9 ms·

Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

119 points by johannsg 6y ago

runawaybottle 6y ago
I hate to be this dismissive, but I couldn’t find a single paragraph in that article that provided any kind of compelling analysis or insight into human behavior. I’m less concerned about misinformation propagating through a platform vs why misinformation even works on someone. I don’t care if the whole country of Russia sat there and told you lies with fake accounts 24/7, I want to know why you believed any of it. Anyways, is The Atlantic supposed to be a reputable website? This article isn’t even the fun kind of hot take, it’s the trite tacky type of hot take (oh, is the Social Dilemma out? Are we going to keep things thematic and piggy back off that?).
- mfer 6y ago
  Just knowing why people believe the things doesn't stop people from believing lies or the damage it can do to them and those around them.
  - soupfordummies 6y ago
    Exactly. People know smoking is deadly but they still light up anyway. You can know that there is a misinformation bubble and it still influence you.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      So, should someone not have the liberty to smoke? I just want to get to the bottom of the logic. Are you my mom or dad? I have the right to join an echo chamber, a straight up human right. I have the right to let Russia feed me misinformation. I have this right.
- bsenftner 6y ago
  It is a social network hack: 1) broadcast misinformation wide and often; 2) some individuals lacking in critical thinking accept the misinformation as true and start repeating it; 3) as the misinformation propagates through those that do not verify, it begins to be noticed by those that might verify new information, but so many people in their sphere have adopted this information they accept the information on faith that their peers are like them and have verified the new information; 4) this process repeats until those that do verify are negated by those that refuse to accept that their peers and themselves could be wrong.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > I want to know why you believed any of it People are really keen to believe the worst of their enemies. People also are prone to believing in "revelations" and "scoops".
- FabHK 6y ago
  > Anyways, is The Atlantic supposed to be a reputable website? The Atlantic has been a monthly magazine for over 150 years. It is as reputable as, dunno, the New Yorker, Harpers, Mother Jones, etc.
blakesterz 6y ago
Wow. As much as I do agree with this, this is some hyperbolic writing. I've read so many articles just like this one, they show up on HN quite often it seems, and I've never seen one that had what seemed like a realistic fix to the problem. I don't think there is a fix really. All social media platforms will be full of bots/fakes that exist to spread garbage. All social media platforms will be full of real people doing the same. It also seems like the loudest people (and bots) are the most toxic and get the most engagement. It's people, all the way down, and there will always be a bunch of people doing the wrong thing. Those people will be highly incentivized and motivated, while the rest of us will just be looking for something to read. (Also, maybe interesting, the author of this is the executive editor of The Atlantic, not just some reporter.)
- gfody 6y ago
  > Those people will be highly incentivized not if we don't incentivize them - we just need a social media platform to not be an advertisement platform
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Again, this is just thinking about the problem incorrectly. You think people are vain, reactionary, signaling-obsessed, shallow and gossipy because Facebook put a fucking ad system on their website?
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      No, but Facebook will deliberately "optimise for engagement", regardless of whether the engagement is positive or negative for the user or society, because ads. Facebook wasn't the cesspit it is today when your news feed actually showed you your friends updates in chronological order. Hell, it was better still even before the GD news feed even existed.
      - runawaybottle 6y ago
        I guess I just don’t understand the argument. For decades everyone knew commercial breaks were just that, no one was being influenced by 30 second ads on TV. The stuff that influenced people back then is the same stuff that influences people today, social pressure and desire to fit in/attain status. Facebook ads, if anything, should be a distraction from social pressure. People are creating the social pressure to express yourself, and it’s now manifesting in shallow ways (too much pressure). Ads is not what’s causing this. If there’s any argument to make, and maybe I’ve been missing this the whole time, maybe you guys are saying platforms like Facebook abstract you into a living Advertisement. Thus, you must behave like an advertisement (get attention at all costs), and that is the core of their ad system, you, like a human battery in the matrix. But, there’s no argument to be made if you realize you’re jacked into the matrix and can leave. If you’re aware, you can bounce. Do we bear no responsibility at all here for how we behave?
elindbe2 6y ago
Hysteria much? Reads like the typical media rant today where you redefine words to mean whatever you want: "these bad people being allowed to communicate is GENOCIDE, TERRORISM, and HOLOCAUST" Bad people are bad people and should be treated as such but its clearly not the END OF THE WORLD.
MR4D 6y ago
FB has turned into the Paperclip Maximizer [0]. The question I have is what do we do when we recognize that there is a paperclip maximizer among us. This is a pattern that is new with internet technology, and we’ve never had to deal with before. I would also argue that Google Search with its SEO crap has also become a paperclip maximizer (or at least on its way to becoming one). As a civilization, we need to start thinking about it like this before we destroy ourselves. [0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
- JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
  > It has one simple goal of maximizing the number of paperclips; human life, learning, joy, and so on are not specified as goals. Replace paperclips with dollars and you’ve got Facebook.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Facebook is what you get with s/paperclip/engagement/. What you get with s/paperclip/$/ is just capitalism.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  Like all scifi, "Paperclip Maximizer" is just a fable about something that already happened but you put it in the future to make it seem more interesting. (E.g. robots are just slaves; space colonization is just regular colonization; Weyland-Yutani is just the East India Company; World War 3 is just WW2; etc.) Capitalism has always been the paperclip maximizer, for better or worse. Why did Europeans drag a bunch of Africans across the ocean to America? Well, there's this thing called "money" and Europeans were trying to maximize it, and it turned out that getting cheap labor to work in the Americas would let you trade stuff to China and collect money in Europe. It makes no actual goddamn sense, but it maximized numbers, so it happened.
  - MR4D 6y ago
    I don’t disagree, but technology have now given us a near-zero cost of duplicating that paperclip, so both the growth rate and practical upper bound are much higher than we’ve ever imagined before.
trident5000 6y ago
YouTube has just as much of a monopoly in its category if not more than Facebook (with similar influence over society) yet we dont see the level of regular attacks (I'm not here to defend either, I'm a critic, but just pointing this out). Facebook total users: about 2.7 billion (with probably 80% dominance in its category). YouTube: about 2 billion but with a ~95% video stream dominance. The difference seems to be in the politics. I don't see the Atlantic or peers coming down on YouTubes dominance and influence. Edit: As others have pointed out in here the difference might also be financial. Facebook publishes news articles and YouTube does not. A broken up Facebook offers a fractured publishing market and better pricing for news distribution.
- ben_w 6y ago
  FWIW, I do see some similar criticisms of YouTube and its algorithms. I don’t read the Atlantic so I can’t compare scale, but it does happen.
  - trident5000 6y ago
    Good point, I do see this but it seems to be from the anti-censorship side on the right. It seems the right is focused on the YouTube algos and the left is out for Facebook influence basically since the 2016 election. In all, these media debates over which platforms are dangerous seem highly partisan. We should really be looking at them through a neutral light. What is a monopoly and what is not a monopoly.
    - Keeeeeeeks 6y ago
      In addition to this, people on the left have talked about how certain pockets of YT (gaming, action movies, self help) quickly funnels people into a corner of YT that's rife with misogyny and pseudo-rationalist fallacies. Also the term Monopoly has tricky denotations and connotations; if you read Thiel's work you'll be inclined to have a strict definition of Monopoly (Ex: an online retailer isn't a monopoly because people still buy most things Elsewhere), whereas some have a looser definition (where Online Retailer is defined as likely monopoly because it is online retailer for everything that it can be, while also tracking sales data and using a white label brand to undercut other brands' SKUs)
blhack 6y ago
I must have really different experiences than all of these people that write these articles (it seems like there has been something like this, every week on HN, for the last 10 years) My facebook is mostly people showing pictures of stuff, sharing memes, some movie discussion groups, event planning groups. It seems like mostly just people using facebook as a proxy for real world interactions. Twitter on the other hand is just pure toxic garbage which seems made to intentionally divide people and incite hatred and eventually violence. I think there is a simple explanation for this: the people writing these articles are twitter users, and the people who use facebook are their outgroup.
- busterarm 6y ago
  You're in a socioeconomically-stratified filter bubble on facebook. My facebook was sufficiently diverse and my feed was exactly like twitter, even though none of my friend group were twitter users. I closed all of my social accounts. Doomsday machine is _exactly_ how I would describe all social media.
  - blhack 6y ago
    I am? My Facebook feed contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car. Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are. I’m not sure how that’s me living is a socioeconomically stratified filter bubble. My twitter on the other hand, is mostly (all?) left wing Silicon Valley/tech types. It’s diverse in the way that I’d expect a hackathon to be “diverse”.
    - Merman_Mike 6y ago
      When you have billions of users, and you know every little detail about their lives, "millionaires plus guys sleeping in their car" is probably it's own little segment.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      > contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car. If you live in the Bay Area, this can actually be the same group.
maybelsyrup 6y ago
The Atlantic has always been a kind of tabloid for people who fancy themselves intellectuals, especially with its cover stories. After seeming like they were really on the brink for a few years there, not really knowing how to do digital, they turned it around - apparently by doubling down on this approach. High-minded clickbait for right-thinking elites, in other words. Have a look at their "most popular articles" box and you'll frequently see some breathless, hysterical stuff. It's a shame, too, because a majority of their content is probably still pretty good! Their pandemic coverage is a good example. But their editorial staff need engagement and they're gonna drive it by pushing the same "dark" buttons (fear, anger) that everyone else pushes these days. Ironic they're doing it in a critical article about Facebook.
- trident5000 6y ago
  Wait what? You think The Atlantic leans right? floren - got it, whoosh right over my head. Read that too fast.
  - floren 6y ago
    "Right-thinking" means "agreeing with the Atlantic", not "politically conservative".
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  > Ironic they're doing it in a critical article about Facebook. They're both fighting for the same advertising dollar pile. And to be honest Facebook is walking away with it.
- Balgair 6y ago
  > The Atlantic has always been a kind of tabloid for people who fancy themselves intellectuals, especially with its cover stories Case in point: Ghostbusters has a brief gag on The Atlantic and it's over the top writing in 1984. Timestamp at 1:55 in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwKR_y93izs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwKR_y93izs
cobbzilla 6y ago
> No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. Well, one can control oneself, that's about the best we can do. As others have mentioned, don't use it. I tried that. After years of not using FB at all, I missed out on some important news that was only posted there. I decided to get back on FB, on my own terms. I created Bubble [1] and now I can visit FB with most tracking disabled, no ads, I only see posts from my friends, and even then only posts that do not link to news websites or contain political keywords. My signal/noise ratio is usually about 50%. I love my clean feed. Works on LinkedIn, Twitter, others. But the root problem goes deeper -- clearly not everyone cares or has the motivation to filter their own social media feeds. Some people like reading echo-chamber/fake news posts, truth is far down on their list of priorities. I don't know what the big-picture answer is. [1] https://getbubblenow.com https://getbubblenow.com (currently in beta)
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  I got tired of the garbage. First of all, I made a decision Facebook is not the center of my life and decided to stop posting personal things on it except for major announcements. I also started doing the following very aggressively: - unfollowing everyone who only tended to posted stuff I didn't want to see, - using the "Hide Post", "Hide All From X", and "Hide Ad" options very liberally - if I had any problem at all with the post or ad whatsoever, - reporting posts that had content I didn't like and even had a hint of violating Facebook policies--none got deleted but I think this affects Facebook's AI. I'd love to see a list of everything I've blocked and share it, but I don't see how to get that from Facebook. It took several months, but probably would have been less time if I was a daily Facebook user. At this point I have no political or news items (things I hid like crazy) on my Facebook at all. I have fun things from groups I've joined and that's it. It's boring and quiet, and there if I really need it without annoyances. But it did take some work and it's true, not everyone cares to put in that work. But they'll repost dumb meme stuff all day.
vmception 6y ago
Extend the indefinite public health orders to Facebook Health and Human Services can ban Facebook and states have clauses in their own emergency orders to automatically include that To pass constitutional muster, you can say “publicly traded social media networks that brag about how many fake users they have with over 500 million of them”
upofadown 6y ago
Social media is, well, social. It is a place for people to express how they feel, not how they think. I find it surprising that anyone thinks Facebook could ever be a place of rational thought. It isn't for that.
reuben_scratton 6y ago
That article is one of the dumbest articles I've read in an unusually dumb year. Why do these journalists think we should all only ever be spoon-fed inoffensive, carefully-curated pap? And when was the last time anyone changed their mind about anything because of something they saw on Facebook? The worst it does is confirm existing bias and prejudice.
robertlagrant 6y ago
If you have to repeatedly compare an opt-in social network with an automated nuclear launch system, you don't have much of a point.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
Another week, another hyperbolic article written by journalists against the industry eating their lunch. I hate Facebook as much as anyone else, but let’s be honest here: the Information Age means that the technologies of information generation and propagation have been democratized. Just like the Church was angry at the Printing Press, the old gatekeepers (legacy media) are rabidly resisting the new technology. Ultimately it isn’t a question of right or wrong, but when and how. Get used to it. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle and these top-down solutions are still stuck in the previous century.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
karaterobot 6y ago
I agree with the broad message that social media has had a net negative effect on the world. I think the Doomsday Machine metaphor doesn't work, and even though I'm open to the argument the article was making, I don't think it did a good job making it. I wonder whether the media climate created by social media has made it harder to write persuasively against it. In order to be part of a successful business model centered around social media, these articles tend to embody the qualities (inflammatory, reactionary, narrow-minded, unfocused) of the thing they're railing against.
djohnston 6y ago
> Facebook inadvertently auto-generated jaunty recruitment videos for the Islamic State featuring anti-Semitic messages and burning American flags. Wow what an amazing slant. Done reading at this line.
harscoat 6y ago
re. Twitter negative comments: sorry, it's very valuable to me. It's easy to curate: I use LIST. I have a focused list ("story") which provides great, relevant information. It seems there is a subgroup of people on Twitter who understand how to use (& how not to use) it / imo Twitter is underrated.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
> If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene? Perhaps a better metaphor is how a Jehovah's Witness was forbidden to preach from a sidewalk of a company town. She was later found in her right to do that by the Supreme Court. But in both of these cases, the issue is that of scale - neither compares to Facebook's megascale.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
Well, the Atlantic is not really free now, but I feel that this criticism still applies : https://samzdat.com/2017/10/13/the-guardians-inferno/ https://samzdat.com/2017/10/13/the-guardians-inferno/ (This is not just about social media.)
threesmegiste 6y ago
Media loves Facebook articles. Perception.
LordHumungous 6y ago
Getting tired of these melodramatic think pieces.

119 points by johannsg 6y ago

I hate to be this dismissive, but I couldn’t find a single paragraph in that article that provided any kind of compelling analysis or insight into human behavior. I’m less concerned about misinformation propagating through a platform vs why misinformation even works on someone. I don’t care if the whole country of Russia sat there and told you lies with fake accounts 24/7, I want to know why you believed any of it. Anyways, is The Atlantic supposed to be a reputable website? This article isn’t even the fun kind of hot take, it’s the trite tacky type of hot take (oh, is the Social Dilemma out? Are we going to keep things thematic and piggy back off that?).

mfer 6y ago
Just knowing why people believe the things doesn't stop people from believing lies or the damage it can do to them and those around them.
- soupfordummies 6y ago
  Exactly. People know smoking is deadly but they still light up anyway. You can know that there is a misinformation bubble and it still influence you.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    So, should someone not have the liberty to smoke? I just want to get to the bottom of the logic. Are you my mom or dad? I have the right to join an echo chamber, a straight up human right. I have the right to let Russia feed me misinformation. I have this right.
bsenftner 6y ago
It is a social network hack: 1) broadcast misinformation wide and often; 2) some individuals lacking in critical thinking accept the misinformation as true and start repeating it; 3) as the misinformation propagates through those that do not verify, it begins to be noticed by those that might verify new information, but so many people in their sphere have adopted this information they accept the information on faith that their peers are like them and have verified the new information; 4) this process repeats until those that do verify are negated by those that refuse to accept that their peers and themselves could be wrong.
pjc50 6y ago
> I want to know why you believed any of it People are really keen to believe the worst of their enemies. People also are prone to believing in "revelations" and "scoops".
FabHK 6y ago
> Anyways, is The Atlantic supposed to be a reputable website? The Atlantic has been a monthly magazine for over 150 years. It is as reputable as, dunno, the New Yorker, Harpers, Mother Jones, etc.

blakesterz 6y ago

Wow. As much as I do agree with this, this is some hyperbolic writing. I've read so many articles just like this one, they show up on HN quite often it seems, and I've never seen one that had what seemed like a realistic fix to the problem. I don't think there is a fix really. All social media platforms will be full of bots/fakes that exist to spread garbage. All social media platforms will be full of real people doing the same. It also seems like the loudest people (and bots) are the most toxic and get the most engagement. It's people, all the way down, and there will always be a bunch of people doing the wrong thing. Those people will be highly incentivized and motivated, while the rest of us will just be looking for something to read. (Also, maybe interesting, the author of this is the executive editor of The Atlantic, not just some reporter.)

gfody 6y ago
> Those people will be highly incentivized not if we don't incentivize them - we just need a social media platform to not be an advertisement platform
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Again, this is just thinking about the problem incorrectly. You think people are vain, reactionary, signaling-obsessed, shallow and gossipy because Facebook put a fucking ad system on their website?
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    No, but Facebook will deliberately "optimise for engagement", regardless of whether the engagement is positive or negative for the user or society, because ads. Facebook wasn't the cesspit it is today when your news feed actually showed you your friends updates in chronological order. Hell, it was better still even before the GD news feed even existed.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      I guess I just don’t understand the argument. For decades everyone knew commercial breaks were just that, no one was being influenced by 30 second ads on TV. The stuff that influenced people back then is the same stuff that influences people today, social pressure and desire to fit in/attain status. Facebook ads, if anything, should be a distraction from social pressure. People are creating the social pressure to express yourself, and it’s now manifesting in shallow ways (too much pressure). Ads is not what’s causing this. If there’s any argument to make, and maybe I’ve been missing this the whole time, maybe you guys are saying platforms like Facebook abstract you into a living Advertisement. Thus, you must behave like an advertisement (get attention at all costs), and that is the core of their ad system, you, like a human battery in the matrix. But, there’s no argument to be made if you realize you’re jacked into the matrix and can leave. If you’re aware, you can bounce. Do we bear no responsibility at all here for how we behave?

elindbe2 6y ago

Hysteria much? Reads like the typical media rant today where you redefine words to mean whatever you want: "these bad people being allowed to communicate is GENOCIDE, TERRORISM, and HOLOCAUST" Bad people are bad people and should be treated as such but its clearly not the END OF THE WORLD.

MR4D 6y ago

FB has turned into the Paperclip Maximizer [0]. The question I have is what do we do when we recognize that there is a paperclip maximizer among us. This is a pattern that is new with internet technology, and we’ve never had to deal with before. I would also argue that Google Search with its SEO crap has also become a paperclip maximizer (or at least on its way to becoming one). As a civilization, we need to start thinking about it like this before we destroy ourselves. [0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
> It has one simple goal of maximizing the number of paperclips; human life, learning, joy, and so on are not specified as goals. Replace paperclips with dollars and you’ve got Facebook.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Facebook is what you get with s/paperclip/engagement/. What you get with s/paperclip/$/ is just capitalism.
earthboundkid 6y ago
Like all scifi, "Paperclip Maximizer" is just a fable about something that already happened but you put it in the future to make it seem more interesting. (E.g. robots are just slaves; space colonization is just regular colonization; Weyland-Yutani is just the East India Company; World War 3 is just WW2; etc.) Capitalism has always been the paperclip maximizer, for better or worse. Why did Europeans drag a bunch of Africans across the ocean to America? Well, there's this thing called "money" and Europeans were trying to maximize it, and it turned out that getting cheap labor to work in the Americas would let you trade stuff to China and collect money in Europe. It makes no actual goddamn sense, but it maximized numbers, so it happened.
- MR4D 6y ago
  I don’t disagree, but technology have now given us a near-zero cost of duplicating that paperclip, so both the growth rate and practical upper bound are much higher than we’ve ever imagined before.

trident5000 6y ago

YouTube has just as much of a monopoly in its category if not more than Facebook (with similar influence over society) yet we dont see the level of regular attacks (I'm not here to defend either, I'm a critic, but just pointing this out). Facebook total users: about 2.7 billion (with probably 80% dominance in its category). YouTube: about 2 billion but with a ~95% video stream dominance. The difference seems to be in the politics. I don't see the Atlantic or peers coming down on YouTubes dominance and influence. Edit: As others have pointed out in here the difference might also be financial. Facebook publishes news articles and YouTube does not. A broken up Facebook offers a fractured publishing market and better pricing for news distribution.

ben_w 6y ago
FWIW, I do see some similar criticisms of YouTube and its algorithms. I don’t read the Atlantic so I can’t compare scale, but it does happen.
- trident5000 6y ago
  Good point, I do see this but it seems to be from the anti-censorship side on the right. It seems the right is focused on the YouTube algos and the left is out for Facebook influence basically since the 2016 election. In all, these media debates over which platforms are dangerous seem highly partisan. We should really be looking at them through a neutral light. What is a monopoly and what is not a monopoly.
  - Keeeeeeeks 6y ago
    In addition to this, people on the left have talked about how certain pockets of YT (gaming, action movies, self help) quickly funnels people into a corner of YT that's rife with misogyny and pseudo-rationalist fallacies. Also the term Monopoly has tricky denotations and connotations; if you read Thiel's work you'll be inclined to have a strict definition of Monopoly (Ex: an online retailer isn't a monopoly because people still buy most things Elsewhere), whereas some have a looser definition (where Online Retailer is defined as likely monopoly because it is online retailer for everything that it can be, while also tracking sales data and using a white label brand to undercut other brands' SKUs)

blhack 6y ago

I must have really different experiences than all of these people that write these articles (it seems like there has been something like this, every week on HN, for the last 10 years) My facebook is mostly people showing pictures of stuff, sharing memes, some movie discussion groups, event planning groups. It seems like mostly just people using facebook as a proxy for real world interactions. Twitter on the other hand is just pure toxic garbage which seems made to intentionally divide people and incite hatred and eventually violence. I think there is a simple explanation for this: the people writing these articles are twitter users, and the people who use facebook are their outgroup.

busterarm 6y ago
You're in a socioeconomically-stratified filter bubble on facebook. My facebook was sufficiently diverse and my feed was exactly like twitter, even though none of my friend group were twitter users. I closed all of my social accounts. Doomsday machine is _exactly_ how I would describe all social media.
- blhack 6y ago
  I am? My Facebook feed contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car. Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are. I’m not sure how that’s me living is a socioeconomically stratified filter bubble. My twitter on the other hand, is mostly (all?) left wing Silicon Valley/tech types. It’s diverse in the way that I’d expect a hackathon to be “diverse”.
  - Merman_Mike 6y ago
    When you have billions of users, and you know every little detail about their lives, "millionaires plus guys sleeping in their car" is probably it's own little segment.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    > contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car. If you live in the Bay Area, this can actually be the same group.

maybelsyrup 6y ago

The Atlantic has always been a kind of tabloid for people who fancy themselves intellectuals, especially with its cover stories. After seeming like they were really on the brink for a few years there, not really knowing how to do digital, they turned it around - apparently by doubling down on this approach. High-minded clickbait for right-thinking elites, in other words. Have a look at their "most popular articles" box and you'll frequently see some breathless, hysterical stuff. It's a shame, too, because a majority of their content is probably still pretty good! Their pandemic coverage is a good example. But their editorial staff need engagement and they're gonna drive it by pushing the same "dark" buttons (fear, anger) that everyone else pushes these days. Ironic they're doing it in a critical article about Facebook.

trident5000 6y ago
Wait what? You think The Atlantic leans right? floren - got it, whoosh right over my head. Read that too fast.
- floren 6y ago
  "Right-thinking" means "agreeing with the Atlantic", not "politically conservative".
jackcosgrove 6y ago
> Ironic they're doing it in a critical article about Facebook. They're both fighting for the same advertising dollar pile. And to be honest Facebook is walking away with it.
Balgair 6y ago
> The Atlantic has always been a kind of tabloid for people who fancy themselves intellectuals, especially with its cover stories Case in point: Ghostbusters has a brief gag on The Atlantic and it's over the top writing in 1984. Timestamp at 1:55 in this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwKR_y93izs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwKR_y93izs

cobbzilla 6y ago

> No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. Well, one can control oneself, that's about the best we can do. As others have mentioned, don't use it. I tried that. After years of not using FB at all, I missed out on some important news that was only posted there. I decided to get back on FB, on my own terms. I created Bubble [1] and now I can visit FB with most tracking disabled, no ads, I only see posts from my friends, and even then only posts that do not link to news websites or contain political keywords. My signal/noise ratio is usually about 50%. I love my clean feed. Works on LinkedIn, Twitter, others. But the root problem goes deeper -- clearly not everyone cares or has the motivation to filter their own social media feeds. Some people like reading echo-chamber/fake news posts, truth is far down on their list of priorities. I don't know what the big-picture answer is. [1] https://getbubblenow.com https://getbubblenow.com (currently in beta)

tenebrisalietum 6y ago
I got tired of the garbage. First of all, I made a decision Facebook is not the center of my life and decided to stop posting personal things on it except for major announcements. I also started doing the following very aggressively: - unfollowing everyone who only tended to posted stuff I didn't want to see, - using the "Hide Post", "Hide All From X", and "Hide Ad" options very liberally - if I had any problem at all with the post or ad whatsoever, - reporting posts that had content I didn't like and even had a hint of violating Facebook policies--none got deleted but I think this affects Facebook's AI. I'd love to see a list of everything I've blocked and share it, but I don't see how to get that from Facebook. It took several months, but probably would have been less time if I was a daily Facebook user. At this point I have no political or news items (things I hid like crazy) on my Facebook at all. I have fun things from groups I've joined and that's it. It's boring and quiet, and there if I really need it without annoyances. But it did take some work and it's true, not everyone cares to put in that work. But they'll repost dumb meme stuff all day.

vmception 6y ago

Extend the indefinite public health orders to Facebook Health and Human Services can ban Facebook and states have clauses in their own emergency orders to automatically include that To pass constitutional muster, you can say “publicly traded social media networks that brag about how many fake users they have with over 500 million of them”

upofadown 6y ago

Social media is, well, social. It is a place for people to express how they feel, not how they think. I find it surprising that anyone thinks Facebook could ever be a place of rational thought. It isn't for that.

reuben_scratton 6y ago

That article is one of the dumbest articles I've read in an unusually dumb year. Why do these journalists think we should all only ever be spoon-fed inoffensive, carefully-curated pap? And when was the last time anyone changed their mind about anything because of something they saw on Facebook? The worst it does is confirm existing bias and prejudice.

robertlagrant 6y ago

If you have to repeatedly compare an opt-in social network with an automated nuclear launch system, you don't have much of a point.

ceilingcorner 6y ago

Another week, another hyperbolic article written by journalists against the industry eating their lunch. I hate Facebook as much as anyone else, but let’s be honest here: the Information Age means that the technologies of information generation and propagation have been democratized. Just like the Church was angry at the Printing Press, the old gatekeepers (legacy media) are rabidly resisting the new technology. Ultimately it isn’t a question of right or wrong, but when and how. Get used to it. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle and these top-down solutions are still stuck in the previous century.

deleted 6y ago
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karaterobot 6y ago

I agree with the broad message that social media has had a net negative effect on the world. I think the Doomsday Machine metaphor doesn't work, and even though I'm open to the argument the article was making, I don't think it did a good job making it. I wonder whether the media climate created by social media has made it harder to write persuasively against it. In order to be part of a successful business model centered around social media, these articles tend to embody the qualities (inflammatory, reactionary, narrow-minded, unfocused) of the thing they're railing against.

djohnston 6y ago

> Facebook inadvertently auto-generated jaunty recruitment videos for the Islamic State featuring anti-Semitic messages and burning American flags. Wow what an amazing slant. Done reading at this line.

harscoat 6y ago

re. Twitter negative comments: sorry, it's very valuable to me. It's easy to curate: I use LIST. I have a focused list ("story") which provides great, relevant information. It seems there is a subgroup of people on Twitter who understand how to use (& how not to use) it / imo Twitter is underrated.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

> If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene? Perhaps a better metaphor is how a Jehovah's Witness was forbidden to preach from a sidewalk of a company town. She was later found in her right to do that by the Supreme Court. But in both of these cases, the issue is that of scale - neither compares to Facebook's megascale.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

Well, the Atlantic is not really free now, but I feel that this criticism still applies : https://samzdat.com/2017/10/13/the-guardians-inferno/ https://samzdat.com/2017/10/13/the-guardians-inferno/ (This is not just about social media.)

threesmegiste 6y ago

Media loves Facebook articles. Perception.

LordHumungous 6y ago

Getting tired of these melodramatic think pieces.