The Real Problem with Facebook and the News
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
So, given that long-term trend, it seems quite silly to say that liberals are now more consistently liberal, and that amounts to polarization. In the past there were people who were liberal on the environment or racial equality or other issues but were against gays, or were liberal on the environment and were against both racial and sexual equality. Those people are now dead. To call this polarization is to treat with moral equanimity the positions of tolerance and of hate, which isn't useful. There are not equally valid positions.
Although one could make parallels about Roman culture and homosexuality.. Once an empire fails, the religious vultures prey on the weak-willed and once again spread bigotry and hate (much like certain political candidates) as scapegoats for the failure of the empire.
Sorry, I know it's not really relevant to the article. I just don't like the sense that everyone in the past who was racist or anyone in the present who's sexist or whateverist is just worthless garbage, or "bigoted assholes". People are more complicated than that. People holding opinions you hate can nevertheless be moral relative to their cultural environment, given the thoughts that made sense in their milieu.
Forecasting the development of moral judgments decades or centuries before it happens and living according to that future standard is an impossible and pointless task. People should be judged according to the times they lived in, not according to our privileged, 20/20-hindsight present moment.
Homosexual acceptance in the US was higher in the 1920s than in the following decades until the late 1960s. Arguably, this cycles. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_history#1920s*
Not necessarily. Homosexual acceptance in the US was higher in the 1920s than in the following decades until the late 1960s. Arguably, this cycles.
My take-away from the article (which I admit was also my pre-existing bias, so perhaps I injected it) is that the news is essentially a propaganda machine. It reflects the conscious and unconscious biases of the curators and attempts to present a consistent world view. The sad part is how unaware the readership is. From one of the quotes the the author included, people become more extreme in their views when surrounded by others who have the same views. This leads to polarization on every topic -- an us vs. them attitude. With such an attitude no substantial changes can happen. For example, if Trump wins the nomination, how many liberal thinking people would vote for an independent, risking splitting the vote and handing the country to Trump? If Clinton wins the nomination, how many conservative thinking people will allow the Clinton dynasty (the spouse of a former president!) to win the day?
In the end the status quo prevails. So it just seems a bit ironic that your extension, which allows you to dial in your bias even further, is mentioned here. Possibly (if you don't already have it) you can add an option to turn off the trending news headlines altogether :-)
Agreed.
It follows, though, that attempting to inject a balanced view in the Trending News is necessary (i.e., not suppressing content of one perspective through careful curation). Otherwise, only one side will be "engaging with viewpoints that make them question their assumptions."
Proposed solution: eliminate human curation from the mix altogether, and let the algorithms fight it out.
My main concern is that, as more and more of the average Internet user's communications becomes funneled through a small number of big private companies, the typical media ecosystem that we're accustomed to is changing. For some people, Facebook and their feed basically is the Internet. I don't know what the solution is or if there is one, but I find it unsettling to imagine a future where more and more of everyday life becomes dependent on private forces that pride themselves on not having to provide the protections that people grew up assuming they could rely on.
I understand that. But why is it a bad thing? We have freedom of the press in the U.S. That means that the press is free to be biased.
I don't think I need to argue the laws of the US to make this point, but the press is free to be biased (up to a limit, remember that!) because excessive legal attempts to curtail media bias can tend toward making things worse -- simply putting the people in power in charge of doing the biasing.
And I would agree. Nonetheless, in a free country, the owners of a media source are not bound by what you and I think (and that's a good thing).
> up to a limit, remember that!
Huh? What's the limit?
i.e. The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is fucking blatantly spreading propaganda by misrepresenting consensus and then lying about it.
I'm not saying they are dumb. I'm saying not that many would stop and seriously think if 'trending' news section on FB was possibly being used for spreading propaganda.
I don't think people necessarily thought that it was a purely automatic algorithmic creation (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case -- remember that most people are not nearly as tech-savvy as the HN crowd in knowing what is or isn't likely to be the result of "pure algorithms"). But the fact that it's called "trending" inherently implies that it's a representative snapshot of what the current attention ecosystem is -- that it's a passive record into what "is trending." By manually inserting or removing things from the "trending" list, that creates a false impression that certain things are or aren't popular.
I would say it's good they do that. Just like dang & co diligently try to control what gets to frontpage and what doesn't (specifically, banning certain outlets known to be bad/unreliable and trying to slow down hastily-thunk grab-your-pitchfork movements in favor of rationally-minded and considered stories).
If you don't do this, Trump happens. Trump is a product of a capitalistic-media which kept providing an easy diet of shit. If facebook is preventing brietbart stories from reaching the top, more power to facebook.