How Facebook makes us dumber

> Once people discover that others agree with them, they become more confident -- and then more extreme.

And then the example plus explanation.

> Arriving at these judgments on your own, you might well hold them tentatively and with a fair degree of humility. But after you learn that a lot of people agree with you, you are likely to end up with much greater certainty

This mechanism is considered extreme? Why? When a lot of people agree with me on some issue then naturally I'll be more confident in expressing my views.

So what if Facebook pairs tin foil hat wearers together so they can share their views? I doubt that they'll start believing that they are now the mainstream.

I suspect that the writer of this article just deeply resents the fact that persons with out of the norm beliefs or thoughts can now effectively organise and exchange ideas which in turn directly threatens the journalists monopoly on creating the mainstream narrative.

It is a good thing that ideas and views from other perspectives are now widely available online. You now can watch RT and then CNN or FOX and conclude that basically all of these channels are just feeding us propaganda crap with different goals.

Careful not to cut yourself on that edge

What most people forget about networks like Facebook (or twitter for that matter) is that just a misinformation can spread quickly, corrections of that information can to.

What FB have helped with is to make sure that neither newspapers nor politicians will be able to communicate in a vacuum.

What we see now is the first steps of a more enlightened society not a dumber one because dissent both gets normalized and much better access to minds it didn't before.

Of course there is going to be people who think alike or people who only befriend people who think exactly like them. But the second they want to spread their gospel outside their groups they are going to be met with a lot of other perspectives and thats a good thing.

Just out of interest, what is the overwhelming scientific evidence? Is it causal or just correlational? Because I can imagine tons of reasons why children who are often spanked have more problems in school - not least, reverse causality - that would not imply you should never spank your child.

> 1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No.

First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself.

Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform. Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are. If you want to reach people, you want to be where they are.

> 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there.

Facebook is not trapping anyone inside. If you mean that you can't contact them out-of-band, then well, that's by design and actually a feature.

> If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business.

Most businesses come to the rational conclusion that this almost never happens, and the small risk is worth being where the customers are.

> 3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page.

That is totally by design and again, very much a feature.

For some reasons businesses think they're entitled to "reaching out" to people with their unsolicited offers. They're not. We don't want your spam. Neither your, nor that of any of hundreds of companies we deal with every month. The etiquette here is the Hollywood principle - don't call us, we'll call you.

> 4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people).

It's actually simpler than writing quality e-mails, or quality snailmails. There is some additional work because people will reach out to you more through Facebook than through conventional channels, and you need someone to handle the communication.

> - Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors:

> 1. You are in control of your list.

Which is something we, the customers, don't want.

> 2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free.

And that we absolutely, positively don't want most of the time.

I mean, I get it. There are some exchanges we both agree that we want to have. You can't make a reliable newsletter via Facebook, nor I would like to get my account info through Messenger. But please move your ad communications to Facebook, where they will be unobtrusive for us and properly curtailed by the platform.