The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least).
Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to go along with it.
The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea.
As an example, right now you are promoting a narrative on an internet site holding FB responsible for the behaviour of others. Do your readers have so little agency that they will mindlessly act on your words without reflection?
If so, what differentiates your post from a similar post on FB?
If not, what makes FB different?
These are genuine questions by the way, I'm actually interested in your answers.
I don't idealize the past at all. Too many bad things to write.
However, the internet amped up the level of overall craziness to an unprecedented level. Even the first twenty years, it was much like the regular world, but geekier. But then in a fairly short time all these crazy ideas just started to spread in an incredibly tiny period of time.
I have always been a student of the paranormal and conspiracy theories - as a skeptic. Suddenly random people were spouting all the obscure classics, and brand-new ones appeared every day.
Last year, before COVID, I decided that this was akin to an infectious disease - suddenly people were thrown in with hundreds of thousands of anonymous people, many with bad but infectious ideas.
Before the internet, you acquired most of your delusional ideas at birth from your parents under the guise of religion etc.
Now you could pick up delusional ideas one at a time - more, the presentation gets to evolve because the creators get second-to-second feedback. Call these Vemes for virulent memes perhaps?
Some once-friends of mine clearly have very poor immune systems as they picked up many vemes.
> The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea.
1. Infectious diseases don't work that way!
2. Also, a lot of this is caused by a small number of actual psychopaths who literally just want to cause grief. Allowing a tiny group of people to damage the whole is wrong.
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Trying to assign agency to the crowd is madness and not backed up by observations of humanity en masse or reading a history book. In such a mob scene, crazies, aggressive people and criminals will always win.
If it's not immediately apparent, pretty much no other medium in history (new or old) had/has the real reach Facebook has now. So taking it out of context and simply defining Facebook as a "new medium" is disingenuous. A firecracker and a bomb only differ in scale, hence the massive difference in how they're seen and treated.
With great power comes great legal and moral responsibility, and greater scrutiny. You can't shrug it off just because others have also done badly at this, especially when nobody else did it badly at such a massive scale.
I wonder what the cell phone generation would think of our pulp paper fake Necronomicons from the 1970s? There was also a book of spells at my local library in the very-white very-evangelical suburbs of Little Rock, AR when I was a kid, too. I liked the one about how to become a werewolf a lot, but didn't really get to the point of going and murdering a dog and painting myself with its blood and boiled fat.
The pearl-clutching about social media is because power has been taken away. Media executives can no longer fancy themselves in control of people's minds, because they no longer have a monopoly on eyeballs via print and TV information.
Worse yet (for them), the user customizable nature of social media feeds mean that they can't even know what people really see.
If people use the internet to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not the internet.
FB has almost every eyeball now. Can you say the same about your fake Necronomicon? Book of spells? The media that controlled your mind?
The last statement is basically one against any form of control or regulation. If people use the x to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not x. Sometimes people need help.
They are a platform rather than a publisher, in my view at least.
For all intents and purposes they should be responsible for everything that happens on the platform regardless of where the content was picked up from. They should have a responsibility but this comes in conflict with their goal to to drive engagement and profits.
Their algorithm curates what people see, shows specific links, and influences opinions. And when you can influence opinions on such a large scale and monetize it we have a conflict of interest and even a weapon. FB and others have proven this in the past. Why do you think the media is regulated so tightly around election time? FB can take even a blog post and push it so aggressively right before elections that they manage to sway opinions but still claim they were just a platform.
Let's put it in terms other than politics...
In the early 1980s a full third of all households in the US watched the TV show "Dallas" every weekend. Was "Dallas" the greatest performance ever made or just the best option out of 3 choices?
If facebook is wading into being a truth-teller, they’re going to run straight into government-media-academia social circles a la Pinker, Chomsky, all the punditry on TV, all the punditry in opinion columns (claims still need fact checking even if the result is an opinion).
Then, how do you deal with framing the presentation of verifiable facts with extremely ominous and sinister tone/hinting? You can do an enormous amount of damage just making untestable, unverifiable implications.
IMHO facebook is gonna get squeezed till they pop over this, either by blatantly having political double standards or by becoming a misinformation-based hellhole. The accessibility of Truth is much harder than people realize, and I don’t even think it’s fair to off load this responsibility onto facebook. People are just strangely ok with believing bullshit.
Most of the west has learnt that we should not penalise drug addicts. We treat the underlying problems that brought about their habitual use. The need to self-medicate disappears.
Like the war on drugs failed, so too shall the war on misinformation. The solution is tending for the human condition that leads one to not only believe, but want to believe, in these fantasies.
The problem is that Facebook's algorithms are directly helping those cults grow by polarising people, as stated in the linked article:
> Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
I'm sure we can all agree that you can't end all cults, but surely actively encouraging their growth is a bad idea.
Similarly, rats and mold flourished long before we started keeping open trash bags in the kitchen.
It's pretty clear that FB is an incredibly fertile breeding ground for such ideas, and that is on them. Not on the ideas.
I hope one day the war on drugs will end - but sadly it is still alive and well in the United States and all over the world.
As for the war on misinformation, we have lost continuously on this one for years in a row, and there's no evidence at all we're succeeding.
That's a horrible example, I don't think that is even remotely comparable to swaying the population into burning down dozens (hundreds?) of cell towers or accusing Bill Gates of starting the coronavirus pandemic.