[typeiierror]

Sometimes I wonder that when we shower criticism on Facebook about privacy concerns, we're missing the forest for the trees. The bigger issue I see is the sheer amount of eyeballs trained exclusively to Facebook's content.

What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos, because an algorithm says that challenging articles cause people to leave FB, reducing page views and ad revenue?

[Torgo]

It's a man-in-the-middle attack on culture.

[ChuckMcM]

Media has always been that. Why, during a military coup, is the first thing that is attacked are the TV stations? Control the message, control the culture.

It is fascinating to see the Internet (and in this case Facebook) displacing the multi-billion(trillion?) media estate. I remember the dot.com bubble where the media claimed that statements that the Internet would make them obsolete was crap. 20 years ahead of its time I guess.

The policy question is similar to the phone system one, is it in the people's best interest that their be a standard phone system? And if so, can you regulate it sufficiently to avoid abuses? Those were the questions surrounding the original Bell network in the US. What does a monopoly look like in the Internet world, and do we, can we, regulate it? Pretty important questions.

[ethbro]

We ultimately decided landlines needed to be subjected to pretty stringent regulatory requirements in return for their monopoly (before ultimately breaking them up). Hopefully the same will happen to Facebook if they retain market share in 20 years.

[WalterBright]

The government created the AT&T monopoly.

[ethbro]

I defer to you, but my take would be that the government simply declined to fight it on anti-trust grounds between ~1910-1970.

On the other hand, I don't think you can ignore Bell Labs or the fact they they did build some amazing infrastructure. Would the world have been better off on the whole with more competition in AT&T's heyday?

[jacobolus]

Go read Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch. The details of these media/communications monopoly histories are fascinating.

It’s hard to answer your counterfactual definitively, but probably, yes.

[dredmorbius]

Which turns out be the general argument against centralised authority. Autocratic rule, monopoly power, monoculture agriculture, etc. You've only got one system, one set of preferences, one set of decision algorithms, often with its own preferences (even if unconscious, though very often not), determining outcomes for all.

Any wealth or power imbalance tends toward this result.

[hnbroseph]

just like tv, radio and newspapers. perhaps even churches, temples and mosques... though that might be more controversial to say.

[mabbo]

There always another radio, newspaper, church. There's really only one Facebook, and it's now how you get essentially all of those things.

[khattam]

I REALLY hope that you are being sarcastic.

[mabbo]

Honestly? I'm not. I personally browse a few news sites, hacker news, etc, but I'm in the minority.

Facebook is doing a very fine job of being the first place people hear about stuff happening. It's one website, and it will give you exactly the news you care about- big stories side by side with your friends' random musings. They've aggregated all information that a person cares about in one place, personalized, custom-fit, nothing you don't care about.

I'm not calling that a good thing, but I do think it's true.

There's a MacDonald's in every city in the planet, and it's literally killing us from how unhealthy it is, but good god I keep going back every now and then. Same idea as Facebook.

[xiaoma]

You may have a point about facebook, but I have to disagree about McDonald's. Many, many people eat tons of McDonald's and live to a ripe old age, including Warren Buffet, my great aunt (now 103), and countless others.

Yes, you can make a strong argument that eating ONLY McDonald's is unhealthy (though others have done the opposite in various documentaries), but if you're going to say that McDonald's is "literally" killing us, you'll need to back it up with a mountain of evidence. Anecdotes aside, the places with the greatest longevity also tend to have a lot of McDonalds restaurants. The top McDonald's eating countries (per capita) outside the US are Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada and France—some of the longest living people in the world!

If they're "literally" being killed by the food, it sure takes a long time to do its damage!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12464729

[beachy]

Its how some people get all those things. Not people who care enough to get their news directly from a number of sources, instead of via the Facebook filter.

[fasfdkjlk]

Even if you don't get your information from Facebook, if enough people do, then Facebook can influence the outcomes of elections which directly affect your life. If you are a plumber who doesn't use Facebook, and Facebook promotes a bunch of content that foments anti-plumber sentiments, you may be attacked on the street by an angry mob of Facebook users.

It is not possible to design your life so that you completely avoid the influence of an entity as large and powerful as Facebook, just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government.

[amagumori]

to be completely honest, having the time and energy to stay well-informed on current events from a variety of sources is a privilege. working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources. the reason i say this is not to tell you to "check your privilege", by the way. it's to make the argument that facebook's shaping of the zeitgeist primarily affects the impoverished and working classes - the people who bear the brunt of all policy decisions, the people who need to be well-informed the most.

[bobcostas55]

The poorest people spend the most time consuming media: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2015/the-total...

[zaroth]

Looking beyond Facebook for news and reporting on diverse topics with balanced viewpoints is a "privilege"?

On what can you possibly base this claim? This is why Internet.org and the walled garden got nuked. This is what we really mean when we talk about network neutrality. You type a URL into the address bar and press enter, and the page you requested loads.

While certainly there are populations where internet access is not readily available, that doesn't appear to be your argument. "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.

[Retra]

No, the people making the policy decisions need to be better informed. It doesn't much matter if you suffer them and don't have the time to go campaigning your grievances. The sword cuts on both sides: the poor don't have political power because they don't have the luxury needed to wield it, not because they are uninformed of the state of affairs.

[rdiddly]

All the examples you cite are essentially one-to-many communication channels, where you expect to hear one viewpoint from the getgo. Whereas Facebook dishonestly promises many-to-many, but all you get is the same old one-to-many.

[kmonsen]

true, but the main point is that they are competing with each other and so there is so movement as public opinion shifts.

[munificent]

machine-in-the-middle, since most of this is all automated using machine learning.

Each human's window into the larger world is increasingly through a lens controlled by automated software we don't understand.

[dragonwriter]

> What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos

That Facebook is a social networking platform that some people incidentally use to try to relay news of general public concern, not an online public affairs platform with an incidental social networking function?

[bunderbunder]

There's what a thing was originally designed to be, and then there's what a thing currently is. They aren't always the same thing.

[gozur88]

It's still mostly a social networking site, and to the extent "serious" content threatens the social networking aspect, Facebook has an interest in placing limits.

[PhasmaFelis]

Lots of people have an interest in doing things that are bad for other people generally. That doesn't actually mean the rest of us should be okay with it.

[gozur88]

Can the rest of us not go to other web sites for this kind of content?

[vidarh]

The rest of us can, but the question is to what extent the rest of us are or will in the future.

It's irrelevant if the most fantastic analysis of news and current affairs is readily available around the corner if people stop going there.

[mikeash]

And there's also what it ought to be in order to benefit humanity the most, which is often a third thing.

[dragonwriter]

True in general, but not relevant in this particular case. Facebook is still a social networking site with an incidental public affairs use, and not the other way around.

[pessimizer]

Why would a social networking platform prioritize wedding photos over news? Is the news less "social"? Aren't weddings news? You're begging the question here.

[Anagmate]

wedding photos keep you on facebook, which means more time spent on facebook -> more ads server & more behavior tracked. If you click the news, it will take you away from facebook.

[noobermin]

If we follow your logic, it seems like a valid response would essentially be a social network disconnected from a company with a profit motive. The closest thing we had to that was diaspora[0], although it doesn't seem very successful.

[0] https://joindiaspora.com/

[dredmorbius]

Previously Usenet. Which died under, ironically, trolls, antipornography drives, and copyright enforcement.

There was the WWW itself, at least for a time, though there are elements which tend toward centralisation, largely discovery, discussion, authentication, and directory.

Tim Berners-Lee and others have recently announce Solid.

https://solid.mit.edu

[voidz]

In my opinion, the whole idea of social networking is flawed. I don't need a network where people are interconnected ("webbed" together), I just need individual contacts and ephemeral groups. Ok, one can say that this implies that people are connected, and that multiple connections implies network, but the way this works on the Internet just doesn't feel right to me, especially with Facebook and so on. The elements of permanence and interconnectivity are just not done right. But as to how they should be done then, I haven't a clue.

[openasocket]

> What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed

I think it means absolutely nothing. I use Facebook so I can see how my friends are doing, not to find news articles to read (unless it's an article my friend just shared, and even then only maybe). I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.

[Swizec]

> I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.

And yet enough people do that it's a real and recognized problem to the point that HN discusses it every couple of weeks. HN in itself being a similar echo chamber.

People get news from what they look at. There's no such thing as "news". It's all eyeball based. The source with the most eyeballs is considered The News.

[maxlybbert]

That reminds me of John Stewart telling people not to consider the "Daily Show" a real news show.

[Retra]

That is what you say when you're making a distinction between "editorial" content and "news." Jon Stewart was saying "My show is obviously editorial content, not fact-reporting objective journalism." As a way of objecting to other sources who claimed to be providing fact-reporting objective journalism when they were actually providing editorial content. AKA "Fox News" vs "Comedy Central."

[maxlybbert]

That is true. But Stewart also said "The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls."

[MaxfordAndSons]

> I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.

Actually, nearly 50% of American adults use facebook as a news source [0]. Not that this means they don't have other sources, but it seems very likely that increased consumption of news via facebook is cutting into consumption from other sources. Anecdotally I've noticed that trend in my own news consumption, to my chagrin.

[0] http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-...

[Johnny_Brahms]

My biggest gripe with facebook is that we have given them, a company that earns money by knowing as much as possible about us, and important role in deciding how we interact with society and the people around us.

I believe you have to be a special kind of crazy not to acknowledge that as a problem. Or, considering their big user base, a very general kind of crazy.

[SCdF]

> I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.

Anecdotally I'd agree with you, but apparently statistically most facebook users are trending that way, so it's a genuine concern.

[inputcoffee]

Thank goodness I am too sophisticated to rely Facebook for my news.

I get all my news from Twitter.

[schoen]

> What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos, because an algorithm says that challenging articles cause people to leave FB, reducing page views and ad revenue?

Couldn't a newspaper that uses algorithmic metrics (or any kind of metrics or surveying) end up making a similar editorial decision for similar reasons? Journalists have worried about independence of editorial and advertising for somewhat analogous kinds of reason for a long time, and also about whether their news outlets were doing the most important journalism vs. journalism with the greatest mass appeal.

[dredmorbius]

Newspapers can and do.

When there were two reasonably good newspapers in virtually any city (or 3, or 9, or in some cases 30 or 40), there was a readily available local alternative to the editorial decisions of any one paper, though other factors (political machine, major advertiser, mob) might have similarly restricted what was covered.

But those days are gone -- many cities in the US have only one major daily, and it's often stopped trying. Local radio and television, as well as national broadcasts, are abysmal.

What I'm noticing today, at least in print media, is a staggeringly widespread mediocrity and lack of relevance. Actually, that goes beyond print to broadcast (radio and television), and many mainstream online sources.

The saving grace, at least for now, are competing, largely non-mainstream sources, which carry information that is less likely to be carried. Yes, some sites cater to eyeball-attracting, outrage-inducing bogosities, but others actually contain solid content.

My local paper has had little if any coverage of international trade pacts which treaten to rewrite major elements of laws across multiple countries, but I can find detailed information at, of all places, Buzzfeed. Or The Intercept. Or The Guardian. Or Pro Publica. Or your EFF article -- one of the best explainers I've found, and some colourful infographics to boot (they've been in heavy play, and largely my only content, at Google+, as Google are among the sadly far-too-many tech companies promoting the TPP, TTIP, BITS, and TiSA).

Something is badly wrong with media, though, and globally. It's not a whole lot that's not been warned about for a long, long time -- Eric Blair (George Orwell), Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Neal Postman, Jerry Mander, I.F. Stone, and others cautioned about it. Oh, and Walter Lippman and Noam Chomsky. But is it ever getting flagrant.

I'd even be modestly satisfied with algorithmic placements, so long as they were different algorithms, possibly rotated, and with some sortition blended in for random perterbations.

Facebook's a problem, and a large problem, but not the only problem.

[PKop]

Taking the US as an example, I think the concern is that there is 1 Facebook, vs 50+ state / regional news papers to get competing viewpoints. Yes, many of the sources of news on Facebook are themselves different news websites.

The point here is that this is all being funneled through one filter. And many media / news companies may disappear over time so the issue could become worse.

Number and variety of sources of information is the distinction.

I think your analogy would apply if there were many "Facebooks". But there is only one.

[andreasklinger]

imo they essentially did those algorithms. tabloids are the outcome

[ksk]

>because an algorithm says that challenging articles cause people to leave FB, reducing page views and ad revenue?

I don't quite get how that is any different from a TV news station or a newspaper coming to the same conclusion?

[marcosdumay]

While is stays an algorithm optimizing for usage, I'm not concerned.

The moment is squires extra optimizing targets, that's a problem. What is more troubling is that we can't even know when that changes (if it didn't already).

[madcowherd]

do people use social media as their sole news source? why is a newspaper my friend?

[vkou]

Many people use it as a gatekeeper of news - they read what gets shared.

[m1sta_]

Gmail has similar power through its automatic filtering.

[aaron695]

> What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos

You'll be a hell of a lot healthier since the war photo is pointless(Exactly what's the point of reseeing the photo... to remind you war is bad?) but your friends count.

[vidarh]

You are assuming people will "resee" it. But people need to have seen it for the first time somewhere in order for that to happen. A lot of people don't know this picture, or have idea what impact it has, and if Facebooks censorship remains unchallenged, a lot of important pictures will remain unseen by a growing proportion of people.

This specific people may escape that fate, as it's important enough to be in history books - I believe I first saw it in primary school - but handing Facebook the power to hide important parts of history from a huge proportion of people is dangerous.

[tdkl]

> since the war photo is pointless

Those war photos are supposed to be reminders for future decisions.

Based on continuous USA policy to export war to foster weapon economy, not much has changed though.