Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
My facebook is mostly people showing pictures of stuff, sharing memes, some movie discussion groups, event planning groups. It seems like mostly just people using facebook as a proxy for real world interactions.
Twitter on the other hand is just pure toxic garbage which seems made to intentionally divide people and incite hatred and eventually violence.
I think there is a simple explanation for this: the people writing these articles are twitter users, and the people who use facebook are their outgroup.
My facebook was sufficiently diverse and my feed was exactly like twitter, even though none of my friend group were twitter users. I closed all of my social accounts.
Doomsday machine is _exactly_ how I would describe all social media.
I’m not sure how that’s me living is a socioeconomically stratified filter bubble.
My twitter on the other hand, is mostly (all?) left wing Silicon Valley/tech types. It’s diverse in the way that I’d expect a hackathon to be “diverse”.
If you live in the Bay Area, this can actually be the same group.
But you're basically talking about all Bay Area people, which is not a representative cross-section of America as a whole in any way shape or form.
I've lived all over this country and abroad, succeeded, failed, been homeless, succeeded again. My social circle is absurdly broad and my Facebook looked like people fighting each other all the time.
Facebook has even confirmed that it drives engagement.
What? I live in Arizona, and I grew up in the midwest. I've only ever even been to the bay area like 4 times in my life. Most of my friends are in Arizona, and then some in North Dakota, northern MN, and Iowa.
And somehow this isn't spilling over into big toxic feuds?
There is a groups of people I can think of who occupy dramatically different idealogical spaces, and they do argue with one another, but it's usually more in the form of giant walls of text back and forth.
The most "dramatic" thing happening in my facebook space right now is that a bunch of my friends worked on building a drive through Christmas light show (many of my friends are artists and fabricators), and then the person they built it for didn't pay them, so they're organizing protests.
Just going through my feed right now it's:
Somebody posting pictures about her adventure van build.
Somebody posting a "shop local" guide for Arizona.
A person posting a bunch of selfies of herself.
Somebody asking questions about a soft egg that one of their chickens laid (in a backyard chickens group)
Somebody posting that she just graduated with her masters degree
A post in a group called "let's really argue about film/tv" about christmas movies.
A solicitation for donations to a charity for the homeless (its' getting cold here in Phoenix right now. It was in the 30s last night)
Solicitations in a "buy nothing Tempe" group.
Ah, the first political post: the headline is: "even with three Trump appointed justices on the Bench, SCOTUS Declines to Roll Back Marriage equality"
Picture of a clock tower
A news article about NZ lifting covid restrictions
A motivational picture/meme about self care
Somebody talking about fasting
Somebody selling their tiedyes
Somebody graduating nursing school
More backyard chickens
I'm trying to find something inflammatory here but honestly my entire feed is basically just this forever and ever. People I know and am acquainted with in real life just posting about what they're doing. A few political posts here and there, and generally those don't get any comments.
I un-followed everyone on Twitter some-time ago and set up TweetDelete to delete all my tweets after 2 weeks. I started re-following select accounts on Twitter, and it's not that many. In fact, I frequently find no new content on Twitter, so I am free to ignore it for a while.
I also found that I unfollow any accounts from humans that post too often. Anyone who's sitting on Twitter all day... I don't want to follow. Not very often is it valuable. Even the reasonable constant-posters, they're just jacked into their twitter-sphere. I don't need that. It's a weird thing, to have a job and crank out 20-40 tweets/day.
My wife's facebook on the other hand is a dumpster fire. Religion, racism, politics all day long with various ads for crappy little boutique stores selling the same cheap clothes at a giant markup.
People post crap about religion and politics that they would never bring up in real life.
On Twitter it's complete strangers who are the problem (and the occasional bluetick or celebrity). On Facebook, it's your friends and family being recommended all sorts of extremist propaganda groups to join.
(Oh, and there's an incredibly nasty feedback loop between the worst of the media and the worst of Twitter, producing things like the Graham Linehan anti-trans fiasco)
Look, I'm not trying to defend facebook here. I agree that social media is basically a drug, and have said many times that one day we will look back at it the way we look back now at cigarettes.
But I think it's a little bit ridiculous to see all of the fingers get pointed at facebook when at least my experience has been that facebook is bad, and twitter is infinitely worse to the point where somebody could reasonably assume that twitter was actively trying to create chaos and make people hate one another.
My qualm with the "Twitter is toxic" discourse is that it often (not accusing you of doing this) points the finger at people with opposing beliefs who are making _fun_ of each other, or being "snarky" as HN guidelines put it. Certainly HN isn't the place for that, nor should it be, but I don't see why Twitter should stop being a place for that. Of course there are users who do incite violence as you say, and I don't have a problem with calling them toxic, and moderating them.
I should also add that Twitter is far easier to curate -- there is no social obligation to follow people in your real world social circle.
Me too!
It's almost as if the recommendation algorithm and ad model end up showing and reinforcing different types of content and behavior for different sets of users.
We really need a good word for this process how different people on Facebook see different things-- how it's kind of "sifted," so to speak, in such a way that even if the user tries to venture out to find different content, they can easily end up back where they started. Like walking inside a sphere without knowing it.
For example, maybe I read articles like this one for a full decade and tried at least one time to find fake news and rabid content on Facebook. So I started looking, but lo and behold, the recommendation engine never hooked me up with the ICE Facebook group, or a proudboys group, or one of the zillion other nasty echo chambers these articles keep mentioning.
Did any of the articles you read for the last 10 years give a name to this phenomenon of keeping a user in a cordoned off area with their custom-sifted content? I'll be honest, I've never actively searched to see if such a term exists. But you'd think after all this time an article that uses such a term would have eventually been posted to my wall.
Occasionally I do have to mute someone that's getting too annoying or use the "stop showing me this" feature for certain re-shared content. These are actions I take every few months, so it's not a very regular maintenance.
The difference is that the one person doesn’t care about politics very much and thus doesn’t interact with political content if it shows up, whereas the other person gets very invested into political content. I myself deleted Facebook because I was getting far too invested into political content.
The overall point being that Facebook’s machine learning algorithm is going to increase your engagement with the platform by showing you posts with content you’re more likely to interact with.
So I guess the question is: OP, do you have a tendency to interact and comment on political posts if they ever come up, or do you just ignore them?
That's also my impression. I mostly use FB for my neighborhood, hiking, biking, bird watching or any kind of nature related groups. It's been mostly pleasant experience for me. I think you can use FB without lowering yourself in all that outrage and drama. It's absolutely doable.
Twitter, OTOH, is a cesspool. I feel the whole platform was designed to congregate the worst of humanity and to bring out the worst in any decent person. It's almost impossible to use Twitter without causing emotional harm to yourself or the others. I find it interesting that FB gets so much hate from media, but Twitter seems to be a media-darling.
Lucky you!
For me: A childhood friend's mother reposts anti-muslim propaganda right out of the nazi playbook. My friends on the left also repost stuff that's tonedeaf, but it's a bit harder to explain why.
Facebook is where I am "friends" with extended family and random people from high school. This is where all the toxic garbage in my social media life comes from. Thank goodness for the option to "unfollow but don't unfriend" there.
I can see where people get this idea, though. Twitter is trying really hard to make it impossible to curate your feed. They started jamming "follow topic" suggestions into mine recently, which appear to be random tweets from angry video game nerds I don't know or care about. I had to write my own script to remove them from the page since there seems to be no way to do it through Twitter's own settings.
I really wish they'd let me keep it to just the people I follow, and the things they like and retweet. I don't want to see anything else.
It's a shame, too, because a majority of their content is probably still pretty good! Their pandemic coverage is a good example. But their editorial staff need engagement and they're gonna drive it by pushing the same "dark" buttons (fear, anger) that everyone else pushes these days. Ironic they're doing it in a critical article about Facebook.
floren - got it, whoosh right over my head. Read that too fast.
They're both fighting for the same advertising dollar pile. And to be honest Facebook is walking away with it.
Case in point: Ghostbusters has a brief gag on The Atlantic and it's over the top writing in 1984.
Timestamp at 1:55 in this clip:
(Also, maybe interesting, the author of this is the executive editor of The Atlantic, not just some reporter.)
not if we don't incentivize them - we just need a social media platform to not be an advertisement platform
Facebook wasn't the cesspit it is today when your news feed actually showed you your friends updates in chronological order.
Hell, it was better still even before the GD news feed even existed.
Facebook ads, if anything, should be a distraction from social pressure. People are creating the social pressure to express yourself, and it’s now manifesting in shallow ways (too much pressure). Ads is not what’s causing this.
If there’s any argument to make, and maybe I’ve been missing this the whole time, maybe you guys are saying platforms like Facebook abstract you into a living Advertisement. Thus, you must behave like an advertisement (get attention at all costs), and that is the core of their ad system, you, like a human battery in the matrix.
But, there’s no argument to be made if you realize you’re jacked into the matrix and can leave. If you’re aware, you can bounce.
Do we bear no responsibility at all here for how we behave?
If all the infrastructure around you is intended for driving, it's tough to blame you for not walking instead.
Either software design has a real impact on how users behave and interact with a system or it doesn't. If you concede that design can impact a user's behavior, then it becomes a question of "how much" and the ethics of how to use that power. The irony is that by placing the burden on users to counteract the tendencies that are openly being encouraged by the software we absolve ourselves of our responsibility as designers, engineers, and architects to consider ethics in our work.
Do we bear no responsibility at all here for what we build?
as described in tfa, the ad infrastructure is maximizing controversy and devisiveness when it optimizes for engagement. it's like inciting a mob - the instigator is more culpable than the members
TV programming in the past was optimised for engagement as well. There were extremely limited slots, so each slot had to appeal to the maximal number of people. This resulted in content that was generally relatively bland and inoffensive.
Fast forward to today, and digital 'slots' are limitless. Each user gets their own personalised view. No longer do you need to optimise for what appeals to the maximal number of people as a group. Instead, you optimise for what results in continued engagement by each individual.
It turns out the vast majority of us are stupid (myself included) and are easily manipulated through negative / divisive / controversial content.
The revenue model hasn't changed. It's the content delivery that has.
So to your point, I agree, ads aren't the problem. To my point, Facebook as it exists today is the problem.
In a system like Google Reader or FB/Twitter before algorithmic feeds, you just see what your friends post in roughly chronological order. It still has the problem that people like to post junk, but there's a natural limit on it. Algorithmic feeds however promote "hot" content, which is pretty much inevitably emotionally driven. There are a lot of possible fixes, such as rate limiters and manual review of high performing content, but they all come down to the same thing: don't let sheer virality be the driving metric. The best way to decouple virality is just to make advertising against algorithmic feeds illegal.
The misaligned A.I. which drives engagement — or whatever the precise metric is — with no regard for anything else, and optimises that metric ruthlessly with continuous variations to tease out the most effective way to maximise eyeball-seconds, that’s the problem.
The paperclip factory doesn’t hate you, it’s just that you’re made of stuff that can be used to make more paperclips.
Which is why we need to make decentralized, federated, non-commercial social networks dead simple to set up and use (shameless plug[0]).
Such changes will be required by law. FaceBook is a controversy engine, and as such they will fight tooth and nail to maintain as much controversy generation capability as they can, because that is what drives engagement there. It is certainly not friends sharing their days.
I mean it's not like the bad outcomes are theoretical here. We've grown up in a blessed time, but we have relatively recent examples of how civic dysfunction can lead to genocide and massive world wars. The risk this time is similar except that (1) political destabilization is visibly happening in many nations at once, and (2) the tools of warfare and genocide are orders-of-magnitude more powerful.
I struggle to see how personal FB/IG/Twitter use is anything other than a net negative at this point. And it's gotten a lot more so over the last several years, IMO.
Very quick thought experiment. FB had about 70 billion in income in 2019, and 2.7 billion monthly users. That's $25/user/year.
So maybe transition FB to a paid platform? In return, no advertisements, no tracking, no 'adversarial' feed algorithms.
I know that a large chunk of monthly FB users would not pay, and that a lot of the problems aren't from the algorithms, but rather with the groups and communities people form themselves, and what people share with each other.
I post pretty rarely on FB, and when I use it, I only look at particular people's pages, so I'm not (directly) subject to the dreaded feed.
As some others have said, using it as described, my personal FB experience is pretty positive. To be clear: I do manually follow a wide variety of people, across the socio-political spectrum. There is a certain amount of noise but the signal is much higher. And I will naturally tend to stop following people who primarily share/reshare toxic crap.
Maybe not a "fix" per se, but one big step could be a ban on infini-scrolling in websites. I think having to click on "page 2," scroll to the bottom of the page again, click on "page 3," etc, would introduce enough friction to get people to stop a little earlier.
(My own personal rule on Hacker News is that I never go deeper than page 2. That helps me not spend all day on HN) ;-)
You can argue that s230 protects them just hosting it for other people. However, if Facebook suggests you join "Islamist Kill-The-Infidels And Cake Recipes" because you're into cake, that's entirely their speech.
I would also argue that Google Search with its SEO crap has also become a paperclip maximizer (or at least on its way to becoming one).
As a civilization, we need to start thinking about it like this before we destroy ourselves.
Replace paperclips with dollars and you’ve got Facebook.
Capitalism has always been the paperclip maximizer, for better or worse. Why did Europeans drag a bunch of Africans across the ocean to America? Well, there's this thing called "money" and Europeans were trying to maximize it, and it turned out that getting cheap labor to work in the Americas would let you trade stuff to China and collect money in Europe. It makes no actual goddamn sense, but it maximized numbers, so it happened.
Anyway, capitalism doesn't have human values. Nor do nations. Human beings have human values, and we have to band together to impose those values on the various collectives that oppress us… but then because we've banded together, that band becomes the new form of oppression! So it goes.
Edit: As others have pointed out in here the difference might also be financial. Facebook publishes news articles and YouTube does not. A broken up Facebook offers a fractured publishing market and better pricing for news distribution.
Also the term Monopoly has tricky denotations and connotations; if you read Thiel's work you'll be inclined to have a strict definition of Monopoly (Ex: an online retailer isn't a monopoly because people still buy most things Elsewhere), whereas some have a looser definition (where Online Retailer is defined as likely monopoly because it is online retailer for everything that it can be, while also tracking sales data and using a white label brand to undercut other brands' SKUs)
For example, this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003
Well, one can control oneself, that's about the best we can do. As others have mentioned, don't use it.
I tried that. After years of not using FB at all, I missed out on some important news that was only posted there.
I decided to get back on FB, on my own terms. I created Bubble [1] and now I can visit FB with most tracking disabled, no ads, I only see posts from my friends, and even then only posts that do not link to news websites or contain political keywords.
My signal/noise ratio is usually about 50%. I love my clean feed. Works on LinkedIn, Twitter, others.
But the root problem goes deeper -- clearly not everyone cares or has the motivation to filter their own social media feeds. Some people like reading echo-chamber/fake news posts, truth is far down on their list of priorities.
I don't know what the big-picture answer is.
[1] https://getbubblenow.com (currently in beta)
- unfollowing everyone who only tended to posted stuff I didn't want to see,
- using the "Hide Post", "Hide All From X", and "Hide Ad" options very liberally - if I had any problem at all with the post or ad whatsoever,
- reporting posts that had content I didn't like and even had a hint of violating Facebook policies--none got deleted but I think this affects Facebook's AI.
I'd love to see a list of everything I've blocked and share it, but I don't see how to get that from Facebook.
It took several months, but probably would have been less time if I was a daily Facebook user.
At this point I have no political or news items (things I hid like crazy) on my Facebook at all. I have fun things from groups I've joined and that's it.
It's boring and quiet, and there if I really need it without annoyances.
But it did take some work and it's true, not everyone cares to put in that work. But they'll repost dumb meme stuff all day.
Ultimately it isn’t a question of right or wrong, but when and how. Get used to it. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle and these top-down solutions are still stuck in the previous century.
I wonder whether the media climate created by social media has made it harder to write persuasively against it. In order to be part of a successful business model centered around social media, these articles tend to embody the qualities (inflammatory, reactionary, narrow-minded, unfocused) of the thing they're railing against.
Why do these journalists think we should all only ever be spoon-fed inoffensive, carefully-curated pap? And when was the last time anyone changed their mind about anything because of something they saw on Facebook? The worst it does is confirm existing bias and prejudice.
https://samzdat.com/2017/10/13/the-guardians-inferno/
(This is not just about social media.)
Wow what an amazing slant. Done reading at this line.
Health and Human Services can ban Facebook and states have clauses in their own emergency orders to automatically include that
To pass constitutional muster, you can say “publicly traded social media networks that brag about how many fake users they have with over 500 million of them”
Perhaps a better metaphor is how a Jehovah's Witness was forbidden to preach from a sidewalk of a company town. She was later found in her right to do that by the Supreme Court.
But in both of these cases, the issue is that of scale - neither compares to Facebook's megascale.
I’m less concerned about misinformation propagating through a platform vs why misinformation even works on someone. I don’t care if the whole country of Russia sat there and told you lies with fake accounts 24/7, I want to know why you believed any of it.
Anyways, is The Atlantic supposed to be a reputable website? This article isn’t even the fun kind of hot take, it’s the trite tacky type of hot take (oh, is the Social Dilemma out? Are we going to keep things thematic and piggy back off that?).
You can know that there is a misinformation bubble and it still influence you.
I have the right to join an echo chamber, a straight up human right. I have the right to let Russia feed me misinformation. I have this right.
People are really keen to believe the worst of their enemies. People also are prone to believing in "revelations" and "scoops".
The Atlantic has been a monthly magazine for over 150 years. It is as reputable as, dunno, the New Yorker, Harpers, Mother Jones, etc.