Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine

[MachineGhost]

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics. Using this data, I was able to speak to a wide array of the activists and entrepreneurs, advocates and opportunists, reporters and hobbyists who together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in media.

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic. And unlike traditional media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to lure readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magaz ... chine.html

[Kriegsspiel]

"People want to go online and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? Friends, pictures, profiles, whatever you can visit, browse around, maybe it's someone you just met at a party. Eduardo, I'm not talking about a dating site, I'm talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online."

Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network

Once they moved beyond hungover-facebook-stalking someone you met at a party in college, the turd-like qualities went geometric.

[Pointedstick]

"The entire social experience of college" is awful. It is a mockery of real human interaction, driven by the inexperience, fickle passions, and high libidos of bitter losers and opinionated narcissists.

For precisely that reason, the Facebook of today ironically in no way resembles the social experience of a college campus. Actual college-age people have largely fled to Instagram and Snapchat and the like. The reason why Facebook is so politically toxic today has more to do with the illusion of reach to political zealots, coupled with the self-affirming pleasure of a real-time echo chamber when your similarly-opinionated friends like what you share (because it's always someone else's political content that you're sharing, not your own) or post supportive comments. It feels like you're genuinely "getting your message out there" or "raising awareness" even though you're really not. In that respect, Facebook is quarantining the most toxic political discussions to a realm where nothing matters at all and it can be safely ignored by the real powerbrokers. The big question is whether those toxic discussions were always out there, or if Facebook has encouraged and magnified them.

[Kriegsspiel]

"The entire social experience of college" is awful. It is a mockery of real human interaction, driven by the inexperience, fickle passions, and high libidos of bitter losers and opinionated narcissists.

Sorry, this is the quote I was wanting:

"Relationship status; interested in... THIS is what drives life at college. ARE YOU HAVING SEX OR AREN'T YOU. It's why people take certain classes, sit where they sit, do what they do... having some... center. That's what Facebook is gonna be about. People are gonna log on because after all the cake and watermelon there's a chance they're gon..."
"Gonna get laid!"
"... meet a girl, yes."

In any case, college was a rather great version of life. I recall you went to Sarah Lawrence or one of those places, maybe that's why you have such a dark perception of college?