How can freedom of speech be the downfall of democracy? Surely Facebook and democracy can coexist if we get better at teaching people to think for themselves?
I don’t like the idea democracy can only survive if governments censor and remove platforms for spreading information (however false that may be).
Facebook isn't "Free Speech" in the traditional sense, it is a massive AI system designed to funnel people towards controversy and lies (because it turns out controversy and lies get the highest engagement).
Twitter is even worse because of the format. At least with facebook people can have their own private spaces with only the people they trully know. Twitter is a just a machine to get people outraged and pissed off and yell at each other.
Yet I see very little pieces written against Twitter, probably because Twitter bought the media with the blue check system, creating an 'elite' class within Twitter.
- Twitter relationships are based on interests mostly. If I follow people who tweet about math I will see tweets about math. Facebook relationships are based on real-life relationships so the topics in my news feed will be more heterogeneous.
- In Twitter don't see as many content from people I don't follow directly. Sometimes I will see tweets that other of my followed liked or replied to, but it's a minority. In Facebook I end up seeing a lot of comments of people I follow in other publications.
- The suggestion engine of Twitter is not as aggresive as Facebook's. Right now I have three suggestions of profiles to follow (people who follow me or profiles I've visited before), a few trending topics which can be mostly ignored, and that's it. Facebook is constantly suggesting me pages to follow and friends to add (people I don't know at all) and groups to join.
- Twitter is more straightforward in the content you get shown. Yeah, they changed things with the inclusion of tweets liked by other people and replies, but most of the time you see tweets of people you follow. Facebook, however, does this weird thing where it shows you only the content you're more likely to engage with. If that content is conspiracy theories, so be it, even if that means you don't see innocent updates from your friends.
- Privacy controls on Twitter feel easier. Make your account private and that's it, instead of five different controls for each thing you might or might not do on Facebook. Muting and blocking accounts, notifications and keywords also feels easier.
Very succinct description of twitter. I use it mainly for work and I mostly see work related stuff that is trending.
Facebook likes mashing your whole life together, so one post is from a group, another from your high school weirdo that sells MLM products and another one from your racist uncle.
Honestly, Google+ "circle" concept was ahead of its time and I will die on this hill.
I do not think many will disagree about circles. Having circles would make Facebook so much better, but presumably they do not think that that would make them any money.
This is a good point. Facebook has a lot of value in community groups where you can find all sorts of friendly people in your area with common interests in hobbies, sports, or what have you.
Twitter has none of this. Twitter rewards abrasive clapbacks, angry arguments, and rage tweeting.
Mainstream media is no better, look at how many pages of newspapers are dedicated to columnists, editorials and opinions instead of news. Why aren't they being criticised? It's exactly the same principle.
In the end it comes down to the fact that people are being conditioned that they should have an opinion or position on everything, because "everything is politics". And many people fall for that and therefore search around for some indication on what opinions are out there.
Instead we should be propagating the message that it's entirely fine not to have an opinion on something that doesn't affect you. Indifference is actually a virtue.
Because newspapers have editorial boards, ombudsmen, and liability (in the form of libel) for what they print. Facebook has the conceit that it doesn't have any perspective, that it's just a carrier of speech of others. The concern is that Facebook (and YouTube and Twitter) already has preferences (such as for controversy over dry facts) and is developing more (curation through fact checking, etc.).
If Facebook came out and said, "Yeah, we're more or less like Readers Digest but for the internet" I suspect they'll still have detractors, but it will be more of the "I don't like reading Readers Digest" variety, not of the "Someone needs to break up Readers Digest!" one. They might also lose accounts, too, because who wants to write for a paper with clear points of view and biases that work at cross purposes to their own?
In the US - which tends to be the main country articles like this on efocus on - it is almost impossible for public figures such as politicians to sue newspapers for libel, and any suggestion of changing this is immediately met with sinilarly outraged articles about it being a danger to democracy. Also, the editorial boards are just as keen on pushing their preferred narratives regardless of the facts as the papers themselves.
Gawker certainly was held accountable. Facebook blames it's users if similar content is posted. But it also censors and suppresses content. I'm just saying it should pick a lane. Be a carrier or have editorial control.
Mainstream media has gotten a lot worse in the last few decades because subscriptions have tanked and now most of their profit determined by how many clicks facebook and twitter send their way. Newspapers have to choose between competing with buzzfeed or closing their doors.
Real journalism is a casualty of social media too.
The problem isn't free speech in itself. The problem is the amplification of that speech by algorithms optimizing for "engagement" which practically speaking ends up being synonymous with "conflict". The medium lends itself to spreading bullshit and outrage, not quiet reflection, empathy and 'thinking for yourself'. Lies simply scale better than truth, outrage scales better than understanding and clickbait scales better than accurate headlines. As if that's not bad enough on its own, authoritarian states have realized the potential in this, and weaponized it, by using sock puppet accounts and targeted advertisement to further amplify division and conspiracy theories, as a concerted attack on the electorate of western democracies.
Sure, but is the internet to blame then? Everyone ends up in their own echo chamber, even us on HN right? And the media have been doing this for decades too... Maybe not to this level but I find it hard to believe democracy is that brittle, and I worry the narrative to remove sources of sharing info freely is actually anti-democratic (all news coming from 'authorised sources' at its most extreme).
Youtube has 55 hours uploaded every minute (iirc). Its not "the internet"'s fault that, of all the content available youtube recommended Alex Jones's videos 15 billion times. Or that facebook has been recommending and promoting antivaxer content and communities to mothers' groups. (And specifically mothers who its algorithms think might be taken in by conspiracy thinking).
The blame lies with our peers who work at those companies. And every manager who prioritises their own advertising profits over healthy sensemaking amongst their billions of users.
The central point of the article is that Facebook is not free. Yes you can have free speech and democracy but free speech becomes rather more difficult when its biggest medium is a privately controlled monopoly.
Fake-news and the like aren't mentioned in the article.
But why does it become more difficult when it's centralised by numerous tech companies and not by numerous media organisations or the government itself? I don't see why FB is any different except it's easier for anyone to share stuff, and I don't see why that stuff should be a risk to democracy.
- For one when a news article is incorrect it is very easy to hold accountable the source of that information. How many people keep track of who said what on the internet?
- Fake Information takes more time to respond to than true information. False news travels 6 times faster (..) than truthful news [0].
- Media has a cycle of information that is way slower and more curated (even if manipulative) which allows true information to be heard louder.
- It's becoming easier and easier to fake image, video, and audio in a way never seen before [1].
- It's way easier for platforms like FB and Twitter and YT to make you spiral down a rabbit hole of similar content. Sure, this did happen in the past, but the current level of detailed recommendations makes it really easy for people to lose context inside their bubble.
- People are not machines, if they hear a message many times by different sources that trigger the right emotional responses they will believe it to be true. Now group every point and compound it by a lot of consumption and ingest it into monkey-like brains :)
When a single platform controls a large part of public discourse, without democratic control, and actively stifles competition (the jury's still out on that one, but that is the allegation), then that places a lot of power in private hands.
This doesn't mean that power is being abused (though it gets increasingly hard to tell) but it's hard to call that kind of platform 'free'.
Sure you might be fairly certain that Facebook isn't limiting free speech right now, but the main reason you know this is through other channels. When their monopoly is complete there'd be no way to tell if speech truly is or isn't free.
And of course there's no way to tell if your posts are unpopular because of some well intentioned algorithm, or a more malicious algorithm. At the very least Facebook's incentives don't align with the rest of society.
In most countries, as far as I'm aware, TV started out as a government controlled medium, which has its own problems but is definitely not privately owned.
And to the best of my knowledge there's still nothing preventing you from buying radio bandwidth. It's not really my area though so I could be wrong.
> Surely Facebook and democracy can coexist if we get better at teaching people to think for themselves?
There are some serious limitations on that approach.
We have limited time to devote to going into an issue in any depth. We can maybe handle thoughtfully evaluating all sides for one or two issues if we are getting honest information from all sides.
When you have one or more sides deliberately trying to mislead, they have a huge advantage. First, since they aren't burdened by the need to actually be correct, they can generate a wider variety of arguments and do so in greater quantity than those who are arguing in good faith.
Second, we have a variety of built in cognitive biases. The people trying to mislead can purposefully craft their arguments to hit those, increasing the chances we'll believe them.
On top of all that, social media's algorithms for determining what to show us are trying to maximize engagement, and the things that most engage us are the things that fit in with our cognitive biases. They have a huge amount of behavioral data on us, which has made them very good at picking out and prioritizing stuff on our individualized feeds that will hit those biases.
You can't really think for yourself without high quality information, and because they are based on maximizing getting your attention social media tends to mostly show you low quality information. In short, the way social media sites like Facebook are designed makes it nearly impossible to get accurate information from them no matter how much you try to think for yourself.
There was a recent article in Scientific American covering research into this, "Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It" [1]. HN discussion of that article [2].
Do you think that the majority of adults and children in the United States right now are highly valuing education, and pushing their politicians harder than corporate interests, to improve our education such that critical thinking is a top priority going forward?
Is that the value system that is being streamed into each citizen's eyeballs at this moment?
I don’t like the idea democracy can only survive if governments censor and remove platforms for spreading information (however false that may be).