Comment by ta20211004_1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ta20211004_1 | Hacker News Reader

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> And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting in extremist candidates.

The Rohingya genocide? While I agree that Facebook does not do enough to moderate content in non English communities, what percentage of the blame do you think Facebook actually deserves here? Recall this genocide was funded and executed by the military of a sovereign state.

It's _forcing_ increased polarization in politics? Be fair. We all have a choice whether or not to engage with content on Facebook, and whether we accept what we see there as truth. Facebook is available in every democracy in the world. In my home country of Canada, we just had a safe and fair election between a reasonable number of moderate parties. We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.

You're using the term "facilitated" constantly in this post because really all Facebook has done in these cases was serve as a communication medium for blameworthy people with bad ideas. You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things_.

Do you think anything you pointed out here would be difficult to do given any other existing communication medium?

> It's _forcing_ increased polarization in politics? Be fair. We all have a choice whether or not to engage with content on Facebook

Yes, forcing, and respectfully, no, we do not have that choice, because Facebook decides what you see, not you. And that is the fundamental issue.

If I'm a conspiracy theorist and I constantly seek out content that validates my beliefs, that's a me problem.

If I'm just an inquisitive person that thinks not everything is what it seems and a platform starts feeding and amplifying conspiracy content because it thinks that's what I want and I become radicalized, that's a platform problem.

> You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things

On the contrary - the people who actually did the things should be at the very center of this story, because at issue is essentially the hacking of human behavior.

To be clear, I don't believe Facebook is solely to blame here. What we're seeing is an amplification of human behavior and tribalism that predates the existence of social media. What makes the current climate interesting and problematic is that such tendencies are being exploited and encouraged by algorithms, and the platforms are no longer neutral to the problem.

> We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.

And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.

> To be clear, I don't believe Facebook is solely to blame here. What we're seeing is an amplification of human behavior and tribalism that predates the existence of social media. What makes the current climate interesting and problematic is that such tendencies are being exploited and encouraged by algorithms, and the platforms are no longer neutral to the problem.

That seems pretty reasonable. I am sure the Facebook recommendation algorithms can be improved. I would be in favour of more transparency here. Without transparency we simply can't know to what extent Facebook is trying to improve things, or if they even are.

To be clear, I do think recommendation algorithms are useful in content aggregator sites (which Facebook basically is). I just think we'd be better off if we could see what they're doing.

> And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.

I don't thing this argument is falsifiable. It's totally possible. But I think we'd expect to see this in many countries where Facebook is available if it was a single cause of these kinds of outcomes. And so far that is just not happening.

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