Hacker News Reader

Comment by heurist | Hacker News Reader

Facebook can do whatever it wants. Personally, if facebook does not stop the spread of false information I will stop using their services and will do my best to convince my friends to stop using their services. If they want to create harmful social bubbles for profit that's their prerogative, but I won't be part of it.

View on HN

If you use facebook, you've been in a harmful social bubble since the beginning.... you are only realizing it now

Hardly anyone does this, but it's certainly possible to follow a varied set of people on Facebook. Left, right, non-political, religious, irreligious, American, European, Trump-loving, Hillary-venerating, and so on.

Nothing stops a person from creating a set of signals that Facebook will use to generate a mixed content feed that's representative of a broad range of views.

The problem is that almost no one uses Facebook like that.

In my experience, Facebook in 2016 is akin to what AOL was in 1994 - to a large swath of people, Facebook is essentially "the internet" they use. Kind of subscribing to cable TV but only watching one station. It's not too far out of the realm of thought that bubbles exist because people seek them out and like having a bubble (notions of bubbles being good/bad outside the scope of this).

For a while early on, I recall enjoying Facebook when it was .edu email addresses only, because it was a good way to keep tabs on people I went to upper education with and parted ways with shortly after. It was a nice contact resource in that regard. Now the platform is a behemoth, the AOL thing.

I had a feeling Trump was going to win due to the viewpoints I was seeing on Facebook... but I trusted the polls, which were in their own bubble that I didn't recognize.

How will you even know about the spread of false information if you're in your own bubble of what you believe to be "non-false information"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com