Hacker News Reader

Comment by mevile | Hacker News Reader

> but it's doing well in its own right.

I don't think anyone thinks Twitter is doing well in its own right. It's shedding users, it's possibly harming democracy, their moderation is being questioned daily in the national US press and many users don't know how to use Twitter.

View on HN

Facebook and Google are just as complicit, if not more so, in this "harming democracy" and moderation questioning.

That may be true and I never made any assertion to say they weren't.

I understand Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, but how is Google being more complicit?

Perhaps via youtube's search and recommendation algorithms optimising for misinformation as an engagement strategy?

Is there proof that they are?

I encourage you to have a look at Guillaume Chaslot's https://algotransparency.org - it identifies what videos YouTube's algorithm most often recommends, based on a given search. Serious question (I'm not trying to be facetious): looking at those recommendations, what do you think?

That is not proof. It's cherry picked topics for uncontrolled Youtube recommendations to a bot account they created. I think nothing about that is scientific and it screams tech illiteracy.

Google ads were also used substantially during 2016 [0]. Google’s ability to target messages to demographics that they only know because of their data trawling is effective for selling garage door repair and election influencing.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/technology/google-russian...

But, they are profitable... Which is more than fan be said about many social media companies.

This "harming democracy" and "being questioned daily in the national US press", is all about the existing arbiters of information (also called the mainstream media) trying to protect their control over information dissemination.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com