Facebook Exec: We Got Trump Elected, and We'll Do It Again

While it might feel nice to give Facebook all the credit(/blame) it's just way too simple of a explanation. Ads have been effective for a long time regardless of the type of media. There were complaints about running presidential campaign ads during I Love Lucy in the 1950's.

Whenever I see one of these blame Facebook articles, I always think of what it's saying about the American public. If a significant number of people think of Facebook as a reputable source of truth, there really isn't much hope for the nation. Without an educated population capable of critical thinking there can't be a real democracy (or even a representative democracy).

> “As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear.”

> “If we limit what information people have access to and what they can say then we have no democracy at all,” Bosworth wrote.

You manipulate the information people have access to every day as a core feature of your business! You started using those tools and became a curator of what information people receive many years ago when you decided to use your propriety, hidden algorithm to filter and order what people see. If you actually believe in taking an idealistic "maximum free speech" approach, you would return to a simple chronological ordering.

~sigh~

I usually don't like wasting energy worrying about past decisions. Investing time and energy on regrets and blame is usually a waste of resources. However... the one thing in my past that I really do regret is introducing this asshole to computers and teaching him to program. Bosworth! Instead of undermining democracy and creating a surveillance capitalist dystopia, could we go back to writing silly graphics hacks in QBasic?

(note that this article dates from January 2020, although there doesn't appear to have been much discussion of the news previously on HN)