| Ah I slightly misunderstood your position - I apologize. Personally I find the topics highly related in my mind and so my mind made a jump in your argument I should not have. I do actually still disagree with you though: > At its core is the observation that people let Facebook content influence their finances and politics; the demonstrable dump of people's unthinking, reactionary blurted opinions, and their personal or incentivized proselytizing/propagandist/marketing skews. These are the random words of random accounts, all unworthy of blind trust. Personally I don't think that people are actually putting blind trust into such sources. Rather, Facebook is instead creating a narrative about how the world is rather than what is truth and what is a lie. I don't think that Facebook is incredibly influential because people put blind faith into it. There's definitely a lot of people who do that, and they're dumb, but I think there's a larger problem at play. Facebook is able to create a narrative about what "the world" is like. If you're liberal, you see a very different "world" on Facebook than if you're conservative. In this way, I don't think Facebook is influencing the world via trust, but by misconstruing what the world actually looks like. People have the perception that Facebook is an "unbiased" perspective on the world at large and especially your social circle. But we know that Facebook doesn't actually present such a world - it instead gives you a highly "biased" (think more of the statistical version than the political one) perspective on life. In this way I think it's not necessary to make Facebook the arbitrator of trust on their network, but instead to require them to arbitrate the way information is disseminated. To say it simpler: It's not a problem that Facebook has fake news, it's a problem that Facebook can create a fake world. Again sorry for misunderstanding you. |
I would further dig into the intentionality of who's creating what. Facebook creates a platform where people can be surrounded by very selective & similar feeds, fed by producers of content seeking to gain traction of their ideas as described in the article (ie seeking sales or political power). To say that Facebook creates these narratives can sound like people at the company are intentionally crafting these narratives, instead of it being a substrate where 3rd parties craft them.
However, let's contrast this with TV, since it also has the creation of narratives and the problem of getting too sucked into it. Different networks have their different slants, people pick their favorites and get wrapped up in the narratives presented there, be they from news or from consistent themes permeating entertainment programming.
But for some reason the response to getting too wrapped up in TV (your fault, watch less or get off it completely) is quite different than the responses to getting too wrapped up in Facebook (regulate Facebook and don't change our habits!). I think the responsibility of the info consumer is the same in either case, and a lot of that is related to how you handle trust vs skepticism regarding these commercial outlets.