During the early and mid-aughts, I heard endlessly about the power of Facebook over the news industry. But I was working remotely in Southern California and the Mother Jones newsroom was in northern California, so I heard about it only at a remove. (Plus what I read about it, of course.) My takeaway was that Facebook was mainly an economic problem because it took a lot of traffic away from our site. Less traffic meant less advertising, and that was a big problem since hardly any sites had found the key to profitability and certainly couldn't afford to have some of it siphoned away by Mark Zuckerberg.¹
There was also the problem that Facebook changed its direction every year or two and that meant all of us minnows had to adjust. When Facebook sneezed, we caught a cold.
But Matt Yglesias, one of the founders of Vox, writes that Facebook also created an entirely different problem:
Even in retrospect I don’t really understand why this was the case, but objectively speaking, hard-core identity politics and simplistic socialism performed incredibly well on Facebook during this period. That doesn’t mean journalists started pretending to be left-wing to get clicks. But people who had some authentic left-wing opinions found that writing on the subjects where they were the most left tended to generate the most traffic, and early career journalists with authentic leftist views outperformed their colleagues. So you ended up with this whole cohort of discourse structured around “Is Bernie Sanders perfect in every way or is it problematic to vote for a white man?” as the only possible lens for examining American politics and society.
I was entirely protected from this because I never looked at site statistics and no one at Mother Jones ever asked me to. If I were a younger journalist, I would have done this almost automatically because I had a career ahead of me and I needed to make sure I understood what kinds of stories were popular. Those were the ones that might help me get ahead, after all.
In any case, I assume the answer to Matt's question about the Facebook effect is fairly straightforward. This is a little less true now than it used to be, but it's pretty common knowledge that Facebook discovered early on that outrage was the emotion that kept people engaged and kept them coming back. So their algorithms were tuned to focus on posts that created outrage. In the political world that means hard left and hard right.
I assume that our editorial colleagues on the conservative side faced similar pressures from Facebook in the opposite direction. So we ended up with small but influential cadres of insane wokeness on the left and big influential cadres on the right who produced Donald Trump.
Things were always worse on the right because Facebook never had as much control there. Fox News was the big kahuna, and they controlled the outrage. Unluckily for all of us, they preferred more outrage than Facebook. That was their business from the start, after all, not just the bloodless consequence of geeks tuning an algorithm to get more hits.
Dialing down this outrage is the task of the rest of the decade. We just have so many bigger fish to fry than whether critical race theory is taking over our kindergartens or cutting early voting by three days is bringing back Jim Crow.
But I don't know how we're going to get there.
¹As an aside, it's ironic that the rare exceptions are almost all obscure trade journals or avatars of The Man: Politico, Axios, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. As usual, the internet hasn't empowered dissident voices nearly as much as it's entrenched establishment ones.
Burn it down, salt the ground where it stood... then nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
IQ's suddenly dropped while she was away...
It’s always strange for me as a former employee to read about facebook and its motivations. Stranger still to read of its effects, when I see the same effects everywhere, and they’re even cited in posts attributing the effects to facebook.
People talk about facebooks algorithms, but the fundamental “algorithm” at facebook was and is people sharing what catches their attention. What people choose to share, who they connect to, who they block, who they mute, etc. have far greater effect than the choices made by the sites themselves.
When people complain about The Algorithm, they’re never really asking for The Algorithm to be replaced. They’re asking for An Algorithm that makes people behave better, An Algorithm that makes people care about The Right Things and behave in The Right Way.
These requests don’t call the result The New Algorithm. They talk instead of things like misinformation, amplification, fact checking, and moderation. But it’s still an algorithm, still a process for controlling what people see and how they behave, still a demand that a central authority police the population to achieve a goal chosen by those more powerful and trustworthy than themselves.
Maybe that’s necessary. Maybe we can’t control ourselves. Maybe we need to be controlled by our betters.
Those demanding more control seem to believe so. They’d just know better than to put their requests in those terms.
It's not so much being controlled by our betters (we are all subject to exactly the same psychological features that make misinformation sticky and outrage appealing). It is really about having a way to slow the process so there is time for critical thought to become involved. That may be well beyond the capabilities of an algorithm. It will likely require conscious behavioral and cultural change.
Behavioral change is certainly the tool being employed by people teaching media literacy.
I wonder how the algorithm reacts to my posts where what I share or link to is 180 degrees out from my comments on the post or link? Alternative Facts!!!!
I am not a normal FB user (or non-user). I object to the fundamental structure of FB. I object to The Algorithm being given charge of my feed. I wouldn't object to suggestions or recommendations, that I could ignore or dismiss.
But that's not how it works. I don't like not having control. I also don't like FB trying to leverage my most important and intimate relationships for commercial purposes.
Just sayin.
I quit FB after a few months because it's intrusive. Most of my friends who are still on it liked it because they found it easier than email or anything else.
My husband reads it everyday but all he says he reads is a cooking thing he subscribes to and his children and all sorts of family and friends.Is it possible to do FB and not subscribe to all this political stuff? He like political stuff elsewhere.
@bemused
When people complain about The Algorithm, they’re ... asking for An Algorithm that makes people behave better, An Algorithm that makes people care about The Right Things and behave in The Right Way.
...They talk instead of things like misinformation, amplification, fact checking, and moderation. But it’s still an algorithm, still a process for controlling what people see and how they behave, still a demand that a central authority police the population to achieve a goal chosen by those more powerful and trustworthy than themselves.
You seem to be suggesting that FB has no means -- or should have no obligation -- to control what it publishes. And let's be clear: FB is a publisher. It's exactly what it is. FB publishes content created by its users and various third parties every minute of the day. They publish ads targeted at its users.
First, FB clearly has the means to determine what content it chooses to publish. FB chooses not to publish porn, and FB does an effective job scrubbing the site of any infringement to its no-porn policy. But in most other areas, FB is laissez-faire. Anything goes. That's a policy choice
That's a different policy choice than what almost every other publisher in the history of publishing has made. Other publishers, including all news sources (print and otherwise) exercise some level of editorial judgment.
Yes, publishers control what they publish and what they promote. It doesn't mean everyone will trust their judgment, but it means people over time will develop a level of trust or mistrust based on how well a publisher exercises its judgment. People will gravitate to sources they trust.
You seem to think FB is above it all, with no need to "police" the content creators when FB publishes their content. That's folly. What happens is not that we become a better connected people who can thank FB for helping us learn recipes for yummy chocolate chip cookies. What happens is that the propagandists take over, truth takes a back seat, society fractures, and everybody hates each other.
There is a difference between "policing" and a "police state." There's not a open society of this Earth that doesn't exercise some sort of policing to maintain the peace. The police state of closed societies like China or North Korea is not only dystopia. The anarchy that comes from the visions of tech libertarians is another.
A few years back, I was being blocked regularly on FB for things like posting side-by-side pictures of Joseph Goebbels and Stephen Miller or saying "most Americans are innumerate" (according to FB, "innumerate" is hate speech and Americans are a protected class. It happened so many times that I started my own Blogspot blog. So no, FB has not been a haven for liberals. The moderators regularly blocked me and my liberal friends.
You could probably get around the innumerate problem by just saying that they can’t do math.
According to FB's community standards, if you are quoting someone else, you are not violating the standards. Whenever I have doubt, I just put scare quotes around it. Seems to work.
My small contribution to destroying FB has been to do the 4 clicks necessary to hide ads from my page. The internets wants to be free.
It has been an interesting exercise in training the FB ad bot.
Patricia is back!!!!!
Ads on FB come and go for me. They and my ad blocker are in a constant battle over whether the ads will be displayed.
I've been doing that for weeks. I keep getting related ads (evangelist preachers, ammosexual paraphernalia).
Are lower- and middle-income people who vote Republican really being enraged by CRT and other fringe leftist things, some of which are apparently fictional (litter boxes in school restrooms)? I think not - I think they are afraid of the loss of White Christian supremacy. It is no longer socially acceptable to be openly racist, so rightist politicians and non-fringe activists have to talk about these other things. In fact the left is continually if slowly winning the culture wars (apart from Supreme Court action), so there is continual provocation which is not dependent on fringe leftists (who rarely win politically). If the leftists who do talk about fringe things were suppressed, Fox News would not be deprived of things to enrage the base.
The threat to democracy in this election turned out to be less than portrayed by Democrats and the left in general, and the main body of Republicans are not Fascists (unless Southern Democrats during the Jim Crow era were Fascists), but there are still many Republican politicians who are willing to establish one-party rule. This would presumably be like Democratic rule in the South during Jim Crow, not like Hitler's Germany. This should be a matter for alarm.
That's probably it. What motivates them is not what they say motivates them--they are all sneakily maintaining a conspiracy of silence about their real motivation, fighting for White Christian Supremacy.
This is a very emotionally useful hypothesis, because it provides a mechanism for squaring our side's assumptions about the other side with what we observe, while also allowing us to argue that people who don't like what we're selling are basically evil so it's ok that we aren't convincing them.
You THINK that. Have you bothered to actually investigate the issue?
Or would you prefer to stick with comforting stereotypes than risk perhaps having to change your mind?
It's not hard... You could, for example, watch Errol Morris interview, American Dharma, with Steve Bannon, to see what Steve Bannon thought (and thinks) he was doing and why his proposals were so popular.
What would be interesting would be right up Kevin's alley.
When someone says, "a journalist needs so many views" or clicks or whatever.
How many are we talking about here? Has someone ever compared Tucker Carlson's web presence to these obscure academics whose foray into policy is picked up by Fox?
I get the impression that, for example, 99% of actual liberals would never have even heard of CRT if it were not for conservatives. We know its not actually taught anywhere other than university major courses. Its like if I went to a university biology upper level course and picked something out of it and put it up on Fox. Without Fox no one even knows about it.
This outrage will fade organically because of pure exhaustion. I just went on FB for the first time in months and didn’t see one single outrage post. It’s kind back to posting mundane stuff. To begin, the Outragers were a small number and they simply wore out the rest of us and even they know their outrage went for naught. Seems to be fading
Just wait until we get a little further into the election cycle.
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I'm no expert, but isn't Tik Tok already "solving" the Facebook problem? I keep hearing that Facebook is for old folks these days...
How do we convince companies that advertising online is a waste of money? Ad blockers. Mine seem to work pretty well.
I'd go with FB (and Google and ....) destroying local newspapers as a major concern. To bad the newspapers didn't get online quickly and set up local communities and groups. Posting online where your local community will see has a moderating influence. Posting anonymously to a conspiracy group will push things over the edge...
This is one of those issues (cf lead and crime) where it's possible that alternative explanations are much more likely than the common explanation.
(a) Why the rise of identity politics?
Look at this graph:
https://i.imgur.com/e3xAlvX.jpg
The argument is that narcissism (as technically understood) is a LACK of a strong self. The lack of strong self manifests in one way as excessive reliance on what other people think and say (what you think of as the standard model of narcissism "but enough about me, let's talk about you -- what do you think of me?") but it also manifests as extreme tribalism (build your self-image from what the tribe says and does).
(b) Why blaming Facebook?
For this we have to read the first part of Bobos in Paradise, which describes how the Ivy League in the early 60s (probably in reaction to WW2 and the Holocaust) switched from accepting students based on family to accepting based on merit (appropriately defined...) BUT continued in its role as the place where America's future elites met each other and became indoctrinated.
This resulted in a replacement of America's previous elites, the old-style WASPs (think the WASP speech in The Good Shepherd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl_9ayxs69A -- that was old-school WASP elite control)
with a new elite based on sounding smart and having good grades.
Regardless of whether this was a good or a bad thing, it happened and is where we are today. NOW the important thing is that there was a time, perhaps between about 1990 and 2010, when the ivy elite could, possibly, have been replaced by a different elite, call them the tech elite; people educated not so much at Ivy's as at MIT and CalTech, or Silicon Valley dropouts.
BUT (perhaps by design, perhaps by feral intuition) the ivy elite struck back; stories about the wonders of Silicon Valley and Tech became replaced in the NYT and WaPo with an endless stream of stories about the evils of Silicon Valley (privacy hysteria, how Facebook [but NOT Fox News...] causes polarization, AI is going to take away all our jobs, etc etc).
So that's where we are today, IMHO
- Facebook is blamed (along with Google or Twitter or Apple when feasible, ie when the NYT or WaPo can find a way to also smear them) for our current discontent; because the ivy elite see the tech elite as an existential threat; not because it's been shown to be the primary culprit.
- the polarization exists primarily as a consequence of extreme levels of narcissism amongst younger people. (Narcissism tends to decrease past your mid-30s as you grow into alternative ways of creating a self. But, like religious identity, the tribal identity created when one was younger will likely persist.)
Even the 70s commented that narcissism was on the rise (Christopher Lasch publish in 1978), but unfortunately I can find no hard data to see how the graph I give above should be extended to earlier than 1980.
If we believe that narcissism arises as a result of cultural nihilism (ie "society" has no heroes, and such heroes as do appear are temporary, to be torn down in a few years, and even at their peak restricted to just a subset of society) then the narcissism growth may have started soon after WW2, and just grown as one segment of society after another started knocking off heroes and airing dirty laundry in public (eg compare how JFK's infidelities were treated vs Gary Hart then Bill Clinton).
It isn't the outrage, as such, but the false sense of clarity the simple statements and point of view provide. You needn't think much about it, it's all right there in a few easy, clear illustrations and bold examples, giving the easily impressed a way to relate to complexity.
We have to try to remind people who are enjoying their outrage that it's not that easy, that everything takes more time, and everything has more detail, and ignoring that has never worked.