[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.