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Comment by mmcdermott | Hacker News Reader

I have two reactions to these kinds of pieces.

The first is to think "of course they are - outrage is the easiest form of engagement and social media is all about easy engagement as that means more eyes to sell."

The second is that there is a delegation of responsibility in these articles. The tone is a "Facebook/Twitter made me act like a jerk." The algorithms may be tuned to surface content that will ruffle your feathers, but the reaction is yours as is the decision to engage with social media at all.

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Well, yes, but this isn't a new problem and society long ago decided that sometimes it has to protect people from themselves. We prosecute drug dealers, we punish cigarette manufacturers, we enforce seat belt laws. I think we will be better off when we understand that social media in its current form is much worse than cigarettes, perhaps even, all things considered, worse than drugs.

ok, so Facebook/Twitter has obviously already decided it is to their benefit that people act like jerks.

So what if they figured out that they could determine who was most likely to be goaded into acting like jerks - like - hey, user 20018 just lost their child, they joined a group for support for people with family members dying of cancer, and their football team lost last night! Start pushing our most highly provocative content at user 20018 stat!

At some point there is a delegation of at least some responsibility - when is that?

It looks like they delegate (or have formerly delegated) this type of intention, to paying customers. That of course doesn't mean the userbase: you'd call it 'advertisers' but Facebook got in some trouble over selling off extremely granular access to targeted advertising, to state actors, foreign governments etc: basically whoever's willing to pay enough.

So, if you're trying to create domestic terrorists, it's extremely valuable to be fed information just like your example represents, to sell off access to that demographic.

Facebook doesn't have to consider it 'provocative content', they see it as 'feeding a demographic to a paying customer'. If you're smart enough about your targeting, you can turn it to 'provoke susceptible people into committing acts of terrorism at rates substantially higher than the baseline likelihood of this'. So it's the foreign intelligence agency that is thinking of 'provoking', and Facebook sort of shrugs and fills the order for targeted demographics, without itself thinking much about whether anything is 'provocative'.

good point, the poster I was responding to suggested that delegation of responsibility was happening from the user of facebook not taking responsibility for their own actions, but I guess there is delegation at several levels.

Not just the social media but also the print and TV news. At least here in India about 80% of all the news is rage inducing. Because that’s what drives the TRP which in turn means more advertising money.

And then we have artificially induced rage through sports, mostly cricket, where spectators get riled up and vent it out on, where else, Twitter.

Right. And my reaction has been to mostly stay away from Facebook and Twitter.

But I’m not the one rioting.

I think you are breaking this down into a sociological statement vs one of individual responsibility.

The first is more useful because the system as a whole may have emergent properties. E.g. think of the opioid crisis and the extra profit incentives for doctors, sales reps creating a vicious cycle.

Hence this is also the best place to frame, and fix the problem.

Of course promoting individual responsibility is good, "don't do drugs" but it is usually not enough.

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