Time to unfriend Facebook? - From Science
Science editorial:A few months ago, New York Times reporters Cecilia Kang and Sheera Frenkel published An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebooks Battle for Domination, in which they explored how the worlds largest social network, Facebook, fills its coffers by exploiting the viral spread of misinformation while trying to convince everyone of its noble mission to connect the world. Kang told me that she believes the algorithms and business practices of Facebook and other social media companies that encourage misinformation erect huge barriers, keeping people from paying attention to authoritative scientific information. Her ideas for combating this begin with understanding two kinds of misinformation that propagate through these powerful social networks. One is the news that is blatantly wrong. These posts are sometimes taken down but mostly flagged by Facebooks algorithms with a disclaimer, which most people ignore. This has only a minor effect on stopping their spread. Kang sees an even bigger problem: the misinformation that arises from conversational posts among individuals. This kind of informal misinformation is frustrating because its not easy to police the people you know from saying crazy things on Facebook. The result is that both kinds of misinformation tend to rise to the top of Facebooks news feeds because they get more engagement than posts about recent research findings reported in scholarly scientific articles or even in the mainstream press.
Communicating about research in real time is hard because science is always a work in progress, with caveats and answers that are not always definitive. That doesnt translate well to social media or Facebooks algorithms that determine which posts to promote. Oftentimes that kind of content just does not work well in terms of engagement, Kang said, because its not the kind of stuff that people will immediately try to share.
The antiscience opposition doesnt care about the caveats. Kang pointed out that super figures on social media, such as Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino, have built up a loyal following of people who will believe them no matter what.
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Chin music This message was self-deleted by its author.
PortTack
(32,754 posts)Response to PortTack (Reply #3)
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fierywoman
(7,680 posts)police) wet dream?
localroger
(3,625 posts)...asking me to join Facebook and friend him so we could keep up more easily. So I made an account, friended him, looked around a bit, saw nothing compelling, and logged out. Next day I logged in again, looked around a bit, still didn't see much of interest, and logged out. About 10 minutes later I got an email from Facebook. "Dear Localroger" it said, "We noticed you logged in and didn't do anything. Here are some suggestions..." This sent me running to another board where I was more active and I posted "I just got the creepiest email from Facebook. They made a record of the fact that I logged in and didn't do anything?" Whereupon everyone assured me that yep, of course, FB makes a record of everything you post, everything you click on, everything you look at, etc. And with that I decided FB was a "service" I did not need in my life and I never logged in again.
Rhiannon12866
(205,130 posts)First there was the Cambridge Analytica scandal and now we're learning that the site isn't just inciting hate among Americans, but in other countries as well. What does it take??
bedazzled
(1,761 posts)Boring elderly relatives with nothing better to do I guess.
Immediately and completely uninterested, even if it means I have no idea what my nephews are doing. Figure if they cared they would use their phone
Lars39
(26,109 posts)Never a member, but especially not after learning that a profile is set up for people tagged in photos, whether they are Facebook members or not.