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.
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?