Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine

I must have really different experiences than all of these people that write these articles (it seems like there has been something like this, every week on HN, for the last 10 years)<p>My facebook is mostly people showing pictures of stuff, sharing memes, some movie discussion groups, event planning groups. It seems like mostly just people using facebook as a proxy for real world interactions.<p><i>Twitter</i> on the other hand is just pure toxic garbage which seems made to intentionally divide people and incite hatred and eventually violence.<p>I think there is a simple explanation for this: the people writing these articles are twitter users, and the people who use facebook are their outgroup.

The Atlantic has always been a kind of tabloid for people who fancy themselves intellectuals, especially with its cover stories. After seeming like they were really on the brink for a few years there, not really knowing how to do digital, they turned it around - apparently by doubling down on this approach. High-minded clickbait for right-thinking elites, in other words. Have a look at their &quot;most popular articles&quot; box and you&#x27;ll frequently see some breathless, hysterical stuff.<p>It&#x27;s a shame, too, because a majority of their content is probably still pretty good! Their pandemic coverage is a good example. But their editorial staff need engagement and they&#x27;re gonna drive it by pushing the same &quot;dark&quot; buttons (fear, anger) that everyone else pushes these days. Ironic they&#x27;re doing it in a critical article about Facebook.

Wow. As much as I do agree with this, this is some hyperbolic writing. I&#x27;ve read so many articles just like this one, they show up on HN quite often it seems, and I&#x27;ve never seen one that had what seemed like a realistic fix to the problem. I don&#x27;t think there is a fix really. All social media platforms will be full of bots&#x2F;fakes that exist to spread garbage. All social media platforms will be full of real people doing the same. It also seems like the loudest people (and bots) are the most toxic and get the most engagement. It&#x27;s people, all the way down, and there will always be a bunch of people doing the wrong thing. Those people will be highly incentivized and motivated, while the rest of us will just be looking for something to read.<p>(Also, maybe interesting, the author of this is the executive editor of The Atlantic, not just some reporter.)

FB has turned into the Paperclip Maximizer [0]. The question I have is what do we do when we recognize that there is a paperclip maximizer among us. This is a pattern that is new with internet technology, and we’ve never had to deal with before.<p>I would also argue that Google Search with its SEO crap has also become a paperclip maximizer (or at least on its way to becoming one).<p>As a civilization, we need to start thinking about it like this before we destroy ourselves.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;paperclip-maximizer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lesswrong.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;paperclip-maximizer</a>

YouTube has just as much of a monopoly in its category if not more than Facebook (with similar influence over society) yet we dont see the level of regular attacks (I&#x27;m not here to defend either, I&#x27;m a critic, but just pointing this out). Facebook total users: about 2.7 billion (with probably 80% dominance in its category). YouTube: about 2 billion but with a ~95% video stream dominance. The difference seems to be in the politics. I don&#x27;t see the Atlantic or peers coming down on YouTubes dominance and influence.<p>Edit: As others have pointed out in here the difference might also be financial. Facebook publishes news articles and YouTube does not. A broken up Facebook offers a fractured publishing market and better pricing for news distribution.

&gt; No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made.<p>Well, one can control oneself, that&#x27;s about the best we can do. As others have mentioned, don&#x27;t use it.<p>I tried that. After years of not using FB at all, I missed out on some important news that was only posted there.<p>I decided to get back on FB, <i>on my own terms</i>. I created Bubble [1] and now I can visit FB with most tracking disabled, no ads, I only see posts from my friends, and even then only posts that do not link to news websites or contain political keywords.<p>My signal&#x2F;noise ratio is usually about 50%. I love my clean feed. Works on LinkedIn, Twitter, others.<p>But the root problem goes deeper -- clearly not everyone <i>cares</i> or has the motivation to filter their own social media feeds. Some people <i>like</i> reading echo-chamber&#x2F;fake news posts, truth is far down on their list of priorities.<p>I don&#x27;t know what the big-picture answer is.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getbubblenow.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getbubblenow.com</a> (currently in beta)

Another week, another hyperbolic article written by journalists against the industry eating their lunch. I hate Facebook as much as anyone else, but let’s be honest here: the Information Age means that the technologies of information generation and propagation have been democratized. Just like the Church was angry at the Printing Press, the old gatekeepers (legacy media) are rabidly resisting the new technology.<p>Ultimately it isn’t a question of <i>right or wrong,</i> but <i>when and how</i>. Get used to it. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle and these top-down solutions are still stuck in the previous century.

If you have to repeatedly compare an opt-in social network with an automated nuclear launch system, you don&#x27;t have much of a point.

I agree with the broad message that social media has had a net negative effect on the world. I think the Doomsday Machine metaphor doesn&#x27;t work, and even though I&#x27;m open to the argument the article was making, I don&#x27;t think it did a good job making it.<p>I wonder whether the media climate created by social media has made it harder to write persuasively against it. In order to be part of a successful business model centered around social media, these articles tend to embody the qualities (inflammatory, reactionary, narrow-minded, unfocused) of the thing they&#x27;re railing against.

That article is one of the dumbest articles I&#x27;ve read in an unusually dumb year.<p>Why do these journalists think we should all only ever be spoon-fed inoffensive, carefully-curated pap? And when was the last time anyone changed their mind about <i>anything</i> because of something they saw on Facebook? The worst it does is confirm existing bias and prejudice.

Well, the Atlantic is not really free now, but I feel that this criticism still applies :<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samzdat.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;13&#x2F;the-guardians-inferno&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;samzdat.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;10&#x2F;13&#x2F;the-guardians-inferno&#x2F;</a><p>(This is not just about social media.)

Social media is, well, social. It is a place for people to express how they feel, not how they think. I find it surprising that anyone thinks Facebook could ever be a place of rational thought. It isn&#x27;t for that.

&gt; Facebook inadvertently auto-generated jaunty recruitment videos for the Islamic State featuring anti-Semitic messages and burning American flags.<p>Wow what an amazing slant. Done reading at this line.

re. Twitter negative comments: sorry, it&#x27;s very valuable to me. It&#x27;s easy to curate: I use LIST. I have a focused list (&quot;story&quot;) which provides great, relevant information. It seems there is a subgroup of people on Twitter who understand how to use (&amp; how not to use) it &#x2F; imo Twitter is underrated.

Extend the indefinite public health orders to Facebook<p>Health and Human Services can ban Facebook and states have clauses in their own emergency orders to automatically include that<p>To pass constitutional muster, you can say “publicly traded social media networks that brag about how many fake users they have with over 500 million of them”

Getting tired of these melodramatic think pieces.

Media loves Facebook articles. Perception.

&gt; If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?<p>Perhaps a better metaphor is how a Jehovah&#x27;s Witness was forbidden to preach from a sidewalk of a company town. She was later found in her right to do that by the Supreme Court.<p>But in both of these cases, the issue is that of scale - neither compares to Facebook&#x27;s megascale.

I hate to be this dismissive, but I couldn’t find a single paragraph in that article that provided any kind of compelling analysis or insight into human behavior.<p>I’m less concerned about misinformation propagating through a platform vs why misinformation even works on someone. I don’t care if the whole country of Russia sat there and told you lies with fake accounts 24&#x2F;7, I want to know why you believed any of it.<p>Anyways, is The Atlantic supposed to be a reputable website? This article isn’t even the fun kind of hot take, it’s the trite tacky type of hot take (oh, is the Social Dilemma out? Are we going to keep things thematic and piggy back off that?).