Do you really believe that Facebook is actively tailoring posts to create a false narrative rather than just people posting things and Facebook showing you those you might engage with more?
Facebook's newsfeed algorithms are actively tailoring the content that is surfaced in your newsfeed in a manner that encourages 'engagement', but this quest for engagement creates false narratives and an inaccurate understanding of reality. People engage with combative and controversial content that supports their biases or triggers a few discrete emotional centers like disgust, outrage, and strong in-group/out-group distinctions. I also do more that just 'believe' this, I know it to be true for a fact.
> Facebook's newsfeed algorithms are actively tailoring the content that is surfaced in your newsfeed in a manner that encourages 'engagement', but this quest for engagement creates false narratives and an inaccurate understanding of reality
Except that the “algorithms” are executed by humans and not always concretely defined, this has been true of every ad-supported commercial news medium ever, for the same reason as it is for Facebook: the business model is securing attention of an audience to sell ads to them.
The humans running the news agencies used to at least pretend to exercise due diligence when selecting their stories. Without humans reviewing the stories that run, the paperclip/engagement-maximizer is happy to run garbage.
Facebook seems happy to be the Weekly World News, amplifying the modern BatBoy stories.
Basically this, but it even goes a level deeper. Facebook engineers to not know they are working at the Weekly World News. At a high-level the algorithms treat the actual content as a black box; what matters is how people respond to and interact with that lump of content and this response is what is measured and optimized. A human editor in a newsroom at least applies some conscious thought to the nature of the story and the facts claimed within. The people designing and operating the paperclip/engagement-maximizer do not really try to understand what they are maximizing other than the fact that it is considered a revenue-generating target and their paperclip production gets published in the quarterly reports.
All the content is still plainly visible with no extra clicks or screens. In the standard interface I often miss hackernews comment rankings unless they are highly negative (causing the comment to be grey).
The comments are also broadly divided by topic (the post itself) whereas a facebook feed is a firehose of 'anything that might engage the user'.
These two facts alone heavily dispute your argument in my opinion.
>Do you really believe that Facebook is actively tailoring posts to create a false narrative
They have done something similar before[0]. So any denials on their part now will necessarily be taken with a truckload of salt.
In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' "positive emotional content", resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to "negative emotional content" and the opposite happened.
Sounds like a distinction without a difference to me. If I make a robot and instruct it to "unobtrusively retrieve bank notes" I'm still picking pockets.
You don't have to manufacture individual posts if you can just chain existing posts together to create narratives. I'm not sure if Facebook tries to create a specific agenda, but it is no secret that they certainly try to paint a specific picture: The one that creates the most outrage, and they probably just don't care what that picture looks like.
If I sell guns to someone living in the middle of Alaska, those guns help keep them safe from bear attacks, and hunt to find food. If I sell guns to bank robbers in NYC, those guns are used to hurt people.
Similarly, Facebook helps people from across the world keep in touch with each other. It also helps people say very mean things to a wide audience.
Nudging your users to use the tool you created only for good is not easy.
> Facebook doesn't "help people from across the world keep in touch".
Well, that's exactly my personal use case for FB, as well as that of many people I personally know irl. It genuinely does help me and my friends to stay in touch. We don't browse the feed for hours or anything (I open FB maybe twice a week for 20-30 mins tops, and that's only because I am also checking up on a few hobby-related FB groups I am in).
Could it be the case that this is NOT how most FB users use the service? I mean, sure. Still would be wrong to say that it doesn't "help people from across the world keep in touch," because there is a non-insignificant number of people who use FB for this exact stated purpose, me included.
Facebook makes it hard for me to keep in touch with people, since I have to manually pick through a mountain of bullshit to find any posts that are actually from my friends and actually about their lives
At first I could set up a list of “Actual Friends” and see all their posts, but now it’ll only show a couple days’ worth, so I have to manually click each profile and check them one by one
If they had RSS-enabled blogs or kept up with an email chain or used a shared subreddit, there’d be no problem
I mean... They are actively trying to make you follow the common practice of following news sources, favorite teams, groups, etc.
I have less than 200 "friends", Reuters, Economist, DeWalt and a few local groups on my profile. And it's a stream of complete garbage....
Because I get served the article posts, where my friends comment on(that's default) or interact with.
That's the normal use case for Facebook, to get you dragged into the cesspool.
My sister is paranoid and it was facebook's desire to get more interaction out of her that literally resulted in her becoming a paranoid COVID anti-vaxxer. Which is infinitely infuriating...
At this point even Reddit is better than Facebook.
