If Facebooks algorithms prioritised content from people I actually interact with, instead of showing the clickfarm-content that some high school classmate of mine liked, I suspect many of their problems would actually dissapear.

I mind seeing the post from WhateverLADMeme that she 'liked'. It's easy for me to see the difference, and I think it would be easy for Facebook as well.

They already filter what you see and they prefer to choose that because it serves their interests, not yours.

If they wanted to serve the user's interest, that comment would most likely be filtered out.

If they are going to take the role of curator — which they have via their newsfeed algos, then they have become something other than a friend-to-friend sharing platform and they assume the responsibilities therein.

That needs to be moderated.

I put my $ where my fingers are: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

I would wager that the primary reason the majority of people are on Facebook (unlike Twitter and Instagram) is still the original reason: to be connected to people they already know. Facebook wants to leverage and interrupt that as far as possible, as far as we will allow.

The WhatsApp founder quit over differences around privacy / advertising, and WhatsApp is only one part of facebook. Facebook can see everything on facebook itself, and Messenger. In addition, they failed to the data that they do have private. The problem is they are failing on both fronts simultaneously, privacy, and preventing harm on their platform.

If they were only failing on one front, then I would have some sympathy for your position.

The particular accusation I was referring to was the one pertaining the mob violence in India, which is a tragedy that was completely orchestrated on whatsapp AFAIK. I'm pretty sure I can find more if I look on the media, more recent also.

The founder of whatsapp quitting does not change anything in the equation.

These are just tools of the trade - which in this case was probably some local politics. Today, when more and more such tools are available with instant communication to a large audience, having an educated opinion and thought about the incoming communication (messages, memes or videos, etc.) is more important. Unfortunately, that is way more easily said than done.

With all the media already causing severe cognitive load, giving a thorough thought to something you come across becomes even more difficult, especially when just reacting to it is so much more simpler.

This applies not only to WhatsApp or FB, but the numerous online platforms that have a wide reach.

Since I may have gone off-topic, I suppose I should end this with a /rant

Some of these things that have occurred could reasonably be argued to be genocide. Calling that ‘local politics’ and minimising FBs role is not the way this should be handled.

In fact, I seem to remember they recently did... The idea was limiting the number of possible recipients of a message, and also limiting forward chains. That would seem a promising policy to stop the sort of mass-coordinated eruptions of violent emotions these products otherwise enable.

The second point is rather more subjective, but in my recollection, there was never a moment where there was a collective sense that the internet is of negative net value in the way that is the case for FB today.

When the internet was small, it was also unknown. At the time where it became part of the general dialog, it often came in the form of CompuServe and AOL. Those were rather sanitised walled gardens, and the obvious positive uses had front page billing in the average person's mind. Sure, there were lots of scare stories of porn and whatever, but I don't remember them ever getting close the far larger narrative of the dotcom boom.

However, who would like to use a platform where things can not go viral ? Certainly not advertisers. This is an impossible conundrum.

I've come to the conclusion that (to a first approximation) anything that the masses want to share, I don't want to see.

They built systems with a dreamy vision that drastically reducing friction for sharing, communicating, grouping and discussion will lead to a better world.

To me, that is a forgivable mistake. But what's not forgivable is not doing proper introspection when something goes wrong. The job of the CEO is to ensure his company does well in the long run. That the company survives and thrives.

Due to this myopic vision of facebook and its assumption that creating such a platform will only foster good, it was too late to build effective controls to it's platform. It assumed that data is a cash-cow that ought to be milked and sold that to anyone willing to pay. It failed to see the repercussions of it's data-for-all approach, in fact it proudly proclaimed that the company's most valuable asset is its data, that data is the new oil, etc. It assumed that the millions of people on it's platform need not be monitored or the use of it's platform need not be regulated. It failed to build adequate tools to help it's own users counter / report abusive / blatantly false / troublesome content. Even if it built them, it failed to hire enough staff to handle the content on it's platform.

>They cannot win, and they're expected to monitor and censor everything in real time (and what they do already apparently is bad enough for people that they get PTSD right now, I don't want to imagine the crap they remove)

When FB is shouting loudly to the world that social is the next big thing, that social is the new google, that social is the new oil, that publishers ought to use it's platform to easily and quickly reach audience (remember that it's algorithms control who will see the publishers content), that everyone ought to be connected to it all the time, that everyone ought to play social games on it's social platform, that everyone needs to search social to make the next purchase, that everyone ought to get their information from social, then it ought to accept responsibility to the actions it's platform has enabled.

FB went to the extent of putting real effort in third world countries to eradicate the difference between the internet and FB. It has succeeded in a few African countries too.

FB's intent is pretty clear, it want's everybody to use it's platform and it want's to remove barriers to human interaction. Then it better not complain that it cannot control itself and it's not responsible for what's happening on it's platform.

If you know a murder is being committed in your basement every Monday, and you fail to do something about it, then you have a very high chance of being convicted to being an accessory to murder.

FB has become a monster and, in my view, a necessary scapegoat to educate the masses and those in power, the destructive effects of social media.

Unrestricted, anonymous human interactions have no hope of making the world good, as it's extremely easy for fringe elements to take control of the narrative and poison the well.

FB ought to die and from it's ashes rise the idea that when given a chance, most humanity will behave as wild animals rather than hermits full of wisdom.

Are we supposed to stop complaining about Facebook's negative impact on the world because their business model makes it impossible for them to resolve those problems?

The most common example of this is the tobacco industry and it's pretty much still there. Smaller, sure.

But do we really regulate the sugar industry killing millions every day? Or the car industries destroying the environment, cities and people? Oil industry perhaps?

There are many other examples of these. They are "regulated" in the strict sense, but in reality, they control governments and keep doing whatever they want.

I don't think anything will ever change in this scenario. After all, capitalism is the answer to every problem, right? /s

Hyperbole much? Only 150,000 people die each day worldwide from all causes.

If an industry was committing a literal holocaust every few weeks I think we would notice.

Again, the problem is not sharing. The problem is that they knowingly manipulate the sharing. How they do that is their problem.

I have no idea how to go about enforcing this. But it's impossible for me to look at it and say "just let it run it's natural course".

Regarding what should be regulated, I’d say that assisting genocide should be blocked for a start.

I'm really hoping we're headed towards decentralised federated social networks. With more control in the hands of the users. Like email + usenet on steroids. Not that those were perfect, but in that kind of environment, everybody can curate their own little corner, rather than putting all that in the hands of a single company.

We have international nuclear arms proliferation agreements that are reasonably effective. We keep the worst actors in the world from possessing biological weapons. But we cannot control what social media company Mark Zuckerberg let's loose on the world?

And we can't stop greed? Compared to the robber baron era we're all bleeding heart socialists. Change is possible and we can determine what technologies we want to live with as a society.

If twitter would only allow direct sharing between say, a personal circle of friends, I'd bet you a lot of money that we'd see very different outcomes.

At least they do that until genocide in Myanmar turns into a Facebook public relations problem.

You can always complain, but I find it akin to complaining about telephone companies because people use telephone services to plan and perpetrate crimes. Or knife manufacturers because people kill others with knives.

Facebook is a tool, and turned out to be a pretty effective tool. As with many effective tools, there are bad uses for it.

...and so are its users. In any case: people are arguing specifically that the negatives outweigh the positives. While that is obviously subjective and debatable, there really isn't any argument defending Facebook under the assumption that they are net negative.

In fact, there is a rather long list of precedent. That's why you can't really enrich uranium even if it would make a really cool necklace.

[0]https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

That assumption is very much the point of contention here.

As long as you don't believe they can moderate an e2e channel you're fine in my book. :)

It's like these trash psychological studies about conservatives being motivated by "fear" and "disgust" and liberals being motivated by "openness" and some other word with positive connotations. These people aren't lab rats. They have free will, Facebook didn't force them to vote for Trump. If they're able to be influenced by Facebook ads, they were just as well influenced by anything they saw on Fox, CNN, etc.

No doubt, Facebook has an influence on the thoughts of people who use it. But that influence is present in every other medium. Acting like people are two-dimensional characters who made the wrong decisions because they were badly influenced by Facebook, but not me, not me the intellectual who is immune to such influence because I'm not a lab rat but these people are. That attitude drives me up the wall. And the lab rats see it too. They're not so stupid that they're unaware about being talked about like idiotic subhuman specimens incapable of coming to their own conclusions.

And then the same people that talk about them like lab rats get mad at the NPC meme. Okay, I'm laughing again.