[contourtrails]

I don't have much sympathy for major news organizations because they are publishing opinions more than they are publishing breaking news based on investigative journalism.

Of course I can't blame them, because the industry's economic reality is that a certain number of articles must be published every day, and opinions are just much more plentiful and easier to source than breaking news.

Yet the broader reality is that Facebook has no obligation to society at large to deliver these opinion pieces to the masses. In fact by doing so, Facebook (and the internet more broadly) contributes to social unrest and polarization by constantly feeding people opinions that reinforce their own.

Facebook should be reducing the visibility of such content on its network.

Certainly high quality opinions exist, and they do have value. And intellectual content usually holds at least some kernel if opinion. But the problem is the pile-on, the crowd-fury, the group-think that always seems to accompany and eventually overpower those few reasoned opinions that exist.

The root problem is the avalanche of opinions that assaults our rationality whenever anything happens in the world. We need to slow things down to reduce the group-think, to give people room to breathe and the reasoned opinions to be heard and not shouted down.

Hence my belief that Facebook should reduce its bandwidth for opinion ("news").

[tlb]

I prefer high-quality opinions, such as found in the Atlantic, Economist, and New Yorker, over "breaking news" which is usually just a copy-paste of someone's press release. Opinions have far more intellectual content. You can't have intellectual content without some point of view, and once you understand the POVs of some authors and publications, you can see around things you disagree with.

It's true that there are lots of low-quality opinions too, but there is more than enough high-quality opinionated content to fill your day reading. There's no reason to read "breaking news". If something's important, a weekly publication will soon enough have something thoughtful to say about it.

[siruncledrew]

Opinions are good to read sometimes, but neither "opinion pieces" nor copy/pasted "breaking news" seem to qualify as high-standards journalism (especially from organizational outlets). That's the kind of content I would expect to find on Reddit or HN from user comments, not something a 100+ year old business like the Economist or the Atlantic would produce.

Yea, they get most of their money from ads and also subscriptions so they need to produce a great volume of content to get the most return, but that also sets the bar very low if that's now acceptable "journalism". Compared to what used to be written in newspapers, the average content we are getting now is (subjectively) much worse overall. Rather than numerous well-written text articles with a few ads and one opinion section, most online news websites look like the reverse of that nowadays.

[eterm]

This is why I like the Guardian, because they clearly mark the difference between their News section and their Opinion section, "Comment is free", and they keep the news part relatively opinion-free, subject to certain bias on what they choose to report.

[ng12]

> Atlantic, Economist, and New Yorker

But you know what you're getting into with these pieces -- they largely exist as an outlet for opinion pieces. What I have a problem with are outlets like the NYTimes which blur the line between opinion and news.

[tlb]

The NYT is a big conglomerate, so you have to drill down a level when considering that particular source. Also true for the WSJ. You have to have your Paul Krugman filter on reading him, and your David Brooks filter on for him. If you combine insights from all of them, though, you'll end up with some good insights.

[JasonFruit]

Why should Facebook be choosing what's good for me and what isn't? Isn't that part of the problem, that it reduces the visibility of material that one person or group thinks we ought not see?

I don't have a horse in this race, since I quit Facebook, but I'd rather see Facebook do its unavoidable filtering in a way that is aware of relationships but blind to content; you see more posts from individuals and groups that you give evidence of caring about, without regard for what they say.

[tlb]

It's true that there's a gray area of debatable content. But there's a huge amount of content that's purely bad in any absolute sense. Outrage clickbait based on completely fake purported facts, for example.

Indeed, FB should probably tread lightly in the gray area. But don't let the existence of a gray area confound attempts to deal with the giant, growing, cancerous, black mass.

This content is part of the worst filter bubble of all time. You and I don't see it, because this content is not merely targeted towards the "highly suggestible" demographic, but carefully targeted away from the "might publicly object or be able to do something to stop it" demographic, which most HN readers are in. That anti-targeting allows showing much more scurrilous content than could ever be shown on TV.

[Bartweiss]

Even a year and a half later, I'm still sad about how quickly the meaning of "fake news" diluted. We throw it back and forth over CNN errors and inflammatory Daily Caller topic choices, but there's a very different meaning behind all of that - things that are literally just falsified, in the full "sky is green" sense of the word.

Something like "ABCnews.com.co" is A) impersonating ABC and B) publishing objectively-false stories. If Facebook wants to put a warning next to it, or drop its share priority, or only accept shares with comments attached, I don't give a damn. That's not an entry into a partisan fight, it's the news equivalent of flagging a spam link.

I have lots of Facebook friends who sometimes share dubious or ill-sourced stories, and I wish they wouldn't. But I have a few Facebook friends in a very different group, who post whole-cloth inventions at the level of the dumbest conspiracies, or take Onion and Duffleblog articles as real news. It's a fundamentally different phenomenon.

[bobbygoodlatte]

In essence they already are via the news feed algorithm. It doesn't show you everything all of your friends / pages post, so it's already deciding "what's good for you".

I think until recently the algorithm making the decision has had a peculiar bias. It's had a bias for "engagement" and the most engaging content is often the most outrageous / incendiary / clickbaity.

So if Facebook doesn't "choose what's good for you", a default decision was already made: they'll show you what's engaging. But I think it's important to appreciate that default is still biased. It's just biased in a strange way that could have negative political consequences.

[s2g]

> I don't have much sympathy for major news organizations because they are publishing opinions more than they are publishing breaking news based on investigative journalism.

This is the same sort of "say it enough and it becomes true" crap that Zuckerberg is peddling.