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Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

theatlantic.com

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Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#61

Post by gfody »

runawaybottle wrote: post #22
oarsinsync wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but Facebook will deliberately "optimise for engagement", regardless of whether the engagement is positive or negative for the user or society, because ads. Facebook wasn't the cesspit it is today when your news feed actually showed you your friends updates in chronological order. Hell, it was better still even before the GD news feed even existed.

I guess I just don’t understand the argument. For decades everyone knew commercial breaks were just that, no one was being influenced by 30 second ads on TV. The stuff that influenced people back then is the same stuff that influences people today, social pressure and desire to fit in/attain status. Facebook ads, if anything, should be a distraction from social pressure. People are creating the social pressure to exp…

> Do we bear no responsibility at all here for how we behave?

as described in tfa, the ad infrastructure is maximizing controversy and devisiveness when it optimizes for engagement. it's like inciting a mob - the instigator is more culpable than the members

Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#62

Post by karaterobot »

I agree with the broad message that social media has had a net negative effect on the world. I think the Doomsday Machine metaphor doesn't work, and even though I'm open to the argument the article was making, I don't think it did a good job making it.

I wonder whether the media climate created by social media has made it harder to write persuasively against it. In order to be part of a successful business model centered around social media, these articles tend to embody the qualities (inflammatory, reactionary, narrow-minded, unfocused) of the thing they're railing against.

Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#63

Post by pjc50 »

blhack wrote: post #47
busterarm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in a socioeconomically-stratified filter bubble on facebook. My facebook was sufficiently diverse and my feed was exactly like twitter, even though none of my friend group were twitter users. I closed all of my social accounts. Doomsday machine is _exactly_ how I would describe all social media.

I am? My Facebook feed contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car. Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are. I’m not sure how that’s me living is a socioeconomically stratified filter bubble. My twitter on the other hand, is mostly (all?) left wing Silicon Valley/tech types. It’s diverse in…

> Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are.

And somehow this isn't spilling over into big toxic feuds?

Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#64

Post by Raphmedia »

trident5000 wrote: post #17

YouTube has just as much of a monopoly in its category if not more than Facebook (with similar influence over society) yet we dont see the level of regular attacks (I'm not here to defend either, I'm a critic, but just pointing this out). Facebook total users: about 2.7 billion (with probably 80% dominance in its category). YouTube: about 2 billion but with a ~95% video stream dominance. The difference seems to be in…

There are a lot of articles about YouTube's recommendation algorithms and how it spread fake news, conspiracies and similar problematic things.

For example, this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003

Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#65

Post by lurker619 »

blhack wrote: post #27

I must have really different experiences than all of these people that write these articles (it seems like there has been something like this, every week on HN, for the last 10 years) My facebook is mostly people showing pictures of stuff, sharing memes, some movie discussion groups, event planning groups. It seems like mostly just people using facebook as a proxy for real world interactions. Twitter on the other han…

The ratio of signal to noise on my facebook feed is much worse than my twitter feed. Maybe I'm the right target segment for twitter (young professional in tech) but I see 100x more interesting content from tech/comedians/VCs on twitter as compared to FB, which even my elder family members don't use anymore (they all use whatsapp groups for sharing photos).

Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#66

Post by jancsika »

blhack wrote: post #27

I must have really different experiences than all of these people that write these articles (it seems like there has been something like this, every week on HN, for the last 10 years) My facebook is mostly people showing pictures of stuff, sharing memes, some movie discussion groups, event planning groups. It seems like mostly just people using facebook as a proxy for real world interactions. Twitter on the other han…

> I must have really different experiences than all of these people that write these articles (it seems like there has been something like this, every week on HN, for the last 10 years)

Me too!

It's almost as if the recommendation algorithm and ad model end up showing and reinforcing different types of content and behavior for different sets of users.

We really need a good word for this process how different people on Facebook see different things-- how it's kind of "sifted," so to speak, in such a way that even if the user tries to venture out to find different content, they can easily end up back where they started. Like walking inside a sphere without knowing it.

For example, maybe I read articles like this one for a full decade and tried at least one time to find fake news and rabid content on Facebook. So I started looking, but lo and behold, the recommendation engine never hooked me up with the ICE Facebook group, or a proudboys group, or one of the zillion other nasty echo chambers these articles keep mentioning.

Did any of the articles you read for the last 10 years give a name to this phenomenon of keeping a user in a cordoned off area with their custom-sifted content? I'll be honest, I've never actively searched to see if such a term exists. But you'd think after all this time an article that uses such a term would have eventually been posted to my wall.

Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#67

Post by oarsinsync »

runawaybottle wrote: post #22
oarsinsync wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but Facebook will deliberately "optimise for engagement", regardless of whether the engagement is positive or negative for the user or society, because ads. Facebook wasn't the cesspit it is today when your news feed actually showed you your friends updates in chronological order. Hell, it was better still even before the GD news feed even existed.

I guess I just don’t understand the argument. For decades everyone knew commercial breaks were just that, no one was being influenced by 30 second ads on TV. The stuff that influenced people back then is the same stuff that influences people today, social pressure and desire to fit in/attain status. Facebook ads, if anything, should be a distraction from social pressure. People are creating the social pressure to exp…

> I guess I just don’t understand the argument. For decades everyone knew commercial breaks were just that, no one was being influenced by 30 second ads on TV. The stuff that influenced people back then is the same stuff that influences people today, social pressure and desire to fit in/attain status.

TV programming in the past was optimised for engagement as well. There were extremely limited slots, so each slot had to appeal to the maximal number of people. This resulted in content that was generally relatively bland and inoffensive.

Fast forward to today, and digital 'slots' are limitless. Each user gets their own personalised view. No longer do you need to optimise for what appeals to the maximal number of people as a group. Instead, you optimise for what results in continued engagement by each individual.

It turns out the vast majority of us are stupid (myself included) and are easily manipulated through negative / divisive / controversial content.

The revenue model hasn't changed. It's the content delivery that has.

So to your point, I agree, ads aren't the problem. To my point, Facebook as it exists today is the problem.

Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#69

Post by [deleted] »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #54

Another week, another hyperbolic article written by journalists against the industry eating their lunch. I hate Facebook as much as anyone else, but let’s be honest here: the Information Age means that the technologies of information generation and propagation have been democratized. Just like the Church was angry at the Printing Press, the old gatekeepers (legacy media) are rabidly resisting the new technology. Ulti…

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

#70

Post by blhack »

pjc50 wrote: post #63
blhack wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am? My Facebook feed contains people who make over $1M/yr, and people who live in their car. Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are. I’m not sure how that’s me living is a socioeconomically stratified filter bubble. My twitter on the other hand, is mostly (all?) left wing Silicon Valley/tech types. It’s diverse in…

> Some right wing people talking about how suspicious they think the election was, and left wing people talking about how bad those people are. And somehow this isn't spilling over into big toxic feuds?

No not that I've seen. On facebook, most of the people know each other in real life, so it seems like those sorts of feuds don't really happen there as much.

There is a groups of people I can think of who occupy dramatically different idealogical spaces, and they do argue with one another, but it's usually more in the form of giant walls of text back and forth.

The most "dramatic" thing happening in my facebook space right now is that a bunch of my friends worked on building a drive through Christmas light show (many of my friends are artists and fabricators), and then the person they built it for didn't pay them, so they're organizing protests.

Just going through my feed right now it's:

Somebody posting pictures about her adventure van build.

Somebody posting a "shop local" guide for Arizona.

A person posting a bunch of selfies of herself.

Somebody asking questions about a soft egg that one of their chickens laid (in a backyard chickens group)

Somebody posting that she just graduated with her masters degree

A post in a group called "let's really argue about film/tv" about christmas movies.

A solicitation for donations to a charity for the homeless (its' getting cold here in Phoenix right now. It was in the 30s last night)

Solicitations in a "buy nothing Tempe" group.

Ah, the first political post: the headline is: "even with three Trump appointed justices on the Bench, SCOTUS Declines to Roll Back Marriage equality"

Picture of a clock tower

A news article about NZ lifting covid restrictions

A motivational picture/meme about self care

Somebody talking about fasting

Somebody selling their tiedyes

Somebody graduating nursing school

More backyard chickens

I'm trying to find something inflammatory here but honestly my entire feed is basically just this forever and ever. People I know and am acquainted with in real life just posting about what they're doing. A few political posts here and there, and generally those don't get any comments.

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