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Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

> I am more wary of a government policing what it sees as “misinformation”.

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.

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Facebook purposefully propagates anger and rage as much as it can because it gets people to log on to the website. Cities aren't designed to maximize hatred and crime.

Not sure how that’s different from 24-hour news networks. CNN and FoxNews are consciously making choices and targeting audiences. Facebook is just algorithmically solving for the same unknown…

Yes it’s similar to Fox and CNN, but with an audience in the billions instead of the tens of millions.

>>People are doing that on FB. FB is not doing it, it's just facilitating it.

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.

Yeah, it’s people who actually do the engaging. People could simply not get spun up by BS and cultivate a better set of sources for their info.

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.

Ah, so you are the perfect person, and if anyone else falls prey to any trickery, it is their fault.

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

> 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.

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.

The problem is how people engage with Facebook.

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