Re:Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
by WorldMaker on Thursday May 30, 2019 @01:06PM
(#20053414)
Relatedly, a big problem with Twitter/FB was showing the friend dismissed content as well as the verified content, because dismissed content eyeballs is still eyeballs on content, then making it sometimes hard to tell which was which.
A friend might retweet on Twitter content they were dismissive about, but that retweet would sometimes accidentally legitimize that content by removing the dismissive context (spreading it away in readers' timelines).
Similar with FB showing you stuff friends react to or comment on; their reactions might be Anger and their comments critical, but that context also is still partly lost if you weren't looking for it, and sometimes intentionally whitewashed ("x friends reacted to this" instead of "10 friends hate this, but one kind of liked it"), in the maelstrom of the FB timeline algorithm. (Obviously the worst case on FB up until recently was how easy it was for people to whitewash paid ads by resharing them, losing the context of who paid to promote that content in the first place.)
A friend might retweet on Twitter content they were dismissive about, but that retweet would sometimes accidentally legitimize that content by removing the dismissive context (spreading it away in readers' timelines).
Similar with FB showing you stuff friends react to or comment on; their reactions might be Anger and their comments critical, but that context also is still partly lost if you weren't looking for it, and sometimes intentionally whitewashed ("x friends reacted to this" instead of "10 friends hate this, but one kind of liked it"), in the maelstrom of the FB timeline algorithm. (Obviously the worst case on FB up until recently was how easy it was for people to whitewash paid ads by resharing them, losing the context of who paid to promote that content in the first place.)