I totally agree. And we're the ones paying the price of their actions.

Who is we? I am not paying anything AFAIK. When my girlfriend had problems, she simply stopped using it that much. I myself simply don't subscribe to pseudomotivational bullshit or internet "personalities".

When people get stuck in a bubble of fake news and manufactured outrage they tend to vote accordingly, and that does impact you.

fake news and manufactured outrage is how our political system has always operated, it's just easier to see the process applying to people you disagree with now

Good point

"We" is referring to society in general. There will be exceptions to everything. Maybe you'd like to point out that people are free to opt out? Is that what you're saying?

It sounds good on paper, but in reality, it is not. For many people, they absolutely need to be on FB otherwise they will be excluded from all their friends. Sure those people can choose be hermits.

I think it's mostly this mindset that keeps that being true. As soon as some of your friends defect from FB, it becomes much easier to defect yourself. Or, you could be the first person, and make it a bit more viable for your other friends to stop.

At this point, most of my friends don't really use Facebook much, we mostly stick to messaging apps and email. Maybe start by making a chat group in Telegram and telling people about it?

That's what I meant, "we" as society, as culture. Because people aren't just tweaking their stories. When you do this at a mass scale you have a responsibility as citizen. And as I pointed out, building fictional stories can lead to genocides and wars (we've already seen it). We all suffer from this.

I have scaled back my usage of Facebook after I discovered they are advertising my like activity to my audience i.e. "friends". I've had relatives accost me at family gatherings or have been unfriended over a Facebook page I followed, even though I rarely if ever share my personal views directly in my feed. Sometimes I'll like something even though I have a marginal interest in the subject.

Facebook has the power to destroy life-long friendships because we continue to give it this power.

Ya...I really think hard about it before I like anything on facebook. Even scrolling through the feed or something I'm always concious not to accidently like anything or press the wrong button. I actually prefer looking through things on the few private groups i'm part of and if I post anything it'll be to one of those for the most part. Your normal facebook friends don't see anything you do on those.

I think worse though is when people tag you in public posts. You have no control over it at all, it gets announced to, seemingly randomly, some or all of your other friends...i'm not sure who exactly but I know other people end up seeing this...and the only way to get rid of it is to ask the other person to remove it or find the post, click untag yourself, not remove post from feed...that leaves you tagged in the post still...it needs to be the right one because if you remove it before untagging yourself good luck finding that shit again.

Isn’t Twitter doing this as well by algorithmically sorting their feed? Why single out Facebook?

There’s a single switch on Twitter to turn this off.

You can bash Twitter for a lot of things, but this isn’t it.

As long as algorithmic is the default, it’s changing aggregate behavior in a big way

I can switch algorithmic sorting off, but if it’s the default for everyone else, and causing the most polarizing political content to spread even faster, it effects me and even people who don’t use Twitter at all