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by gentleman11 1811 days ago
Instead, they could just stop aggressively pushing extreme and upsetting content with their algorithms to increase engagement. I know people getting really depressed thinking all their friends have become extremists. In actuality, that’s just the only content that is being pushed to them in their feeds (and likewise, the only content that their friends are getting pushed as well)
3 comments

Really miss the days when feeds were just chronological lists of posts from your friends/family. No re-shares, suggested content, etc...

Ironically providing this and just charging like $1/mo would be far more effective than labeling content as extreme or not.

I miss when there was no feed. You visit their page if you wanted to know what someone was up to
That's really the problem here. Instead of just the content that I specifically signed up for, I constantly get pushed for things I don't.
Why should they. They are in business to make money, and cannot effectively self-police. Imagine a time, way back after WWII when fascism almost took over Europe and destroyed democracy, when the grown-ups in charge took responsibility for fighting against intolerance and propaganda by carefully regulating communication through a government agency. For better and sometimes worse, but mostly better, this agency created LAWS that prevented the distribution of propaganda and obviously false and unbalanced news through regulation of the broadcast media, specific rules about what could be considered 'news', and the fairness doctrine. These grownups cleverly called the agency the Federal Communications Commission, whose job was not restricted to just the airwaves: it was to protect the people from hate groups, harmful extremist content, yes communist propaganda, and many other unbalanced or biased sources of information.