Hacker News Reader

Which is the point. In reality the appropriate title is more along the lines: "How media enables Propaganda", so why single out just Facebook when they're just conforming to the industry standard?

There's a simple solution to this, which is to write legislation to ban commercial political ads.

View on HN

I have the same inclination about ads, but I'm highly skeptical that such a solution would work fully. I'd be willing to give it a try though. The problem is bad enough that it's worth throwing solutions out and trying them until we see what sticks.

The point about Facebook anyway, singling them out, is that it happens to be an article about Facebook and how they in particular do this. A similar article on "How Fox News…" or "How ESPN…" or "How the NYT…" would be appropriate also in the case that any of those places had a dedicated political unit which was interesting to report about, especially if it contradicts the way the entity prefers to present itself.

Of course, it's reasonable to focus on Facebook merely in their dominance.

And finally, it's possible at least that Facebook is actually worse in some ways (or just more effective at spreading propaganda etc), and I'm not ready to rule that out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com