> "it is not Meta's role to police offensiveness"<p>Just to fund, transmit, amplify, protect, and profit from it.
And of course publish it.<p>Logically we might expect Meta to get into selling narcotics next.<p>"It is not Meta's role to police drug use"
It runs that global marketplace enabling this kind of trade per their internal 2024 documents quoted in the following article:<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...</a><p>“Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”
The constitution guarantees free speech, but not free drug use (though maybe it should). So I don't see any contradiction here. Meta has every right to police speech as it is a private company, but it has no obligation to do so.
Meta has already been okay with drug use by allowing people to place ads and other posts clearly promoting drug use/sales. IIRC, 404 Media did an article on this<p>What's the latest social media platform position on being labeled a publisher? Aren't they against that?
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It's disingenuous to try to present all offensive subject matter as "differences of opinion" and objections as politically motivated.<p>Some subject matter, such as terrorist beheadings, animal abuse, sucker-punching strangers, etc, is just plain illegal and should not be publicized and glorified.<p>YOU may not agree, but society and the legal system has.
At least you don’t have to use the default feed. You can make your own.
The default feed is orders of magnitude more visible than the cherry-picked low-follower-count users that formed the basis of this article.<p>There’s a tremendous double standard here. The offensive right wing content is something you’d have to explicitly search for, whereas the offensive left wing content is front and center.
Imagine thinking the right has learned to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive.
Most of the calls for censorship of right wing voices has specifically been about them inciting violence and riots (e.g. against asylum seekers).
Out of curiosity, which part of the world are you in?<p>While agreeing that every side and compass orientation has conspiracy theories and ragebait, here in North America the right / Conservatives are foaming-at-the-mouth livid at the (real, Perceived, or mixed) wokeness / communism / liberallness of "mainstream media".<p>In this neck of the woods, the sentence "right has learned to tolerate different opinions they find offensive" isn't even hilariously wrong, it's tragically, despairngly, painfully bizarre :-(.
Ah, so you agree that a "white nationalist with Neo-Nazi links" is accepted as a right-wing voice these days? That's how it has looked to me since Charlottesville, but it's always nice to get it confirmed by people with different perspectives.
The egregious part is the amplification part. Profit derives from that. Transmission and protection are neutral and they are necessary for all information especially if there is a history of freedom of expression; though of course some governments and others like regulating permissible expression.
Transmission and protection are not neutral. They're a choice. Facebook has freedom of association and is allowed not to host content they believe harmful. Something they already do extensively. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/" rel="nofollow">https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/</a>
Don't forget the politics too behind it:<p>- <i>Facebook and Genocide: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable</i> - <a href="https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/" rel="nofollow">https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...</a><p>- <i>UN: Facebook had a ‘role’ in Rohingya genocide</i> - <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/13/un-facebook-had-a-role-in-rohingya-genocide" rel="nofollow">https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/3/13/un-facebook-had-a-r...</a><p>- <i>Rohingya refugees sue Facebook over genocide</i> - <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/rohingya-refugees-file-lawsuit-against-facebook-over-genocide/a-60038553" rel="nofollow">https://www.dw.com/en/rohingya-refugees-file-lawsuit-against...</a>
Facebook is doing that in India as well. They are becoming Government Lap dog and do as its comfortable to their profits. Government of India able to suppress many dissent in recent years because of social media suppression. BTW Current government control News Channels by other means, we have term for Indian news channel as Godi Media. "Godi" in hindi literally means lap.
And Gaza:<p>- <a href="https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2024/12/20/facebook-meta-censoring-palestine/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2024/12/20/fa...</a><p>- <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240921-big-techs-complicity-in-genocide-the-unforgivable-silence-of-online-platforms/" rel="nofollow">https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240921-big-techs-complic...</a><p>- <a href="https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-out-google-and-amazon-for-abetting-gaza-genocide/en/" rel="nofollow">https://progressive.international/wire/2025-08-26-un-calls-o...</a>
Zuck was gagging for the Trump 2nd term so he could go all in on this shit. Slow clap for the Meta employees that enable it.
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> Even if its an engineer that's making 6 figures that you are liekly alluding to, do you expect everyone to agree with your moral code and quit their job?<p>No, but you shouldn't expect to see them addressed with respect either, just like Enron traders, Purdue salesmen or tobacco scientists don't get a lot of it.
Everyone has the moral obligation to not enable or profit from harm. Do we all live up perfectly to that all the time? No. There's no meaningful moral rule where people can do that. If there were, it wouldn't be worth having as a moral rule.<p>Is Zuckerberg responsible for the harm he's causing? Yes. Are the workers enabling that responsible? Yes. Are the people who profit from indirectly supporting that responsible? Yes. Responsibility is not zero sum.
"Harm" is a mushy term that means everything and nothing. There are many competing definitions of "harm" based on one's cultural, religions, and philosophical priors. So what kind of harm are you talking about exactly?
<i>Somebody</i> implemented this. If you did, you did, and I don't think you should be allowed to claim you didn't.
> do you expect everyone to agree with your moral code and quit their job<p>Yes. This would be ideal.
And second best would be these people owning their moral vacuity.<p>I can sort of respect a response like, "Yeah, I like Zuckerberg's money and I don't give a shit about the harm I'm enabling. I'll keep cashing my checks and being an asshole." It's the people who expect us to pretend they're not asshole that get to me. They want the upside of bad behavior without the downside. Sorry bub, FAFO.
If you work for a company, you are enabling that company's practices. If those practices are bad and you are aware of them, then continuing to work there means your hands are dirty too.<p>People have, of course, every right to make such a decision based on their own ethical sensibilities. I have every right to judge them based on mine.
These big companies have orgs within them that do, e.g., charitable work. Or work on standards or open source. Or accessibility or inclusion or other work to genuinely improve lives. How does your judgement apply to folks who attach their altruistic efforts to the funding and reach of a big company?<p>I would understand if you said, "Nope, still equally responsible" or if you said, "Relatively less worried about these folks".<p>Genuinely interested in hearing thoughts about these orgs at big companies.
Doing good deeds does not absolve anyone of their bad deeds.<p>> How does your judgement apply to folks who attach their altruistic efforts to the funding and reach of a big company?<p>If it's getting the company to fund your altruistic efforts and isn't benefiting that company, then it's not contributing to the bad deeds. Otherwise, it is.<p>Either way, if you're working for the company, then you're still enabling them. Whether or not you participate in internal do-gooding efforts doesn't change that.
> <i>What if you are a cook or a plumber or a janitor at Meta who has no idea</i><p>One, do better. Two, the vitriol is obviously aimed at Meta’s white-collar employees. (Anecdotally, it’s getting harder for them to date.)
> There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!
Terrible take. Trying to moral gymnastics your way out of taking responsibility for who you work for. If you're working at meta it's <i>unlikely</i> to be your only good option. Yes, the janitors get a pass.
Shame on anyone that works for Meta!
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Literally the second paragraph in the article:<p>“An ABC NEWS Verify investigation into several controversial Australian pages on Facebook has found that some are benefiting directly from social media monetisation programs run by Meta.”<p>They are paying him for his content. Funding him, if you will.<p>Virtually every company pays people to do stuff and then profits off of the stuff those people do.
Gangster rap has largely faded out of mainstream media.
There’s a big difference between fiction when the viewer knows it’s make believe and when it’s presented as factual. Nobody is committing genocide because they saw a violent movie whereas Facebook shares responsibility for at least one recognized genocide and a number of smaller scale events where the company amplified hateful content and was very slow to take it down. A key distinction here is choice: I don’t accidentally start watching a slasher movie or listening to gangster rap, but Facebook / TikTok / X will ensure that I see unrequested content if it’s something their algorithms reward for “engagement” (i.e. it sells ads), it won’t be labeled, and they won’t let you reliably control it because they’d lose money if Facebook had a “only show my actual friends’ posts” default.<p><a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...</a>
> There’s a big difference between fiction when the viewer knows it’s make believe and when it’s presented as factual.<p>The difference is far more nuanced and borders on inconsequential when it comes to mass media influence on society.<p>Just because something is presented as fiction or for entertainment doesn’t mean it doesn’t impact your psyche or your perception of the world and others.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinion#Work_with_entertainment" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...</a>
You certainly accidentally start listening to gangster rap when it's played on TV, on the radio, or on the auto playlists from streaming services. Or you wouldn't turn on your radio by accident, but then you wouldn't open Facebook by accident either.<p>Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide, I don't think anybody would deny that anymore. So if we treat it as harmless entertainment, then we should apply the same standard to content published on social media. Publishing genocidal content would be beyond that, nobody would disagree. Still, what music do you think that African child soldiers listen to when they go on a raid to burn a village and kill everybody they find?<p>As for violent movies or torture horror movies which are so celebrated in mainstream culture, their impact on viewers minds and souls are probably worse than a lot of what people here don't like on Facebook.
> Gangster rap has inspired a lot of murders and other violent crime world wide<p>What's your evidence for this? You seem to be making the claim that without gangster rap there's a bunch of violent crime that wouldn't have happened. But it seems more plausible to me that the bulk of that crime is due to the drug trade and other social and economic factors, and that gangster rap is just the musical expression of what's already going on.<p>And I'd expect the same to be true of, say, country music. Are you also going to claim that people who listened to a lot of Johnny Cash were more inclined to shoot people, possibly in Reno, just to watch them die? Did many Merle Haggard fans turn to crime because of him?<p>Personally, I listened to plenty of Ice T, NWA, and Snoop. Sometimes I still do. I have yet to become a stick-up kid or pack a 9 mil. Should I be worried? If there's some sort of threshold dosage, I might go over it at any time.
<i>> Meta doesn't fund the stuff people put there</i><p>Actually, the article makes it pretty clear that they fund some of the really bad stuff.
This type of comment is why K-12 education in the US really needs to start focusing on skills related to disinformation. The example given here is obviously an art vs disinformation/misinformation/psyops. They aren't the same and conflating them doesn't do anyone any good.<p>Also, Meta <i>does</i> fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs. You'd think that money being paid would also mean a higher level of scrutiny. I'm really curious how these conversations play out internal to Meta. Does everyone just pretend this isn't an issue? Seems like there's a lot of great book material that will be dropped in the coming decades as these efforts wear on and break people.
Are you implying gangster rap wasnt cultivated and pushed to the masses by the large media companies? The only difference between then and now is the technology available and the name of the companies.
In real life right now and for many years, we have gangster rappers (or drill or trap, whatever you'd like to call it) who are funded by record companies, broadcasted everywhere, and praised by the mainstream. Including being broadcasted and celebrated by public service stations.<p>In their records they rap about murdering people and raping women, and also threatening to murder specific individuals or bragging about having done such. Among other things.<p>They are also active on social media, where they also threaten people with violence and death, or brag about such feats.<p>And finally they also murder people in real life, or get murdered likewise by their peers.<p>Now for the same person, expressing themselves the same way but on different platforms. For their record company funded content we say "that's art and free speech", and for their social media posts we say "what have you done, Zuckerberg!?".<p>> Also, Meta does fund these initiatives. They choose who to give money to in these programs.<p>You are right. I misunderstood the program to be general payments to all creators of size á la Spotify, but it's an invite-only program.
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He really doesn't. Look at the consequences to him for wasting tens of billions on his "metaverse" fantasy, for example. Let me know if you find anything.<p>But even if he did, that doesn't require that he ignore negative externalities. Facebook has a Net Promoter Score similar to what health insurance companies and monopoly utilities do. Zuckerberg himself is disliked by 2/3rds of humanity. That's not good for long-term shareholder value.<p>Something else that's bad for long-term stock values? Profiting from slowly destroying the health of the societies in which all your customers live.
> <i>Zuckerberg has a fiduciary responsibility to optimize shareholder value</i><p>“Shareholder value” is ambiguous for good reason. It defers to the Board’s judgement. Fiduciary responsibility doesn’t excuse this sort of incentivizing of crime.
That's a serious oversimplification. A CEO doesn't have any duty to maximize profit at all costs. "Shareholder value" includes quite a lot of things that aren't directly about that at all. Often, the way to optimize shareholder value is to pass on certain practices that may be technically profitable.
> Zuckerberg has a fiduciary responsibility to optimize shareholder value<p>Is that true?<p>And if it is true, he controls 60% of the voting power because he owns class B shares that get 10 votes each. Do you think he will sue himself if he fails to wring every last dollar out of Meta?
Generally speaking, there are two fiduciary duties of the officer: do not usurp corporate opportunities and do not act without information.<p>Your second question is not relevant because you do not have to be the majority shareholder to initiate such an action.
No, the OP is repeating a common misconception. Corporate law sets out a number of fiduciary duties, including to act in the best interest of the shareholders but “maximising shareholder value” is not one of them.<p>The idea that companies should “maximise shareholder value” is a key ideal of some political/economic ideologies (especially what people describe as ‘neoliberalism’) but it’s not law.
Fiduciary duty only means acting in the interest of those providing you with money. If they demand sanity that can become the guiding goal instead of money. Never going to happen in the money first, I want more society we live in but there is no reason it can't. See some activist shareholders demanding change to boards to ensure certain outcomes not related to money.
I quote myself 2 years ago, forgive me if I’m stating the obvious:<p>I'm going to set up two axioms to arrive at an extrapolated conclusion.<p>One: Human psychology tends to ascribe more weight to negative things than positive things in the short term. In the long term this generally balances out, but in the short term it's more prudent in a biological sense to pay attention to the rustling in the bushes than the berries you might pick from them. This is known as the [negativity bias](<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias</a>).<p>Two: The modern gatekeepers of social interaction, Big Tech, employ blind algorithms that attempt to steer your attention towards spending more time on their platforms. These companies are the arbiters of the content we experience daily and what you do and don't see is mostly at their discretion. The techniques they employ, in simple terms, are designed to provoke what they call 'engagement'. They do this because at the end of the day FAANG have not only a financial interest, but a fiduciary duty to sell advertisements at the behest of their shareholders. The more they can engage you, the more ads they can sell. They employ live A-B testing, divide people into cohorts and poke and prod them with psychological techniques to try and glue your eyeballs to their ads.<p>Extrapolated conclusion:
These companies have a financial and legally binding interest to divide the population against itself, obstructing politics and social interaction to the point where we might not be able to achieve any of the goals that we need to reach to prevent oblivion.
and a moral responsibility to do otherwise. Or, well---whether or not you agree that it is the case in some cosmic sense, it is still how we get to judge him.<p>Ironically he seems to be very sensitive to this judgment. You would think he would also take action on the basis of it, but so far, seemingly not?
Why didn't he step down for his metaverse then?
This is such a tired trope to blame capitalism for every company’s misdeeds.
Right? If the press and commentariat is to be believed, these companies are run by genius titans who can do anything, anything at all. Except something good for the societies they and their shareholders live in and profit from. That would be a violation of the gospel of St Ayn, and therefore unthinkable.
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I think this is a bit misleading.<p>It sounds to me like the creators are creating and uploading the content, and then that is getting monetised on the platform?<p>The title makes it sound like meta is <i>commissioning</i> the content? I don't think that is the case here? Or is it?<p>Directly commissioning someone to create it is pretty wild.
This is correct, it's monetisation, not commissioning.<p>Facebook isn't paying <i>to</i> produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.<p>It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.<p>However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.<p>Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.<p>Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?<p>I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
> appear to be profiting from is "an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts."<p>The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.
The invitation is automated
Oh, that’s good, because if you automate something then you’re automatically absolved from all responsibility for its actions.<p>And you certainly shouldn’t bother monitoring what it’s doing.
Did Meta set up the selection criteria for the automated selection system?
It’s the new smoking. It’s currently at the stage they profess ignorance while being lambasted with all the videos of them clearly knowing what was going on and lying to congress about it.<p>I give it a couple years before the PSA about ‘your brain on social media’ or whatever.
They are creating an environment where they incentivize it and profit from it. Whether or not that’s meaningfully different from directly commissioning it themselves seems like a minor quibble to me. It’s no different than a mob boss suggesting a rival should take a long walk off a short pier.
Yes, it says in the article that they are being paid through Meta’s content monetization program. The title is a bit of bait but it’s simply true that rage sells eyeballs so Meta does create an incentive for people to create awful content of many different types.
It sounds like the Twitter/X creator system that was recently curtailed when it didn’t have the expected results. I’m sure the same will happen to Meta’s system, if you pay for raw engagement then you tend to get trash.<p>Ironically, the article is itself ragebait! But that’s the media as a whole (including Meta).
They wrote that title specifically to mislead people.
Twitter/X has actually paying some of those creators. They're changing that program in September.<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/13/twitter-starts-paying-creators-tens-of-thousands---amid-intensifying-competition-with-threads/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/13/twi...</a>
No, Meta intentionally set up the incentive structure to reward rage bait content. You should expect they knew what they were going to get from doing that.<p>You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and <i>not</i> know exactly how this will go.
I think it depends on whether what Meta states about the "Content Monetization" program being invite only is true? If it is, that's effectively commissioning, if it's not, well Meta is lying and then the question is why lie?
First, pay people for the "engagement" their content generates, then aggressively promote the most "engaging" content. At the same time, such content is known to have certain characteristics. This is the Facebook (<i>et al.</i>) commissioning model.
Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me. They are bad for your soul, bad for the nation, bad for the world.
If I may offer: Because they have become fiendishly adept at exploiting an addictive behaviour/weakness in our brains WHILE masquerading as some sort of social utility (AND perhaps vestigially retaining some semblance of that) - which, incidentally, is what (some) originally might have been, before encrappification.-
I suspect the OP understands this. Since few of those on HN (I am assuming) no longer have a FB presence, the question is why hasn't <i>everyone</i> arrived at this same conclusion and walked away from that addiction?<p>Meta should really have gone the way of MySpace a long, long time ago.
People may believe they need facebook to maintain their relationships.
And/or MySpace should have gone the way of F'book :)<p>Though I hear it <i>might</i> make a comeback.-<p>PS. To your point, I am guessing: For one thing it takes the ability to thus conclude, to begin with. THAT, in turn takes intellect and time AND evidence such as has been accruing. AND third, probably, because addictions are by definition hard to quit. ALSO: I think <i>few</i> times in the history of addictive behaviours has the <i>enabling agent</i> had such a low low low entry threshold, such presumptive innocuousness, and such assumed and granted "utility". It began by hijacking <i>human communication</i>, "socialization". It is devious.-
Breaking any type of addiction is hard. For some people it requires intentional and deliberate help from others.
People educated in math and probability are actually still prone to gambling addiction and things.<p>It doesn't matter what your <i>high level</i> brain knows, there is a structure and organization of your brain that only changes on geologic timescales, and that structure has serious, easily attackable flaws.
I like your use of "attackable" (and of flaws, obviously).-<p>PS. F'book commoditized social interaction to their ends while abusing these attackable surfaces. Kalshi and that ilk have now done away with the <i>whole pretense of communication itself</i> and <i>are abusing the same addiction mechanisms</i> to <i>commoditize</i> OPINION to their ends. Opinions: Everybody has one.-<p>PS. At some point somebody is going to commoditize mere bodily movement wrapped into such an addictive mechanism and we will get people with "weird" performative "palsies" walking about.-
Exactly. Same reason we eat junk food that also isnt good for us.
i recently downloaded it again after nearly a decade to use marketplace to buy a bike for my wife. Got the bike and deleted the app. but my god opening it up was hell. the interface on mobile is just....stressful. super cluttered, shit all over the place with notifications and things to see. first post i saw on there was someone i used to be friends with but havent thought about in years just blatently reposting ACTUAL racist shit... bought a bike in one day and deleted the app once again. horrible experience aside from the nice old dude who sold me the bike lol
I had a similar experience logging in to FB to delete my account which was inactive for almost a decade. It’s legit was like the movie Idiocracy. Casino vibes, over stimulation, people saying stupid thing, trying to sift through lots of garbage to find the thing you’re looking for.
My experience with Instagram too. Signed up to talk to one person who only uses Instagram, and it's just garbage all around.<p>I think it's a frog boiling situation. Early users got gradually accustomed to the gradually increasing garbage, but anyone who enters the ecosystem now is immediately turned off.
I use Instagram on Android because it's heavily modified and stripped to its bare essentials just for responding to friends. Prior to this I used the web app. If those two disappeared I would be done.
at the very least, insta is a semi cleaner and its the content itself thats abrasive... for now... thats the only other thing i use purely to keep up with family and i do photography so its somewhere to share some pics with family and friends.once you spend an entire night flagging everything you dont wanna see it becomes pretty clean. and then i put a 15 min timer on top of it. so it barely gets used but its semi well-tailored lol
I refuse to use facebook on mobile. Website only, and it’s terrible but that’s where the local community is if you need to find a lost dog or deal on a bike.
It's an addiction. These platforms have been engineers to be addictive, and now people are hooked.
It's not like traditional media is any better. At least with social media platforms the means of producing media and building a following has been democratized.
Hard agree, I keep hoping for the day society awakens as a whole to realize what they're doing to us.
I don't use FB or insta , but here are some reasons why people use it:<p>- Keep in touch with family<p>- Comfort from having their ideas reinforced<p>- Organize small events<p>- Share pictures easily<p>- not feel lonely<p>- stay current on world events<p>All of those have other routes to accomplish the same thing, but I guess they have the "Dropbox effect" of simplifying it so even techno challenged can use it.
Meta is easier for that stuff, I won't deny. Nevertheless, we've managed to get our families into Signal groups that largely accomplish the same things at the scale we need. And the benefits of not needing to wade through slop make up for the losses. It's so peaceful! Hopefully more people give it a try.
I'll help you understand: Important information is many times only found on these platforms. Many local businesses and events only have their info on Facebook or Instagram. Many local community groups are only on Facebook, and you'll find information there that has a real impact on your life (like bus broke down).<p>The other part is messaging. In parts of Europe nobody uses WhatsApp or SMS to communicate, everybody is on Facebook messenger.<p>And there's still the old school social media posts: cousin had a baby, friend got married. And also content made for the general public which is not malicious.
Yeah, Instagram is by far the most reliable communications channel from my kid's school, believe it or not. Like, there are mailing lists and portals you can log into, but the IT aspect of actually getting access for even one parent, let alone both, is such a fucking slog for everyone involved (and who knows what bullshit the school has to deal with from their side) that we get info through our WhatsApp group chat from the parents who have Instagram.
Once I overcame the addiction tech, engineered over billions of brilliant-person-hours, atop research into human behavioural prediction and conditioning that’d make the KGB blush?<p>It’s the hundreds of people on my Facey that I have no other way to contact, and whom I can’t convince to move to e.g. Mastodon, even by offering to do or automate it for them. I suppose I could get an agent to run through the list with a script that gives my phone number to anyone who expresses a wish to remain in touch.<p>Quora has become a scam and CP-ridden cesspit but there are still some old-timers who can really write, and whom I’ve become somewhat emotionally invested in. And a habit of 13 years is hard to break.
If you want to "make it" as an artist / restaurateur / musician / million other things you kind of have to.<p>Hell, the most reliable communication channel for getting information from my kid's school is Instagram.
I'm not sure if you're talking about Meta platforms or social media in general. It's been years since I've used any Meta platform but I'm a daily user of Tiktok.<p>On Tiktok I don't think the platform is paying people to rage bait, at least not directly. But wannabe influencers will still try and rage bait their way into a viral video and hopefully a following. To me it's entirely transparent and I just move on but people fall for it. Lots of people. Gender wars is easy pickings. A good example was the $3 cheese surcharge on a burger. I knew immediately that was fake and it was later confirmed [1].<p>But why am I on Tiktok? Because there's actually some good stuff on there and just some plain entertaining stuff. But what really seals it is the comments. Therea re a ton of videos where the comments are the best part. There are some funny people out there. And Tiktok more than any other platform I've experienced seems to surface such comments.<p>But I could best describe Facebook as your racist uncle posting conspiracy theories and that's pretty much it.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.bonappetit.com/story/tiktok-3-dollar-burger-cheese-hoax-explained" rel="nofollow">https://www.bonappetit.com/story/tiktok-3-dollar-burger-chee...</a>
> Why anyone still engages with these platforms is totally beyond me.<p>Because it provides a form entertainment, low hanging entertainment. All designed to grip you in your weakest fronts.<p>Map out what triggers a person visually. Feed it in to a LLM model and on the evil scale, you can start exploiting those who get angry based on whatever content.<p>Anger is one of the easiest trigger points in form of media. Broadcast a opposite view of an individual or a group. Downvotes and Upvotes are the primitive form of this and if you lack the emotional intelligence (thick skin) to handle the flack, you end up turning on emotions.<p><pre><code> Tabs are superior to spaces and Python is basically JavaScript with indentation.</code></pre>
Because they influence a lot of opinions which influences decisions which ends up influencing all our lives. Back around 2016 bots were loose on ut internet, with everyone freely gobbling up misinformation. Now there is an unofficial army of people determined to keep facts up at the forefront as well as other malicious social media negative trends at bay.
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So is meth, but it’s as popular as ever.
I will call out the ABC here for taking a lot of the boots on the ground work that Tom Tanuki - independent journo (<a href="https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/@tomtanuki</a>) has done with these far right slopaganda mills, slicing off the prior recognition and pretending it's a big new problem they just found.
While a bit of this is new... Is it that new? Is this report that detailed? Hmmmmm
Well, they claim they've done their own independent investigations, maybe started because of that bloggers/vloggers work, but still could be independent. What exactly is pointing towards it not being independent? It seems to be a detailed enough account of why the people break Facebook's own guidelines, yet receive money from Facebook.
Facebook is still big in my country, Lithuania, and both rage-bait and other type of fringe content is rampant, and even worse after fact-checking was removed. It is wild, and with some outside actors (specific country that shall not be named) it is a big problem with political and social effects being felt IRL.
And is Lithuania doing anything about it? In Romania Facebook and TikTok do whatever they please, and whatever they are paid to do, with complete impunity as the authorities actively do nothing at all.
Recent Guardian article:<p><pre><code> “Inside a meme factory: meet one of thousands of Indonesians trading political outrage clicks for Facebook cash“
</code></pre>
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237298">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237298</a>
Just to add onto this; Instagram purposely floats controversial comments to the top of a comment section for "engagement" purposes. I've seen this many times.
This isn't anything new, it was abundantly clear after Facebook removed their fact checking team during covid that the priority was engagement over everything else, and rage bait is exactly that.
COVID-era “fact checking” went way beyond its remit and started to become a political tool. This had negative consequences for the average person’s trust in institutions of all kinds, because people <i>really</i> don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech, even if it’s clearly inaccurate (as it so often is). It’s a good thing that it was removed.<p>The problem with Meta is the monetization and engagement model, not the lack of fact checking.
> because people really don’t like it when you attempt to police their individual political speech<p>I'm not sure that I buy that when people's health are at stake. When things are objectively false, and spreading that information will actively harm people, you have a responsibility and duty of care to point out falsities. But that's just me.
It isn’t just you, but it also isn’t everybody. Dissent is always present, and the 1st amendment ensures that people have the right to speak their mind. Having the government lean on private platforms to pressure them into censorship, especially in a coordinated fashion, violates that right. Even if the government attempts to launder that pressure through a maze of domestic and foreign NGOs.
COVID was accidentally released from a lab.<p>That statement was censored as "objectively false", but our best information says it's probably true, and it was probably true then, too. Censorship is a dangerous walk. I totally agree with you that harmful misinformation is a problem, and that we have a duty of care. The problem is "who fact-checks the fact checkers?", and what happens when political leaders can request certain topics "fact checked".
Sorry your COVID misinformation was removed and your president actually lost the 2020 election.
I just want to add, that they (FB and other big social media) probably understood what propaganda power they wield after 2016 facebook and cambridge analytica scandal.<p>Personally - I think that this was the moment when silicon valley billionaires without shadow of a doubt understood that they have power what used to be reserved only for state actors. Bonus - for using that power they get fined penny on the dollar at most or just slap on the wrist.<p>Update: now situation is even worse - states actively buy propaganda with social media companies, making those companies even more rich and influential.
Facebook figured out a long time ago that "ragebait" and profit are transitively connected via "engagement". They recognized that anger, hate, fear, and all negative emotions can ALSO bring in a LOT of clicks.
Every single time historically we have unregulated media you get a shitshow. I think you can blame our societies nonchalant lassez faire attitude to the propaganda profiteering by American big tech for lots of the issues we face today. Honestly: do cocaine laced recommender algorithms really benefit us? I really hope the EU fully bans this stuff.
That used to be called "yellow journalism" in America (and "tabloid journalism" in the UK) which led to the Spanish American war in 1898.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War</a>
“Unregulated media.” LOL.
Care to elaborate? You don’t think the creator of “You should self harm: the TV show” would’ve been regulated and held accountable for the detrimental consequences back in the day? Not saying it was perfect back then, but today I do think internet media companies are out of control.
Right, cos we know that it's regulated - Elon rules X/Twitter, Mark rules Facebook, and shareholder value rules the others. In fact it's even more regulated now because Donald rules over them.
But regulated media is also a shit show!
FB is built on rage bait, what else do they have beside cute videos?
Horrible sympathy and religion bait like "I bet nobody will upvote this poor sick child with one leg, won't you? 1 amen = 1 prayer!"
Unfortunately things like craigslist died off and moved to Facebook marketplace somehow. I have to ask my wife to post things for me.
Marketplace. It’s pretty good that’s my main usage of Facebook nowadays
If you use the friends or "all" feeds, you just get stuff about what your friends are up to and things from pages you've subscribed to. Or I do anyway. Also good for discovering events locally.<p>Even the main feed isn't that bad for me. I guess it depends who your friends are and what you click on.
I removed all friends years ago. After I read about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I quit, but I still need an account for a few groups I moderate.<p>I think it has done more damage to this country than tobacco.
Connecting with your friends and family. Unfortunately they abandoned this long ago because they weren't satisfied with making a mountain of money.
I use FB for genealogy, because there are a lot of local groups where people post historical pictures, and older people in general are more active on Facebook.<p>I've seen some local groups taken over by ragebait slop, though. Ironically, not even right wing rage bait slop. As far as I can tell, it finally boiled over for the admin of the page, who was a fairly liberal guy in an extremely rural place, when a local museum found out he was anti-Trump and stopped collaborating with him on local history (maybe for fear of other's reactions). Since then he's strictly reposted rage material from other places/people on Facebook, much of it clearly low effort/AI generated.<p>I can't judge him, he lives there after all, and from this side of the ocean my political sympathies are definitively closer to him than to his enemies. Still :/
I would drop Facebook in a heartbeat but Facebook Marketplace is a strong pull for getting bargains in my local area.<p>I have alternatives like eBay and Gumtree but they have their own shortcomings.<p>Examples from Facebook:<p>- Antique lumber planks 50p a plank<p>- 4 sticks of DDR4 16GB SODIMMs, £60<p>- Garden tools, £10<p>This stuff would be slower and more expensive on eBay, and Gumtree is more of a waiting game as its userbase has definitely shrunk.
Every other day, my feed seems to be filled with pro-Republican posts, followed by pro-Democratic posts the next. It’s fascinating how the model decided this was the kind of content worth generating.
To some degree I think social media algorithms already altered our behavior enough that extreme and controversial content generation would continue even if we disabled the algorithms. They've reinforced the memes enough now that they are self-sustaining.
"The Model" didn't decide anything. Facebook and these other attention economy companies have been A/B testing for two decades now, and there have been multiple "Metas" they have found. They have all converged eventually on ragebait being an extremely effective engagement driver.<p>They didn't just run a linear regression or whatever on some data and magically get the most rage inducing system. They made conscious decisions at nearly every step to make changes to optimize for "Engagement", which at this point is a code word that means "Controversial" the same way that a video of someone eating a toddler would be "Controversial"<p>It's digital crack pointed at a subsection of our brain that evolved to do group signalling.
I'm not surprised, I quit because I kept getting pushed this content for a long while and suspected as much. Same is happening on nextdoor for sure, whenever I login there's some pushed post that creates a bunch of engagement of someone stating something very political and controversial. It almost feels funny how bluesky and other platforms lack this sorta rage bait being prioritized. Facebook and friends sold us out hard and made society suffer. Stop using their services.
I hate that I've become jaded enough to say this, but what else is new?
Meta and its products are a cancer.
There is no solution based on censorship that doesn't undermine democracy. If you want Facebook to censor people/content/ideas that you don't like it is going also to censor vital information needed for a democracy to work.<p>The best solution for now seams to be what twitter is doing with community notes.
The companies clearly won’t listen to reason, not as long as this strategy works.<p>Voting seems to work, either with actual votes, or wallet, or attention.
Ragebait is what FB runs on. A lot of these people do not even believe what they say. <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/king-of-slop-how-anti-migrant-ai-content-made-one-sri-lankan-influencer-rich" rel="nofollow">https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...</a>
FB and IG reels both.
Twitter gets a lot of rightfully owed criticism about it's fair share but its always weird to me seeing people slam twitter then go right on to IG or some other meta owned app as if its significantly different.
I'm so glad I got myself off Instagram and Reddit, the longer I go without them the more I realise what massive cognitohazards both of them are if you spend too much time on them. Different mechanisms but both were much more of a net drain on me than I realised before leaving them.
I use both IG and Twitter. IG reels for me are largely funny videos, stuff I follow, and stuff I'm interested in. On Twitter I only follow tech stuff and yet about 20% of the stuff in my 'recommended' feed is racist, violent, and stuff I have zero interest in. Even if you hit the 'non interested' button they continue to shove it down your throat.
Is it ethical wrong in this case, to wish those persons to get beaten up one day, by one of the people where they fueled their hate (who do take it out on other people for real)? So they reap what they sow?
Understandable but wrong.
Wishing for something doesn't make it happen. So we should consider the effect that this wishing has on <i>you</i>: does wishing for vengeance make you a worse, or better, person? I'd try to avoid it, myself.<p>If you're in a position where you're <i>actually</i> making the decision between letting these harmful practices continue, or putting a stop to them, that's different. But in this society, such people are more likely to be journalists and justices than vigilantes, so violence is still inappropriate. I think the scenario you described, of those incited to violence turning on the inciters <i>with violence</i>, is rather unlikely in reality, and it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.
Click on it, read the image title, that's all you need to know and the correct title here.
I stopped logging into Faecebook, years ago, because it marked most of my posts as spam (I tended to post "look at my latest" stuff, there, so I understand why; but it rendered the platform worthless, for me).<p>However, I'll lay odds that if I had posted that Hitler was just a misunderstood genius, my posts would have gone viral throughout the system.
I have a very mixed friend group from hard left and hard right and they all get their own little bubble of rage bait that amplifies their own beliefs. Since i have them in my feed I get this crap from both side in my feed thanks to the algorithms. So i barely touch the site anymore
Probably training the rage-bait edition of their AI so they can generate future "content" themselves.
Especially before elections, it feels like they rewards people for being toxic
Can't they just do it with AI ?
Newspapers and also pay people to produce rage-bait content.
I don't know anyone who uses Facebook anymore
This is a tired rehash of the same panic we had after 2016. In short: “Oh no, if we allow unrestricted communications, people may turn this into political advantage!” No shit. That’s the point of free speech.<p>As always, the only solution is twofold: (1) end the targeted advertising business model (for <i>everyone</i>, not just Meta) and (2) acknowledge and address the underlying social and economic problems affecting average people. But of course the establishment has no interest in pursuing either one of these. And so popular anger will continue to build.<p>I’m sure that shutting down the few release valves for that anger is a <i>great</i> solution.
We've become a provocateur type of society... Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast, Jake/Logan Paul... it's all the same thing at the end of the day. They harvest attention and in return funnel their audience towards ads, merch, OnlyFans, etc.
This is a really funny way to describe Facebook's (and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and...) entire business model. It's long been known that they aggressively promote <i>ahem</i> "engaging" content. How do they incentivize people to make it? Ad revenue!
Maybe they should pay their programmers to fix the audio bug in their iOS app. I can't listen to my podcasts and use the facebook app at the same time because it wants to mute the podcast to play nothing, even with the phone on silent and autoplay disabled the facebook app just randomly mutes my podcasts for no reason making me not want to use the app.
Entire public Meta suite of products are cancer to the society.
Social media platforms have been paying out for attention seeking behaviour for a long time now. It’s why every YouTube video now has the same lame shocked face, red arrows, and clickbait title. It’s why assholes film themselves intentionally pissing people off for TikTok. It’s a whole category called nuisance tubing.<p>I remember during COVID I saw a number of YouTubers swing from producing normal content into conspiracy shit. Their views ballooned. I saw a nasty feedback loop where the more controversial content received more engagement, hence more ad revenue, leading to more of it being produced.<p>These platforms are actively degenerating society; there’s a reason the CCP is keeping tight control and reportedly rebalancing things to promote educational creators on China’s.
Indeed. What I noticed is that the quality of the videos went down on youtube in the last 3 years. Now, the quality was never as great as it used to be anyway, but Google changed various things that made youtube worse. They are slowly killing off youtube without realising it.
A lot of channels got bought by private equity. YouTube is saturated with similar content so creators have to resort to clickbait to keep up. AI has allowed creators to increase their efficiency writing scripts.<p>I don't know what you believe Google changed about YouTube, but I believe it has just made itself worse.
It's difficult for me to understand what people are getting out of the youtube experience, as I'm pretty straight up intolerant of most of the traits of this kind of content - all I hear recently from the neighbours kid's tablets and phones is loads of stuff with too-fast too-intense mono-tone TTS.<p>Such a shame that people take up against AI, rather than the people selecting and serving them slop.
CCP is keeping tight control over social media platforms first and foremost to prevent spreading information which could topple CCP.<p>"Last month 60 popular celebrity gossip sites were closed overnight for corrupting "core socialist values," and a new regulation released in May requires all online news portals to be managed by Communist Party-sanctioned editorial staff."<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40896235" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40896235</a>
It also has a lot of other side effects. One of them seems to be a more stable, prosperous society. I don't like that a totalitarian dictatorship is more stable and prosperous than us, maybe we should fix that?
No, they actually do have a paternalistic drive to keep things healthy and pro-social above and beyond some Bond villain stuff.<p>I mean, yes, you also can't get away with organizing an opposition, but they really do care about social cohesion and good family values above and beyond that.<p>(Also, one should always note that the BBC is state owned when they write articles full of invective like this).
The priorities of CCP are suppressing opposition first and social cohesion and good family values second. If you don't like state owned BBC, you can read for example non-state owned Guardian about the state of Chinese media landscape.<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/dec/15/jimmy-lai-verdict-hong-kong-court-national-security-charges-live" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/dec/15/jimmy-lai...</a><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/hong-kong-authorities-disrupt-independent-press-inland-revenue-tax-audits" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/22/hong-kong-auth...</a>
Your first paragraph and second contradict each other somewhat. Celebrity gossip sites are not likely to threaten the party. On the contrary they may well work as "opium for the people", or circus with the bread, to keep dissent down.<p>The party doesn't actually need "core socialist values" to stay in charge. They could easily have adopted a Putin (or Napoleon, or Caesar) attitude of "I don't give a damn about the framework legitimizing my rule, as long as you acknowledge me as the boss".
Maybe keeping the CCP in power and society not degenerating are correlated?<p>They did oversee an unprecedented rise in living standards and global influence after all...<p>Maybe those core socialist values were what enabled it?
People want to feel like they're doing something in the "culture war". Rage-bait gives them an outlet. Facebook might be saving us from total civil war here.
Clickbait. Title makes it sound like they pay them directly to promote the platform, but they get paid through facebook content monetisation program
Not Clickbait.<p>If you provide both:<p>a) a service to earn money from content<p>b) an algo promoting those videos<p>then yes, IMHO they pay them directly for the content produced.
There is a distinction between:<p>- Meta is commissioning or sponsoring rage-bait<p>- Controversial creators are earning money through Facebook's content monetization program<p>The title is ambiguous (at first, I thought it was the first case), and that's where the clickbait lies.<p>No doubt that also the second case is a serious problem, but that's orthogonal to the ambiguity of the title.
The distinction disappears when Facebook incentivizes the creation of the rage-bait content by prioritizing it in their algorithm. They can, at any moment, de-rank rage-bait, but they don't. That clearly signals "make rage-bait for our platform and we'll pay you."<p>Contrast it with something like Elsagate. Google actioned the offending creators and attempted to deprioritize the kind of content that caused the controversy. Facebook would do the same if they didn't condone rage-bait.
>They can, at any moment, de-rank rage-bait, but they don't. That clearly signals "make rage-bait for our platform and we'll pay you."<p>They don't because they don't select for it. They disporotionally push engagement but as far as I know don't have some indians or AI working tirelessly analysing countless videos to categorise them and rank them according to how ragebaity or controversial they are. Those things just rise to the top out of their effort to drive engagement and screentime.<p>Any alternative that does the same will end up with similar result.
I find it hard to believe that Facebook's feed is "dumb" and only promotes what's engaging the most users. They serve you content that they think <i>you</i> will find engaging, and there has to be some automatic categorization as a result.<p>And regardless, even if they don't select for rage-bait, they still refuse to take action against accounts that repeatedly post it, making your interjection largely pointless.
"an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts." implies this is only available to a subset of people?
So they do directly pay them?
Ironically, this article is rage-bait.
It is not only rage bait. They like the new corporate fascism and that its followers believe that the right wing will fix the economy.<p>Maybe they have some romantic ideals about the 1930s, where Schacht fixed the economy for Hitler with a form of quantitative easing. But that scheme became unsustainable around 1938.<p>The difference is that back then the powerful needed people. The current Silicon Valley "elites" want to get rid of everyone, make them dumb and replace them with AI.<p>The sooner the right wing audience realizes this, the better.
they are paying Nazis to make Nazi content.
Meta have long profited from knowingly aiding and abetting the enemies of the West by undermining our societies from within.<p>Meta are the greatest force against freedom in the world today, apart from Putin's post-fascist power vertical and the Chinese Communist Party.<p>What I think of Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately cannot be printed, because unlike Meta platforms, HN has standards.
First of all, Facebook is not even the worst offender. That'd have to go to X and TikTok. Rage bait, propaganda, and straight up bad actors with money pushing their agenda. If you got angry because of a TikTok video, you are being exploited.<p>Some of these actors also put a lot of money into campuses in the west, so when you're done watching some terrible propaganda, you can join a local club and find your way to more people getting angry at misinformation. This is how we get stuff like "globalize intifada" and students "occupying" buildings.<p>I wish this was just hyperbole, but really, go check for yourself what kind of money state actors put into schools and universities in the west, and why.
When will people learn that rage bait content thrives thanks to people who are so delicate and emotional that they get unhealthily enraged at such content?<p>Stop raging on the internet and the rage bait content will disappear overnight.<p>Stop buying oil, chasing newest phones, luxuries, and the climate will get better overnight.<p>It’s all on the consumers, contrary to Redditor belief that the big corporations are at fault, it’s simply the matter of demand and thus supply. Not the other way around.<p>Take accountability. I know nowadays it is very unpopular to take accountability but this is the first step to make world better place. You can only change your own habits.
> You can only change your own habits<p>Rather like smoking, I can only change my own habits (have never smoked) but that won't prevent me from being harmed by other people's habits.<p>Even if I don't use Facebook, I can be harmed by Facebook voters.
Any solution that requires individuals to “just” do something that’s contrary to their nature is not a solution.<p>No society has ever solved a serious problem by “just” doing something on an individual scale <i>en masse</i>.<p>Think about what you’re suggesting. <i>Individual</i> action that acts like <i>coordinated</i> action. It’s impossible at scale. It’s a total contradiction.<p>(This is not even touching on the fact that the vast majority of oil use and pollution comes from military, energy, and industrial uses, not individual consumers.)<p>This does not imply that every problem can or even should be solved, but you’re not going to solve it this way.
Out of interest, would you have made this argument with respect to Big Tobacco back in the day? In my view surveillance-based behavioural recommendation engines belong very much in the same category.
Meta could help the situation, for instance by providing fact-checking tools and banning rage-bait creators.<p>Instead they have removed those tools and are paying these creators. So it's not just consumers to blame here.
Well, you use their platform and thus line their pockets. Why? Because it’s convenient, it’s lazy and “free” and you sold your soul and data for far too cheap.<p>If the population cannot behave in their best interest then the whole western civ gets Darwin Award and I am fine with that honestly.<p>And it is actually happening in real time in almost all categories from fertility rate to losing psychological warfare.
I'm not holding my breath for masses to become informed, rational, responsible and balanced overall.<p>And why would the responsibility lie solely on consumers to act perfectly
Now people understand why Suckerberg is called Suckerberg.<p>Those greedy billionaires also keep on having ties to right wing nuts. Let's not forget Melon Usk with his suspicious right-arm-raising gestures (having done so twice, which is quite strange when you do the same gesture twice in a row - I mean there can be no doubt about this if you do it twice; twice is an accident?).
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Why do the richest and most powerful humans, who have seen all of the world and its wonders, and can go anywhere anytime, and get all the luxuries our civilization has to offer, and never have to struggle for anything in their lives..<p>want to make it worse?
Because, often, that's how they became the richest, most powerful humans. If your goal is to have money and power, and you have more today than yesterday, the world for you didn't get worse.
If we were normal society company like Meta would be shut down and its CEO would be in Hague and prosecuted for crimes against humanity
Similarly, Meta is paying violent illegal israeli settlers, who commit attrocities against Palestinians in the West Bank in order to steal their land. Same mechanism.<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/posts/meta-doesnt-just-permit-settler-and-extremist-israeli-pages-to-publish-violent-r/1421321073371388/" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/jewishvoiceforpeace/posts/meta-does...</a>
My ragebait good. Your ragebait bad.
Social network is a cancer. I don't even talk to people who use these networks.
The irony here is that ABC is the platfrom doing the rage-baiting.
How is this any different than traditional media? Cable news creates fake problems and controversy constantly, and pay their news anchors well to do so.<p>In return, many companies that rely on these problems, turn around and advertise on these networks.<p>Social media is just following the same strategy.
What are you trying to say? That Facebook should be excused because others also behave badly?<p>Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.
Social media has been protected by the Safe Harbour rules because they had millions of users creating content which was difficult to monitor and moderate.<p>If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.
One big difference is regulation and algorithms. All viewers/readers see the same content in traditional media, and they’re all subject to scrutiny by government regulators (however effective or not they may be).<p>Social media networks display different things to different people so it’s borderline impossible to know exactly what they’re even showing. That makes regulation extremely difficult.<p>More broadly, this perspective depresses me. I’m old enough to remember the promise of the internet when we first all got it: that it would democratise information and we’d be able to break free of the issues with traditional media. Fast forward to today and we’re asking “why <i>shouldn’t</i> the tech giants monetise hate speech?”. How far we’ve fallen.
With social media you can spend small amounts of money , create media and target people half across the globe from you.<p>ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.
> How is this any different than traditional media?<p>Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.
Sure, and Ebola and influenza share traits too. I’m not sure that makes them interchangeable though.
>> How is this any different than traditional media?<p>Facebook is global. Traditional media is much more heavily regulated in some countries and while it may not be perfect, it's not comparable to the shit show that is social media.