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This reminds me of a recurring conversation I've had with relatives, in which I try to explain to them that Facebook isn't a person. It's not a media company wi

by cwp 5y ago

This reminds me of a recurring conversation I've had with relatives, in which I try to explain to them that Facebook isn't a person. It's not a media company with an editorial staff. It's not a company like anything we have seen before. It has billions of users. Trillions of posts, photos, videos and sundry other content. Thousands, possibly millions, of advertisers. If a person breaks a promise to you, he's a lying liar who lies. If Facebook recommends a political group to "at least 3 people," that's not a broken promise. That's an amazingly effective tweak to the recommendation algorithm. The same goes for all sort of claims people make about Facebook: - You were paid in Rubles! (It's not like there was a salesman that should have been suspicious. Facebook gets paid in Rubles *all the time* because they have millions of Russian users and many, many Russian ad customers. No human looked at the ad before it went up.) - You're allowing people to post hateful things! (Again no human reads all the posts. There are people that review a tiny percentage that have been flagged for one reason or another, but they'd have to employ a sizable percentage of the world's population to review everything.) - You're censoring conservatives! (Same thing, nobody is checking the political affiliation of posters before allowing posts to go up.) The fact is, this thing has never existed before, and basically no human inventions have reached this many people before, and it's frigging hard. Zuckerberg and the rest, are making it up as they go. All that's not to say that Facebook is awesome and the criticism is unwarranted. I personally don't use Facebook anymore for all the usual reasons. We should absolutely be talking about the role of social media in society, and how it's really warped public discourse, polarized the polity etc. But "it's easy, if you would just do this one thing, everything would be peachy" is absolutely the wrong conclusion and people seem to insist on reaching it every damn time Facebook comes up.

wnissen 5y ago
What you're saying is true to a large extent. But numerically the most interacted posts on the platform are not just right-wing, but far, far right wing. See https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 which posts them every day. There's the occasional cute cat, NASA photo, or centrist/left-wing news source, sure. But it's 80-90% far right commentators. Whether this is due to the asymmetrical polarization of right vs. left or something that Facebook is doing is hard to say. But the fact is that the most active posts are almost all far right political commentary.
- bryan_w 5y ago
  That would only measure public content. A large portion of US users have stopped engaging with public content on FB. A lot of people want to use FB to communicate with loved ones and news is just shoehorned in awkwardly. They don't engage with public content because either because it got them put in timeout or because they realized it was like shouting at a brick wall It's not surprising that the ones that still engage with public content are people you could imagine enjoying shouting at walls.
- samatman 5y ago
  Out of curiosity, I checked out the last twenty entries from this list. Clearly, the reigning heavyweight champion of Facebook is Ben Shapiro. It is simply dishonest to call Ben Shapiro "far right". He's a Republican. He doesn't promote military dictatorship, or "plandemics", or "the steal"; he's an Orthodox Jew who wants Republicans to be in charge. That's it. That's just bog-standard right wing. I happen to think he's a twerp; so what? So your source doesn't support your claim.

by cwp 5y ago

wnissen 5y ago

What you're saying is true to a large extent. But numerically the most interacted posts on the platform are not just right-wing, but far, far right wing. See https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 which posts them every day. There's the occasional cute cat, NASA photo, or centrist/left-wing news source, sure. But it's 80-90% far right commentators. Whether this is due to the asymmetrical polarization of right vs. left or something that Facebook is doing is hard to say. But the fact is that the most active posts are almost all far right political commentary.

bryan_w 5y ago
That would only measure public content. A large portion of US users have stopped engaging with public content on FB. A lot of people want to use FB to communicate with loved ones and news is just shoehorned in awkwardly. They don't engage with public content because either because it got them put in timeout or because they realized it was like shouting at a brick wall It's not surprising that the ones that still engage with public content are people you could imagine enjoying shouting at walls.
samatman 5y ago
Out of curiosity, I checked out the last twenty entries from this list. Clearly, the reigning heavyweight champion of Facebook is Ben Shapiro. It is simply dishonest to call Ben Shapiro "far right". He's a Republican. He doesn't promote military dictatorship, or "plandemics", or "the steal"; he's an Orthodox Jew who wants Republicans to be in charge. That's it. That's just bog-standard right wing. I happen to think he's a twerp; so what? So your source doesn't support your claim.