Facebook will not fix itself
time.com
time.com
>Twitter and Interoperability: Some Thoughts From the Peanut Gallery
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/twitter-and-interopera...
When Obama's campaign used the internet in 2008 it was hailed as revolutionary. "A new age for democracy" yadda yadda yadda.
Facebook is our scapegoat. Because so many conversations are happening on there, we are blaming it for the contention that exists in the world.
The Obama campaign was mostly a bunch of vapid “change you can believe in” sloganeering and posters in that now iconic Obama style. I guess you could say Obama made a lot of campaign promises that were not kept, but that can be said of all of them. The ground breaking thing in 2008 was using the Internet as a major channel at all.
What happened in the lead up to Trump was much crazier.
Of course it wasn’t just all Trump. I recall seeing social media become dramatically more toxic around 2012. I’m not sure why. This was years before the Trump campaign. Maybe they just used a trend already firmly in place.
The arguments have gone from inspiring, generic, and slogan-esque to cynical, underhanded, and accusatory. Birtherism was definitely a thing in 2008. In 2004 America had the swiftboating crap.
Yea, the internet probably bolsters the spread of crap like that, but it's nothing new.
It's not so much that I don't see the change occurring in front of us. I just think people have incorrectly identified the cause of that change.
They think they are upset because Facebook has so much power over what people see and read and engage with. In reality they are upset that people are reading and engaging with wrongthink. It's a kind of self delusion because they (we?) cannot admit that we are opposed to free speech.
Supposing that Obama did use the internet like today--spreading suspicion and pessimism, calls to imprison his opponents: do you think the same people hailing Facebook as democracy's kryptonite would say that? I don't think so. I think they would praise the platform for 'illuminating Bush's war crimes' and 'giving a voice to the silent'.
No, I cant get inside people's heads and prove it... But after seeing these arguments for 5 years I am pretty sure it's true.
Instead, we as a society have to enact new boundaries around what we consider acceptable behavior from these algorithmic entities (recommender systems, social media etc).
FTFY.