Dear Mark Zuckerberg: Democracy is not a Facebook focus group

Re:Dear Mark Zuckerberg: Democracy is not a Facebook focus g... by anigbrowl on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @03:39PM (#13699688)

I think you overstate the centrality of Facebook. Yes, FB feeds people a lot of nonsense int he name of commerce. But extremist people with odious political views were and are forming their own social networks without FB and have been for years (not least because quite a lot of them think Zuckerberg is part of an international Jewish conspiracy).

I'm not a big fan of FB and don't have any ownership interest in it. However I think it's largely politically neutral and that Zuckerberg is just a bit out of his depth with the manifesto as opposed to being wickedly cynical - even though most people would peg me as a radical leftist.

the phenomenon that Facebook exemplifies is a real problem, and it's why I've been arguing in general terms for the destructiveness as capitalism as the only driving force in development and the superiority of protocols to platforms, so as to preserve a truly open and inclusive internet rather than one built around the extraction of economic rents. But I regard FB as a symptom rather than a cause, and try to save my anger for the people who are actively working to strip people of their rights and liberties as opposed to those who merely profit from applying technology to the existing but often unethical way of doing business.

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Re:Dear Mark Zuckerberg: Democracy is not a Facebook focus g... by ricw on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @03:53PM (#13699831)

You probably don't realise how influential it is. Americans spend on average 50 minutes per day on Facebook [1]! That is a lot. It's probably the prime source of news in the western world. This is not to be underestimated.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-t...

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Re:Dear Mark Zuckerberg: Democracy is not a Facebook focus g... by anigbrowl on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @06:28PM (#13701256)

You probably don't realise

You probably don't gather enough information before jumping to conclusions. I am sick to the back teeth of people assuming disagreement must be a result of ignorance, doubly so for people whose idea of rebuttal is citing a single data point and extrapolating absurd conclusions from it.

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Re:Dear Mark Zuckerberg: Democracy is not a Facebook focus g... by flootch on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @04:42PM (#13700326)

Thank god for now that you are in error about that:

> That’s the average amount of time, the company said, that users spend each day on its Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms (and that’s not counting the popular messaging app WhatsApp).

So that's not Americans it's users, and it's not FB, but I am hopeful that it's Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, which I perceive for now are "task" based communications and sharing apps, not the "spam my friends and family with my political beliefs" stuff I don't want in nearly the amount that FB shovels at me.

You had me scared there for a moment, but I bet you are more right than wrong in your basic point It's probably the prime source of news in the western world. This is not to be underestimated.

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Re:Dear Mark Zuckerberg: Democracy is not a Facebook focus g... by stinkytaco on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @03:57PM (#13699862)

> But extremist people with odious political views were and are forming their own social networks without FB and have been for years

Judging by the Facebook feeds of people I know, there seems to be plenty on Facebook.

I thie problem is less stamping out extremist views -- which as you point out is impossible -- but the maintstreaming of those views. And that mainstreaming is done at least partially via the Facebook sharing mechanism.

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Re:Dear Mark Zuckerberg: Democracy is not a Facebook focus g... by anigbrowl on Tuesday February 21, 2017 @06:32PM (#13701281)

I agree about the mainstreaming but I think FB is just the current easiest platform for that, like AOL in days past and Compuserve before that. People are always going to gravitate to the single largest platform with the most consistent UI and the simplest onboarding, but I argue the underlying social synamic is platform-neutral.

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