Stop working for Facebook.
Quit working for that leadership.
Let their talent erode and their technical debt lead to atrophy.
Don't expend your finite life living and slaving for this empire of evil.
The next best step is to pledge to not hire ex-Facebookers.
This has been going on since the 1980s. Facebook may be an accelerant, but it didn't start this fire—not by a long shot.
Its quite weird, because the exact same narrative of unprecedented polarization has been used under Clinton (during the bipartisan neoliberal policy consensus), Bush, Obama, and Trump (with Biden, its at least usually acknowledged as a continuation of that under Trump, not new), with most major voices just seemingly forgetting the unbroken succession of preceding instances of the same narrative, pretending whatever is currently happening came recently, out of the blue without warning.
I think you can justify the claim that there was a real increase in political tribalism resulting from the resolution of the long post-WWII set of political realignments that was particularly evident from about the 1994 midterms and the Contract With America through today. (With some signs as far back as the 1980s as the lines of the new alignment started to become clear and the parties really accelerated movement toward their new polarity, where previously major ideological divides weren't aligned with the major partisan divide, so that ideological factions, to succeed, had to work across party lines.) But that's not as sexy a narrative as “suddenly we woke up in this election cycle with divisiveness that just came out of nowhere”.
Because a lot of people want to believe that the time in which they live is more special and more different than the ones that came before.
The problem is, the internet, the web, and now social media has accelerated this divisiveness to a whole new point. As the GP says, it's an accelerant. Like a small cooking fire can turn nasty with the addition of gas, the acceleration of the culture wars thanks to the winner-take-all outcomes of today mean that everything is getting more heated _faster_.
EDIT: While I know it's faux pas, I am curious where/why the downvotes are coming (from) simply because this seems fairly non-controversial, and also because it started out with a few upvotes first.
I think its pretty obvious to anyone whose knowledge of US history extends earlier than the 1960s that it did not start there (and, also, that the existence of the culture war and partisan polarization, while not unrelated, are quite distinct.)
> The problem is, the internet, the web, and now social media has accelerated this divisiveness to a whole new point
No, its not, as looking at US history anytime outside of a partisan realignment will show. Partisan polarization is a feature of the divide between the major parties in the two-party system aligning with the major ideological divides in the country, which they tend to do in a normal stable political alignment, but not during a period of partisan realignment.
The relatively low level of partisan divisiveness (despite the often quite high level of ideological divisiveness, seen in overlapping things like the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the youth counterculture/“hippie” movement, etc.) in the (roughly) WWII to 1990s period isn't due to some kind of weird temporary absence of technology needed for partisan division, it is due to the long and overlapping partisan realignments spurred by (mainly) the New Deal Coalition and parties settling out their positions on civil rights. These things meant that on the politically salient ideological issues, the divide between the parties was not aligned with the major cleavages; “liberal Republicans” were farther left on the key ideological issues of the day than “conservative Democrats”, and the opposing ideological factions were present in both parties.
That political realignments had largely settled out by the mid-1990s, with Clinton and the remaining “conservative” Democrats who hadn't defected to the Republicans solidly to the left of what was acceptable for Republicans, and vice versa, which enabled ideological division to translate more directly into partisan division.
A feature? I'm not aware of any document written by the American founders that calls this a "feature" of the system. An emergent property of FPTP perhaps but not a feature. I'd call it a mistake to attribute more to FPTP than its intuitive appeal; the American founders invented FPTP off-the-cuff.
> The relatively low level of partisan divisiveness (despite the often quite high level of ideological divisiveness, seen in overlapping things like the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the youth counterculture/“hippie” movement, etc.) in the (roughly) WWII to 1990s period isn't due to some kind of weird temporary absence of technology needed for partisan division, it is due to the long and overlapping partisan realignments spurred by (mainly) the New Deal Coalition and parties settling out their positions on civil rights. These things meant that on the politically salient ideological issues, the divide between the parties was not aligned with the major cleavages; “liberal Republicans” were farther left on the key ideological issues of the day than “conservative Democrats”, and the opposing ideological factions were present in both parties.
Right but what _caused_ this political realignment? I mean sure, you can say that the ideologies were extant and during the Civil Rights Movement (and that this divide itself traces itself back to the Reconstruction period and before that into the founding of the US itself) the New Deal Coalition began unraveling and formed the seeds of today's divide, but I submit a large part of what exacerbated that divide was technology. FDR was a popular president and helped cement the New Deal coalition largely because of his use of radio. Likewise Goldwater and early televangelists received a lot of their support from the rise of TV. Social media is just the continuation of this ongoing technological trend.
There's a difference of kind to mass broadcast on a platform one incidentally scrolls (and thus receives incidental exposure from) versus, say, chain emails. The latter have a lot lower impact and require way more activation energy to push onward than a one-click Share.
But as Haugen points out in her 60 Minutes interview, they don't _have_ to optimize for engagement above all else. They have tools to drive down divisiveness and disinformation. They just choose to leave them turned off most of the time.
What if the unified POV is not the one she wants, would she still support it?
People seemed pretty upset that FB was used to unify a majority for Trump, I mean that’s when all the complaints really started.
Optimizing for engagement inevitably leads to toxic and unhealthy ecosystem sooner or later.
Issues with facebook and the right wing becoming more extreme long before Trump became mainstream ( perhaps it was always there). There was lot of concern noise during the early Tea Party movement in 2010s. There was a lot of toxic content when Obama became president.
Facebook started as tool to rate looks of female students in Harvard , I don't think there was ever a time when Facebook was not toxic.
It seems that there is a subset of the populace whose opinions you disagree with and want FB to stop serving those users. If female users didn't want to be rated, why would they post photos and encourage people to 'like' them? It seems FB/IG has found a set of users who want to rate photos and a set of users who want to upload photos to be rated. How is this 'toxic'?
It is toxic when said users are teenagers and pre-teens, that is the whole point of all the Instagram / Facebook public discourse recently .
At that age as a society we have decided they cannot take certain decisions on their own, which is why Sex, Alcohol, Marriage , Content with Rating PG/R, admission to certain venues, etc are all regulated.
Why should Social Media be different ?
The equivalent here is not that a company produces cars, and that cars are dangerous. The equivalence is more in the line of a specific car manufacturer makes a car which they know is more dangerous to a subset of their customers, but still continue to push it to them.
But let's be clear, Nissan is making a car that is as safe as they can make it for consumers at a certain price point. Safer than riding a small motorbike. Safer than crossing a road. Or many other alternatives. They're enabling and empowering consumers that can't afford better cars to have some measure of mobility and safety.
Facebook, on the other hand, designs features to manipulate emotions and harm consumers. Make them feel bad, stay engaged, worry more, buy more. They ran the numbers. As long as the increase in suicide count is under a certain threshold, it's not a big deal for them.
There's a big fucking difference between the two.
This value that they are providing should not necessitate the wholesale pillaging of user data. My data is worth way more to me than a simple weblog service. These thieves are trading trinkets for land and the natives just don't realize how valuable their land actually is. (hint - it is worth way more than FB charges their advertisers)
The problem is not that Facebook exists; it’s that they wrested control from their users and assigned it to themselves and their advertisers.
So, if this is the rule, then there's no reason for FB employee to quit as they'll never find another job.
I agree that Facebook is a plague, but this divisive, realpolitik, tough-guy power-play nastiness really nauseates me.
The chances of it working are near zero because there’s always some asshole capitalist like myself to f it up.
I actually agree with that, and not because of any personal agenda against FB, but because I don’t want the corrupted, unethical mindset of FB to permeate my organization. I just cannot trust ex-FB employees to make ethical decisions.
Maybe make a bot that goes to Facebook and click on all ads costing them money?
I quit Facebook 6 years ago, and Twitter a few months ago, didn't have any other "social media" websites. Not missing a thing. Nobody cared. Still talk to all the same people. So there's that little nugget of knowledge if you're reading this and wondering if it was hard to quit.
"Social media" never: Got me a job Got me a raise Made me a friend Helped me find X Helped me Changed my mind Made me happy