201–210 of 527 posts
How about bringing the same rules to the wider FB? I just want to look at baby pictures and connect with friends. I don't want to be part of a machinery that spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories.
No one has to use Facebook.
Facebook wants their employees to stop talking about politics, even though Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. How exactly do you avoid political discussion when you're asking what constitutes hate speech, whether a US president should be allowed to violate Facebook's content guidelines, or to what extent governments can spread misinformation in other countries? If you work at Facebook, y…
>Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. Why is that "by its nature"? I don't think that's "by its nature" at all. Phone companies and ISPs facilitate communication between people, but that doesn't necessitate they take political stances on what communication to allow. Why should Facebook? If certain language should be restricted, then laws should be written restricting said language and Face…
Some of filtering is based on what the user wants to see, some of it is based on some notion of how "good" a piece of content is (scored by likes and engagement numbers), some of it is from advertisers paying to have their content make it through the filter, and some of it is Facebook deciding what should be seen and what shouldn't (mostly driven by their desire to keep you on the platform). Every single thing you see on Facebook has made it through a huge filter that ultimately decides if it's something you should see or not. And the inevitable outcome of building a gigantic what-information-do-you-get-to-see machine is that there are many, many parties trying to influence the machine.
Phone lines don't have that problem.
I wonder what the people who justify working for Facebook because they’re “changing it from the inside” think about this.
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Even so, in the grand scheme of things sports is utterly inconsequential, politics isn’t. If your team won the Super Bowl or your nation took home a lot of gold at the Olympics, how does that affect you materially?
The reason to avoid political discussions is that they're often as toxic as the worst sports arguments, not that the underlying topics don't matter. No matter how important the underlying issue is, having my coworkers call each other nasty names won't resolve it.
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I can't see how that is even possible at this point. You'd have to remove groups, pages, public profiles, and sharing, which would wreck the advertising and revenue ecosystem. Or, come up with magical AI which could detect politics/memes/disinformation and remove it instantly after it's been posted.
I’m sure they could develop a classifier that would catch most (~90%) of political content, and make it opt-in - if people want to see it they can, but it could be hidden by default. This would be my preferred approach, so that I can use it for connecting with people but avoid listening to everyone’s political outrage.
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> Taking a stance to not control what communication is allowed is a very political stance. Then in your model of the world, how would one not take a political stance? If everyone takes a political stance in your model by definition no matter what their intents or actions are then it's a rather useless definition.
It's like Rush says in Free Will, "If you choose not to decide, You still have made a choice".
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Imagine if it wasn’t a Fox News talking head, but an incendiary video built on falsehoods being spread to incite violence - or what if it’s 2011 again and ISIS beheading videos are being shared and supposing the evidence showed they were causing ISIS recruitment to increase?
I would still have a proper judge made a decision than Facebook. I can easily block people that share BS on Facebook but I don't want Facebook to make that decision for me. That overrides my own choice to follow them in the first place.
How about bringing the same rules to the wider FB? I just want to look at baby pictures and connect with friends. I don't want to be part of a machinery that spreads misinformation and conspiracy theories.
I wonder what happened... the early days of FB you're still somewhat close to your friend circle and therefore most of the content were personal updates. At then at some point Facebook started suggested links, posts that you have not explicitly followed, news articles that may or may not have been verified. Now every time I check the comments under such posts, it's people arguing with each other, and then people shar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Facebook by its nature takes stances on deeply political topics. Why is that "by its nature"? I don't think that's "by its nature" at all. Phone companies and ISPs facilitate communication between people, but that doesn't necessitate they take political stances on what communication to allow. Why should Facebook? If certain language should be restricted, then laws should be written restricting said language and Face…
Because Facebook, by it's nature, is designed to filter content. It turned everyone and everything into a content generator, even down to the level of "Jimmy liked a post by Burger King!". It gives everyone access to this unfathomable ocean of content, and then filters it down to something a person can consume. Some of filtering is based on what the user wants to see, some of it is based on some notion of how "good"…
If Facebook limits the filtering to engagement, then it isn't the fault of Facebook that political content is engaging. That's just human nature. Disasters, outrage, politics, polarizing topics - these are all popular topics both online and off-line, and apread quickly as town gossip well before Facebook.
It is only when Facebook steps in and says that particular topics need to be exceptions to the filtering rules that apply to everything else, that they make themselves into a political actor.
For instance, let's say that the news feed showed you content based purely on number of likes. If political posts get lots of likes that isn't Facebook's problem. If the same ranking rules apply to all posts (# of likes) then they would remain neutral. As soon as Facebook says "content from x person will have their ranking artificially changed to reduce/increase engagement with it" thereby making an exception to the rule that applies to everything else, they have now become a political actor.