You can see it in action on this very site: Pizzagaters get banned, Libertarians are allowed to remain. The differences between BB and FB in that respect are those of priorities, moderation system design philosophy, scale and market power.
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Behind every great fortune is a crime, as the saying goes. Is Zuck being investigated? Will he ever be indicted?
But there is the question of who gets to decide what garbage is and how this will be implemented - via users voting or via someone at FB making those decisions. Do we trust either one at this point?
We’ve seen time and again how people who are very obviously and blatantly spouting racist shit or sharing obvious “fake news” or what have you are getting a pass time and again. And the people who are inclined to believe it anyway who do see people’s trustworthiness score going down are likely going to just get backed up yet again by “their” side.
I think the internet and social media companies is seriously exacerbating this problem of obvious and dangerous falsehoods (as you rightly note), but I don’t think it’s the core cause of it. This is of a piece with attacks on academia, “mainstream” media, government, etc, that predate the wide spread use of the internet. It’s really weaponized postmodernist thought turned on it’s head… a real widespread rebellion against the enlightenment/capitalist project that’s gone askew. I just don’t think that the problem is only the social media companies, and so far they’ve been unwilling or unable to help deal with the problem.
If you haven’t read it, it’s worth while checking out Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust which is about the rise of holocaust denial over the course of about 20 or 30 years (60s to the 90s when this was written). I think it really speaks to this larger problem of truth, memory, and the rebellion against certain kinds of authority.
The thing there is, we have… it’s called critical thinking, but we’ve seen an erosion of that in favor of tribalized thinking.
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The current political nightmare situation does seem to support that view.
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I’m antisocial enough that i could stop using FB right now and i wouldn’t miss it, but i am trying to make more of an effort to keep in touch with friends and family. So this FB bullshit is making it quite difficult for me to want to keep tabs on various people in my life. Realistically what’s the alternative? I am not going to use Twitter, so what’s left? Myspace?
On my family’s side i know a big chunk of them use Whatsapp. But that’s also owned by FB (and i’m not keen on the app either).
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I still do pretty well with e-mail, SMS texts, and even phone calls and f2f conversations. I have a few relatives and friends on FB who are glad to keep me up on developments from their social network they think I’d be interested in, so I end up missing very little about births, weddings, deaths, divorces, new jobs, and other things that matter.
That’s still me “outsourcing” the unpleasantness of FB, though. I’d still prefer that there were better social networks for them to use, ones that I’d feel comfortable using myself. That’s why I want to see federated FOSS alternatives like Mastadon and Diaspora get a foothold.
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I’m lousy at keeping up conversations over email, text, phone, etc. As i said, i’m anti-social 
back when emailing people was more common i was notorious for never replying or replying months later. Still am.
FB works for me because i can jump in an ongoing conversation fairly casually. I could do that with Whatsapp but again that’s owned by FB and i’m not keen on the app to begin with. So right now i have not much of an alternative than keep using FB until a good replacement shows up
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I hear you. Due to being somewhat antisocial myself I have to make a real effort for those things, something I started forcing myself to do long before social networks existed (to the point where it’s now habit*). In this case it pays off because I get a lot of the benefits of FB without having to be on it.
[* a lot of it comes down to setting expectations for myself and for those who want to communicate with me. It’s really life-changing]
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And these are the same people who buy IOT shit that can be hacked by almost anyone.
When bad things happen to those hundreds of millions, at what point do we get to stop worrying about “vicitm blaming” and say “hey, shit for brains, you did it to yourself”?
And FB’s “scale and market power” puts it arguably in the common carrier class, something which will never happen to BB.
Here is the Anathem passage about “Artificial Inanity”:
“Early in the Reticulum – thousands of years ago – it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes – a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors – swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
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As with the anti-trust approach suggested above, government regulation and enforcement of industry standards can go a long way toward keeping corporations from selling dangerous garbage to stupid and/or ignorant people. Before I blame someone who bought an insecure IoT smart plug I’m going to blame the company that sold it to him. If that company isn’t willing to self-regulate properly then it might have to be forced to do so.
I doubt that FB would accept the level of regulation that comes along with common carrier status, so anti-trust legislation is the more realistic remedy (although that’s not a trivial solution either, requiring a complete shift in thinking on what makes a monopoly).
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This is Whuffie, right?
How is this not Whuffie.
There’s the problem right there, I think.
Biased news and propaganda are not science fiction problems. They’re old problems.
See the Rwandan media in the leadup to the genocide, see the media on all sides during and in the leadup to both world wars, see the yellow press and the Spanish-American war, see the battling pro/anti-slavery papers of antebellum America.
I don’t have any easy solution, but it seems to me that history offers more lessons here than fiction will.
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Facebook went from users to subjects.
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But how will boing boing get new users to this site if they don’t have the share on f_c_book or twitter buttons?
No, that pretty much nails it. There’s a lot of complaining right now that “It shouldn’t oughta be like this!!1!”, but the fact is that there will be no tecno-utopian future where just the existence of the internet fixes everything.
The way the internet currently works has been gamed to the point of near-unusability, and certainly non-trustworthiness. This is just the tail-end of the first pendulum swing, where the internet swung from “pretty trustworthy, overall” to “haha, are you fucking kidding me here? What is this shit.”. There will be countermeasures put in place, that will swing it the other direction somewhat, and then the big fight will be over trying to game- and game-proof those algorithms and systems, and so on until the swings are small enough that nothing quite this insane happens again, at least until the systems themselves occasionally get undermined, and then the process resets back to a previous point. And so on forever.
Same thing has happened in other spheres, same will happen in new ones. FB, Twitter and reddit will either give their prime (12-34 y/o people with disposable income) userbase what they want (a site to communicate with others that’s not too cluttered up with shit) or else that userbase will migrate away and something new will replace it. FB is already crumbling in slow-motion because they ignored the obvious trends, for example. Nothing new under the sun, y’all.
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Thanks for this, I didn’t have my copy in front of me so I could only go off of memory!
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Precisely. There are so many of us who live happy and fulfilled lives without ever having enrolled in FB or Twitter that it’s hard to conceive of them as monopolies.
Now, if it came to pass that I had to have a FB account to, say, renew my library card, then I’d have an issue, although it would likely be with my library board rather than FB.
Non-the-less, that’s what they are. Roger Macnamee, an early investor in Facebook, has a good take on this:
Basically, the state has to change its views to reflect the fact that a company can be a monopoly without gouging consumers on price. That’s a big shift in regulatory philosophy, especially when the political consensus is still mired in Libertarian fantasies.
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For me it would take getting a new job outside of marketing that doesn’t require me to have a Facebook account.
As it is, I’m mostly a ghost there (I can’t recall the last thing I posted on FB, or even when I last looked at my feed), so I don’t really care what they would rate me. By all means Facebook, give me a zero. Your sandbox is chock full of cat turds anyhow; making it harder for me to play in it is doing me a favor.
If they stick to their guns with this, I can see it being a good thing.
Not because it will create a hierarchy, or make people who already feel like they aren’t being heard even less heard; but because it will give more people an greater incentive to abandon the site.
Why keep going to FB if you start to see less of what you are looking for, hear less from the people you like listening to.
Options will emerge, people will move on.
I’ve heard tales that some people are still using MySpace, so from that I would assume that some people will never leave FB. Great! Let them have it.
