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Comment by JacobJans | Hacker News Reader

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

-- ???

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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.

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.

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

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.

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