
How many dead profiles are on there? I've just deleted mine, and in my circle of "friends" there were about 20 out of 350 that had updated their profile within the last year. Is there some kind of pareto distribution where Facebook has found its 'whales' that it can attract, and silently dropped all the other users, but kept their dead profiles?
- Karunamon 6y ago
  Those are Alexa rankings, which count actual page views and time spent, not mere accounts.

sneak 6y ago

How does that put them in control? Users still read at least five other websites. Their popularity does not give them any ability to censor information widely, unless perhaps they collude with search engines to blacklist certain terms across all popular sites. The fact that many people use Facebook is an indicator that those same huge groups also have access to every other website, which reduces the persuasiveness of the argument that Facebook gets to be the arbiter of truth, so long as all of those Facebook users have internet access that can access sites that are not Facebook. If anything, the real arbiters would be the ISPs, who get to decide which sites you can even access, in real-time.

dragontamer 6y ago
> How does that put them in control? Users still read at least five other websites. I can't read Chinese. So discount those sites.
Karunamon 6y ago
>Users still read at least five other websites. Three of those are entirely Chinese and can be discounted from this conversation due to government. That leaves two sites run by the same company, all of which are headquartered in the same general area and have similar culture, and both have ongoing censorship/misinformation controversies.
- sneak 6y ago
  Ok, what about all of the other websites on the internet?
  - Karunamon 6y ago
    The fact that other sites exist does not diminish the impact of the most prominent ones.

hengheng 6y ago

How many dead profiles are on there? I've just deleted mine, and in my circle of "friends" there were about 20 out of 350 that had updated their profile within the last year. Is there some kind of pareto distribution where Facebook has found its 'whales' that it can attract, and silently dropped all the other users, but kept their dead profiles?

Karunamon 6y ago
Those are Alexa rankings, which count actual page views and time spent, not mere accounts.