The Facebook Trap
Oct 24, 2021
This is a pretty good article, perhaps more kind toward Facebook than I would be, but also one that gets to the core of the issue with Facebook. The 'Facebook trap' referenced in the title is familiar to most: Facebook is incentivized to create more and more connections between people, and especially between people and strangers, advertisers, professional content producers, and politicians. But to solve its problems of toxicity and misinformation, Facebook needs to work against that incentive. My thinking is that the problem is with the algorithmic connections; they serve Facebook interests, not user interests, and they incentivize volume over quality. But the HBS article also looks at user-originated connections, which it suggests here is in need of content moderation. But, in my view, the problem of misinformation and trolls is much more serious when it is amplified algorithmically.
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