Facebook Has Been a Disaster for the World
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> Framing of Facebook as just the next stage in the evolution of mass media.
> Personal story about how Facebook helped someone find help or companionship in a tough time.
> Admonitions about how Facebook's benefits are not worth the societal cost.
> A call for regulation.
> A call for a free-market solution.
> A post from someone who works in marketing about how "that's where the audience is so we have to give them money".
> Personal story about eerily accurate targeting.
> Personal story about how the targeting is totally inaccurate.
> Humblebrags about how long ago one hasn't used Facebook - "I haven't used Facebook since 1914, when the Kaiser went to war."
> Pointing out that traditional media is just scared because they're being disrupted.
> Something about "Facebook" being a black mark on one's resume.
I just wish there was something we could do other than repeatedly argue about the nature/scope/cause/solution of the problem, but the US political process is pretty broken.
That's all cancel culture is at its root. It's been rebranded in America's asinine culture wars so we can pretend there's some insidious new threat to free speech while the real threats go perpetually unchallenged.
There's been the red scare in the decades between ww2 and my birth, but that seemed more like a "threat to the system" kind of thing, this feels more religious, with individual small-time sinners being exposed and hunted down, not the deep state pulling levers to blacklist hollywood actors they suspect of having sympathies for communism.
Twenty years ago, an insensitive (and probably intoxicated) comment at a bar would be forgotten about the next day. Today, someone says the wrong thing on the internet and a pitchfork mob is ready to cancel their humanity forever.
Has this sort of witch hunting occurred in human history? Yes, but we typically taught these lessons as cautionary tales of the hysterical past, not blueprints for the 21st century.
What do you think? Is there enough of a difference between the way the platforms handle disinformation and calls to violence to distinguish them?
From what I read, it appears to me that Twitter is more outspoken about their policies (which are also stricter than FB's) but gives a bit more lenience to people politically aligned with their employees. FB's approach seems to be to have fewer rules but apply them more consistently, and not care as much about their employees' political ideology (which might also explain why FB is massively profitable and Twitter is not).
Twitter feels less like a neutral platform than Facebook, but I wouldn't say that they hand-pick who's allowed to post (and what they can post) either, so they're also not a publisher. I don't know anyone that was ever banned from FB, but I know a few people who were banned from Twitter, which might suggest that Twitter enforces their rules more, but on the other hand, my impression is that Twitter brings out fundamentalist aggressiveness in people, so that may lead to more bans as well.
Facebook is the main weapon, but because of my point. Though, Twitter used to be the main weapon until they banned conservatives.
I ask if you've seen social dilemma because it's not about facebook vs twitter. It's all of the above and especially why tiktok is a national security threat. Also why there's bipartisan support in banning tiktok.
No one person or organization exists to "cancel" things. It's a thing that happens, like nuns all meowing together at the same time. It's a phenomenon of nature, or mind, but not at an individual organization or at a personal belief level.
In other words, people may be "for" "cancel culture", but the growth and life of the phenomenon itself is empty of meaning in the individualist sense. Also, because things like Facebook enable these memes to form, your statement could easily be rewritten:
> Facebook is being targeted by mass thinking on their platform because of their refusal to entirely ban republicans off their platform.
Now we see the truth of the matter, which is that Republicans support the Tragedy of the Commons for their own gain.
While cancel culture is a derogatory term and nobody flies that flag. The terminology still touches on a real thing. As for Q. Q is horoscopes. They have larger numbers of predictions, most of which are wrong.
>No one person or organization exists to "cancel" things. It's a thing that happens, like nuns all meowing together at the same time. It's a phenomenon of nature, or mind, but not at an individual organization or at a personal belief level.
JKRowling and the book burning would tend to disagree with this.
>In other words, people may be "for" "cancel culture", but the growth and life of the phenomenon itself is empty of meaning in the individualist sense.
I don't understand this. How can people be for it and not for it?
>Also, because things like Facebook enable these memes to form, your statement could easily be rewritten: >Facebook is being targeted by mass thinking on their platform because of their refusal to entirely ban republicans off their platform.
I'm not sure I necessarily agree that is my position. Though we could fork into a side discussion into the reality that social media represents society and that thinking is what is happening. The only way forward is more thinking and longer discussions. The absolute antithesis of the situation is censorship.
>Now we see the truth of the matter, which is that Republicans support the Tragedy of the Commons for their own gain.
I'm not American. I'm an objective observer. The problem isn't tragedy of the commons at all. We need more thinking and more discussion.
I do wonder whether we'd be having this conversation if Clinton had won Florida and Michigan in 2016.
> Like industrial-age steel companies dumping poisonous waste into waterways, Facebook pumps paranoia and disinformation into the body politic, the toxic byproduct of its relentless drive for profit. We eventually cleaned up the waste. It’s an open question whether we can clean up after Facebook.
Penalizing Facebook without also changing the incentive structure (personalized advertising) is a short-term, short-sighted fix.
There is nothing in the ad revenue ecosystem which requires indulgence in or tolerance for sociopathic, amoral, unethical, or duplicitous behavior.
Complicity. Complacency. Collusion.
That's what participation is today.
Ignorance may no longer be pleaded.
The game is shit, yeah. But so's this anyone who enthusiastically said "yes, I would like to find ways to monetize people's desire to talk with each other, and do not care in the least if this involves being paid to spread disinformation, or making ad view money off of pushing people towards insane viewpoints".
Yes, this includes Google. This includes Twitter. This includes every damn online service that decides its primary customer is advertisers, not users.
If public libraries did not exist in this day and age, and someone floated the idea, they would be laughed at and/or fought in the courts of law and public opinion. "It would cause authors to starve! It's socialist/communist! There is no reason I should fund your perverse taste in books!" etc.
It is considered axiomatic in Europe, but in the US even things like public schools and public fire brigades are not controversial to some segments of the population.
Internet search should be a public good, as should internet service, and email service , much like public schools and the postal service; but it won't happen any time soon just because it makes sense.
I think the reason it will happen in some form, sooner or later, is the fact the US is the de-facto hegemon of the internet by being the jurisdiction of Google, Facebook, Amazon/AWS and Microsoft. The NSA+FBI+CIA are able, by decree through NSLs, to read and rewrite the personal communication of probably 90% of the world population, as well as shape their search results. FB has already shown they can affect mood of population at large (in an experiment they did without consent and of which they were proud at the time!) - and they will surely cooperate with governments if "asked" (In the "speak softly and carry a large gun" sense of asking, but likely even without it).
At some point, likely after being burned by this (but possibly before), governments will likely setup a local hegemony if only to deleverage the US. Russia and China already did.
Who are we to deny the validity of their feelings?
How can anyone justify working at facebook, knowing perfectly well what they do.
It just shows more that money seems to quiet a lot of consciences. And look at all that amazing tech you could work on!
Werner von Braun worked also on awesome rocket tech back in the day...
We can hate both. There needs to be both personal accountability as well as proper regulations.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We both know that's not what the GP meant. Snarkily strawmanning someone is low effort and boring.
Personally I think facebook, instagram, and WhatsApp should be broken apart.
We can’t achieve change at a rapid pace by dismissing the experience of others.
Acquiantances I haven't seen for 5 years because they live in a distant place? No I wouldn't bother. But I like visiting Facebook once a week and check up on what everyone's been up to. The less often I visit the better stuff I get shown.
Point being that I think you're right that the media played an important role in contextualizing mass communication and controlling bias. Not only does social media disintermediate mass communications, the intermediaries themselves are now ignoring roles they historically performed.
Take a moment and survey what whistleblowers and watchdogs have been shouting for years now.
It's not the "medium."
There is no abstract medium.
There is corporate suppression of internal checks; active collusion or participation in unethical and immoral behavior; and grotesque performative punishment for those who push back.
Yeah—imagine the concern people would probably more readily voice if the same "move fast and break things" approach were applied to, for example, malignant tumour resection surgery, all while reaping massive financial profits. (Whoops there goes another one...)
At the outset of the company you could say that it was just naïveté. That can't really be said anymore.
Or, to put it succinctly: it's a people problem, and people problems are hard.
In such a case one could blame that car manufacturer without blaming the highway their cars are operating on.
These articles would be much more interesting if they included any suggestions at all for how to address the issues.
One is the goverement is hiding aliens in area 51, definitely not libel, not conductive to outrage, not dehumanizing political opponents, it does not actively harm national unity.
QAnon on the other hand claims Democrat figureheads are eating babies in satanic orgies, definitely libel, greatly harmful to national unity.
I furthermore think that just the liability would be great enough to completely change the face of this platforms, they would be on the defensive things that are not libel would definitely be censored.
Considering that it’s NYTimes, I’ve seen people questioning it because of the trackers it uses to track and profile people while criticizing other companies using similar tactics for making money. Of course, Facebook is at a totally different (evil) level, but NYT shouldn’t get a free pass without criticizing its platform.
Then it turns out that people are horrible and that over-connecting them can be fatally destructive. To deal with his cognitive dissonance at building something of nuclear-weapons-bad level, he became the comic book villain that we know today.
Nope. [1] He didn’t start out that way. He just kept misleading people quite well every step of the way.
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
That being said, at some point it seems clear that FB internally recognized that FB was being used to support violent authoritarian politics - and the Zuckerberg/Sandberg/Kaplan crowd should be held responsible for that. It is shocking to me how badly they seemed to have acted (and are continuing to act) in response to bad faith political actors, and how much they have torched their own reputation as a result.
Same happened in Hungary and the EU can't give a flying fuck. But honestly I don't blame Facebook, the destruction of independent media is a complex problem not just a political one (adaptation of the market driven by Facebook and Google for example). Especially in East Europe, former soviet block where the kind of venture capitalism of the west/US never really existed. And like a vassal you have to pledge allegiance to the government either formally or informally.