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?
-
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
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.
-
-
"True by assumption" sounds about right.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
This Tweet is unavailable.
-
If there were a cap on size of social networks, grandma would likely not be on 8chan. The problem with Facebook is the single engine for discovery. Decentralized networks can still steer you to extreme opinions, but the information won’t spread between groups as easily.
End of conversation
-
-
-
I don't favor "breaking Facebook up", but it's better to consider a realistic model of what breaking Facebook up would result in, than an unrealistic model.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
-
-
There are certainly already 1000 small social networks. You can probably add two zeros. But they aren’t companies set up to run social networks, they’re just people using platforms. No one is targeting them, because only the members care that they exist.
-
They don’t make any money and they don’t take advertising. Growing the network isn’t their goal. A lot of them are on Facebook, but a great many are on much smaller, older platforms. They’re only polarized insofar as the people using them have a reason for doing so.
- Show replies
New conversation -
-
-
It would be much harder to target people on a network which is private by default -- e.g. grandma who shares stuff with relatives only sees posts from these relatives. As they say: “If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.”
-
We can imagine in parallel universe people pay something like $5/month for a 'social network service' which only shares data with people they want to share with, no data mining, analytics, etc. It would be much harder to target people in this case. So the real problem is that
- Show replies
New conversation -
-
-
Suppose 1000 social networks were working with the same shared and open database, and you could use a single user account to log in anywhere and see your data. The role of each network is to become a data filter, i.e. choosing what to show and what to filter.
-
Users get a selection of networks and can choose one with their preferred algorithm.
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.