Facebook’s Walled Wonderland Is Inherently Incompatible with News

The biggest reason is that most of the Dale Gribbles of the world, just like the local college's Revolutionary Socialist club, are all talk. It takes a lot of commitment to actually carry out a shooting or bombing or whatever, and most people are happy to say "This is really bad. Someone oughta do something, and it's good thing that I'm aware of this unlike the rest of the sheeple" while doing absolutely nothing to effect that agenda.

The people who actually manage to commit these acts are on an entirely different level of nuts.

Pedestrian example: How many gung-ho teenagers talk about joining the military? How many of them actually go through with talking to a recruiter, going to MEPS, and signing on the dotted line? And that's for a cause that is widely accepted by society and confers actual benefits rather than guaranteed violent death or lifelong incarceration in an elaborate concrete box in rural Colorado.

My personal view is that low regulation advertising is simply not compatible with Western Democracy. If you don't regulate away emotive and brand advertising you're corrupting all the systems that are supposed to regulate our societies (for brevity "advertising" refers to brand and emotive advertising in the below).

The basic idea of how information flows & control works in western market driven democratic republics:

People -> Government -> Markets The People Elect their Government. The Government controls the rules of "The Market". The People decide what they want in their day to day lives, demand it from actors in "The Market". Those who fulfill these needs are rewarded and copied. Information moves from consumers to market actors rapidly, this information is hard to fake.

This is very much how markets that don't have much advertising work, take rice, wheat, logistics. Success demands you provide a better product at lower cost. People can easily compare products so you _must_ compete on price, the companies get very efficient they make stuff people want cheaply.

What does advertising do to the above system? Firstly your market starts rewarding the best liars and cheats. Make cheap crappy sewing machines whilst buying out previously good sewing machine brands and running their name into the dirt? FANTASTIC! HUGE REWARD! DO MORE OF THIS. Make soft drinks of dubious health value but persuade people that their consumption is necessary to their social lives? FANTASTIC! HUGE REWARD!

If this wasn't bad enough the advertisers are able to give away entertainment and news content for free. Most people do not want to pay for things and aren't aware how subtle and pervasive the lies are. So most people lap this free information up, so now the advertisers hold the purse strings on every media channel out there. The advertisers control the people, the advertisers control the market.

Adverts -> Government -> Market The final negative impact is the huge swaths of people who are working incredibly hard at a net loss for society at large. People who aren't working making things other people want. People who are working at making other people want things they otherwise wouldn't. Wonder why we aren't working 15 hour weeks as predicted by Keynes? Blame all the people making adverts and everyone who's making content funded by those adverts.

Fake news & Facebook are the latest and worst examples of this corruption. But really it's just a symptom of the underlying disease. After we've perfected mechanization and economies of scale large profits require you fool people into making bad decisions. Doing this is lucrative and since our markets are evolutionary optimizing machines we are going to see it get worse unless we take action to stop it.

Yo I'm from India.

> bullshit your way into thinking that somehow you are changing the world.

Yet in the paragraphs before that you are speaking about how facebook _is_ changing the world.

Apart from that minor (mistake?) thing, I do agree with you fully. Using facebook is a good way to surround yourself with people who think and do exactly as you do, which is not beneficial.

Same goes for other types of social media, but you can break it easier with for example twitter. You can follow people with different ideas than yourself and be challenged by their view, which is a healthy thing to do. I feel like the treshold to that is lower on twitter than on facebook. But then again, I am not a facebook user myself since a couple of years ago, and that experience might have changed.

Though on the flipside, it can also be used for good. Not because you are into some kind of weird belief that will be reinforced by others, but for example imagine that you want to learn esperanto, there might be facebook groups full of people doing the same and it might help you learn it with greater ease.

> Our education system is failing to instill critical thinking into young people.

I'm convinced this is the key.

However, media outlets (social or otherwise) also have a responsibility of, at the very least, not spreading stories that are demonstrably, factually inaccurate, even if it impacts their "bottom line". Naive and hopeful, I know, but there are two sides to it.