Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?

To be fair there is also "It was Hilary" and "It was the Democrats". Not too much "It was Bernie".

What gets coverage in the news is not the totality of what is being said by Democratic or Republican politicians.

But they did appeal to enough of the electorate. Clinton received ~3% more votes, which was in line with the polling data.

Unfortunately, because we have a system that makes certain Midwest and rust belt votes worth 3-10x more, Clinton lost anyway.

Most of what people have been complaining about actually happened. Russia really did interfere. Facebook turned a blind eye to massive misinformation campaigns on their platform. Facebook also knew about the Cambridge Analytica breach for quite a while before making it public. A lot of the voting and ads for Trump were driven by latent (or not so latent) racism.

It's not Facebook's "fault" that these things are happening any more than it's paper's fault if someone makes a racist poster. However, we can't ask paper to help us protect systems of election and governance that were invented before instant global communication.

Facebook is "just a platform," but we have the unique ability to ask the platform for help ensuring against abuse. I believe we must try to do that.

>Facebook has issues, but the idea that it will "break democracy" is absurd, and kind of offensive.

Agreed. But there is no kind of about it.

The not-so-hidden subtext of the article is “how can Facebook get away with helping only Democrat candidates”

Even if you beleive in the ““theory”” that Trump was helped by Russian ads on Facebook, you’d need to admit about 1/2 were ProClinton or AntiTrump.

I have hopes they’re going to come to their senses. They’re driving away reasonable people.

I agree. There was some examination of why he may have won in the first weeks after the election, but that aspect of the conversation has largely disappeared.

It's now all about the dark art of "fake news", almost as if, since he was elected illegitimately, none of the reasons he may have been elected matter.

I wonder if we'd even be having this discussion if Trump hadn't been elected. Probably at some level but not to the degree it has been.

Democracy is “broken” for a variety of reasons, including deep problems with the parties themselves. But the role of news media in democracy is critical (in both senses of the word), and the rise of Facebook and other media based on unmoderated positive feedback loops is certainly not helping.

I think the premise is reasonable that FB (and other gigantic social networks) might be hurting democracy to some extent, but I also agree that the extent described here is absurd. However, perhaps ironically, I think the commonly held opinion you're expressing is actually dangerous. It's bad that people "blame" things too freely for their team's loss in democratic elections, but it's unavoidable, and while I do think there's more of it this time around, I think it's only because of a combination of two things: 1. There's more stuff to blame this time (right or wrong). 2. The winning team had a more mocking and disrespectful tone this time, openly represented even by the winning candidate himself, which is highly unusual.

My point is that your list isn't mutually exclusive (Facebook, interference, racism, bad Democratic candidate), and, anecdotally, every human being I know in person agrees those are all real issues that contributed, and only disagree on degrees, and those disagreements have always been reasonable. What I think is dangerous is broadly dismissing all those issues under the umbrella of "you lost, deal with it." Irrational blame-seekers will always point to every single issue they can - please don't let that cast a shadow on the issues themselves if you can.

I reject your framing of what the left's response has been. In fact, analyzing the 2016 occupies little of the left's response. We have been tuning policies, and messaging. Did you even notice that we had some primaries recently, in which several well established incumbents lost to challengers with a new message? What more proof could you need that the left is making actual changes instead of excuses? Your "concern" is based on an untrue assumption.

Don't mistake what the media reports for reality, especially not when the media is so polluted with people determined to muddy everything and exacerbate conflict. That's the modern way to distort the political conversation, practiced both by our international adversaries and by the current administration's domestic allies. Modern citizenship requires being alert to it, and resisting rather than magnifying its effects.

This isn't about Trump using social media to win elections. This is about Russia using social media to spread misinformation to influence U.S. elections. No such thing happened 8 years ago.

The rich also don't want to pay taxes. I think they're okay with that outcome.

That's exactly the problem. Facebook bubbles tell you your view is just fine as it is, and in fact you should probably radicalize your view to better conform with the click worthy voices you hear.

Well, that's the problem, isn't it? People are increasingly retreating into echo chambers that present no contradictory opinions. And now those echo chambers are being used to slip in incorrect facts and twisted opinions. People increasingly accept outlandish positions and the whole political spectrum is getting more polarized.

CNN documented that the Russians pushed propaganda on both sides, once having helped plan a protest and a counter protest at once. Their plan to disrupt democracy is very much helped by echo chambers.

When you can create "lookalike audiences" and target political ads at people that will feed off their fears it's quite easy to see what the problem is.

But because it is an echo chamber it steers them into more radical postures, and creates division that politicians can exploit.

It's really, really hard to see in yourself when you're being turned into an extremist by an echo chamber. It's a self feeding cycle. The more extreme you get the more extreme your filter bubble becomes. It looks normal to you at any point in time. It happens slowly over time and it's hard to notice. If you're lucky one day you go to smoke it up with your hippie friends and you realize they're all talking about bail reform, solar power and sustainable ways to raise beef and you're talking about toppling statues, silencing wrongthink and seizing the means of production and realize that something has changed. Some people realize they've been radicalized and step back. Others think their friends have gone soft and double down on their new ideology. Most will never see the change because it happens so slowly.

It is not about changing minds, it is about angering and motivating a certain segment of the population to vote.

It is not so much about changing the beliefs of a potential voter as modifying their behaviour. In this case giving them enough of a reason to stay at home rather than vote. As the article states:

  > During the campaign, Trump used Facebook to raise two 
  > hundred and eighty million    dollars. Just days before
  > the election, his team paid for a voter-suppression 
  > effort on the platform. According to Bloomberg 
  > Businessweek, it targeted three Democratic 
  > constituencies—“idealistic white liberals, young women, 
  > and African Americans”—sending them videos precisely 
  > tailored to discourage them from turning out for Clinton.
  > Theresa Hong, the Trump campaign’s digital-content 
  > director, later told an interviewer, “Without Facebook 
  > we wouldn’t have won.”