In an earlier era, people's opinions were shaped by a small number of newspapers and newscasts. Some of these old media were so biased and agenda driven that they caused wars.
Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
Democracy has always been fragile, barely functional, easily corrupted, warped by money. The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.
I have the same inclinations as you. I see there are various kinds of bias from different sources, and that you have to be able to think critically in order to maintain some sort of perspective. I also think that we need a bunch of different perspectives, so in that way it's good there's a lot of people talking.
But we also live in a world that is more educated than ever, and a lot of those people who went to school can't figure out why they should believe in the moon landings, or dinosaurs. How often you do come across a posting from a friend who thinks the virus isn't real? You sat in a room with people like this for over 10 years. Did you think they would someday be able to think for themselves? I had hoped for that.
I'm starting to think that education as the answer might just be a naive point of view, but I'm also not desirous of a world where we tell adults what they're supposed to think.
A lot has changed. If you didn't like a newspaper or a broadcast, you stopped seeing it. They built a reputation that they had to maintain somewhat. You knew most of the time who was behind each piece.
Now? You see content that a lot of people dislike because it generates controversy and engagement and attacks, lies get way more exposure than truths. A lot of publications come from unknown sources, with no reputation, so they can lie without consequences. You don't know who wrote something and the interests they might have.
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis.
What is more probable, that social media has completely changed the type of content that people see or that education has plummeted in a decade or two?
Education is not the solution: no single person can be educated enough to make informed decisions on all the topics they are exposed to in a single day. We don't even have the time to do that! We need to revert the changes that social media has created in our information diet, that's the solution. And we need to start by forcing social media companies to stop maximizing engagement over everything, show people only the content they explicitly subscribed to (no 'look at this comment someone made on this post of a page you don't follow'), and stop editorializing the priority of that content via algorithms to maximize engagement.
There is no such thing as news anymore. It is infotainment designed to shock, outrage and be sticky for the sole purpose of selling advertising. Additionally, the FTC and SEC have failed us in letting such enormous consolidation. Just look at something like Parler that got popular for a hot minute but will fade back to obscurity whence it came. We need to start taxing advertising revenue aggressively to make disinformation more costly.
A very interesting story about democracy and its evolution is in Estonia's history.
Estonia in the early 20th century had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. When it first won independence around 1920, it formed a parliamentary democracy based on a constitution. A little while later, one party took over, and a new constitution was written that was much more authoritarian. The same leadership a little while later than that wrote another new constitution that was halfway between the first and second constitutions in terms of mix of democracy and authoritarianism.
Then the Soviets invaded, and democracy vanished until the early 1990s. At that time they regained independence and created their present government.
This is a huge oversimplification, but the four separate constitutions and the evolution of the Estonian system is fascinating.
Facebook is also a public forum. Normal folks talk about things they care about, including politics, on social media. Normal folks did not peer-to-peer discuss the sinking of The Maine in the pages of The New York Journal. So there was never the issue of The New York Journal promoting, hiding, or editorializing that peer-to-peer speech.
Filter bubbles existed before, but they were nowhere near as narrow as they are today. Only fifteen years ago it was normal for most people to either watch or at least be aware of the same shows (including nightly news) as their neighbours, work colleagues, and school friends. That is no longer the case at all.
I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the ML recommenders that companies like Facebook are deploying, and the assumptions going into these algorithms, and the externalities they are creating. In my opinion they are playing a similar role in our social crises as the Gaussian copula played in the financial crisis.
Do you oppose health warnings on cigarettes? Food labels? Independent testing and verification of air and water? Safety testing for appliances and vehicles?
In your informed consumer advocacy, is there any room for shared responsibility?
What chance do individuals have against a corporate juggernaut's finely tuned outrage machine, exquisitely crafted to prey on human fallibility?
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Sure, we've always had propaganda.
What's new with social media, like with personal computers and smart phones, is the convergence.
Now all the social pathologies (targeted ads, dopamine hits, crowd out authentic speech) are bundled together and monetized, begetting a positive feedback loop.
But that all requires an informed populace. The problem with Facebook (and others, of course) is that it warps all financial incentives for the publishers, while sapping revenue away from them.
Now if you want any revenue at all, which is required for surviving, you need to have clickbaity headlines so you can get traffic to your page. And even that assumes that certain news can find an audience; local news especially tends to fail in that regard because it by definition appeals to a smaller group of people.
Except for the fact with journalism you know who's responsible for the bit they publish. And that the publisher can't hide behind the fact that they're 'not responsible for user generated content'.
In most countries media is regulated, you're not allowed to advertise everywhere or publish lies.
When Facebook says 'free speech' they actually mean 'free enterprise'.
That's not correct. There were staggering numbers of them. In 1900 there were 15 English language daily newspapers in New York City alone.
The problem with Facebook is monopolization. It's different when you have a ton of places that share information, and some of them are biased in one direction or another, versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.
I agree that education is one of the best ways to combat this problem. I don't necessarily agree it's the best one.
> Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
There's no reason why middle grounds don't exist. We can guarantee Free Speech without everyone having access to Instagram, FB, Twitter...
I bet most of the problems could be solved by making these platforms pay to use. Moderation loads would get reduced significantly. Excessive tracking would stop (because now ads are way harder to justify). Accounts would NEED to be somewhat verified by a payment, which makes it harder for trolls/manipulators/abusers of the platform to hide new accounts etc.
Honestly, americans who are thinking in all seriousness that "we can have democracy or we can have Facebook" are just deluding themselves.
I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".
Consider these countries as a control group for "facebook being bad for democracy" test.
Maybe US should take a hard look into a mirror and accept the fact that it is very polarized country, not very cohesive society, with very little common ground (if any at all) between different factions, and facebook just shows this fact.
> I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".
Yes it is. Polarization is increasing in a lot of countries, and there is heavy criticism. But while US news are exposed to the rest of the world, news from EU countries aren't as much. That's why you don't see "Facebook is damaging democracy" takes from EU countries. At least from what I see in Spain (I can't speak for other countries because I don't read french or german or dutch news) the debate on Facebook (and other social media platforms) effect on democracy is growing bigger each day, specially now with the COVID pandemic.
Russia, and many populist/extremist political campaigns, literally manipulate European elections by employing content farms to push out controversial content. Internet Research Agency, Cambridge Analytica, etc.
How do you think populist leaders gain such a large voice so quickly in those EU countries? You're kidding yourself, if you don't think the same tactics are being deployed in Europe, and amplified via platforms like Facebook.
What makes you say that Facebook isn't doing those things in other countries? It really is. It's so easy to get caught in a web of scary news that agree with something you were already thinking, and never letting go.
I have friends and family members who will blame random problems on completely unrelated things like "new walk-way in large city" or "beheading in france". Meanwhile they will vehemently deny or state that real issues are overblown.
Agreed, Facebook is just exploiting weaknesses that already exist in American minds. Those problems exist elsewhere, but have not advanced as far.
There will be a silver lining in the Facebook case though. We're going to see a lot of emails and depositions that end the "Mark Zuckerberg is a uniquely competent person who earned an empire through ability" myth. That's good enough for me.
It's sowing discord everywhere, because the design is the same everywhere, and humans have the same psychological vulnerabilities everywhere.
Maximum profit requires maximum engagement. This requires creating filter bubbles and prioritising emotional content. From there, the social fracturing is inevitable... only the topics differ from country to country.
Notice that in US, one side (Democrats, media conglomerates and their 'journalist' employees) are pushing for Facebook to censor, de-platform, or 'rank down' independent, conservative and progressive outlets. It is this group, author of the post included, that keeps calling Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (and even first amendment) divisive or undemocratic as a cynical, self-serving strategy to move the needle in their direction (for Democrats, it means more political power, for media conglomerates, it means less competition for eyeballs, and more revenue).
Meanwhile conservative and progressive outlets are calling for less Facebook censorship because they see themselves under constant attack, even when they report factually correct news.
The far right and far left have surged globally, the old center has collapsed. The far right has had more successful surges, to be clear.
Are you American by any chance? You may be committing the same mistake you complain of.
The neonazis have made great gains in Germany, Brexit happened. The far right northern league came to power as part of a coalition, with a leader who called for mass cleansing.
A Hindu nationalist party is in power in India, buoyed by whatsapp chain messages. In France, Macron came out of nowehere: he is a centrist but this still shows a collapse of the old structures. His biggest threat is a fascist.
Bolsonaro, a Trump admirer is in power in Brazil. The president of the phillipines, Duterte, boasts of summarily executing drug dealers. Authoritarians rule in Hungary and Poland.
> I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands
But it is? Antivaxxers are at an all time high here, the Pietendiscussie is inflamed on both sides primarily through social media. My plumber-neighbour is an excellent source for learning what the latest conspiracy theory is on his Facebook feed.
If you don't see it, you probably meet people from a narrow slice of society. I certainly see that these kinds of experiences are vastly different between my friends-circle, all former fellow university students, or my villages neighbours, a tiny place far from the urban centres of the Netherlands. My family is a bit in between, again correlating with age.
I absolutely think Facebook is making this country worse. It's the main method of how corona-disbelievers are keeping rates up by encouraging each other to ignore 'rules'.
Another angle here is the amount of people communicating and making a living thru facebook, particularly in third world countries (i am born in, and still living in).
The accessible value in tapping the network effects of FB as a communication platform is quite an okay amount of democracy.
But on the other hand I think the polarity in US (and large countries like RU and CH) is quite relative to the size of their countries.. is there any science to that lol
Yes, there are problems in the United States but I do believe Facebook is accelerating the polarization significantly. We have widespread belief in voter fraud based on no hard evidence. This was simply not even conceivable 4 years ago. Just because there's a fire burning already doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to those who pour gasoline on it.
I am from Brazil, and here Facebook is a problem too...
We even have our supreme court doing blatantly inconstitutional things because they are upset with Facebook (and Whatsapp).
Also during the Gamergate debacle, there was some high profile news about a "gamergater" that sent actual death threats to people (many people falsely claim to have received death threats), when police caught the guy, it was a Brazillian leftist troll, that thought it would be hilarious to watch whatever was going on in Facebook and try to outviralize viral posts by doing whatever would stoke more controversy (in this case, pretending to be right wing, sending death threats to left wingers, and watch the two sides fight).
But Facebook is affecting Germany, the Netherlands and here in Sweden where I live. Most of the voters for SD (Sverigedemokraterna) follow the same pattern as Trumpists in the US: regurgitating bullshit spread through Facebook (and to a lesser extent YouTube) which became a firehose of lies, impossible to keep up with to be disproven. People fall into that hole more often than I imagined and I'm glad that the education system here is decent enough to allow the majority of the population to see through this farce.
It still affects society, it still sows discord and I'm not sure how you are unaware of this if you are making such claims...
People have to always preface any criticism of it by saying “there is nothing at all wrong with capitalism, but...”
But no, the actual ECONOMIC SYSTEM and the incentives and constraints it exerts on institutions and organizations is responsible for what is happening. It selects for the current types of organizations and outcomes by its very nature.
You see, both our news and our social networks are driven by a profit motive and face market competition. Thus they are forced to adapt to changing circumstancss in certain ways:
Act 1. Journalism was disrupted by the Internet, and survived by adopting the FOX News model of locking in an audience and being biased, showing one part of the story.
MSNBC explicitly did it, while CNN jumped the shark after the Malaysian Airlines flight, realizing it can lock in audience. One sided clickbait outrage articles are the norm. There is some attempt to have journalistic integrity and policy focus at Vox and NowThis, but then you also have MotherJones, OccupyDemocrats, DailyKos and more on the left. You have all kinds of independent podcasts like TYT network, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, Majority Report, etc. And similarly for the conservatives, libertarians, etc.
We are divided also because giant corporations like Sinclair Television bought up all the local stations and outlets, resulting in this:
No really, watch it. It’s black mirror level, and you can see the capitalism at work here. Top down control by a small group of people, disseminating to everyone under the banner of “free speech”.
Act 2. Social networks are in a race to the bottom for advertising dollars.
So they adapt by desiging algorithms to maximize your “engagement” and attention on their platform.
Capitalism leads to a tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where in this case the commons is human attention. There is a reason that you salivate at notifications like Pavlov’s dogs. You’ve been conditioned to look at that screen light up during dinner. It’s NOT just about a slot machine dynamic. It’s that - if Facebook doesn’t get your attention every so often, then LinkedIn or Twitter would.
The solution is changing the economic model for news and social media.
Yes I said it. But let me use less triggering words than capitalism and socialism.
We need more projects built on collaboration instead of competition.
Wikipedia instead of Britannica
Workd Wide Web instead of America Online
Open Source Software instead of closed source commercial software
Cryptocurrency instead of banks
Creative Commons instead of Copyright
Prizes for Open Source Drugs instead of Patent System and IP
And so on. Not only would it make the system cheaper, it would make it far more effective and less divisive. People would be able to build on each other’s work, without threats.
This is already how peer reviewed science has worked, and for all its flaws it has produced tremendous progress. Scientists are careful not to overstate things. Titles are “boring” and descriptive rather than sensational.
Compare that to the “free speech” where money - and yes, audience size - determines which ideas get pushed in one direction. Clay Shirky spoke about this 15 years ago:
There would be a wiki-like site for news. People around the world would upload their own videos and raw media.
Then each news story would be edited and re-edited by mutually distrusting parties, checks and balances, similar to Wikipedia’s talk page.
The final result would be published only after a delay, when most parties have had a chance to challenge all the claims they needed, with well sourced claims of their own (each claim would have its own page).
That way, the world can make up its own mind by using the collaboration of the crowd, on issues like what’s happening in Saudi/Yemen, with China and Uyghurs or whether Assad gassed his own people after winning with conventional weapons. As well as on issues of religion, science, health policy, and so on.
We are building something like this as a reference implementation. The domain will be Rational.app
If you want to be involved you can email me at “greg” at the domain qbix.com. I am happy to welcome people on the project who know Javascript or PHP and who believe something like this is needed. This would be an open source project.
Very good point. There are a ton of legitimate criticisms of Facebook, but you can’t blame FB for American anti-intellectualism, rampant gullibility, and the failings of the two party system.
Americans have for decades been gullible fools who never read below headlines and fall for tabloid trash. This “post-reality” thing that is culminating with stuff like Qanon has also been cooking for decades, nurtured by trash TV, dumbed down religion, and new age word salad.
In the past only mass media had the privilege of being able to lead this mass of morons. Now that has been democratized, allowing DIY YouTube and Facebook personalities to take advantage of America’s rampant foolishness.
The solution has to start with an broad spectrum social movement to raise the quality of discourse in the culture, a kind of big tent anti-bullshit movement. We need to replace hard line partisan intolerance with intolerance for intellectual junk food. Liberals, conservatives, and anyone else should start promoting all content of any perspective so long as it is well written, well reasoned, and credible, and rejecting BS from their own side as well as others.
This person is confusing ranked newsfeeds with free speech. Ranked newsfeeds are the actual poison, because they are their own form of censorship and amplification for exploitative purposes.
It’s fine if someone says something horrible or false on the internet, it’s not fine if a ranked newsfeed amplifies that message to millions of people because it’s engaging.
This free speech or not argument is a complete straw man.
> The business model is to divert revenue that used to go to newspapers and publishers to themselves. And so by manipulating people in this specific way that they do, which is to keep them using their system and keep surveilling them so that they can target them with ads, they are, in the process, crushing newspapers and publishers, who no longer have any financing, particularly local newspapers and niche publications like Black-owned newspapers.
Is there any business this entitled? Imagine a bookstore owner describing amazon's business model as diverting revenue that used to go to bookstores, particularly black-owned backstores, to themselves. Somehow the revenue flows, like water, it used to flow to newspapers, and now it flows to facebook. I'm glad at least that the interview skips over bots, russians and algorithms and goes straight to the point, which is that people like matt make less money because everyone can share their views now, and people find their friends rants just as entertaining as matts.
1. That Facebook is maliciously and mostly singlehandedly responsible for the death of the newspaper and journalism.
Except newspaper readership has been on the decline since the 90's. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation... - the article frames Facebook's grand plan as taking money from newspapers, but Facebook's revenues in 2019 were nearly twice what the whole newspaper industry had as revenue in 2008. In that same window of time the ad industry grew 50%. Facebook makes money by making products that engage people and then presenting them with ads that are of interest to the individual in question. That makes them in the broader attention market but the framing of "Facebook versus newspapers" seems peculiar here.
2. That "monopolism" is rampant and anti-democratic.
Besides the fact that this is poorly defined in the article (perhaps as incentive to purchase his book?), it sure is an curious turn of phrase that there are "endless numbers of monopolists" in healthcare. Perhaps one could say there are millions of monopolists in music because each work is copyright? Over what does the author claim Facebook have true monopoly? On attention? On information dissemination?
3. The thread of conversation implies that breaking up Facebook will somehow help, for example, the decline of the newspaper industry. It's not clear how any of the author's goals will be accomplished by this and the OP alludes to this in "there's a lot more you need to do than just break them up". But what?
If the point of the article is to claim Facebook's present mode is a threat to democracy (claimed in title) they A: need to actually articulate this case and B: ought make an argument for how they'd propose to remedy the situation. Instead the former was done barely at all and the latter was omitted.
How can freedom of speech be the downfall of democracy? Surely Facebook and democracy can coexist if we get better at teaching people to think for themselves?
I don’t like the idea democracy can only survive if governments censor and remove platforms for spreading information (however false that may be).
So the premises to support the title are that Facebook 'steals' revenue from traditional news publishers and allows user generated content to proliferate, which can contain conspiracies.
I don't know that breaking up Facebook will actually fix these issues or 'save' democracy. Conspiracies will still spread on other sites (Reddit: The Frontpage of the Internet, anyone?). Ad revenue will continue to go to electronic platforms and use tracking (Google is huge in this space too).
I can see that Facebook has engaged in anticompetitive behavior, such as buying some competitive companies. I don't see them as a full monopoly. There are plenty of other sites (some of them large) that allow you to connect with others, share content, and create an online identity. Just look at LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, etc. There are other large ad services too, like Google.
A strong democracy requires an educated and diligent citizenry. We can break up Facebook, but that won't fix the root problems in our society. We could start by teaching basic logic in schools. And I'm sure this will be controversial, but I do think we should make a citizenship test part of school curriculums so that the citizens know their rights, the structure and function of our government, etc. Then we still need to hope that voters do their homework.
> The business model is to divert revenue that used to go to newspapers and publishers to themselves.
And there you have it. Anything that threatens the position of media companies is always portrayed as an attack against Democracy.
If choosing democracy means shutting down the free flow of information between individuals on social media sites like Facebook, then my vote is for Facebook.
America is and has always been predicated on the idea that the ordinary person has the capacity to make decisions that guide the republic, either as elector or elected. This idea is the basis of all democracies, generally.
Whenever I read that people “aren’t educated” enough or are “unduly influenced” by media, e.g., newspapers, television, or social media, I like to remind myself of this.
I notice that there is, and maybe always has been, a vocal group of people who believe that we should only elect and appoint experts, highly-trained specialists in their area of government. Heinlein reminds us that “specialization is for insects”.
I’ve come to know many politicians in the past few years, some of them nationally prominent. And I can say without hesitation that the average person is as qualified to make decisions about governance as the average professional politician.
Crowds can be pretty smart. Not faultless, but smart. That idea has been fashionable for a few years now but it’s definitely not new. Its implementation has changed from democracy to democracy. But as a general principle it’s been broadly and effectively applied.
I think the "Facebook bad" horse has been beaten down to Earth's inner core.
Yes, Facebook has its downsides just as any other social platform would. Yes, you can live without it. But I don't believe that the negatives Facebook has enabled comes close to the utility it has provided to society.
Does anyone actually enjoy this kind of writing style where the author constantly blows their own trumpet? The introductionary text is borderline satire.
There article is reasonable and it just asks to apply laws that already exist. I am surprised how much false advertising is allowed on all this platforms. Chinese counterfeit products sold on Amazon, Russian state propaganda promoted by Facebook, ... The judicial system and the law need to catch-up with new technologies.
USA companies are becoming less competitive and more hostile to its own users and costumers. USA in general has an increasing image problem as many people defend to lie and scam customers. Trust is extremely important for a well functioning society and even more to do business.
These headline dichotomies have a tendency to be utterly false.
Even after a successful antitrust action and forced division, Facebook would likely stay Facebook, only minus Instagram, WhatsApp and possibly other current appendages.
Information used to be hard to reproduce and disseminate across geography. This is no longer the case, and now exploits in human psychology that weren't really feasible to exploit in the past are available.
The "problem" isn't facebook or any social media company, it is with humans as a whole, and it isn't really a problem, just an evolutionary bottleneck. Selection pressures have changed and certain traits that used to be a net positive are now net negatives. People will adjust generationally as those resistant to mass hysteria from information overload succeed and get rich while everybody else (most people on HN included) fail and get poorer. Until the adjustment to the new ecosystem is complete, expect instability and uncertainty.
Partly Facebook is a problem because of their top-down profit-driven manipulation. But partly it seems inherent to any recommendation algorithm that gives weight to content you're more likely to share, reply to, etc. The stuff that outrages you is more likely to propagate.
So what would be a recommendation algorithm that does not have this effect? What would it measure and optimize?
The case for free speech absolutism has never looked more questionable than it does right now. Every online platform that has tried to market itself as a “bastion of free speech” has become overrun with the absolute worst of society and as of 2020 is directly implicated in multiple real life terrorist attacks including most recently in the Nez Zealand government’s post-mortem on the Christchurch shootings here https://christchurchattack.royalcommission.nz/the-report
We already have rules regarding what we consider to be acceptable both in general society and in a legal context with regards to free speech so the line in the sand already exists.
Trying to wave away this debate by just shouting “censorship” contributes nothing meaningful to a debate that is sorely missing from society.
Edit: There are some interesting points in the replies that I think could be answered with some clarifications.
I think there is something that is very unique about social media specifically that should have a higher standard about it than other forms of speech. My argument is not at all about trying to force "the one acceptable point of view" or anything like that. History has a long long list of ideas that were once considered dangerous that not only stood the test of time but instead became something much more and in order to continue having that diversity of opinion is generally a good thing.
There are fundamental problems with how the economics of a social media platform function. Never before has a tool existed that allowed everyone to broadcast any unfiltered thought they had to everyone else in the world with basically zero effort.
Furthermore, they can do this both anonymously and without any kind of repercussion. That sounds great in theory as some libertarian fantasy where you might expect the "marketplace of ideas" to take care of everything and the cream would rise to the top. The reality of what that looks like in 2020 however is actually very different and I think now would be a great time to have that discussion about what guardrails we can all generally agree on that would address some of the many downsides that have come out of this experiment so far.
All of the current iterations of major social networks came pretty much exclusively from a group of people who had zero background in anything then Computer Science. At no point have we reached out to groups like sociologists, ethicists, historians, psychologists or anyone else who might have some really valuable thoughts on how to arrange anonymous social interactions in a way that might not devolve into the shit fight we have on our hands currently.
As an example Facebook was started by a guy who by all accounts is not exactly known for having great social skills where he could rate women on campus. Twitter is a platform that purposely doesn't allow for nuance. I think they were both a terrible starting point and that perhaps we should rethink what social media COULD look like from the ground up and learning from all of the mistakes we made with it the first time around.
Facebook is a very large company, and is taking large amount of advertiser cash. That is true.
That money would otherwise go to publishers (possibly true, although I suspect it would go to google.)
What the author fails to back up is the either facebook/democracy argument.
facebook could attempt to editorialise all content, to give a specific bias to the news feed. But I don't see any evidence that it is, barring the bias towards "virality". (again I'm not convinced that's a function of facebook, I think its a function of society.)
Virtually all publishers (be it paper, radio, tv or internets) are privately funded. They all make editorial decisions about the content they commission, edit and syndicate. I suspect the argument is that because there are more than one of them, its not a concentrator of power. Unlike these entities, facebook doesn't actually wield power, its far to incoherent. It allows certain content to flourish, which has a similar effect, perhaps.
I am uncomfortable with facebook the website, its trivially easy to create organise and operate a group that is contrary to the health of wider society (what the subject is, it entirely left to the reader's preconceptions of what bad is.)
I don't think facebook is the antithesis of democracy. Far from it, we are seeing more people voting. What we are seeing is western democracies struggling with people finding their own voices.
We are also seeing many extreme opinions. Most of them emerging after being amplified to catch eyeballs. Some of it is being driven by facebook, but a lot is being driven by the twitter->pundit->journalist->politician->journalist->pundit feedback loop.
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|5 years ago|reply
Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
Democracy has always been fragile, barely functional, easily corrupted, warped by money. The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis. This is the best inoculation against totalitarianism.
[+] [-] lordnacho|5 years ago|reply
But we also live in a world that is more educated than ever, and a lot of those people who went to school can't figure out why they should believe in the moon landings, or dinosaurs. How often you do come across a posting from a friend who thinks the virus isn't real? You sat in a room with people like this for over 10 years. Did you think they would someday be able to think for themselves? I had hoped for that.
I'm starting to think that education as the answer might just be a naive point of view, but I'm also not desirous of a world where we tell adults what they're supposed to think.
Rock and a hard place.
[+] [-] gjulianm|5 years ago|reply
A lot has changed. If you didn't like a newspaper or a broadcast, you stopped seeing it. They built a reputation that they had to maintain somewhat. You knew most of the time who was behind each piece.
Now? You see content that a lot of people dislike because it generates controversy and engagement and attacks, lies get way more exposure than truths. A lot of publications come from unknown sources, with no reputation, so they can lie without consequences. You don't know who wrote something and the interests they might have.
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis.
What is more probable, that social media has completely changed the type of content that people see or that education has plummeted in a decade or two?
Education is not the solution: no single person can be educated enough to make informed decisions on all the topics they are exposed to in a single day. We don't even have the time to do that! We need to revert the changes that social media has created in our information diet, that's the solution. And we need to start by forcing social media companies to stop maximizing engagement over everything, show people only the content they explicitly subscribed to (no 'look at this comment someone made on this post of a page you don't follow'), and stop editorializing the priority of that content via algorithms to maximize engagement.
[+] [-] snarf21|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bovermyer|5 years ago|reply
Estonia in the early 20th century had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. When it first won independence around 1920, it formed a parliamentary democracy based on a constitution. A little while later, one party took over, and a new constitution was written that was much more authoritarian. The same leadership a little while later than that wrote another new constitution that was halfway between the first and second constitutions in terms of mix of democracy and authoritarianism.
Then the Soviets invaded, and democracy vanished until the early 1990s. At that time they regained independence and created their present government.
This is a huge oversimplification, but the four separate constitutions and the evolution of the Estonian system is fascinating.
[+] [-] humanrebar|5 years ago|reply
Facebook is also a public forum. Normal folks talk about things they care about, including politics, on social media. Normal folks did not peer-to-peer discuss the sinking of The Maine in the pages of The New York Journal. So there was never the issue of The New York Journal promoting, hiding, or editorializing that peer-to-peer speech.
[+] [-] esja|5 years ago|reply
I think a lot more attention needs to be paid to the ML recommenders that companies like Facebook are deploying, and the assumptions going into these algorithms, and the externalities they are creating. In my opinion they are playing a similar role in our social crises as the Gaussian copula played in the financial crisis.
[+] [-] specialist|5 years ago|reply
In your informed consumer advocacy, is there any room for shared responsibility?
What chance do individuals have against a corporate juggernaut's finely tuned outrage machine, exquisitely crafted to prey on human fallibility?
--
Sure, we've always had propaganda.
What's new with social media, like with personal computers and smart phones, is the convergence.
Now all the social pathologies (targeted ads, dopamine hits, crowd out authentic speech) are bundled together and monetized, begetting a positive feedback loop.
[+] [-] salimmadjd|5 years ago|reply
With social media more people have access and some amount of power as the $billion media entities, and the old guards don’t like it.
[+] [-] nillium|5 years ago|reply
Now if you want any revenue at all, which is required for surviving, you need to have clickbaity headlines so you can get traffic to your page. And even that assumes that certain news can find an audience; local news especially tends to fail in that regard because it by definition appeals to a smaller group of people.
https://blog.nillium.com/news-was-never-meant-for-social-pla...
[+] [-] FriedrichN|5 years ago|reply
In most countries media is regulated, you're not allowed to advertise everywhere or publish lies.
When Facebook says 'free speech' they actually mean 'free enterprise'.
[+] [-] CPLX|5 years ago|reply
That's not correct. There were staggering numbers of them. In 1900 there were 15 English language daily newspapers in New York City alone.
The problem with Facebook is monopolization. It's different when you have a ton of places that share information, and some of them are biased in one direction or another, versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.
[+] [-] MonAlternatiu|5 years ago|reply
I agree that education is one of the best ways to combat this problem. I don't necessarily agree it's the best one.
> Not that much has changed, except that people now rely on centralized, AI-driven funnels of information and entertainment.
There's no reason why middle grounds don't exist. We can guarantee Free Speech without everyone having access to Instagram, FB, Twitter...
I bet most of the problems could be solved by making these platforms pay to use. Moderation loads would get reduced significantly. Excessive tracking would stop (because now ads are way harder to justify). Accounts would NEED to be somewhat verified by a payment, which makes it harder for trolls/manipulators/abusers of the platform to hide new accounts etc.
[+] [-] nopriorarrests|5 years ago|reply
I wonder why facebook usage isn't "sowing discord" in Netherlands or, say, Germany, or other EU countries? From what I know, Facebook makes some real euros there, so adoption rate is quite high, but still, democracy is not "under attack" in these countries because of "automated newsfeed".
Consider these countries as a control group for "facebook being bad for democracy" test.
Maybe US should take a hard look into a mirror and accept the fact that it is very polarized country, not very cohesive society, with very little common ground (if any at all) between different factions, and facebook just shows this fact.
Don't blame the mirror for what you see in it.
[+] [-] gjulianm|5 years ago|reply
Yes it is. Polarization is increasing in a lot of countries, and there is heavy criticism. But while US news are exposed to the rest of the world, news from EU countries aren't as much. That's why you don't see "Facebook is damaging democracy" takes from EU countries. At least from what I see in Spain (I can't speak for other countries because I don't read french or german or dutch news) the debate on Facebook (and other social media platforms) effect on democracy is growing bigger each day, specially now with the COVID pandemic.
[+] [-] solaarphunk|5 years ago|reply
How do you think populist leaders gain such a large voice so quickly in those EU countries? You're kidding yourself, if you don't think the same tactics are being deployed in Europe, and amplified via platforms like Facebook.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20191007IP...
[+] [-] fwsgonzo|5 years ago|reply
I have friends and family members who will blame random problems on completely unrelated things like "new walk-way in large city" or "beheading in france". Meanwhile they will vehemently deny or state that real issues are overblown.
[+] [-] rmrfstar|5 years ago|reply
Agreed, Facebook is just exploiting weaknesses that already exist in American minds. Those problems exist elsewhere, but have not advanced as far.
There will be a silver lining in the Facebook case though. We're going to see a lot of emails and depositions that end the "Mark Zuckerberg is a uniquely competent person who earned an empire through ability" myth. That's good enough for me.
[+] [-] detaro|5 years ago|reply
On what basis do you believe it isn't?
[+] [-] kerng|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esja|5 years ago|reply
Maximum profit requires maximum engagement. This requires creating filter bubbles and prioritising emotional content. From there, the social fracturing is inevitable... only the topics differ from country to country.
[+] [-] macspoofing|5 years ago|reply
Because it's not Facebook.
Notice that in US, one side (Democrats, media conglomerates and their 'journalist' employees) are pushing for Facebook to censor, de-platform, or 'rank down' independent, conservative and progressive outlets. It is this group, author of the post included, that keeps calling Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (and even first amendment) divisive or undemocratic as a cynical, self-serving strategy to move the needle in their direction (for Democrats, it means more political power, for media conglomerates, it means less competition for eyeballs, and more revenue).
Meanwhile conservative and progressive outlets are calling for less Facebook censorship because they see themselves under constant attack, even when they report factually correct news.
[+] [-] graeme|5 years ago|reply
Are you American by any chance? You may be committing the same mistake you complain of.
The neonazis have made great gains in Germany, Brexit happened. The far right northern league came to power as part of a coalition, with a leader who called for mass cleansing.
A Hindu nationalist party is in power in India, buoyed by whatsapp chain messages. In France, Macron came out of nowehere: he is a centrist but this still shows a collapse of the old structures. His biggest threat is a fascist.
Bolsonaro, a Trump admirer is in power in Brazil. The president of the phillipines, Duterte, boasts of summarily executing drug dealers. Authoritarians rule in Hungary and Poland.
[+] [-] whimsicalism|5 years ago|reply
I'll be honest, I have trouble believing you live in the EU if you're claiming something like this.
[+] [-] brnt|5 years ago|reply
But it is? Antivaxxers are at an all time high here, the Pietendiscussie is inflamed on both sides primarily through social media. My plumber-neighbour is an excellent source for learning what the latest conspiracy theory is on his Facebook feed.
If you don't see it, you probably meet people from a narrow slice of society. I certainly see that these kinds of experiences are vastly different between my friends-circle, all former fellow university students, or my villages neighbours, a tiny place far from the urban centres of the Netherlands. My family is a bit in between, again correlating with age.
I absolutely think Facebook is making this country worse. It's the main method of how corona-disbelievers are keeping rates up by encouraging each other to ignore 'rules'.
[+] [-] joshxyz|5 years ago|reply
The accessible value in tapping the network effects of FB as a communication platform is quite an okay amount of democracy.
But on the other hand I think the polarity in US (and large countries like RU and CH) is quite relative to the size of their countries.. is there any science to that lol
[+] [-] dyeje|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] speeder|5 years ago|reply
We even have our supreme court doing blatantly inconstitutional things because they are upset with Facebook (and Whatsapp).
Also during the Gamergate debacle, there was some high profile news about a "gamergater" that sent actual death threats to people (many people falsely claim to have received death threats), when police caught the guy, it was a Brazillian leftist troll, that thought it would be hilarious to watch whatever was going on in Facebook and try to outviralize viral posts by doing whatever would stoke more controversy (in this case, pretending to be right wing, sending death threats to left wingers, and watch the two sides fight).
[+] [-] piva00|5 years ago|reply
It still affects society, it still sows discord and I'm not sure how you are unaware of this if you are making such claims...
[+] [-] EGreg|5 years ago|reply
It’s CAPITALISM.
People have to always preface any criticism of it by saying “there is nothing at all wrong with capitalism, but...”
But no, the actual ECONOMIC SYSTEM and the incentives and constraints it exerts on institutions and organizations is responsible for what is happening. It selects for the current types of organizations and outcomes by its very nature.
You see, both our news and our social networks are driven by a profit motive and face market competition. Thus they are forced to adapt to changing circumstancss in certain ways:
Act 1. Journalism was disrupted by the Internet, and survived by adopting the FOX News model of locking in an audience and being biased, showing one part of the story.
MSNBC explicitly did it, while CNN jumped the shark after the Malaysian Airlines flight, realizing it can lock in audience. One sided clickbait outrage articles are the norm. There is some attempt to have journalistic integrity and policy focus at Vox and NowThis, but then you also have MotherJones, OccupyDemocrats, DailyKos and more on the left. You have all kinds of independent podcasts like TYT network, Kyle Kulinski, David Pakman, Majority Report, etc. And similarly for the conservatives, libertarians, etc.
We are divided also because giant corporations like Sinclair Television bought up all the local stations and outlets, resulting in this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
No really, watch it. It’s black mirror level, and you can see the capitalism at work here. Top down control by a small group of people, disseminating to everyone under the banner of “free speech”.
Act 2. Social networks are in a race to the bottom for advertising dollars.
So they adapt by desiging algorithms to maximize your “engagement” and attention on their platform.
Capitalism leads to a tragedy of the unmanaged commons, where in this case the commons is human attention. There is a reason that you salivate at notifications like Pavlov’s dogs. You’ve been conditioned to look at that screen light up during dinner. It’s NOT just about a slot machine dynamic. It’s that - if Facebook doesn’t get your attention every so often, then LinkedIn or Twitter would.
The solution is changing the economic model for news and social media.
Yes I said it. But let me use less triggering words than capitalism and socialism.
We need more projects built on collaboration instead of competition.
Wikipedia instead of Britannica
Workd Wide Web instead of America Online
Open Source Software instead of closed source commercial software
Cryptocurrency instead of banks
Creative Commons instead of Copyright
Prizes for Open Source Drugs instead of Patent System and IP
And so on. Not only would it make the system cheaper, it would make it far more effective and less divisive. People would be able to build on each other’s work, without threats.
This is already how peer reviewed science has worked, and for all its flaws it has produced tremendous progress. Scientists are careful not to overstate things. Titles are “boring” and descriptive rather than sensational.
Compare that to the “free speech” where money - and yes, audience size - determines which ideas get pushed in one direction. Clay Shirky spoke about this 15 years ago:
https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_institutions_vs_collab...
So how would it work?
There would be a wiki-like site for news. People around the world would upload their own videos and raw media.
Then each news story would be edited and re-edited by mutually distrusting parties, checks and balances, similar to Wikipedia’s talk page.
The final result would be published only after a delay, when most parties have had a chance to challenge all the claims they needed, with well sourced claims of their own (each claim would have its own page).
That way, the world can make up its own mind by using the collaboration of the crowd, on issues like what’s happening in Saudi/Yemen, with China and Uyghurs or whether Assad gassed his own people after winning with conventional weapons. As well as on issues of religion, science, health policy, and so on.
We are building something like this as a reference implementation. The domain will be Rational.app
If you want to be involved you can email me at “greg” at the domain qbix.com. I am happy to welcome people on the project who know Javascript or PHP and who believe something like this is needed. This would be an open source project.
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
Americans have for decades been gullible fools who never read below headlines and fall for tabloid trash. This “post-reality” thing that is culminating with stuff like Qanon has also been cooking for decades, nurtured by trash TV, dumbed down religion, and new age word salad.
In the past only mass media had the privilege of being able to lead this mass of morons. Now that has been democratized, allowing DIY YouTube and Facebook personalities to take advantage of America’s rampant foolishness.
The solution has to start with an broad spectrum social movement to raise the quality of discourse in the culture, a kind of big tent anti-bullshit movement. We need to replace hard line partisan intolerance with intolerance for intellectual junk food. Liberals, conservatives, and anyone else should start promoting all content of any perspective so long as it is well written, well reasoned, and credible, and rejecting BS from their own side as well as others.
[+] [-] solaarphunk|5 years ago|reply
It’s fine if someone says something horrible or false on the internet, it’s not fine if a ranked newsfeed amplifies that message to millions of people because it’s engaging.
This free speech or not argument is a complete straw man.
[+] [-] amadeuspagel|5 years ago|reply
Is there any business this entitled? Imagine a bookstore owner describing amazon's business model as diverting revenue that used to go to bookstores, particularly black-owned backstores, to themselves. Somehow the revenue flows, like water, it used to flow to newspapers, and now it flows to facebook. I'm glad at least that the interview skips over bots, russians and algorithms and goes straight to the point, which is that people like matt make less money because everyone can share their views now, and people find their friends rants just as entertaining as matts.
[+] [-] dweekly|5 years ago|reply
1. That Facebook is maliciously and mostly singlehandedly responsible for the death of the newspaper and journalism.
Except newspaper readership has been on the decline since the 90's. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/01/circulation... - the article frames Facebook's grand plan as taking money from newspapers, but Facebook's revenues in 2019 were nearly twice what the whole newspaper industry had as revenue in 2008. In that same window of time the ad industry grew 50%. Facebook makes money by making products that engage people and then presenting them with ads that are of interest to the individual in question. That makes them in the broader attention market but the framing of "Facebook versus newspapers" seems peculiar here.
2. That "monopolism" is rampant and anti-democratic.
Besides the fact that this is poorly defined in the article (perhaps as incentive to purchase his book?), it sure is an curious turn of phrase that there are "endless numbers of monopolists" in healthcare. Perhaps one could say there are millions of monopolists in music because each work is copyright? Over what does the author claim Facebook have true monopoly? On attention? On information dissemination?
3. The thread of conversation implies that breaking up Facebook will somehow help, for example, the decline of the newspaper industry. It's not clear how any of the author's goals will be accomplished by this and the OP alludes to this in "there's a lot more you need to do than just break them up". But what?
If the point of the article is to claim Facebook's present mode is a threat to democracy (claimed in title) they A: need to actually articulate this case and B: ought make an argument for how they'd propose to remedy the situation. Instead the former was done barely at all and the latter was omitted.
[+] [-] exdsq|5 years ago|reply
I don’t like the idea democracy can only survive if governments censor and remove platforms for spreading information (however false that may be).
[+] [-] giantg2|5 years ago|reply
I don't know that breaking up Facebook will actually fix these issues or 'save' democracy. Conspiracies will still spread on other sites (Reddit: The Frontpage of the Internet, anyone?). Ad revenue will continue to go to electronic platforms and use tracking (Google is huge in this space too).
I can see that Facebook has engaged in anticompetitive behavior, such as buying some competitive companies. I don't see them as a full monopoly. There are plenty of other sites (some of them large) that allow you to connect with others, share content, and create an online identity. Just look at LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok, etc. There are other large ad services too, like Google.
A strong democracy requires an educated and diligent citizenry. We can break up Facebook, but that won't fix the root problems in our society. We could start by teaching basic logic in schools. And I'm sure this will be controversial, but I do think we should make a citizenship test part of school curriculums so that the citizens know their rights, the structure and function of our government, etc. Then we still need to hope that voters do their homework.
[+] [-] CyberRabbi|5 years ago|reply
And there you have it. Anything that threatens the position of media companies is always portrayed as an attack against Democracy.
If choosing democracy means shutting down the free flow of information between individuals on social media sites like Facebook, then my vote is for Facebook.
[+] [-] nondeveloper|5 years ago|reply
Whenever I read that people “aren’t educated” enough or are “unduly influenced” by media, e.g., newspapers, television, or social media, I like to remind myself of this.
I notice that there is, and maybe always has been, a vocal group of people who believe that we should only elect and appoint experts, highly-trained specialists in their area of government. Heinlein reminds us that “specialization is for insects”.
I’ve come to know many politicians in the past few years, some of them nationally prominent. And I can say without hesitation that the average person is as qualified to make decisions about governance as the average professional politician.
Crowds can be pretty smart. Not faultless, but smart. That idea has been fashionable for a few years now but it’s definitely not new. Its implementation has changed from democracy to democracy. But as a general principle it’s been broadly and effectively applied.
[+] [-] Mysterise|5 years ago|reply
Yes, Facebook has its downsides just as any other social platform would. Yes, you can live without it. But I don't believe that the negatives Facebook has enabled comes close to the utility it has provided to society.
[+] [-] waihtis|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|5 years ago|reply
Even after a successful antitrust action and forced division, Facebook would likely stay Facebook, only minus Instagram, WhatsApp and possibly other current appendages.
[+] [-] another_sock|5 years ago|reply
The "problem" isn't facebook or any social media company, it is with humans as a whole, and it isn't really a problem, just an evolutionary bottleneck. Selection pressures have changed and certain traits that used to be a net positive are now net negatives. People will adjust generationally as those resistant to mass hysteria from information overload succeed and get rich while everybody else (most people on HN included) fail and get poorer. Until the adjustment to the new ecosystem is complete, expect instability and uncertainty.
[+] [-] sneak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DennisP|5 years ago|reply
So what would be a recommendation algorithm that does not have this effect? What would it measure and optimize?
[+] [-] mhoad|5 years ago|reply
We already have rules regarding what we consider to be acceptable both in general society and in a legal context with regards to free speech so the line in the sand already exists.
Trying to wave away this debate by just shouting “censorship” contributes nothing meaningful to a debate that is sorely missing from society.
Edit: There are some interesting points in the replies that I think could be answered with some clarifications.
I think there is something that is very unique about social media specifically that should have a higher standard about it than other forms of speech. My argument is not at all about trying to force "the one acceptable point of view" or anything like that. History has a long long list of ideas that were once considered dangerous that not only stood the test of time but instead became something much more and in order to continue having that diversity of opinion is generally a good thing.
There are fundamental problems with how the economics of a social media platform function. Never before has a tool existed that allowed everyone to broadcast any unfiltered thought they had to everyone else in the world with basically zero effort.
Furthermore, they can do this both anonymously and without any kind of repercussion. That sounds great in theory as some libertarian fantasy where you might expect the "marketplace of ideas" to take care of everything and the cream would rise to the top. The reality of what that looks like in 2020 however is actually very different and I think now would be a great time to have that discussion about what guardrails we can all generally agree on that would address some of the many downsides that have come out of this experiment so far.
All of the current iterations of major social networks came pretty much exclusively from a group of people who had zero background in anything then Computer Science. At no point have we reached out to groups like sociologists, ethicists, historians, psychologists or anyone else who might have some really valuable thoughts on how to arrange anonymous social interactions in a way that might not devolve into the shit fight we have on our hands currently.
As an example Facebook was started by a guy who by all accounts is not exactly known for having great social skills where he could rate women on campus. Twitter is a platform that purposely doesn't allow for nuance. I think they were both a terrible starting point and that perhaps we should rethink what social media COULD look like from the ground up and learning from all of the mistakes we made with it the first time around.
[+] [-] macspoofing|5 years ago|reply
Facebook is not the problem when it acts like a platform.
[+] [-] egberts1|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps we need more journalists and not National Enquirer-type ones.
After all, who is really turning off the lights to this “Democracy dies in a darkness”?
[+] [-] KaiserPro|5 years ago|reply
Facebook is a very large company, and is taking large amount of advertiser cash. That is true.
That money would otherwise go to publishers (possibly true, although I suspect it would go to google.)
What the author fails to back up is the either facebook/democracy argument.
facebook could attempt to editorialise all content, to give a specific bias to the news feed. But I don't see any evidence that it is, barring the bias towards "virality". (again I'm not convinced that's a function of facebook, I think its a function of society.)
Virtually all publishers (be it paper, radio, tv or internets) are privately funded. They all make editorial decisions about the content they commission, edit and syndicate. I suspect the argument is that because there are more than one of them, its not a concentrator of power. Unlike these entities, facebook doesn't actually wield power, its far to incoherent. It allows certain content to flourish, which has a similar effect, perhaps.
I am uncomfortable with facebook the website, its trivially easy to create organise and operate a group that is contrary to the health of wider society (what the subject is, it entirely left to the reader's preconceptions of what bad is.)
I don't think facebook is the antithesis of democracy. Far from it, we are seeing more people voting. What we are seeing is western democracies struggling with people finding their own voices.
We are also seeing many extreme opinions. Most of them emerging after being amplified to catch eyeballs. Some of it is being driven by facebook, but a lot is being driven by the twitter->pundit->journalist->politician->journalist->pundit feedback loop.