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by white-flame 3149 days ago
It's cool.

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.