Re:Facebook Morale Takes a Tumble Along with Stock Price
by talkingtab on Thursday November 15, 2018 @09:59AM
(#18459697)
Technologies can amplify types of human behaviors. Twitter h brings people together, but it amplifies twits. That does not mean all people are twits, there are many people I respect who use/have used twitter. But it is an amplifier for certain kinds of people and messages. Zeynep Tufekci's book "twitter and teargas" is a great reference for this issue.
In particular there is no specific company necessary to communicate or connect on the internet. There are even fully decentralized messaging programs that operate independent of anything besides an internet connection. The reason it's easy to blame Facebook is because they are a net ill on society for many reasons aside from the ones being discussed here, they have a founder that's both remarkably visible and remarkably uncharismatic, and they or related properties are one of the most common methods of organization simply because they have, by a wide margin, the greatest marketshare of all means to organize.
But I think blaming Facebook for e.g. mob violence in India is akin to blaming the Bell System (which held a monopoly on telephone connections from the 19th century until they were broken up in the 1980s into AT&T, Verizon, etc) for e.g. the KKK organizing through telephone calls. In other words this a people problem, not a company problem. You're not going to solve this through some sort of content filtering or clever algorithms. I have absolutely no love for Facebook, but I think turning them into a scape goat for any social ill is hardly productive. It means you're going to spend all your energy shooting at one target that has nothing to do with what you're actually aiming for.