Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Furthermore, it's funny hearing this hypocrisy coming from journalists, since they are the ones who are throwing away their "journalistic integrity" to make money. It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays.
They have to write polarizing articles to gain more eyeballs since otherwise no one will have enough attention to read their articles. They should realize there's a bigger opportunity here but instead all they're focused on is short therm revenue and complaining about how Facebook (who focuses obsessively on long term value) is being unfair.
I don't want to be too dismissive, but even though I like the coverage I get from the NY Times, I'm still financing a bunch of think pieces on the fashion industry, their cooking apps, "78 hours in X" articles, movie reviews, Bret Stephens op-eds, "Republicans place doubt on Hillary for X"-style both sides pieces, etc.
I mean, sure, journalism. And its a big outfit, we don't all need to be writing about the opiod crisis. But I would like to think there's a market.
Bonus points if you make this and get a rich person to help finance it. The subscription can help ease the losses whatever billionaire ends up taking. Medium is already kinda this.
Medium has also made the same mistake of introducing bias even though they claim to want to become a platform.
A lot of people see Medium as a place where a bunch of self-important people, wannabe activists, growth hackers, social justice warriors live.
You can see that by the type of posts they promote on their main page as well as their official Twitter account.
It's really hard to become unbiased when the organization has a clear owner. I am hoping that the new decentralized technologies will inspire some people to come up with a completely transparent and non biased system for true journalism.
You wouldn't want to read a defense of homeopathy right? Why do I have to suffer through denial of climate change, defenses of trickle-down economics, or "increased economic growth will counterbalance the tax cuts!"?
I totally understand why you want to filter those out from your life, and I also want to filter a lot of things out of my life too. But that's our problem, not the media's.
I think the job of journalism is to give you what needs to be heard instead of what you want to hear. Being unbiased is not easy so I think at least media needs to provide as many sides of the story as possible so that each value judgment cancels out and the consumer can make the right decision based on complete set of information.
The problem with the current mainstream media is that every one of them has become "Buzzfeed"ified, which means they try very hard to optimize content AND their interpretation to cater to their existing audience. This is why you see acceleration in polarization. And this is why you see so many people sharing articles talking shit about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump. They just want to be reinforced with content AND value judgment of what they want to believe in.
This is human nature and we as consumers cannot easily change to act rationally because we have other better things to do in our lives than focusing every waking hour of our lives into useless political debate or whatever that's being marketed through the media. This is why I think this is journalism's job.
I no longer can trust any one side coverage of a single story so have started following multiple sources just so i can make a sane judgment on anything that's happening around me. You should try that too, it's amazing how almost always different parties write extremely different interpretation of the same objective static fact that doesn't need to be sensationalized.
Maybe many people may want to live in the matrix and just believe what they want to believe, but personally I do want to know exactly what I'm being fed and don't want to brainwashed with propaganda.
I realize this is something that's not easily possible within the traditional centralized organizational structure (because they have to make money) which is why I think the new decentralized trust-less technologies may be able to help.
This also neatly sums up why “tell every side” is the same disastrous pitfall it’s been since creationists were advancing it on USENET. Expertise and facts matter, and on many issues they’re very unevenly distrusted. On things like climate change, evolution, etc. increasing the number of sides is simply increasing the number of known-incorrect things you’re exposed to, and most people lack the time or background to tell them apart, especially when many of them are actively being gamed by people who stand to profit from spreading those falsehoods.
Manifesto Guy was backed up by actual scientists who spoke out to say he'd got the science right, he provided many citations of scientific papers, most of what he wrote was about Google's own culture anyway (and those parts were clearly supported by leaked communications), and in interviews he dwelled on his own firing - a fact.
To you it's just "science-y sounding" and "unsupported by evidence or logic". But what he said is all true. You can read the studies or look at the statistics yourself. There is a clear imbalance in interest (vs ability) between genders in the field of computer science.
By denying this you make yourself the gender-science equivalent of a climate change denier.
Thanks for inadvertently providing a great example for why this is so hard: what you said is wrong but recognizing that requires time – simply reading that turgid slog of an essay, recognizing the difference between a blog post or option piece (i.e. most of his citations) and peer reviewed publications in respected journals (of which he cited almost none), reading the few cited papers to see how they supported the claim being made and whether those results had been upheld or were suspect within the field (most of the remaining items), and using a logical framework to tell whether they were even relevant to the issue being discussed.
That’s a lot of work and most people are going to skip it in favor of picking the side closest to what they already believe, or which is the most entertainingly written, as you did. Most people are going to look at the issue, decide it’s too complicated and find something else, missing the fact that there’s far more scientific consensus among people who actually study the issue at hand.
As an example of what that looks like, consider https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... – someone went to the trouble of figuring out original sources, analyzing specific claims, citing everything … and the most common complaint was that it was too long. At some point, it’s unreasonable to expect a general audience to follow the details of a big topic and that’s where journalists act as a useful filter finding relevant experts and filtering out the guys with degrees in other fields speculating wildly.
I never said the Google guy was correct or wrong. In fact, parts of it makes sense and parts of it doesn't.
What irritates me is that people are making a huge fallacy. For example two people can have a whole set of arguments that conflict with one another. Let's assume we can absolutely measure whether a statement is absolutely correct or not. And two people each make their own set of statements about a topic.
Person A: Right - wrong - wrong - Right
Person B: Wrong - Right - Right - Wrong
Instead of A and B sharing their ideas and coming to a conclusion which will be
Right - Right - Right - Right
They keep fighting over small details and say "Because you have this little part that's wrong, your entire argument is wrong" to one another. This will never resolve because they each have errors in their arguments for a fact.
Any humble person would agree that he/she is not a perfect being therefore prone to errors, especially when it comes to complex topics like politics.
Giving someone like that your attention is simply increasing the distraction level. It would be much better to get someone qualified — in this case, say, a neuroscientist or cognitive psychologist — who can do a better job representing that position.
But it's clear that we've reached a point where agreeing on basic scientific facts or even common sense is apparently impossible. You're so filled with hatred for Damore that you can't see past your own biases. You even called it a "turgid slog of an essay", well revealing that you can't even separate the quality of writing from the ideas a piece of writing expounds. You hate the idea that men and women are actually different so much it's become a religion to you. You're a lost cause: far, far beyond science.
Defining your personal political viewpoints as “basic scientific facts” is why you're having such a hard time understanding this.
Should you want to talk about science, here would be a few places you could start:
1. What is Damore's thesis, anyway? Simply extracting a coherent theory from that essay would be good for making sure you're talking about the same thing as everyone else.
2. What data supports that position? (Peer-reviewed journals, not “frankly also common sense”)
3. How can you test that theory against the data? In particular, actual science is falsifiable and it'd be really important to find ways a speculative theory could be disproven.
For example, if I'm reading “The idea that there are biological differences that cause differences in interest is entirely uncontroversial and frankly also common sense. Alternative explanations for why girls don't study computer science are all absurd.” correctly, you're making a broad claim that differences in the current makeup of CS participation can be explained by biology.
Looking at that like a scientist rather than a fundamental would reveal a few things to test:
1. Has it always been like that? 2. Is it like that in similar fields? 3. Is it like that in other cultures? 4. What skills could explain that gap? 5. Are there reliably measured differences in those skills? 6. Can we measure a difference in performance in those skills due to biological differences as opposed to socialization and practice?
https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf13327/content.cfm?pub_id=4... shows a big problem for a biological claim since the big drop in CS participation from the mid-80s onward is orders of magnitude too rapid to be explained by evolution, and since that trend has not been present in other demanding fields we'd need an explanation for while e.g. CS is so much more specialized than medicine, math, chemical engineering, etc.
Similarly, actual studies have shown that e.g. mathematical skills are extremely close (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-22162-004) so you're left needing to demonstrate that CS is so highly dependent on specific skill performance that anyone not performing at the extreme upper bound of the distribution cannot compete. This is especially unlikely when looking at the larger software engineering field given how multidisciplinary that is.
Finally, we'd be left needing to demonstrate that these unspecified critically important skills are actually innately determined rather than the product of practice. Simply linking e.g. the ability to rotate 3D models mentally would require more work to tell you whether that was innate or simply an uneven distribution of people who'd previously practiced that skill.
> You even called it a "turgid slog of an essay", well revealing that you can't even separate the quality of writing from the ideas a piece of writing expounds.
Or, if you care about the real answer, that it's merely the latest in a long line of people jumping into a long-running debate without having done their homework and being surprised when “You're wrong and I'm right” doesn't get more respect. It's like coming into a discussion of evolutionary biology and going “Hey, have you ever thought about how this violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics?” like you're the first person who's ever had that idea.
thanks for the speculation, but no.
It sounds like what you actually want is a blog of opinion pieces that aligns with your own preconceived political notions. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's a perfectly reasonable product to want. But that would not be news.
I stopped supporting NYT and the Atlantic once they became more sensationalist.
The opinion pieces' use of fancy words tend to obscure the fact that it's filled with junk economics that only very few people actually believe in. Then you have all these people on the right defend themselves with this, and journalists accept it because surely one side of the political spectrum couldn't possibly be guided by lies.
Financing that does not make me a happy camper
I'll still support them as my news source where I don't have to see vitriolic, polarizing headlines.
I'd like to say I cancelled out of principle but really it was more that I couldn't find time to read it anymore
That's about the price of a print subscription to the Financial Times, who are dry but reliable with good worldwide business-focused coverage.
> I'm still financing a bunch of think pieces on the fashion industry, their cooking apps, "78 hours in X" articles, movie reviews, Bret Stephens op-eds
That kind of stuff unfortunately pays for the serious stuff like the opioid crisis coverage.
The FT panders just as hard, it has its own severe biases that result in deeply unreliable reporting.
My go-to example of how unreliable the FT can be is an article they published before the Brexit referendum. It said the FT had polled a panel of over 100 "experts" and "leading thinkers". Every single one thought a vote to leave would damage economic growth. In fact economic growth accelerated. The FT, by the way, literally flies the EU flag above its offices in London.
https://www.ft.com/content/1a86ab36-afbe-11e5-b955-1a1d298b6...
In the FT’s annual poll of more than 100 leading thinkers, not one thought a vote for Brexit would enhance UK growth in 2016.
Where is the line between spectacularly bad reporting and propaganda? If the FT really couldn't find a single "leading thinker" who could actually get it right in a pool of 100, and they didn't even realise that was a problem, how reliable can their coverage on other topics be? Like all newspapers the FT employs generalists who rely heavily on FT-identified 'leading thinkers' for analysis and facts. If they aren't able to spot self-created bias and groupthink on the topic of Europe then they surely cannot in other areas.
I agree with rtpg - journalism seems to have a serious sickness and I'd pay for news sources that seemed to have real commitments and processes in place to ensure wide-angle reporting.
Really? Are you sure? It's still in the fractional percentage points: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-growth
And some of that article says "medium term". There is still no decision on what Brexit will look like and the number of businesses planning accordingly is increasing.
> "Don Smith, deputy chief investment officer at Brown Shipley, said: “The uncertainty generated by a decision to leave the EU would undoubtedly be damaging for sterling assets across the board and, indeed, the value of sterling on foreign exchanges"
Sterling was 1.3 to the euro just before the vote and is now 1.13.
Sterling was 1.3 to the euro just before the vote and is now 1.13
Because the BoE panicked and dropped rates even further, which always hurts the value of a currency. Regardless, my point was about the prediction I specifically named and more generally, the vast wrongness of the FT - a problem that has gone unanalysed and uncorrected, as far as I know.
Specifically, the article you linked to includes the full statements of everyone they asked. You can obviously accuse them of selectively choosing their panel's composition, but (a) it appears this is a group of people they regularly poll, meaning it doesn't have a specific anti-brexit slant because it predates that issue. And (b) I challenge you to find a group of 100 people with similar credentials that reflects your opinion.
I'd also like to see proof of brexit's positive effect in growth in 2016. Hint: that's impossible to do, unless you have an alternative universe.
If you invest the time to actually read the opinions, you'll also notice that almost every single one says they expect little effect on growth in 2016, which is probably pretty close to the truth, considering the referendum only happened in June, and the second half' numbers are completely within the normal range.
I'd also point out that several of comments quoted by the FT are as pro-brexit as you seem to want them to be. And that there are quite a lot of people today who would consider comments such as the following to be exactly the sort of contribution to public discourse that was regrettably underrepresented in the run-up to brexit:
We cannot count on the EU being prepared to grant continued access to the European market on the same privileged terms, particularly if the divorce turns vitriolic (contrary to received wisdom, in terms of trade flows "they" do not need "us" as much as we need them). And, if it were so easy to expand trade with the rest of the world to compensate, you would expect that to be happening already.
And (b) I challenge you to find a group of 100 people with similar credentials that reflects your opinion.
100 random members of the British public would have got it more right than this panel did. Obviously gaining a credential in this space results in less ability to analyse the situation, rather than more.
Other than that: The fluff you're complaining about has the fantastic benefit of being pretty cheap. Op-eds don't need days of calling people or at the courthouse.
These parts of publishing may also work much like a non-profits advertisement, in that they look like a terrible waste of money that could be put to better use. Yet they bring in more than they cost, and are therefore in your interest even if you (don't want to read them/weren't attracted to the charity by the ad)
That's certainly a problem with the media I'm familiar with, but it's all first-world western. Does the media in Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia share those issues, in your experience?
I'm assuming you read the article and are aware that those are the only countries currently affected?
I'm not sure what your whole screed about journaists has to do with the decision at hand. It's just a fact that one of the largest online audiences is on Facebook and that newspapers & magazines have to be present on that platform to get views. They can't really get around posting to Fb, can they? If Fb suddenly cuts a major source of revenue for a whole industry without any discussion, if that is Fb's power, then this is really unhealthy for our market economy and our ideas of democracy
From Facebook's point of view, these media sites are nothing more than parasites that try to write sensational articles to mislead the public and get people to fight online.
Users become unhappy because they get into unnecessary arguments with their friends and family about things that ultimately have no right or wrong answer (such as politics), and end up blaming Facebook for facilitating it.
Facebook is unhappy because their users are unhappy.
It's only these short-sighted media companies that "benefit" off of the traffic (but in the long term not so much).
By cutting this party out of the equation, users are happier. Facebook is happier.
And I would say it's a good thing even for the media because essentially they are being cut off of access to the race to the bottom that's killing them. One of the reasons why these publications had to write sensationalism articles and disseminate them onto Facebook was because if they didn't, their competition would.
Now that they are cut off, they are forced to compete in healthier ways. It's kind of hilarious because it's like these self-important media companies are some kids trying to get their hands on a cookie jar and fighting, and one day their mom (Facebook) takes it all away so nobody gets the cookie jar. The kids cry and bitch about it saying it's not fair. But soon something great happens. kids no longer fight because there's nothing to fight over, but go out to earn their own cookie in their own creative ways. They may even share the ones they earned with one another if they're generous.
Anyway this has nothing to do with democracy, they're just doing the thing they've become good at doing--spinning news to fit their interest--like kids crying and complaining about how it's not fair that the free cookie jar is gone.
I would completely agree if it wasn't possible for a media page to pay to have their posts back in the news feed again. Which it is.
If FB was genuinely trying to "make users happy" then I'd be more charitable. But they're not. They're trying to monetise more.
As a publisher affected by this test, it was a nightmare. All our users are on mobile, and use FB as their search engine. We saw a ~75% drop in engagement for the main site affected by it.
Yes, people can type a url into a browser. But they don't. they scroll their newsfeed.
Our choices are: take FB head-on trying to get engagement with our users outside FB, or pay FB to regain our old levels of engagement. Not fun.
They don't ... for your site.
You know how often I see Hacker News on Facebook? Never. Yet I visit here regularly. Same for reddit and many other sources of news.
You know how often Breitbart links appear in Facebook or Google News? Never. Yet it's the 49th biggest site in the USA according to Alexa.
Our choices are: take FB head-on trying to get engagement with our users outside FB, or pay FB to regain our old levels of engagement. Not fun.
Isn't that cookie-jar thinking, just like cocktailpeanuts says? You got large amounts of free advertising and referral traffic for a long time. Very few businesses benefit from that sort of thing. Now you're back to having to get loyal users the old fashioned way, or you can pay for that traffic in the manner of traditional advertisers.
Producing quality journalism is expensive, the business model doesn't work to pay for the journalists and also pay for our traffic.
Having been through this test, our only viable long-term choice here is to gtf off FB. That's going to be extremely painful.
Let's hope a few good news sources survive the pain, eh? Otherwise all you've got left on your lovely FB/HN/Reddit feed is the shite that's cheap to produce and optimised for clicks...
The vast majority of news sources are actually worse than "shite that's cheap" and optimised for clicks - they're stuffed with lying, manipulation and nonsense designed to bring about political outcomes preferred by the journalists. See my other post in this thread about the FT. If we end this era with most current journalistic outlets going bankrupt and disappearing, fine! There will always be news. If it comes from other people who see journalism as a way to aggregate timely facts rather than push agendas, so much the better.
And, since this sort of thinking seems to be quite prevalent on HN: does anyone subscribing to this dystopian view of today's journalism care to provide a single example of a for-profit publisher that they consider high quality?
Because all I can think of when I read about "aggregate[d] timely facts" is the phone book.
Technical and scientific journals, for example, are higher quality than newspapers.
It is exactly relevant to your point. You don't derive value from those sites, you derive value from the content those sites link to.
AP/Reuters are also aggregators, they pull stories written elsewhere into a feed that publishers can use.
At some point, somewhere underneath this pile of aggregation, someone needs to actually do some journalism. And get paid for it.
But seeing as you're stuck on the aggregation aspect, I also directly navigate to several news sources.
Both Google News and Facebook tailor what you see based on your search history/engagement habits. Just because you've never seen Breitbart in your search results doesn't mean no one's seen it.
But that's what journalists are demanding. The NYTimes, Guardian, WaPo, WSJ and all the established news organizations have been pressuring FB, TWTR and google to censor other viewpoints.
The selfish hypocrisy of the media is what I just can't stand. The biggest proponent of censorship on the internet and social media are these supposing "free speech" loving journalists. They don't care about free speech or democracy. They just want money.
Nobody goes into journalism for the money, the pay is terrible.
> It's impossible to come across a mainstream publication with unbiased point of view nowadays.
Is this actually possible? Does believing in e.g. global warming constitute bias?
I think I should have clarified. When I said "journalists", i used it in the same context as this article.
Which means by "journalists" I meant "journalistic organisations". I have worked with and know many journalists who have high integrity. But at the end of the day it's the organization as a whole that decides what to focus on.
So yeah, from my experience I'm pretty sure they all get into journalism because of their ideal and each journalist as an individual (especially those who work at those top newspapers) has high journalistic integrity, but my impression is that this spirit is dying away as new entrants see what's going on in the ecosystem. It's no secret that these media companies who pride themselves on having high bar for journalistic integrity have started pouring efforts to emulate Buzzfeed (and I'm not using Buzzfeed as symbolism, they have explicitly tried to study Buzzfeed and emulate it)
> Is this actually possible? Does believing in e.g. global warming constitute bias?
I think I mentioned this elsewhere in this thread but I believe this is possible if you hire people from the both ends of the spectrum and write both points of view about the same story. This is impossible at the moment because the entire organization tends to consist of mostly left wing people or mostly right wing people, etc. It's a "company culture" thing, and you can't do this unless you change the company culture fundamentally.
I get cutting down on noise, but it sounds like they made following a page basically irrelevant (since the "explore" tab apparently has "recommended content it thinks you might find interesting, including posts, articles, photos and videos from sources you haven’t followed yet" (https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/18/facebooks-discovery-focuse... ). That sounds a bit much.
Large media companies that "sold out" might be able to afford to promote some stories (which then will have to have a higher profit, pushing even more click-bait?), but for smaller actors as described in the article that seems unlikely. That kind of sounds like this move pushes what you dislike about "journalism" even more?
Not only that. These same journalists are the ones demanding censorship of opposing views on FB and the rest of social media.
All these selfish greedy journalists want is their own "fake news" making money on social media and other people's "fake news" banned.
Frankly, I wish google, fb, twtr, etc would all band together and just ban all news from their platform for a week. Maybe that will quiet these useless journalists.
- Ignores non-negligible capital costs
- Complaining about politics in your social feed is asinine since many people are interested in politics and choose to share that interest socially, so you're gonna hear about it anyway
The article is about publishers (and the journalists who work for them). Not independent journalists/bloggers.
> Ignores non-negligible capital costs
That’s the same problem every service in the internet has. It’s pretty cheap to get started though so costs would come as usage scaled up.
> Complaining about politics in your social feed is asinine since many people are interested in politics and choose to share that interest socially, so you're gonna hear about it anyway
I would unfriend or mute those people so not sure why my point is “asinine”. In fact if your friends are talking about politics then this article’s topic is non-applicable since it’s not about filtering content produced by your friends.
It's funny how these comments illustrate how different people use Facebook for different things. I for one mute people who post too much personal stuff, so I rather primarily use fb for discussing politics.
For me it’s nice to catch up on the truly personal moments my friends are having. Politics has invaded every aspect of life (professional, media saturation, Internet discussion...) so it’s nice to be able to tailor FB enough to not see it there.
I can't trust the feed to show me everything in a reverse chronological order so it is worthless to me.
In hindsight, I must agree that WhatsApp was a good buy and probably a good thing for Facebook to own.
I just kind of realized that happened in the last few months and it wierds me out. What used to be personal stuff between friends and family, they want you to share with everyone.
If they behave unethically we can certainly complain about it, and possibly take some kind of action if we feel strongly enough (e.g. boycott).
You comment concerning the users’ freedoms is, sure, correct; that’s the market I’m talking about.
Please clarify your argument if you have one.
As an advertiser, I would love this change if it does in fact bring daily users back to engaging on FB. I already pay for reach, but much of it is mobile and off FB news feed.
I wonder what their metrics for ad engagement would show though: does ad engagement increase if the ad is the only non 'human social' post in view, or does the mixed content that 'blends' an ad into similar looking content produce more engagement (perhaps through engagements that users don't realize are on an ad)? And if engagement is higher because of this blending 'trick' engagement, do I actually want to pay for it or do I want to pay maybe a higher price for more 'authentic' engagement? Probably very hard to measure, which is why in my business we use polling to look beyond metrics FB reports...
Maximizing user's time by decreasing efficiency with dark patterns seems to be the name of the game.
I mean it's harder to measure for brand advertising, but we track very closely lifetime value and persuasion through surveys, so the bid method doesn't matter as much to us - and FB is probably the best IMHO at letting us bring in whatever value data we want and optimizing for that.
These companies live by the code of the market - they will happily make changes that make them more profitable. It does not make them evil if a small customer gets caught in the crosshairs - it just means that small customers need to be resilient to change.
Think of something else like monopoly: money. Does it matter where your money came from? A drug network killing teenagers across the country or selling iphones to rich people. One makes you a criminal, the other makes you Steve Jobs.
This is a good idea by former editor (1975-95 [1]) Peter Preston: move The Guardian back to Manchester from London and trim the wage bill in the process. [2]
Perhaps then they might slow the cash burn of their Scott "Trust" endowment (£838.3m 2015) ... [3]
Also, if they weren't quite so London centric they might be less surprised by "events" outside their Facebook bubbles like Brexit and Trump.
I write the above as someone born in London, but now an expat (Japan) who voted against Brexit, but wasn't surprised or offended that others didn't.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/profile/peterpreston
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/apr/09/guardian-manch...
It's impressive double think: what they mean is, exposure to views they disagree with might cause people to vote against things Guardian writers like and for things Guardian writers dislike, therefore, it's important that such people are not exposed to "wrong" views. The assumption that the Guardian can't or shouldn't argue against those views is held very deep - if they took opposing views seriously and tried to engage in debate, that would "legitimise" such views or worse, they might lose the argument.
I used to be a Guardian reader. I read it religiously around the time Snowden's stuff was getting published there. But I came to find it manipulative and extremist. The amount of vitriolic hate they publish in their comment is free section is very disturbing. If they go bankrupt I won't miss them.
The publishing that they did concerning Snowden was important for journalistic freedom.
All that stuff stopped after Katherine Viner became editor in 2015.
I do read it occasionally - just have uBlock Origin picker handy each time her face pops up begging for funds ...
Likewise at the Economist. Once Micklethwaite left and was replaced by Minton Beddoes the stories became much less neutral.
https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/amp...
Media tends to winner-take-all dynamics for various reasons. Zipf's law means that at best a small number of outlets will be significant. These are characteristics of media platforms, period. Not journalists' or publishers' fault.
This is the Orwellian outcry? I'm much more concerned about the idea of everyone getting their news (especially passively) from Facebook and making Facebook some sort of "social network" instead.
> Soy502 is a new site in an unstable democracy where journalists and civil society groups already face an uphill battle to be heard. “We currently have a smear campaign that is targeting journalists, which is really vicious, fuelled by interest groups who are against the anti-corruption drive in our country,” she says. “We are regarded in the region as a success story on new media for the digital age. This can destroy us.”
So clearly, I'm in a bubble, and my ignorance is self-wrought, but honestly, I never get it when there's talk about people reading news - fake or otherwise - on Facebook. How do you even do that? Why would anyone? What am I missing? If I ever did see a news item there, my first instinct would be distrust, my first potential reaction would be seeking out some external source, and if none could be found, absolute dismissal.
Two billion users do realise FB is nothing but a cheap, tacky marketing ploy, yes? They do, don't they? Please!
Wait, Silicon Valley techies wouldn't be in favor of anything like that, would they?
Ohhh....
If Facebook back then was lauded for enabling online communication in a way that wasn't possible before that led to political revolution for certain nations, it is ironic that these journalists are complaining about Facebook killing their click count by taking their official pages out of the mainstream feed. Taking their official pages out of the mainstream feed perhaps brings Facebook closer back to the Facebook that Kirkpatrick wrote about. This leads me to wonder whether the journalists are worried about political freedoms or really their income while raising the banner of political freedoms. The fact of the matter is that if Facebook indiscriminately removes these pages from the mainstream feed, they'll remove "good" pages, but they'll also remove "bad" pages (and let's not even get into which news media are "good" and which are "bad").
Today, we can see that Facebook is like any other technological product: it is amoral and can be used for "good" and "bad". Even though Zuckerberg now concedes that Facebook may have had a part to play in Trump's election, an idea he at first thought was nonsense, and even though he now makes overtures of wanting to help ensure elections around the world are fair (where a private American organization may or may not even be the right party to do this), Zuckerberg in fact does not have much ability to control what happens on his network. At a fundamental level, Facebook is about online social activity. Even if he manages to successfully ban politically manipulative ads (and which ads aren't?), bans fake accounts with amazing accuracy, and gets reviewed by government committees for political ads the way television and radio get reviewed, Facebook cannot survive without the lifeblood of its members engaging in online social activity. It would not be easy to ban all the "bad" people if there are a lot of "bad" people who still "deserve" their freedom of political speech. So there will likely always be an attack surface for some smart strategist to take advantage of Facebook and spread ideas maliciously and manipulatively.
Pandora's Box has been opened, and it's not going to get closed again. And if people mute those they don't like, then all it does is increase individual echo chambers, which in turn then increase political polarization.
If technology is amoral and can be used for both good and bad, depending on the user, we should have seen this future coming from a mile away. But we didn't, I certainly didn't. It's funny how all the lessons from 1984, Brave New World, and all the other classics have come true in so many ways. Not sure if there was a book that warned about this type of future discussed in these comment threads, but anyway. I should have seen it coming and not sure why I didn't. So we'll live in an era where information and misinformation seem to become one.
I remember thinking "If Zynga is that bad, then what about Facebook?"
Facebook's ability and willingness to manipulate just about everything in sight - WhatsApp ad policies, privacy policy changes, arbitrary censorship of content, providing clear misinformation to legal entities for e.g. the promise to EU that they cannot infer/merge user profiles, the absolute shitshow that is shadow profiles - in line with corporate profits is starting to make Zynga look angelic in comparison.
That said, you can't do this with an account named "markyuckerberg". We want thoughtful conversation, not cheap shots or personal attacks. Perhaps Zuckerberg needs no protecting when it comes to these things, but HN certainly does, so I've banned this account. If you want to comment on HN, a good place to start would be with a username that doesn't violate the spirit of the site, re which please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html.
Btw, special-purpose accounts aren't allowed here either. We're hoping for good conversation, not pre-existing agendas.
Thanks, Dan! But regardless of one's feelings toward Facebook, I think Mark Zuckerberg should be treated with respect here just like anyone else. Not only is it good for the overall tone of the site, but there are enough "public figures" in tech that use this site that a flat "no personal attacks" (without exceptions for fame) seems like the best policy.
There's a reason the media were information gatekeepers: there's a responsibility to be accurate and unbiased.
Facebook's product was manipulated and helped Donald Trump get elected by swaying public opinion. There has to be consequences- sorry, but in my opinion not every voice deserves to be equal.
In what universe is this true? Historically journalists have had long eras of questionable judgement, e.g. the yellow journalism era. Sometimes it feels like they're not really any better.
Journalists have been information gatekeepers because of a structural monopoly. As this monopoly is being broken down by technology, of course the entrenched interests will clamor against the disruptors, claiming a sense of propriety that never really existed in the first place.
That is definitely speculation and not fact.
Do you have actual proof of that. For all we know if facebook didn't exist the population might have voted even more towards Trump.
Let's not, in justly criticizing Facebook, excuse the crimes of the press. They were gatekeepers, and that was a role they loved, but they were not, in general, fair unbiased.
For a social network that may have hosted content that may have convinced people to vote for a candidate you don't like? What sorts of consequences do you have in mind here? And where exactly do you draw the line between "manipulating" Facebook to help a candidate and using Facebook legitimately to get a candidates message out there?
> Facebook's product was manipulated and helped Donald Trump get elected by swaying public opinion.
I find this exceptionally hard to believe for a myriad of reasons.
- The MSM never gave Trump serious consideration. They thought he was a clown when he announced his candidacy. Even his own party thought he was a joke. Clinton never prepped for the possibility he might be the candidate. After he beat out 14 other candidates for the nomination, she still never took him seriously. She was so arrogant about winning, it was if she merely expected this to be her coronation after ceding to Obama in the previous race.
- The MSM was running nothing but glowing stories about Clinton the entire race. At one point MSNBC said she had a 98% chance of winning. At the same time, Trump was enduring a non stop wave of bad publicity and negative stories about him. The juxtaposition of the way the MSM covered the two campaigns is so obvious it felt at times the MSM was on the DNC payroll. All you heard was positive spin for every Clinton story, and negative spin on every Trump story.
- Clinton started to believe her own polling that showed her up in many of the battleground states. So much so, she started campaigning in traditional republican strongholds. The media were running stories that she didn't just want to beat Trump, she wanted to humiliate him like Reagan did to Mondale.
- Even on the day of the election The MSM was saying she was up 10 points in all the battleground states. They were basically saying her victory was all but assured.
- She was under an ongoing FBI investigation the majority of her campaign. In the history of the country, we've never had a presidential candidate who was running under the threat of possible FBI indictment and the possibility of going to jail.
All of these far outweigh the Facebook ads that were run. It can't even compare to Clinton's own arrogance and the MSM culpability in attempting to do anything to get her elected.
> There has to be consequences- sorry, but in my opinion not every voice deserves to be equal.
Every voice deserves to be equal, but unfortunately in our society, it will never be the case. We're so far removed from what "real journalism" is it's quite scary. There is no objectivity anymore. There is always a political angle to be had, pushed and manipulated so one side looks good and the other side bad. Hell, MSNBC and CNN, the Times and a multitude of other "news" outlets don't even pretend to be objective anymore. Real journalism is gone. What's replaced it is a political machine, bent on seizing power at all costs and pushing any other party that disagrees with them to the sidelines.
The days when journalists used to be the check on government are long gone. For the most part, they're all on the parties payroll now.
Besides that, this is just a list of things you think is unfair about the election or something but which doesn't actually address directly anything OP claimed
And Facebook's product was used in 2008 to help Obama get elected.
And several traditional media were used in all previous elections to get presidents elected.
If the media are information gatekeepers, why do they allow political ads without challenging the misinformation in those ads? What were the consequences of CNN, Fox News, etc for not being proper information gatekeepers?
Drawing the line at Twitter/Facebook is very arbitrary (and perhaps convenient).
But there is a vast chasm of difference between using social media to organize people and mobilize a campaign's message (as Obama's campaign sort of did in 2008, a lot of that engagement was organic though) and using the Facebook ad network and a network of phony accounts tied to real people in influencer groups to spread a litany of propaganda and false information meant to foment outrage and cultivate doubt in the integrity of the American election system.
1. Do not treat Facebook differently from traditional media - we seem to agree on this.
2. The use of phone accounts to influence people should be targeted in and of itself - not just because it happened to help win an election.
And on the side:
>using the Facebook ad network and a network of phony accounts tied to real people in influencer groups to spread a litany of propaganda and false information meant to foment outrage and cultivate doubt in the integrity of the American election system
Influencer groups spreading propaganda and false information is common amongst special interest and lobby groups, in both traditional media and social networks. I do not like it, but I do not see Facebook being in any way special about it.
Like minded they frequently had, opposition minded was harder to come by though there were lots of methods of targeting by demographic correlates in many case (views often correlate with some combination of age, race, income, etc. which then correlates with the audience of various media outlets.)
Lobbying groups have always been on the cutting edge of media targetting.
As if we're saying "Yeah, we can tolerate the concept of ads, as long as they're fairly inefficient".
Ultimately, your comment sounds like the issue isn't about elections, but the dangers of extremely effective ad distribution networks (Google, Facebook, etc). As a tool, it can be used for all sorts of mass influence leading to outcomes some people do not like - that are not inherently tied to elections. Examples could be effective ads targeting a particular racial demographic regarding education. I don't see that being any more or less desirable than using it to affect an election.
I'm all for that conversation, as long as it is about the broader topic and not tied to the much narrower topic of influencing elections.
More news at 11.
More speech from sources = goodright unless it's someone else's different message to a wider audience. Then it's badwrong. As long as you have the money to shout it loud enough and long enough you have the same equity of audience as anyone else.
Fail.
That's exactly why they are doing this experiment. To answer the question: will people come back if they don't have to wade through all this stuff they don't really care about?