Facebook tried to make its platform a healthier place, but it got angrier

1) I set my location to the country Chad so I don't see popular trends that aren't very interesting, or serve as sources of outrage. 2) I use the word-based content filters to omit annoying politicians or topics from my feed. So much more peaceful now that I don't have to see people's outrage at the latest political enfant terrible. 3) I primarily follow primarily historians who make fantastic long threads, film critics I respect, movie/art channels. No crazy politics stuff. Few of my friends are on it so I don't have to see their stuff either.

If I want the news, I just read a few major newspapers. It works well enough for me!

We know there are some people with pretty idiosyncratic political beliefs and unsavory connections on Facebook's board and within its senior executive leadership. It's not hard to imagine that maybe they like it being an engine for stoking outrage and perpetuating disinformation for reasons unrelated to the financials or for any intelligible design/engineering logic. It doesn't even necessarily have to be malicious. They could literally just be blinkered by a weird ideological belief in "absolute" free-speech.

"Early tests showed how reducing [downstream MSI- the likelihood of creating long chains of reshares] of the algorithm for civic and health information helped reduce the proliferation of false content. Facebook made the change for those categories in the spring of 2020. When Ms. Stepanov presented Mr. Zuckerberg with the integrity team's proposal to expand that change beyond civic and health content -- and a few countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar where changes were already being made -- Mr. Zuckerberg said he didn't want to pursue it if it reduced user engagement, according to the documents."

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/2020/08/16/face-masks...

Better than nothing, but there are better options.

> if grocery stores are dangerous

I don't think it's possible to make a concrete answer to that question. The "danger" of any given place is going to just be a placement on a spectrum based on the airflow and how crowded it is. Where the line is to define something as "dangerous" is going to be pretty subjective. It's like showing a white-to-black gradient and asking where "dark grey" ends and "grey" begins.

But in your other post, you said:

> What are the actual results from non-vax drugs or treatments?

This is one where there is very clear scientific consensus, yet people ignore it. Take of course Ivermectin, where it's been proven that while it does somehow kill COVID in vitro, the dosage needed to make it work in vivo is higher than the maximum recommended dose.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7172803/

> How long are the vaccinations likely to be useful?

At the time of the invention of the vaccine, this was unknown, but I've always failed to see how it would be a valid criticism against the vaccine enough to choose to skip the vaccine entirely. Whether it would require a booster after 6 months or if it lasted a lifetime, they were proven to significantly reduce hospitalizations and death from COVID.

> Did early large-scale vaccination simply cause forced evolution of variants?

Anyone with a basic knowledge of microbiology acknowledges how quickly bacteria and viruses can evolve (Hence why doctors always plead for patients to complete their anti-biotic prescriptions and not stop taking them once symptoms subside!). Evolution of variants was inevitable. But if we had achieved 90%+ vaccination rates quickly enough, we could have mostly eradicated it before a variant could have taken hold.

And we totally could have. It's really disheartening to see the graph of COVID cases and deaths this year. From January to July, the number was plummeting as vaccinations were being distributed, but some time around June/July, we reached the point where everyone who wanted a vaccine had one, and it was only the anti-vaxxers that were holding out. Eventually, Delta happened, and cases/deaths have been skyrocketing since the beginning of August.

Of course, over 90% of the people being hospitalized or dying from COVID now are unvaccinated (There's even a subreddit dedicated to anti-vaxxers dying to COVID, https://old.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward) , but that still isn't convincing them.

At this point, I'm convinced absolutely nothing will convince an anti-vaxxer. Data doesn't matter to them. Peer-reviewed studies don't matter to them. They think the CDC and FDA are corrupt and everything they spout is a lie. If they get COVID, they'll talk about (but not follow through with) suing the hospital for malpractice when the hospital doesn't give them Ivermectin because Joe Rogan told them Ivermectin cures COVID.