Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is?

Is this an issue with Facebook, or an issue with the society that has yielded the wild success of Facebook?

"I read it on the internet, so it must be true."

Everybody would know I was joking, yet all of this is only an issue precisely because people are insufficiently critical of the things they read. But I'm leaving off an important part of that sentence: ... people are insufficiently critical of the things they read when such things confirm their own biases. People believe what they believe because they believe that is the most logical view to have. That causes people to turn off their filter when seeing something that confirms that belief.

Somebody censoring a belief or attaching an appeal to an arbitrary authority declaring it false isn't going to change people's minds. If anything, it could very well strengthen their resolve as they feel as though they're being oppressed or attacked. There needs to be more cordial debate and discussion between differing groups. I am not suggesting promoting a false balance, but rather pointing out that what we have now is a false balance. So many topics are optically homogenous - which gives participants and readers a gross misunderstanding of reality and leads both to less questioning of their own views, and a lack of understanding of how anybody could ever disagree with them.

Shockingly, my post was quickly downvoted a few times. Seems that several HN users also think that Zuck has more power than Trump.

  Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we 
  can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional 
  object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the 
  three-dimensional world we recognize.

This is an incredible bit of prose. It reads like a description of some kind of future mega-corporation from a Gibson novel, and it's mind-bending to contemplate that we really do live in that universe.

Slowing down fake news is a good thing, and nothing is perfect, which was rather my point too. The grandparent poster states that "(facebook) should not be a platform for propaganda", an absolute statement implying that it is desirable to keep _all_ "propaganda" off facebook (it might be, assuming you can define propaganda) and that it is also reasonably possible to do so (a lot less likely).

I take the point about paid ads, but that does not cover all of "propaganda" any more.

The grandparent's reaction is a bit unkempt.

I suggest that it is very possible that Facebook, with its access to something like 1 billion MAUs, needs to be regulated, and regulated possibly differently than companies before it. The FEC has some rules for political ads with respect to the Internet, but I am in favor of revisiting those to see what rules need to be established for the greater good of the public

>There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook"

It appears that Russians bought $100,000 worth of ads, so that is some place to start looking that is wholly different than a discussion on politics of users.