Everyone wants to blame Mark Zuckerberg for polarization and fake news. But if social media were fragmented into a thousand smaller companies instead of a few big ones, wouldn't polarization and fake news be worse?
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Nope. Centraliation enables cheap scale for attackers. Decentralization is stronger as a system. I mean you know why TCP/IP was built that way. You know why email is more resistant to attacks like this.
Decentralization would make the network stronger if people were randomly assigned to the smaller networks, but they wouldn't be. An attacker who wanted to target union members in Wisconsin would know exactly which subnetworks to go for.
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Easier than Facebook? Profile targeting anyone takes minutes.
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Yes. But the union members in the neighboring town might not be on the same network? Each network might have a different ad platform, API, cookie, policy, so the attacker would have more work to take to scale?
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Of course they will be. The smaller social networks would be based on affinity, and only incidentally on geography. As for the complexity of attacking the distributed network, would you find it easier to compromise Zuck's laptop, or those of 1000 random people?
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No, no, no! You have hidden assumptions that Facebook is doing a good job, and that the benefits outweigh the costs. These are false assumptions, if not now then in the future (though I think now). This is not a comment about Facebook, it's true for any centralized system
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The opposite is likely to happen. Smaller groups bring higher accountability.
@nntaleb principia politica 101 -
Why corruption is more rampant and more difficult to spot and cutoff off at the National level than the provincial or municipal levels.
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That is only true if the union members for cow farmers in Wisconscin don't vet their members as do some groups in Facebook now. Yes the attacker would know which groups to attack but they would find it harder to melt into the membership. Human tribalness will win out.
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Doesn't this also illustrate what makes Facebook uniquely dangerous? That with it you can target very specific demos, down to a few dozen people, without subjecting it to the scrutiny of a wide audience.
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Facebook groups does the same thing.
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