Tech billionaire: Facebook is what's wrong with America
cnn.com
cnn.com
The idea that companies like facebook could defeat misinformation, nonetheless that they should, is absurd given the failure of every other attempt throughout history to do the same. Those championing the idea either do not understand the problem, or wish to benefit from its inevitable failure.
The fact is the internet has made it easier than ever before for people to communicate with one another, to access legitimate and accurate sources of information, and to challenge those who have long benefited from keeping people uninformed. Yes when people speak and read and get angry, they may sometimes be speaking and reading and getting angry at the wrong things, but the ability to do something wrong is a necessary condition of freedom.
Yes and no. Now that the labor for executing misinformation campaigns is outsourced and presented in a new way, the old wisdom of "don't trust the media", and "trust people you know" has become the new naïveté.
At least in the days of mass media, the centralization of messaging made it easy to identify and thus in some ways able to defend against. Now we're defending against brothers, sisters, aunts, and uncles who have been caught up in whatever nonsense happens to be most engaging. The commodification of social relations is rapidly progressing and there isn't any viable protection from it.
Punishing those who do something socially distasteful that harms me but is not necessarily illegal is also a necessary condition of freedom.
So, how do I punish Facebook in any meaningful way?
100% a goverment that decides truth is more dangerous than one that doesn't stop it's people from lying.
I think the "FB is evil" is overblown tbh. People are doing that on FB. FB is not doing it, it's just facilitating it. FB is the digital equivalent of a city - lots of people in close proximity, and some stand on the street corner on a soap box and try to get you to listen. It has all the people issues a city does, just bigger.
Nonsense
FB curate every phrase specifically to gauge it against their metrics and amplify it based on 'engagement' and other metrics useful for Facebook.
Note that those metrics do not include, and are in fact roughly inversely correlated with truth value, moral compass, or societal value (what ordinary publishers generally curate for). The net effect is highly corrosive to governance and society without even accounting for their amplification of intentional dezinformatsiya as part of active measures warfare.
If (and they do not even close to do this) FB provided only a strictly chronological timeline of items posted by exactly the people with whom you were directly linked, you might have a point. But it has been decades since it was anything like that.
Trying to act as if FB is merely some innocent carrier is at best massively ignorant, when FB in fact amplifies the problems for it's own profit.
Facebook is just exposing the problems of people. They are no more a problem on their own then a three-ton pile of cocaine sitting in the middle of a public park.
EDIT this should have replied to vineyardmike’s comment. But you seem to more or less agree with the comparison. I didn’t say that it wasn’t a problem for people. I’m many arduous miles from perfect myself.
Under your reasoning, scammers are just letting people do what they do anyway, and should not be charged or prosecuted. Bernie Madoff should not have died in prison because all his investors should have seen that his returns were unlikely.
No.
Exploiting the flaws of people is still exploiting people.
And there are laws against what you propose for exactly the reason that people are imperfect. Let's remove the illegal cocaine, and replace it with a 3-ton pile of $100 bills, all legally obtained. Despite your generosity, unless you took great care to ensure that there would not be pandemonium, you would held responsible at least for creating an attractive nuisance [1] and likely a trap, and held partially responsible for accidents, crowd crush injuries & deaths, etc. Both are illegal. Sure, the people did it to themselves, but it would not have happened without your input.
Of course people have flaws. Those systematically and scientifically exploiting and weaponizing those flaws are largely responsible for the results, in particular the results at scale.
EDIT, add: >>Facebook is just exposing the problems of people. Similarly, it would appear that you think that people cracking into other's systems are merely exposing the problems in the system. So, if I crack into your system and bank account and steal your private info, intellectual property, and/or money, I'm not at fault, I'm merely exposing the flaws in your system, you were the problem for having a flawed system.
Of course both are at fault. If you have something to protect and fail to take any measures, they you may be lazy/incompetent. But that does not give others the right to exploit that. Eve if you leave your front door unlocked, I'm not allowed to wander in and take what I want.
Similarly, of course the people on FB are flawed. As I saw through them decades ago and never signed up, I could similarly condescend to every FB user who is fooled.
But I don't - there is a mammoth amount of deliberately weaponized disinformation being systematically spread onto FB, and FB systematically amplifies it. Sure, many of the ppl falling for it could do better at curating their info sources, but many also were not blessed with the intellectual capacity or education common on HN.
To just put all the blame on the consumer, and claim that FB is irrelevant as a piece of paper while their business model is poisoning the common well... it's a borderline sociopathic claim.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/attractive_nuisance_doctrine
Just way bigger. I see this a lot, FB is like some public area. No, it's not. How many people is that person on the street corner realistically reaching? Thousands at best, but more likely hundreds over the course of hours. FB is reaching tens of millions in seconds. There is no real world equivalent to social networks, it's a lot different, and because of that, they have larger responsibilities that they created themselves.