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Absolutely. FB is a house of cards at this point.


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Yep. FB has issues, but people are dancing on its grave a little too early.

Yes.

I think it’s a huge amplifier of what would otherwise be fringe ideas.

In the absence of FB, there would be tensions, but no battleground.


I think in a few years, as FB’s popularity craters and awareness of their terrible practices becomes more widespread, that notion will seem even more comical than it does today.

Sure, but they are also the arbiter of truth now.

FB tried to be purely a platform but society has asked them to "annotate" fake news or propaganda. So FB is now playing an editorial role.

However we got here, it's not a great place to be in. We have massive networks that we cannot escape which are actively firewalling information.


True but then Trump went and lost and got kicked off the network. My point is its more a chaos factory than a controllable weapon.

It no one can tell if their own head is going to be blown off, when they wield the weapon, then its not a very good one.

That said, there are lot of people who have become Like and Follower chasing robots thanks to FBs content mechanics and that fuel the chaos. These people think they are great shapers of reality, but the outcomes speak for themselves.

There are no lasting results or outcomes that will go into the political history book from all the activity that happens on FB. Its just wasting everyones time and energy. And for that reason it will suddenly one day collapse and everyone will stand around shocked and suprised just as they did with Hilary.

Chaos is easy to generate and impossible to control. And it will be FBs downfall.


Facebook? Probably. Which is why (among other things) we should be concerned.

I would agree. If the worst we have to worry about from outside influences is that they're sharing posts on FB, I really think their power is over stated.

You may well be right about that. One of the things that makes FB evil is that it is not immediately apparent that they are.

It feels sort of of helpless all around, but I feel like fb/meta had a very large part in the turmoil we're in.

Fb makes all if its money by separating people into neat little echo chambers and making them feel warm and cozy and in possession of the Truth. Basically driving a number of wedges into the society. A _little_ blame would be in order, I'd think.

Not really. You would think in a forum full of techbros, FB being a private entity would be the end of the discussion. But because it's white supremacist viewpoints that many of the forum users are sympathetic with, it gets moved into a conveniently gray area.

To me, that does seem to be the case based on headlines I see here and on reddit. This may just be the media fanning flames to create a story but maybe the anti-Facebook sentiment has reached a tipping point.

Despite all the justified critique I wonder whether there is currently an orchestrated propaganda machine trying to drag Facebook down.

I don’t think we think that. Obviously, in the context of HN crowd, FB has no real credibility / ethical compass.

Well, if so the problem goes a bit deeper than Facebook.

Totally agree. However, I wanted to put my thoughts on this down... Surely we need more info and time to see what the actual truth is - but I just do not believe that FB is in any way some altruistic innocent/neutral entity.

I agree it's roughly the same as it's been. I think its ubiquity has made the FB situation worse.

I generally agree strongly with that, but FB is caught up in this - and social media is in general.

No, the crazies finding each other and organizing is entire FB's fault.
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