Facebook Groups Are Destroying America

I take this as a hit piece. Writer wouldn't have this problem if it were a left leaning Mastodon instance which are also "built for privacy and community"

In fact I take Mastodon as much more worse where that's the whole selling point: make your own echo chamber and enjoy it.

Every time someone proposes to dethrone Facebook from its position as social media monarch, we get a lecture about the omnipotent 'network effect' and how it ensures that Facebook is unassailable until such time as a critical mass of its users disengage from the service.

What you're missing here is that this network effect is being weaponized by these groups. The 'make your own echo chamber' approach happens all the time, but those sites never really grow and thrive; those that grow implode and those that thrive stay intimate.

With Facebook, things are different -- Facebook's own discoverability and sharing tools get used to shape a user-acquisition funnel just like any business communication major learns about in advertising classes. There's an engage-indoctrinate-radicalize-evangelize cycle that Facebook sharing tools are explicitly compatible with.

Nobody needs technical abilities to run a Facebook group in the way that you need technical abilities to operate a Mastodon server. The barrier to entry is artificially low, the ad tech is artificially strong, and it's prime real estate for turning disgruntled centrists into performative extremists who will say anything for the likes, delete the missteps along the way, and develop into inspirational stories for nutbars. You can't do this on niche platforms, but on Facebook you've got a global stage.

An earlier smaller-scale version of that enthusiasm was visible during the Howard Dean campaign, which was considered the first Internet-centric or at least Internet-adept major party presidential campaign in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dean_2004_presidential_...

This was said to have disintermediated the connection between the candidate and the public, which, at the time, the press generally admired. While Dean apparently pioneered the idea of this direct connection through the Internet, he wasn't credited with the database and psychology expertise that Wired attributed to the Obama campaign four years later.