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Comment by travisoneill1 | Hacker News Reader

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travisoneill1

Options:

1. I will decide for myself what is reliable and what is not

2. FB will decide for me

Why would anybody want option 2?

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Option 3: I just want to see my friends and family on my feed. It's sometimes hard to tell what else is reliable or not, but I don't want Facebook curating my life.

What kinds of things do your friends and family share, though? Any articles that got them riled up?

If there were only friends and family on Facebook, there would be far fewer news articles shared. Get rid of Pages, and Facebook would be pleasant again. Of course, Facebook would also be broke.

Plus, I already know that Uncle Al is a conservative nut, and cousin Fred is a liberal nut, and interpret their content accordingly.

There are a myriad of problems with this naive set of options.

1) Are you even capable of realizing what is reliable and what isn't?

2) Do you realize that Facebook and users of Facebook are manipulating what you see to encourage you to think a certain way?

Most people believe they follow option 1, when in reality we are all way more susceptible than we want to admit to misleading reports and falsities posting as real news.

It takes a lot of energy to dive into a report to tell if it's reliable and true, and in many ways it's impossible for most people to even know how to start. And if you don't even realize that misleading news exists, you are that much more susceptible to it. This is especially true today with how good we've gotten at image and video manipulation.

Facebook is trying to accomplish the literally impossible and has made the world a much worse place because of it.

I guess OP meant 1) to be chronological timeline vs 2) FB-curated. It's very easy to skew what is "normal" perception of society by downrating some opinions and sticking others at the top. Especially with topics where there's no objectively correct answer looking at the big picture. Curating newsfeed and the resulting hivemind bubbles is the highway to polarised society.

To point 1, that's the wrong question. Is FB better at it than me? Maybe. Do I trust FB to do the job for me? Hard no.

To point 2, yes obviously I realize that, but they are my friends / groups I have chosen to follow so fair game. I'm not interested in FB getting between me and the content that I want to see online anymore than I am interested in them censoring books (that also have an agenda) that I decide to read.

1alt. If you see a lie repeated often enough, you will believe it. Especially if it agrees with your biases.

thank god someone said this. Even educated, rational, and skeptical people fall into this.

Same goes for the FB moderation team. I would rather be subjected to my own bias than FB's bias.

What about option 3?

3. New Republic and the rest of the MSM decide what is reliable and how you think?

Isn't that what this is all about? The mainstream media and the power brokers behind the MSM wanting control of a major means of communication?

Isn't that why they attacked google and google news? Isn't that why they attacked reddit? Isn't that why they attacked youtube? Isn't that why they are attacking facebook.

I think most people want option 1 and were happy with 1. But the MSM is trying to force option 3.

That's probably much closer to the truth than any of the participants are willing to admit.

Facebook has always been the devil, using your friends and hacking your brain to keep you using more Facebook. It's only now that the media has starting waking up to the existential threat Facebook poses that suddenly they're some huge problem.

Note that while commentators all seem to agree that FB is a problem, the type of problem is always skewed to whatever audience that media outlet is more likely to sympathize with. That's not analysis. That's rallying the troops.

> Isn't that why they attacked google and google news? Isn't that why they attacked reddit? Isn't that why they attacked youtube? Isn't that why they are attacking facebook.

Also: don't forget Whatsapp, who're responsible for that people in backwards parts of Asia misuse their chat-app for getting together lynch mobs.

Option 3:

Strangers you never interact with will decide, based on extremely competent propaganda, and their decisions will determine:

-- The outcome of elections

-- Whether to commit genocide

-- ???

I don't think anyone "decides" as such. It's just the incentives within the system promote whatever content people engage with most. As it turns out, negativity bias wins out.

I don't understand why people don't get this. "Hey we do X with the news feed algorithm and revenue is up 2.17%." That is how it works. It is up to humans to logically decide if this is moral or not. Algorithms just know numbers and morality is difficult to quantify.

these algorithms hold a mirror up to us, and we don't like what we see. Outrage bait is so prevalent because we are easily drawn to outrage so it generates more clicks/engagement/revenue. I think cognitive dissonance is a powerful factor in this - we don't believe we are capable of irrationality, immorality and naivety so when we see these things happening we say "some evil faction that isn't like me must be at play here!"

Said evil faction is taking the guise of Facebook and Google right now but it's the oldest rationalisation in the book.

There should be an asterisk on "strangers" with a description that they aren't necessarily even real people since trending topics and news feeds are heavily manipulated by whoever is willing to pay the most for manufactured interactions.

You didn't say how Facebook relates. I don't doubt that Facebook has made the Myanmar genocide worse, but I also think they would be genocide-ing regardless.

And if Facebook wasn't the most popular group communication tool, wouldn't we just be blaming whatever is?

It's almost like blaming the telephone if a group uses it to coordinate to commit a crime. I think facebook should really try to make themselves out to be a content neutral utility. They are just going to keep getting stuck in messes where they don't have good options if they try to control political speech on their platform.

Strangers like some engineers at FB censoring content? Would rather have a bunch of strangers with competing agendas than one centralized agenda.

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