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Comment by arkh | Hacker News Reader

> I’ve removed friends on Facebook that where alt-right

So you've helped what I consider the problem of social media and targeted everything: you decided to reinforce your echo chamber.

The problem with everything giving you suggestion based on your previous behavior (from Netflix and Youtube to Amazon) make people never even see new things and philosophies. The only way they get a view of "the other side" is through the exaggerated prism of their own side. Recommendation engines should start to let a little percentage of their suggestion be really different things or thought appreciated by people you have nothing in common.

Just as a thought experiment: read a description of whatever group you associate with from some opposite media / blog. See how they'll tend to cherry-pick and misinform. Then go back to your usual media and how they inform you.

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Hmm, I think your view on the situation is a little flawed. As you’ll notice, I chose to unfriend these people in the real world as well, so it wasn’t just on Facebook. I genuinely don’t want to spend my time with people who don’t think the holocaust was real.

I don’t think that puts me inside a bubble though. It’s not like I avoided the philosophical origin works on fascism when I was studying history at the university some decades ago. I know what these people stand for, and I know their opinions, hell I probably have a good deal of insight in their plights thanks to my job, I just don’t want to associate myself with them.

I mean, I don’t hang out with a lot of drug dealers either, but I have a general idea of what it is they do in society and I won’t avoid reading their opinions of things.

I think you support my point more than you’d like though, because social media already put me in that bubble thanks to algorithms. I’m left-wing, so I see left-wing things on social media, but that’s exactly why I consider it such a terrible place for information.

I read a print newspaper for news, it’s a fairly conservative newspaper, and because that falls out of my left-wing profile, I’ve not once seen an internet add for it, though I’ve been a happy subscriber to it for a decade.

Unfriending someone you dislike on Facebook does absolutely nothing other than make your life a little better.

I’ll read the guardian and the telegraph just fine. I won’t read the canary or breitbart. There’s a difference between different viewpoints and extremist propaganda. The internet fails to make that distinction. Rather than a shifting Overton window, we have an inverse one

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