Quit using it. Let's go back to the way the internet used to be, y'know with instant messaging and a multitude of cultures that have their own ecosystems. Let's stop consolidating all of this information and wealth in the hands of people who don't give a shit about what makes us different (unless it sells an ad).
This is very unhelpful advice, as we are talking about a massively influential platform and the advice is ‘dont let it influence you.’
Our society has more dependencies than node.js, and the incentives in facebook’s world are skewed toward big payoffs for bad actors who will benefit at the expense of all others.
I’d classify this comment as fitting a very common paradigm called ‘If I were the god this would be my simple solution, so let us dispense with further discussion of the matter.’
I quite honestly believe that Facebook contributed to -- or was responsible for -- the ever growing rate of depression. This type of behavior has led numerous people to participate in degenerate activities instead of contributing something to society. Social media may have started well but now it has morphed into becoming the cesspool of the internet.
Go back to what, the AIM and Myspace domination? Before Facebook it was Myspace that was the juggernaut of the social media sphere.
As the number of people that can freely access the internet grows, you see them focusing around a single social media platform. That's because social media strongly benefits from centralization, it's easier to talk to family and friends if you don't have to manage fifty different accounts.
The idea that there was a 'multitude of cultures' before Facebook is just wrong. There was the main social media platforms and a bunch of niche offshoots. That's why this is such a tricky problem to fix because even if Facebook vanished tomorrow, eventually there would be another platform which absolutely everyone would circle around.
> we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly. Since the Reagan era, antitrust law has operated under the principle that monopoly is not a problem so long as it doesn’t result in higher prices for consumers. Under that framework, Facebook and Google have been allowed to dominate several industries—not just search and social media but also email, video, photos, and digital ad sales, among others—increasing their monopolies by buying potential rivals like YouTube and Instagram. While superficially appealing, this approach ignores costs that don’t show up in a price tag. Addiction to Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms has a cost. Election manipulation has a cost. Reduced innovation and shrinkage of the entrepreneurial economy has a cost. All of these costs are evident today. We can quantify them well enough to appreciate that the costs to consumers of concentration on the internet are unacceptably high.
With the current deck of politicians, it is highly unlikely that anything will be done to address this
Hyper-restrictive copyright and network access laws (coupled with aggressive interpretations a la the RAM Copy Doctrine) are the key overlooked components that have allowed the net to devolve into a giant AOL-Keyword-ized walled garden.
Fix these laws (which doesn't necessarily mean abandoning their core concepts) and the floodgates will open with fresh competition. This is never discussed because these legal mechanisms undergird a massive part of the tech and media industries. It is better to fix the anti-competitive mechanisms at the source than to use the anti-trust kludge to break down people who have simply exploited them too well.
> When citizens of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, most observers were stunned. The polls had predicted a victory for the “Remain” campaign. And common sense made it hard to believe that Britons would do something so obviously contrary to their self-interest.
Y'know, I suspect that Leave voters thought leaving was in their self-interest — or at the very least that voting 'Leave' send a message which was in their self-interest.
What I find perhaps most interesting here is how the narrative about political campaigns has changed in four and eight years. When Mr. Obama won twice, his campaign's adroit use of the Internet was praised by the media; when President Trump (for whom I did not vote) won, his campaign's — and other actors' — use of the Internet has been reviled by the media.
I think all of this is just due to psychic aftershocks from the 2016 election: folks just can't believe that their candidate lost, that they live in a country which rejected her. The sad fact of the matter is that Mrs. Clinton was easily the worst candidate that the Democrats have put forward in a generation — she makes Mondale, Dukakis & Kerry look charismatic! Pretty much any Democrat in the country could have won the election — heck, Tim Kaine (the Democratic vice-presidential candidate) would almost certainly have won handily.
My own theory is that outside meddling in the U.S. election was intended to weaken Mrs. Clinton's administration. I don't think anyone expected Mr. Trump to win.
> It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.
You know, there were an awful lot of folks who felt pretty similarly in 2012. I don't think many of them tried to undermine the freedoms of association & speech, although perhaps some did.
Most people felt positive about the impact of Internet advertising on political campaigning when the themes of the message were hope and change. It has become clear that those themes are easily trumped by messages of fear and divisiveness. I think it's a fair question, now that we've seen where we're likely headed, to question anew whether we need to adjust course.
> The sad fact of the matter is that Mrs. Clinton was easily the worst candidate that the Democrats have put forward in a generation — she makes Mondale, Dukakis & Kerry look charismatic!
I saw this sentiment floating around Reddit a lot amongst disenfranchised Democrats supporters. It sounds exactly like the type of meme the article is discussing. Does being charismatic actually matter? It makes sense to make this a talking point if the candidate you want to win has no political experience but is a great showman.
> Pretty much any Democrat in the country could have won the election
Trump didn't just beat Clinton – he beat a whole bunch of pretty decent Republican candidates. He beat them by saying and doing things that hadn't been done before, appealing to the worst elements and instincts of Americans, and relying, in the last few months, on the Republican establishment to acquiesce to a man they would not have near their daughters.
Trump's victory is not Clinton's fault. It's America's.
"Y'know, I suspect that Leave voters thought leaving was in their self-interest — or at the very least that voting 'Leave' send a message which was in their self-interest."
The trope about rubes voting against their interests is easily my least favorite of this political season.
1. First of all, when a group of people consistently vote in a way that surprises you, perhaps it's time to update your understanding of the world, instead of assuming -- over and over -- that theirs is broken. At the very least, one might admit that they don't actually know much about those interests.
2. An inability to understand why somebody might vote against their most immediate economic interests isn't something to be proud of. There is an enormous gap here and it's increasingly a gap in a belief in the transcendent. Yes, for a lot of rural American voters the transcendent is god, but it's more than just that. Are there or are there not ideals worth dying for? It shouldn't be so surprising to the left that some people actually behave as though there are.
I quit Facebook around Christmas time. Felt weird at first, but overall it's been a position experience. The Chrome blocker plugin I use to enforce my quitting keeps a count of how many times I've attempted to visit it. I'm in the 40s now. If I spent 2 minutes per visit, then I've saved 80 so far!
I blocked reddit. I can still use it via incognito mode if it contains useful information while doing Google search result. What I've learned is that, I wasn't really addicted to reddit as much as my bored fingers were. I don't miss it.
I also blocked cnn.com, and couple other sites that I habitually go to. I may even add HN to the list. Sure there are some gems to be found here, but I find myself coming here more to read comments and headlines. It has essentially turned into reddit for me.
This quote sums up, for the most part, how the system is gamed; "People tend to react more to inputs that land low on the brainstem". Maybe parents and schools should teach kids more about how not to respond in such a fashion.
I get the impression that well meaning teachers, parents, guardians, friends, strangers, and everyone else HAS been trying very hard for a very long time. Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, you think they were trying their darndest?
The problem is that even if we give ourselves well meaning instructions that will benefit ourselves in the medium to long term, invariably we will come to betray ourselves.
Personally I think it stems from a censor-breaker strategy that emerges from the complexity of the limited hardware we have that needs to quickly solve real world problems.
Facebook's monopoly is a problem because, increasingly, Facebook's dopamine-driven tools replaces traditional civic society. They're easier. They're superficially more pleasing. They're often addictive. And any company in control of the sphere in which people congregate and interact then controls /how/ we congregate and interact. And if you control how we congregate and interact then you control how we exert control on those who we chose to rule us. As soon as you change that quality, quantity and ability you change the whole basis of society. And therefore how that society presses its current rulers and chooses its future rulers. And this is happening and has happened. And it may not be for the best.
I wish TFA had opposed Facebook for the right reasons and in the right way. It really is a massive waste of our collective thought and attention, but apparently that's only bad because then we voted for the guy that the TV talked about all the time. (You know another era in which we voted exactly as TV told us to vote? Before the internet existed! Oh Facebook you have ruined us!) Also apparently the answer is to expand FCC's role until it defends Facebook against all competition in precisely the manner in which it has long defended Bell Telephone against all competition. Democracy in action!
(And Google? Does TFA actually contain an argument against Google, or did he just mention it a bunch of times? Oh right, they stopped funding a think tank. To a Washingtonian that would probably constitute a high crime. Out here in flyover country, that doesn't even rate a "meh".)
If the author really wanted to help, rather than insert himself and his cronies into the regulatory state, he'd be getting Sanders and Warren on a reality show with Snoop Dogg and Mama June, right away. Or he could act like what he claims to be, a "technology investor", and start funding the innovations that will eat the heart out of an increasingly old and ungainly Facebook. It's interesting that he made such a big deal about his visionary investment in Facebook without bothering to tell us if he is still invested. (Which, obviously, he is, which is why he wrote TFA about this wonderful "movement" which coincidentally totally aligns with Facebook's interests.)
I'd agree, it was obvious what FB and Zuckerberg were from the beginning. But we all see what we want to and what we allow ourselves to see, so it's commendable that they are seeing it now and speaking against it.
> All software platforms should be required to offer a legitimate opt-out, one that enables users to stick with the prior version if they do not like the new EULA. “Forking” platforms between old and new versions would have several benefits: increased consumer choice, greater transparency on the EULA, and more care in the rollout of new functionality, among others
Interesting. Although if this applied to all software platforms, I suspect startups are going to be hit a lot harder than the big co's. Maintaining this level of "forking" seems like a nontrivial engineering task.
> Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly
Feels unclear how this would help. It feels difficult to craft anti-trust laws that big co's can't reason their way out of. But IANAL, so please correct me if I'm wrong here.
hmm.
if one grasps the basic idea behind this (recently top-HN-ed) weird-machines+exploitability stuff:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx7/6245516/6558478/08226852.pd...
and extrapolates "weirdness" further from hardware/OS/application into a social-network-as-system... there might be many ways to hack it to do something useful for someone. How about Machiavelly-as-a-service, anyone?
Pretty long article that I doubt most will read in its entirety, if at all.
It was, however, a good read about social engineering, and I've summarized the points made and the solutions proposed below:
>Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy.
>The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.
>Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts.
>The Russians appear to have invested heavily in weakening the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary by promoting emotionally charged content to supporters of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, as well as to likely Clinton supporters who might be discouraged from voting.
>We also have evidence now that Russia used its social media tactics to manipulate the Brexit vote.
>A team of researchers reported in November, for instance, that more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted pro-Leave messages in the run-up to the referendum.
>[B]ad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.
>Facebook and Google responded by reiterating their opposition to government regulation, insisting that it would kill innovation and hurt the country’s global competitiveness, and that self-regulation would produce better results.
>Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies.
Solutions proposed:
1) [I]t’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans
2) [T]he platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.
3) [T]he platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.
4) [T]he platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms.
5) [T]he platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users.
6) [W]e need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms.
7) [C]onsumers, not the platforms, should own their own data.
8) [F]inally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly.
I suspect people worried about these issues are a bit more likely to make time & muster attention to read the articles on the topic.
This article was at the very end of my one-sitting article-reading endurance, but it had enough of a flow for me to finish with only a bit of skimming near the end.
This year is election year in Sweden and we know the Russians spread disinformation during the Finnish election through social media. They’ve had plenty of practice for taking on our small country.
Denmark, Norway and Finland have a populist, far right party in their respective government coalition, Sweden and Iceland are the only Nordic countries that have resisted. I fear this will stop being the case. The Sweden Democrats are already polling highly and something bad, anything, wether it’s a recession after this long bull market or a politically charged murder could quickly be blamed on immigration and spread like wildfire on social media by people who love simple answers to complicated questions.
Aren't you overestimating facebook influence and underestimating the real life?
If "evil Russia" is spreading misinformation isn't it a great opportunity for traditional media to expose and correct the misinformation?
Censorship will mate the matter only worse.
It is obvious for reading just a few lines of this article that the author is extremely biased in support of Clinton and Democrats and he only cares about media manipulation when he loses. If media manipulation in his side it doesn't matter.
I am not American and from my point of view Democrats totally own media attention in the US. They own the artists and famous people space, they own most important TVs and newspapers and so on.
In fact Trump won because of their support, as they only talked about him in preelection time, as they believed Trump was way weaker than other Republican candidates.
Now this man is socked not because Facebook is a manipulation media, like TV or Newspapers, but because other entities could control it as well as they can.
For this man it was obvious that Hillary was going to win (because they control most media) so it was a big surprise that people could actually vote on their own in a democracy system.
The day they lost the election he wants to talk with Zuckerberg to "make them aware of the problems" of facebook not being a totally biased platform like the New York times or Washington Post is.
Again as a non American I don't want to be manipulated by either side. I don't want to be forced to go to a WWIII just because some people can't deal with losing a democratic election or because some guy impulsive action.
So it looks to me that the best solution is to design alternatives to facebook that are not as centralized and to start using them even if they are not as good.
If you'd read the article, you would know that it is not about election meddling, but about the susceptibility of social media to social engineering, because of specific underlying technology (filter bubbles) and current policy (outdated).
You making this out to be about Democrats vs Republicans is a pretty cheap move, and detracts from those real (hopefully non-partisan) issues.
I created an account once, in "incognito" mode, but I only sent one message and never posted anything... It turned out that someone who couldn't be emailed or telephoned because he "was only on Facebook" also didn't respond on Facebook. Shocking!
I agree the article is incredibly long (him establishing his credentials is almost an article onto itself), but I assure you that the article is not just about him. :-)
One of the other commenters gave a succinct bulleted overview. I recommend you check it out, if you're interested in what the article was actually about.
[+] [-] tzakrajs|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] banku_brougham|8 years ago|reply
Our society has more dependencies than node.js, and the incentives in facebook’s world are skewed toward big payoffs for bad actors who will benefit at the expense of all others.
I’d classify this comment as fitting a very common paradigm called ‘If I were the god this would be my simple solution, so let us dispense with further discussion of the matter.’
[+] [-] wildflowero|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fzeroracer|8 years ago|reply
As the number of people that can freely access the internet grows, you see them focusing around a single social media platform. That's because social media strongly benefits from centralization, it's easier to talk to family and friends if you don't have to manage fifty different accounts.
The idea that there was a 'multitude of cultures' before Facebook is just wrong. There was the main social media platforms and a bunch of niche offshoots. That's why this is such a tricky problem to fix because even if Facebook vanished tomorrow, eventually there would be another platform which absolutely everyone would circle around.
[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|8 years ago|reply
With the current deck of politicians, it is highly unlikely that anything will be done to address this
[+] [-] cookiecaper|8 years ago|reply
Fix these laws (which doesn't necessarily mean abandoning their core concepts) and the floodgates will open with fresh competition. This is never discussed because these legal mechanisms undergird a massive part of the tech and media industries. It is better to fix the anti-competitive mechanisms at the source than to use the anti-trust kludge to break down people who have simply exploited them too well.
[+] [-] grinsekatze|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eadmund|8 years ago|reply
Y'know, I suspect that Leave voters thought leaving was in their self-interest — or at the very least that voting 'Leave' send a message which was in their self-interest.
What I find perhaps most interesting here is how the narrative about political campaigns has changed in four and eight years. When Mr. Obama won twice, his campaign's adroit use of the Internet was praised by the media; when President Trump (for whom I did not vote) won, his campaign's — and other actors' — use of the Internet has been reviled by the media.
I think all of this is just due to psychic aftershocks from the 2016 election: folks just can't believe that their candidate lost, that they live in a country which rejected her. The sad fact of the matter is that Mrs. Clinton was easily the worst candidate that the Democrats have put forward in a generation — she makes Mondale, Dukakis & Kerry look charismatic! Pretty much any Democrat in the country could have won the election — heck, Tim Kaine (the Democratic vice-presidential candidate) would almost certainly have won handily.
My own theory is that outside meddling in the U.S. election was intended to weaken Mrs. Clinton's administration. I don't think anyone expected Mr. Trump to win.
> It reads like the plot of a sci-fi novel: a technology celebrated for bringing people together is exploited by a hostile power to drive people apart, undermine democracy, and create misery. This is precisely what happened in the United States during the 2016 election.
You know, there were an awful lot of folks who felt pretty similarly in 2012. I don't think many of them tried to undermine the freedoms of association & speech, although perhaps some did.
[+] [-] darkerside|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] underwater|8 years ago|reply
I saw this sentiment floating around Reddit a lot amongst disenfranchised Democrats supporters. It sounds exactly like the type of meme the article is discussing. Does being charismatic actually matter? It makes sense to make this a talking point if the candidate you want to win has no political experience but is a great showman.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] muglug|8 years ago|reply
Trump didn't just beat Clinton – he beat a whole bunch of pretty decent Republican candidates. He beat them by saying and doing things that hadn't been done before, appealing to the worst elements and instincts of Americans, and relying, in the last few months, on the Republican establishment to acquiesce to a man they would not have near their daughters.
Trump's victory is not Clinton's fault. It's America's.
[+] [-] foobarbecue|8 years ago|reply
I've never understood this line; she always seemed charismatic to me.
I'm curious -- can you name a female politician you consider charismatic?
[+] [-] dionidium|8 years ago|reply
The trope about rubes voting against their interests is easily my least favorite of this political season.
1. First of all, when a group of people consistently vote in a way that surprises you, perhaps it's time to update your understanding of the world, instead of assuming -- over and over -- that theirs is broken. At the very least, one might admit that they don't actually know much about those interests.
2. An inability to understand why somebody might vote against their most immediate economic interests isn't something to be proud of. There is an enormous gap here and it's increasingly a gap in a belief in the transcendent. Yes, for a lot of rural American voters the transcendent is god, but it's more than just that. Are there or are there not ideals worth dying for? It shouldn't be so surprising to the left that some people actually behave as though there are.
[+] [-] fortylove|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|8 years ago|reply
I also blocked cnn.com, and couple other sites that I habitually go to. I may even add HN to the list. Sure there are some gems to be found here, but I find myself coming here more to read comments and headlines. It has essentially turned into reddit for me.
[+] [-] jf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tankenmate|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kleer001|8 years ago|reply
The problem is that even if we give ourselves well meaning instructions that will benefit ourselves in the medium to long term, invariably we will come to betray ourselves.
Personally I think it stems from a censor-breaker strategy that emerges from the complexity of the limited hardware we have that needs to quickly solve real world problems.
[+] [-] mlinksva|8 years ago|reply
> This allowed the platforms to centralize the internet, inserting themselves between users and content, effectively imposing a tax on both sides.
Sadly this does not contain the obvious fix: tax ads.
[+] [-] tarkin2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|8 years ago|reply
(And Google? Does TFA actually contain an argument against Google, or did he just mention it a bunch of times? Oh right, they stopped funding a think tank. To a Washingtonian that would probably constitute a high crime. Out here in flyover country, that doesn't even rate a "meh".)
If the author really wanted to help, rather than insert himself and his cronies into the regulatory state, he'd be getting Sanders and Warren on a reality show with Snoop Dogg and Mama June, right away. Or he could act like what he claims to be, a "technology investor", and start funding the innovations that will eat the heart out of an increasingly old and ungainly Facebook. It's interesting that he made such a big deal about his visionary investment in Facebook without bothering to tell us if he is still invested. (Which, obviously, he is, which is why he wrote TFA about this wonderful "movement" which coincidentally totally aligns with Facebook's interests.)
[+] [-] marenkay|8 years ago|reply
I am wondering how someone seemingly oblivious to what Facebook is can be a successful investor.
[+] [-] aaron-lebo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misterbowfinger|8 years ago|reply
Interesting. Although if this applied to all software platforms, I suspect startups are going to be hit a lot harder than the big co's. Maintaining this level of "forking" seems like a nontrivial engineering task.
> Eighth, and finally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly
Feels unclear how this would help. It feels difficult to craft anti-trust laws that big co's can't reason their way out of. But IANAL, so please correct me if I'm wrong here.
[+] [-] svilen_dobrev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] log_base_login|8 years ago|reply
It was, however, a good read about social engineering, and I've summarized the points made and the solutions proposed below:
>Fear and anger produce a lot more engagement and sharing than joy.
>The result is that the algorithms favor sensational content over substance.
>Continuous reinforcement of existing beliefs tends to entrench those beliefs more deeply, while also making them more extreme and resistant to contrary facts.
>The Russians appear to have invested heavily in weakening the candidacy of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary by promoting emotionally charged content to supporters of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, as well as to likely Clinton supporters who might be discouraged from voting.
>We also have evidence now that Russia used its social media tactics to manipulate the Brexit vote.
>A team of researchers reported in November, for instance, that more than 150,000 Russian-language Twitter accounts posted pro-Leave messages in the run-up to the referendum.
>[B]ad actors plant a rumor on sites like 4chan and Reddit, leverage the disenchanted people on those sites to create buzz, build phony news sites with “press” versions of the rumor, push the story onto Twitter to attract the real media, then blow up the story for the masses on Facebook.
>Facebook and Google responded by reiterating their opposition to government regulation, insisting that it would kill innovation and hurt the country’s global competitiveness, and that self-regulation would produce better results.
>Polls suggest that about a third of Americans believe that Russian interference is fake news, despite unanimous agreement to the contrary by the country’s intelligence agencies.
Solutions proposed:
1) [I]t’s essential to ban digital bots that impersonate humans
2) [T]he platforms should not be allowed to make any acquisitions until they have addressed the damage caused to date, taken steps to prevent harm in the future, and demonstrated that such acquisitions will not result in diminished competition.
3) [T]he platforms must be transparent about who is behind political and issues-based communication.
4) [T]he platforms must be more transparent about their algorithms.
5) [T]he platforms should be required to have a more equitable contractual relationship with users.
6) [W]e need a limit on the commercial exploitation of consumer data by internet platforms.
7) [C]onsumers, not the platforms, should own their own data.
8) [F]inally, we should consider that the time has come to revive the country’s traditional approach to monopoly.
[+] [-] thisacctforreal|8 years ago|reply
This article was at the very end of my one-sitting article-reading endurance, but it had enough of a flow for me to finish with only a bit of skimming near the end.
Thank you for preparing a great summary :)
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pimmen|8 years ago|reply
Denmark, Norway and Finland have a populist, far right party in their respective government coalition, Sweden and Iceland are the only Nordic countries that have resisted. I fear this will stop being the case. The Sweden Democrats are already polling highly and something bad, anything, wether it’s a recession after this long bull market or a politically charged murder could quickly be blamed on immigration and spread like wildfire on social media by people who love simple answers to complicated questions.
[+] [-] qbaqbaqba|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chronic193|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pipio21|8 years ago|reply
I am not American and from my point of view Democrats totally own media attention in the US. They own the artists and famous people space, they own most important TVs and newspapers and so on.
In fact Trump won because of their support, as they only talked about him in preelection time, as they believed Trump was way weaker than other Republican candidates.
Now this man is socked not because Facebook is a manipulation media, like TV or Newspapers, but because other entities could control it as well as they can.
For this man it was obvious that Hillary was going to win (because they control most media) so it was a big surprise that people could actually vote on their own in a democracy system.
The day they lost the election he wants to talk with Zuckerberg to "make them aware of the problems" of facebook not being a totally biased platform like the New York times or Washington Post is.
Again as a non American I don't want to be manipulated by either side. I don't want to be forced to go to a WWIII just because some people can't deal with losing a democratic election or because some guy impulsive action.
So it looks to me that the best solution is to design alternatives to facebook that are not as centralized and to start using them even if they are not as good.
[+] [-] jessaustin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simsla|8 years ago|reply
You making this out to be about Democrats vs Republicans is a pretty cheap move, and detracts from those real (hopefully non-partisan) issues.
[+] [-] spiraldancing|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessaustin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noncoml|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teaneedz|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simsla|8 years ago|reply
One of the other commenters gave a succinct bulleted overview. I recommend you check it out, if you're interested in what the article was actually about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16092602
[+] [-] junkscience2017|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]