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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook isn't the problem. It's a function of its users. It is as much responsible for misinformation as a city park is responsible for the crazy guy shouting about the lizard people. The problem is all the users who actually believe anything they read via facebook.

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Suppose you were the person to relay the message though.

Imagine one friend tells you "Can you please tell Adam X", but you know X is a flat out lie and is actually horrible and offensive. So do you agree to spread the lie? Oh and you're doing this free, and it's not your friend it's 2 strangers.

"Can you please tell Adam X" is a hair away from spreading rumor, hearsay. I would ask, at least in the context of facebook, why the speaker cannot talk to Adam himself. If he cannot, if he doesn't have the connections required to speak to Adam, then his message probably isn't worth forwarding.

I was trying to paint the picture that Facebook is the one passing along messages from one person to another. So yes, people could turn their computer off and go directly to someone elses house and tell them the message, but I think we've grown accustom to sending messages to each other over social media.

Systems are functions of nodes, and edges, and the biases and characteristics among them.

Facebook's users, absent Facebook, weren't influencing world events without Facebook. Now they are.

What changed wasn't the nodes. It was how the edges (Facebook) connected them.

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