It’s definitely fixable
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What? Not with any semblance of freedom of speech it isn't. And even then, I doubt it. The scale is too large. Look at what FB had to do with WhatsApp: remove functionality until the pain was bearable. Unless you mean fixable by the products committing partial suicide...
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"Partial suicide" is an apt description for any reduction in engagement, which is clearly on the menu (pour one out for Trending). As for misinformation: while free speech guarantees a measure of venom there is nothing inevitable about its algorithmic amplification.
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Second clause is casuistry. Either legally or in the public perception around what constitutes 'free speech', amplification is considered part of the right. Consider the right-wing conniptions around 'shadow banning'. Nobody going to accept posting with no distribution.
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please. second clause is absolutely accurate. there's no right to freedom of reach. it's not enshrined in the constitution. it wasn't even a possibility until a 10 yrs ago. conniptions are by people who don't understand how an algorithmic feed works (sometimes willfully ignorant)
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The 'this isn't the government therefore no 1A' arguments about this are the most tiresome and pointless. That's clearly not public perception. If anything, the people who think posting with no feed distribution is speech are the ones who don't seem to get it.
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Instead of me defending what's reality right now, why doesn't one of you opinionated disinformation people actually sketch out a vision of how this would work in practice. Who's doing the truth patrolling? In a world where much news is becoming op-ed, what's held to the standard?
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What's funny is even if you're right, we're still fucked. In a world of wildly divergent values, truth alone is enough to get to Civil War II levels of polarization. Nobody needed to do a viral deepfake of the Kavanaugh hearings for that to become what it did.
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But nobody afaik is saying it can be _fixed_; they're saying it can be _mitigated_ more than it currently is.
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Sure, but even at that level we're still fucked. The recent MIT Twitter study (biggest credible study to date) showed that real, live humans spread 6x more misinformation than bots. Unless you remove the right of posting nonsense by humans, there's no immediate solution.
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Sure there is. Stop optimizing for engagement, by which I mean, stop showing people posts just because lots of people have engaged with those posts in one way or another.
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Assuming social media exists in some form like today, I can't see that going away. Twitter couldn't exist without it. Neither could FB.
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Sure it could. It did for years. It wouldn't be near as successful or profitable, true. But "there's no immediate solution" is very _very_ different from "there's no immediate solution consonant with their business model."
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You're saying we're going to somehow arrange that near-trillion-dollar companies will opt to manage themselves in some stilted, self-limited form...just like that? Without the 82nd Airborne parachuting into MPK and detaining Zuck?
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No, but I am saying "the problem is fixable, but Facebook will choose not to implement any fix, because doing so will slash their profits" is quite different indeed from "the problem is unfixable," and the resulting media attention re that non-decision is richly deserved.
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I find it strange to be the social media pessimist in the room. I would claim that FB could expend whatever reasonable resources (and even its profit margin isn't infinite), and we'd still be mostly screwed.
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who in the media is making the case that the misinformation problem is "easily fixable"?
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Everyone who's covering every micro-incident of misinformation like it's news, which is about everyone.
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Is it too much to ask them to confirm who's paying for ads?https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/wj9mny/facebooks-political-ad-tool-let-us-buy-ads-paid-for-by-mike-pence-and-isis …
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This they should do. FECA should apply to them.
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