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I would think that everyone expects salespeople, ads, news, and politicians to be acting in their own interest, and therefore takes precautions to counteract th

I would think that everyone expects salespeople, ads, news, and politicians to be acting in their own interest, and therefore takes precautions to counteract that. Facebook, though, pretends to be a communication service. The general expectation from a communication service is that it transmits information between users, thus users expect that what they see or hear coming out of the communication service is what the person at the other end has said/that the person at the other end will see what they say. A service that doesn't provide that isn't really a communication service at all, by definition - and lacking any other uses, isn't really good for anything. Just imagine a phone company with advanced speech recognition and synthesis software in the line that rewrites your conversations to be happier (or any other quality that the company or its customers prefer).

TeMPOraL 12y ago
> I would think that everyone expects salespeople, ads, news, and politicians to be acting in their own interest, and therefore takes precautions to counteract that. You're underestimating human irrationality and how communication works. No one has enough brainpower to constantly correct everything they hear for someone's self-interest. That's why ads work. They're identifying and exploiting methods for bypassing rational thought. > The general expectation from a communication service is that it transmits information between users, thus users expect that what they see or hear coming out of the communication service is what the person at the other end has said/that the person at the other end will see what they say. No, Facebook is a curated communication service. Always has been. You wouldn't be able to keep up with raw, unfiltered stream of posts by your friends and liked pages. This would turn the service useless.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  Are you sure you are not missing the point? Whether curated or not, the expectation of users certainly is not that it's curated according to facebook's interest of the day, but according to their own interests (that is, to reduce noise, not to influence them), and whether perfect or not, people certainly do expect and counteract lying in ads. Also, just because ads are generally perceived with some scepticism, doesn't mean that certain kinds of ads aren't unethical as well. In particular, ads that exploit methods of bypassing rational thought might indeed be unethical, and certainly are not the same as just general self-interested advertisement. And despite what you claim, manipulation is actually not a defining property of ads - if you have a product to sell that is actually a rational thing to buy, advertisement can use perfectly rational thinking in order to pursuade you to buy it. Just because much of end-consumer directed advertisement nowadays is trying to sell bullshit, doesn't mean that advertisement can only be used to sell bullshit.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

> I would think that everyone expects salespeople, ads, news, and politicians to be acting in their own interest, and therefore takes precautions to counteract that. You're underestimating human irrationality and how communication works. No one has enough brainpower to constantly correct everything they hear for someone's self-interest. That's why ads work. They're identifying and exploiting methods for bypassing rational thought. > The general expectation from a communication service is that it transmits information between users, thus users expect that what they see or hear coming out of the communication service is what the person at the other end has said/that the person at the other end will see what they say. No, Facebook is a curated communication service. Always has been. You wouldn't be able to keep up with raw, unfiltered stream of posts by your friends and liked pages. This would turn the service useless.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
Are you sure you are not missing the point? Whether curated or not, the expectation of users certainly is not that it's curated according to facebook's interest of the day, but according to their own interests (that is, to reduce noise, not to influence them), and whether perfect or not, people certainly do expect and counteract lying in ads. Also, just because ads are generally perceived with some scepticism, doesn't mean that certain kinds of ads aren't unethical as well. In particular, ads that exploit methods of bypassing rational thought might indeed be unethical, and certainly are not the same as just general self-interested advertisement. And despite what you claim, manipulation is actually not a defining property of ads - if you have a product to sell that is actually a rational thing to buy, advertisement can use perfectly rational thinking in order to pursuade you to buy it. Just because much of end-consumer directed advertisement nowadays is trying to sell bullshit, doesn't mean that advertisement can only be used to sell bullshit.