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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The problem is that FB is polarising grandmothers looking for family photos and people looking for cat gifs. The people already at the fringes will find their tribes either way, the ones in the middle are being pushed to a side for no reason.
If that grandmother would be useful to an attacker (e.g. is a likely voter in a swing state), surely she can be found and polarized as easily on a small social network as a big one, no?
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They'd be targeted by both sides and cancel out. What I find more scary is subtle unintended effects. Polarization that does not even benefit a particular faction, that just sort of happens.
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Doubt grandma would be on a small social network - they’re only on the big one because everyone they know is on Facebook and if the grandkids aren’t going to visit, at least Facebook allows them to keep in touch
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I realize the hypothetical situation of 1000 small social networks is unrealistic, but when imagining what things would be like in the hypothetical situation, it's true by assumption that she is.
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Nope.. grandma never gets to know about small networks... Only beyond a level of hype.
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Substitute attacker with advertiser, then try to answer the question. Reducing friction at scale matters for both
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I’m sorry, I really don’t understand the distinction between attacker and advertiser, at least in so far as social media goes. Today on twitter I’ve already blocked two pharma ad suppliers.
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But the spread would be slower no?
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The dichotomy is not FB or fragmentation IMO. It’s FB vs a social network with sensible policies towards its users. Happy to keep FB if they get serious on privacy, fake news, politically targeted ads and the like.
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The issue is that we were promised monopolies would have the profits to solve problems that smaller companies cant. We’d hope that the problem would be solved once and for all, not by a matter of degrees. And solutions def exist, just not compatible w/ ad biz model
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Phrased differently, a lot of Facebook’s woes today are a product of their decisions, not inherent bug of social media
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