There's many people out there, myself included, who signed up with Facebook years ago and don't use it today. I don't like FB personally but don't understand the steady stream of criticism about -- that it's too addictive, that the site should be curating content in the wake of the last election? Pretty sad if you ask me. FB is not responsible for verifying the truth of every FB news post, nor helping its users to live productive meaningful lives. If you are addicted to FB you should do some soul searching.
I was with you until recently. Don't like it, don't use it. I log in once a month. Never felt strongly about FB one way or another.
But lately, I flipped. I think responsibility needs to correlate to some extent with power, to be useful. FB have power now, big power. They are not some site, they're a core social and political institution of society.
In some circles, FB's just a very common way to conduct part of your social life. In that context, complaining about FB is like complaining about your local town square. It's noisy and filthy and making our social time suck. I consider this an appropriate complaint, considering what FB is and does.
"Go start your own social network" is a red herring. It's like saying "if you don't like this country, leave". At least, I consider these similar.
On the news point, I consider this a seperate point and a bigger deal. This is what flipped me. FB is the world's most important news outlet. I think this is undeniable in 2017. They have tremendous power (and responsibility) in this role. News/journalism is an institution of democracy and political life generally. FB decide who sees what news, and this is a huge deal. If they peddle crap quality news, the overall quality of journalism in society deteriorates. The quality of news (taken as a whole, including the news bubbles and everything else) on FB is terrible. It's a valid complaint and we should be louder about it.
I love your comment but disagree on one point. I don't think Facebook has ANY obligation to improve the quality of the "news" shared on it.
I favor freedom of speech and freedom of association. If I have a friend who keeps posting BS articles from shady sources (and I do) then I just block them from my feed or simply ignore their posts about current events and conspiracy theories.
I think asking FB, or any other platform, to start policing the quality of what we post is dangerous. What happens is if a story breaks that official authorities deny, but which is actually true. Would you want FB being the arbiter of truth, in such a case, or would you prefer for individuals (preferably alot of them) to be free to do their own research and to come to their own conclusions?
But they aren't just an anonymous background hosting provider, they algorithmically promote some posts over others. If Facebook just hosted static pages where all posts were treated equally I might agree with you, but they're actively seeking out "good" content and pushing it to other people.
Imagine you run a coffee shop, and a local political group hosts a weekly get together there. They're weird people, always talking about crazy theories and plans, but they're not hurting anyone and they're great customers, so you don't want to kick them out. If some other people come in and start getting freaked out at the conspiracy talk and "time to march" proclamations, shouldn't you walk over and say "hey don't worry about them, this stuff is completely crazy, I actually looked it up myself since they talk about it every week. I'd be happy to show you some articles if you're worried." Maybe you're not technically endorsing their ideas, but you're hosting them, serving them, giving them a prominent place in your shop. You could put a sign out front that says "I don't endorse anything said in my shop", but that just protects you, not your customers.
Now imagine it's not just a coffee shop, but the only coffee shop, everyone in town goes there, and half of them get all their news just by talking to other patrons. Is there any obligation to pay attention to what's being said and who gets to reserve your best tables? If you didn't want to be involved in this, you should have grown so much. If you buy up every other shop and meeting place in town, you have to accept the responsibilities that come with all that power.
Cheers. I actually wrote a response before I read this comment and deleted it because this is exactly what I wanted to say, but better written. This is exactly the point. The thing is, we already hold journalism to these standards. It doesn't matter if its radio or TV or print. If a major publication or channel totally dropped all standards as a matter of principle, and responded with "but who knows what truth really is man"type statements... we wouldn't find this acceptable.
If you run a coffee shop where Nazis regularly come to hang out, hold their group meetings, spread their propaganda, etc all while wearing swastika tee shirts, people will call your shop a Nazi coffee shop, and they will be very right to do so - even if you swear that you are not a Nazi and are just doing your best to protect freedom of expression.
This is what Twitter and Facebook are today (Twitter will even hide these accounts in their German digital coffee shop, where spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal, but are fine letting it be for the rest of the world).
Both the left-wing zealots & right-wing zealots (and others) peddle their propaganda and skewed opinion pieces on Facebook. It's not like one crowds the other out, like a coffee shop with a shared physical space might. Everybody has their own little view of the world from inside FB, curated to their own preferences and propagated by AI similarity recommendations.
Facebook itself isn't a cesspool of just 1 side, so isn't meaningfully associated with any one. Independent and overlapping cesspools of all strokes form and grow in multitudes there.
> It's not like one crowds the other out, like a coffee shop with a shared physical space might. Everybody has their own little view of the world from inside FB, curated to their own preferences and propagated by AI similarity recommendations.
This statement is incorrect. Twitter has a huge harassment problem, that users have been begging the company to fix for years, to no avail. There are users openly associating with nazi ideology (not exaggerating here - we are talking about users with swastikas as their avatars, nazi references in their bios, etc.[0]) harassing others on the platform. In no way is this people in their little bubble, being perfectly isolated from others who don't share their ideology.
As far as left-wing vs right-wing or whatever, I don't really care. I chose nazis as the main example because this is a very clear ideological group that has been unequivocally responsible for crimes against humanity in the past, against which Twitter chooses to do absolutely nothing (even if this contradicts their own TOS). Well, they choose to do one thing: make those accounts invisible in countries where they would be breaking the law if they didn't. So they literally have a `isNazi` flag in their database, but they only choose to use it to not get in trouble with German/Austrian/etc. law instead of, you know, just banning people who are calling for ethnic cleansing. Great job, Jack Dorsey.
If there are other similar ideologies (left wing, right wing, or other) you would like to put in the same bucket, please do - I have no issues with that. The only fundamental issue is that Twitter is choosing to let extremist, well defined, communities such as nazi ideologues thrive on their platform because growth or something.
The trouble with this, of course, is that you build an echo chamber for both yourself and your friend. You no longer see the posts you think are BS, and you preclude yourself from challenging your friend's BS in comments.
I agree that delegating to Facebook judgement of what speech is acceptable or not isn't a good idea, but the flip side of that is you have to take a slightly more active role in cultural discourse if you have any desire to see society converge on good ideas, and eschew harmful ones.
> FB is the world's most important news outlet. I think this is undeniable in 2017. They have tremendous power (and responsibility) in this role.
Do they have more power and responsibility than the grocery store newsstand that has the National Enquirer next to Time Magazine, or the cable TV company that delivers Fox News and RT alongside more reliable news sources, or the email services that people used to forward everyone nutty right-wing newsletters before sharing them on Facebook became popular?
Most people don't want news. They want outrage porn and confirmation bias. They want junk food. Facebook optimizes for what people want to see, just like your corner store optimizes for what people want to buy. It's not 7/11's fault that people want to drink 64 oz sodas and eat gummy bears and it's not Facebook's fault that people want to read Breitbart.
If 7/11 stopped selling Big Gulps and gummy bears, people would stop going to 7/11 and they would go broke. If Facebook stopped letting people share outrage porn and confirmation bias with each other, people would stop using Facebook and it would go out of business. So those of us who just want a nice place to buy batteries or keep in touch with distant friends and family members just have to accept that people will use those same venues and mechanisms for things we disapprove of.
P.S.: "Journalism is an institution of democracy"? Well, sometimes. And if you do a good enough job of it, you get a prize named after someone who made a fortune by selling terrible quality newspapers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer. News has been a cynical business of propaganda for profit far more often than it has ever been an institution of democracy.
FB is very much falling into a local not global optimum.
Social networks are optimizing for the derivative of peoples actions. A/B testing to see what causes more clicks etc. However, people are complex enough that they notice patterns and change how they approach things. Some of the most frequent users suddenly chose to quit.
I remember seeing a slightly different discussion on HN ~5 years ago with almost the same arguments and thinking it was Déjà Vu because it was so similar to another HN post. Which get's a very different response than the first time around, because people change. Yesterday FB may have been the worlds most important news source, today less so, and long term people will treat it as just another tabloid.
In that context, starting your own 'social network' will eventually be good advice, because trust is much easier to lose than gain.
>I don't like FB personally but don't understand the steady stream of criticism about -- that it's too addictive
You're right, you don't understand.
This is a problem that you don't personally deal with but the data shows that there is a problem.
Many tech consumer products are specifically tailored to get a user more and more addicted to the service, similar to the way the food industry specifically tailors food products to make humans consume more and more of the food (salt/fat/sugar). Never-ending and constantly optimizing research and development goes into this addiction cycle since for many tech products revenue == traffic/engagement.
Adding a little bit of "sweetness" to your product makes it more enjoyable, and that's a good thing. But capitalism is a never ending process of optimizing for profit so before long your product is so "sweet" it is causing serious issues for many people.
I like this analogy for why Facebook should be regulated. We have no problem regulating food for health benefits, so to extend that to other items seems like a decent proposal.
I believe it is harder to empirically calculate and observe negative psychological effects than to do the same for physiological effects, but psychological concerns are becoming more mainstream.
Television is also likewise specifically tailored to get a user more and more addicted to its service. Yet it falls upon the media consumer to not get themselves addicted or wear blinders to anything else but their one program/network that encourages their particular leanings.
Ah, the age old argument for personal responsibility...
"Oh, is the river polluted? Then don't go in the damn river! Use your head! Don't expect someone, or god forbid the government, to force someone to clean it up just so you can go fishing in the river!"
It doesn't matter if you or I choose not to use Facebook. The rest of the planet is glued to their smartphones and phubbing us every time we leave the house and that affects us regardless of our choices.
> Your analogy is ridiculous. In what way is polluting a river like hosting a social network on your own servers?
It's an analogy for the "age old personal responsibility argument", but if you want to get metaphorical then maybe society is the river, Facebook the pollutant?
I mean come on man, it doesn't take a creative genius to connect the dots here, and it's certainly not ridiculous.
The Facebook logo is everywhere. On the side of delivery vans, pizza boxes, business cards and paperback books. Public spaces are littered with people staring down at their phones. Our politics has been usurped by the machinations of social media.
Pretending like an individual can simply logout of Facebook and not have to deal with the social consequences is what is ridiculous!
I'll go full Godwin: There were probably less swastikas per square inch at the height of Nazi Germany than there are Facebook logos today. The perceived rise of authoritarianism of some political Other is nothing more than the actual authoritarianism of Facebook.
Because facebook is a handy label for all forms of malicious capitalism. And the excesses of malicious capitalism are becoming sufficiently extreme that people are starting to notice. It's much easier to notice this in new technologies rather than old ones you're already comfortable with. So facebook gets the flak, which is deserved but lots of other people avoid it.
Take soft drinks which are terrible for peoples health. Your profit comes from:
1) Convincing people that buying your drink will make them popular & happy.
2) Convincing the government to keep corn subsidies.
3) Convincing everyone that calories in calories out and self control are the _real_ method to health. Our sugar water isn't at fault it's your personal weakness!
We're in a situation where powerful companies use their economic clout to buy off the government and convince the population of falsehoods so they can make more profit.
This isn't new but since we've gotten pretty optimised on at solving genuine human needs (companies vs entropy) is much harder to profit from than fooling suckers into bad choices (companies vs irrational monkey brains).
So now all our most profitable companies largely work to create little anti-competitive fiefdoms and to fool people into harming themselves. So of course people are going to point out that this is terrible and we should probably do something to regulate it's excess.
You forgot the part of shaping public opinion that their products are not a health issue and having the public subsidize their main ingredient. Even if you don't drink soft drinks you still subsidize health effects and corn and sugar.
The same applies to drug dealers. Busybodies notwithstanding.
But underneath that simplistic surface view, you're dealing with somebody who inflicts cost on society as a whole to extract profit for themselves. And they extract it in a way that individuals don't necessarily care to fix.
And so, you'll need somebody to stand up for a functioning society. That would then be your "busybodies". (Sure, there's the libertarian fantasy of complete self-determination. Which inevitably leads to a might-makes-right world. Most of us have decided long ago we'd rather live in a civilized society)
These statements + the 60 minutes piece awhile back (https://www.cbsnews.com/videos/brain-hacking-2/) make this a very likely outcome. I wonder what the equivalent warning label + restrictions will look like.
Removing much of the motivation for this crap by outlawing exploitation of user data, and making even having it very expensive and/or risky, through huge bond or insurance requirements to cover data breaches for anyone who stores such things, would be a good place to start.
And yes, that should absolutely apply to more traditional data-mining companies (credit card companies, for example).
Like you I stop actively using FB for about a year now. I've considered deleting the profile but thought that is giving facebook too much importance (I would also hate that my grandparents can't find my old photos anymore).
On the other hand I can see why people are treating facebook more like an utility and not a service in a competitive market: the size of its network is now huge and too many people rely on it to receive and propagate information.
The problem with facebook, in my view, is they have (understandably) developed all these tools for you to easily add things to it but make zero meaningful effort to let you (as user) erase things you have place there. After a decade of using facebook, why can't I easily unlike everything I liked? why can't I go and unfollow (massively) "friends" from 10 years ago? why doesn't facebook REALLY delete my content when I tell it to?
I am free to leave facebook or stop using it, but apparently I'm not sure to stop facebook from keep using my old content for eternity. if this was a company that could fold tomorrow, I wouldn't care about this. But its facebook. it's the power company, the water company, the government, and they have my data and does not let me trim it.
Their algorithm acts like a "sad" person who after several desperate and failed attempts at getting my attention to use the service resort to showing my ancient posts/photos to people who are likely to interact with me so that I have to login and use it. It's a sad service.
I think what makes me the most angry at Facebook is how impossible it is to liberate your data from Facebook. When you upload information/data to Facebook, you don't own it anymore; Facebook gives you no way to retrieve it.
Sure, they offer an archive process which gives you a zip archive of your post history in HTML, but it's not in any format that's easy to parse or process. On top of that, Facebook events are impossible to get off platform because their API does not expose any way to grab them, which keeps event invites and communication completely locked into the platform.
I'd be much more sympathetic to letting Facebook run amok if they had an actual story for meaningfully extracting data or interacting with your Facebook network without using their client. Then competitors to Facebook would actually stand a chance. But Facebook makes it as hard as possible to liberate your own data, which shows me that they have no intention on letting you leave once you're in.
The EU is going in the right direction with this, re: the right to data portability in the GDPR. Only way Facebook is going to implement this functionality is when they are forced to.
If the Colonel simply makes great chicken that people want to eat, then I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If, on the other hand, he puts an addictive chemical into it that makes you crave it fortnightly, that's a different thing.
Facebook has spent a lot of time and money making itself addictive.
Read the book “Irresistable: The Rise of Addictive Technology” and I suspect you’ll have a different opinion. People get addicted to everything that exists and you’re essentially blaming the victim. The difference is also that Facebook designs its Newsfeed/Instagram like a slot-machine that encourages people to just keep hitting refresh. Maybe they’ll see something new or they’ll get a like...
Also, most people aren’t nearly as smart as the people on this thread. So you have fairly average folks getting hooked on tech that was designed to be that way by psychology majors and data scientists.
Also, Facebook could do a lot better in removing propaganda and obvious lies. They just don’t want to remove all the hundreds of millions of fake accounts they report as real to their ad buyers.
With all the resources at their disposal, they could perhaps bring in a professional editorial staff to rank each news source based on some unbiased (ahem) and transparent criteria like # of sources for a story, past accuracy, level of bias, etc. Still let people click and post whatever but apply an easily visible and understandable "news" score.
Some businesses rely heavily on FB and other social media for getting customers. Other people only get family updates from it. It's getting harder and harder to "just don't use" social media.
It used to be that every business needs a website. Facebook is just a cheap and easy alternative to a website, and it comes with a lot of features like analytics (I think FB Pages have Analytics) and knowing how many people are interested in your services. Sadly it comes with your business website being generic and inside a walled garden run by arbitrary-moral police/government who will also lie to you to make money out of you ("Pay $ for this post to get x impressions!", but how many of those will be from bots?).
Hopefully with technology being simpler, it'll be simpler for the 95% (https://lifehacker.com/this-chart-shows-how-computer-literat...) of people to make websites without walled gardens. But a small business probably thinks an FB page is good enough, why pay for your own design and hosting?
It's getting harder and harder to "just don't use" social media.
I don't know about the business perspective, but why is it hard not to use facebook for people? It's a serious question. Everybody I know (me included) who is not on facebook has no problem with it, and it certainly isn't getting harder.
> but why is it hard not to use facebook for people? It's a serious question. Everybody I know (me included) who is not on facebook has no problem with it, and it certainly isn't getting harder.
You'll get left out of real life. If your social circle organizes events on Facebook, and you're the only weirdo that can only be contacted by email and phone, you'll be forgotten by all but your strong friends (who don't need Facebook's friend-menu to remember you).
That might not be a problem if your social circle doesn't rely on Facebook much or you're (for instance) an introvert who doesn't care about parties thrown by acquaintances (which are a nice way to meet new people), but there are a lot of people who those don't apply to and who would have to sacrifice to avoid Facebook.
That assumes a lot about what one considers "real life." My social circle has never included "people who only remember me because I'm in a list curated by Facebook". Whether or not these people invite me to parties makes no difference to me. I think as one gets older one finds that "Partying" with distant acquaintances becomes less and less an important part of one's social life.
> That assumes a lot about what one considers "real life." My social circle has never included "people who only remember me because I'm in a list curated by Facebook". Whether or not these people invite me to parties makes no difference to me.
I already covered that in my original comment: it might not be a bad thing for you, but you are not everyone. There exists a significant number of people for whom quitting Facebook would have some real negative costs.
> I think as one gets older one finds that "Partying" with distant acquaintances becomes less and less an important part of one's social life.
Also getting invited to a party was just an example, and not all parties are booze-fueled keggers where you "party."
It's also not "distant acquaintances" I'm taking about. The group I'm talking about are the people 1) who you like enough to want to hang out with, 2) who like you enough to invite you, but 3) don't like you enough to always remember your special communication preferences unprompted.
This happened to me: I quit Facebook some while back, but there is an alumni group I wanted to connect to. But their events are organized on an FB page, which I can't even access. So I had to find someone else who's a member of the group and ask them when they are assembling.
I'm reminded somewhat of certain websites only favoring a specific browser or being written in a manner that seriously messes with accessibility.
> you'll be forgotten by all but your strong friends (who don't need Facebook's friend-menu to remember you).
How is that a bad thing?
It's not normal or healthy to try to maintain hundreds or thousands of "friendships" with people you barely know. You don't need to keep in life-long contact with some guy you spent 4 minutes talking to at a bar while on vacation 5 years ago.
>> you'll be forgotten by all but your strong friends (who don't need Facebook's friend-menu to remember you).
> How is that a bad thing?
I already covered that in my original comment: it might not be a bad thing to you, but you are not everyone. There exists a significant number of people for whom quitting Facebook would have some real negative costs.
> It's not normal or healthy to try to maintain hundreds or thousands of "friendships" with people you barely know. You don't need to keep in life-long contact with some guy you spent 4 minutes talking to at a bar while on vacation 5 years ago.
That's not what I was talking about at all. I was thinking more about the kind of friendly acquaintances that you see regularly. For instance, you might have 3-10 close friends, 20-30 more distant friends, and 500-2000 Facebook non-friends. I'm talking about the second group of 20-30 friends.
> I was thinking more about the kind of friendly acquaintances that you see regularly.
If you see them regularly, why not just exchange phone numbers or e-mail addresses? I just don't understand why Facebook is needed to keep in contact with them.. unless you somehow feel it's necessary to always know what those distant acquaintances are eating for lunch at any given time.
Because by getting off Facebook, you end up missing a lot of what you are used to. If your life and your friend's life is not on it, this won't affect you. But if you and your social network has let Facebook grow as a dependency, you can't easily get out of it. The only way it could work is if you manage to migrate your entire social circle off it and it won't happen.
By getting off Facebook, you simply make yourself hard to reach and it will make your casual relationships rot and die. When my friends create an event, they click "add all members of 'amazing friend group' to event" and that's it.
Nobody is going to then track down the one person who decided to leave the group for a casual event like "5-7 beer this Friday". Even for big events, you may end up being let out simply because you have made yourself harder to reach.
Sure, by leaving Facebook I would still be able to see my 2-3 closest friends and partner but that's it. Nobody in this day and age is going to send an email to me asking to come to a group event. Hell, I don't even know the email addresses of my closest friends, let alone our extended friend group. I can't even imagine how I would organize a 20+ Christmas event without it.
A christmas party for 20 people? Do you not have anyone's phone number? Or address?
People will ask if you are going to the party and people tweet about a party or they will ig a photo about it. If you have no point of contact outside of facebookfriendgroup you are on the edge of losing connection to that group. It will start happening when people start moving over to snapchat one by one, joining new circles you are not part of, having smaller parties you didn't know about. If those casual friends are important you really need to strengthen those bonds outside of facebook. One day there will be a new smaller group.. will you make the cut?
Everyone is on Facebook but only some people are on the other networks. Fragmentation is not much of an issue or danger.[1]
Sure, if I'm not looking at Facebook and a party happens without me I'll receive some snaps about it. However at that point it's already too late. Snapchat is for sharing slices of life. Nobody organize big events via Snapchat.
Twitter and Instagram are for interacting with strangers. I can't see how posting a photo of a private event to my Instagram followers would help the situation. All it will do is end up with people unfollowing me for posting content that is not what they follow me for. It's not somewhere to interact with friends. Twitter is even worst. Am I to do? Look at #party daily in hope to stumble on a real life friend using it? On both those networks, I follow brands and hobbies. Not close friends.
Everyone is on Facebook and leaving it would simply make my social life harder. I've tried it many time and I've also seen it happen. Whenever someone isn't on Facebook, you don't see them. It keeps happening. "Where is Bob? Did we forget to invite Bob tonight? Does anyone of you has his phone number? I can't seem to find him on Messenger." Phone numbers and addresses are on a need to know basis. If I never needed someone's, I don't have it. Since everyone uses Messenger to communicate, I don't have a lot of them.
[1] Perhaps that's a French Canadian thing, over here Facebook has around 70% of the population while Twitter has only around 10%. Even if you go Canada wide, Facebook has 71%, Twitter 27%, Instagram 20% and Snapchat 9%.
> FB is not responsible for verifying the truth of every FB news post
I look at it this way: If FB wouldn't influence the content that you're looking at - e.g. they wouldn't go on fire if someone posts a nude photo - then it were alright to deny responsibility as they'd merely provide infrastructure.
If, however, they do discriminate content they don't like then, given their sphere of influence, they have to be held responsible I think.
You're completely right on a personal level. People should really do some thinking about why they spend so much time on Facebook. However, there is a separate discussion about Facebook's effect on the community. Zoom out and you can't see any individuals, just large trends. Say 30% of Americans feel like they are addicted to Facebook. Maybe, as a community, we should do something about that.
I'm sorry, but I can't get behind this idea that you're not responsible for the platform you create. Quite frankly, I do believe FB has a moral obligation to what they've brought into the world.
I'd love (love!) for the answer to all questions about addiction to be "suffer your own consequences," but the US exists as a massive welfare state where intelligent and conscientious citizens should try to ensure that the investments they're making in the lower classes are going to better use than heroin and acting as proxy votes to foreign regimes in US elections.
But we're not even close to a libertarian enough nation to just ignore the problems that corporations create for our citizens, even if those problems could be avoided by personal responsibility. And "soul searching" is waaaay too far up Maslow's hierarchy for most US citizens to even start considering.
Why is it that the faults of people always boil down to "personal responsibility", but the faults of companies never do? Why is FB not responsible for what they're doing to their platform?
It's not correct to say that America isn't a welfare state, and if you're a Democrat (which it sounds like you are), then you should not be offended by that term.
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid consist of almost 50% of the federal budget. If you include "Other," which includes other welfare programs such as veterans benefits, federal food stamps, as well as "Non-defense," which includes additional veterans benefits/housing/health, you can see that a very large percentage of the federal budget is on welfare programs.
Military budget in the US is obviously absolutely atrociously massive, but it is only about 15% of the budget.
So I don't think it is at all fair to say that the US is not a welfare state, particularly when compared to the foundation of the country being rooted in laissez-faire classical liberalism. I am all for the discussion of mitigating attempts on economic distribution of wealth, but what we have in place even now already far surpasses what the budget is capable of facilitating (in terms of cost, not strategy or outcome).
I'd like to add that the military itself is kinda looking like a welfare program. The US isn't at war. The military is often considered a fall back carrier path. If we even get 10 cents on the dollar in return for military labor, I'd be surprised.
When I step back and look at it in a larger picture, I kinda see a welfare program that demands its recipients stay in shape and follow some special rules.
Not a bad point. Military service is actually one of the most reliable paths for upwards economic mobility, and it is absolutely not tied to any natural demand or market. In practice it does serve a welfare-like function, albeit inefficiently.
