Social media bubbles may threaten democracy
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I don't want to get my news from Facebook, so I routinely ask to "see less" of almost all politics, especially regarding Trump. There's almost never anything I wouldn't have learned about by reading mainstream news.
Here's the remarkable thing - this doesn't seem to be affecting my feed at all. I get as much politics as ever. I couldn't tell you how many times I've informed Facebook not to show me Trump news, and it's still there, lots of it. I'm starting to wonder if maybe pushing the "show less" button is akin to replying to a spammer to please don't send any spam, or perhaps pushing on a button next to a crosswalk that actually doesn't do anything, but makes people less likely to jaywalk by giving them the illusion of control.
Why am I even on the site? Well, I'm on Facebook because I like hearing about the various musical, theater, and arts events any of my friends and acquaintances are involved in. I'm not delighted that Facebook essentially controls our communication with each other - there was a time this tended to happen on the open web, rather than within the walls of a corporation, but I guess that's a topic for another day.
During the peak toxicity of the election cycle, I unfollowed a lot of sites/sources/people on Facebook. For a while, it worked.
Eventually, though, I simply lost that ability. For the last few months, if I click "unlike" or "unfollow" on some source I'd like to be rid of, nothing happens. I'm literally unable to unfollow content on Facebook now.
If you Google around, you'll see that this is a common problem that people have been reporting for years.
This makes me wonder if this is a bug, or if, perhaps, the Facebook algorithm simply refuses to allow me to have fewer than N number of connections to other nodes or something.
Since gaining entry into the US middle/professional class I have been informed numerous times that disagreeing with one's friends is impolite.
I miss the times when I could say things like "No, what you're saying is dumb" without drawing shocked stares. It was a simpler often better time.
I'm told it is particularly inappropriate to disagree with your girlfriend's mum and tell her she's spouting rubbish. Especially at a cordial thanksgiving dinner.
But if you can't argue with people and test each other's ideas, then what's the point of keeping them around?
> I miss the times when I could say things like "No, what you're saying is dumb" without drawing shocked stares.
I think you may be mistaking cultural norms about the manner of expression of disagreement with a cultural norms against disagreement generally.
“I think, if you consider X, Y, and Z, that you would find that it's more case A than case B” may get a different reaction than “No, B is dumb.”
I have been told that this also is impolite in many situations. My usual approach is asking questions. People get upset when they don't have answers because they aren't used to having their beliefs questioned and don't think defending them should be necessary.
This so much. Some how in the last 10 or so years we as a society have been moving towards holding beliefs that are rooted in nothing but an emotional foundation in which knowledge has no part of. Then when those beliefs are questioned by others the response of the person is to close up and get defensive, while coming to the conclusion you are ignorant or stupid for disagreeing.
When I start to disagree with people and try and have a conversation about our differences in perception on the subject, the other party always thinks I want to have an argument, but in reality I want to have a conversation. Arguments aren't about sharing knowledge, they're entered into to triumph over the other. It's as if we have lost the art of conversation.
Was it ever different? In particular, questioning religion used to draw angry emotional responses.
Alternatively, if you look at 1960ties, you won't find dry rational discourse. You will find people fighting and destroying each other.
When to argue and when not to is as important as knowing how.
I mean, I don't usually try to start arguments on purpose over a family dinner. But when someone, out of their own initiative, starts talking complete nonsense and expect me to take part in that conversation, then well... I understand social objects, but I believe accuracy of beliefs is more important than talking for the sake of talking.
And unrelatedly, it is easier to find flaws and nitpick then put on theory or explanation.
Ya know?
Do I get to vocally disagree with stuff like that even though it's thanksgiving?
Write them a letter the next day. Ring them, meet up?
Sometimes we need to celebrate our commonalities, our shared humanity regardless of deep differences.
Perhaps demonstrate your dissent softly and postpone your opposition.
Maybe. Perhaps it's best we all just keep quiet and don't say anything for fear of opposing each other.
Or maybe the whole point of having meals together is having interesting conversations.
I definitely give you that you have it hard.
But FB is different. It's like being in a big ballroom with all of your friends and acquaintances standing around watching you argue with one of them at the top of your lungs. It feels somehow boorish.
While in general friends should be able to disagree amicably, I wouldn't automatically jump to this conclusion; check how you're presenting your "counterpoint" first.
Furthermore, I find it hard to accept that if there are bubbles on social media they are materially different than the natural geographic and social bubbles from the pre-internet age. Again another topic light on actual data to make more informed conclusions.
Since most people don't feel like repeatedly getting involved in pointless debates with their friends, and are frustrated seeing posts they disagree with without any simple way of voicing their disapproval, they either use Facebook's tools to filter out those posts or just unfollow that friend entirely.
The most misguided consumer and propagator of fake news will still mostly just see likes of their friends who are also misguided. They might get a brave friend chiming in here or there to disagree, but their comments are easily dismissed because they will have no depth. The majority of their friends may disagree, but they'll never know because those who disagree (if they haven't filtered/unfollowed them already) have no good way to show that they disagree. Facebook as it is currently designed mostly just serves to affirm whatever the user wants to believe. That's where the bubble effect comes from.
If you make a post with an opposing view, or share someone else's then your friend group can use that opposing post to show their dissent for the initial post.
Now, regulated communities where karma allows you to hide opinions you disagree with so nobody can see the debate, that's a problem. It's one of the reasons people were so surprised this election.
The only (poor) idea I have is to have a 'value' button or something. Click it if you think the comment has 'value' but is not necessarily something you 'like'. Yeah, I know, it'll be gamed and just turn into yet another thing to express downvotes with, but maybe it'll work.
Any other ideas?
Still, FB is totally dominant and they could change it in a day if they wanted to and people would come back without any other issues.
After all, there are many parts of human condition that we view as negative and are reasonably successful in controlling and reducing them. E.g. if somebody has something you want, we no longer OK with clubbing that person over the head and taking it. There are many animal and other base urges that we keep under control with reasonable degree of success. Maybe we could do it here too, if we only tried?
Edit: that said, I think there exists a big problem in attempting to filter these items. How do we determine what is fake vs what simply goes against our preexisting (mis)conceptions?
Edit 2: best course of action might be that a wide diversity of ideas gets a chance to be seen (i.e. show stuff outside of your bubble), rather than trying to artificially manipulate proliferation.
We determine what is fake in the same we we always did. Sanity checking the authors, validating for self-consistency, cross-checking evidence, searching for conflicting interests, and evaluating probable accuracy based on those factors.
The paradigm shift is the Internet as a whole: democratizing dissemination of information. Facebook, email, same thing.
We're now flooded with noise from random anonymous un-credentialed entities, unable to track and filter out low-signal sources. The public is the new broadcast medium... the narrative becomes whatever resonates strongest with some subpopulation, rapidly spread through the wires by people who never critically analyze agreement.
Old news institutions at least held some degree of credibility... plenty of faults, from simple mistakes to missed coverage to occasional outright propaganda (generally corporate) - but there was accountability. John Doe wrote for The City Times, you learned to ignore the bad reporters and institutions, and if we go back far enough you could actually talk to them in-person.
Every democratization comes with a social challenge of creating norms to maintain order. Political democracy is a work in progress, economic democracy currently not viable, I guess this signals it's time for us to face information democracy...
We all went through those lessons in high school, but for a lot of people they just didn't sink in. And they still don't. Talk to a high school teacher about how their students use Wikipedia.
The postal service cannot prioritize letters that encourage banning abortion. Telephone companies cannot subsidize conversations about organizing unions. Facebook, on the other hand, can exert control over how visible a post is based on whether or not it, say, supports Donald Trump.
Many previous mechanisms for sharing do have such central control mechanisms, and exercise them far more enthusiastically than does FB. Dead tree print outlets are a mechanism for sharing with such features. Meatspace social clubs are a sharing mechanism with such features.
Facebook may be unique in the degree of it's reach for a sharing mechanism with the capacity for centralized editorial control, but it is not historically unique in being a sharing mechanism which features the capacity for centralized editorial control.
This hints at mechanisms to deal with such a monopoly (were it to arise) in analogy to how the government has protected its people by dealing with economic monopolies (sometimes creating them deliberately, sometimes monitoring them, and sometimes breaking them up when they abuse that position, etc.).
Imagine if those chain emails from your crazy uncle were always displayed prominently at the top of your inbox depending on the number of forwards.
And like the article points out, the inefficiencies (from the campaign's point of view) of the current targeting may be doing an overall service to democracy by giving populations a message they wouldn't otherwise hear.
There is a lot of hand waving in this argument but I'm convinced we should attempt to solidify what effects are there and whether we find them valuable before dismissing it.
No such mechanism in traditional media. In my country sometimes news outlets can be forced (by law) to publish a correction of a false story, but it is usually done in small print and gets hushed over.
Me too.
Bloomberg doesn't know what you said to your mother earlier today, probably doesn't have a list of everyone you know, and doesn't know where you went for lunch today.
Very few of them would ever see a Bloomberg article unless it showed up in their feed (which is something Facebook's black box has final say over).
And 86% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Do you have any data to support your claim?
Don't really see a solution for any of this. It's like we're three different tribes doing our best to coexist. And it's not really working very well.
Maybe, as with everything, the solution is more education. In this case: "yes, that person posted something you don't like. You should still read it, else you might risk becoming unaware that people who disagree with you exist, which could distort your view of the world, at least a bit."
First, the lack of a real threaded comment system. When replies below the first level all appear at the same depth, it becomes extremely difficult to have a real back-and-forth debate and nigh impossible to read/participate in someone else's discussion. It is not conducive to substantive dialogue.
Second, the lack of a dislike/downvote, particularly an anonymous one. When one shares something they agree with and only see that some (if any) of their friends like it, they might figure that the rest just didn't see it. Very rarely will someone register their disagreement with a comment because, even when you're receptive to discussion, a real discussion cannot be had because of the aforementioned shitty comment system. Worst of all, when you disagree with most of what a friend posts (and aren't the type to carry on pointless arguments all the time, or don't feel comfortable sharing your disagreement), having no way to easily register your disapproval, you quickly tire of seeing their stupid posts in your feed and the temptation is to unfollow them, further insulating them from dissent.
If people who post crap saw that many of their friends gave it a thumbs down, they might not think themselves right all the time. If you could hold a real back-and-forth discussion with someone and have it be readable by others, and see everyone's approval/disapproval of those comments, you might feel more inclined to participate. The conversations would better reflect the opinions of one's social group. There would still be some bubble effect, but it would be greatly moderated because hardly anyone has only friends who agree with them about everything and their friends who disagree would have a way to make their disagreement known by engaging in a substantive conversation or at the very least in the form of adding a dislike to their post.
> Second, the lack of a dislike/downvote, particularly an anonymous one.
I don't know. I agree that Facebook's commenting mechanism is ill-suited to deep discussion, but isn't the mechanism you're describing more-or-less exactly what exists on Reddit? And people are certainly able to self-segregate into bubbles on Reddit.
And for that matter, at least anecdotally I'd say that most of the political "discussion" that occurs on Reddit is low-quality, in that it tends to devolve into users shouting "fascist" or "cuck" at each other. (Some subreddits are better than others, admittedly.)
I suppose that Reddit users typically don't know each other in meatspace, though, and that Facebook is (mostly) different in that regard. Maybe that would make a difference. I don't know.
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/maybe-internet-isnt-tearing-us...
What data tell us:
"In the United States, according to Gentzkow and Shapiro, the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent. In other words, the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation."
and more:
"PROBABILITY THAT SOMEONE YOU MEET HAS OPPOSING POLITICAL VIEWS On a News Website 45.2%
Coworker 41.6%
Offline Neighbor 40.3%
Family Member 37%
Friend 34.7%"
Remember even the proponents of democracy (e.g. American Founding Fathers) were also rightfully fearful of it.
This IS democracy. It just might not be democracy that generates informed decisions.
To me therefore such articles are merely a smear campaign in support of impeding censorship.
I really don't see how the public is supposed to be better informed without social media. In some countries it is even worse, when the people who get elected for government also happen to be the owners of the major media outlets (like Berlusconi in Italy).
I think I also saw a paper debunking the filter bubble thesis (as in people still get so see other viewpoints), but I am too lazy to Google it.
Even without social media, people create their own filter bubbles by only consuming media that aligns with their views. I suspect in the US, Democrats rarely watch Fox News?
Also, it's quite easy to avoid this trap by listening and reading what other people are saying and writing, trying to understand them, and by always fact checking their claims, but also your own beliefs. But it takes some mental effort to do this. Therefore, most of people are not ready to do this, they don't care. You can't fix this without fixing the society first, and not Facebook.
Fascism is very closely aligned with the rise of radio, cinema, and phonographs, as well as public address systems in which many thousands of people could hear a single speaker.
Communism much the same, as well as very cheap publishing -- Chairman Mao's Little Red Book (official title, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, is one of the two most widely reproduced books in all history (the other is the Bible, and it's not clear which is the more published).
Father Coughlin and Joseph McCarthy were both tremendously boosted by radio. Rush Limbaugh has the largest radio audience in the United States, at about 26 million weekly listeners (NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered come in second and third at about 14.5 million apiece).
The history of dramatic changes to social structures and systems due to changes in media and epistemic is older than history itself -- it was one of those changes (writing) which started history.
Elisabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, and Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, particularly address this.
> In the run-up to Thursday's U.K. election, a group called Who Targets Me recruited 10,000 volunteers to install a browser extension that registers targeted messages, ranging from Facebook videos to Google search ads. The group calls them "dark ads" because they are so hard to monitor: They've been targeted to specific local constituencies, gender and age groups.
Has anyone gone the other direction with either a browser extension or app to essentially give permission to MITM the content and metadata input into, say, Facebook and Twitter? In other words, get the data for 10,000 users input and then test what inferences can be made based on metadata, content, and a combination of the two.
This is mostly because of the flagging system and mods like dang removing or censoring comments and submissions that don't agree with their silicon Valley based belief system (possibly the location of the most liberal/progressive beliefs in the world today).
They use the excuse that the offending items are written in an abusive or hateful manner or they "don't contribute to the discussion", but the truth is that different regions of the world and different cultures have different standards for politeness, so it just ends up filtering out different opinions.
In the past week or two, I've placed a front-page article (which drew the criticism that other significant stories are being ignored), and an admonition from @dang for a comment on another story. I've also had numerous submissions go nowhere (everything can't be first).
Additionally, if you think there's a particularly good or bad post or comment not being appropriately addressed, emailing HN directly (hn@ycombinator.com) typically generates a quick response.
You're part of the voice here.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/in-seattle...
titled "In Seattle, is it now taboo to be friends with a Republican?". Somehow, I don't think Facebook is to blame for this. Rather Facebook just provides tools to ensure the bubble.
What I can't believe is that people actually believe some of the stuff on social media.
They are two mutually reinforcing threats, not mutually exclusive alternative threats.
The proper response to social ills is almost never to add rules about what people may or may not say to each other.
Second: I doubt whoever wrote this even considered that possibility for a second, and I'm sure Mike Bloomberg has absolutely no idea this article even exists.
If targeted messaging can enable fraud on the democratic process, it can just as easily enable fraud on economical processes. All the issues pointed at the article apply just as well to a seller/buyer relationship.
Maybe we should work into regulating those opaque robots.
May threaten democracy
May threaten democracy
May threaten democracy
This way, repeated, sounds weird, not just dumb as it was at first...
[x] I deleted my FB account 5 years ago and couldn't be happier
[x] FB is literally cancer
[x] Zuck called his users dumbfucks
[x] I haven't been to FB in months but I miss out on being invited to Events by my friends
[x] Zuck called his users dumbfucks
[x] Zuck let his news editors be biased against the right
[x] After news editors being fired, FB's news AI picks up news based on numbers instead of what I want to see
[x] FB invades your privacy to show you relevant ads
[x] FB doesn't show me relevant ads
[x] FB is for high-school drama
[x] Zuck wants to be the President. All this is just theatre.
[x] FB makes ghosts profiles of people not on the platform. This makes me feel like punching Zuck
[x] FB makes ghosts profiles of people not on the platform. This makes me realize the futility of avoiding FB, so I joined it
[x] Remember, Zuck called his users dumbfucks
[x] Disparages arguments without actually addressing them
[x] Adds nothing to the discussion
[x] Comments that Hacker News is caught in the morass that befell Reddit
P.S. For all those taking this seriously, I deliberately wrote it as a hyperbolic phrase. I am fully aware that other organizations do hyperbole better than Bloomberg.
Original title: Democracy Never Faced a Threat Like Facebook
1861: Is Democracy a Failure? http://www.nytimes.com/1861/03/14/news/is-democracy-a-failur...
2014: Why Democracy is Failing https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/27/opinion/why-democracy-is-...
2016: Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy? https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/sunday/is-donald-...
2017: Democracy in America: How is it Doing? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/upshot/democracy-in-ameri...
2017: Checking Democracy's Pulse: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/25/upshot/checking-democracy...
2016: How Stable Are Democracies? 'Warning Signs Are Flashing Red' https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-li...
2016: How Republics End https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/how-republics-end...
By the way, for the non-Americans 1861 was the year the American Civil War started. Eleven states seceded from the Union to fight with their lives for perpetual human slavery of Black people: Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Brother fought against brother in an immense war. Almost one million people died, in a small nation of thirty one million. Today the death toll would be comparable to killing every human soul in New York City, and not in a humane or quick way either: most civil war soldiers took at minimum hours to die, bleeding to death, after being stabbed or shot by a fellow countryman at close range in the middle of a battlefield. The US government, after the war, estimated that two thirds of Union soldiers died slowly over a period of weeks due to disease from wounds.
By the way, this incomprehensible massacre claimed the lives of more soldiers than all other American wars combined, from the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812 to World War I and II to the Vietnam War. In two days at the Battle of Shiloh, more Americans died than in all previous American wars combined.
The modern-day equivalent to the civil war would be killing every soul in the following places:
San Francisco, Detroit, Seattle, Memphis, Denver, Boston, Washington DC, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami, and the entire US states of Vermont and Wyoming.
Remember, all this fighting was close combat, hand-to-hand, brother vs brother, with most people taking weeks to die from their wounds.
The scale of the American Civil War is pretty difficult to comprehend. Every time a news anchor suggests that we are on the brink of civil war, I try to think of the truly terrifying reality that would be.
The fact that political dialogue in America has died and both sides are furiously pitted against each other is positively horrifying, and I hope (and believe, for now) that we are very, very far from a civil war.
There is not going to be a civil war in the US. Modern-day rebellion in the US looks more like the violence around the time of the BLM protests. It's certainly not going to be organised at anything like a state level; the US is far too interwoven now. Not to mention that there's no core issue to galvanise a significant bloc into armed action; no core leadership; people are too comfortable these days to actually go into the field and fight on that scale, let alone a bitter war.
Likewise, in the 19th century, a citizen could become an effective soldier by donning a cap and picking up a gun. Not so these days, as the US military has far more toys at their disposal, both in terms of arms and intelligence. The idea that 2nd Amendment enthusiasts have of taking on the government's military is pure fantasy.
The article from 1861 is fascinating.
I haven't read this article, but Bershidsky tends to be one of the less hyperbolic pundits, so this is a good time to remember that major-media article writers don't write the headlines.