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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

It’s you vs a team of 200 PhDs who’s entire job is to make you spend more time on the platform and make more clicks. It’s invasive marketing on a level that has never occurred in human history, and also happens to have the effect of amplifying the craziest voices. It’s hijacking people’s psychology, creating fights when peace would be better, because fights are less boring. And you pay for it, just with the dissolution of society where you might’ve talked to your neighbors. How many families have been split because of Facebook radicalization of conservatives? Mine for one.

I believe strongly that the social media and internet ad business models are at best amoral but responsible for the second order effects, much as coal plants are responsible for pollution. At worst they are making money off of making people crazy by giving every crazy person a megaphone and making sure you have to hear from them.

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Well said, really sums up the problem. People I know and even work with have fallen in this trap and I have no idea how to get them back out. It’s like they are a completely different person. It’s not just politics either - it’s this overwhelming amount of information that they are being fed about everything.

Yeah... I considered being a little more "both sides" about it but anyone with an objective view of reality can see how far off the deep end of conspiracies the average conservative has gone. My parents believe Obama was a muslim. They believe in a Deep State. They're open to conspiracies about every democrat in power being a pedophile. To those who might say "Blame them, not facebook" - I absolutely blame my parents, but I also blame facebook for putting links to those ideas next to photos of friend's babies and vacations. This isn't what people signed up for facebook for. They signed up so they could keep in touch with their family and friends, and post updates about their lives. They didn't sign up for it to become their #1 source of news carefully crafted to get them to click and confirm either their worst fears or highest desires, the objective truth be damned.

My niece at age 17 suffers from depression and anxiety. Looking at how those kids socially depend on their phones and myself being old enough to understand that the big companies actively (not coincidentally as in the very early days) making people addictive makes me very angry.

Human beings can't develop essential emotional skill hanging around at FB, Netflix, TikTok, Insta ... what ever. Kids are becoming emotionally crippled for their whole lives. The big companies know what they're doing with us, but they don't care.

It's billions of dollars of science and research of how to get customers and make them addictive vs. individual fate.

I know that this needs to stop but unfortunately don't know how.

What's the solution? You squeeze FB/Google and you'll get several another ones that will start with lofty slogans ("Don't be evil. Really this time!") and by the time end up being same silos. I think these platforms are inevitable.

Inevitable unless its not. Providing the infrastructure for say, facebook's primary needs is relatively cheap, but nobody can compete due to the network effect + them buying up any large competitor.

Its because everyone is already there that this stuff is allowed to fester. Nobody who's not crazy right wing is going on Parler - that is the way it should be. It should be totally self-selected which grouping you use, and there shouldn't be one thing that has "everyone" that prevents all others from starting. White supremacist websites existed well before this stuff, but in a decade they didn't get the traffic that one popular FB post gets.

Where's "Apolotical" Facebook? Where's "only share photos of your kids and vacation" Facebook? They can sell ads for baby clothes and cheap flights. There's more of a market need for that sort of thing than what it is that Facebook provides.

Here's a solution - a bunch of competing "profile" companies that you can choose to manage your online profiles that would work on any social network. They get kickbacks from those social networks running ads. Some of those profile companies might be incredibly private, some might give out a ton of info about you for targeted advertising. Regulate it so companies must have X and Y user access controls on your user profile, and also so sites must use those sites.

I don't even think the above is actually a workable solution. But the idea that things are inevitable is a lack of imagination.

> It’s you vs a team of 200 PhDs

So Facebook apparently laid off 800 or so PhD‘s?

I kid.

> How many families have been split because of Facebook radicalization of conservatives? Mine for one.

I am willing to bet your family is saying the same thing but calling it "radicalization of liberals" it works both ways

That’s how they justify it, certainly. That’s also how they justify cheering for violence.

Anti vaxxers and people wanting police dept reform aren’t the same as the people who want and are preparing for a second civil war

Or how a section of liberals want to defund/disband the police, tear down any link with the past(if the past involves a white male), cancel everybody to the right of Biden and so on. Again, it works both ways.

What part of justice for murderers, tearing down idols of people who fought for slavery, and social shaming of people who espouse racist ideologies do you find to be wrong?

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