Facebook’s 2016 Election Team Gave Advertisers a Blueprint to a Divided US

Its a good hypothesis. I think there's more psychology at play then just this though. In a way, Facebook helps minorities find each other, and then isolate themselves virtually to be "just amongst them". Possibly its the no consequence framework that has given them the courage to continue to pursue finding others of similar values. As they grow though, and realize they are not alone, the isolated group can now open itself to others and recruit into the group, promoting its values.

Now, for a lot of minority groups, this can be great, maybe positive overall for society. Unless a group with vicious values comes along, then it turns into a problem. Especially if it is found that this minority was in fact never small, just very well amortized across all of our society.

Another aspect though, is that those values could have even been amortized among each individual, in the full set of a person's value. So maybe a person believe many things, and has many values, but they balance out, and generally an overall behavior comes out of them. This behavior maybe is a desired one for society at large. Now comes the internet, or Facebook, and one can explore a subset of its values, maybe the ones that often get most repressed. You explore this in isolation of your other values, almost as a fantasy. Now through this exploration, you find others exploring the same subset. This social finding could somehow re-enforce that value, suddenly weighing it higher into your overall balance. This would mean that it might be a bad thing, as it can alter ones balancing values which have worked for society till now, into a new balance that might exhibit a more detrimental behavior. Alternatively, it could also not affect the behavior when away from the internet. In which case, the internet behavior could mislead us into thinking we have all these people which would have detrimental behavior in real life also, when in reality, we do not, they only exbibit such behaviors when online. And off-course, as we move most of real life on the internet, that might still mean trouble overall.

Just some thoughts.

I remember reading about Obama's election and the use of "big data" and "data science" to target voters: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-us...

The social media companies picked on that and ran with it. So, while Facebook is not exactly the paragon of ethical behavior, this is just fodder for click bait. If the same targeting had worked in someone's favor the article would have been "gave advertisers an edge over traditional advertising" or something.

See below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15590910

You are making many assumptions that need support. They are directly contradicted by relevant research.

This study on the community effect of downvotes [1] came to rather different conclusions. They conclude that downvoting has a paradoxical effect. It actually incentivizes the poster to post even more content, of even lower quality. And just as importantly, upvotes similarly have no positive effects. They do not result in users posting more regularly, nor generating more well received content. Upvoted users actually tend to leave the community more quickly than downvoted users. The one and only response that negatively incentivizes users is no response at all - which causes them to leave much earlier than up or down votes. And it gets even better. Downvotes tend to spread. Downvoted users tend to downvoter others who in turn begin downvoting others as well. All of this along with the consequential effects downvoting have on quality.

I'm not sure the content voting system has been a success. The nominal idea is to enable the masses to sort content by quality. But on most sites when the systems are not being gamed, it just results in people upvoting things that stir their emotions (sensationalism, controversy, politics, cat videos). And when it is being gamed, what little meaningfulness that remained is completely removed.

Even on a site like this which is going to have a more well educated and technical userbase than average who clearly make some effort to upvote more on quality than the above metrics, compare the front page to the first page of new. The frontpage should be on the orders of magnitude more interesting and higher quality, since you're comparing a heavily filtered selection to a random selection. Is it?

[1] - https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1429

I think there is a bigger danger in this sort of isolationism (quite the euphemism!) than just vicious values being allowed to coalesce. The isolationism results in individuals' values not being challenged, which can push them further and further away from reality. Let's create an imaginary example. We're trying to solve a math problem. The correct answer to this problem is 0. However, one side believes the answer is absolutely at least 50. And the other side believes the answer must be no more than -50. When these two groups remain within contact, they counter balance each other. But now let's isolate these groups. In the past when the -50 side chose to go -60 there would be some push back against that and it would help create a more of a central equilibrium. But in isolation without opposition, -60 sounds awesome. Why not -70, or even lower? And on the other side an equal but opposite push for 60, 70 and more is simultaneously happening.

Taking this into real life, I think this is arguably what is happening with politics today. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being right leaning or left leaning. But as we have begun to segregate ourselves into 'only right leaning' or 'only left leaning' the individuals within these groups have started becoming increasingly radicalized. News that is supportive of the chosen belief is accepted unquestioningly. Negative news of 'the other side' is similarly accepted without question. And, perhaps more than ever before, we are creating a country where people are not only becoming radicalized in their beliefs, but mutually intolerant of anything except those beliefs.

And now a thought experiment. Imagine we broke the country into two by political view. And, for the sake of fairness, we'll pretend that both magically have all the resources/wealth/etc of the original nation. Would this resolve the issues with everybody living happily ever after? I imagine we'd see the exact same cycle begin to be carried out without these new nations as people divided and radicalized once again to no real end. The founding fathers were, in terms of identity and broad political view, relatively homogenous. Yet it took no time for them to break into Federalist vs Antifederalist (in spite of their astute prognostications on the dangers of parties). And as one side or the other gained dominant support it never resulted in stability. Instead there would be a fracturing and new split to no end. But as they remained with arm's reach of each side, radicalism never took that much of a hold. Granted, we did have a sitting vice president kill the first secretary of the treasury in a duel. But in a paradoxical way that illustrates how generally respectful the parties remained. Sufficiently impugning somebody's honor, part and parcel of modern politics, was sufficient cause for a duel which did on occasion result in death.