Just boycott Facebook already. 'but everyone uses it', yes but you have a choice. If you don't like the Facebook, then gtfo and make the effort to build something to replace it. But I guess that is too much work. People whine about Facebook, yet they do nothing to change the situation. You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
Facebook is the worst way of getting news and information in general. It's not the open independent web and by joining Facebook you agreed that you give them control. So even when I understand the frustration and I agree with the context... you all agreed to Facebook conditions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I understand why the media is frustrated about this. Zuckerberg basically promised them all of this traffic if they just "go all in" with Facebook. And now he's pulling the blanket from under them - just like the media was warned he would do, and they didn't listen.<p>That said, from an objective point of view, first off the media is not entitled to the user's home page in a random social network. They should have never believed that they were.<p>Second, to be honest, I think it's better for democracy if stories aren't <i>fed</i> by Facebook through its black-box algorithm. I suppose the a small government like the Serbian one couldn't do much to get Facebook to spread their propaganda through it, but if say the U.S. government were to do that, or even say the Indian government - oh boy. It would be such a propaganda machine, better than TV ever was.<p>The second part to this is that even if governments don't directly control the feeds to spread propaganda, they <i>can</i> exploit Facebook's algorithm, just like Russia supposedly did in the U.S. election, so the end result is the same.<p>This is why I'd rather <i>people do their own research</i> and they do the job of looking for posts, rather than "being served" those posts by a black magic algorithm that may have all sorts of biases embedded in it.
Why is every complain about Facebook directed towards Zuckenberg. He is not alone in this company. We are thousands of engineers that work here and make fb what it is.<p>It feels like all our work (good or bad) is work being done by Zuckenberg, even if he did not have any input on some issues.<p>I don't see Larry Page receiving the same thanks or blame when deepmind or other google thing does good or bad.
>This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders.<p>I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.
I'm really, really proud to see my former colleague reaching the front page of HN.<p>I know the pain and struggle investigative journalism organizations face (especially in infosec). Going through all of this and reaching less people because some dickhead in the United States decided to add these countries randomly really pisses me off.<p>Even worse are the other countries chosen like Cambodia and Venezuela, which both have Free Basics. Bloggers, pizza shops, investigative journalism organizations... they're all screwed because of one group of dickheads in Silicon Valley.
I'm not sure this is explained well. Everything is still accessible, it's just put on different tab. Now there's "News Feed" as before and "Activity Feed", the tab just below "News Feed" tab.<p>It's really annoying from my experience, I just forget to check that other tab also. Basically your feed is now split to what your friends posted and what pages you follow posted.
The effect author describes might as well be attributed to people: a) not realizing there is another tab to check, b) people forget to check other tab (I'm one of those).
From UX standpoint it might be an improvement, but I'd rather see it implemented as filter you can switch on/off than hardcoded tab you have to remember to check.<p>For comments advising author not using Facebook, I don't see where that goes? It's just how media works in our country and Facebook is most common social network that all groups of people follow, and there is quite a lot (otherwise censored) political information floating around on it.<p>Specifically:<p>> You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.<p>That's all nice and visionary, but in countries where you can cut yourself off of alternative news sources by not following Facebook I don't see how that's good advice.
Correct. Your democracy is not his laboratory. His website, however, is. If you want to control the behavior of Fbook, buy it. If you want pageviews from people's news feeds, make things which people decide are worth sharing.<p>From a user perspective, doesn't moving non-person-related (actually social media) things to a separate feed make the ux better?
Yes what could be worse for democracy than people seeing more posts from their friends.<p>Does anyone know if the views of paid page posts are going to go up, or is it just that the views of unpaid page posts are going to go down? Maybe that level of detail isn't public, but it seems important for deciding how to tell this story.
This is stupid. Facebook was bashed for influencing politics. It now tries to avoid political discussion entirely by downplaying news from Pages, but it is now bashed for it as well.<p>Where's your integrity, journalists?
Eben Moglen's FreedomBox project -- <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox</a> -- is more democratic. It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central servers.<p>It needs work, but what part of democracy doesn't?<p>What does it take for widespread support for the project?
I have a suspicion that after the utopian western world phase with autonomous/non passenger controlled vehicles is over, a country with few traffic controls or systems will be a guinea pig for 'mass adoption'...<p>Much like the Serbia and other FB experiments a system will be set up, tested and then rolled out across the first world...
Even though their formats are different NYT et al. and FB are competitors. Even though there is kernel of truth, the media witch-hunt of Facebook is out of proportion.<p>Long story short, its not concern for democracy (if NYT was concerned about democracy it would not be a rabid partisan) its just jealousy and hate that Zuckerberg is eating their cake.
His name is phonetically "suckerberg". Do we really have to tolerate Facebook and it's hideous negative influence on the world?<p>We make all of this stuff up, we can do whatever we want, let's just get rid of it.