The reason they have to police content is that they want to sell ads next to that content.

The ads are content too and probably need more and better policing than the content they appear next to. Literally anyone can buy a Facebook ad and target it with exquisite precision to people who will agree with it and not report it, and since it’s their main source of revenue they’re not inclined to turn people away.

+1 hahahaha

You could unfollow your classmate and won't see the crap he posts. What you say you want is for Facebook to read your mind and detect who you like and who not. And if they actually will do that, "omg that's creppy, bad Facebook"...

I wouldn't mind seeing what my former classmate posts herself.

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.

Last time I checked, Facebook filters your content by default to optimize their ad business. They don't show things chronologically, which would make your argument pertinent.

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.

Exactly this! Once Facebook became a broadcast medium, their responsibility changed. They don’t need to police me taking to my friends. But when content literally can travel around the world to millions in an instant, they have a very real responsibility that can’t be shrugged off.

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.

Does Facebook need to police your friends talking to their friends? And those friends talking to their friends? That's all "virality" means. People (on average) are garbage, and Facebook empowers people. If Facebook is wrong, maybe Noah and is Ark are the only ones who were right.

The problem is not that they need to police people's interactions. But they take (a big) part in deciding which interactions to display to each person and insert their interests in the middle of them.

That needs to be moderated.

The reason they have to police such a sheer amount of content is because they are too big. Communities should be smaller. And social networking technology platforms should be distributed to everyone (open source).

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

Along with all their revenue.

Come on, not all their revenue. Facebook has been taking the ugly easy way forward for way too long. How many of these messy features were rolled out after Facebook already built its userbase on the strength of features people actually want? If a TV show or some other media platform switched around on us to the extent Facebook has, we'd have stopped engaging long ago.

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.