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Twitter is where members of the media are given special status (blue checks) and they generally use it as a tool for self promotion.

Facebook has gained huge shares of advertising revenue once owned by said members of the media.

> Twitter is where members of the media are given special status

Like politicos aren't?

The problem we've allowed to happen with Twitter and et. al is the assumption that individuals in politics may be allowed to operate a "public" persona that then is used to change sentiment in the population using language and strong imagery...as has been done by "those who try to control" for thousands of years.

Gov has no business being on privatized social media, but perhaps they could build their own...

Facebook is a mimetic competitor and thus a huge target: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

I like this framing! Very interesting way to think about it.

Sure, Facebook and the conventional media both compete for the same eyeballs and ad dollars. The conventional media is critical of the upstart Facebook in part because of legitimate complaints (spread of fake news, triviality, etc.) and in part because they are jealous.

What does the Girardian analysis add? Is mimetic competition different than regular competition? Is a Girardian scapegoat different than a normal scapegoat?

Thanks for linking this interesting article. While reading it, I followed a link to what turned out to be another great article, "Why everyone hates the mainstream media":

https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hate...

Reminds me very much of Walter Lippmann's work, Public opinion, part of a time of his debate with Dewey on democracy's functions. This was in 1922 and he already emphasised the role of the media in validating existing worldviews in a sense. There's much to benefit from Lippmann's insights, one of which is this concept of psuedostructures we all construct and caricatures in those pseudostructures.

Philosphize This episode: https://youtu.be/6QJYsSJGR8I

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)

I think Facebook is particularly vilified (rightfully in my opinion) because it developed the biggest "village" where it privatized the profits and socialized the costs by asking the village to police itself, and by relying on or expecting its government bodies to handle the enforcement of any regulation.

I get that policing billions of users you just gave a voice to is hard but so is counting all those profits they bring. When corporation profits were at stake everybody threw money at solutions that instantly and automatically solve the issue to everyone's advantage but the users' - copyright infringement. Now we get the "policing is hard, man" discourse from one of the biggest companies in the world, with the biggest userbase in the world. Indeed, the solution to this problem may not be technical but they're still miking everything for profit while claiming it's hard to come up with a solution and people are rightfully skeptical of their stance and vilifying them.

> Judgements about status are embedded in almost everything aspect of the news. To read the news is to be insulted — which is why people are fleeing the mainstream media in droves.

Except that the people that are "fleeing the mainstream media" are going to media sources (on the right, and the left) that are even more judgmental, and even more insulting.

That pretty much annihilates his argument.

These other sources conform more strongly to the existing beliefs and values of prominent groups, right? So they are only more insulting for those outside of that group.

For better or worse, mainstream media is the closest thing we have to a consensus view that resembles reality as it exists (affirmatively, not normatively).

Retreating into safe spaces (either on the right, or on the left) isn't the answer.

While I enjoy what is written here (I don’t agree with everything said, but do agree that “Year of the Linux Desktop” was a folly), its use of Gentium Book Basic as a font is problematic on Windows 10: The strokes have inconsistent width, which makes things hard to read.

ttfautohint may be able to resolve this issue; another solution would be to use either Source Serif Pro or Vollkorn for the body text (i.e. the class “wf-active”), which, like Gentium Book, have a traditional look to them, while rendering more nicely in Windows 10.

My workaround is to use Firefox’s document inspector to make the font a mixture of Bitstream Charter and Charis SIL, but reader mode is another workaround.

Thanks!

Should be fixed now.

That looks really good!

Georgia has a very readable and slightly old fashioned look, is available everywhere (including Linux desktops once people legally add the Microsoft Core Fonts themselves) except on Android phones, but the substitute on Android phones looks quite nice too.

I still wonder if Gentium Book Basic (which, yes, looks great in PDF files; it is a beautiful font) can be salvaged on Windows devices if we run it through ttfautohint.

It's probably because Facebook is huge and making fuckloads of money while the narrative about Twitter has been that it's struggling to monetise the popularity of its platform. Hard to make the argument that they're profiting off of hate if they're not profiting.

I've become increasingly convinced that the fanout model of modern social media, where anything sufficiently popular will be seen by everyone on the platform, is just fundamentally broken. Moderation debates are attempting to answer the question of "who should have global broadcast rights?", and the only answer people will really be happy with is "nobody".

I think that's a reasonable conclusion, yeah. Optimization for virality as the bottom line is a disaster.

Reddit is the 7th most visited site in the USA and somehow never gets brought up in conversations of hate speech, toxicity, and disinformation in social media.

I'm not sure if that's correct. I think r/The_Donald managed to keep Reddit in the headlines by itself when it still existed.

Reddit’s bias is aligned with the mainstream media’s, so they get a pass. The same is largely true for Twitter.

It gets brought up in a different context. Until recently, Reddit had no rules against hate speech, with the CEO explaining openly and at length why free speech principles speak against such rules and why the company won't institute them. So you could (and people did) write news articles about terrible things people say on Reddit, but you couldn't claim Reddit was being hypocritical or point to a policy they're not properly enforcing.

Now that Reddit does have a hate speech policy, I expect we'll start to see them in the same conversations.

This is just factually incorrect. A simple google search for "reddit hate speech" limited to the last year brings up major articles on both maintstream news sites and smaller niche sites. Dozens and dozens of articles. Reddit has also been called out fairly regularly for their stances on pornography (allowing things like "r/jailbait" for years). They regularly do mass bans because of the press.

Because everyone has written it off as a lost cause.

Heck, "unsubscribe from all the default subs they're a cesspool" has been the going advice for at least a decade now. If that doesn't say lost cause I don't know what does.

default subs haven't been a thing since 2017 though (https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/65x4a7/testing_a...)

At least for me, if I log out of reddit the homepage still promotes /r/politics and a few of the other 'news' subreddits. These are all horrible places.

The worst part is that it reverts back to the new UI.

Maybe it’s just how I’m targeted but I rarely see “big” companies in my ad feed on Instagram. I would say it’s 95% Shopify stores from small brands.

Facebook consistently tries to emphasize how large of a fraction of their advertising is "small businesses", but it doesn't seem to sink in / people tend not to believe them. Big advertisers like Unilever are a fairly small (but meaningful) fraction of the ads on Facebook.

The selection of the content that goes on your Tweeter feed is way more transparent than the one that goes on your Facebook.

Tweeter also isn't pretending to be a way to keep in touch with your friends while it actually acts like a propaganda machine. It's much more transparent in that you subscribe to the (propaganda or not) channels all by yourself.

Huh? Almost certain Twitter switched to an algorithmic feed a long time ago. That's why realtwitter.com exists

And many users have complained about their tweets getting suppressed, inconsistent banning policies, etc.

> realtwitter.com

Strange. It doesn't show tweets chronologically, so I don't understand what it's supposed to be. Certainly not original twitter.

Any news organization profits from hate, terrorism, murder, and the lot.

But there has never been a boycott campaign that wasn't awfully selective, of course.

Probably because being consistent in one's suppose noble ideals would actually compromise one's own well-being, rather than simply not doing business with one giant corporation, of which there are many that do the same to choose from.

> It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate'

The press I see here on HN is that they profit off our privacy.

I haven't seen 'profiting off of hate'.

The criticisms aren't genuine, they are narratives. Those things didn't matter when they were happening to faraway poor countries.

These are phenomena Google has been dealing with for about a decade now.

Beyond a certain size, you really do have no choice but to have an editorial opinion. Even adherance to neutral tone is a choice.

No company should reach that scale without implementing sufficient moderation for said scale. With great power comes greater responsibility; so on and so forth.

> No company should reach that scale without implementing sufficient moderation for said scale.

It was a huge mistake to not require content filters on the phone network.

Twitter banned political ads this year, Facebook didn't. It was probably the most important social media policy of the year (with Trump's tweet warnings)

The media may be biased by their history with FB, but they deserve an huge part of this reputation.

Are political ads a bad thing though? Isn't it better to hear what politicians actually think instead of whatever caricature of their thinking goes viral?

That's an extreme mesure indeed, fact-checking political ads can be another solution, but FB won't do it either.

It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate', but yet I never see Twitter and others mentioned in this light nearly as often,

Really? I see it all the time. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit. Even Instagram a lot lately. Perhaps your reading selection is a bit narrow?

let alone any media organization.

Sounds like you missed the whole "Fox News is the devil" thing that's been going on for close to 20 years on the internet. That only changed a few months ago when it stopped fawning over Mr. Trump. Now Newsmax (rightly or wrongly) is the internet's media whipping boy.

It is not as hard as it sounds in spite of billions of users. Image recognition and other automatized systems help greatly in filtering stuff out.

Saying Facebook “profits off hate” is a blatant untruth to take heat off the fact that Facebook is basically the world’s largest prog propaganda outlet.

They profit off human psychology which readily devolves into hate.