Comment by grive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grive | Hacker News Reader

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> They sell ads. If "news filtering" aligns with their bottom-line they'll do it, if it doesn't, they won't, that's business.

Yep, that's what is said when saying "Facebook [...] kills democracy for their own benefit". They provide a discourse perceived as the public discourse for a profit.

Some people are considering that this exercise is a threat to democracy, and even though you seem to imply that you are more versed / cynical / aware ("Give me a break"), that's precisely the for profit part that ruffles some feathers.

> What kills democracy is people incapable of convincing others that they are being mislead/wrong without insulting them with all possible -ism .

Offering a platform for misleading news does not help and actually plays an active part in this.

> What kills democracy is people on both side being so extreme they just can't talk to each other anymore. Facebook isn't responsible for that.

Building a bubble is the prime example of how you can stop separated communities from talking to each other. You can say that the separation existed before Facebook, before other online communities, it does not make it any less salient that these bubbles exists and that it is in the monetary interest of Facebook to further them in order to sell better targeted ads. They whole business plan, their whole point of existing is depending on practices and behaviors that are currently a problem in our democracies.

This means that as of now, Facebook will fight for these problems when they fight for their business. Even if you don't use Facebook or other social networks on the Internet, this means that as an individual citizen your country / nation is being influenced by these products. Even if you choose to not use them, it is perfectly reasonable to go out of your way to tell people to stop using them and to fight their influence in your country.

So, people can perfectly continue to blame Facebook for these problems. No one says that they should be alone in being blamed on this, no need to exaggerate the critics to make them appear ridiculous. But acknowledging these problems is absolutely critical these days.

> So, people can perfectly continue to blame Facebook for these problem

It's just scapegoating. It's useless and a waste of time. The time you spend blaming Facebook is the time you don't spend actually fixing what should be fixed : creating an healthy environment for debate.

Blaming this or that website is easy and it doesn't solve anything. Quitting the extremist views, quitting calling people morons,trolls,douchebags when they disagree with this or that political line and actually engaging them strictly on ideas instead of dismissing their concerns as -ism or -phobia is the only way you're going to make people listen to what you have to say.

If you filter people's news, they'll just go somewhere else that give them what they want. And then you'll wake up again not understanding the result of the last elections because you lived in your own, filtered echochamber.

On the contrary, I think it is crucial for us to fight against websites selling audiences.

Fake news exists because they are able to sell ads on their pages, and they are profitable because they attract people, creating feelings, outrage, unreasonable reactions that feeds the pre-existing bias in the whole population.

Fighting these should be cutting their revenue streams. Google did just that, but it is a survival move so as to avoid precisely being in the blast of defense move that ought to be taken by citizens.

However, Google can and will only do the bare minimum for them to show that they somewhat care and that they are in control. They are starting a play of cat and mouse with people that can easily switch platforms.

> It's useless and a waste of time.

Ad-blockers are pretty effective there. If everyone used ad-blockers, fake news website would not have any revenue left, beside some marginal subscription streams. Evangelizing for ad-blockers, against Facebook, against Google and against analytics in general is an effective way to fight against these parasites.

> The time you spend blaming Facebook is the time you don't spend actually fixing what should be fixed : creating an healthy environment for debate.

The time I spend blaming all social networks is a time spent to better the Internet and fight against populisms at large. As for how to foster a healthy environment for debate, I'd quote Sartre:

> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

Replace anti-Semites, which were the populists of the pre-45 era, to whichever populism you want today, be it from the left or from the right. You cannot win with reason against them, because they speak to the guts and then explain that since they have popular support, they have already won. You cannot defend measure and reason because their main weapon is bipartism coloring things in black and white, and this will always be more popular than trying to explain things, to have some critical thinking.

Mass-media in general will always push forward this kind of gregarian thinking. Internet ought to be a way for us to build other ways to consume and produce, to share information. Facebook and Google and Amazon are building empires upon the ashes of the old world, effectively cutting the disruptive factor that Internet was introducing in its infancy. Fighting those mastodons is not vain, it is time spent actually fixing what should be fixed.

Great comment!

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