What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users | Hacker News Reader

What Facebook knew about how it radicalized users

nbcnews.com

23 pointscoloneltcb19 comments

Why all the attention on Facebook? How many people has Twitter radicalized? We had a year of riots with 10s dead and billions in damage, the actual taliban and hamas are active on Twitter, and any content you find on Facebook is just as readily available on Twitter.

I’m not defending Facebook here, it’s just as toxic as the rest. But that’s exactly the point: they’re ALL toxic, why the disproportionate focus on Facebook?

Media companies who make their revenue on advertisements have a business interest to attack their biggest competitor. Fair criticism or not, the continued push against Facebook just feels like desperate hope for news outlets to gain some ground against tech giants.

I remember reading articles about how Facebook "tricked" a news outlets to leverage Facebook's news feed in an attempt to keep them relevant by giving them exposure to their user base, but it backfired on them. Here's a couple of article on it I found.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/03/facebooks-siren-call/

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/facebook-media-buzzfeed.p...

Facebook has many more users. Twitter's tweet limit also makes content less likely to be long form, and possibly less effective to persuade.

Those are my guesses anyway.

FB recommends and suggests content much like youtube except much more social. Twitter is closer to reddit than FB.

Reddit is worse than facebook. Their voting system concentrates extremism and portrays that extremism as mainstream. For all of FB's stupid "engagement optomization" BS as least there exist fewer feedback loops to mint new extremists on it.

Reddit, like HN, have “deniability” though. It’s the users that are doing it, the users control the front page, not some fancy engagement algorithm.

This is my hunch, but is it fair to say that it is because Twitter (left) and FB (center)? Everything that's left cannot be touched. You'll get burned by the mob.

Another observation: No criticism of Tiktok on HN.

Twitter is by no means left.

It's where Trump used to hang out, it's where the entire right wing griftosphere (Shapiro, Trump Jr, JonTron, Czernovich et al) still hang out.

The only mob I've ever experienced is right wingers storming the capitol while decrying cancel culture.

A miniscule portion of the right wing supports storming the Capitol (which seems to be the clutch), and far more people on the left wing speak out against cancel culture (myself included).

Twitter immediately pulled Trump the moment he left office. It had no spine to do it earlier, which if the leadership had any consistency in their morals would have done a lot earlier.

Anyways, this is just my hunch and trying to observe some trends. It could be completely wrong.

Here's an article from today contradicting your initial claim pretty neatly: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/22/22740703/twitter-algorit...

I was thinking perhaps about the leadership (Jack vs. Zuck/Thiel). This is good clarification regardless.

Interesting. Jack strikes me more of a right wing libertarian type, where did you get the left wing impression from?

Jack is left liberatarian, Thiel is right liberatarian. I've studied Thiel quite a bit, haven't studied Jack as much. It's also possible that they are both left in pre-2015 era, but the left has moved further out today (likewise, the far right is unrecognizeable today). I consider them all intellectuals and interesting.

I'm not sure being left libertarian is compatible with being a CEO as left libertarianism calls for abolishing private ownership of the means of production... (maybe elected CEO of a coop might be compatible with those views? either way, nothing like what Twitter is doing)

Doesn’t mean we should ignore the problems at Facebook.

No, it means some problems are addressed while others aren't.

This was actually a pretty even handed article compared to others I've seen on this topic.

It's fascinating because it sheds light on internal work Facebook is doing; work that, if they were more transparent, might have actually helped their public image.

Personally, if we're going to look at regulating big tech, the first thing I'd like to see done is plain and simple transparency. Just give researchers and policy experts access to aggregate, anonymized data, as well as visibility into policy decisions so we can understand how these massively influential companies operate.

If they're truly working to do better, as Zuck claims, then I can't see why that would be a problem. And given their enormous power, we as individuals have the right to understand how they work.

"Within one week, Smith’s feed was full of groups and pages that had violated Facebook’s own rules, including those against hate speech and disinformation."

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