How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

I'm not patronizing any nation or bringing up the "holy" democracy. Even jumping the gun and introducing that "holy" in there makes betrays your message's very... zealoty nature. That is entirely your wording and understanding. If you want to make a point do it without distorting the message you're replying to into oblivion.

This being said, to this day there is no better real world alternative to democracy. I take it you know very little of how Russia and China work internally. It's going to sound cynical but if you did you'd appreciate the "lesser evil" of western democracy. Think at least of the fact that you're now free to express these opinions, as you do.

You know the upside of democracy? With enough people behind you you can easily install dictatorship. The other way around needs slightly more sacrifices. Pretty sure those people fighting in the Arab spring against their not elected leaders weren't doing it just to jump on the bashing hype train ;).

Or the other way, by governments of democratic countries to destabilize nondemocratic countries, which is arguably easier.

I agree that this type of headline would've been written like:

"Facebook Gives People A Voice in France" - or something along those lines, a few years ago, if the Arab Spring is anything to go by.

The writer's perspective very much matters in this type of articles. It's especially obvious in politics (although many people still don't notice it, and think they are just being served "the facts").

That said, I'll hardly spill a tear over people "over-criticizing" Facebook. If there's one company that's worthy of waves and waves of criticism, Facebook certainly qualifies for that role.

It certainly deserves it more than Tesla, which, with the exception of the criticism of the reckless promotion and implementation of Autopilot, I think the criticism of Tesla lately has been largely off-base and undeserved.

But for some reason, people seem to assume that both good news and bad news should be delivered evenly throughout the year, or something. Like they get surprised when there's a lot of bad news/negative press continuing for many months about something (whether it's Tesla, Facebook, or cryptocurrencies), but forget the same has been true about the good news about those things in the past, too. The good and bad news are almost never evenly distributed over a period of time. They are far more likely to come in bursts of either positive or negative stories.

Not long ago, I remember reading on this very site comments dismissing the idea that Facebook will suffer over the Cambridge Analytica. I said then that Facebook will likely not see an immediate effect, but will likely see it over the long term, when it starts declining, the Cambridge Analytica will be one of the reasons for that decline.

All of these negative news stories you see now are connected to the Cambridge Analytica story, which seems to have opened a kind of "Pandora's box" for Facebook. It's all downhill from here for Facebook. Some people just haven't realized it yet.

The issue described in the article is not an issue with Facebook. Filter bubbles are an issue that's much larger than Facebook. Blaming it all on Facebook would mean we ignore the fact that they also exist elsewhere.

I'd argue it's more a defence of accuracy than Facebook per se.

Just because you don't like a person or company or country or whatever doesn't mean that it's reasonable to accuse them of all the ills of the world.

I'd even argue that it can be detrimental. If you get enough "Facebook killed my puppy" stories, folk will start ignoring stories about Facebook and miss the stuff that's genuinely a problem.