4 ms·

> can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News? More people get their news from social me

> can you explain if Facebook and Twitter actually have bigger sway than obviously partisan news media like Fox News? More people get their news from social media than from... let's call it "big media" (CNN, Fox, etc). Sometimes that's from people linking content from those sources, but the point being people are spending a -lot- more time trawling social media than they are specifically checking their news media feeds.

tqi 6y ago
That's like saying people don't get their news from Fox, they get it from their TV... Most of the time spent in SM is consuming/sharing content from news media and their affiliated contributors.
- indigochill 6y ago
  There are some crucial differences between Facebook and your TV, though. Your TV shows you content from a set list of channels which content providers like Fox have made commercial arrangements to broadcast on. So if you want to watch Fox, you go to their channel. Facebook has profiles so you can still go to Fox's profile page, but the default way of interacting with it is via a stream that Facebook's algorithm tailors through magic algorithm pixie dust. More importantly, this pixie dust could hypothetically decide that one party is spreading misinformation that doesn't belong on their platform while another party speaks only truth. And they'd technically be within their rights to do so as an online community, but since we've let them become the online community, that power in the hands of a single company poses problems for society. Because media self-censorship (such as on TV) is bound only by the minimal legal requirements rather than the whims of some algorithm concocted by Silicon Valley, the desire of this upcoming bill seems to be to give legacy media special privileges/negotiating power with online media platforms to enforce the legacy media status quo online.

tqi 6y ago

That's like saying people don't get their news from Fox, they get it from their TV... Most of the time spent in SM is consuming/sharing content from news media and their affiliated contributors.

indigochill 6y ago
There are some crucial differences between Facebook and your TV, though. Your TV shows you content from a set list of channels which content providers like Fox have made commercial arrangements to broadcast on. So if you want to watch Fox, you go to their channel. Facebook has profiles so you can still go to Fox's profile page, but the default way of interacting with it is via a stream that Facebook's algorithm tailors through magic algorithm pixie dust. More importantly, this pixie dust could hypothetically decide that one party is spreading misinformation that doesn't belong on their platform while another party speaks only truth. And they'd technically be within their rights to do so as an online community, but since we've let them become the online community, that power in the hands of a single company poses problems for society. Because media self-censorship (such as on TV) is bound only by the minimal legal requirements rather than the whims of some algorithm concocted by Silicon Valley, the desire of this upcoming bill seems to be to give legacy media special privileges/negotiating power with online media platforms to enforce the legacy media status quo online.