It is fascinating to see the Internet (and in this case Facebook) displacing the multi-billion(trillion?) media estate. I remember the dot.com bubble where the media claimed that statements that the Internet would make them obsolete was crap. 20 years ahead of its time I guess.
The policy question is similar to the phone system one, is it in the people's best interest that their be a standard phone system? And if so, can you regulate it sufficiently to avoid abuses? Those were the questions surrounding the original Bell network in the US. What does a monopoly look like in the Internet world, and do we, can we, regulate it? Pretty important questions.
On the other hand, I don't think you can ignore Bell Labs or the fact they they did build some amazing infrastructure. Would the world have been better off on the whole with more competition in AT&T's heyday?
It’s hard to answer your counterfactual definitively, but probably, yes.
"At stake is not the First Amendment or the right of free speech, but exclusive custody of the master switch." — FRED FRIENDLY
Any wealth or power imbalance tends toward this result.
Facebook is doing a very fine job of being the first place people hear about stuff happening. It's one website, and it will give you exactly the news you care about- big stories side by side with your friends' random musings. They've aggregated all information that a person cares about in one place, personalized, custom-fit, nothing you don't care about.
I'm not calling that a good thing, but I do think it's true.
There's a MacDonald's in every city in the planet, and it's literally killing us from how unhealthy it is, but good god I keep going back every now and then. Same idea as Facebook.
Yes, you can make a strong argument that eating ONLY McDonald's is unhealthy (though others have done the opposite in various documentaries), but if you're going to say that McDonald's is "literally" killing us, you'll need to back it up with a mountain of evidence. Anecdotes aside, the places with the greatest longevity also tend to have a lot of McDonalds restaurants. The top McDonald's eating countries (per capita) outside the US are Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada and France—some of the longest living people in the world!
If they're "literally" being killed by the food, it sure takes a long time to do its damage!
It is not possible to design your life so that you completely avoid the influence of an entity as large and powerful as Facebook, just like the citizens of most countries cannot design their lives in a way that fully avoids the influence of the U.S. government.
On what can you possibly base this claim? This is why Internet.org and the walled garden got nuked. This is what we really mean when we talk about network neutrality. You type a URL into the address bar and press enter, and the page you requested loads.
While certainly there are populations where internet access is not readily available, that doesn't appear to be your argument. "working-class and poor people have neither the time nor mental energy to peruse a variety of sources" is a bizarre claim I can't quite get my head around.
Consider the possibility that this difficulty lies not with the claim, but with your head.
The real value of money is that you can use it in place of time. The less of it you have, the more time you must spend on dealing with problems that you could make go away much more quickly and easily otherwise. The converse is also true.
That's why people say that it's a privilege to be able to gather a balanced view of the world. I would not say the same, because the rhetoric of privilege is inseparable from personal attack, and making people feel uneasy and defensive is inimical to worthwhile discourse. But when people use that lazy cliché in this context, that is what they mean.
Is this a generational point of view? I don't think that the word "privilege" is "inseperable from personal attack. To me, this very much fits into the definition of a privilege as "a benefit enjoyed by a person, beyond the advantages of most". Access to and time to read a broad variety of news sources is very much a benefit enjoyed by some people, beyond the advantages of most. I don't see how there's any personal attack implicit in that...
I speak to communicate with people - that's communicate with, not talk to, and if you're unclear on the distinction, any dictionary with etymological information will serve you.
Talking about other people's opinions, behaviors, and beliefs in terms of privilege makes communicating with them harder instead of easier. So it's not worth my while to do.
This is true to a point, but you stretch it to an absolutism. As if, a lack of money by definition means a lack of time, which is most certainly false. In many ways, having more money increases demands on your time, and this can hold true up through even Larry Page levels of wealth.
Working-class and poor people; many often hold a much more balanced world-view than the wealthy or elite. And yes, many of them used the internet to access diverse viewpoints mixed with their life experience in order to help arrive at those viewpoints.
I think net worth is very loosely correlated with some of the things you seem to think net worth is strongly correlated with.
Now, your self-description is quite colorful, but seems to only support my claims. It almost sounds like you're saying that a diverse group of people do actually have the means to discuss complex topics and critically analyze diverse viewpoints beyond whatever Facebook's algorithm might choose for them.
And thank you bobcostas55 for bringing data to the conversation upthread.
But if this is what you call "communicating with people not just talking to them" I'll just step out now.
Sorry to say, yours is the first direct reply in years of HN I've regretted not being able to downvote.
Before I could get more than a few words into all of that, though, I got an email from my father, who told me that my distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up is in fact permanently paralyzed in the lower half of his body, and between that and other injuries will almost certainly require lifelong care.
I may be a sarcastic asshole of a redneck, but I am also an amazingly fortunate redneck. I have made a successful career in software engineering, which enables me to earn more in a year than both my parents combined. A lot of that I send back home. I cannot send enough. I do not make enough. In that light the perspective you express strikes me as thoughtlessly facile. I did a poor job of expressing that in my last comment, which was written in the heat of the moment. Perhaps this one, with the benefit of reflection, will make it more clear.
It's a shame you are unable to downvote that comment, if you feel it is warranted. Perhaps someone else will step up and do so.
And to give a little more background, Facebook was trying to get free "internet" access away in India, but it wasn't really internet access it was actually just a Facebook walled garden. The local population organized and ultimately the government rightly told them to piss off.
Because being able to access a diverse set of viewpoints on the Internet is not, actually, a "privilege" but rather the central point of the whole affair.
Each human's window into the larger world is increasingly through a lens controlled by automated software we don't understand.
That Facebook is a social networking platform that some people incidentally use to try to relay news of general public concern, not an online public affairs platform with an incidental social networking function?
It's irrelevant if the most fantastic analysis of news and current affairs is readily available around the corner if people stop going there.
Look, if people aren't going to choose news-focused sites over social-networking-focused sites, then existing social-networking-focused sites that bait-and-switch their users into a news-focused experience are just going to lose to actual social networking sites, starting the problem back at zero.
There was the WWW itself, at least for a time, though there are elements which tend toward centralisation, largely discovery, discussion, authentication, and directory.
Tim Berners-Lee and others have recently announce Solid.
I think it means absolutely nothing. I use Facebook so I can see how my friends are doing, not to find news articles to read (unless it's an article my friend just shared, and even then only maybe). I don't think many people use facebook to get their news and nowhere else.
And yet enough people do that it's a real and recognized problem to the point that HN discusses it every couple of weeks. HN in itself being a similar echo chamber.
People get news from what they look at. There's no such thing as "news". It's all eyeball based. The source with the most eyeballs is considered The News.
Actually, nearly 50% of American adults use facebook as a news source [0]. Not that this means they don't have other sources, but it seems very likely that increased consumption of news via facebook is cutting into consumption from other sources. Anecdotally I've noticed that trend in my own news consumption, to my chagrin.
[0] http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/pew-report-44-percent-of-u-...
I believe you have to be a special kind of crazy not to acknowledge that as a problem. Or, considering their big user base, a very general kind of crazy.
Anecdotally I'd agree with you, but apparently statistically most facebook users are trending that way, so it's a genuine concern.
I get all my news from Twitter.
Couldn't a newspaper that uses algorithmic metrics (or any kind of metrics or surveying) end up making a similar editorial decision for similar reasons? Journalists have worried about independence of editorial and advertising for somewhat analogous kinds of reason for a long time, and also about whether their news outlets were doing the most important journalism vs. journalism with the greatest mass appeal.
When there were two reasonably good newspapers in virtually any city (or 3, or 9, or in some cases 30 or 40), there was a readily available local alternative to the editorial decisions of any one paper, though other factors (political machine, major advertiser, mob) might have similarly restricted what was covered.
But those days are gone -- many cities in the US have only one major daily, and it's often stopped trying. Local radio and television, as well as national broadcasts, are abysmal.
What I'm noticing today, at least in print media, is a staggeringly widespread mediocrity and lack of relevance. Actually, that goes beyond print to broadcast (radio and television), and many mainstream online sources.
The saving grace, at least for now, are competing, largely non-mainstream sources, which carry information that is less likely to be carried. Yes, some sites cater to eyeball-attracting, outrage-inducing bogosities, but others actually contain solid content.
My local paper has had little if any coverage of international trade pacts which treaten to rewrite major elements of laws across multiple countries, but I can find detailed information at, of all places, Buzzfeed. Or The Intercept. Or The Guardian. Or Pro Publica. Or your EFF article -- one of the best explainers I've found, and some colourful infographics to boot (they've been in heavy play, and largely my only content, at Google+, as Google are among the sadly far-too-many tech companies promoting the TPP, TTIP, BITS, and TiSA).
Something is badly wrong with media, though, and globally. It's not a whole lot that's not been warned about for a long, long time -- Eric Blair (George Orwell), Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Neal Postman, Jerry Mander, I.F. Stone, and others cautioned about it. Oh, and Walter Lippman and Noam Chomsky. But is it ever getting flagrant.
I'd even be modestly satisfied with algorithmic placements, so long as they were different algorithms, possibly rotated, and with some sortition blended in for random perterbations.
Facebook's a problem, and a large problem, but not the only problem.
The point here is that this is all being funneled through one filter. And many media / news companies may disappear over time so the issue could become worse.
Number and variety of sources of information is the distinction.
I think your analogy would apply if there were many "Facebooks". But there is only one.
I don't quite get how that is any different from a TV news station or a newspaper coming to the same conclusion?
The moment is squires extra optimizing targets, that's a problem. What is more troubling is that we can't even know when that changes (if it didn't already).
You'll be a hell of a lot healthier since the war photo is pointless(Exactly what's the point of reseeing the photo... to remind you war is bad?) but your friends count.
This specific people may escape that fate, as it's important enough to be in history books - I believe I first saw it in primary school - but handing Facebook the power to hide important parts of history from a huge proportion of people is dangerous.
Those war photos are supposed to be reminders for future decisions.
Based on continuous USA policy to export war to foster weapon economy, not much has changed though.
What does it mean for society when Facebook can demote a challenging but important article (say, of war reporting) in your newsfeed so it can promote your friend's Wedding photos, because an algorithm says that challenging articles cause people to leave FB, reducing page views and ad revenue?