
The Real Problem with Facebook and the News - shawndumas
https://stratechery.com/2016/the-real-problem-with-facebook-and-the-news/
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thrownaway2424
This article is among many recently that have been citing Pew's ongoing
research into political polarization. That's starting to bug me because
although Pew puts out a nuanced 100-page interpretation of their data, most
news outlets can't be bothered with nuance. Of particular interest to me are
underlying long-term trends that must necessarily be interpreted by Pew's
method as "polarization". One of their ten questions to classify respondents
into liberal or conservative bins is whether homosexuality should be accepted
or discouraged. This question probably made as much sense in 1994 as a
question about interracial marriage would have made in 1950. At that time
interracial marriage was universally opposed by white people (96% opposed in a
poll), but today it is universally accepted (87% not opposed in 2010).
Acceptance of homosexuality is on a similar long-term trend. Many people were
opposed to acceptance of homosexuality in 1994 for the same reason that 1950's
white people were opposed to interracial marriage: those people were bigoted
assholes. As those bigots get old and die the trend shifts dramatically to
acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever. If you doubt this just
look at the trends by respondent age. Practically all Americans under 30 years
old are accepting of homosexuality.

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.

~~~
paavokoya
>the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift
back, ever

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.

~~~
beamatronic
Can you turn this around and say that as long as the bigoted political
candidates don't succeed, the empire hasn't fallen yet?

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morninj
For those interested in breaking free from the Facebook trending news
headlines, I wrote an open source extension to replace them with stories from
real news sources (or any RSS feed):
[http://www.fluffblocker.com/](http://www.fluffblocker.com/)

~~~
devishard
For those interested in breaking free from Facebook trending news headlines,
why not quit Facebook?

~~~
morninj
I like to use Facebook for several reasons, but I want to hide the silly
headlines--hence this project.

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ps4fanboy
Silicon Valley darlings (twitter, fb) really need to stay out of politics,
attempting to curate what people say and see at the very least.

~~~
dragonwriter
FB's entire business model is provided a UX that is curated for stickiness,
comfort, and convenience with a veneer of organic feeling so as to make it a
comfortable platform for multiple different kinds of ads, which are what they
make money from.

~~~
ps4fanboy
I find it hard to believe that attempting to marginalize half your users to
match the political outlook of your employees is driven by profit. If it was I
wouldn't criticize it.

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lloyddobbler
_Indeed, one could make the argument that an authoritative news module from
Facebook would actually be a civil benefit: at least we would all be starting
from a common set of facts. What is far more damaging — and far more engaging,
and thus lucrative for Facebook — is all of us in our own virtual
neighborhoods of our own making, liking opinions that tell us we’re right
instead of engaging with viewpoints that make us question our assumptions._

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.

~~~
thrownaway2424
"The algorithm" is easy to game and not fundamentally neutral. Ask Rick
Santorum for his thoughts on this.

~~~
beamatronic
Wait isn't that the guy named after... uh, nevermind

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lisper
I don't get it. Facebook is a private company. If they want to present biased
news they have the right to do that. If they want to withhold information
about their editorial process, or even lie about it, they have the right to do
that too. Fox News does it, why can't Facebook?

~~~
DanAndersen
I don't think people are saying it's illegal -- people are saying it's a bad
thing. Those don't necessarily equal each other. Concepts like "censorship" or
"freedom of speech" can exist and be talked about independently of the United
States First Amendment; there may not be legal grounds for prosecution but
from a social/philosophical angle these are still things that can be
legitimately debated.

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.

~~~
lisper
> people are saying it's a bad thing

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.

~~~
DanAndersen
If people go to a media source with the assumption that they're going to be
receiving useful information about the world, then I'd consider it a self-
evident bad thing for the media source to lie to them and give them
information that isn't representative of reality. To put it into machine
learning terms, giving people a bunch of training data that is biased (i.e.
isn't sampled from the same distribution as reality) is going to train
people's judgment to be less in tune with reality.

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.

~~~
lisper
> I'd consider it a self-evident bad thing for the media source to lie to them
> and give them information that isn't representative of reality.

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?

~~~
DanAndersen
There are rules regarding libel and slander -- they're not as overly strict as
some other countries, but media isn't free to say absolutely anything about
anyone.

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multinglets
The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is using human
curators to _assert_ , without challenge, what is "trending" with the _other
humans_ and then denying it.

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._

~~~
beamatronic
Serious question. When it comes to "Top Stories" or "News" or anything on
Facebook, did anyone actually believe for real that it was _purely_ the output
of an algorithm and that _no_ provisions were made to have a human in the
loop? I doubt anyone ever thought that, so I'm not sure how anyone is
surprised by any of this.

~~~
DanAndersen
Consider how often the 24-hour news networks would fill their time by talking
about "what's trending" on Twitter or Facebook or the like. The implication is
obviously that the fact that they are trending is a newsworthy thing in and of
itself, that it's some sign of "people making something go viral."

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.

