Facebook is destroying us through a diet of noise and anger. But it doesn’t need to be subject to regulation: it needs a conscience.
This story originally appeared on PCMag
Facebook is the ultimate toxic friend. You’ve probably had a friend like this in your life: a charming, charismatic, entirely non-self-aware pal who blithely leaves destruction in their wake but will always be forgiven, because they’re fun to be around and to ditch them would be social suicide.
The Facebook algorithm, the artifically intelligent editor of our Facebook lives, is designed to activate passionate responses from its users. It’s not evil, if you think evil requires intent to harm, but it verges on evil in that it makes decisions without caring about who it hurts. The company doesn’t care whether it’s getting good passion or bad passion, as long as it gets that sweet, sweet attention.
Personally, I can’t quit Facebook because what it does right, it does very right: connecting families and old friends. I’ve found old high school friends, peered into the personal side of coworkers’ lives, and kept up on neighborhood activities. If you ditch Facebook, and your friends and family still use it, you end up uninformed and disconnected.
Facebook’s power is its network effect. When everyone you know uses Facebook, they probably aren’t going to move somewhere else. Defaults and inertia are powerful.
Because it turns out that bad passion is more engaging than good passion, Facebook is destroying us through a diet of noise and anger. It’s in the news right now because a consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, impermissibly gamed Facebook’s system to target various political ads. But Cambridge did what Facebook does all the time, in terms of optimizing ads for attention. Facebook is just annoyed that it wasn’t the one in control.
I’m far less concerned about the ins and outs of whether Cambridge did a bad thing, or whether individual Russian trolls targeted a specific ad at a specific key voter, than I am about Facebook’s overall status as a platform that feeds on anger. Lies are more entertaining than truth; hate gathers more attention than contentment. A…
