People were talking about this nonsense polarization during Nixon’s term. Read Nixonland to get an idea.
Listen, guys, all of you have an external locus of control. Facebook is doing things to you that you are unable to control. You have a paternalistic view of people. Grandpa is too dumb to evaluate on his own. Facebook made him a Nazi.
Gonna be honest with you. It’s the people. Facebook didn’t exist when Nixon was elected. No one made grandpa a Nazi but grandpa and no one is doing things to you but you.
FB is actively changing how you see the world through it by removing the content you do not like to see. This is how it yields to more divided society.
Guys, when you give people the ability to share things, they'll share things with each other that aren't true.
Facebook is as much to blame for this as Gutenberg is.
The extent to which people will go to avoid accepting that grandpa actually is racist is astonishing. No, dude, Facebook didn't make grandpa racist. It gave your racist grandpa the ability to talk to other racists.
Facebook accurately detects that your grandpa wants to talk to racists and gives him that ability.
The Facebook logo is everywhere. On the side of delivery vans, pizza boxes, business cards and paperback books. Public spaces are littered with people staring down at their phones. Our politics has been usurped by the machinations of social media.
Pretending like an individual can simply logout of Facebook and not have to deal with the social consequences is what is ridiculous!
I'll go full Godwin: There were probably less swastikas per square inch at the height of Nazi Germany than there are Facebook logos today. The perceived rise of authoritarianism of some political Other is nothing more than the actual authoritarianism of Facebook.
OK, so I'm reading a Hitler biography and it's affecting my outlook, but I think we all need to step back for a moment and acknowledge that people hated their political opponents long before Facebook came along.
I do think FB is pushing people to extremes. More precisely I think social media is pushing people to extremes, I find twitter a lot more antagonistic than FB actually, where people think they can 'destroy' their opponents in 280 characters or less. Reddit is a cesspool. We know, or we should know, that these sites are deliberately divisive . There are bad actors who want us to be really angry, all the time, because angry people are stupid.
It still is just the latest iteration. People used to gather in beer halls. People used to gather in churches. People used to have their social clubs and circles and had been able to carefully manipulate their environments so that people who disagreed with them lived and worked and went to school far, far away.
This anger doesn't go away if Facebook goes away. I'm not sure how to make it go away. I'd wish that people could take a step back and consider for a moment that maybe intelligent, decent people can disagree with them. Probably not.
The arguments that Facebook is evil are really dumb and I'm kind of tired of them.
The core mechanism of political polarization is that the internet inexorably pulled society out of its temporary state of mass media consolidation. For a couple decades, we had an unusual situation where a few companies ran mass media, and those companies all sort of agreed to toe the centrist consensus line politically. Now, we've reverted to something like what we had before radio, which was that socialists read the socialist newspaper, right-wing folks read the right-wing newspaper, etc., if not even worse -- some folks just got their news from the loudest partisans at the bar.
We've gone from an era where news distribution was fragmented because it was very difficult, to an era where it was consolidated because it was easy for large corporations only, to an era where it's so dead simple that anyone can do it, so it's fragmented again.
Legacy media folks hate this. They blame the biggest players helping people share fragmented media sources with one another, rather than recognizing the inevitability of this fragmentation, no matter what products people use to share news over the internet. They demand a return to elite consensus blocking extreme viewpoints. It is simply not gonna happen. That barn was always temporary, and it has collapsed around the horse.
I know this was snarky and probably in violation of site guidelines, but it is my personal opinion that Facebook is the main impetus in the hatred and division between political ideals in the US right now.
Exactly. Facebook is a convenient scapegoat because people can't simultaneously hold in their head the two concepts "My grandfather is loving and kind and good to his family" and "My grandfather hates Mexicans and gay people". An easy way to resolve this is "Zuckerberg deceived him!".
Facebook also has a long history of meddling in elections and actively promoting far right groups. Meanwhile, fascism is absolutely not a meaningless label, and it's literally what's happening in US right now. Trump’s own former defense secretary just compared him to the nazis https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wn7m/welp-trumps-own-fo...
When a company builds its whole business model on promoting extremist ideology and mass surveillance, then it's a pretty strong indication that it does not in fact benefit society.
Your attempts to draw parallels between the nazis and facebook by invoking schindlers list hasn’t gone unnoticed. FB has its flaws, but isnt half as bad as what you are trying to paint it to be. Not everyone who disagrees with your point of view is a nazi.
Part of the problem is Facebook doesn’t want anyone to have a negative experience because those people disconnect, at least temporarily.
I can go on Facebook, praise Hitler, and get likes. I think that skews peoples’ perception of what’s acceptable and what’s not. Maybe Facebook needs a way to give negative feedback.
It’s such a hard problem though. The quantity over quality friend groups everyone has now makes it difficult to trust others. When I was growing up, if one of my good friends disagreed with me it was a good indication I needed to reevaluate my opinion. I think that’s been lost.
Tyrants in power are going to find ways to get information on people they dislike. It already happened before personal computers and internet existed. The goal is to not put tyrants into power. That's a political problem. Facebook is useful for social purposes and I'm saying this as the least social person you could find. It makes connecting with people easy and that's good.
What scares me is the sheer amount of conspiracy stuff on Facebook. My dad is on Facebook, he's 80, and the stuff he talks to me about on the phone is just amazing. I initially thought it was only him, but then my sister-in-law's mom started sending me videos, and I was faced with the same crazy stuff.
I'm not sure what groups my dad is in or how they contact him, but damn there are a lot of old folks talking about all the same crazy stuff. I really wish Facebook would address some of this crazy nonsense. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to tell my dad that it is not George Soros or Bill Gates behind the conspiracy.
Huh. I didn't even know that Trump was on Facebook, I should get out more.
Looking at this, I don't know what the justification for banning is but like most political decisions I guess you don't want to watch the sausage getting made.
Future historians will look back at the brilliance of building near-monopoly platforms by inviting one and all for free, ignoring copyright, doing a build-out at a loss, selling personal information, winner-take-all network effects, and then applying a POV to the whole works. Personally, I'm attracted to this view of the Facebooks of the world:
This is what people have always wanted. The bloody paternalists are winning in America and they want to tell us what we’re allowed to watch. “Facebook is responsible for radicalization”
Nah, Facebook just links you to like minded people. You have a problem facing the fact that it’s your grandpa who is a racist shit, that your brother is an incel, and that your sister thinks trans women shouldn’t be allowed to use women’s toilets. So you blame Facebook.
So you guys decide you want to blame Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. They’re “not doing enough”. Let them be and get your grandpa off them if you care so much.
Don't even try to speak rationally about Facebook on HN. The atmosphere around it is hysterical.
Advertising is evil according to HN, so therefor Facebook is evil. Evil mastermind Putin plugged directly into the consciousness of every conservative voter and magically made them vote for Trump. Fox News and friends disseminating constant vitriol and misinformation had no effect. It was evil Facebook and mastermind Putin. Oh and don't forget, Facebook is worse than heroin!
The anti-FB circle jerk around here is comically ridiculous.
The people whose attitudes don't align with Facebook will recognize this paternalism for what it is. Those people whose attitude align with Facebook won't. That's been my experience with these kinds of things.
Facebook purposefully manipulated the emotional states of thousands of users.
This guy made a bot to shitpost on /pol/ without getting noticed. As far as I see, the worst thing he did was subject the people browsing /pol/ to more of the same bullshit they spew there daily. Good play on his part though, making the direct victims of his AI fuckery the most unsympathetic people you can find online.
Listen, guys, all of you have an external locus of control. Facebook is doing things to you that you are unable to control. You have a paternalistic view of people. Grandpa is too dumb to evaluate on his own. Facebook made him a Nazi.
Gonna be honest with you. It’s the people. Facebook didn’t exist when Nixon was elected. No one made grandpa a Nazi but grandpa and no one is doing things to you but you.
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