It was good early on. So was Instagram. I think the beginning of the downfall was the like button for Facebook and the heart for Instagram. Once you introduce a voting system that determines what gets exposure and what gets buried, it seems like the inevitable outcome is that the garbage floats to the top. Especially as things scale to include huge groups of people.
I think with Facebook there's another problem of "you may not be in the huge group of people", and you may not be even aware of the particular floating garbage. Not only you only are fed with the garbage from your social group, but also are basically deprived of the other groups' views.
Is it the source of hate campaigns though? Or is it the medium the hate campaigns are using to spread their message? Because I believe it's the latter, and if you ban it, the hate campaigns don't vanish, they just start using other mediums.
>Because I believe it's the latter, and if you ban it, the hate campaigns don't vanish, they just start using other mediums.
While true that it may not be a source per se, Facebook enables those ideas whereas they would normally (at least, in the past) be relegated to the darkest corners of the web.
Take QAnon for example. The source is 8kun, which is accessible only through Tor and consisting of incel and white supremacist communities. Do you think the majority of people posting this material are getting it from the source in this case?
I believe that they use Facebook because it's easy to use, not because it's the only available option outside the dark web. That is to say if Facebook removed them, they'd switch to some other platform.
Might slow them down (won't have FB's built-in audience), but not nearly as much as only being available on the dark web. Hate campaigns worked pre-internet, and they'll still work post-FB. Maybe not as efficient, but I don't think efficiency is the limiting problem there.