Laying off the hate is likely just good advice all the time.

I'm guessing this one. Although facebook didn't invite this violence directly, they were the primary tool of propaganda. Now I'm not saying it's easy to solve this problem but facebook seems to be actively overlooking these things as it has happened repeatedly.

Have you seen the rampant propaganda and manipulation of facts from social-media-driven left wing and right wing groups? It is far more inaccurate and vile.

Facebook has been around at scale for a short period of time so the total amount of harm it has done so far won’t compare to propaganda done by others but this should not detract from worry/blame/concern about Facebook. I won’t lay the FB hate aside as you put it because I see the great harm it can and does do. Humans are easily manipulated and Facebook can do this at an unprecedented scale.

Then you have a very limited understanding of the extreme issues with viral social media misinformation filter bubbles.

You know why it's mainstream? Because it's nuanced, and well-researched and run by actual real-life journalists.

You know what you're left with when the media is no longer mainstream? The extremes.

American news consumers should be critical, and pay attention to times when major competing news outlets are running the same headline about a complicated story.

Which "Mainstream media" outlets do you consider to be nuanced and well-researched?

I would put the opposite question, which non-mainstream media outlets would you consider to be nuanced and well-researched?

Ahem.

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

― Michael Crichton

1. It assumes that inexperience in reporting correlates well across disciplines (i.e. if you read one badly researched physics article, it means the sports pages are similarly bullshit)

2. It assumes the existence of better-informed alternative media

In the particular case Crichton cites, it's entirely reasonable to assume a news outfit might have better reporting on Palestine then on physics, if only because politicians have an incentive to talk to news outfits where scientists might not. In fact, much of journalistic ethics and process revolves around trying to determine political "truth", as much as something like that can exist. Conversely, there are plenty of scientists who can explain the details of the Standard Model or Quantum Field Theory; but don't have a single clue as to how trade negotiations work or why we sided with Saudi Arabia despite them not sharing our values one bit.

Michael Crichton assumes knowledge is an RPG stat and that if a newspaper fails a knowledge roll once we should discard the paper because it's writers didn't put enough points into INT.

Second, most alternative media I've encountered does no better on the "wet streets cause rain" problem. Actually, my experience is that they're more prone to shoddy reporting, because their goal isn't to try and find out something approaching the truth. It's to sell me a series of plausible lies that lead up to their particular political bias.

For example, let's talk about climate science. It's a demonstrable fact that the Earth is warming due to human activity, but there's multiple ways one can be wrong about that. The kind of inaccurate reporting I'd expect to see out of a mainstream outfit would be something like "CO2 causes ozone depletion". A right-wing alternative rag would instead try to deny the science altogether, either by casting FUD on the scientific process or worse. The former is something that might be technically incorrect, but the latter is deliberately trying to convince me that black is white, up is down, and short is long.

All the problems you list with legacy media are true but also have a clear expiration date as these outlets are usually money losers. Meanwhile Facebook looks like it's here to stay.

I agree with you "western" (let's say democratic instead) medias are very biased. I live in Hong Kong and I couldn't believe what I was reading in british media about our "oppression" while kids were breaking the pavement down my road and doing V for vendetta graffiti under the cries of "Fuck the Popo".

But all in all, it's fine, to be honest. We don't ask media to be without bias, but to be clear about them. We know somewhat the editorial position of the Guardian, they're one opinion amongst many.

What turn countries into rubbles, is when people can't understand who's telling them what. Facebook is too blurry, you don't know if it's your sister, a CIA agent or a FSB one talking to you about a solution to a problem. People get angry in closed networks, that echo and echo until they feel the entire population think the same way. And you can't really calm them down with deep and complex analysis because while anger is easy to spread with a quick BS meme, calming down people requires focus, dual way communication and effort on every side.

That's what happened to HK at a small scale, a sort of irrational mass anger, but that's not what happened in Lybia. Simply because in Lybia, people weren't the richest most powerful people on the planet. They tried the last resort solution, they won somewhat, now after the destruction they have to rebuild and they're learning it's way harder. We've all been through these phases, no need to argue the Guardian caused it :) I'd be partial to Facebook though :D

https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12659

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfa... (p10#20)