[koboll]

The arguments that Facebook is evil are really dumb and I'm kind of tired of them.

The core mechanism of political polarization is that the internet inexorably pulled society out of its temporary state of mass media consolidation. For a couple decades, we had an unusual situation where a few companies ran mass media, and those companies all sort of agreed to toe the centrist consensus line politically. Now, we've reverted to something like what we had before radio, which was that socialists read the socialist newspaper, right-wing folks read the right-wing newspaper, etc., if not even worse -- some folks just got their news from the loudest partisans at the bar.

We've gone from an era where news distribution was fragmented because it was very difficult, to an era where it was consolidated because it was easy for large corporations only, to an era where it's so dead simple that anyone can do it, so it's fragmented again.

Legacy media folks hate this. They blame the biggest players helping people share fragmented media sources with one another, rather than recognizing the inevitability of this fragmentation, no matter what products people use to share news over the internet. They demand a return to elite consensus blocking extreme viewpoints. It is simply not gonna happen. That barn was always temporary, and it has collapsed around the horse.

[gfodor]

The argument isn’t about Facebook per se, and especially not the people at Facebook. It’s that providing Internet services for “free” on the back of advertising was an obviously great idea when such “ads” were cute product pitches and led to positive cash flow.

But when it became obvious that “ads” was the wrong mental model, and that the products being created were ultimately about the general problem of persuading people by using data collected by spying on them, it should have been realized this was an incentive structure that any sane code of engineering ethics should abandon. Facebook ended up being the best and most successful example of an organization taking this system to its most logical endpoint, but someone always would have unless a code of ethics managed to materialize upon seeing the damage it was causing before it got too far.

I don’t judge people who work at Facebook generally, but do think every one of them at this point should resign on ethical grounds. The situation could be fixed if the company (even just internally) owned up to the malincentives they have fallen into and committed to exiting it and leading on forming a code of ethics on when these kinds of system ought not be built.

[lugged]

I stopped using Facebook when they stopped showing you everything in chronological order and started implementing boosted posts and advertising in your feed.

I really don't understand why it's taken almost a decade for you idiots to figure out what that would result in.

"At this point"

What point? The point they started hiding your friends "boring" posts in order to serve up the most clickbait shit possible?

Or the point they allowed political parties to ram Obama and then trump down your throat.

Or the point they decided to become arbitors of truth?

Or the point they decided to censor you over your beliefs?

[gfodor]

I deleted my Facebook account many years ago so I would say the obligation to resign, to me, probably goes back pretty far. But overall I understand this wasn’t self evident for many for a long time and for many it still isn’t. I wouldn’t peg it at their feed engagement algorithm changes, but I think once people started seeing them creating creepy targeting buckets in their ad system, like “target parents who just had their first child” (how would they know this?) it started to be pretty obvious how fucked up the logical endpoint of that was going to be.

[lugged]

> I understand this wasn’t self evident for many for a long time and for many it still isn’t.

Nah, it was made very clear by very many back when, all of my friends understood my concerns clearly, I made sure they knew what was happening.

They chose not to care. I don't blame them, but I have no sympathy for them either.

I don't really have many regrets either, my life improved a lot since distancing myself from the online world.

[cowpig]

Your reply, like the other below it, both completely ignored the article and the comment they are replying to.

Sure, media is more fragmented now. But that doesn't address any of the criticisms in question.

[gigatexal]

Koboll, might you work at 1 hacker way and be one of the folks on the “inside”?

[iammisc]

Facebook is evil because it censors not because people engage in "wrongthink". That Americans can have any other take on this is frankly shocking.