Maybe for you, but you should know that Facebook is becoming the primary source of news for Americans (in the ways it has been explained above), and IMHO it probably is the one thing that most helped Trump get elected–precisely because it seems to keep so many people so ignorant, or misinformed.
I have had my FB account deactivated for a while, I recently just went nuclear and deleted both my personal and writing accounts. (I may have to keep an author page someday, but we’ll cross that bridge when I have something worth bragging about.)
I took several extended breaks prior to that, and every time I came back, I did my best to cultivate a page with reasonable-fact-based articles and a good balance of news sources. It did this by trying to control what news sites I followed and only clicking ‘‘like’’ on friends’ articles that met my own standards for good journalism. It failed every time. Even when I followed legit news sources, like Forbes or NYT, the content on their Facebook feed was invariably the fluffiest, bullshittiest content they write, not the in-depth, interesting stuff I want to read. See, these newspapers actually write content that is designed to go on Facebook - stuff you can read in five minutes that will teach you absolutely nothing but make you feel like it did. If you want to actually learn anything, you have to go straight to the source.
My conclusion is that Facebook is fundamentally broken, a scourge on humanity, and probably one of the worst things to happen to human intellectual development since The Dark Ages. Well that’s a slight exaggeration. But I’m not impressed. If I had such dismal results while making a concerted effort, imagine the content that is generated by the vast numbers of people who don’t even care.
What I know about it doesn’t make me inclined to sign up.
I have a couple of friends who belong to large, scattered families, and I think that’s the best use for FB-- keeping specific groups in touch. It takes the place of round robin letters, sending multiple photo copies to everyone, and overlapping phone calls. When the newest grandchild takes her first steps, everyone can see the video at the same time.
Beyond this, it seems like FB is trying to do and to be too much.
I will click on a post which is of interest to me. If it sounds dubious (I never take information at face value, anyway), I will do some searching to verify the post. If I find that is it not true, I will (SDMB style), post a link so others in the thread can look for themselves. I have seldom received a comment or smart remark so I think the others just don’t pay attention.
Bob
And WHERE do you get fed this “SLANTING” idea? Sounds like Russian propaganda to me! (Planting the idea our mainstream news sources are not to be trusted.)
Perhaps FOX News?
Please explain exactly how US, Canadian, UK, and Middle East news sources would ALL slant a story the same way?
My dad was in the newspaper business and I learned one thing, that is to check several different sources. If U.S. mainstream news sources AND foreign news sources are saying basically the same thing, then you can be pretty darn sure the stories are correct! Right?
Note compare FOX News with what all the other news sources are saying. You will notice a BIG difference. Especially what they don’t say!
I read/watch…
BBC
USA Today
NY Times
Washington Post
LA Times
ABC
NBC
CBS
Al Jazeera
UK Guardian
Euro News
They all frequently say the SAME things! (FOX News says different things.)
No. This is how many people think Facebook acts, but the reality is far different.
Facebook only shows you a portion of the posts of all those people you follow. It carefully curates what you see in order to keep you logged in and using the site.
Someone you follow may post pictures of their cat. Facebook may decide to show you this picture today, or two years from now, or to never show you the photo.
Facebook never shows you everything, and it not chronological.
It’s true that most people aren’t getting a well-balanced diet of news from Facebook. But I question if those same people who are misinformed by biased and fake news on Facebook would be doing much better if social media didn’t exist. It’s not like everybody was a news junkie 10 years ago and has gotten lazy because of Facebook. A lot of people just watched local news which tends towards just talking about local stories or sensational bits, not a whole lot of general information about the world. Or if they subscribed to a paper maybe scan the front page before going to the sports or comics or obituaries.
Strange, I follow the Washington Post and New York Times, and I get some fluffy bullshit posts, but also a lot of the regular in depth news articles and features through Facebook. I just went right now to my Facebook to see what was posted, and I think things are thrown off a little since it’s the end of year so there are a lot of end of year/best of the year/most read of the year stories, but here’s what’s posted for me:
[ul]
[li]New York Times: China Bans Its Ivory Trade, Moving Against Elephant Poaching[/li][li]Washington Post: The white flight of Derek Black[/li][li]New York Times: The Evangelical Scion Who Stopped Believing[/li][li]New York Times: How Much Sugar Can You Avoid Today?[/li][li]Washington Post: THE COBALT PIPELINE [/li]Tracing the path from deadly hand-dug mines in Congo to consumers’ phones and laptops
[/ul]
The one on sugar is a op-ed somewhat fluffy article I’m sure posted because of New Year’s resolutions, but the other ones are good, in-depth informative articles. You can get good information through Facebook, but it’s also easy for good information to be drowned out by bad and pointless info.
[QUOTE=Sam Lowry]
But I question if those same people who are misinformed by biased and fake news on Facebook would be doing much better if social media didn’t exist.
[/QUOTE]
Well, there’s no way to draw a direct causal link to social media, but we are certainly a more polarized country than we’ve been in decades. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that’s media-related, especially given how dramatically our media has changed in 20 years.
I recently read this book called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains, and while it was lighter on neuroscience than I would have hoped, there was a lot of interesting research in there about the brain’s neuroplasticity and how it appears the internet, as a medium, has changed the way humans process information. In essence, we’ve become worse at deep thinking, we have more difficulty drawing complex connections between ideas and even when we seem to have a grasp on the content, we have a harder time finding meaning in what we’ve read. Studies that track eye movement have found we don’t even read internet pages the same we read a book – our eyes track in an F shape, meaning we read like a line or two, then find the content we’re looking for (that probably confirms are pre-existing beliefs), scan down to the bottom and off we go to another hyperlink. We’ve become information hunters that disregard the context of a page in our efforts to quickly find what we’re looking for. And the time we spend on any given page only increases marginally in correlation to its length – that is, we’re spending way less time than would be required to thoroughly read what we’re looking at.
If you consider the vulnerabilities that the human brain already has – confirmation bias, tribalism, difficulty multi-tasking, and how easily distraction impedes memory consolidation… well, it’s easy to see how we’re having such a difficult time. (The argument here is that it’s not merely the content that is the problem, but the medium through which we are perceiving it.) Your long list of information-dense articles from NYT and WaPo is just as much a demonstration of how my brain has a preference for the internet fluff – since the only thing I’d likely have clicked on is the sugar article. And that’s the rub, it’s one of those cases in which the short-term reward of sensationalist garbage is often chosen over the long-term gain of actually learning something. It’s the junk food of the human mind, and many of us struggle to kick the habit.
Incidentally, I don’t have this problem with books. The author of The Shallows does a lot of hand-wringing about ebooks, but I read his book on Kindle and it was one of the more focused learning experiences I’ve had in a while. It has prompted me to read more books and learn more things. I have time for that now that I’m not on Facebook.
As far as my particular issues with Facebook go, it doesn’t help that a lot of my friends are frothing-at-the-mouth political types. And when I post to Facebook, I become one of them. I just sit on my ass screaming about things I hate instead of doing things to positively impact the world around me.
I don’t miss it.
I try to keep my feed set to Most Recent so it is pretty much chronological and shows me “everything”. What I can’t really figure out is the chronological order it keeps relative to the original posting and subsequent likes and comments.
If you want news via Facebook or anywhere on the open internet, sign up to the feeds from a news provider you trust and with a proven record in other media. Everything else is just gossip until proven otherwise.
Damn, Damn, DAMN!
mmm