“News” on Facebook is not news, it is gossip. Participating in gossip has always been poor practice. Now that gossip has been corporatized, there is no way to fix it.
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Don’t forget:
Science
Guns
Economics
Art
Video game consoles
Apple vs. Android
etc.
etc.
etc…
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Fight Club’s ending?
Crowdsourcing- adult unpaid interns who won’t even get a recommendation out of it.
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How can FaceBook think logically that this can work?
The reason the platform had got so much bullshit is that the content is crowd-sourced and they can’t police it. (Without spending huge amounts of money…)
Why should FB think they can police crowd-sourced the anti-bullshit? It’s just going to add a layer of meta-bullshit.
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Sure but that’ll be user-approved meta-bullshit.
so all ok.
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Sociopaths don’t learn. And people who manage a business in the conscienceless, venal, greedy manner in which Zuck, Thiel and Sandberg run Facebook, that’s sociopathy.
In other words, anyone who expects anything different from what the post references is clueless at best.
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It doesn’t really matter if Zuckerberg learns anything or not. It’s the users that need to learn that popularity does not equal truth.
Zuckerberg looks like CGI work. In every photo of him I’ve ever seen, he always has that blank, vapid stare and utterly lifeless eyes. There is not a real human person behind those eyes.
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Most of those seem to be handled ok. Guns are maybe the one exception in that list. The only times when “Science” gets out of hand is when there is yet another study confirming that Global Warming is real and people are causing it or talk about the Earth older than 10,000 years or so.
What’s missing from this conversation is that knowledge is political, and therefore so are facts. Fact-checking is a political process. Experts can’t save you from that.
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Facts and the knowledge they can produce are not the same thing.
It’s part of theory of knowledge.
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“Popular” is a reasonable proxy for “true,” right?
Oh, his “new” general direction is free labor? ok. ok.
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It is a tough one for me. The “Trust the experts” talk is ringing almost as cognitively dissonantly as “The FBI is a critical force for positive change” I grew up in the eighties with a new age mom obsessed with personal truth and self-exploration. Talk therapy hit its stride, riding a longitudinal wave of the maturing of people who were young in the 60s. Don’t Trust Experts, They Have an Agenda was a common refrain. From Formula vs. Breastfeeding to Mental health abuse, etc…there is a legitimate distrust developed in capital “E” Experts. I think this is why we have the two sides of the coin with Goop and Infowars hawking the same supplements. I really appreciated when Cory recognized that a history of blatant institutional corruption plays as critical a role in vaccine denial as any other social factor.
Not sure how to end this comment. I thought I’d have a conclusion by now…
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Even if we debate the specifics, most of us agree that there are broad topics where the popular consensus is more or less right. But I’m not sure we should believe that.
Facebook has only been working its magic on the popular consciousness for a relatively short time, and already some seemingly-basic certainties have begun to crumble (vaccination, sex criminal presidents, the Earth being round etc.). And that’s with a population that mostly learned about these things initially in school or on TV news. What will people believe in 50 years if everyone’s primary understanding of the world comes from social media yelling?
Science, in particular, is terrifyingly vulnerable to this, since it depends absolutely on not being influenced by popular opinion.
I think the answer is that we need good experts. Which is kind of the point the sixties anti-establishment movement was making, or at least, the more sophisticated strand of it. The whole reason corrupt experts are a problem is that we have to trust experts. If you could just use your own gut instincts to do heart bypass surgery, it wouldn’t matter whether you could trust experts.
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My absolute first thought was a byline of “Newsy McNewsface.”
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Agreed. And an informed public, who, even if they don’t understand every data point the experts are analyzing, at least can understand the accreditation process that evaluates the experts to make any efforts at transparency fruitful.
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