Facebook is America’s scapegoat du jour

Users' Friend data, which was used by OfA, was not explicitly given by those Friends.

Yes, Facebook's user agreement allowed them to do that. But I'd bet most people didn't consider that by signing up for Facebook, their personal profile data could be given to political campaigns without their knowledge, if any of their friends consented to it.

Our most trenchant and persistent criticism of Facebook has been rooted in a skeptical view of its illusory component; one where illusory experience is scapegoated as our fatal flaw to be subsequently exploited by Facebook’s evil machinations. We view the net-worth of its board of directors as being directly proportional to their malign influence in our society, pulling the wool over our eyes with an addictive illusion while voraciously funneling our private information into vast data-centers where AI is trained to new heights of persuasiveness. In this view ‘The Filter Bubble’ and ‘Fake News’ can easily be seen to be be mere effects of the following feedback loop:

User engages with material that matches their base desires, they are seduced and enveloped by these illusions, and the illusory experience of having their internal life seemingly manifest in the real world, this feels important to them so they form groups on this basis, like the prisoners in Plato's allegory of the cave. Facebook optimizes for engagement, presenting this user with more specialized material, eventually this material detaches from reality altogether. However this results in a skeptical cul-de-sac where the meaningfulness of Facebook is ignored. Instead it is scapegoated so that we can largely avoid taking responsibility for our actions. To refute these claims Mark Zuckerberg has emphasised our agency in deciding what Facebook is for and does. Regarding Fake News he has said:

> “I do think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is they saw some fake news … If you believe that, then I don’t think you have internalized the message the Trump supporters are trying to send in this election.”

And regarding the Filter Bubble:

> “The research also shows something that is a little bit less inspiring, which is that we study not only people’s exposure in Newsfeed to content from different points of view, but then what people click on and engage with. By far the biggest filter in the system is not that the content isn’t there, [or] they don’t have friends who support the other candidate or are of another religion, [it’s that] you just don’t click on it. You actually tune it out when you see it. You have your world view. You go through, and I think that we would all be surprised how many things that don’t conform to our world view that we just tune out.”

Usefully Winnicott’s transitional object helps us out of the skeptical cul-de-sac by foregrounding our agency in choosing our illusory experiences and thereby restoring their hopeful character. It also matches Mark Zuckerberg’s informed view on what happens on Facebook.

- http://iain.land/posts/20170201-transitional-object.html

Sure, it's just like that, because all that hacking of Democratic databases didn't happen.

I think the assumption that the wrongdoing was a conspiracy to get Trump elected gets far too much attention and is a secondary issue, but unlike the birther issue, there was quite a bit of funny business in general. The birther issue was just made up a priori.

The funny business, regardless of whether it benefited anyone, needs to be investigated. Once we understand what happened, then we can worry about whether it was an effort to swing the election or just a tactic for creating chaos.

It has, but it's never been so easy to spout off to the world before, or be instantly informed about what other people are thinking.

In the 1980s the media hated Reagan about as much as they hated Bush or Trump. Before that it was Nixon. But you really only heard about it if you watched the evening news, and that was 30 minutes of the day. It wasn't being fed to you continuously like an intravenous drip on your phone.

It's the speed and pervasiveness that have increased, not so much the partisanship.

Of course they do. They influence the bias by various means. They don't select particular topics. To choose the specific topic everyone is talking about today, you need just a bit more than a handful of board members though.