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Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

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Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#21

Post by canistr »

If the problem is that Facebook provides an echo-chamber that exacerbates the influence of one particular viewpoint, wouldn't the solution be for Facebook to begin injecting opposing content directly into the newsfeed?

You can kind of see this with trending topics. If you don't follow a particular topic but suddenly see it trending in your feed, there's a chance you may random walk into clicking it. If Facebook opens up a global/regional/local newsfeed that isn't highly targeted, then you could potentially start seeing more original content.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#22

Post by gnuvince »

Back in late August when I started my new job, my first purchase with my first paycheck was to get a subscription to Le Devoir, Montreal's independent newspaper. It's amazing how much more informed I feel now: because the content only changes every 24 hours, I have the opportunity to get to the less sexy stories, stories that would be buried on a fast moving website because they don't generate clicks, but which still deal with important local issues.

I highly encourage people to research their local newspapers and support one: you get so much out of something that costs the equivalent of a couple Starbucks coffee pet month.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#24

Post by sambe »

I know it's off-topic to comment on the quality of a submission, but this is the first time I've been truly shocked by a #1 HN story. Normally when there is some discussion about relevance to HN, I can at least say "this is not really for me, but there's no problem with it being here". This is so mundane and obvious that I suspect non-normal voting. If you found this story interesting - why?

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#25

Post by mmagin »

Spellman wrote: post #2

Right. People just need to leave their bubbles, read from a variety of sources, and not rely on their friends for news. Obviously easier said than done. But personally that's what RSS feeds are great for. Long ago in 2011, there was a lovely TED talk about the possible bubbles forming. https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...

Yeah, he wrote a good book, and then started Upworthy, which IMHO is just a source of facebook clickbait.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#26

Post by mxfh »

empath75 wrote: post #14
leeleelee wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't want to leave their bubbles, for the fear of uncovering uncomfortable truths. For example, I have friends who flat out refused to read any of the WikiLeaks e-mails that could potentially reveal something bad about Hillary, her campaign, the DNC, or any entity on the left. That's just how some (probably a lot of) people are. When some people encounter something that challenges your pre-existing beliefs, i…

I'm a liberal who voted for Hillary Clinton, despite basically loathing everything the Clintons stand for, and I read all the wikileaks emails. That said, the torrent of pure bullshit based on those emails that was floating around on both sides was unbelievable. Either she was as pure as the driven snow or a she-demon, with nothing in between. After a certain point, it wasn't even worth the effort to argue about it a…

The mail dump was basically a free for all corpus to plug any preconceived narrative up to hamfistedly made up conspiracy you could grep out of this.

The rest is more of the normal mode of operation of any human organization: "Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#27

Post by Spellman »

mmagin wrote: post #25
Spellman wrote: post #2

Right. People just need to leave their bubbles, read from a variety of sources, and not rely on their friends for news. Obviously easier said than done. But personally that's what RSS feeds are great for. Long ago in 2011, there was a lovely TED talk about the possible bubbles forming. https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_b...

Yeah, he wrote a good book, and then started Upworthy, which IMHO is just a source of facebook clickbait.

Well, that's disappointing...

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#28

Post by leppr »

gcatalfamo wrote: post #3

Does Snowden really think that the canonical man on the street is here waiting to be advised on this topic? The people who were influenced the most by fake news are those who probably don't even feel there exists a fake news issue.

There are a lot of people just on the verge of being convinced, who consume mainstream media and probably know a little about Snowden and look up to him as an authority figure on the same level as any other "tech/science" personality (Elon Musk, Neil deGrass Tyson, ...), who will be convinced by his position and then influence the more naive/ignorant people around them.

Politics is never black and white.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#29

Post by woodchuck64 »

One thing's for certain: Facebook AI research is running deep-layered natural-language ANNs right now on a year of election comments and likes. I think well before four years they'll know exactly how to detect bubbles of alternate political reality and also how to break them up. There will be some interesting decisions facing them before the next election.

Re: Snowden: Stop Relying on Facebook for Your News

#30

Post by notadoc »

This article is on a "How to make money blogging" website, not exactly a source I'd turn to for trustworthy anything let alone news about not relying on other news...

Anyway, here are some more legitimate sources for the same topic for anyone interested:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/snowden-discusses-facebook...

https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/15/snowden-we-rely-too-much...

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