I am increasingly of the opinion that there's a case to be made that there simply is no positive way to jam more than a few dozen thousand people onto a single site, into a single community, with the hyperconnectivity implied by modern technology, without a problem. At some point, the community as a whole is going to have to take some stances on some things, and society can't afford to have those stances be writ so large.
The governnment may very well come along someday and break up Facebook, but I bet it would be broken up into three or four pieces or something. I'd say it should be shattered, though. A new BabyBook shouldn't have more than 50,000-100,000 users in it. And that's still a single community starting out at what may very well be already the maximum size.
Of all the places, it's the hardest sell here, because this is where Facebook's ideology comes from and it's hard for a lot of HN denizens to see much light of day between truth and Facebook's politics, but abstractly, there's no compelling reason to believe that everything labeled as bad and wrong by Facebook actually is wrong. The odds that all "conspiracy theories" are false approaches zero, honestly. The availability heuristic will bring the most obviously false ones to mind like "flat earth" and "moon landing hoax", but the HN gestalt believes plenty of conspiracy theories like companies conspiring to hold prices down or blocking research that shows negative side effects for pharmaceuticals, or honestly I could go on for quite a while here; there are many other things of a similar level of believability that are either getting blocked by Facebook now, or where the frontier of Facebook censorship is about to reach at its current pace, that simply don't flatter Facebook's political positions and choices.
I think it ought to be OK for Facebook to make those decisions, because I'm serious about communities having to make calls about what it's going to accept. There's no way around it, it's as inevitable with community growth as gravity pulling a large body into a spherical shape. What's wrong with that is that we have small numbers of managers at Facebook making these decisions for the entire Internet, inevitably inflaming everything in the process. It should be a more distributed process.
As for those who hope that there's some way to leverage Facebook's concentrated power to simply eliminate all the bad ideas, even if we stipulate that Facebook's aribtration of truth is in fact totally accurate and totally unbiased, a rather astonishing and frankly unbelievable accomplishment for an advertising company, you need to give that idea up now. History tends to show this sort of suppression just energizes those movements. Rather than deplatforming them by trying to deny them access to the Facebook of today, you need to deplatform them by destroying the entire platform that has that reach in the first place. You can't get rid of them, if for no other reason than there's a baseline of literal mental illness that isn't going away any time soon. You can't prevent them from speaking out. But you can make it so that they're in a corner of the Internet, because everyone's in some corner of the Internet somewhere. We kinda had that in the 200x's and late 1990s. It mostly worked.
Is the article correct? Who knows. I'm neither endorsing nor criticizing the content directly right now. Is it fringe lunatic nonsense that should be censored lest some right-thinking person be deceived into injecting themselves with bleach or something? Not even remotely. I feel I'm being conservative with the 25% estimate, too. Anyone over about 30 has all the data they need to ask some pointy questions about exactly how committed the various parties are to anti-war positions, rather than co-opting them when convenient and discarding them the second they aren't.
(I am assuming that Facebook is very likely incorrect in labelling that as spam. It doesn't look like true spam, it looks like it's participation in a conversation. But I admit I can't prove it. I also admit that at this point my priors give me very little reason to trust Facebook over even a random internet poster.)
The Facebook censorship frontier is much closer than I suspect most people reading this comment here would suspect.
< there simply is no positive way to jam more than a few dozen thousand people onto a single site
Agreed. The trick is, how do you leverage, or get around, network effects without destroying the community? Network effects create the problem, but are built in to the medium itself.
< But you can make it so that they're in a corner of the Internet, because everyone's in some corner of the Internet somewhere. We kinda had that in the 200x's and late 1990s. It mostly worked.
Youth is always sunny, but those days certainly seemed better. There was a meta-community of people just wanting to grow the internet, so everyone at least had that shared goal in common. I get that feeling here on HN for the most part.
The governnment may very well come along someday and break up Facebook, but I bet it would be broken up into three or four pieces or something. I'd say it should be shattered, though. A new BabyBook shouldn't have more than 50,000-100,000 users in it. And that's still a single community starting out at what may very well be already the maximum size.
Of all the places, it's the hardest sell here, because this is where Facebook's ideology comes from and it's hard for a lot of HN denizens to see much light of day between truth and Facebook's politics, but abstractly, there's no compelling reason to believe that everything labeled as bad and wrong by Facebook actually is wrong. The odds that all "conspiracy theories" are false approaches zero, honestly. The availability heuristic will bring the most obviously false ones to mind like "flat earth" and "moon landing hoax", but the HN gestalt believes plenty of conspiracy theories like companies conspiring to hold prices down or blocking research that shows negative side effects for pharmaceuticals, or honestly I could go on for quite a while here; there are many other things of a similar level of believability that are either getting blocked by Facebook now, or where the frontier of Facebook censorship is about to reach at its current pace, that simply don't flatter Facebook's political positions and choices.
I think it ought to be OK for Facebook to make those decisions, because I'm serious about communities having to make calls about what it's going to accept. There's no way around it, it's as inevitable with community growth as gravity pulling a large body into a spherical shape. What's wrong with that is that we have small numbers of managers at Facebook making these decisions for the entire Internet, inevitably inflaming everything in the process. It should be a more distributed process.
As for those who hope that there's some way to leverage Facebook's concentrated power to simply eliminate all the bad ideas, even if we stipulate that Facebook's aribtration of truth is in fact totally accurate and totally unbiased, a rather astonishing and frankly unbelievable accomplishment for an advertising company, you need to give that idea up now. History tends to show this sort of suppression just energizes those movements. Rather than deplatforming them by trying to deny them access to the Facebook of today, you need to deplatform them by destroying the entire platform that has that reach in the first place. You can't get rid of them, if for no other reason than there's a baseline of literal mental illness that isn't going away any time soon. You can't prevent them from speaking out. But you can make it so that they're in a corner of the Internet, because everyone's in some corner of the Internet somewhere. We kinda had that in the 200x's and late 1990s. It mostly worked.