[jlei523]

For many years, I resisted from using Facebook. Recently, I started using it more to connect with friends and family.

And holy shit. The amount of misinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories on Facebook is insane. Facebook is a machine that breeds extremists.

I now understand the #deleteFacebook movement much more where I previously thought it wasn't a big deal.

[goatinaboat]

Facebook is a machine that breeds extremists.

Facebook is, more accurately, a machine designed to maximise the amount of time you spend on Facebook. It just so happens that the maxima for that is to provoke arguments. That is why the only safe exposure is zero. You can’t beat a machine that is using every single interaction with you against you. Even people who imagine they’re battling disinformation are in reality, just being held in place to be exposed to more ads.

[beerandt]

Facebook is a machine built to amplify influence.

It just doesn't know how to exploit users influence without allowing them to express their individual views, extreme or not.

More to the point, Facebook is designed to maximize how much marketing influence it has over you, which it does both by maximising time and exploiting the existing trust you have in Facebook friends, to convert that into implied endorsements and peer pressure or popularity based groupthink. Or exploit your mental state of engagement to equate content from an ad with content from a friend.

Which I point out, because Facebook is basically working as intended, they're just upset that they've built a machine which (by it's design and very nature) they can't monopolize control of the content of influence, since they rely on amplifing users' influence to express theirs (or their advertiser's).

Like most tools, it inherently just does a job, which is to get you to to influence your friends. Just like real life, friends can be a good influence or a bad one.

[goatinaboat]

Indeed. Two friends conversing on Facebook are misled into believing that they’re talking to each other, whereas in reality they are both having solo conversations with Facebook itself.

But I don’t think Facebook -the algo - really cares about which way it influences it’s captive audience. It just wants more ads to be shown. It’s up to the humans in charge to decide on what those ads are, and they are very bad at it. Or they don’t care either.

[shlo22]

Twitter also breeds extremist - unlike Facebook the entire reward system on that site encourages out-extreming each other

[jlei523]

Yes agreed. I tried using Twitter to promote my work but I found Twitter to be even more toxic than Facebook in general and have since quit.

I'd argue that Reddit also does the same thing. On Reddit, you can always find a community that agrees with your radical thinking. Reddit also has a problem with groupthink where the upvoting system heavily rewards popular opinion, even if it's false.

In this day and age, I find that not participating in social networks makes me a happier and less radical person. If I do partake in them, I limit myself to generally harmless hobby and work-related communities.

[shlo22]

Yep, in Reddit there is organized trolling between subs and many subs have been banned due to this kind of targeting.

Even the news is based on getting anger clicks so it's hard to escape

[keenmaster]

Honestly, I’m not as concerned with Reddit. It allows a greater degree of self-selection, it has community moderation, and bots are easier to spot.

[encom]

It's the community moderation that's a problem on Reddit, because any kind of dissenting opinion is immediately wiped out, when it goes against the group think. And the group think is leaning very heavily to the left on Reddit.

The most prominent example is supporters of Donald Trump being forced off-site, but any kind of conservative or right-leaning community or politically incorrect community is being forced out.

I was there for about 10 years, and a few months ago my account got temp-banned because I said a naughty word. So I deleted my account and left the place for good. Some people on the extreme right have congregated elsewhere, but I'm not sure where right-leaning centrists are supposed to go.

[jonathankoren]

> I was there for about 10 years, and a few months ago my account got temp-banned because I said a naughty word.

What was the word?

[htfu]

> The most prominent example is supporters of Donald Trump being forced off-site, but any kind of conservative or right-leaning community or politically incorrect community is being forced out.

Do you have any concrete examples of this? I won't pretend I'm up to speed on the subject but this just strikes me as incredibly heavily exaggerated.

[encom]

I just had a look at /r/reclassified and saw that /r/GavinMcInnes has been banned. He's a conservative talkshow host. While I was still around, /r/ClownWorld and /r/CringeAnarchy got banned too. Both were critical of extreme leftwing politics, while being politically incorrent.

/r/SargonOfAkkad is quarantined, meaning it's circling the drain before being banned.

Actually just browsing /r/reclassified sorted by top posts brings up a lot of examples. It's not all political of course, there are literal CP subs getting axed like /r/AgePlayPenpals, but banned subreddits are overwhelmingly either conservative, anti-feminist or edgy or equivalent.

[pjc50]

The point of the original article is that almost all right-wing politics is saturated in disinformation. The particular combination of disinformation, racism, and incitement to violence or disruption that characterised the_donald, and their persistent inability to rein it in despite the site admins begging them to, led to them getting banned. It is entirely their own fault. Just as I can work up no sympathy for those with self-inflicted bleach injuries due to being stupid enough to listen to him.

> not sure where right-leaning centrists are supposed to go

Given that's basically Biden's Democrat party, I don't think they're an endangered species just yet.

(There is also a disinformation problem on the left, but nowhere near as prevalent in the mainstream politics and news organisations, and a non-aligned smattering of nonsense such as the anti-5G campaign)

[encom]

I disagree with you, and I think you're wrong, but I suspect political arguments of this nature are extremely offtopic on HN. If I'm going to make enemies here, I'd like it to be over my intense dislike of JavaScript, Docker and Apple, and not over my political persuasions.

In closing, before anyone puts me in a category I don't belong: I'm not american, and I don't follow or care particularly about american politics.

[sdoering]

For some years now I had not visited Twitter. Over the last three days I followed links to Twitter because they got pushed into my way.

Man was I taken aback every single time. The initial tweets referred to me were quite interesting nuggets. But once I started scrolling some distance down I was immediately in a strange land of turf wars between different groups of tin foil hat people. And people promoting their fake COVID views all over.

From that it was just a short step to adding twitter to my blocked hosts file.

[intopieces]

I have twitter, facebook, instagram, reddit all blocked. I seem to benefit from a feature in iMessage where Apple will proxy the content to show the preview in-line, but I’m not able to click through to the actual site. This is nice, because people can share funny tweets with me and I can respond to that person only, without getting sucked in.

[jlei523]

Same! The initial tweets are generally ok.

But as soon as you scroll down, the comments make you want to throw up.