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Comment by drhayes9 | Hacker News Reader

But the algorithms that decide what content to surface come from one place with one intent. Newspapers can't globally decide to emphasize particular stories and have as great an effect.

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"Newspapers can't globally decide to emphasize particular stories and have as great an effect."

One way to read the new's industry's issues with Facebook is that, actually, yes they did, and they're trying to protect the turf that Facebook is encroaching on.

The media has an incredible power to set the agenda, in both a positive (choosing to cover) and negative (eliminating a story by simply ignoring it to death) sense, and it uses it to an extent that can only be called "routine".

Imagine setting the agenda on a per reader basis. Newspapers set the agenda for their entire audience. Facebook sets the agenda for each personally identifiable reader, or specific groups of readers. Facebook tracks what each one reads, when, etc. Having billions of non-anonymous web users all visit the same website, tracking and recording everything they do, coercing them to supply all manner of personal information, then manipulating what they see based on the collected data, this is a propaganda machine with power equally as incredible as the media.

Have you heard of the Sinclair group?

> The company is the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, and largest by total coverage; owning or operating a total of 193 stations across the country in over 100 markets (covering 40% of American households)...

> Sinclair's stations have been known for featuring news content and programming that promote conservative political positions, and have been involved in various controversies surrounding politically-motivated programming decisions

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group#Polit...

I have, but I think Facebook, as a media company, is what Sinclair can only wish it was. It's a media company that has real-time measurements of what people are engaging with, who they are demographically, and can respond minute-by-minute with adjustments of what kind of "coverage" they provide (for Facebook, this is adjustments to the algorithms that make stories show up in users' timelines).

I think we, as users, bear a lot of responsibility for the content we create and if there's a lot of awful stuff out there... well, we created it. But I think someone deciding to make a bunch of money in concentrating and distributing that awfulness deserves a lot of scrutiny.

Not quite. I think for it to be a more apt comparison, Facebook would need to be pushing a narrative to it's most popular users to promote on their channels, the same way that Sinclair group does:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI

I don't think there's evidence of that right now with Facebook.

I’d say it’s the revealed preferences of FB users that decide which content to surface. Facebooks algorithms are just enabling that.

At what point do we accept that polarization (in a tribal sense) is a featurebug in human psychology? Maybe fb is just giving us what we want.

Seems like you've never listened to / watched / read things from News Corp. They globally set an agenda. If you are a minority, it is a very hurtful agenda. It has happened for decades.

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