Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

I think people are being unreasonably demanding of FaceBook.

Fake-news, I can see the problem.

However snobbishly trolling with risque art and historical pictures, and slamming FB because the overworked mods were not sophisticated enough to recognize them seems like bullying to me.

> We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about. We are in the business of connecting people and ideas — and matching people with the stories they find most meaningful. Our integrity depends on being inclusive of all perspectives and view points, and using ranking to connect people with the stories and sources they find the most meaningful and engaging.

Simply incredible. They are asserting themselves only as a business and not emotional influencers. The emotional influences that facebook brings in people is very powerful. I have seen so many of my friends just vanishing from my feed and almost all of my feed is filled with a couple of pages that I see/interact often. The bubbles are getting incredibly smaller that its very worrying.

A very good example that I saw is the `demonetisation of higher denominations` in India. I was shocked to see the amount of ignorance my close friends showed on how the poor people of our country were left to suffer. So many never read any sort of arguments against the govt's move. They read only pro posts. They were quite visibly upset when being told about how 70+ people have died because of this and all that. I saw a bubble being burst with my own eyes. When there is no way to argue then its not a democracy at all. It favors fanatics because hate/fear spreads faster than love/acceptance.

Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit.

It's not just Facebook, but also Twitter and Reddit.

The Republican guy that shot the pizza place in DC today was driven by a conspiracy theory marketed on Reddit.

These social-media sites are literally dangerous.

I understand your frustration, though I find statements like Facebook simply kills democracy for their own benefit frustrating as well. Facebook is attempting to police the community they provide. Online communities, while they've been around in some form since the usenet days, are still a relatively new phenomenon, especially at the scale of billions, and there's a lot of stuff to figure out.

What concrete steps would you have Facebook take? What should Facebook's goals be? What tradeoffs are worthwhile that ensure an overall positive experience? And still be a profitable business? Lots of things to balance, in my opinion. I think it's a very interesting and important challenge, but I'm not envious at all of doing it in public under the level of scrutiny that Facebook faces.