Journalists who cover Facebook and bristle at their haughty disdain and/or patronizing condescension, consider this illustrative example from Daniel Ellsberg, discussing a conversation he had with Kissinger. The problem is with asymmetric information.https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/ …
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Given the chasm in understanding and information, you stop listening to the press, and treat them only as a PR problem to be managed. The FB comms team sends you emailed summaries of the day's coverage, highlights what needs to be dealt with, and you ignore the rest.pic.twitter.com/Cw004n3CvZ
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Eventually though, you realize that your privileged viewpoint is also blinding in its own way. Along with all that data come some big biases and assumptions about the world. As you deafen yourself to the outside world and its whining, you also miss out on some truths.pic.twitter.com/Qk1JfChSFe
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As with most major conflicts, this one is made bigger because both sides are partially right. It *is* true that if most journalists knew what insiders know, they'd think very differently about Facebook and its attendant problems, and the media narrative would totally change.
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But it's also true that FBers live inside a blinding miasma of values and assumptions: the world looks very different from Menlo Park (inside a Disneyland campus) than it does from a Rohingya refugee camp or a Brazilian favela. The journalists also see things FBers don't.
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This is real FB pickle: Journalists with little information, reporting on insiders with better information (themselves blinded by a corporate culture that feels besieged and can't shake itself out of the FB perspective), read by a public that largely doesn't understand any of it.
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Unlike Kissinger though, the journalists are never getting clearances. FB does a uniquely bad job at conveying their view, and journalists aren't really incentivized to understand it anyhow. They're as captive to the media cycle as anyone, despite collectively creating it.pic.twitter.com/z5Prp5Odjy
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The full impact of Facebook, or really the mass adoption of socially-connected smartphones, will only be understood decades from now. I suspect much contemporary coverage will seem silly in retrospect, but so will many of FB's actions.
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Personally, I try to ignore the fleeting hangups of the FB commentariat (e.g. Cambridge Analytica), and focus on the bigger technology shifts. Take the recent example of WhatsApp, which differs markedly from core FB, and yet has caused much turmoil.https://www.wired.com/story/why-whatsapp-became-a-hotbed-for-rumors-and-lies-in-brazil/ …
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End of conversation
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This is why most presidential candidates who are critical of war, spying, drones, etc, completely change course after getting into office. Once they know the volume and magnitude of the problems, their naive critiques quickly dissipate.
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