Just boycott Facebook already. 'but everyone uses it', yes but you have a choice. If you don't like the Facebook, then gtfo and make the effort to build something to replace it. But I guess that is too much work. People whine about Facebook, yet they do nothing to change the situation. You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
I don't have a facebook account. Never had one (apart from some experiments and trials which were never under my own name or known aliases). Don't need it. Don't care for it.
I also don't have a Linkedin account. (Well, maybe i do now, because i have a hotmail account). Don't need it. Don't care for it.
According to others it is a bloody miracle i survive in IT :)
No. Small publishers have no choice. They have to be where their readers are. All they can do is try to diversify as much as possible, but it won't mean a whole lot if one of the world's oligopolists cuts them off overnight.
Exactly this. The benefit of small newspaper services is just too small for most of their readers to bother making sure to actually receive the news.
If they are gone, other content will fill the gap. That's pretty bad for those current content creators, sure. It also enables a local news revival as soon as people realise that there might be huge value in some forms of local publishing.
So what are you gonna do in Venezuela and Cambodia (also on this experiment) where people have and use Free Basics? Cut yourself off completely from your potential market because you don't want to have Facebook?
It's not too much work, it's too costly. Boycotts themselves are almost never successful or effective at all. The only way for any boycott to fully work is if a critical mass of people join the boycott, and that critical mass is almost never reached. For individuals to boycott without the critical mass accomplishes nothing.
For those people where leaving FB is just individually positive, absolutely they should do it. For those doing, e.g. political organizing where most of their audience is on FB, they are stuck in a terrible conundrum.
Personally, I think FB should be used where effective to reach people on FB, and everyone should try to make at least 70% of their posts be specifically discussions of what's wrong with Facebook. As much as possible, every comment and discussion should include a side reference criticizing the platform. If enough people get the problem, maybe some day we'll have critical mass for a boycott that might work.
These countries' leaders would like nothing better than for people to boycott Facebook. The less information the "voter" has in these places the better for them.
It's not West where we can assume benevolence or at least competence in our leadership (ok, we... used to be able to do that, which makes this even scarier).
These people take everything they can until their caught, and if you're a small organization you can bet that you'll never be on a newsstand or build an audience without going to where people already are (hint: it's Facebook)
Reminds me of a scene in "The Social Network" movie (2010):
Lawyer: What are you doing?
Mark Zuckerberg: Checking in to see how it's going in Bosnia.
Lawyer: Bosnia? The don't have roads. But they do have Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg: [stops typing and looks up from his notebook]
If life is a formal system, then it needs postulates. Obviously humans can’t agree on postulates. Do you have a useful scheme of postulates that you’re sure all humans will agree on? If so, please share. You’ll be able to clear up tens of thousands of years of misunderstandings if so.
Is life a formal system ? I prefer to say that we need to make hypothesis, and this is part of life. But religion is not simply a collection of hypothesis.
In my view, religion is a cultural spine of a community that defines the rules for living together. It also comes with a set of assumptions (beliefs) that are used to justify the rules, make the whole hold together, and enforce their acceptance.
Calling back into question the assumptions lead to question the rules. This puts the community at risk. As a consequence religions establish protective measures. Some of them are swift and brutal. I hope you understand what I'm referring to.
Some religions are much less toxic, but there is still the problem of their assumptions that introduce a bias in the act and decision making. People who adhere to a religion tend to forget to put a weight of confidence in the assumptions with the rational to not put the community in danger. Anything that represent a threat to the religion is considered bad, and this includes calling back into question assumptions and rules.
Science did not work that way. And this is why it evolves so fast toward a better understanding of the world we are living in. I'm not saying science is a religion or an acceptable religion substitute. I'm just comparing the effectiveness and benefit of a faster evolution of knowledge.
I'm convinced by multiple personal experiences that any community (e.g. startups, forums) needs a cultural spine and community rules, but I don't think that religions is the appropriate answer to it. The rule and the knowledge must be able to evolve and this is only possible when they can be called back in question by anyone anytime, and an objective method is used to decide. Assumptions and beliefs should be considered as mere hypothesis. Religions tend to obstruct evolution for their survival and the survival of the community. And of course many humans use religions as leverage to manipulate people, not only for the good of the community.
The real problem of religions are their beliefs that we can't call back into question. People brain washed through all their childhood with these beliefs, that we are requested to respect, can't make the difference with was is true and not, can't call back into question the beliefs and are prone to integrate similar irrational beliefs. This put humanity at risk.
That is a summary of my current view of religions. Note that it may still evolve because it is only based on my current knowledge and past experience.
That's a misrepresentation of Buddhist beliefs. The whole reincarnation thing is a teaching about karma than a literal belief that you will come back as a bedbug if you're naughty.
Off-topic: because the Buddha explicitly favours reason and testability over blind belief. Granted most Buddhists have developed rituals akin to other religions over the millennia (and also a lot of mythology that demands blind belief), but core Buddhism (as given in the suttas) is almost not a religion. In fact calling it a philosophy of life is a better description.
There's 7.6 billion people in the world. That's a substantially larger "US" if you are going to reframe the OPs comments as implying "US vs Them."
Also given the recent velocity and volume of bad PR for Facebook, it's possible that public sentiment is irreparably turning against them.
Lastly, technology has no shortage of once popular products that have been relegated to the dustbin of history - see AOL, Nokia, Friendster, etc. Today's dominance is far from a guarantee.
I don’t have a Facebook account, but I also don’t believe that simply boycotting them is where action against them should end. We need stronger, ethics-based privacy laws that greatly check their psychological manipulation and mass surveillance.
The solution is not to build FB killer. The solution is to decentralise the web. Let's embrace newsletters and RSS feeds once again.
I recently came back to using RSS feeds and it feels great. The problem is that many websites don't maintain their feeds properly. Broken links, missing content and whatnot.. I guess nobody ever uses them aside from weirdos.
In other words, confine computer use to research and communication in sci-tech alone?
Not bad. It's probably how things should have been, but that boat has sailed long, long back.
Point is, efforts to make decentralisation and independent content creating, hosting and sharing should go on simultaneously with other social steps that you have enumerated. Neither can replace the other.
That sentiment is why 99.9999 of programmers like us never made facebook. Normal humans don't want to maintain seperate feeds and RSS readers for every possible interest etc along with a seperate message client along with a place to post photos, etc. They want something simple and human, like fb.
Humans are lazy by design. That's why most laws inconvenience on individual level for the sake of greater good. Getting rid of FB may soon reach that level.
I've also done the same. Invested the last 2 weeks more time in my theoldreader account and using twitter bridges (even instagram bridges exist) for not supporting entities like http://twitrss.me/
Facebook is the worst way of getting news and information in general. It's not the open independent web and by joining Facebook you agreed that you give them control. So even when I understand the frustration and I agree with the context... you all agreed to Facebook conditions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Shut down and get off the internet" is what the leaders in these countries want people to do.
The question isn't for individuals, it's for distribution. If you're in these countries essentially the only way to reach the people these days is through Facebook. Any other option and you're handing out a poorly xeroxed zine on the side of the street. The president of the country used to explicitly run the censorship of media in Yugoslavia. Nothing gets published without a tacit sign off even now.
Facebook promised to democratize interactions, got every journalist in the world to go along with it, and then pulled the carpet.
I understand why the media is frustrated about this. Zuckerberg basically promised them all of this traffic if they just "go all in" with Facebook. And now he's pulling the blanket from under them - just like the media was warned he would do, and they didn't listen.
That said, from an objective point of view, first off the media is not entitled to the user's home page in a random social network. They should have never believed that they were.
Second, to be honest, I think it's better for democracy if stories aren't fed by Facebook through its black-box algorithm. I suppose the a small government like the Serbian one couldn't do much to get Facebook to spread their propaganda through it, but if say the U.S. government were to do that, or even say the Indian government - oh boy. It would be such a propaganda machine, better than TV ever was.
The second part to this is that even if governments don't directly control the feeds to spread propaganda, they can exploit Facebook's algorithm, just like Russia supposedly did in the U.S. election, so the end result is the same.
This is why I'd rather people do their own research and they do the job of looking for posts, rather than "being served" those posts by a black magic algorithm that may have all sorts of biases embedded in it.
Don't turn this into "media fighting against Facebook" thingy or whatever you just tried. It's not only about them. Yes, they have the strength/influence and they used it. But what about every other Page? What about small businesses and communities that are now losing their viewers? They have no chance to get noticed if they want to speak up against those changes. And yes you can say that they should expect it, but maybe not? I think you shouldn't because FB is just using its strength and is negatively affecting freedom of the internet. Why freedom of the internet? Because of the size of the mass that they can reach.
> What about small businesses and communities that are now losing their viewers?
There is no duty whatsoever for Facebook or reddit or twitter or any other company to provide viewers for small businesses and communities for free. As far as I know, facebook never even promised to not change this functionality. If you claim to be search engine or use your power to damage competitors, absolutely. If you selectively hide content to damage opposition, sure.
Maybe facebook should think about timing when there are election around or something similarly important. But still, just like it was ok to separate games from feed, it is ok to separate news from feed.
Is Google limiting freedom because it automatically hides "spam" in mail? Spam in quotes because it's spam that the user has subscribed for. It's absolutely the same concept.
It's beneficial to the users and Facebook owes the pages absolutely nothing. It has to cater to the users if it wants to sell ads, and this is beneficial to the users (or at least how Facebook sees its users).
And while I agree it's not solely a media issue, they were extremely loud about it. Following many pages in the country that is already affected, the media cried out the most (for an individual user, me, they have the same voice as smaller pages).
Why is every complain about Facebook directed towards Zuckenberg. He is not alone in this company. We are thousands of engineers that work here and make fb what it is.
It feels like all our work (good or bad) is work being done by Zuckenberg, even if he did not have any input on some issues.
I don't see Larry Page receiving the same thanks or blame when deepmind or other google thing does good or bad.
This sounds like one of those "be careful what you ask for" things. I do tend to think the world would be a better place if engineers were held (at least slightly) morally accountable for their employer's actions, but I suspect it would be an unpleasant experience for many.
That's not the point at all. Facebook just happens to be right now how most people discover and consume news, in many (most?) countries. This is a position of absolutely enormous power, giving Facebook the ability, deliberately or otherwise, to control and manipulate public discourse more than perhaps any entity in history.
Moderation of public discourse – in the sense of keeping public discourse in a roughly central place, and minimising the extent to which extremists can manipulate it – is absolutely a requirement for a working democracy.
Facebook is not supposed to be public. That the random media got to fill up the pages there was a bad thing.
Nobody is entitled to the visibility or exclusive treatment on the Facebook. There are much more posts than anybody can read, those using Facebook agreed to let Facebook apply its algorithms and designs.
> those using Facebook agreed to let Facebook apply its algorithms and designs.
Nonsense! EVERYONE clicks "I agree to the ToS" WITHOUT agreeing to the ToS. They don't read it, they don't understand it, they aren't agreeing to it. The suggestion that users actually agree is completely dishonest.
>This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders.
I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.
If Capitalism is your sole guiding philosophy, Facebook is doing nothing wrong. But if you believe that companies (of any size) should seek to "do no harm" in the world, Facebook is coming up woefully short.
I'm not familiar with the harm Facebook does to the world, because I don't generally use facebook or care to read news about it.
With that being said, in this particular case, how is facebook to decide what is moral? Would you suggest that they put together an investigative team to decide which moral news organizations are negatively affected by the changes, and exclude said organizations? Surely the new "experiments" do not target purely moral organizations; it's indiscriminate. Even within this thread we have active debate surrounding whether or not stories should be fed through the black-box algorithm.
I'm really, really proud to see my former colleague reaching the front page of HN.
I know the pain and struggle investigative journalism organizations face (especially in infosec). Going through all of this and reaching less people because some dickhead in the United States decided to add these countries randomly really pisses me off.
Even worse are the other countries chosen like Cambodia and Venezuela, which both have Free Basics. Bloggers, pizza shops, investigative journalism organizations... they're all screwed because of one group of dickheads in Silicon Valley.
I do think that consumers would be better off with something like 100 MB of free data per month than an unlimited access to Facebook.
And I do think that Facebook wouldn't lose a lot compared to the current system. 98.41%[0] of the total social media traffic would still go to Facebook.
I'm not even sure that Serbia has "free basics". It's a fairly well developed country with a 110% mobile penetration rate (last I checked, probably higher now), 4G and the prices are dirt cheap and affordable for the vast majority of the population.
I'm not sure this is explained well. Everything is still accessible, it's just put on different tab. Now there's "News Feed" as before and "Activity Feed", the tab just below "News Feed" tab.
It's really annoying from my experience, I just forget to check that other tab also. Basically your feed is now split to what your friends posted and what pages you follow posted.
The effect author describes might as well be attributed to people: a) not realizing there is another tab to check, b) people forget to check other tab (I'm one of those).
From UX standpoint it might be an improvement, but I'd rather see it implemented as filter you can switch on/off than hardcoded tab you have to remember to check.
For comments advising author not using Facebook, I don't see where that goes? It's just how media works in our country and Facebook is most common social network that all groups of people follow, and there is quite a lot (otherwise censored) political information floating around on it.
Specifically:
> You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
That's all nice and visionary, but in countries where you can cut yourself off of alternative news sources by not following Facebook I don't see how that's good advice.
Correct. Your democracy is not his laboratory. His website, however, is. If you want to control the behavior of Fbook, buy it. If you want pageviews from people's news feeds, make things which people decide are worth sharing.
From a user perspective, doesn't moving non-person-related (actually social media) things to a separate feed make the ux better?
The problem is FB indoctrinated users and soft-killed most alternatives. A regular user don't care to signup for a newsletter or RSS feed. They "like" page on FB and think that's enough to get updates.
I asked around and many non-tech people think liking a page equals subscribing. Both pages owners and regular users. They think they communicate to each other. Well, in fact they don't.
FB is dangerously close to monopoly if it isn't one already. But I wonder if any gov has the guts to deal with it. Even EU seems to be in bed with Zuck.
That is because most pages worked exactly this way for years - every update was shared on facebook too. It was comfortable for sites for a while - people were likely to hit like on facebook and got you in the feed they visit daily for unrelated reasons. They are less likely to give you e-mail or start with rss feed they don't use.
The alternative is not rss. The alternative is news aggregator few months down the line when sites stop asking people to like them.
My partner is again and again disappointed that all her "friends" don't "respond" to what she posted on her page, even if I explained her many times that Facebook algorihtmically selects what to show to each of them, and that nobody sees everything posted by those who are "friends" or "liked."
Nobody is entitled to the visibility or exclusive treatment on the Facebook. There are much more posts than anybody can read
It seems the media are "disappointed" the same way. And when they don't get the reach on the Facebook that they wrongly expect to "deserve" they wrongly call that "an attack to democracy."
When a corporation's actions with its own private property becomes a threat to the public good, it is well within the purview and established precedent of government to regulate that specific corporation.
They didn't selectively choose this media organization, they did it for every single page. Users still have choice to see the content, if they are interested. I would argue that engagement should be higher if people actively opt in to view this content, as opposed to having it mixed in with their social feed.
I believe the issue isn't that the articles aren't been shared
Natively, but that in order to even appear for a chance of being shared, page owners need to use the "promote" feature first, which costs money.
Users don't go to pages on FB to find new info, they expect to see it in the feed. This way only paid content gets seeing, and otherwise you are SOL.
Not to say that it isn't expected, FB needs to chase growth and likes, but it's still unpleasant in a world where people are making FB synonymous with the internet.
Yes what could be worse for democracy than people seeing more posts from their friends.
Does anyone know if the views of paid page posts are going to go up, or is it just that the views of unpaid page posts are going to go down? Maybe that level of detail isn't public, but it seems important for deciding how to tell this story.
This is stupid. Facebook was bashed for influencing politics. It now tries to avoid political discussion entirely by downplaying news from Pages, but it is now bashed for it as well.
Facebook was bashed for not doing enough to counter efforts by individuals and foreign governments to spread false and misleading stories in the run up to recent elections.
The solution is not to downplay articles from established news organisations, especially not organisations that Facebook users have chosen to follow.
What a bullshit comment, Facebook needs to be more responsible with its massive power, it can ruin countries.
Europe needs to do something about the Silicon Valley companies, we can't build Chinese firewall but in order to have a chance for competition we need to come up with a plan. One possible way to fuck off FB is because it's spy machine that is very much illegal on some aspects.
Europe doesn't need a plan. High level central planning has never succeeded in producing viable world-class competitors. That approach has already been tried and failed. European countries would achieve better results by setting up more favorable business climates and letting competition occur naturally.
(There's nothing wrong with European countries protecting their citizens with data privacy and security laws. But that's separate from competition.)
Eben Moglen's FreedomBox project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox -- is more democratic. It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central servers.
It needs work, but what part of democracy doesn't?
What does it take for widespread support for the project?
> It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central servers.
Early Bitcoin-- download this app and click the "Generate Coins" button. Now you've got digital tokens in exchange for having verified the global state of the transaction database. A problem was addressed by some software. Woot! Somebody bought a pizza with these digital tokens, so mission accomplished.
Current IPFS-- lots of people add an important file/directory, and now other people can retrieve that data. Doesn't exactly have a robust system to discover things. But Catalonia used it to workaround some censorship, so it must be at least minimally usable. Hence a problem was addressed with software. Mission accomplished.
Freedombox-- please continue the pattern here. What technical problem does Freedombox solve with software, and what is a single example of how it has been leveraged to accomplish a mission by ordinary humans?
I have a suspicion that after the utopian western world phase with autonomous/non passenger controlled vehicles is over, a country with few traffic controls or systems will be a guinea pig for 'mass adoption'...
Much like the Serbia and other FB experiments a system will be set up, tested and then rolled out across the first world...
Except that people don't rely on their gym for 90% of their media diet, and their gym's TV isn't controlled by a company thousands of miles away that can change all the screens in harmony.
Well in my hypothetical it does, so yes. The gym can still play what it wants. You could argue that it ought to be responsible, which is fine, but there's no entitlement.
Even though their formats are different NYT et al. and FB are competitors. Even though there is kernel of truth, the media witch-hunt of Facebook is out of proportion.
Long story short, its not concern for democracy (if NYT was concerned about democracy it would not be a rabid partisan) its just jealousy and hate that Zuckerberg is eating their cake.
The anxiety seems proportional to Facebook's reach, does it not? Does anyone else have that reach?
Don't believe you can support your second paragraph. You can't erase the points an article makes by identifying a potential motive, and surely in an organization the size of the NYT, there's room for lots of motives.
Whether they are jealous or not, Facebook is still a threat to democracy.
Probably a grain of truth to that, but no more. Sure, there are plenty of valid concerns and discussions to be had about Facebook (where I work BTW). OTOH, a lot of the most vitriolic commentary, from both fellow techies and from traditional media, seems to have at least a tinge of Tall Poppy Syndrome to it. Does anyone really think $newspaper or $startup would be any less problematic if they grew to the same size? Get real. Maybe if we dropped some of the double standards and blind hate, we could actually have those important conversations about real solutions to real problems.
That's a good point. The government broke up Bell Labs when it got too big for the public good. It's high time a few of the modern telecommunications giants have the same done to them.
What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy. Facebook is a treat to democracies. There are more articles on this than the other way around.
Funny that you should mention education in your comment, since commentary based on the lack of it is a real threat to democracy.
> There are more articles on this than the other way around.
Appeal to popularity. Facebook might indeed be a threat to democracy, in the same way that radio or TV were in their heyday. It's for us to deal with it and turn it into something positive, not try to turn back the technological clock.
One of the most annoying things to me about HN, or any forum site in general, is when people jump on obvious typos or grammar errors when they could easily ignore them and respond to the actual content of the comment instead.
Use context. It's so incredibly obvious that this person didn't mean treat, and yet here it is, a little jab to say "I'm just a little bit better than you" because I noticed a missing h and just couldn't help but point it out to everyone else, who also noticed it but didn't care.
Is it obvious though? I thought maybe they were being funny or clever by perhaps meaning to use the word treat. Responded further here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703788
No jab intended. I think assumptions are dangerous as well, and lead to more problems - including internal distress - instead of perhaps putting inquiry forward to ask for intentions instead. Obviously you're getting an answer from me now, however you still may not believe my intentions.
The first poster says Facebook "[is] not [a] concern for democracy".
The responder says "What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy. Facebook is a treat to democracies. There are more articles on this than the other way around."
The first two sentences seems to imply that they disagree with what has just been said, that is except for the word "treat", which implies that they actually agree. If they are saying "treat" then they're saying not only is Facebook not a concern for democracy, but it is actively beneficial.
However this argument is then immediately negated by saying "There are more articles on this than the other way around." Ignoring the ridiculously false logic of the statement, there are objectively more articles about Facebook being a threat to democracy than there are about Facebook being a benefit to it.
Thus I concluded the person meant "threat", which I found to be a very obvious conclusion given the context of the statement.
I think you're not understanding me. If "Facebook is a treat for democracy" is said sarcastically, it has the same meaning as "Facebook is a threat to democracy."; sarcastic might be the wrong term, I can't think of the right one at the moment.
Maybe if s/he hadn't just accused other people of being uneducated (without repercussions despite the obvious lack of respect), the typo wouldn't have stood out as hypocritical. You too need to use context.
What? You couldn't guess what he was at least trying to get at? If you were really confused, you could have substituted each word and then disregarded the substitution that makes absolutely no sense.
Honestly I wasn't sure what point the commenter was making, and was looking for clarification. Perhaps they were being sarcastic by seriously meaning to say that FB is a treat for "democracies" - in the sense that for targeting and accessing voters to potentially manipulate is a piece of cake with FB's ad targeting. It would act as a way to point out otherwise if it was a typo or not as well.
"I'm going to use my political motivations as a shield to avoid credible, consistently reasonable reporting of situations that don't align with my narrative. The facts, err I mean NY Times, are just biased!"
