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Comment by danra | Hacker News Reader

Facebook sometimes does good, sometimes does bad, depending on how its algorithms are tweaked. And it’s likely the algorithms are mostly tweaked to maximize profit.

Currently, the only way to get the company to focus its efforts on truthful news and protection from abuse is through regulation, which happily it looks like the EU has started doing.

But the deeper issue is Facebook being a for-profit, closed-data-garden, global social media behemoth who strangles competition aggressively. As a result, there are few other social media sources to get the truth from, and there is no real competitive pressure on Facebook to make it care enough about protecting its users from abuse.

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Why does the truth have to come from social media sources? Did people suddenly forget about old-school journalism? Newspapers, publicly-funded radio and TV programmes etc. Those are far better sources of 'truth' than you'll ever get through social media.

In the Philippines, the old school journalism that you are referring is dead. Most journalists here can be bought and this is a fact. We use social media to get information from government agencies pages without the "spin" included.

The "spin" is included in the reports given out by those gov agencies ;) It's a pretty neat way for the government to manipulate its people.

In the west that might be the case, check and balance for journalists. Our previous administration used to do that as well. Duterte doesn't want to spin information. If you're in doubt you can request something from their Freedom of Information website.

I truly hope you’re paid for this, and not a true believer.

Paid for what exactly?

Would accepting money to defend a mass murderer really be any better though?

Mass murderer? You have no idea what you're talking about.

He certainly aspires to be. Here he is, unedited, expressing his desire to slaughter 3 million drug addicts: https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/sep/30/philippi...

His government has murdered thousands of people. If that's not mass murder...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/07/world/asia/ro...

Yep a website full of spin. It's a joke.

What's the argument here? Those people didn't really die? Or do you have an alternate explanation for who killed them, something the NY Times isn't telling us the truth about because of their secret liberal agenda that extends to the Philippines for some obscure reason?

I might get smacked down by the mods for this, but I don't really care in this particular case, because someone needs to say it. It takes a seriously repulsive human being to justify/defend what Duterte is doing. You should really re-evaluate your belief system, because it's severely defective.

Coming from someone who haven't been here? You're a joke. All the sources that you're linking are from Liberal leaning media which are full of spin.

And there are journalists that are corrupt, paid by politicians, paid by drug lords. It is hard to believe the news coming from official journalists. Foreign journalists must go to the Philippines and investigate themselves. If this kind of article the world believes, and Duterte will be kicked from his precidency then my neighbor would like to celebrate and be back into his drug business.

The point wasn’t there aren’t any other sources of reporting available. (though, the traditional media do have a harder time keeping in businees due to the dominance of social media). The point was that an important part of the media, the social one, is being aggressively monopolized by Facebook, so there are less news sources in the social space, so the truth suffers.

> Those are far better sources of 'truth' than you'll ever get through social media.

It depends. I think it’s fair to say social media has an important role in reporting, but that like with newspapers - if you have just one for the entire country, the quality of news will suffer, as will your susceptibility to biased abuse.

So you expect publicly funded journalism to bite the hand that feeds it when necessary? How does that work?

That costs money and and also distribution methods have to move with the times. People don't newspapers or newspaper advertising the way they used to and are much ore likely to turn to their devices for news updates. What are journalists supposed to do? Sure, they can plod away and write serious long-form journalism in the same old publications in hopes of creating the best historical record possible, but if nobody is buying how are they supposed to keep the lights on? Not only do journalists need to get paid, investigations cost money to conduct, and money doesn't just fall out of the air.

> Facebook sometimes does good

Maybe in the past, when it was still a free for all, and governments hadn't woken-up to the power of social media. Since then, Facebook has "learned its place" and it seems to become increasingly more "optimized" toward government propaganda.

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