Agreed, but when they do it themselves there tends to be this Lord of the Flies thing to their adulthood 
You could do a lot, if you’re not looking at it from the end-user perspective.
If the government made Facebook break up into multiple companies- let’s say that the web hosting part was one, the analytics/algorithms was another, and the actual front-end software was another, and no one entity can own more than 40% of any one, then that might go a long way toward busting the issue up. I mean, if the UI people and analytics people have to pay each other for access, and aren’t controlled by the same outfit, and the UI people have editorial control, then that would be good. And if the analytics people and UI people have to negotiate with the infrastructure outfit for services, that would also be good. Especially if they’re not all under one umbrella.
If the Nazi Party had had the information FB can access today and if they had had the computing power FB has today they would have known what to say to every single person in the globe connected to their version of FB to manipulate enough people to vote for a presidential, senate and congress candidates that would have allowed them to get away with concentration camps and that would have prevented your countries participation in WWII, so they could have won it. This is fictional history, but if they had known that they could have equated their Rassengesetze with Jim Crow, they had sown hatre against Russians and communists, and some algorithm had told them how to do it, they might have been successful. Just as Putin has been successful in things nobody could have imagined just a couple of years ago wrt the GOP. The Nazis were not stupid either. They had no scruples, no idea what their ceiling might have been, but let me observe that the Nazis themselves looked to the USA and their laws on eugenics and their racial laws as an example to follow. With a tool like FB they might have sold it much better. And many in the USA would have been willing to buy that message, not just Kennedy Sr. and Lindenberg.
Putin did not get nor needed to “get tens of thousands to attend a Nazi rally in Madison Square Gardens” to achieve his goals. He got Trump. The Nazis might rather have had Kennedy Sr. as president rather than “tens of thousands to attend a Nazi rally in Madison Square Gardens”
How does it go? When a service is provided “free” to you, you are not the customer, you are the merchandise?
My belief is that many people were lulled into this by the habits of whole lifetimes of old-school media, where the critical now-absent component of editorial curation did its job too well. It was not that media were “not allowed to publish such stuff”, it was that respectable mainstream media would refuse to publish such stuff lest they be fact-checked by competitors or sued for libel. In reality, of course, scandal rags and vile pampleteers were all over the place, but because they were finite physical units that you had to go out and look for, they were to an extent self-contained.
Now, of course, the scandalmongering has no inherent containment.
Except a whole bunch of stockholders would sue them for their souls and those of their descendants to the fourth generation.
Live by the algorithm, die by the algorithm. And the algorithm exists for the purpose of maximizing rate and speed of return no matter what.
The real problem is the integration of the advertising platform. That creates incentives to promote and distribute content not based on what is truly best for its user base, but by what is most profitable.
OTOH, there is no way that they would provide that much content and service for free.
I actually am a customer of facebook, as I have paid them for advertising in the past. I did so because it was an excellent way to reach quite a number of people fairly effectively and inexpensively. Facebook and google are far better than any other form of advertising probably in history, and that’s not a bad thing. I’ve paid far more, and gotten far worse results with pretty much every other form of advertising.
So, I really don’t see any way to “fix” the problem without breaking it up in a way that utterly destroys its value to both advertisers and users.
I’ve compared social media to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel in the past, and I still find that comparison apt. The problem is not the means of communication, the problem is with the people communicating. Every step of easing communication between individuals has met with resistance, and often with a bit of disruption, but ultimately, the world ended up a better place for it.
I find facebook and other social media to be neutral at worst, and whether it is used for good or evil, constructive purposes or ruinous, is up to the people who use it.
Then we are doomed, because evil is more motivated than good and FB has an inherent evil bias that reinforces that tendency.
I like this comparison. I think that Yahweh is the bad guy in that whole narrative, an that there was nothing wrong with what the people building the tower were doing.
Even with facebook, we still managed to elect Biden.
And people can still look to respectable publishers for accurate information. They still exist.
You didn’t really have to look that far. Every grocery check out lane and gas station carried any number of tabloid publications.
Then we always have been doomed.
I think we would need to unpack quite a bit of what your definition of “evil” is before that claim can be validated or refuted, but I don’t see it as anything other than a tool. Facebook itself and the technology behind it is neutral, it is not immoral, it is amoral.
See my post further up. It’s the way they prioritze buzz over truth, revenue without regard for the social consequences. It is their bussiness model, they can’t avoid it.
What person or entity has ever done anything based on what is truly best for its user base? Even charities have their own agendas that they pursue, that may be good for some people and actually not so good for others.
And what content is, actually, best for a user base? The mind boggles at how anyone or any thing would figure that out.
Who are all, at base, people. Many people are harder to move than a few people, but it is not impossible.
It’s kind of like Neo’s conversation with Councillor Hamann in the second Matrix film. Sure we could shut them off. But then how would we order food, get driving directions or post pictures of kittens?
I would say that these platforms have already grown to a point where humans can’t control them directly. And we already see cases where a programming error can cause a catastrophe (like a plane crash or stock market crash) by mistakenly “optimizing” something before humans can react to it.
Something like that. “If you aren’t paying for the product, YOU are the ‘product’.”
That sounds awfully familiar. To cast it in an old familiar context, “Gun control didn’t do anything to prevent ‘X’ (some horrible mass killing). It’s the people, not the guns, causing the problems.”
What’s wrong with that logic? What’s wrong is that it ignores the fact that, like guns, social media is a very powerful enabling factor for the damaging consequences that we quite rightly associate with them. The fact that “people” are the abusers of these tools is basically a self-evident tautology. Social media is directly responsible for us being in an era of unprecedented, manipulative disinformation mostly originating from self-serving malignant interests and mostly propagated by idiots, spreading literally like a virus. It’s absolutely incredible, for instance, that Trump can lie with impunity about anything and everything, and not only do it without any damaging consequence to himself, but rather the opposite: he garners tremendous support for his lies from millions of ignoramuses interconnected by social media.
A couple of observations on Facebook from the often insightful alt-media cartoonist Jen Sorensen:
Her main site: https://jensorensen.com/
If I am judging only by my own personal experience, Facebook easily does more good than harm and is a net positive. But of course I know that that’s a very limited perspective.
I think that’s kind of the point. You can’t judge the effects of social media based on your own personal experience because the entire system is designed to ensure you have a “good” experience (or neutral at worst). All the ads you see and posts that get prioritized in your feed are the ones that the algorithms learn will keep you most engaged with the platform.
Society is very adaptable, and is generally not prone to self destruction. Facebook isn’t like nuclear weapons where a single short term mistake can lead to a point of no return. I think that over time as people start growing up with the technology and intuitively recognize its dangers and traps, we will figure out how to reach a livable equilibrium with it. The problem is that we are still in the unstable training phase and haven’t developed that traits, habits and legal framework that will make it work.
But people can lie all they want with print as well.
And those who print newspapers certainly are not without their biases, not without their desires to persuade audiences, and certainly not without their advertisers.
When you buy a newspaper, you are barely covering the costs of printing, the real costs are borne by the advertisers. There’s quite a bit of marketing analysis that goes into those ads, that goes into which newspapers to sponsor.
My perspective as well. I am able to easily reach out to my clients, I am able to advertise to new clients efficiently and affordably, and sometimes I like to play some mindless browser games.
It also depends on how you use it. I could go to various groups that talk politics, and see all sorts of political content, but I choose not to.
I suppose that is one thing. I never check my “timeline” or whatever its called. I visit my business page, make some posts to it, read replies from clients or prospective clients. I visit some pages related to the business from time to time. And occasionally I play a browser game if I’m feeling fairly bored.
For those who feel that facebook is a tool of destruction, what are thoughts on the messageboard we are currently using? Is it just a smaller tool of that same destruction, or is there a reason why, even though it is pretty much the same model, just on a smaller scale, it is inherently different?
“Just”?? That’s the whole shootin’ match, right there. (Excuse the expression.)
The whole point is that the amalgamation of FB and other UBIQUITOUS social media are, well, UBIQUITOUS.
I think the main difference is the constant feedback and curating of content. While the SDMB (for example) might act as a bit of a “Liberal echo chamber” due to the nature of the subscribers, AFAIK, there is no mechanism in the SDMB that ensures posters are only fed content they support and agree with (or get outraged by).
On the one hand, we all want to see content that interests us and avoid having to deal with content that we find irrelevant. But that same technology makes it very easy for advertisers or bad actors to quickly create a profile of people who are likely to behave in a way they can influence, and then reach out and influence them.
Plus, there were barriers to entry in terms of the finish of the final product, and in a lot of cases, licensing with broadcast media. The upshot is that not just anyone had the scratch to fire up a TV or radio station, or could publish a reputable-looking newspaper or magazine. So the really fringey stuff looked it- photocopied or mimeographed in most cases, with goofy pencil-drawn art, etc…
We saw the first iteration of the changes in this regard with the Web and e-commerce. Any asshole can gin up a nice looking web page and a storefront, but that doesn’t mean that they’re worth a shit in terms of order fulfillment, standing behind their products, etc…
But yeah, the Enquirer and the like have always been around, but they were pretty limited in terms of their subject matter- celebrities and the like in general, or stuff so fantastic as to be obviously humorous (Weekly World News’ “Bat Boy” is my favorite example). But nowadays, the barriers to entry are so low, that anybody can found a website and call it a “news outlet” without actually having to prove anything or be accountable to anyone for the content. Or in the case of Facebook, come up with the most absurd claims or statements without any actual fact-checking or anything like that. And if people repost it enough, it might end up with wider broadcast.