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Comment by MustardTiger | Hacker News Reader

This is why certain groups have such a strong interest in controlling twitter, facebook, google, etc. Most people simply go along with what they perceive as the majority opinion. This used to take the form of doing whate everyone around you does, which is why political views tended to group up so much by community.

But we no longer have communities, we no longer speak to actual people, especially not about anything like politics. So that instinctive conformity is now based on easily falsified information presented though the media. This is why facebook prevents certain topics from trending, and puts others that are not naturally trending into the trending queue.

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> But we no longer have communities, we no longer speak to actual people, especially not about anything like politics.

Oh but we do have communities, and we do talk to actual people (also about politics!) - it's just no longer strongly tied to your location. Blame the invention of the telephone, that lets you stay in touch with your family and friends at long distances, and the invention of the car, that lets you visit them often.

>Oh but we do have communities, and we do talk to actual people (also about politics!)

No, we don't. Communities have bonds. Seeing facebook spam is not the same as talking to a person, and joining a group of people who post likeminded facebook spam is not a community. It just scratches the same instinctual itch as a community.

>Blame the invention

Blame has nothing to do with it. Understanding how and why people control information to manipulate the public and undermine democracy is important. Trying to blame dead people for technology they invented is not.

> No, we don't. Communities have bonds. Seeing facebook spam is not the same as talking to a person, and joining a group of people who post likeminded facebook spam is not a community. It just scratches the same instinctual itch as a community.

You and I may be using Facebook differently. I'm not thinking about random Facebook groups and news feeds of people you don't even remember. But e.g. for me, there are people with whom, due to temporal and geographical constraints, Facebook (both site and Messenger) is the primary means of communication, and said communication is frequent and often deep. It's just another tool, not unlike the phone or telegram or paper mail.

> Understanding how and why people control information to manipulate the public and undermine democracy is important.

How: with free speech.

Why: because they have goals they want to achieve.

This actually is democracy working as designed - people being free to bullshit one another. The hope might have been that bullshitting from different actors will cancel out, but that doesn't generally work due to, among other things, simple randomness.

Keeping in touch with your family is not a community. And no, this is not democracy working as designed. Democracy as designed required access to information. This is why hearing everyone was important. You do not hear the voices in your community now, you hear a curated selection of voices intended to give you an impression they want you to get.

Yep, not to mention our species didn't evolve under the constraint that all communication will be forever recorded.

The nature of social media, especially when it isn't (at least)pseudonymous is such that all statements are forever a part of the public record.

It's lead to a culture of going out of your way not to offend anyone(especially for facebook where your literal identity is tied to it).

The end result is a bunch of virtue signalling and oftentimes dis-honest but politically correct dialogue.

>This actually is democracy working as designed - people being free to bullshit one another

They aren't free to bullshit one another. Facebook, Google, and co. regularly censor their users.

> You and I may be using Facebook differently.

This is almost certainly the case. I feel like much of the time when people confidently generalize (on HN and elsewhere) about "how everybody uses Facebook", they end up talking past each other because there are just vastly different patterns of usage that you never have occasion to get exposed to (given that your friend group is more likely to have usage patterns similar to your own). I once got downvoted pretty heavily on HN for responding to someone talking about removing their Facebook friends that they don't know by asking "Is this something that people do? Friend people that they've never met or spoken to?". Apparently that's totally a thing, but I never would've known

It may be the case, or it may not. Since we're not discussing how we use facebook, it is both unknown and irrelevant. We're talking about how facebook uses us, not at all the same thing. Facebook curates what you see no matter how you use facebook.

Yeah, a lot of people just play it safe. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" and all of that stuff.

If I could Correct the Record here, no one is trying to control the narrative on these platforms. Sounds like a Republican funded lie to me :^)

Lol. Care to comment on the many bannings/suspensions of prominent right-wing commentators/journalists on Twitter (Milo, Ricky Vaughn, Chuck Johnson, James O'Keefe, to name a few), the practice of "shadowbanning", as well of Facebook's well-documented history of deleting/censoring of posts about refugee crime in Europe and outright censorship of anti-refugee comments in Germany (under the guise of calling it "hate speech" of course...)?

I was kidding fam... I even used 'Correct the Record' in my comment...

C'mon son.

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