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Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

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Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#4
I’ve deactivated Facebook for about 15 years. Hopefully my belief in fake news is correspondingly low.

It’s tough though; for all the bullshit that comes at you through these social networks, there is a lot of genuine personal connection too.

Having shunned most social networking for double digit years I do feel “cleaner” for not having to wade through all the crap, probably comparatively less anxious about the world in general, but also undoubtedly more isolated too.

No easy answer…

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#5
It is still unclear to me how we expect these platforms to filter "misinformation" given that 1) It's not in Meta's interest 2) who gets to decide what is and is not fake news ie "who watches the watchman"? and 3) the human base desire to gorge on junk, of one form or another.

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#6
I would love if there was a Nielsen-rating equivalent for fake news outlets.

Having worked in AdTech and Pulisher Analytics for about a decade, I know that orgs are measuring fake news viewability and content type + quality, so it'd just be nice to see a company making that digestible for people.

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#8

It is still unclear to me how we expect these platforms to filter "misinformation" given that 1) It's not in Meta's interest 2) who gets to decide what is and is not fake news ie "who watches the watchman"? and 3) the human base desire to gorge on junk, of one form or another.

I agree, but we don't really need platforms to filter misinformation so much as to stop knowingly turbo-charging it.

Re: Deactivating Facebook for just a few weeks reduces belief in fake news

#10

I’ve deactivated Facebook for about 15 years. Hopefully my belief in fake news is correspondingly low. It’s tough though; for all the bullshit that comes at you through these social networks, there is a lot of genuine personal connection too. Having shunned most social networking for double digit years I do feel “cleaner” for not having to wade through all the crap, probably comparatively less anxious about the world…

We need to go back to "the old ways", that is, people just need to pay to use the internet. Compute and storage has never been cheaper. Instead of a service subsidized with ads, we each host our own software and just pay AWS (or whoever) for the bits we flip.
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