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Comment by boplicity | Hacker News Reader

> I believe our platforms can play a positive role in helping to heal the divisions in our society,

Facebook systematically promotes and propogates the most inflammatory content posted on its platform. Why? Because it is the most engaging. This is part of the intentional design of Facebook, and is the fundamental reason there are so many problematic things happening on the platform.

Mark's "thoughts" on the topic do nothing to address this in any way.

In other words, the plan is "business as usual."

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Precisely. The business of fb is measured in MAU and DAU. These are their key metrics. The only things that drives these metrics are engagement. It’s basically the core of their business. And controversial items generate the most engagement. Unless it’s crossing the line in black and white terms for example like a beheading and most items don’t do that because the world is shades of grey they are good for business as they have the potential to generate more engagement. It’s basically good for business. What’s good for business may not be good for society. Sometime it is. Sometimes it’s not. Some people are ok with this and some are not.

Makes sense that business incentives inform decision making, but how do you explain the difference in Twitter's content policy? They also, presumably, measure their business via MAU & DAU.

Sometimes I think its as simple as humans making decisions. And Zuckerberg is making a spineless decision (by way of inertia).

That my friend is exactly is the difference made by who is leads the company. This is exactly why what kind of a person a leader is so important. Be it for a company or a nation.

We get what we tolerate.

The vast majority of FB users use it for staying in touch with friends and family.

The cynical framing we encounter on HN isn't actually representative of the experience of most FB users.

That gets to the heart of the problem, actually. People use Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends, yet Facebook still systematically pushes inflammatory content on them, despite that not being the "reason" people are there. And, eventually, it gets a surprisingly high percentage of people to respond to that inflammatory content, thus furthering the cycle.

FWIW (and it might not be worth much much).

I'm from Venezuela and most of my contacts are too.

Most content that I would consider "bad" that comes up for people are just memes, and stupid top X/spammy-ish/clickbaity content or recipe videos.

Maybe a different algorithm or just network effects?

It could be any number of things - for one there may not be much advertisment spend in your region compared to the US.

Are you in a target group for voter ads using fake news messages?

Yeah they should just stop hosting public profiles and figures.

The average number of friends that a Facebook user has is 338. Out of those, I'm sure there's quite a few in every person's group of "friends" that posts some pretty inflammatory content. I, for example, have over 800 friends, despite the fact that I haven't posted anything in about 10 years, I don't go on the site more than once every three months or so, and the only thing I use my Facebook account for is messaging my significant other because they mainly use Messenger to stay in contact with their friends. Yet, when I go on for my quarterly check-in because my SO wants me to like a photo, it's nothing but inflammatory posts. I quickly unfriend them and move on, but it still seems to mostly be those types of posts.

i generally use the unfollow button for people who post a lot of stuff I don't like. I got to the point where its really stable, I mostly see what I want, funny memes, pictures of my friends doing things, etc. I use to have 800 friends, went on several purges to get it to 250 - much more managable

The idea that being barraged by insane politics is separate from staying in touch with friends and family is contrary to most people’s experience of national and religious holidays.

Rather than shying from it, dreading Thanksgiving, or hiding behind an eggshell thin wall of group think, people should learn to grow a spine. Learn to defend your own opinions, stop getting overly agitated that someone has their own conflicting ones, and generally stop caring when people disagree with you.

I’m no doctor but I’m fairly certain you’ll live longer.

You seem to live in a different world than mine. In mine, social media would be much less of a problem if people tended to shy away from online confrontation. The online/social media problem is in large part one of people defending their own opinions too aggressively.

> You seem to live in a different world than mine.

I liked the more inflammatory initial hot take of “What kind of world do you live in?” better. It goes better with my speak your mind and damn the consequences philosophy.

I wasn’t talking about online. I meant in person communication. It’s likely even hard for people these days but once you get used to the idea that it’s okay to offend people, you realize you’re never really offended either.

> In mine, social media would be much less of a problem if people tended to shy away from online confrontation. The online/social media problem is in large part one of people defending their own opinions too aggressively.

Having any sort of personal accountability for social media defeats the purpose. It should be an outlet for the id. Be the craziest you and assume everyone else is as well.

Really? Because my parents are probably among the most tech-illiterate people I know (love you, Mom) but I've had to talk with them multiple times because they asked me if such-and-such or so-and-so was true or real and it was the result of completely fake FB groups or accounts posting bullshit that they read on there.

I'm lucky that I have such a good relationship with my family that they're willing to come to me as a source of truth for some of those things.

Have you met my friends and family? Oy vey.

> The vast majority of FB users use it for staying in touch with friends and family.

Out of personal experience it's the opposite. I even talked about a chrome plugin to get rid of everything but friends' activities and they said they primarily use it for just scrolling through news and memes and shit.

Most people who complain about FB on HN, "deleted FB years ago"

Yet our profiles are still alive and well, as our friends are telling us.

I disagree completely.

Just because you haven't been radicalized on FB doesn't mean it's not a real problem.

i find your comment sensible.

there is that podcast called rabbit hole (by nytimes) which was very revealing to me.

i started using youtube before it became a popular platform and never in my life have i ever watched a conspiracy theory video on youtube! i don't think i have ever been recommended one either. i only hear about them in the news.

so hearing that person talk about how youtube recommended videos upon videos to them was really surprising. there were names that i have never even heard of.

so yes, social platforms changing people's view is real and a problem.

Yeah, same goes for books. You know how many people have been indoctrinated and persuaded by books? Let's burn those while we're at it.

People tend to bring this up as some sort of forceful counter-example, but the printing press contributed significantly to religious sectarianism in Europe, fuelling the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century which killed over a third of the German population.

Books might not have been burned, but about 50.000 'witches' did.

A rapid increase in the dissemination of information in systems that have no mechanism to tolerate them is no trivial matter.

Witch burning pre-dates the printing press. Might want to look up the 13th century some time. Didn't know there were any anti-printing press advocates left out there. I thought y'all died off during the Enlightenment? As far as sectarianism goes, the Catholic hegemony was never going to last forever. And Europe was plagued with sectarian violence for thousands of years. Free exchange of information is the one thing that eventually got them to come together.

Books can be publicly scrutinized, facebook feed will only reach it’s targeted audience. I think a more apt comparison is pamphlets at a rally. And even a rally is absolutely scrutinized—or even stopped by the police—if they are found to distribute illegal, radicalizing, or dog whistling material.

In real life there’s a loophole to get around this kind of scrutiny: religion. It doesn’t matter which one really. But if it’s religious and you don’t discriminate against people in obvious ways, you have much wider latitude to say eyebrow-raising things in public.

Seems like that works online too, now that I mention it.

If the cost (monetary and one’s credibility) of publishing a Social post matched that of publishing a book, we wouldn’t be here discussing this.

If we allow anyone with opposing thumbs to spew garbage online, platform have some responsibility to have some limits or require making source/author public

Yeah that's how freedom of speech works. Listen, you don't police private conversations among friends. Not in America. One man's trash is another man's treasure. I'm sure I could comb over your personal beliefs and find all sorts of garbage, including what you're saying now Corporate regulation of speech is a losing proposition for society. Period.

My only ask is that you see the difference between free-speech as intended in the constitution vs free-speech under an unverifiable and easily forged online pseudonym. You may not even be defending free speech of an American citizen/resident

Free speech under an unverifiavle and easily forged obline pseudonym is worth the cost of the speech. If reading my $0 speech incites you to do something stupid or illegal, bad on me, but good luck enforcing that; in the meantime you did something stupid or illegal and will have to live with the consequences.

If people continue to act on information without regard to its source or veracity, and we need to rely on the platforms to sort it out, we're in some deep shit. The telephone company never comes on the line and says 'Hey harikb, your friend is full of it, what your friend said is totally untrue' but somehow we expect that of today's communications platforms. If the telephone company was monitoring the content of your calls, you'd be rightfully pissed.

Of course, maybe these platforms could stop showing me random garbage from random people that aren't on my list, and weren't meaningfully interacted with by my list. (What gets shown on FB because someone I know liked a corporate page 5 years ago is like huh???)

Disclosure: I used to work at WhatsApp, including while it was part of Facebook; my opinions are my own.

I believe free speech is a human right. Facebook itself is not built up around pseudonyms, that would be Twitter moreso. But the founding members of the U.S. regularly wrote in pseudonyms in the Federalist Papers. Ben Franklin also regularly wrote in pseudonyms.

I don't like social media, as it exists today. I think it's a toxic form of communication.

But I'd rather people just realize that and migrate off it and towards chat rooms, group chats, discussion forums, etc.

I'd be fine with forcing social media companies to regularly warn users of addiction and to provide built in and highly visible tools for tuning it out.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

We all act like we're above the false corporacy with our casual ways and toxic pecadilloes but it's actually a signal that we're willing to be even more ignorant than the average bloke.

Facebook is hands down the most toxic platform I've encountered. It doesn't get as much flak as twitter because not every 'post' is visible to everyone, but go to your local town's facebook group. Boy oh boy is the stuff you find there is horrid.

Is that a problem with the platform or is that a problem with people?

Marshall McLuhan addressed this question in great depth.

The problem is on all monetized platforms, esp those governed by ML. It will always degenerate into the worst of everything because of humanity ⓧ money equals sadness.

You are entirely right.

I've long said that optimising for "engagement", with no regard to what kind of "engagement" that is, is a paperclip maximiser.[0] Rewarding the posts that get the most comments regardless of whether they are positive or negative or thoughtful or shitposting, and the posts that get the most reactions regardless of whether the reactors (?) have or have not given it a few seconds of thought, is destructive to understanding each other and destructive to democracy.

See, I would rather Facebook not de-platform Trump, or any of his fans, or anyone else I don't like, but let's not pretend that Zuckerberg gives a shit about peace, love, and understanding. They have taken conscious decisions to prioritise "engagement" over anything else, because that is what makes them money. I get it, that's business, that is what they have to do. Likewise, we should do what we have to do to protect ourselves and to protect democracy: Zuckerberg and anyone that works at or has worked at Facebook should, to borrow a phrase, be unto us as heathens and publicans.

(You can extend this to Twitter too. I know, they scored some imaginary Internet points with left-leaning crowds by "fact-checking" Trump, but the truth is, with the algorithmic timeline providing exactly the same rewards to shitposting as Facebook does, they are as much to blame for this too.)

[0] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

I am not so sure - I had to put away my twitter usage because it was all the crap that is going on. I have pretty much dumped facebook because it has nothing but crap on it.

> Facebook systematically promotes and propogates the most inflammatory content posted on its platform.

This is not borne out by the facts. Facebook is a lot tamer than unmoderated, uncurated, algorithm-free platforms.

This idea that facebook promotes inflammatory content was invented by unscrupulous people, with the goal of getting facebook to censor even more than they already do, because this will give their viewpoint the upper hand.

>Facebook systematically promotes and propogates the most inflammatory content posted on its platform. Why? Because it is the most engaging. This is part of the intentional design of Facebook, and is the fundamental reason there are so many problematic things happening on the platform.

Remove the word "Facebook" and change it with MSM. How is that okay?

It's not okay, and it is a real problem with ad-supported platforms. twitter and youtube have both been dealing with this same issue.

The problem is the recommendation algorithm. Oh you like this far right video? Here’s a bunch more!!!

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