I wonder why someone who is not stupid gets it so wrong, and you are not the only one, as I have already written. There are several differences:
First, scale. FB, Twitter and Google are all monopolists in their respective fields. That is necessarily so, that’s why FB bought WhatsApp & Instagramm, promising the EU regulator not to merge the data, only to merge them immediately. They gladly paid the (ridiculous) fine. The price was worth it, they have been getting away with everything for years.
Second: Moderation. Not only will the mods not let me insult you, stray off-topic, or blatantly lie, all of them offences for which people have been banned (who was ever banned from FB and what did they have to do first?
Third: FB craves engagement, never mind the quality or the aim. And now the system here tells me I have responded three times to your posts, I should try to remember that: “A great discussion includes many voices and perspectives. Can you get anybody else involved?” FB will never tell me to shut up.
So you say that you use FB responsably and for your own good. Nice for you (I don’t believe you are right, btw, but that is just my opinion). But by simply using it, rightly or wrongly, you are empowering FB to use you and the mass of other users in good faith to manipulate others. And they do.
Sometimes it’s a matter of opinion. If you speak in absolutes, and consider your way to be the only right way, then you will probably wonder why you encounter countless people who get it so wrong.
So, as I said, scale…
The mods will allow you to insult me all you want in the pit, and if you are careful, you can get away with some snarky swipes elsewhere as well. Things do stray off topic, and there is only a little bit of guidance there, and they will absolutely let you lie. I see people lie on this board all the time, it is calling them out on their lies that mods won’t let you do.
And this is probably the best moderated board on the internet.
It’s not telling you to shut up, it’s telling you to get more people involved in the conversation. That’s not just craving engagement, it’s asking you to help increase the engagement.
So, I’d say that it comes to scale. This little MB in its backwater isn’t likely to make any substantive changes to many minds.
I use it as a tool for the purposes that I find it useful for.
I’m not sure where you are going with that link, are you suspecting that I’m going to go burn down an immigrant’s home? (or have already done so?)
We all manipulate others, all the time. That’s the whole thing about being social. You are trying to manipulate me with your persuasion, you are trying to get me to visit the links that you have provided, and to agree with the sentiments expressed therein.
I have used facebook to try to manipulate people, and it worked. I paid them to try to get more clients, and I got more clients because I paid them.
Ultimately, what remedy are you seeking here? Are you looking to have FB disbanded, with the assumption that nothing else will come to replace this very useful tool that many have grown to depend upon? Are you looking for some sorts of regulations, and if so, what would these look like?
Will this fix the problems of Newsmax and OANN, or even Fox?
Personally I’m far more worried about false journalism and the lack of credibility that comes from it than I am worried about social media. People may share those stories on facebook, but that’s not where those stories originated.
No, of course the stories did not start on facebook, that is why they claim they don’t have to moderate them, they are a platform, not content creators (wrong: they highlight some content more than others, so they algoritmically and actively create the resonance for the content that goes viral). But by sharing those stories on facebook, the stories go to another level, this a qualitative change. Facebook makes an enormous difference.
But I see I am not going to convince you. Well, it remains a fascinating observation that facebook does change minds and I can’t. My reasoning is flawed, because (my) reasoning is not enough. They appeal to sentiments and that works. It makes me mad, but it is like it is. I give it up. Still I am deeply convinced that the article the OP linked to is right, even if I can’t persuade anyone who is not already persuaded.
I am sorry if you have the impression I was being snarky at you, it was not my intention and I apologize if it came across like that. Please consider it an expression of my frustration for not getting my pov across. I meant it when I wrote that you are not stupid: I have read some other posts you wrote.
And even then, to take the specific example of the Enquirer, they had certain aspirations of quality to differentiate themselves from the WWN – and they’d ocassionally scoop the mainline papers on things like the John Edwards scandal. The top tabs would nuance and spin to stay just this side of getting sued and count on the celebs avoiding the “Streisand effect” to not draw attention, while the WWN and its ilk went with the principle of if it’s so ridiculous that no reasonable person would take it seriously, it gets a pass.
Problem is, today the NON-reasonable persons who would take it seriously, have a voice multiplier in the form of being able to themselves repost/relay with equal ease, and see many others doing the same, before anyone can come up to them and say, come on man that’s ridiculous.
Say you shut down Facebook or Google. Well, 10 minutes later untouchable servers in China, Russia, or elsewhere will pop up and provide the same service. There is no solution outside of education to deal with mass media.
And many of those stories are shared by users. Just as you shared some news articles with me, trying to persuade me.
As I said, it is a tool. I also think that guns are tools. And just like guns, FB can be dangerous if it is not properly handled. I wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of regulations to curb the worst effects of it, but that’s difficult and nuanced.
I was not being rhetorical when I asked what remedies you were looking for. Would you actually like to see it shut down, or at least broken up so that it is not the massive social media platform that it is today? Would you like to see regulations put on it, and what would that look like?
Maybe have some sort of circuit breaker that pulls out stories that are going viral for some sort of fact checking or moderation before they are allowed to be shared further? I don’t know, just spitballing there.
I don’t know about shutting it down or breaking it up. It is a useful tool, when it is used for good.
Like I said, I think it’s the journalism that needs to be reined in somehow. Exactly how, I don’t know, but I like the idea that people should somehow be accountable for the stories that they put out there. A person should have to put their personal reputation on the line to call themselves a journalist, and their credibility should be easily checked.
I didn’t mean to say that you did, though looking back on it, I can see how it could have sounded that way. I understand the frustration, our society itself is at a fragile point, and I understand the concern about it going too far and coming crashing down. I just think that facebook isn’t the prime cause, and focusing on it is not really the best way to repair the damage that is being done.
And the ability to set up an echo chamber; it’s very easy and I suspect comfortable for many to only consume news from sources saying what they want to hear or that confirms their biases and suspicions.
Back in the day, you had fewer choices- the big 3 broadcast networks on radio and TV, a handful of national-circulation newspapers (WSJ, WP, NYT), and your local papers. And another small handful of national news magazines published weekly (Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, Life).
Now someone can self-curate their own set of biased and outright fraudulent news sources- someone could plausibly listen to Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Mark Davis on the radio and watch Fox News, OANN and Newsmax on the web and cable, and not have to be exposed to anything else. I’m sure they have equivalents on the left, who read/watch Wonkette, Jacobin, MSNBC and Salon only.
Facebook and social media make it worse, in that at least, news outlets are marginally accountable, but stuff on Facebook is just unsubstantiated crap without any attribution, factual basis, etc… It’s all that stuff that Snopes investigates.
I’ll give facebook this credit: During my brief stint there I was able to identify which of my family and acquaintances were racist right wing shitpile sheep. Thanks, facebook?
I don’t think there is anything the media itself can do. Markets are a bit like any other ecosystem in that there is no greater imperative than survival. What survives, like roaches, isn’t always what we’d love to survive. But we can’t fully analyze the niches and dictate what will evolve to fill them.
In media, the ecosystem is attention. What attracts attention isn’t what we’d necessarily want to attract attention if humans were rational creatures. But we aren’t. So crafting messages or stumbling upon messages that resonate with brains is more important to survival in the mediasphere than crafting messages that are truthful.
It’s a cultural value problem and at the moment we don’t have the moral courage or intellectual courage to insist on a set of shared values. Unfortunately, I don’t see any solution to any of that and I see the problem getting worse as other nations see cleavage planes to attack.
Enforced truth in labeling would go a long way. If a post had to be labeled as “Originated from a chinese government troll” and whenever forwarded the label had stay attached that would go a long way.
With enough crypto-magic we can make indelible labels. What we lack now is reliable original attribution. Because it’s not profitable for the carriers to do so.
This is essentially the same problem as spam robo-calls. Absent regulation the phone companies have no reason to want to invest in the tech to reign in spam calling. Given new regulations, they are making the investments now and spamming should decline a bunch in a year or so when everything is fully functional. becasue they, and we the recipient, will know that call originated from a Bulgarian spam-bot farm, not from Joe Doaks’s personal landline in Kansas.
I’m NOT suggesting a Ministry of Truth that passes judgment of what is true and what is false. But I am suggesting that reliable accurate original source attribution would go a long way to slowing the spread of deliberate profitable misinformation.
While this is true to some extent, before the internet – and specifically before social media created a lunatic subculture – print media were largely fact-based and responsible. So were the major broadcasters. To the extent that they had a bias, the bias was towards the basic framework of state and private power, as Noam Chomsky put it. Which is very different from living in a totally delusional alternate reality, relentlessly promoted by a self-reinforcing subculture largely enabled by internet tools like social media that enable any idiot to become a “publisher”. Today these morons consider what’s left of responsible media to be “fake news”.
The real gotcha in all this is that it’s profitable to spread disinformation, and far less profitable to spread real information.
Until we get that fixed, we’ll be stuck with a Gresham’s Law for information. Salacious rumor has always traveled better & faster than boring old truth. But the barriers to entry for broadcasting the BS have been reduced from high to nil.
In the days before email there was nothing to prevent spam sent via the postal service. Nothing except the cost of a stamp. And in fact we all used to lament “junk mail”, even back in the 1070s. What converted it from 3 pieces of junk mail per day 6 days a week to 3 pieces of spam per minute 24x7x365 is that the cost of distribution went to zero. Email spam would disappear if it cost 2/10ths of one cent to send an email.
Stopping disinformation requires that it has to have a direct dollar cost to transmit or retransmit. As long as it makes money to retransmit, we’re screwed.