Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Government to Break It Up

Re:Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Gov... by mastazi on Sunday July 28, 2019 @10:47PM (#20551159)

Thank you, your points about social context are spot on in my opinion, I have those problems in my own circle of friends and acquaintances as well. I feel that those mostly apply to Facebook itself and not to the other services that Facebook owns, like Whatsapp and Instagram. It is interesting that much of the negative press coverage also ignores IG and Whatsapp and instead focuses on "Facebook proper" so you may be onto something. I remember Danah Boyd from reading a paper about the social differences between Fb and Myspace users, that must have been a few years ago :-)

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Re:Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Gov... by bertil on Monday July 29, 2019 @12:32PM (#20556394)

There’s a lot of criticism on WhatsApp and Instagram. The most interesting are:

- WhatsApp is used by conservative political parties (notably Mohdi in India) to promote non-representative, outrageous stories. Those spread in group chats, away from fact-checking. Reducing group maximum size should help slow down and allow media to counter-message before the message spreads too far.

- Instagram is promoting a superficial, edited, material lifestyle. There’s good pushback from the company like reducing the visibility of Likes.

I don’t think that either of those examples contradicts the general trend of issues with context collapse.

danah boyd on MySpace vs. Facebook users, there were two main ones in 2007 [1] and 2010 [2].

[1] http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html [2] http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/07/21/myspace...

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Re:Chris Hughes, a Facebook Founder, Is Working With the Gov... by mastazi on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @03:21AM (#20562746)

Thank you, yes I had heard both of those lines of criticism, I think that the solution of limiting group size on Whatsapp is going to be effective but I'm more sceptical about hiding the number of likes on IG.

Thanks for the Danah Boyd links, the one I remember is the one from 2007, it's still an interesting read in my opinion!

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