Re:Mark in the Middle
by m0ck on Thursday September 24, 2020 @07:55AM
(#24577700)
I would go even further in this argument - it's the small, altough very loud minority of FB (or other IT company) employees, living in their Twitter feeds and causing outrage totally disproportional to their group size. The "missing snacks" example in the article illustrates it beautifully. I would argue that it actually concerns more employees than content policy issues.
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The irony is just delicious. It's just like the problem that very small minority of folks on FB have been given a megaphone to spread lies and hate.
All FB has to do is tone down the engagement algorithms. Put up a bunch of invisible walls.
10 years ago the concern was filter bubbles. Now we want invisible walls?
Yep, increase friction. Instagram is a good example.. You have to post a photo and you can't retweet.
I think we would just be trading one set of problems for another, people are already physically self sorting so it's not clear to me that enhancing digital echo chambers would make things better.
What do you mean by physically self sorting? I’m taking about turning down the dials to decrease virality, discovery and engagement. If you want to change people’s behavior you need to increase friction.
That we are increasingly self sorting into politically isolated bubbles (based on where we choose to live / work) so we are less likely to encounter diverse opinions in real life [1]. Definitely agree that virality/discovery/engagement need to be carefully balanced, but I don't think that they are inherently good or bad. Virality/discovery/engagement can absolutely lead to the spread of misinformation, but it also is clearly a big driver for awareness of social causes like police brutality / BLM.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-Minded-Ameri...
The twitter link in the comment at the top of this post reports that the top 10 daily FB posts are almost all right wing. I am pretty sure this is being driven by a minority of users (and a lot of bots). In fact we know the whole system can be gamed. In that sense the whole network is polluted and suffering the tragedy of the commons.