Facebook’s Next Target: The Religious Experience

nytimes.com

13 points·samiur1204··6 comments

I'm certain all faiths will be happy with Facebook moderating and mediating the Message they want to share...

"Fact Check: This story is apocryphal, as ruled by First Council of Nicaea in 325"

I can only imagine something along the lines of radicalism towards other religions to the point where Facebook starts moderating it. Which will happen and will be counterintuitive to what they want to achieve.

Wouldn’t increasing radicalism increase engagement and thus ad revenue? Doesn’t seem counterintuitive to me since the process flow would be something like:

- increase access and reach for religious groups

- more extreme elements interact , perhaps hostility ensures (engagement number go up)

- “moderate” the hyper engaged groups and tune the engagement to increase but in a manner controlled by Facebook (ad revenue number go up)

If you have Christians criticizing Islam (of which there are rational criticism of both) but Facebook moderates what Christians may post about Hadiths or the Koran, it will make people not want to be on Facebook. Not only will they be the arbiter of what is "tolerable" Christianity, but they'll also try to hide some of the horrors of things in Islam (just as an example, much like how the Catholic Church tries to hide the things about the Crusades and pedophiles).

Zuck sees human emotion as something to profit from. It's inevitable that he would ally with religion, which has a similar outlook.

Most religions don't go into it wanting to profit, but the love of money is the root of all evil after all. It corrupts even the purest intentions.

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