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I feel like we're singling out FB here. Can we bundle Twitter and Tiktok with it? May be Youtube comments? The danger of course is that we have all piled up on

• dragontamer 5y ago
  Television is a new medium where opinions are neither rare nor well done. (~~Anonymous from the 1930s, with many varieties) It helps to remember that most new mediums follow the same trend: when its easier to share opinions, everyone is flabbergasted at the huge volume of "low quality" opinions.
  • systemvoltage 5y ago
    I'd argue that the problem is much deeper than social media. It's the internet and we're acting surprised that giving a microphone to every human was not going to lead to angry mobs and echo-chambers of the scale the world has never seen. Then, we decided to clamp down on it, lose civil liberties and the ability to dissent. Comedians are apologizing for making people laugh - think about it. So we're overall worse off in terms of social civility than we were 30 years ago. I still believe that the internet has done more good than bad, but it's foolish to not acknowledge the shortcomings.
    • dragontamer 5y ago
      Are you familiar with the 1st Amendment, and the immediate backlash (aka: the Sedition act) passed almost immediately afterwards? The printing press had the exact same issues as today's media, albeit at a slower pace but it was still there. A balance must be found. A few decades ago, the balance people liked was that newspapers were free to say anything, but if something was untruthful, then people could sue newspapers (providing a strong incentive for newspapers to remain truthful). I don't think it was a perfect system, but it was better than what we have today for sure. The issue is that we haven't figured out what the new system should be. (If someone posts misinformation on Facebook or more commonly: false-information on Google Reviews / Amazon Reviews / Yelp reviews: who do you sue?). Heck, people seem to have entirely forgotten the first 150+ years of American history with the 1st Amendment and how we settled upon the libel / slander laws. People don't really care about the national-level discussion. National level is abstract and doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives. But ask people about how misleading Yelp reviews or Amazon reviews have hurt (or helped) them, and you can tell that people are incredibly jaded about this "Free information" online. -------- I don't know what the new system should be. But the 1st step is to acknowledge that at all points of our history, we've had freedoms AND we've had problems associated with those freedoms. We want the "good stuff" associated with free communication, but we must work our best to clamp down on the "evil stuff". I don't think anyone disagrees upon "evil stuff" of free speech: doxing, swatting, "fake news" / "misinformation", etc. etc. Both sides pretty much agree upon the realities of today's media (the right calls it "Fake News", the left calls it "misinformation". Come on, its not like we're that far apart on the matter). ------ In any case: take solace in history. The 1st Amendment vs Sedition Acts were the big debate in the late 1700s. Its not like the discussion was ever resolved: we just had different political powers swing free-speech one way, and then swing enforcement the other way (ex: Office of Censorship during WW2).
      • boplicity 5y ago
        > who do you sue? I've recently realized that a lot of the crap on Facebook comes from this ambiguity. They've basically created a system where it is very hard for anyone to take responsibility. Case in point: New articles posted on FB tend to have very low quality comments, almost as a rule. For pages that post these articles, it is extremely difficult for them to "moderate" those comments, in order to enforce high quality discussions. In fact, their is a lot of pressure on those pages to not enforce quality commenting. It is hard to say, even, that the organizations who post new articles are even responsible for creating a positive community around their Facebook posts. Contrast this with the "old way" that newspaper brought in reader voices: Through letters to the editor. No matter whether or not you agreed with the opinions, these letters were (and are), of a completely different caliber than the typical FB comment. The newspapers willingly published them, and, in a sense, took responsibility for them. Namecalling, slander, misinformation, etc are mostly (though not always) filtered out of letters published by newspapers. Compare this, too, to a forum like Hacker News. Here, we have a steady moderator who enforces the rules, and that the community also helps enforce. The rules are clear enough. Low quality discourse is discouraged, and sometimes even removed. There is someone whose job it is to maintain the quality of discussions. On the comments on a Facebook page, that almost never happens, neither from FB or from the company hosting the page. As has happened through the history of online forums, without decent moderation, things tend to devolve very quickly. This is exactly what's happened at Facebook. They've created "pages" that could be there responsibility, or could be the responsibility of the people running the page, but nobody really takes responsibility. Everything, instead, is focused on engagement. Publishers want to drive traffic to their websites. FB wants to keep people on the site, and "engaged" with their advertisements. Moderation, in essence, has been almost completely ignored.
• aierou 5y ago
  What you are seeing is a major weakness of platforms like HN and Reddit. This weakness could very well cause more harm than Facebook, but studies or articles that point this out likely wouldn't receive exposure on the platforms they impugn. We've seen the negative effects of this feedback loop in the past (who else remembers Reddit's role in the Boston Marathon bombing?), but it is clearly a much lower priority than the current Facebook witch hunt.