Journalists decry Facebook experiment's impact on democracy

And this is why we can't hve nice things. The argument here is that we generally don't want an echo chamber focused on one family of postulates and that by wishing for one, the end effect is the depreciation in social value of information sources.

Think of it like genetics/evolution. You want a broad gene/information pool rather than an intellectually inbred circle-jerking cesspool circling the drain of attention at the expense of knowledge and education.

I totally understand why you want to filter those out from your life, and I also want to filter a lot of things out of my life too. But that's our problem, not the media's.

I think the job of journalism is to give you what needs to be heard instead of what you want to hear. Being unbiased is not easy so I think at least media needs to provide as many sides of the story as possible so that each value judgment cancels out and the consumer can make the right decision based on complete set of information.

The problem with the current mainstream media is that every one of them has become "Buzzfeed"ified, which means they try very hard to optimize content AND their interpretation to cater to their existing audience. This is why you see acceleration in polarization. And this is why you see so many people sharing articles talking shit about Hilary Clinton or Donald Trump. They just want to be reinforced with content AND value judgment of what they want to believe in.

This is human nature and we as consumers cannot easily change to act rationally because we have other better things to do in our lives than focusing every waking hour of our lives into useless political debate or whatever that's being marketed through the media. This is why I think this is journalism's job.

I no longer can trust any one side coverage of a single story so have started following multiple sources just so i can make a sane judgment on anything that's happening around me. You should try that too, it's amazing how almost always different parties write extremely different interpretation of the same objective static fact that doesn't need to be sensationalized.

Maybe many people may want to live in the matrix and just believe what they want to believe, but personally I do want to know exactly what I'm being fed and don't want to brainwashed with propaganda.

I realize this is something that's not easily possible within the traditional centralized organizational structure (because they have to make money) which is why I think the new decentralized trust-less technologies may be able to help.

From Facebook's point of view, these media sites are nothing more than parasites that try to write sensational articles to mislead the public and get people to fight online.

Users become unhappy because they get into unnecessary arguments with their friends and family about things that ultimately have no right or wrong answer (such as politics), and end up blaming Facebook for facilitating it.

Facebook is unhappy because their users are unhappy.

It's only these short-sighted media companies that "benefit" off of the traffic (but in the long term not so much).

By cutting this party out of the equation, users are happier. Facebook is happier.

And I would say it's a good thing even for the media because essentially they are being cut off of access to the race to the bottom that's killing them. One of the reasons why these publications had to write sensationalism articles and disseminate them onto Facebook was because if they didn't, their competition would.

Now that they are cut off, they are forced to compete in healthier ways. It's kind of hilarious because it's like these self-important media companies are some kids trying to get their hands on a cookie jar and fighting, and one day their mom (Facebook) takes it all away so nobody gets the cookie jar. The kids cry and bitch about it saying it's not fair. But soon something great happens. kids no longer fight because there's nothing to fight over, but go out to earn their own cookie in their own creative ways. They may even share the ones they earned with one another if they're generous.

Anyway this has nothing to do with democracy, they're just doing the thing they've become good at doing--spinning news to fit their interest--like kids crying and complaining about how it's not fair that the free cookie jar is gone.