This is a technology forum, so I'll warn beforehand that my opinion, although it has political conclusions, is from a systems perspective and not meant to cause a flame war.

Your position, above, is a very common defense of capitalism. Each agent should act on its best interest, and disregard all else. Distilled like that, it's the purest form of capitalism.

While that position has its merits, we should understand its limitations. It prevents capture of companies by the power struggle. On the other hand, in this case, it is failing to act on FB's exploitation of a negative externality.

FB, by keeping users in their comfort zone is preventing society from improving. And is profiting from it. It gains the profit, sheds some costs to the society at large.

Capitalism is the best society optimization mechanism we know. It is not perfect, though. It creates local maximums, it is short sighted and we must always be careful about its limitations.

If the latter, any attempts FB makes will be create an exodus, lose-lose.

No. Each agent should act according to his own will and believes, that often is in his own best interest, but that not always true.

Its a hard case to actually prove this assertion of facebook. I have not spent any time an it or read much research on it.

Is it really that different from all Americans reading the same newspapers that thought the Spanish American War was a great idea?

Yep, that's what is said when saying "Facebook [...] kills democracy for their own benefit". They provide a discourse perceived as the public discourse for a profit.

Some people are considering that this exercise is a threat to democracy, and even though you seem to imply that you are more versed / cynical / aware ("Give me a break"), that's precisely the for profit part that ruffles some feathers.

> What kills democracy is people incapable of convincing others that they are being mislead/wrong without insulting them with all possible -ism .

Offering a platform for misleading news does not help and actually plays an active part in this.

> What kills democracy is people on both side being so extreme they just can't talk to each other anymore. Facebook isn't responsible for that.

Building a bubble is the prime example of how you can stop separated communities from talking to each other. You can say that the separation existed before Facebook, before other online communities, it does not make it any less salient that these bubbles exists and that it is in the monetary interest of Facebook to further them in order to sell better targeted ads. They whole business plan, their whole point of existing is depending on practices and behaviors that are currently a problem in our democracies.

This means that as of now, Facebook will fight for these problems when they fight for their business. Even if you don't use Facebook or other social networks on the Internet, this means that as an individual citizen your country / nation is being influenced by these products. Even if you choose to not use them, it is perfectly reasonable to go out of your way to tell people to stop using them and to fight their influence in your country.

So, people can perfectly continue to blame Facebook for these problems. No one says that they should be alone in being blamed on this, no need to exaggerate the critics to make them appear ridiculous. But acknowledging these problems is absolutely critical these days.

It's just scapegoating. It's useless and a waste of time. The time you spend blaming Facebook is the time you don't spend actually fixing what should be fixed : creating an healthy environment for debate.

Blaming this or that website is easy and it doesn't solve anything. Quitting the extremist views, quitting calling people morons,trolls,douchebags when they disagree with this or that political line and actually engaging them strictly on ideas instead of dismissing their concerns as -ism or -phobia is the only way you're going to make people listen to what you have to say.

If you filter people's news, they'll just go somewhere else that give them what they want. And then you'll wake up again not understanding the result of the last elections because you lived in your own, filtered echochamber.

Fake news exists because they are able to sell ads on their pages, and they are profitable because they attract people, creating feelings, outrage, unreasonable reactions that feeds the pre-existing bias in the whole population.

Fighting these should be cutting their revenue streams. Google did just that, but it is a survival move so as to avoid precisely being in the blast of defense move that ought to be taken by citizens.

However, Google can and will only do the bare minimum for them to show that they somewhat care and that they are in control. They are starting a play of cat and mouse with people that can easily switch platforms.

> It's useless and a waste of time.

Ad-blockers are pretty effective there. If everyone used ad-blockers, fake news website would not have any revenue left, beside some marginal subscription streams. Evangelizing for ad-blockers, against Facebook, against Google and against analytics in general is an effective way to fight against these parasites.

> The time you spend blaming Facebook is the time you don't spend actually fixing what should be fixed : creating an healthy environment for debate.

The time I spend blaming all social networks is a time spent to better the Internet and fight against populisms at large. As for how to foster a healthy environment for debate, I'd quote Sartre:

> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

Replace anti-Semites, which were the populists of the pre-45 era, to whichever populism you want today, be it from the left or from the right. You cannot win with reason against them, because they speak to the guts and then explain that since they have popular support, they have already won. You cannot defend measure and reason because their main weapon is bipartism coloring things in black and white, and this will always be more popular than trying to explain things, to have some critical thinking.

Mass-media in general will always push forward this kind of gregarian thinking. Internet ought to be a way for us to build other ways to consume and produce, to share information. Facebook and Google and Amazon are building empires upon the ashes of the old world, effectively cutting the disruptive factor that Internet was introducing in its infancy. Fighting those mastodons is not vain, it is time spent actually fixing what should be fixed.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jul/12/how-technology...

Perhaps when major media get so many real stories about democracy wrong and the alt media get them right it's time to stop trusting the people getting things wrong and start trusting the people getting things right.

Fuck, even the NYT had to recommit itself to journalism their reporting this year was so bad.

'As we reflect on the momentous result, and the months of reporting and polling that preceded it, we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.'

When you publish articles saying that the support of a candidate is more important than reporting the truth... well... people stop trusting you as someone who tells the truth no matter how politically unpopular it is, and start thinking of you as the political hacks that they are, and openly admit to being.

'In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues.'

If we want to have healthy democracy, it's up to all of us to figure out how to get every citizen to consume factual information and let them know when they're being lied to. That's a Hard Problem with an incredibly valuable solution. To me it seems like FB is well positioned to play a role here. They've figured out how to get a huge population to consume content on their platform - now they need to figure out how to get people to consume some knowledge along with the cat pictures and avoid outright lies (e.g. dead FBI director [0]). The question is whether that would be counter to their engagement KPIs (maybe some people only want "facts" they agree with). My gut says that eliminating the clickbait/propaganda (internet noise) would make it all the more indispensable as a resource/utility.

[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/12/02/504155809/episo...

What do you do when the people don't actually care? IMO people don't want their views challenged. They're happier when they accept stuff they agree with and can get up on their high horse about stuff they disagree with (signing the odd petition or two). I've been shocked by people I know who are very well educated that don't know about major news stories, even ones that effect the field they're in. And when I explain the story to them, they don't care.

You're lifting one sentence out of context. The rest of the paragraph reads [1]:

"In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues. But this is not a normal election year. A comparison like that would be an empty exercise in a race where one candidate — our choice, Hillary Clinton — has a record of service and a raft of pragmatic ideas, and the other, Donald Trump, discloses nothing concrete about himself or his plans while promising the moon and offering the stars on layaway."

The president-elect's walking back on so many of his promises since the election seem to be vindicating these comments.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/opinion/sunday/hillary-cli...

Shouldn't they instead be saying, 'We got everything right, we reported all the facts, like the polls sampling Dems and women @ 60%, and Hillary lost surprising absolutely no one with a rudimentary understanding that the population of the US is 50/50 male / female'

The context always was that this wasn't a normal election year and for some reason what they'd normally do wasn't an option (because the enemy is Hitler.) The reason why they got everything wrong is because they think that people care about things like 'well, so and so didn't exactly say this or that' rather than figure out what the overall gist of the message is. Alt-media is believed because it resonates with the overall feeling people get from the news, which is why the times had to do a mea culpa on the election because they lied so much that after Clinton lost even their base knew that they were just making shit up with no regard to reality which is why Trump won because proper defenses couldn't be put in place because the NYT was blatantly lying to everyone about Trump's chances in hopes that people would just believe Hillary was going to win and stay home.

I hate to sound like Grammar Clippy, but: consider using more than one comma or breaking all those subclauses into separate sentences.

"Alt-media" convinced a man to go shoot up a pizzeria on no factual grounds whatsoever. This is not just dangerous to democracy, it's inciting violence against innocent people.

In theory, yes. In practice, a lot of people fail badly, to the point major contemporary decisions are now driven by intentionally false or heavily skewed information. That’s a big problem.

Perhaps when major media get so many real stories about democracy wrong and the alt media get them right it's time to stop trusting the people getting things wrong and start trusting the people getting things right.

Here in the Czech Republic the alt media spread lies, hatred and propaganda, with no regard for the society. The state-owned and sane private media aren’t perfect, but are much better.

That's difficult if the publisher (Facebook) only shows them untrustworthy material, and the viewer is not aware that this is the case.

The alt-media links extensively to MSM to point out their lies and inconsistency, I'm sure someone has realized that CNN, and MSNBC, and NYT are a thing.

Even if you're not right wing, you'd probably at some point heard of Noam Chomsky who goes on similar rants about how even highly regarded NYT publishes articles that are pretty much propaganda. And then there's Jason Blair...

When did they do that?

No its not. They need to show all articles to the people that form bubbles is the point here.

> They provide a social network, for profit.

yes, but their influence on the world politics and emotions cannot be ignored simply because they are a for profit company. Business is simply not an excuse to separate people in bubbles. >Nobody is forced to use their platform

Do you really think that everyone decides on how they should use facebook before they do? No. People are not blaming FB for everything. Only about forming bubbles that can bring about significant social changes for humans.

I'm not really worried about Trump but for anyone dying or suffering because of his decisions, FB has a huge part in that. There's no denying in that.

Well Facebook _is_ doing that as we speak, but they don't consider it controlling what people read - they're just giving their users what they think they want. For their bottom-line. Which is their business.

But there's no harm in pointing out that a for-profit entity isn't behaving in a socially responsible manner. Even if you or I don't use the platform.

Now some people obviously welcome this trend, but lets just assume there are a few who see this as quite frightening.

I've been debating the causes of this with friends, and it's actually quite murky. The US is running with the "too much identity politics" and/or "economic stagnation for the white lower class" as explanations.

The problem is that these simply don't work in other places: Germany is doing better than ever, economically. And even if you're unemployed, your basic needs are not in danger. Britain was doing fine, as well. Same for Turkey.

Germany has 1 Million Syrian refugees. But the US only took 10,000 and the UK haa half that.

The one mechanism that's universal is the change in media consumption. The media used to be controlled by the elites, who generally remained within the narrow window that's sometimes called "reality". Now, it's a free-for-all and groups have started to coalesce around any possible ideological bend.

Facebook is probably the central mechanism. People always seek the approval of their peers, and it has become so much easier to get that gratification, even if it's from people you rarely see in person.

Of course it'd be possible to change all that by "not using Facebook". But we all know it's impossible to change human nature. That's why people are grasping at ideas of how to inhibit this mechanism.