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Comment by _iyig | Hacker News Reader

I see what you're saying, but it's also true that cigarettes didn't fundamentally weaken the structure of democratic societies. The long-term consequences of that (heck, even short-term) could be much more severe.

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This is one thing I don’t get about this narrative. At this point how do we know how permanent what you’re talking about is? And how much is due to Facebook vs. just generally the unexpected terrible combination of it becoming very easy to distribute information + the fact that humans seek out information that tells them what they want to believe.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t criticize Facebook, or that they shouldn’t be the ones to solve this problem. But I think it’s important to frame it as a problem to be solved instead of growing extremely cynical and saying Facebook is pure evil.

Couldn't agree more. I think Facebook is kind of crappy. But there is basically zero scientific evidence that Facebook is destroying democracies. That's a media narrative at this point. There's a bunch of anecdotal evidence that matches up with a particular view point of the current political landscape. It confirms how people are feeling and therefore is accepted as true. Nevermind that it would be virtually impossible to actual tease out how much misinformation and social division to lay at the feet of Facebook. Nevermind that democratic states throughout history have radicalized, polarized and disinformed themselves without the help of Facebook or even the internet for that matter.

In the case of cigarettes, the companies had the answer to these kinds of questions for decades and used it specifically to mislead the direction of public discovery. In their case, they had to risk their own studies in almost all cases instead of just monitoring their own distribution system.

When Facebook says they don't know something there are a few possibilities, the least likely is that they don't know and don't have a reason not to find out.

I do agree with you that it is not up to them to fix. They should be limited to whatever extent possible in what research they can do on their own discretion to prevent them from staying ahead of public information and misleading research.

No, I wasn’t clear enough. We should be pressuring Facebook to fix this societal problem. They -are- disseminating a ton of bad information.

It's the algorithmic selection of the most shocking posts that aggrevates the problem. They know what ends up getting promoted, and they don't care about the damage.

'democracy' was just not internally robust enough to deal with the lowered barrier to dissemination.

since we've already conceded that votes can be simply bought through advertising, the whole thing was already looking pretty sketchy.

its kind of pointless to rail at the parasites feeding off the open wounds.

I would absolutely disagree with that assertion. While we're hypothesizing about the long-term effects of FB on democracy, I would argue that generations of smokers that die early and impose a huge strain on an already overloaded healthcare system have a much greater effect on the health of our democracy. I think that at this point it's ridiculous to compare FB to those very real and significant effects.

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