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by TomMckenny 2223 days ago
Facebook is not the web, it is a toy devoted to advertisement.

It is not were potential Einsteins or Galileos debut their big new ideas. It is not were cover ups about WMD or anything else are initially exposed. All of that is very sensibly on real sites. To the contrary, rather than being where good ideas originate, it's sole purpose is to attract eyes for advertisement.

The catastrophic problem is their algorithm that massively pushes conspiracy theories, outrage and demagogue's propaganda that would otherwise never be seen and would never get beyond the crackpot website they happened to be posted on.

Facebook is not were any valuable information originates, it is instead where failed ideas and advertisements are endlessly push on it's users. But any attempt to correct that algorithm, manually or otherwise is now portrayed as censorship by those who benefit form it to get support from everyone else. Likewise, it is very effectively used as a propaganda tool by some parties yet ironically any attempt to slow that is portrayed as censorship.

It is not remotely where ideas fairly compete. To the contrary: shocking but false ideas are given an enormous advantage but adding an annotation contradicting them is called censorship. To such an extreme that there is a warning on Lysol bottles not to drink it but if a meme on Facebook telling people to drink Lysol has a similar warning attached by Facebook, it is called censorship.

The notion Facebook could ever afford to bother with any but a tiny silver of the most conspicuously false and harmful posts, let alone judge every post for accuracy, is not reasonable. It could not remotely be picking sides on every tv debate, reading every user's post or reviewing posts about the photoelectric effect for accuracy. And at any rate, Facebook is not the web.