[bostik]

> It’s a site run by a private company that you send content to, they analyze it, then they decide what to publish and in what order.

In other words, they are a syndicator.

In the physical world, syndicators remain accountable for what they publish through through their channels. They are not responsible for the material (given they didn't create or commission it), but they sure as hell carry the responsibility for letting the material propagate.

Incidentally, several years back I was talking to FB after they reached out. Visited their office for an informal chat and got to talk to couple of their senior(ish) engineering managers. I asked if they were doing, or planning to do anything like actually educating the users on their platform once they've identified someone having been subjected to propaganda or misinformation campaign. I said that I could imagine working on that type of project.

It's not often that you see a person physically recoil from an idea. "We don't do that!"

As far as I'm concerned, until FB actively fights not only the propaganda being funnelled through their machine, but also its effects on groups and individuals to undo the damage, the company is beyond redemption.

[vinay_ys]

Mobile App Social Media like FB is more like a micro-reality-tv channel in the form of text/image/short-video posts which are co-"produced" (like a tv show producer) by AI algorithms (in ranking) and yourself (in who you friend/follow) and others in your "network" (what everyone comment/like on more vs less).

Just like tv channels optimize their content for TRP ratings and for ad sales, FB does the same – except its engagement optimization cycle is super-micro and super-fast and super-scalable and its ads are super-cheap and super-granular and super-micro.

Its the same business model followed by newspapers/magazines, other forms of content based attention grabbing and holding mechanism which make money through ads. The older business models are more coarse-grain in everything (cost, price, target size, targeting precision, time-cycles etc) and newer tech-enabled business-models are fine-grain everything.

Obviously, the same old social/behavioral/moral rules that worked (or didn't work, but didn't matter) at coarse-grain/slow-cycle/less-massive/more-local won't work (or needs to work better because it matters at scale!) at fine-grain/fast-cycle/huge/global levels. And the answer isn't obvious.

It is obvious same notions/rules/mechanisms won't scale (like content editorialship/moderation etc).