That's also missing the greater picture. It's giving _everyone_ a megaphone... but giving the loudest megaphones to the people who can get most people to listen to them.

You'll have noticed on the internet that there's a tendency to prioritise engaging with things you disagree with (hell, half of my HN comments are because I felt motivated to write something to disagree with some OP at some point - even this one).

What that means is the traditional small-c conservative 'village elders', 'parish priests', and 'elected officials', who hold authoritative positions not because they're controversial, but because they historically represented positions of neutrality and consensus end up with quiet megaphones, and the madmen claiming the world is flat and there's a paedophile ring run out of a pizza shop end up with the loudest megaphones.

Half of the population is below average intelligence, and giving the wrong people the loudest megaphones has a devastating effect on society.

> why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?

Because it's not idiots that are the problem, it's bad-faith actors, and they're very good at manipulating people. In the past they'd have to do that 1:1, now they can do it at scale.

> The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?

And here is the real problem with FB, the algorithmic feed. Normal life is pretty boring day-to-day, and doesn't trigger 'engagement'. Conspiracies, etc... cause an enormous amount of engagement. When a person is fed conspiracies all day by the engagement algorithm, even the most critical thinkers will start to drift. It works for the same reason advertising works, familiarity and repetition. The solution is never use FB, but that ship has sailed for most.

> The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot?

Societally we solve this through trust organizations. Individually, I have no way to validate the information every expert/idiot I might come across. So is “connect the frombulator to the octanizer but watch out for the ultra convexication that might form” gibberish or just your ignorance of the terminology in use in that problem domain? Most people don’t try to figure out how to navigate each field. Heck, even scientists use shortcuts like “astrology has no scientific basis so it doesn’t matter what so-called SMEs in those fields say”. So you rely on trust in various organizations and peers to help guide you. These structures can often fail you for various reasons but that’s the best we’ve managed to do. That’s why for example “trust the science” is a bad slogan - people aren’t really trusting the science. They’re trusting what other people (some times political leaders) tell them the science is. Add in bad-faith actors exploiting uncertainty and sowing chaos and it’s a mess.

Silencing the idiot is fine as long as your 100% certain you’re silencing someone who’s wrong and not just someone espousing a countervailing opinion (eg Hinton’s deep learning research was poo-pooed by establishment ML for a very long time)

Facebook is not just a hosting platform, through the Facebook feed it exercises a great deal of editorial control over what posts/information is surfaced to users. So while Facebook might be giving everyone a megaphone, it doesn’t turn everyone the same volume. It needs to own that.

Erosion of trust in elites just so happens to also be a long-term goal of polluters, quacks, scammers, and other powerful parasites of the common wealth when they run up against government or science.

I think in general Facebook has a bias towards inflammatory posts - and other platforms for that matter as well including HN actually. Also it's easy to blame the village idiot for everything, but I don't think Donald Trump or Alex Jones are village idiots. They are surely idiots but left the village quite some time ago and gained popularity before Facebook (InfoWars was founded 1999) - although FB surely was an accelerator stage.

That said, the village idiot is harmless and I think aristocracy (rule of the elite) is definitely not the solution. But what is true that the normal filters in an offline community haven't been translated online yet.

> it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone

I think this can be argued against, because Facebook does recommendation and algorithmic curation.

Even if Facebook didn't purposely tweak things to propagate disinformation, you could say it is easy to manipulate their algorithms to disproportionately push the information.

So for me it's a case of Facebook not doing enough to fight potential abuse on their platform.

There's an element of responsibility here, because we are prone to some material more than other. There are primitive instincts in us, and content designed to take advantage of that is parasitic, and it is manipulative and addictive in that sense.

Crazy theories, appeal to emotions, controversy, nudity, clan affiliation, and all that are ways to take advantage of our psyche.

Even a smart person is as smart as the data more readily available to them. If the only thing about gender psychology I ever heard about was Jordan Peterson because he's been recommended to me, even if I'm the smartest most reasonable person, this is now the starting point of my understanding and thoughts around gender psychology.

So I think a platform that is optimized to show information that is most designed to make people susceptible to it, and that also targets information to the most susceptible people to present it to is by design going to result in the outcomes we're seeing.

Facebook (like News) is entertainment. People don't select entertainment for accuracy.

The village idiot (that's successful on Facebook) has self-optimized for being catchy - that's why people are listening.

Not to mention vaccine hesitancy because "when was the last time you got healthcare for free?"

> it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone.

Are they, though? It seems like FB amplifies things that they think will generate more engagement and "stickiness". Sensational things that cause outrage tend to do that more than cold, hard facts. I would not at all be surprised if misinformation gets amplified orders of magnitude more than the truth.

Idiots engage.

Reason doesn't.

> most of humanity is... challenged

Most, no. Everybody is blind to one perspective or another. Also, time is limited and attention is limited. Do not think that others are just stupid because their focus or knowledge does not overlap with yours.

"Those people" does not exist. It's just an illusion of your own limited perspective. We are on this together and calling people stupid not it is true, not it helps.

> this should have been an entirely forseeable outcome

It was. It is. It always will be.

Could you imagine the outrage had the authorities even attempted to prevent Facebook et al?

Not saying you're wrong, but to take a slightly more charitable view on humanity: Facebook exploits well known human behaviour to amplify content.

It's (unfortunately?) human nature to share shocking things, it may have even been evolutionarily advantageous at some point. Using algorithms to exploit this behaviour at a scale never before possible is harmful to humanity. No idiocy required.

True, but the financial incentives of many (most?) companies doesn't align with public benefits (see pollution, plastics, diet etc.) Why is social media singled out in our demands for them to act morally good, instead of just profitable?

Supposedly they were working on detuning this effect.

> Lets say someone walks past you and says "hi" and smiles. Lets say someone else then walks past you and punches you in the face. Which interaction maximizes engagement?

Likely the first one. Could also lead to a literal 'engagement'.

> people want to see train wrecks and inflammatory content.

I'm starting to believe this more and more, but what I can't understand is why? We know it has no real "nutritional value", yet we crave it anyway.

Are we just bored and desire entertainment and drama?

What's the evolutionary drive for drama anyway?

People want inflammatory content like a moth wants a flame. Facebook amplifying a signal from the lunatic fringe preys upon the need of non-lunatics (or different-thinking lunatics) to argue against ideas they consider dangerous or just wrong. As a side-effect, it makes the ideas appear more mainstream, which has the effect of making the ideas more popular. This further increases the compulsion of non-lunatics to address the ideas.

I'm not sure if that qualifies as being what people 'want' or not, but it seems like it's profitable.

Ultimately, yes, but that's a rather short-sighted position to take when there's an cadre of psychologists and other highly-trained people who's entire job is to entrap you further, just so someone can make (more) money.

Eg when you buy items at the grocery store, do you consciously examine all options, including the items on the bottom shelf by your feet, or do you just go for the items at eye level, and are thus tricked by a similar group of psychologists into buying the product you've been trained to want. And even if you, personally, do, there's a reason why product companies pay supermarkets to have their products at eye/arm level - it works.

Sure, but also Facebook has a bunch of doctorate-having engineers and psychologists dedicating hundreds or thousands of hours to figure out a system that gets for me to give my attention to Facebook, whereas I’m one dude who doesn’t even have a graduate degree who gets tired and bored and struggles to sleep sometimes.

And that might be most reasonable thing to do.

It seems like lot of folks here allude though not exactly say that they should be in position to decide on who is "idiot", "bad-faith", "anti-science" and so on.

Take any of these arguments about Facebook, replace "Facebook" with "printing press" and everything still makes sense, which tells you what this really is:

Cultural elites wanting to control what their perceived inferiors think, believe, and most importantly, vote for.

The same class of people who wanted to regulate the printing press in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries are the ones who want to regulate the internet today.

I believe speech should be free but people should be responsible for their speech.

People behave completely differently when there are consequences to what they say.

Speech for "everybody but idiots" is not free speech.

Facebook should ban or suspend accounts which spread objective untruths that will tend to be harmful if spread.

You can have your free speech on your own website.

I want free speech for everyone except idiots.

> who do you think ought to be in charge of deciding who the idiots are?

Think about it. Engineering disciplines have mostly solved this issue. Lets take structural/civil engineering and something that affects many people - bridges. Through a combination of law, codes, and government, not any joe schome can build a bridge. Existing bridges generally work well and can be trusted. Sometimes bad things happen like the FIU collapse, but generally that's very rare.

I don't understand why there can't be a group of people, large or small educated and from diverse backgrounds, that can set basic standards on what is and is not misinformation, with due-process like things such as appeals, etc. It's not an impossible task.

> Those who want Facebook to regulate "misinformation" and gatekeep who (and what) is allowed on the site need to admit that they don't actually believe in free speech -- they believe in limited speech regulated by corporations.

If you're going to use a third party for communication and that third party is not owned by the people (i.e. a government entity) then it follows from the above statement that you don't believe in private property rights.

Facebook Groups and Pages create ways for people to share content, triggering exponential growth (e.g. user shares meme to their page so that their friends see it. Their friends choose to re-share. wash. rinse. repeat.)

The internet alone doesn't connect people. Remove things like Facebook and Twitter, and how do you get this giant interconnected graph with few localized connections?

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair

I think the megaphone is thus more of a metaphor than it is an analogy. Or at least, like most analogies, it breaks down under even the lightest pressure. For it to be an analogy, it'd have to be a megaphone manufacturer that also brings the audience together. Maybe Facebook is the megaphone AND the village square AND then some.

That’s what’s challenging about this situation. We’re experiencing a fairly new problem. It hasn’t before been possible for a member of society to communicate with all other members of society at the same time, nor has it been possible for a member of society to get addicted on a curated feed of random (sometimes anonymous) folks spreading their ideas globally.

All of these things seem new to me:

- Global, direct communication with all members of society.

- Addictive design patterns in software.

- AI-curated news feeds based on increasing engagement.

- Anonymous conversations.

Since it’s new, society doesn’t have frameworks to think about this kind of stuff yet.

I don't understand how a targeted tax would help at all here.

But village idiots can share content into their social circle from other more popularly known village idiots.

Analogies are nearly useless in making an argument Facebook is an online platform with real time access to users communications and metrics and analysis of how it's used which allow it to make reasonable predictions on how it's going to be used in the future.

Comparing it to dumb hardware is ridiculous.

Their ability to predict the negative effect of amplifying crazy provides a moral imperative to mitigate that harm. In case you don't understand there is a difference between the platform allowing Bob to tell Sam a harmful lie, and letting Bob tell 200 people who tell 200 people ..., and different yet from algorithmically promoting Bob's lie to hundreds of thousands of people who are statistically vulnerable to it.

So i think this is a breakdown of our previous mindset on the matter. I don't know what future is "right", what the answer is.. but i think it is important for us to at least recognize that in the past, a crazy person on the street corner was limited quite a bit on velocity.

This megaphone is a poor example imo. A far better example would be broadcast television. We're now broadcasting everyone straight into not just American homes, but world wide.

So i ask, because i don't know, how does broadcast television differ from a megaphone in requirements? What responsibility is there on broadcast television what doesn't exist for a street corner?

Is it a problem, however, if the megaphone manufacturers specifically look for people who spread misinformation, and sell them the loudest megaphones with the most reach?

FB has not directly done that, but they have consistently refused to acknowledge that selling the biggest megaphones to the people who create the most "engagement" (aka money for FB) tend to be the types of people who generate false information and outrage.

Their publicized efforts to shut down fake accounts and pages set up specifically to spread misinformation is perfunctory, and simply something for them to point at and say, "see, we're doing things to fix the problem", when they're merely playing whack-a-mole with symptoms, know what the root of the problem is, but refuse to fix it because it's their cash cow.

Would you expect megaphone manufacturers to give souped up models capable of drowning out other megaphones to only the most controversial, destructive people?

It doesn't get enough attention? The "algorithms" are all anyone talks about when it comes to this issue. I think people put way too much weight on them.

Once you have enough people participating in a single conversation, from all walks of life, the discourse will go to shit very quickly.

Look at Reddit as an example. Small subreddits that are focused on a specific hobby are usually pleasant and informative. Large subreddits that cater to a large audience are no better than the comment section on a political YouTube video.

It's really not. WhatsApp has just as big of a misinformation problem without any sort of algorithmic ranking.

> blaming it 100% on Facebook is not fair.

The problem is that humans are never 100% rational. If the audience for Facebook was purely rational robots, then sure, you could make the argument that since they should just be able to stop caring about these problematic things, and the issue will go away, it's not Facebook's fault that they haven't done that.

But given we are talking about humans, once Facebook has spent considerable time and money studying human behavior and society in general, exactly in order to figure out how to maximize their own goals over anything else, I think they should take the blame when there are negative side effects to doing so. Saying "well if society just stopped caring about (e.g.) negative content it'd be fine, so it's society's fault" is misdirection at best and ignores both the concentrated effort Facebook has spent on achieving this outcome, as well as the hoops they've spent the past few years jumping through to defend their choices once people started calling them out on it.

> And people decide to use Facebook

I don’t choose to use WhatsApp but I have to because that what my family members use and they aren’t tech savvy enough to use anything else. So no, it’s not a simple choice. Once a product gets saturated in the market, it gets very difficult to replace it.

Facebook decides what you see. That they have created an algorithm that "maximizes engagement" is just another way of saying that they've decided what you should see is what they believe will keep you most "engaged". They could choose to use a different metric -- it is entirely their choice.

Facebook as experimented with a number of different options to clean your feed but ultimately they never get deployed because they all decrease engagement.

Indeed. Many think if it sounds like feel-good rhetoric then it must be true.

I don't think so, and I used to spend a lot of time in arcades. For one thing, everyone had to pay the exact same amount to play. Good player, bad player, whatever. There was no "free tier" to get you hooked before things suddenly got much harder, and when they did there was no way to pay more to make things easier (though toward the end some games did let you continue by pumping in more tokens). Every game was also self contained. There was no persistent state that you were in danger of losing if you didn't keep checking in day after day, week after week. Fortunately, the games were also cheap. Even when I was really poor, I could afford a dollar for several tokens that were enough to play the games I liked just about as long as I could stand. Hour-long games of Battle Zone turned into all-afternoon games of Joust. I could turn a game over to someone less skilled, go back to my apartment, eat lunch, come back, and pick up again before they'd managed to exhaust the lives I had accumulated.

Arcade games were certainly meant to be enjoyable, and to keep you playing, but they were nowhere near the dark-pattern psychological minefield that modern games - especially mobile games - often are.

Arcades may have heavier users but not any “whales” who are using mom’s credit card.

Or casinos.

As harsh as I am on humanity, it's not entirely people's fault. We have primate emotions that have been grossly outpaced by our technological development. This is why I've become somewhat anti-technology despite still working on technology because it stretches us to lifestyles that are distinctly inhuman.

Humanity simply does not have the emotional capacity to handle the technology we create. It never has and never will, and it's just that software has greatly amplified this inability. This is why mental disorders are skyrocketing. We're building emotional prisons with technological walls and bars.

Not everything that's stupid is harmful.

It's fine if everyone is stupid, or most of us choose to engage in stupid things from time to time. I paid $17 to see Transformers. That was pretty stupid, but oh well, no one got hurt.

People want to be entertained and engaged - I do not think they aim to harm. So I think we need to develop alternatives to entertain people - these alternatives can still be stupid, they just shouldn't be harmful.

Homo Sapiens have been killing each other on this planet for at least 10,000 years, and only used nuclear weapons for roughly the last 75 years.... If his wife had been armed with an M-28 Davy Crockett firing an M-388 round using a W54 Mod 2 with a yield of 84GJ, she could easily have deterred him, but she would not be legally allowed to carry military weapons.

Maintain the purity of your bodily fluids, friend!

Why use many word when few word do trick?

The murder rate seems a lot lower than the US. Also the "murderers aren't concerned about gun laws" line is specious; a criminal isn't concerned about laws by definition - that doesn't invalidate the reasoning behind passing a law.

So long as it’s mightier than the sword.

Your link shows the US has 4x the homicide rate as the UK. Meanwhile, Japan has incredibly restrictive weapon laws (including knives and swords), and they have a fraction of the rate of everyone else.

And before you point to Switzerland, I am all for gun ownership by certified, well trained, responsible citizens. But the US doesn't have that. Either decrease access to guns, or enact 2 years of compulsory military service where you are trained to respect your weapon and know precisely when and how to responsibly use it AND store it. If you do neither, you get the US.

And in either case, we need to improve the mental wellbeing of everyone in the US by giving more people access to "free" healthcare and not stigmatizing mental health.

But that's the exact issue no.

Social media platforms create immense value as well. I might not be a user but I can see how it helps a lot of people as well.

Do we enforce license on people to use social media platforms?

Have you been to any thread which mentions say China, India or several other topics?

You will see a lot of toxicity and you can find several deleted or heavily downvoted comments.

As even HN front page and commenr section is algorithmic. Vote brigading happens here as well for posts and comments.

That misses the point of the OP. Tumblr (as a general social media platform) had incredible amounts of bullying and toxicity. Whether its from the left or right is a moot point.

Example found after 10 seconds of Googling: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3da838/an-attempted-suicide-...