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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

"...shove Facebook to acknowledge and act on its responsibility as the most powerful distributor of news and information on Earth."

'News' is highly problematic here. News is packaged information. FB segments people into lots of distinct groupings and reinforces their belief patterns. I don't believe many people go to FB for information or 'News'...they go there for social reasons.

I have no desire to consume information packaged by Facebook and presented to me as 'Facts'.

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I guess the question is, do you treat "bad" content on Facebook (fake news and so on) like spam email, where you expect the provider to block it, or like an email from your racist Grandma, which you expect to be allowed through even though it's got the same link to a fake article?

Really in the end, if it's your Facebook "friends" who are posting this stuff, it seems to me like the responsibility is more on the users than the provider. People need to learn to be skeptical of everything, and how to check other sources before sharing. Even if you can "fix" Facebook, something else will come along.

No, FB is not email. You don't see everything your friends post, you see what FB chooses to put in your feed.

That's a good point. Although I suspect people would still be complaining if Facebook simply showed everything your friends posted in chronological order.

Anecdata: nope. I have a few friends who only seem to communicate via FB, and I would almost be willing to pay FB money to simply show a chronological feed.

I don't know about the app, but on the website there's an option sort of hidden under the ··· menu next to News Feed[1]. Facebook unfortunately likes to helpfully reset it to Top Stories sometimes.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/zRdmt8v.png

I use mbasic.facebook.com these days, which doesn't require JavaScript, but when I used the desktop site, I remember that even "most recent" does some kind of filtering.

And yet, FB still remains the dominant source through which news is disseminated. It's lack of appropriateness for this doesn't change the facts, and if anything, should spur further thought as to what its responsibilities are.

But then by this logic why aren’t we regulating mainstream news too - I’m continually shocked by the sensationalist titles that have nothing to do with the article content, poor sources, or poorly derived conclusions. Why is that getting a free pass?

Oh please. Mainstream news is nothing like the completely fabricated often-satire tat gets passed around to whip of frothy hate on Facebook.

Regulation is one of many tools that could be employed, and I don't mean to give smaller media outlets a free pass by focussing on the elephant in the room. "How do we educate our kids about this?" is a more innocuous one.

(1) There is a massive difference between a bad article and fake news, which is completely fabricated information (e.g. pizzagate). Also, learn to differentiate between good journalism (e.g. NYT, WaPo) and tabloids/other rags (e.g. Fox News, Independent, Daily Mail)

(2) Mainstream news is already regulated to some extents

I disagree that there isn’t some totally fabricated information on the good sources you listed.

> most powerful distributor of news and information on Earth

Sandberg (somewhere else recently): "We are explicitly not a news company, we are a tech company."

Similar to how the Daily Show and SNL are not news, but have precariously fallen into a position of authenticity.

precariously or intentionally depending upon your level of paranoia....

What someone says they are and what they actually are can be very different.

And Fox News "we are explicitly not a news company, we are an entertainment company". And same from Alex Jones.

Corporations shouldn't get to choose which laws they want to apply to them. Facebook is picking articles to put in NY feed, Facebook is a news company

Side note: whenever I see people blasting “corporations,” it flips my hysteria/ignorance bits. “Large companies” is usually a better-informed replacement since (a) most corporations are very small and uninfluential, e.g. mom and pop stores and (b) some influential multinationals are not set up as corporations, e.g. Bloomberg LP.

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