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Let's be honest. What a lot of establishment types want out of FB is just censoring their political opponents harder. This business about algorithmic manipulati

Let's be honest. What a lot of establishment types want out of FB is just censoring their political opponents harder. This business about algorithmic manipulation, once you pierce a few levels of narrative, is about only that: the establishment is pissed that FB's engagement algorithm is showing people things that the kind of person who edits major newspaper pages doesn't want the general public to see. We live in one of those periods in history when elite sentiment has disconnected itself from the experience of regular people. (Martin Gurri's recent book "The Revolt of the Public" is a brilliant examination of this subject.) I'm convinced that the recent animus against Facebook is rooted, deep down, in how FB disintermediates regular people from content and cuts out a class of elite gatekeeper who's accustomed to determining the truth. This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again.

skulk 5y ago
> This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again. On the surface this feels like a neat observation, but I think it's very poor because it completely ignores the incentive structures. Those publishing the vernacular during the times of the printing press had no incentive to publish the craziest possible stuff because of an algorithm that artificially promoted scrolls based on the number of things people said about them, positive or negative. The "strongly-worded editorials" are completely justified in criticizing this system as a deliverer of news over traditional journalism.

skulk 5y ago

> This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again. On the surface this feels like a neat observation, but I think it's very poor because it completely ignores the incentive structures. Those publishing the vernacular during the times of the printing press had no incentive to publish the craziest possible stuff because of an algorithm that artificially promoted scrolls based on the number of things people said about them, positive or negative. The "strongly-worded editorials" are completely justified in criticizing this system as a deliverer of news over traditional journalism.