Despite the denials, the stories about Facebook’s bias are real. But the bias isn’t there because of the company’s new technology. Facebook is biased because of its reliance on the biased old media.
Facebook’s trending topics wasn’t the automatic system that the company wanted people to think it was. Instead it hired young journalists with new media experience to “curate” its news feed. And plenty of them proved to be biased against conservative news and sources. Meanwhile someone at the top of Facebook’s dysfunctional culture wanted to play up Syria and the Black Lives Matter hate group.
Mark Zuckerberg’s fundamental mistake was recreating the biases and agendas of the old media in a service whose whole reason for existing was to allow users to create their own experience. The big difference between social and search is that social media is supposed to let you be the curator.
But, like Facebook’s trending topics, social curation was another scam. Facebook users don’t really define what they see. It’s defined for them by the company’s agendas. This includes the purely financial. It would be foolish to think that the fortunes that Buzzfeed spends on Facebook advertising don’t impact the placement of its stories by Facebook’s mysterious algorithm. And there is the more complex intersection of politics and branding in an age when business relevance means social relevance.
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Perhaps the real issue is not Facebook but the concept of social media. Get off the computer and interact with real people. Read a book. Build something. Learn something. Exercise.
Be productive.
David DeGerolamo
The internet’s promise was that it would be open, and collaborative.
The rise of Social Media has created an internet that is controlled by a few large companies, who have an agenda, and who have made a king’s ransom on the backs of the users, who provide the content.
It’s like a dysfunctional feedback-loop.
The Internet has reached the point of maturity, at least from my perspective, to declare it an absolute, complete and utter failure.
There are a lot of parts that are open and collaborative. I use it all the time for work and for my hobbies. I have access to information that I would never of had without it. It is a tool like say an axe. You can build a cabin with it or murder with it. It is the person using it that is the problem.
Absolutely.
Take NCR as an example, what’s here is content, provided by David, that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t include corporate sponsorship, and advertising. This is his sandbox.
The problem is, for the VAST majority of Internet users, it’s nothing more than a clickbait/selfie wonderland. It’s disconnected a large portion of society from healthy, real, “social networking.”
The benefits WE get are grotesquely disproportionate to the benefits that those at the pyrmid’s apex get.
As I said, it is the person that is the problem. The self absorbed population we have now started way before the internet.
We can agree to disagree.
; )
By and large, I find the Internet to be the greatest social-control tool, and tyranny force-multiplier in the history of mankind.
YMMV
I receive no funding for NCRenegade. Any links are done to help people. Other people have posting privileges so this is not only “my” sandbox. I also post information which I disagree with in order to allow people to discuss issues. This is why comments are always on. I have only turned comments off twice when the commenters got off track of the post’s content.
Thanks for what you do, man.
It’s these little corners of the Internet that are a net positive.
It is part of a huge system to control how people perceive the world and to shape their belief system.
The important question to ask is why is there no ‘conservative’ alternative to facebook? Where are the conservative tech nerds?
For that matter, where is the conservative alternative to Hollywood and/or the music industry?
There should be a large market for conservative leaning media and libertarians tell me repeatedly that The Market will solve any problem! 😉
seen.is is an alternative.
Checking it out