
Facebook must kill its news feed. Democracy depends on it - Johnny555
https://medium.com/@tim.dick/facebook-should-kill-its-news-feed-heres-why-7faf0cb15289
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tree_of_item
If democracy is threatened by a simple automated news feed then it's doomed to
fail anyway.

~~~
craftyguy
Exactly. The next Facebook news feed will just fill the void, and people who
blindly believe what they are exposed to will be in the same situation.
Killing Facebook news feed is trying to treat the symptom while completely
ignoring the disease.

~~~
theyregreat
Magnifying gossip is the issue. It’s almost as if we need a few thousand
people or AI with really good domain knowlege and common sense whom can
somehow handle moderating the onslaught of conspiracy theories, rumors and
general BS. Seems very difficult to scale on the tech side. We might be better
off finding a path to building in-real life communities whom can educate each
other and discuss such things civilly.

~~~
freedomben
In theory I agree, but in practice people are much more emotional than we like
to admit, and we come with loads of baggage in the form of preconceptions,
presuppositions, and ideologies. We also have a tendency to be wrong about
things sometimes (to err is human?), even in fields where we have expertise.

Could AI fix this for us? Maybe. AI isn't entirely free of the bias of its
creators tho. As far as solutions to magnifying gossip and fake news, I don't
really have an answer. Perhaps you are on the right track.

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the_common_man
Some of this technology is new and awareness among the general public is quite
low. Give it some more time and people will just ignore most of this stuff
(and probably leave facebook also). Give it 2-5 years and my guess is that
this fad of deriving news from social media will go away.

~~~
marktangotango
Personally I've started to view facebooks feed (and others) as being
indistinguishable from tabloids, like the National Enquirer here in the
states. Grandmother gives birth to triplets! Honeymooners abducted by aliens!
What I read there is not to be trusted, it's not a reliable source. Same goes
for yahoo, msn, etc. Local news is a little better, but still sensational and
salacious. If I want news online I go to Bloomberg, bbc, etc.

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the_common_man
You said it much better than I did :-) People will understand over time this
is tabloid news.

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trjordan
OK, so Facebook kills the home feed tomorrow. What replaces this?

Human-curated news? Either it'll be fast enough that people get sloppy with
facts, or it'll be slow enough that people move to faster sources. Clickbait
wins.

Another site? Most other sites (Google News, Quora, whatever) use clicks as an
important measure of interestingness. Clickbait wins.

Broadcast TV? Have you seen what the networks do when the facts are scarce and
the topic is urgent?

Eventually this all gets sorted. In the moment, fake news always wins,
especially if there are organizations that are invested in producing it.
That's fine. The trick is to help real, verifiable news and level-headed
analysis propagate as it comes out as well.

It's a solved problem via reputation, but we've collectively decided that
reputation isn't that important in the last 15 years. It's an open but in-
progress question for ML / AI. There are probably other models, but we'd first
need to change the consumption norms to make them appealing.

Clickbait is always appealing, so it wins when people are trying to find new
information before they start to sort through it.

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nemothekid
Is this article meant to be serious? The newsfeed is Facebook's most
profitable product. The argument here is Facebook must kill itself for the
sake of democracy. That isn't a solution. Besides the fact that I don't think
Zuck, FB employees, and their shareholders would like to see their multi-
billion dollar product upended, It's like trying to put the formula for a
nuclear bomb back in pandora's box. Are we to depend on a organizations moral
code in order to protect society from the news feed highly potent propaganda
machine?

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Johnny555
If the premise is accepted as true, then it shouldn't be Facebook's choice.

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theyregreat
There’s no simple, panacea, technical solution to prevailing ignorance.
Granted people can have their sentiment adjusted by captological factors, but
people need to dig into issues, do credible research, learn about history and
cultivate better BS detectors. Lazy, passive, clueless wallflowers do not a
healthy society make.

~~~
freedomben
You made me look up a new word :-)

> Captology or behavior design is the study of computers as persuasive
> technologies. This area of inquiry explores the overlapping space between
> persuasion in general (influence, motivation, behavior change, etc.) and
> computing technology. This includes the design, research, and program
> analysis of interactive computing products (such as the Web, desktop
> software, specialized devices, etc.) created for the purpose of changing
> people's attitudes or behaviors.

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captology)

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RickS
The absurdity of the headline makes every following point impossible to take
seriously. Saying dumb stuff has a cost.

It sounds like "facebook needs to start being about people you know, and stop
being about everything else."

That's great advice IMO, but it's not what makes money, so... don't even try.

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albychen5
isn't groupthink/spoon feeding articles something that all feeds naturally do?
e.g. reddit also suffers from similar problems, depending on what subreddits
you follow. Does this mean we kill reddit?

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Johnny555
My mom and grandma (and the rest of my family) are not on reddit, so I don't
care. But Facebook appeals to the masses with _much_ greater reach, thus they
can do much greater harm if they are serving biased news.

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firemancoder
I agree with the premise, but there's no way it will ever happen.

 _Most troublingly, “trending news” accelerates news in what is what is known
a “feed forward” loop: i.e. the more we (and external bots and trolls) click,
the more we will see an item. This reduces visibility of other news, resulting
in “groupthink” that shrinks our perspective. Trending news algorithms can be
adjusted but will always create “observational bias” in that we react most to
what we see most._

This describes Reddit to a T. Definitely a feed forward loop if there ever was
one.

