We can have democracy or we can have Facebook
the.ink
the.ink
Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
Democracy has always been fragile, barely functional, easily corrupted, warped by money. The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.
But we also live in a world that is more educated than ever, and a lot of those people who went to school can't figure out why they should believe in the moon landings, or dinosaurs. How often you do come across a posting from a friend who thinks the virus isn't real? You sat in a room with people like this for over 10 years. Did you think they would someday be able to think for themselves? I had hoped for that.
I'm starting to think that education as the answer might just be a naive point of view, but I'm also not desirous of a world where we tell adults what they're supposed to think.
Rock and a hard place.
>> I'm starting to think that education as the answer might just be a naive point of view, but I'm also not desirous of a world where we tell adults what they're supposed to think.
> You think the problem is a lack of education or understanding? I don't think so, it's something else - being left behind, feeling unheard of, destitute, incapable of changing the situation no matter how you vote. Then people start breaking away from the official story and invent their own explanations, and why would they have solidarity with the mainstream society when it betrayed them? Better to vote in an antagonistic way and muddle the waters because this system is corrupt in their eyes.
I don't think the GP thinks the problem is a lack of "education and understanding," but rather the inadequacy of it.
You both are also right. There's also a problem of people "being left behind, feeling unheard of, destitute.... [and] breaking away from the official story and invent their own explanations," but a good chunk of them have, in their discontent, allied with some of the very same people who caused them to be left behind in the first place. And they've been cemented to that mainstream faction with a slop of lies, delusional conspiracy theories, and other disinformation.
If you were both wrong, I think the discontents would have allied into something like a new Nonpartisan League [1] to work as factions in both parties to change the polices to help the common man.
Politicians have very well understood that modern civilization is governed by scientific beliefs rather than religious beliefs, and masquerading science for political gain will give you power for a very efficient cost.
The problem is not Facebook, but that our science is as vulnerable to 51% attacks as Bitcoin.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLHyNSlsz449SOhzpo7Cl...
I think you're completely right.
Science is not cut and dry or black and white.
Highly qualified experts disagree ALL THE TIME and the scientific industry is very competetive.
Look at Copernicus or Galileo or Barry Marshall or Semmelweis. These scientists bucked all mainstream scientific beliefs even after almost roundly being ostrasized and ended up being correct in the long run.
Many science experiments are measured terms of varying levels of statistical significance not in terms of correct/incorrect.
You can tell someone who is not trained in science when they claim you should 'trust science' or 'just believe in science'.
Science changes constantly and is an ongoing process to discover truth not a static set of true facts.
Science is as open to interpretations, best guesses, and political agendas and all kinds of human frailtys as any other industry.
But ignorant people think because an 'expert' says something is true it has to be true.
The layperson should trust science. Because the alternative is some QAnon cult bullshit. Don't confuse the scientific process with concrete scientific results.
No one is out there refuting Newton or Einstein. Nuclear bombs still work as good as they did in the 1940s. Every time you use your smartphone you're "trusting" that the capacitive screen still works. It's rather silly to not trust science when the products of science are all around us. Whether it's GPS or the airbags in your car.
The problem is with bullshitters and those (such as the media) that use early scientific papers as final scientific truth. With Gell-Mann amnesia effect, the bullshitters have the upper hand. Twitter is particularly bad about this, where people with high follower count toss out "hot takes" all day in hopes of something sticking. You might follow, say, a Paul Graham type of person that knows their VC stuff. But in between their VC messages they start talking about gravitational wells or something entirely unrelated to their core competence. Twitter is an endlessly flowing vortex of this type of bullshit. It's sort of a trust arbitrage marketplace, where influencers in one market try to gain entry into other markets by relying on their expert status in one field.
As for the media, they have deadlines and revenue targets to meet. They want fresh new stories, and Einstein isn't saying much these days. So they'll reach into the scientific paper wastebasket and pull out some trash and present it as some recent scientific discovery.
> But ignorant people think because an 'expert' says something is true it has to be true.
The crux of this problem is that many years ago we decided that experts shouldn't exist. America, at the very least, has a particularly strong anti-intellectual sentiment running throughout its history. So we decided to do away with experts. Just look at Dr. Drew or Dr. Oz. or Dr. Phil. These are people playing the role of expert but are just the same bullshitters that are on Twitter. With the internet, everyone can be an expert.
Meanwhile, a lot of proved studies are dismissed for political reasons. Sometimes that is good, sometimes not. But it is safe to say that it would indeed not be prudent to derive policy impetus from a lot of sciences without a public debate.
And I mean public, not just academic circles.
Having entire sewers of points of views pouring in Facebook is a then great scientific education that there is no one truth, which _some_ people believe a bit too much. And sewers are immensely better than downright falsehoods taught on TV at wide scale with a confident voice and a suit.
What’s next, do people believe Biden is president?
I think citizenship tests should be extended to all via school curriculum. If we require people who immigrate to know our laws and how the system is supposed to work, then I don't see why the people already here shouldn't also be required to know this basic info.
It's a ritual, but rituals have meaning and power. It would be nice to see more native-born Americans with a strong grounding in democracy and electoral politics.
When we had a mandatory military draft, at that time most able bodied young men were required to put on a uniform, salute the U.S. flag, march to patriotic music, etc.
Today this sounds trite and even anti-democracy -- weren't we indoctrinating generations of gullible young people to just blindly follow the leader?
Yet, today, many young people including college graduates are hardly patriotic at all, and are mind-numbingly ignorant of even the most basic facts, as illustrated by man-in-the-street interviews posted on Youtube by wags like Ami Horowitz and Mark Dice, getting college students to admit that the triceratops (an extinct dinosaur) is endangered and trophy hunting of this poor beast should be banned, and similar ridiculous notions.
Even during the Vietnam War, one survey in about 1970 found that 25% of Americans thought Vietnam was in South America.
Education is the key, and by that I believe you and I both agree that indoctrination in particular directions is not the same thing. My kid in high school... well, I could tell you stories, but I'd better stop :)
I'm less comfortable granting people a bid based on general knowledge and intelligence though, I think the uninterested citizenry is a far larger problem than the uneducated citizenry.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about non-electoral politics? I've found that sort of engagement is much easier to get traction for from normal people. It's easy to see the effects of your actions.
I'm judging that the virus is real and a problem based on having had it, knowing people who died from it, knowing other people who had severe symptoms, from knowing (via other acquaintances) what the hospitals in my area were like, and from seeing freezer trucks full of dead bodies in the streets. OTOH, I'm from an area that got crushed by the virus early.
I can't say for sure that if I were in an area that hadn't had much contact with the virus my "Critical thinking" hat wouldn't be saying, "wait, what if they're just telling us there's a virus outside to keep us locked up".
Until a colleague told me he lost his smell 2 years ago after a serious flu.
I still do believe the virus exists, but not having the equipment to look at it myself how can I be absolutely certain?
Some think the lockdown are worth it, some think the lockdown are not worth it.
Both are correct，it highly depends on your personal preference.
This will always cause conflict.
This is democracy, both side will fight and to convince other. Whoever gain the majority/power is the winner.
Unless facebook taking sides, i don't think it harm democracy. Both side too can utilize facebook for their advantage.
> Unless facebook taking sides, i don't think it harm democracy. Both side too can utilize facebook for their advantage.
The problem is, for the most part, there's harm to democracy if no compromise is ever reached, and the "fight" on every issue becomes constant and intractable.
For instance, the fight around the response to COVID has pretty thoroughly undermined the response to it. You have people refusing to wear masks for the most part to just to say "fuck you" to the other side.
This kind of over-the-top fractiousness is a clear propaganda win for authoritarianism. China, for instance, is pretty effectively using it (and their corresponding success) to reduce the appeal of democracy among its people.
Even to reach compromise, fight may still be necessary.
>You have people refusing to wear masks for the most mart to just to say "fuck you" to the other side.
Mask has real downside (for some people), you can't just dismissed that (not just to say fuck you), although there is of course people like that.
Similarly, You have to acknowledge there also people who want to force other to wear mask to just to say "fuck you" to the otherside.
You'll say that Trump called the virus a hoax, or push narratives that imply there's actually any significant percentage of people that think the virus doesn't actually exist. You treat it in black and white, and ignore all the shades of gray and all of the extra dimensions to the issue. It's either "you're with me and everything I believe about every aspect of the issue" or "you're an evil stupid virus denier".
There's so much more to the issue than that, and 99% of the people you think believe the virus isn't real DO believe it's real, they just don't agree with you on how severe it is and how it should be responded to.
The problem is that "education" doesn't necessarily train people to think critically. Indeed, the current educational system often does the exact opposite. This becomes more apparent the farther you advance through the system. Success in most post-grad programs is primarily about a student's willingness and ability to absorb established dogma and conform to orthodoxy. Those who are not willing or able to conform (culturally, socially, politically and educationally) will find their academic progress severely inhibited at every turn and eventually find themselves on the outside looking in.
The paradox is that those in power do not (and have never) want a necessarily skeptical, inquisitive and free-thinking population. They want a docile population that is easy to control. A population that uncritically absorbs and believes whatever messages are disseminated by those in power. This system works well when you have a virtual monopoly on information, and all of the people get their information from ABC, CBS or NBC. It stops working so well when a decentralized system of spreading information comes along, whether its referred to as "the internet" or "social media", and suddenly you have a population that has been conditioned for generations to lack skepticism that is blasted with conflicting messages, ads and propaganda from all angles.
Those in power are now left with a problem that has two possible solutions. Either start a massive campaign where every man, woman and child is taught to be necessarily skeptical, to think critically in all things and reject all established orthodoxies, or to try to put the information genie back in the bottle. The former strategy (if successful) would lead to a population that is very difficult to control and govern. A society filled with critical thinkers and those who question and scrutinize every policy and every assertion by those in power (and everyone else). The latter strategy (the one that has been chosen) is to attempt to close down those decentralized systems of spreading information. Regain control over the information narrative through a massive censorship campaign where those who are not actively working to push the establishment narrative are silenced. Unfortunately, its clear which path our benevolent overlords have embarked on. Whether the excuse is, "hate speech" or "disinformation" or "foreign influence", the desired result is the same. Silence dissenting voices, regain the information monopoly, and feed the gullible dullards you have cultivated the diet of information that you wish them to consume. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), its always very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle - which is why we are seeing the battles over free speech, censorship and information control play out before our very eyes.
A lot has changed. If you didn't like a newspaper or a broadcast, you stopped seeing it. They built a reputation that they had to maintain somewhat. You knew most of the time who was behind each piece.
Now? You see content that a lot of people dislike because it generates controversy and engagement and attacks, lies get way more exposure than truths. A lot of publications come from unknown sources, with no reputation, so they can lie without consequences. You don't know who wrote something and the interests they might have.
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis.
What is more probable, that social media has completely changed the type of content that people see or that education has plummeted in a decade or two?
Education is not the solution: no single person can be educated enough to make informed decisions on all the topics they are exposed to in a single day. We don't even have the time to do that! We need to revert the changes that social media has created in our information diet, that's the solution. And we need to start by forcing social media companies to stop maximizing engagement over everything, show people only the content they explicitly subscribed to (no 'look at this comment someone made on this post of a page you don't follow'), and stop editorializing the priority of that content via algorithms to maximize engagement.
Of course that would be the worst thing for Google, FB and Twitter (and their advertising clients) because they desire our attention more than anything.
Like a sugar addition, we evolved in an environment where information could mean the difference between life and death, so we are hardwired to seek it out.
It takes a huge amount of self control to turn off the screens, but it is the best, and possibly only path forward.
What impact, if any, will verified identities have on social media?
Estonia in the early 20th century had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. When it first won independence around 1920, it formed a parliamentary democracy based on a constitution. A little while later, one party took over, and a new constitution was written that was much more authoritarian. The same leadership a little while later than that wrote another new constitution that was halfway between the first and second constitutions in terms of mix of democracy and authoritarianism.
Then the Soviets invaded, and democracy vanished until the early 1990s. At that time they regained independence and created their present government.
This is a huge oversimplification, but the four separate constitutions and the evolution of the Estonian system is fascinating.
Facebook is also a public forum. Normal folks talk about things they care about, including politics, on social media. Normal folks did not peer-to-peer discuss the sinking of The Maine in the pages of The New York Journal. So there was never the issue of The New York Journal promoting, hiding, or editorializing that peer-to-peer speech.
I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the ML recommenders that companies like Facebook are deploying, and the assumptions going into these algorithms, and the externalities they are creating. In my opinion they are playing a similar role in our social crises as the Gaussian copula played in the financial crisis.
In your informed consumer advocacy, is there any room for shared responsibility?
What chance do individuals have against a corporate juggernaut's finely tuned outrage machine, exquisitely crafted to prey on human fallibility?
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Sure, we've always had propaganda.
What's new with social media, like with personal computers and smart phones, is the convergence.
Now all the social pathologies (targeted ads, dopamine hits, crowd out authentic speech) are bundled together and monetized, begetting a positive feedback loop.
With social media more people have access and some amount of power as the $billion media entities, and the old guards don’t like it.
The bad behavior isn't the problem, the problem is that the current power players in media are now having to compete with Hungarian content farms and it's cutting into their market, with the added industry wide damage that the content farmers don't give a damn about covering their bad actions with good PR.
These are features alternate media outlets don't have concern for. They aren't driven by a subscription model based on whether or not they're generally accurate; they're based on an advertising model utterly detached from the nature of their content.
Now if you want any revenue at all, which is required for surviving, you need to have clickbaity headlines so you can get traffic to your page. And even that assumes that certain news can find an audience; local news especially tends to fail in that regard because it by definition appeals to a smaller group of people.
https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
In most countries media is regulated, you're not allowed to advertise everywhere or publish lies.
When Facebook says 'free speech' they actually mean 'free enterprise'.
That's not correct. There were staggering numbers of them. In 1900 there were 15 English language daily newspapers in New York City alone.
The problem with Facebook is monopolization. It's different when you have a ton of places that share information, and some of them are biased in one direction or another, versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.
In the 1990s in the US, before the internet took off, most people had access to one local paper (two in some cases), maybe an a few local magazines (include “alternative weekly” newspapers), a few local TV and radio stations, PBS and NPR, the 100 or so cable channels their local provider offered, the hundred or so magazines and newspapers the local Borders or Barnes & Noble sold, and whatever magazines and newspapers their library had in the periodicals section. And a lot of this media was owned by a few big corporations like Time Warner, News Corp, Condé Nast, etc.
> versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.
How has Facebook tried to prevent news outlets from emerging? They benefit hugely from news outlets, and kind of even depend on them for existence. They need the content for people to post and share. New publications like Vox probably owe some of their success to Facebook, and vice versa.
FB might have a lot of power to amplify traffic to certain publications (kind of like the big retail chains did in the 90s only more so), but that’s very different from actively preventing new news outlets from emerging.
My situation isn't unique. This is the reality across much of the US. Not just the rural areas. There are many cities where cutbacks mean the local press doesn't cover the cops or the city council as much as they did in past decades.
Time Magazine influenced three generations of Americans.
For the last hundred or so years, every major city has had one primary newspaper, 2-3 local news broadcasters, maybe a local magazine.
Old line magazines and newspapers were information silos unto themselves.
That’s more a last 30 years or so phenomenon. Before that most major cities had at least 2 primary newspapers (often split on party lines). Most large cities had many more than that.
I agree that education is one of the best ways to combat this problem. I don't necessarily agree it's the best one.
> Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
There's no reason why middle grounds don't exist. We can guarantee Free Speech without everyone having access to Instagram, FB, Twitter...
I bet most of the problems could be solved by making these platforms pay to use. Moderation loads would get reduced significantly. Excessive tracking would stop (because now ads are way harder to justify). Accounts would NEED to be somewhat verified by a payment, which makes it harder for trolls/manipulators/abusers of the platform to hide new accounts etc.
If one accepts this premise, it's important to pay attention to who is advocating for and making it easier to get an education, vs those who downplay its importance, let it get prohibitively expensive or put up other roadblocks.
This is really the core of the issue. I was going to add "and allow for competitive market", but that's going to be derivative of a truly educated population regardless.
I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".
Consider these countries as a control group for "facebook being bad for democracy" test.
Maybe US should take a hard look into a mirror and accept the fact that it is very polarized country, not very cohesive society, with very little common ground (if any at all) between different factions, and facebook just shows this fact.
Don't blame the mirror for what you see in it.
Yes it is. Polarization is increasing in a lot of countries, and there is heavy criticism. But while US news are exposed to the rest of the world, news from EU countries aren't as much. That's why you don't see "Facebook is damaging democracy" takes from EU countries. At least from what I see in Spain (I can't speak for other countries because I don't read french or german or dutch news) the debate on Facebook (and other social media platforms) effect on democracy is growing bigger each day, specially now with the COVID pandemic.
I certainly can't prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that it wouldn't have happened without Facebook.
The thing is that it's the first time were you can really microtarget bigots, racists and xenophobes. And that's what makes it frightening. Especially when everybody nowadays has his own brand of reality.
Note: Despite the fact that I think Brexit is a devastatingly bad idea I don't mean to imply that leave voters are bigots or racists. Brexit is just a great example about undue influence on a referendum.
E: Removed redundancy
All the bigots and racists did vote leave though.
I live in California, and recently had a conversation with a family member in The Hague.
She was telling me about her frustrations with Anti-Maskers and Covid-deniers she has been arguing with locally.
Apparently these are not just US political issues.
I think it’s a huge amplifier of what would otherwise be fringe ideas.
In the absence of FB, there would be tensions, but no battleground.
> A study then in 1919 concluded that mandatory mask mandates did not make any difference on epidemic
But, the politics is quite different from the US. Some restaurant and bar owners threatened to stage a protest and re-open against the law, giving six weeks notice that they might do this. This has since been defused.
https://nltimes.nl/2020/12/02/restaurants-bars-defy-dutch-ba...
How do you think populist leaders gain such a large voice so quickly in those EU countries? You're kidding yourself, if you don't think the same tactics are being deployed in Europe, and amplified via platforms like Facebook.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191007IP...
There are two options here.
1. People are not really happy with current status quo so they are looking to choose alternative leaders via elections, just as expected in democratic countries.
2. Some bad guys post bad stuff on Facebook and, like, 30% of german voters read it and march to election booth like zombies to vote the way bad guys said them to vote (for Alternative for Germany).
Well, you can pick which theory survives the Occam Razor test better.
EDIT: And oh, wrt to "a large voice so quickly" -- when a lot of stuff happens quickly (i mean, between 1 or 2 elections) -- yes, a lot of people can change their minds quickly. Turbulent times, you know. In stable times people change their minds slowly.
The issue is that when "bad guys post bad stuff", it gets amplified because its engaging, and can really distort people's reality and nudge their belief systems. Have you taken a look at Cambridge Analytica? This was their playbook. There's a reason those people were paid a lot of money, and received a ton of scrutiny.
As for case 1. Yes, people are not happy with the status quo, but they can be convinced that the reason they are not happy is because of something that's difficult to prove, and creates an "us vs. them" mentality. Think antisemitism in WW2, or anti-immigration, more recently.
Andrew Bosworth, former head of FB ads, has been pretty critical of Cambridge's claims as well: "In practical terms, Cambridge Analytica is a total non-event. They were snake oil salespeople. The tools they used didn’t work, and the scale they used them at wasn’t meaningful. Every claim they have made about themselves is garbage. Data of the kind they had isn’t that valuable to begin with and worse it degrades quickly, so much so as to be effectively useless in 12-18 months."
It's strong parallels to those people who've found a valid but isolated problem with the medical establishment then immediately jump off the deep end into completely untested nonsense from quacks which they've heard from Youtube. "Collodial silver" and all that.
If some party got 30% of votes in Germany, stop blaming facebook and 'state actors'. Germans are better then this, they are not zombies, and they have a lot of information sources to pick up news/opinions from.
If they're voting for the Nazis again, maybe they're not better than this.
Especially Russia would have a lot to gain from Trump being re-elected. It would have been crazy if they didn't put all hands on it. And the same can be extended to friendly candidates in other countries.
-- Trump being re-elected
-- Yellow Vests riots in France
-- Brexit
-- Alternative for Germany party rise in Germany
and all of these happened because of Facebook+Russia.
Sorry, but this is just Q-Anon level global conspiracy theory adopted for progressives. :-(
But no one has picked up/amplified that story. After the 2016 elections, NYT/WSJ/The Atlantic/etc. ran article after article pinning the outcomes of the US and UK elections on Facebook, despite having no evidence of this outside of testimonies from some former CA employees. Anyone with a background in adtech knew that these allegations were full of shit, but the narrative was too good to pass up.
Now, conclusive investigations have debunked these claims, but it's 4 years too late and the idea that FB/CA caused the problems of the past few years is ingrained in everyone's mind.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/no-evidence-that-cambridge-a...
I have friends and family members who will blame random problems on completely unrelated things like "new walk-way in large city" or "beheading in france". Meanwhile they will vehemently deny or state that real issues are overblown.
Agreed, Facebook is just exploiting weaknesses that already exist in American minds. Those problems exist elsewhere, but have not advanced as far.
There will be a silver lining in the Facebook case though. We're going to see a lot of emails and depositions that end the "Mark Zuckerberg is a uniquely competent person who earned an empire through ability" myth. That's good enough for me.
On what basis do you believe it isn't?
The only gripe EU is having with Facebook is about privacy violations, as I can see.
It's maybe not to the same degree, but political polarization, filter bubbles and conspiracy theories made worse through FB and other social media totally are a topic here. EDIT: I guess hate speech legislation is in a similar corner and does appear on here too.
Maximum profit requires maximum engagement. This requires creating filter bubbles and prioritising emotional content. From there, the social fracturing is inevitable... only the topics differ from country to country.
Because it's not Facebook.
Notice that in US, one side (Democrats, media conglomerates and their 'journalist' employees) are pushing for Facebook to censor, de-platform, or 'rank down' independent, conservative and progressive outlets. It is this group, author of the post included, that keeps calling Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (and even first amendment) divisive or undemocratic as a cynical, self-serving strategy to move the needle in their direction (for Democrats, it means more political power, for media conglomerates, it means less competition for eyeballs, and more revenue).
Meanwhile conservative and progressive outlets are calling for less Facebook censorship because they see themselves under constant attack, even when they report factually correct news.
Are you American by any chance? You may be committing the same mistake you complain of.
The neonazis have made great gains in Germany, Brexit happened. The far right northern league came to power as part of a coalition, with a leader who called for mass cleansing.
A Hindu nationalist party is in power in India, buoyed by whatsapp chain messages. In France, Macron came out of nowehere: he is a centrist but this still shows a collapse of the old structures. His biggest threat is a fascist.
Bolsonaro, a Trump admirer is in power in Brazil. The president of the phillipines, Duterte, boasts of summarily executing drug dealers. Authoritarians rule in Hungary and Poland.
I'll be honest, I have trouble believing you live in the EU if you're claiming something like this.
But it is? Antivaxxers are at an all time high here, the Pietendiscussie is inflamed on both sides primarily through social media. My plumber-neighbour is an excellent source for learning what the latest conspiracy theory is on his Facebook feed.
If you don't see it, you probably meet people from a narrow slice of society. I certainly see that these kinds of experiences are vastly different between my friends-circle, all former fellow university students, or my villages neighbours, a tiny place far from the urban centres of the Netherlands. My family is a bit in between, again correlating with age.
I absolutely think Facebook is making this country worse. It's the main method of how corona-disbelievers are keeping rates up by encouraging each other to ignore 'rules'.
The accessible value in tapping the network effects of FB as a communication platform is quite an okay amount of democracy.
But on the other hand I think the polarity in US (and large countries like RU and CH) is quite relative to the size of their countries.. is there any science to that lol
But "baseless conspiracy theory" is practically a term of art. There was sufficient evidence of election irregularities in key battleground states to at least warrant a proper investigation. The same media companies which reported Trump-Russia collusion as hard, settled facts, however, rushed to call any suggestion of fraud a "baseless conspiracy theory" and reassured us that the 2020 elections were absolutely airtight, which -- I don't know what you have to be smoking to believe that last bit.
We even have our supreme court doing blatantly inconstitutional things because they are upset with Facebook (and Whatsapp).
Also during the Gamergate debacle, there was some high profile news about a "gamergater" that sent actual death threats to people (many people falsely claim to have received death threats), when police caught the guy, it was a Brazillian leftist troll, that thought it would be hilarious to watch whatever was going on in Facebook and try to outviralize viral posts by doing whatever would stoke more controversy (in this case, pretending to be right wing, sending death threats to left wingers, and watch the two sides fight).
It still affects society, it still sows discord and I'm not sure how you are unaware of this if you are making such claims...
It’s CAPITALISM.
People have to always preface any criticism of it by saying “there is nothing at all wrong with capitalism, but...”
But no, the actual ECONOMIC SYSTEM and the incentives and constraints it exerts on institutions and organizations is responsible for what is happening. It selects for the current types of organizations and outcomes by its very nature.
You see, both our news and our social networks are driven by a profit motive and face market competition. Thus they are forced to adapt to changing circumstancss in certain ways:
Act 1. Journalism was disrupted by the Internet, and survived by adopting the FOX News model of locking in an audience and being biased, showing one part of the story.
MSNBC explicitly did it, while CNN jumped the shark after the Malaysian Airlines flight, realizing it can lock in audience. One sided clickbait outrage articles are the norm. There is some attempt to have journalistic integrity and policy focus at Vox and NowThis, but then you also have MotherJones, OccupyDemocrats, DailyKos and more on the left. You have all kinds of independent podcasts like TYT network, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, Majority Report, etc. And similarly for the conservatives, libertarians, etc.
We are divided also because giant corporations like Sinclair Television bought up all the local stations and outlets, resulting in this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
No really, watch it. It’s black mirror level, and you can see the capitalism at work here. Top down control by a small group of people, disseminating to everyone under the banner of “free speech”.
Act 2. Social networks are in a race to the bottom for advertising dollars.
So they adapt by desiging algorithms to maximize your “engagement” and attention on their platform.
Capitalism leads to a tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where in this case the commons is human attention. There is a reason that you salivate at notifications like Pavlov’s dogs. You’ve been conditioned to look at that screen light up during dinner. It’s NOT just about a slot machine dynamic. It’s that - if Facebook doesn’t get your attention every so often, then LinkedIn or Twitter would.
The solution is changing the economic model for news and social media.
Yes I said it. But let me use less triggering words than capitalism and socialism.
We need more projects built on collaboration instead of competition.
Wikipedia instead of Britannica
Workd Wide Web instead of America Online
Open Source Software instead of closed source commercial software
Cryptocurrency instead of banks
Creative Commons instead of Copyright
Prizes for Open Source Drugs instead of Patent System and IP
And so on. Not only would it make the system cheaper, it would make it far more effective and less divisive. People would be able to build on each other’s work, without threats.
This is already how peer reviewed science has worked, and for all its flaws it has produced tremendous progress. Scientists are careful not to overstate things. Titles are “boring” and descriptive rather than sensational.
Compare that to the “free speech” where money - and yes, audience size - determines which ideas get pushed in one direction. Clay Shirky spoke about this 15 years ago:
https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_institutions_vs_collab...
So how would it work?
There would be a wiki-like site for news. People around the world would upload their own videos and raw media.
Then each news story would be edited and re-edited by mutually distrusting parties, checks and balances, similar to Wikipedia’s talk page.
The final result would be published only after a delay, when most parties have had a chance to challenge all the claims they needed, with well sourced claims of their own (each claim would have its own page).
That way, the world can make up its own mind by using the collaboration of the crowd, on issues like what’s happening in Saudi/Yemen, with China and Uyghurs or whether Assad gassed his own people after winning with conventional weapons. As well as on issues of religion, science, health policy, and so on.
We are building something like this as a reference implementation. The domain will be Rational.app
If you want to be involved you can email me at “greg” at the domain qbix.com. I am happy to welcome people on the project who know Javascript or PHP and who believe something like this is needed. This would be an open source project.
Americans have for decades been gullible fools who never read below headlines and fall for tabloid trash. This “post-reality” thing that is culminating with stuff like Qanon has also been cooking for decades, nurtured by trash TV, dumbed down religion, and new age word salad.
In the past only mass media had the privilege of being able to lead this mass of morons. Now that has been democratized, allowing DIY YouTube and Facebook personalities to take advantage of America’s rampant foolishness.
The solution has to start with an broad spectrum social movement to raise the quality of discourse in the culture, a kind of big tent anti-bullshit movement. We need to replace hard line partisan intolerance with intolerance for intellectual junk food. Liberals, conservatives, and anyone else should start promoting all content of any perspective so long as it is well written, well reasoned, and credible, and rejecting BS from their own side as well as others.
It’s fine if someone says something horrible or false on the internet, it’s not fine if a ranked newsfeed amplifies that message to millions of people because it’s engaging.
This free speech or not argument is a complete straw man.
I don't have a problem with alex jones. I have a problem with social media companies promoting lies about reality in the name of engagement. Polluting our information ecology in the name of a quick advertising dollar is lazy and dishonest and they know it.
Fortunately, I know a trick that makes my feed better behaved in all of these ways. Some day they're going to kill it (they briefly did break it once already due to sheer incompetence) and then Facebook will become unusable again.
I use a trick as well. I use the "Stop Showing Me This" option in the FB newsfeed. It took a couple days, but now I get zero political content.
That's .... a kind of ranking. Personalized ranking made by algorithms based on what they want to show you using their own patterns is still ranking. Dynamically adjusting ranking based on new data (or not) is still ranking.
HN's formula may be hidden but I think we have a good sense of its inputs: recency, upvotes, moderation to remove crap, and perhaps some boosting to promote YC interests.
Showing them what who wants? The users? That’s be great, but today they are trained to show what the company wants, and the company wants to keep you on the site as long as possible to generate ad clicks.
It’s designed for making you spiral into a topic.
I know you don't like it, but this very clearly is content that people want to consume.
It seems like we're trying to force the input to be wrong as opposed to just acknowledging that the output is wrong. Facebook is doing the same "capitalistically moral" thing everyone else is doing, building something people want so that they make money. The input doesn't have to be "theoretically wrong" for the output to still be wrong. Good intentions and all that.
Specifically, if you had a passing interest in a controversial topic, the algorithm will make sure to sink its barbs into you, and exploit you emotionally. This is especially real for older people who didn't grow up with the internet, or people who are blind to this issue. These two groups haven't learned to moderate their emotions and question the nature, or source, of the content.
But ranked newsfeeds are not about showing people content they want, but about showing people content that will generate more revenue for the company.
This is the problem here. It's like gambling addictions: on the one hand the gambler seems to be doing things voluntarily, on the other hand an entire industry is trying to trick them into coming back.
I might think I am interested in learning about how 5G spreads COVID or about Vaccines causing autism but both of those things are fictions.
The idea that the web needs to be helpful and start showing me more of something I have looked at or even searched for needs to die.
Just because I geolocate as being in Japan does not mean I want my search results in Japanese first, especially when I specify English(Google).
Just because I clicked on a funny looking mousepad that has an ass on it does not mean that I wan advertisements and suggestions for similar things for the next several months(Amazon).
In the name of user engagement and trying to figure out how to capture revenue, I feel that tech is losing sight of how to be a good service. We all railed on Microsoft when Clippy would patronizingly pop up to try and help you write a letter but think we have improved service when we search for one thing and have it show up a number of competing products.
Sorry for being all over the place, I agree that we should be showing people what they ask for but also think that is as far as it need to go. Don't follow them down the street and shove more of the same in their faces.
> it’s not fine if a ranked newsfeed amplifies that message to millions of people because it’s engaging
So companies are now restricted in what messages they are allowed to amplify?
Is there any business this entitled? Imagine a bookstore owner describing amazon's business model as diverting revenue that used to go to bookstores, particularly black-owned backstores, to themselves. Somehow the revenue flows, like water, it used to flow to newspapers, and now it flows to facebook. I'm glad at least that the interview skips over bots, russians and algorithms and goes straight to the point, which is that people like matt make less money because everyone can share their views now, and people find their friends rants just as entertaining as matts.
What would be more likely - that everyone cooking at home is a michelin star chef, or that the restaurant(s) losing money weren't very good to begin with?
Enough with the food analogy - respected and valuable journalists and news agencies are still thriving. Facebook is not eating AP or Reuters lunch, nor the Financial Times or other specialized organizations.
Shameless plug, but we're working on something to take the good of social without the predatory leanings or misaligned interests: https://blog.nillium.com/why-were-building-forth/
1. That Facebook is maliciously and mostly singlehandedly responsible for the death of the newspaper and journalism.
Except newspaper readership has been on the decline since the 90's. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation... - the article frames Facebook's grand plan as taking money from newspapers, but Facebook's revenues in 2019 were nearly twice what the whole newspaper industry had as revenue in 2008. In that same window of time the ad industry grew 50%. Facebook makes money by making products that engage people and then presenting them with ads that are of interest to the individual in question. That makes them in the broader attention market but the framing of "Facebook versus newspapers" seems peculiar here.
2. That "monopolism" is rampant and anti-democratic.
Besides the fact that this is poorly defined in the article (perhaps as incentive to purchase his book?), it sure is an curious turn of phrase that there are "endless numbers of monopolists" in healthcare. Perhaps one could say there are millions of monopolists in music because each work is copyright? Over what does the author claim Facebook have true monopoly? On attention? On information dissemination?
3. The thread of conversation implies that breaking up Facebook will somehow help, for example, the decline of the newspaper industry. It's not clear how any of the author's goals will be accomplished by this and the OP alludes to this in "there's a lot more you need to do than just break them up". But what?
If the point of the article is to claim Facebook's present mode is a threat to democracy (claimed in title) they A: need to actually articulate this case and B: ought make an argument for how they'd propose to remedy the situation. Instead the former was done barely at all and the latter was omitted.
In the article, Matt claims
>There's a lot more that you have to do than just break them up. But the answer is, it would improve things dramatically if they were broken up, and you don't have to imagine it.
Facebook has been doing their practices that deserve criticism before they became a "financial conglomerate". If they are broken up, they will not stop poisoning people's news feed overnight. Things will NOT dramatically improve.
In fact I believe if Facebook is forced to break off instagram and other companies, things may get worse. They would need to try harder to make more revenue using less users / screen time.
Breaking up Facebook would most likely be a good thing, but I personally believe as long the news feed exists, the negatives that Facebook brings will be there.
Empathic agreement. If the outrage machines are left intact, all the baby Facebooks will be incentivized to accelerate their race to the bottom.
2. Gross inequity is axiomatically anti-democratic.
3. The sole flaw in Stoller's anti-monopolistic advice, eg break up the titans, is that half-measures are insufficient.
Critics are not advocating either pro-competition or pro-consumer policies.
a. Prohibit all conflicts of interest, self-dealing. "Chinese walls" between business units are insufficient.
b. Prohibit aggregators from competing with their clients.
c. Normalize the rule of law, allowing plantiffs to appeal to a fair and impartial judiciary to resolve dispute and grievances.
d. Regulatory oversight and enforcement, with real teeth. Impose mandatory punishments onerous enough to alarm activist investors.
The mistake here is in blaming Facebook in particular when it was really the internet in general.
Ironically what really happened here is basically the opposite of the premise. You used to have local media monopolies, or at least sufficiently concentrated local media markets that the players were making ad money hand over fist. Then they used some of that money to pay for local reporting.
The internet leveled the ad market. No longer did you need to buy advertising from the local Los Angeles media outlets to reach customers in Los Angeles. You could still buy it from them, but also Facebook, Google, Apple, a million independent blogs aggregated by third party ad networks, national media outlets that now allow you target adds to specific regions or demographics instead of having to buy nationwide ads etc.
It dramatically increased competition for ad space, which lowered prices and thereby grew the size of the market (Jevon's paradox) but made it so that the incumbents weren't making as much money as they used to because the price for a given amount of advertising fell as a result of increased competition.
> That "monopolism" is rampant and anti-democratic.
This is the part that's actually true. Democracy requires the free exchange of ideas. A handful of oligarchs deciding what people see is the opposite of that.
To give two examples from the recent election, there is some decent evidence that Twitter and Facebook suppressed a negative story about one of the candidates prior to the election as "Russian disinformation" even though it appears to be true, and there have been claims that social media sites showed voting reminders to users on a partisan basis, skewing voter turnout.
> it sure is an curious turn of phrase that there are "endless numbers of monopolists" in healthcare.
This is pretty obviously the case. Healthcare is not a single market, individual products in healthcare are. If you're diabetic you need insulin and can't substitute an SSRI. If you have severe allergies you need epinephrine and can't substitute acetaminophen.
It's frequently the case that the individual markets are controlled by one or two players, not just because of patents but also regulatory burdens that constrain new entrants etc.
> The thread of conversation implies that breaking up Facebook will somehow help, for example, the decline of the newspaper industry.
Breaking up Facebook et al could help the anti-democratic concentration of influence over the political discourse. A larger number of entities would reduce the influence of any one of them and increase the availability of a diversity of viewpoints.
It might even help local news reporting, if Facebook et al were sufficiently atomized, because smashing them into tiny pieces could mean that each city has one or more independent local Facebook which uses some of its revenues to fund local news reporting.
My assumptions have long been that while total ad spending has been fairly stable, the business shifted to digital. In other words, FAANG did not grow the size of the ad market, merely captured it. Sadly, I can't quickly find any cites.
If I understand your points correctly, there are now more ads for same overall spend. Roughly speaking.
Suppose you sell widgets at a margin of $10/customer. You buy an ad in the newspaper, 10% of the readers are prospective customers, 5% of the prospective customers buy the product because of the ad, so showing the ad to 50,000 readers is worth $2500. The newspaper knows this, and the market lacks competition, so that's about how much they charge.
The internet comes in. Now you can target based on demographics, so the percentage of people who see your ad who are prospective customers is now 40% instead of 10%, and showing it to 50,000 people is now worth $10,000. But there are also many more sites competing to sell advertising, so the ad network doesn't get $10,000, it gets e.g. $1000.
Then the advertiser says holy cow, we can make $10,000 by buying $1000 in advertising? Buy more until diminishing returns causes the marginal value to get back to breakeven. Go buy $5000 in advertising. They end up spending twice as much as before even though the price is lower. (Remember though that advertising is mostly zero sum. The advertiser isn't actually making a ton more money all of a sudden because their competitors do the same thing and it cancels out. They're only buying that amount of advertising because that's the amount of sales they lose if they don't.)
So the advertiser pays twice as much as they used to in order to get more value (or avoid losing more value) than they used to. But most of the money is going to Facebook and Google and diffused out to a million random kitten blogs, when it used to go to local media outlets.
Thank you. Three (of your many points) stand out to me and are not receiving enough attention (criticism).
1. People are seeing more ads.
I'd love to see this quantified. Attention theft is another form of pollution, right? Just like we're starting to quantify the impact of noise and light pollution on both our physical health and mental well being.
(I live a mostly ad-free existence. It's always quite jarring when I step outside of my personal filter bubble. Like doing eldercare for my mom, airports, shopping, dining. TVs blaring every where. It's surreal.)
2. advertisers are spending more
I don't doubt that advertisers are spending more online. I would like to know (confirm) if overall ad spending has much changed.
Or perhaps the population of advertisers has changed. So some types of businesses are now advertising less, and others have embraced digital ads, and therefore make up the difference.
Personal anecdote: A sibling opened a neighborhood retail knickknacks (aka "shit you don't need") store. The performance of Facebook and instagram ads is surprisingly good. So I'm now certain that targeted ads are fantastic for at least some advertisers.
Or perhaps what's considered advertising has changed. With the decline of brand based campaigns and rise of ad blocking, there is more product placement and payola (influencers).
I have no idea how non advertising marketing dollars are accounted for; probably something like surveying CMOs. I've skim read reports that marketing budgets as percentage of revenue has been stable thru the shift to digital.
3. ad performance is going down
This is very interesting.
I've long assumed that a huge fraction of digital advertising is fraudulent. Examples abound of Facebook lying, belatedly revising metrics downward, remarkable coincidences that errors always favor the aggregator, etc.
But maybe the bigger scandal is declining performance. I would totally believe this; diminishing returns and all that. We (society) are completely saturated, so excess advertising may even be detrimental. Worse example I can think of is political advertising.
--
Thanks again. I wish critics would better address all the points you touch on.
I don’t like the idea democracy can only survive if governments censor and remove platforms for spreading information (however false that may be).
Yet I see very little pieces written against Twitter, probably because Twitter bought the media with the blue check system, creating an 'elite' class within Twitter.
- Twitter relationships are based on interests mostly. If I follow people who tweet about math I will see tweets about math. Facebook relationships are based on real-life relationships so the topics in my news feed will be more heterogeneous.
- In Twitter don't see as many content from people I don't follow directly. Sometimes I will see tweets that other of my followed liked or replied to, but it's a minority. In Facebook I end up seeing a lot of comments of people I follow in other publications.
- The suggestion engine of Twitter is not as aggresive as Facebook's. Right now I have three suggestions of profiles to follow (people who follow me or profiles I've visited before), a few trending topics which can be mostly ignored, and that's it. Facebook is constantly suggesting me pages to follow and friends to add (people I don't know at all) and groups to join.
- Twitter is more straightforward in the content you get shown. Yeah, they changed things with the inclusion of tweets liked by other people and replies, but most of the time you see tweets of people you follow. Facebook, however, does this weird thing where it shows you only the content you're more likely to engage with. If that content is conspiracy theories, so be it, even if that means you don't see innocent updates from your friends.
- Privacy controls on Twitter feel easier. Make your account private and that's it, instead of five different controls for each thing you might or might not do on Facebook. Muting and blocking accounts, notifications and keywords also feels easier.
Facebook likes mashing your whole life together, so one post is from a group, another from your high school weirdo that sells MLM products and another one from your racist uncle.
Honestly, Google+ "circle" concept was ahead of its time and I will die on this hill.
Twitter has none of this. Twitter rewards abrasive clapbacks, angry arguments, and rage tweeting.
In the end it comes down to the fact that people are being conditioned that they should have an opinion or position on everything, because "everything is politics". And many people fall for that and therefore search around for some indication on what opinions are out there.
Instead we should be propagating the message that it's entirely fine not to have an opinion on something that doesn't affect you. Indifference is actually a virtue.
Because newspapers have editorial boards, ombudsmen, and liability (in the form of libel) for what they print. Facebook has the conceit that it doesn't have any perspective, that it's just a carrier of speech of others. The concern is that Facebook (and YouTube and Twitter) already has preferences (such as for controversy over dry facts) and is developing more (curation through fact checking, etc.).
If Facebook came out and said, "Yeah, we're more or less like Readers Digest but for the internet" I suspect they'll still have detractors, but it will be more of the "I don't like reading Readers Digest" variety, not of the "Someone needs to break up Readers Digest!" one. They might also lose accounts, too, because who wants to write for a paper with clear points of view and biases that work at cross purposes to their own?
Real journalism is a casualty of social media too.
Youtube has 55 hours uploaded every minute (iirc). Its not "the internet"'s fault that, of all the content available youtube recommended Alex Jones's videos 15 billion times. Or that facebook has been recommending and promoting antivaxer content and communities to mothers' groups. (And specifically mothers who its algorithms think might be taken in by conspiracy thinking).
The blame lies with our peers who work at those companies. And every manager who prioritises their own advertising profits over healthy sensemaking amongst their billions of users.
Fake-news and the like aren't mentioned in the article.
- For one when a news article is incorrect it is very easy to hold accountable the source of that information. How many people keep track of who said what on the internet?
- Fake Information takes more time to respond to than true information. False news travels 6 times faster (..) than truthful news [0].
- Media has a cycle of information that is way slower and more curated (even if manipulative) which allows true information to be heard louder.
- It's becoming easier and easier to fake image, video, and audio in a way never seen before [1].
- It's way easier for platforms like FB and Twitter and YT to make you spiral down a rabbit hole of similar content. Sure, this did happen in the past, but the current level of detailed recommendations makes it really easy for people to lose context inside their bubble.
- People are not machines, if they hear a message many times by different sources that trigger the right emotional responses they will believe it to be true. Now group every point and compound it by a lot of consumption and ingest it into monkey-like brains :)
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/false-news-travels-6-ti...
This doesn't mean that power is being abused (though it gets increasingly hard to tell) but it's hard to call that kind of platform 'free'.
Sure you might be fairly certain that Facebook isn't limiting free speech right now, but the main reason you know this is through other channels. When their monopoly is complete there'd be no way to tell if speech truly is or isn't free.
And of course there's no way to tell if your posts are unpopular because of some well intentioned algorithm, or a more malicious algorithm. At the very least Facebook's incentives don't align with the rest of society.
And to the best of my knowledge there's still nothing preventing you from buying radio bandwidth. It's not really my area though so I could be wrong.
There are some serious limitations on that approach.
We have limited time to devote to going into an issue in any depth. We can maybe handle thoughtfully evaluating all sides for one or two issues if we are getting honest information from all sides.
When you have one or more sides deliberately trying to mislead, they have a huge advantage. First, since they aren't burdened by the need to actually be correct, they can generate a wider variety of arguments and do so in greater quantity than those who are arguing in good faith.
Second, we have a variety of built in cognitive biases. The people trying to mislead can purposefully craft their arguments to hit those, increasing the chances we'll believe them.
On top of all that, social media's algorithms for determining what to show us are trying to maximize engagement, and the things that most engage us are the things that fit in with our cognitive biases. They have a huge amount of behavioral data on us, which has made them very good at picking out and prioritizing stuff on our individualized feeds that will hit those biases.
You can't really think for yourself without high quality information, and because they are based on maximizing getting your attention social media tends to mostly show you low quality information. In short, the way social media sites like Facebook are designed makes it nearly impossible to get accurate information from them no matter how much you try to think for yourself.
There was a recent article in Scientific American covering research into this, "Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It" [1]. HN discussion of that article [2].
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...
Is that the value system that is being streamed into each citizen's eyeballs at this moment?
I don't know that breaking up Facebook will actually fix these issues or 'save' democracy. Conspiracies will still spread on other sites (Reddit: The Frontpage of the Internet, anyone?). Ad revenue will continue to go to electronic platforms and use tracking (Google is huge in this space too).
I can see that Facebook has engaged in anticompetitive behavior, such as buying some competitive companies. I don't see them as a full monopoly. There are plenty of other sites (some of them large) that allow you to connect with others, share content, and create an online identity. Just look at LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, etc. There are other large ad services too, like Google.
A strong democracy requires an educated and diligent citizenry. We can break up Facebook, but that won't fix the root problems in our society. We could start by teaching basic logic in schools. And I'm sure this will be controversial, but I do think we should make a citizenship test part of school curriculums so that the citizens know their rights, the structure and function of our government, etc. Then we still need to hope that voters do their homework.
And there you have it. Anything that threatens the position of media companies is always portrayed as an attack against Democracy.
If choosing democracy means shutting down the free flow of information between individuals on social media sites like Facebook, then my vote is for Facebook.
Whenever I read that people “aren’t educated” enough or are “unduly influenced” by media, e.g., newspapers, television, or social media, I like to remind myself of this.
I notice that there is, and maybe always has been, a vocal group of people who believe that we should only elect and appoint experts, highly-trained specialists in their area of government. Heinlein reminds us that “specialization is for insects”.
I’ve come to know many politicians in the past few years, some of them nationally prominent. And I can say without hesitation that the average person is as qualified to make decisions about governance as the average professional politician.
Crowds can be pretty smart. Not faultless, but smart. That idea has been fashionable for a few years now but it’s definitely not new. Its implementation has changed from democracy to democracy. But as a general principle it’s been broadly and effectively applied.
> I’ve come to know many politicians in the past few years, some of them nationally prominent. And I can say without hesitation that the average person is as qualified to make decisions about governance as the average professional politician.
The idea that Facebook is bad for democracy doesn't contradict that idea. For anyone to make good decisions, they need good information, and the problem with Facebook is that it amplifies lies and disinformation.
> I notice that there is, and maybe always has been, a vocal group of people who believe that we should only elect and appoint experts, highly-trained specialists in their area of government. Heinlein reminds us that “specialization is for insects”.
I don't think that's what being advocated for. What specialists are good at is providing accurate information in their specialty. Often different specialists will disagree.
In many cases, democracy should be about the people choosing which specialists to listen to and where the balance will be between them when they conflict. It shouldn't be about ordinary people trying to replace specialists (e.g. lets have a vote of non-engineers to determine how big the support beams for the new bridge should be).
This is an interesting point insofar as the second and third sentence seem to contradict each other. Am I over-simplifying?
A translation of what I expressed above is that common people have common sense and that common sense inoculates us from misinformation. It’s an imperfect response, but effective.
What Facebook is and does, at least in terms of spreading misinformation, is not new. Newspapers were that for a long, long time and, arguably still.
It's not a contradiction. For instance: maybe you have an specialist (a consensus epidemiologist) that says if we don't do A, B, and C, then N thousand people will die. Maybe you have another specialist (an consensus economist) that says if we do those things, it will cost the economy M billion dollars. Maybe you have other specialists in those fields that say other things, but are fringe figures rather than consensus figures.
Now the political figure or ordinary person has a menu of options, and has to make the trade-offs between them.
When I read your first reply I hadn’t considered specialists in different specialties disagreeing on the same problem or issue. But that seems to further bolster my point, at least as it relates to the distance between common sense and specialized knowledge.
That's a thing too, which I was trying to get at with my comment about fringe specialists. But it's not like every specialty is homogeneous (especially true in something like economics), so decision makers may need to choose between one camp or another of some specialty.
The thing I was arguing against was the now prevalent behavior of dismissing any specialist view that contradicts what you would have done in the first place. Common people should have a say in a democracy, but if that democracy is going to function, those common people need to understand the limits of their knowledge and understanding, which means they need to respect the knowledge and understanding of specialists.
I want to go back to something I forgot to respond to earlier:
>>> A translation of what I expressed above is that common people have common sense and that common sense inoculates us from misinformation. It’s an imperfect response, but effective.
I used to think that too, but I think that's turning out to be far, far less true than anyone would have hoped. That's proven by how prevalent and influential misinformation and disinformation have shown to be. For instance, by the support of totally baseless claims of election fraud by an alarming fraction of Republican party officials [1], which in my view is substantially driven by the influence those claims have on the Republican party base. I say that as someone who's leaned to the right for the past 20 years.
[1] See: "17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit" (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/trump-texas-s...) "Two reasons the Texas election case is faulty: flawed legal theory and statistical fallacy." (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/technology/texas-election...)
Yes, Facebook has its downsides just as any other social platform would. Yes, you can live without it. But I don't believe that the negatives Facebook has enabled comes close to the utility it has provided to society.
I've never enjoyed the chat heads and always disabled them right away. I don't notice ads in Messenger, though I mostly use it from a desktop browser with uBlock Origin enabled!
But as a I said, I only use Messenger because I have to, as it is the primary messaging service family members tend to stick to.
Previously, mass manipulation was only available to really rich and powerful, or states versed in it. Now it's available to much smaller and less sophisticated actors.
But I don't think that's an issue, the issue is that manipulation is acceptable at all, and how we can draw the new, better line there? (Looking at you too, Marketing)
Even after a successful antitrust action and forced division, Facebook would likely stay Facebook, only minus Instagram, WhatsApp and possibly other current appendages.
The "problem" isn't facebook or any social media company, it is with humans as a whole, and it isn't really a problem, just an evolutionary bottleneck. Selection pressures have changed and certain traits that used to be a net positive are now net negatives. People will adjust generationally as those resistant to mass hysteria from information overload succeed and get rich while everybody else (most people on HN included) fail and get poorer. Until the adjustment to the new ecosystem is complete, expect instability and uncertainty.
Society can't keep up with that. It isn't just that there are people with polarized opinions, it's that you have people with completely different views of reality. Propping up lies is incredibly easy, and doing the necessary research to disprove those lies and spread the result is orders of magnitude more difficult. It's impossible to keep up the rhythm.
The solution is not censorship, the solution is to force these companies to change those incentives. Stop with the automatic suggestions to get more engagement, stop showing content to people who didn't explicitly subscribe to it, stop the uncontrolled spread of content of any type. We can live without viral memes, we can't without a functioning society.
Freedom of speech is a measure of a free society, if you make freedom of speech the target and insist on maximising it without limit, then boring complicated truths are overwhelmed by simplistic emotionally engaging lies.
I don’t know where to aim, exactly, only that the real target is whatever freedom of speech is for — call it X because I’m not confident I know what X is.
To the extent freedom of speech and X are aligned, aiming for whatever X is will also enable as much free speech as possible.
Lies have always been more popular than the truth. Observe that billions of people are entirely convinced that there is an invisible and omniscient wizard residing in the sky, watching them.
The majority of people believing false things is dangerous, to be sure. Appointing censors is a naive and harmful approach to solving that problem, counterintuitively.
Uncensored communications tools are how we fix that issue, despite the fact that fearful people will look at some of the short term effects and foolishly conclude that it's making things worse, focusing on antivaxxers and the like while ignoring the rise in global literacy and scientific progress and achievement.
> Appointing censors is a naive and harmful approach to solving that problem, counterintuitively.
But even then I would happily accept even the part that it is “naive” to appoint censors (I am calling for something much more subtle).
These two things are close, but not perfectly so. “Free speech = free society” has been a good approximation for most of history even despite a majority believing in falsehoods.
But the difference is there.
Facebook per se isn’t the problem, I think; I would blame everyone who uses A.I. on large populations, testing and refining what is most likely to be shared without consideration as it “sounds about right” while pushing a particular narrative (in Facebook’s case the goal is “money”; others, including those who use Facebook as their means for this testing, have political rather than financial agendas). Facebook is just one of many doing that, the A.I. genie is well out of the bottle, and conversely Facebook could exist without that A.I. optimising for something we don’t really want.
However, despite that being the only point where I think you’re actively disagreeing with me, I disagree with your new point here:
> look at some of the short term effects and foolishly conclude that it's making things worse, focusing on antivaxxers and the like while ignoring the rise in global literacy and scientific progress and achievement.
These are separate dimensions of what I consider a good society. China is part of the rise in those two, yet lacks free speech. Does it lack all the things which free speech is a good proxy for? I don’t know; but it does lack free speech.
So what would be a recommendation algorithm that does not have this effect? What would it measure and optimize?
We already have rules regarding what we consider to be acceptable both in general society and in a legal context with regards to free speech so the line in the sand already exists.
Trying to wave away this debate by just shouting “censorship” contributes nothing meaningful to a debate that is sorely missing from society.
Edit: There are some interesting points in the replies that I think could be answered with some clarifications.
I think there is something that is very unique about social media specifically that should have a higher standard about it than other forms of speech. My argument is not at all about trying to force "the one acceptable point of view" or anything like that. History has a long long list of ideas that were once considered dangerous that not only stood the test of time but instead became something much more and in order to continue having that diversity of opinion is generally a good thing.
There are fundamental problems with how the economics of a social media platform function. Never before has a tool existed that allowed everyone to broadcast any unfiltered thought they had to everyone else in the world with basically zero effort.
Furthermore, they can do this both anonymously and without any kind of repercussion. That sounds great in theory as some libertarian fantasy where you might expect the "marketplace of ideas" to take care of everything and the cream would rise to the top. The reality of what that looks like in 2020 however is actually very different and I think now would be a great time to have that discussion about what guardrails we can all generally agree on that would address some of the many downsides that have come out of this experiment so far.
All of the current iterations of major social networks came pretty much exclusively from a group of people who had zero background in anything then Computer Science. At no point have we reached out to groups like sociologists, ethicists, historians, psychologists or anyone else who might have some really valuable thoughts on how to arrange anonymous social interactions in a way that might not devolve into the shit fight we have on our hands currently.
As an example Facebook was started by a guy who by all accounts is not exactly known for having great social skills where he could rate women on campus. Twitter is a platform that purposely doesn't allow for nuance. I think they were both a terrible starting point and that perhaps we should rethink what social media COULD look like from the ground up and learning from all of the mistakes we made with it the first time around.
Little by little the western freedoms are being taken away. And you want it to go faster?
Rap music which idolizes violence is allowed, despite thousands dying every year in connection to crimimal enterprise. The case to ban rap is just as naive as the case against free speech.
Same is free speech: when actually exercising this right was about printing books of pamphlets that meant a certain level of financial and intellectual barrier to it, free speech was clearly all benefits and no risks. Now that literally anyone can invent his own conspiracy theory and post it on facebook - and with well, intellectual majority driving the views and rankings of them so smart content ends up unnoticed coz it's so nerdy - people are right to be concerned.
The thing that really pushed me over the edge was the poll that said “98% of people don’t believe what they read on the internet”.[1]. Unlike many people, I actually have faith that people will accept the truth, eventually. It may take time and it may be messy and ugly, but it will happen.
And I also believe that the free flow of ideas (good and bad) is a fundamental quality of the American system that is overall a net plus, not a net negative.
And I feel sad when I see people so willing to give up such a fundamental right because of what they see on Facebook. I mean it’s not like there are thousands of examples of where a lack of free speech has been used to oppress people.
[1] https://newsfeed.time.com/2012/07/23/almost-everyone-doesnt-...
You don't need to restrict speech to kill millions, you just need to have a louder voice than the people you are oppressing, deafening out anyone who might otherwise listen to them.
On the free speech and authoritarian side of things you have stuff like the genocide in Myanmar where the direct correlation does appear to be causal: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
What's the amount of murders and ethnic cleansing attributable to free speech where free speech does become suspect? Hundreds, thousands... what?
Facebook has an algorithm which highlights outrageous and livid claims. These often tend to be false.
Your Facebook feed is curated to look like this—something a “traditional” publisher can’t do because of libel laws, etc.
What needs to happen? To my eye this is simple—all algorithmic publishing should be held to the same standard as a newspaper or even better—abolished altogether. Let’s keep it chronological.
You are essentially arguing for a social internet without filtering and search engines. Lots of people claim to want this, but the fact that no platform lets you do this leads me to believe that the revealed preferences of people are different.
Maybe these hate bubbles wouldn't proliferate if they had to co-exist on a platform with a diverse set of opinions. These people are heavily outnumbered. But of course, all the major platforms are so successful because they aggressively silo people into pigeonholes via curation.
And then people who believe in free speech but don't intend to use it to be assholes don't feel comfortable there, further making those sites hives of ... well, whatever bad adjective you want to assign.
And we should not put up with that kind of dishonesty.
Free Speech is not a supply problem it is a demand problem.
It’s not a question of free speech vs censorship, it’s which type censorship do you prefer? The corporate kind or the shitposting bullying trolling kind?
The interesting argument isn't really about the mechanism of free speech anymore, it's the scale. Anyone can have a global platform without any real effort these days. Most of the famous internet people would never have been a blip 20 or 30 years ago. There is something to say about the need for some sort of gatekeeping, but theres also more arguments that counter the benefits. The problem with Facebook, Twitter and the rest of their ilk is the fact they benefit from radicalism of some sort. Take a step away from politics. Who are the popular folks on social media for any subject? The people who are really into whatever it is. They're fanatical about their craft or topic. They then try to show how great it is as to have others appreciate it, do it themselves or fund that influencer's endeavors. Radicalizing the audience. When it comes to ant farms, drone racing, game dev, game plays, growing hot peppers, the dangers only go so far in radicalizing an audience. Apply the same thing to politics and you get psychopaths. Why? I'm not smart enough right now to answer that, but I recognize that social media requires it. That's how they get the views, the ad sales and that sweet sweet user data. They won't give it up, no matter what rhetoric they pull out of their ass and throw in our face. The worst part, they'll agree to censorship, but to their own flavor. Current free speech generally requires you dont talk about hurting or killing someone or directly lie about something specific (libel, slander). Current media platforms, both traditional and social, believe those rules only apply when their group is the victim. When it's those "others", it's okay to be a complete dick and break the law. This goes for all political parties, they're all equally assholes. Free speech laws are meant to affect everyone evenly (naive, I know) when it comes to the gov intervening. Sadly, it's technically true that private corps dont have to play by the same rules. But when the corporation can influence the gov, where is that line drawn? On top, corps influencing gov, where is that line drawn too? This whole thing is a mess. We should go back to being hunter gatherers and fight bears for blueberries.
It's been a year since the Halle attack, the attacker is a joke: a typical internet incel as you would picture him. Infantile, insecure, physically weak, clumsy with his firearms. It would be literally funny if not for the two people he killed. Sorry for them, but, should we really sacrifice basic freedoms and rights, being afraid of THIS GUY?
Every state and institution in the world 'censors.
The BBC, ABC news, Fox News, the government, every corporation, Facebook, Twitter, Google.
Every single one.
Stop talking about this absolutist stuff - it's not helping the argument.
You, as an individual, can stand outside your home and say quite a lot of things before the cops will arrest you, but that doesn't mean there are not rules in the commons.
There are basic rules for civility in every institution, if you don't like them, start your own institution where you can press 'free speech' essentially to the legal maximum.
If someone tried to stop you from criticizing a politician, that would be an unnaceptable restriction but that's not happening.
If someone tried to stop you from telling your friends privately that you think COVID is fabricated by the Nazis, well, it' be bad because you have that right.
But don't have any inherent right to go on to some massive platform to tell Americans that you have evidence the COVID vaccine is killing people - if the owners of said platform don't want to let you on.
This point works against you, and actually supports the free speech advocates.
If you don't like facebook, and want to have a more censored platform, then leave and go make your own social media company.
But this whole thread is not about that. People do not want facebook to be allowed to support as much free speech as it is currently doing.
Why can't these pro censorship people just take their own advice? If they don't like free speech then feel free to make your own social media company.
And yet we already censor beyond that regarding health and voting issues that is certainly NOT the line that is drawn in the sand legally. This is a fact and a very bad development.
It props up all kinds of things good and bad and Social Media execs have fallen into a pattern where they take credit for the good (using the good to defend the Like Counter) and pretend that the bad has nothing to do with the Like Counter.
Old social norms go out the window because everyone is busy pointing at the Like counts they have accumulated to justify their actions and behavior.
So we are at a stalemate on every debate.
Social media companies will talk about everything under the sun other than what happens to society built on top of a like counter.
The way I understood it, the shooter placed a manifesto there before shooting, that, if anything, could have given the enforcement a way to stop it if they were fast enough — it enhanced their chances of doing so.
8chan allowing anything and everything hardly caused the shooting, and gave enforcement a possible window to stop it.
I don't know if this is not well known in tech circles perhaps but this is basically an established fact among those who study this kind of thing for a living. Those communities effectively act as an extremely effective radicalization pipeline where the most extreme version is actual acts of terror and mass shootings.
In the exact same way that say law enforcement and intelligence agencies spent the last 15 years trying to ensure that access to jihadi material wasn't freely available online they are now being asked the question of what exactly is the difference because not only are the outcomes very similar but so are many of the steps leading up to it.
A slight exaggeration.
Imagine Facebook with no comments, everyone just has exactly the one status they can update (and somehow their are no fake accounts).
But that's not what any of these platforms are, so really it's speech for whoever has the fastest script.
In the same way that people with money find it easier to make more money, people with social influence can leverage that to obtain more social influence. It's a positive feedback loop. The "multiplier" is never 1.
4chan has free speech and no one takes it seriously because it becomes obvious who you're talking to.
Trying to wave away this debate by just shouting “RACIST! NAZI!” contributes nothing meaningful to a debate that is sorely missing from society.
Edit: why is this controversial and the post I'm replying to not? We both advocate the exact same thing: to abolish a founding principle of western civilization because sometimes people die. Hell, there's even a quite large disparity between the number of deaths caused by those two principles - my argument has way more merit.
I'd really love to see why these two cases are totally different and incomparable. Three paragraphs of mental gymnastics or less though, please!
I do not see free speech absolutism, I see a hidden agenda. Facebook is a platform used as a hate spreading megaphone. That is the reality that is being defended, free speech is, sadly, a red herring for many people. Let defend whistleblowers, let defend the free press, and stop pretending that Facebook represent freedom of speech values, because it does not. Defending absolute freedom of speech but then telling a platform what it should say it's at best native at worst willingly damaging.
Facebook already has tons of policies for civil conduct that will get you the boot.
Every platform does.
This was never a case of free speech absolution - I think those doing that are straw manning it a little bit because they want to stop the ability for people to have controversial opinions.
'The Challenge' probably boils down to how to deal with otherwise nominal speech, that at scale, can have problems.
For example, total fabrications about COVID vaccines.
Having the opinion: "I think the vaccine is harmful" - is not so bad - hey, it's just an opinion.
But when you make a vide with all sorts of lies in it, and it causes 200M people to believe the vaccine is an instrument of government control and that it has nothing to do with COVID etc. ... well then it becomes a public health issue.
That's a problem.
When foreign actors use to misinform to change the outcomes of elections, obviously that's a problem.
Facebook is not the problem when it acts like a platform.
Perhaps we need more journalists and not National Enquirer-type ones.
After all, who is really turning off the lights to this “Democracy dies in a darkness”?
I totally agree. But I think even now it's too little, too late. HN loved Glenn Greenwald, and then immediately turned against him overnight because he dared to say bad words about a Democratic presidential candidate.
Facebook is a very large company, and is taking large amount of advertiser cash. That is true.
That money would otherwise go to publishers (possibly true, although I suspect it would go to google.)
What the author fails to back up is the either facebook/democracy argument.
facebook could attempt to editorialise all content, to give a specific bias to the news feed. But I don't see any evidence that it is, barring the bias towards "virality". (again I'm not convinced that's a function of facebook, I think its a function of society.)
Virtually all publishers (be it paper, radio, tv or internets) are privately funded. They all make editorial decisions about the content they commission, edit and syndicate. I suspect the argument is that because there are more than one of them, its not a concentrator of power. Unlike these entities, facebook doesn't actually wield power, its far to incoherent. It allows certain content to flourish, which has a similar effect, perhaps.
I am uncomfortable with facebook the website, its trivially easy to create organise and operate a group that is contrary to the health of wider society (what the subject is, it entirely left to the reader's preconceptions of what bad is.)
I don't think facebook is the antithesis of democracy. Far from it, we are seeing more people voting. What we are seeing is western democracies struggling with people finding their own voices.
We are also seeing many extreme opinions. Most of them emerging after being amplified to catch eyeballs. Some of it is being driven by facebook, but a lot is being driven by the twitter->pundit->journalist->politician->journalist->pundit feedback loop.
That's exactly the core question in legal cases so far. If it's recognized as a publisher, it can be held accountable for it's editorial decisions. If it's just a platform, that accountability is delegated to the people posting on that platform.
The big issue is that Facebook will purport to be one or the other depending on the context. As a publisher, for instance, it's protected by free speech rights. As a neutral platform, it can deny that it disrupts the news industry.
This is is exactly what has happened thus far. Facebook says A before Congress, and B in court cases. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...
> What the author fails to back up is the either facebook/democracy argument.
Yes, the article falls short.
So, the question to ask is this: "How does FB even get away with this chameleon like behavior all these years?" and the answer is: careful exploitation of the legal framework.
An innate consequence of a democracy - to be more specific, any self-governing society with a majority vote - is that the process of law making are governed through models as described in game theory. Laws aren't "designed" and decreed in isolation of one another, they are often the result of bargaining, negotiations and compromise. Laws are also written by multiple representatives who often landed their chairs through complex power dynamics with their constituencies, interest groups and so on.
So, unless you're willing to dismiss democracy for a technocracy, the legal framework will never truly be "engineered" towards some ideal equilibrium through the eyes of experts. In a democracy, law making will always be a "work in progress" that represents the state of a public debate.
Facebook isn't a "political institution" as it is described in the article. At least, not in the formal sense of the word. But it is very much a participant in the same public debate that shapes law making. And it will unscrupuously use the flaws in the legal system to its own advantage as a private actor.
This leads to a big question: "How do other participants in a democracy feel about Facebook doing this?" This a moral question, though, and it is based on value attribution. So, the result is many different answers that don't easily converge into a compromise either.
Paradoxically, it's this disparity in opinions within the public debate that allows Facebook to keep doing what it does without being hindered.
> I don't think facebook is the antithesis of democracy.
Personally, I think that Facebook does hold a shared, moral responsibility.
Suppose your parents aren't at a home and you decide to host a party. People flock to your house. Not just your friends, but also friends of friends. And maybe people you don't really know. Including people who do not really care about blasting loud music at night, or even vandalizing cars two streets down the road.
You might think "it's not my responsibility how others behave", but you will def have angry neighbours coming down at you over you not minding who came through your door that night.
Facebook's design, architecture, principles,... allow anyone to partake in the party, but they don't provide the proper affordances to watch the door - e.g. moderation, archiving and findability of posted content,... - and they don't provide it either for private moderation, or public law enforcement.
By extension, news publishers do make the same cardinal sin by putting a "comments section" below any and all news articles without proper moderation.
The Web isn't an affair of a few million early adopters anymore. It's frequented by billions today. And this dynamic brings different, very complex moral questions that can't be readily be answered with "people are responsible enough, they will figure it out for themselves."
I agree 100%
> news publishers do make the same cardinal sin by putting a "comments section" below any and all news articles without proper moderation
Again I agree.
The broad thrust of your argument is correct. I failed to argue the point about responsibility correctly.
If you ever take time to read the "community guidelines" that facebook have, you'll see that they are actually really good. I would quite like to live in an environment where they are applied ubiquitously, equally and quickly.
Which leads me on to your point about responsibility. Facebook has a set of rules, but is not willing to apply them (in the case of celebs and politicians) or unable to in the case of individuals. For individuals I have sympathy, thats a hard problem to crack. For politicians, there is no excuse.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me. Or you.
If you remove moderation rules, there won't be blocking. However we fall in the other extreme with fake news and obsceneties taking over. The loudest and most provocative win because that's what makes the news. At least that's the logic.
Is the root of the problem that no one elected Facebook to be moderators? And now that it is so big, it has become a problem because it has an overbearing affect on people?
So essentially the monopolistic argument is a justification for government to grab back control.
I can't help to see this as a growing pain for global companies becoming bigger than countries. FB has 2.9 billion users. Only 10% are in the US. It has such a reach beyond borders that countries are freaking out, afraid to lose sovereignty over their citizens.
Or am I reading too deep here?
Maybe now is an algorithm, some person censoring news or posts for fcbk, but if you involve the government, any government, they will define the agenda.
So, the most you can get from that deal is to choose who would you want to be your master.
With algorithms at least we - still - have the out of sight factor, some things the algo doesn't "see" or "understand" (quite few probably), but if involve governments, specially the american government, with thousands and thousands of interests, some of them even confronted; you could end with some franken-facebook promoting several hundred of agendas from who-god-knows.
I have no solutions, but I can tell you, there are problems ahead.
[1]: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/09/14/2029237/hate-speech...
Governments around the world have too much power and our antitrusts laws are outdated.
These are technological realities. You can continue to lament them, or you can accept networked information as inevitable and start dealing with your new reality.
Most importantly, the interviewee states "I think monopoly is a worldview." And I happen to agree as I have a tendency to believe that too much power in too few hands tends to make things worse.
The question naturally is.. is FB a monopoly?
The nature of the medium has intrinsic properties and that means that if you broadcast opinions, you always get pushback. It doesn't mean there is or is no justification for it. It is the trivial result of connecting everyone on the planet.
Be it differences or misunderstandings, there simply is no authority that would be accepted to enact a rule that you have to adhere to certain official statements about health, elections or Santa Clause.
As bas as some terrorist deeds may be, the continuation of decreasing liberty for security we tried for some decades is counterproductive and devoid of any results. Change it or lets yourself be classified as insane already.
Not a fan of facebook, but if you don't like it, you can just not use it. Doesn't mean you have the right to dictate how others use media. And don't think you are different to other historic mistakes of curbing speech.
The problem is industrial-scale disinformation campaigns manipulating public opinion and discrediting every single thing you can imagine, grinding the free exchange of ideas to a halt at every turn.
Its a DDOS attack on that very same free exchange of ideas you mention.
This is just a fancy way of saying "people saying things I don't like".
>grinding the free exchange of ideas to a halt at every turn.
How so? Like GP said, you can just not use facebook and freely exchange ideas with your peers through other channels. Sure, some of your peers might have a different opinion than you, and (gasp!) you might even be unable to change their mind, but that's just how it is.
If this was "people saying things I don't like" it would be absolutely fine. People say things I don't like on HN all the time, and I either ignore them or debate with them - which is how it should be.
But that's not what this is about. This is about political PR machines with unusual wealth lying to Facebook users on an industrial scale to control what they believe and how they act.
But perhaps you think lying to people on an industrial scale is ok?
Not just "I don't like", but things that "aren't true". There's a difference, and it's important.
> How so? Like GP said, you can just not use facebook and freely exchange ideas with your peers through other channels.
The how is that the constant exposure to lies makes people doubt everything. A lie is easy to fabricate, will create controversy, and social media will reward that controversy and show that lie to even more people. A truth usually requires more research, and given that more people agree with it it will create less controversy, less engagement and the platforms will not reward that content.
That's how you end up with what you have now: people living in completely different realities because the things that spread the most are lies. You can't have a free exchange of ideas if people don't agree in basic facts of reality.
We really can't ignore the damage that social media is doing to society by dismissing the concerns as "well it's just that people have different opinions". It's not about the opinions, it's about the type of content that gets rewarded now.
People are being (unknowingly) manipulated and the sheer quantity of misinformation is being mistaken for evidence of truth.
Why isn’t subliminal advertising considered free speech or free exchange of Ideas?
No it's not, unless you also think somebody aiming a high pressure fire hose at you is just a fancy way of moisturizing your face. There are differences in quality and quantity that you're just glossing over by claiming that some generalization applies.
Perhaps a start would be forbidding PACs, lobbyists, and politicians from posting things that are factually untrue. That wouldn't fix everything since the majority of misinformation is twisting facts rather than outright falsehoods, but it could at least help.
At some point we will have to face the truth. Companies should not be allowed to use platform protections to becoming lobbying companies. That's how they are able to erase people like Bernie, Tulsi, Wang ... they keep pushing crony politicians that can be easily bought up.
I believe most engineers have a left wing political position for that matter, although I dislike these classifications and that doesn't mean it is still true for publicly traded companies.
And of course big tech would try to reduce anonymity, get people to sign up for their ident services, want to impose closed systems for security and "left wing" people eat that up like candy. Politicians too, although maybe for different reasons again.
At which point do we put our libertarian fantasies aside and say enough is enough?
But then again, always fix the things first that are easiest to fix.